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May 13, 2011
Interview: 'True Legend' director Yuen Woo-Ping
What follows is an interview Gross did with Yuen Woo-Ping during last year’s Fantastic Fest.
Yuen Woo-Ping is sitting in an upstairs room at the Highball, dressed in a light blue and white checked shirt and jeans, a baseball cap pulled over his head. You would not look at him on the street and think, “That man is a legend.” Nor would you think, “That man could probably beat me senseless in about 3.2 seconds.”
Yet both are true.
Yuen is about as famous as martial arts fight choreographers get. He is almost as famous as martial arts movie directors get. He is, quite frankly, one of the most influential artists in the history of Hong Kong action movies.
He is in town to promote the martial arts fantasy “True Legend” the first movie he’s directed since “Tai ji quan (Tai Chi Boxer)” in 1996 and, oh yeah, pick up a lifetime achievement award from Fantastic Fest.
Yuen has worked with everyone from Jackie Chan to Stephen Chow to Jet Li, to Michelle Yeoh. You have seen his work in “The Matrix” trilogy, “Kill Bill” Vol. 1 & 2, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Iron Monkey,” “Kung Fu Hustle,” and many, many more.
“True Legend” returns to the legend of Su Can, Drunken Fist master, a myth Yuen has played around in movies such as “Drunken Master.” While some of these films played the notion for full-contact laughs, “True Legend” is straight-faced and epic, the tale of a humble warrior reduced to a shell of his former self when his half-brother, Yuan, destroy’s Su Can’s family. Su Can, now a beggar, must redeem himself.
Yuen comes from a martial arts family. His father was Yuen Siu-tien, a renowned martial arts film actor. Yuen Siu-tien’s character Ol’ Dirty in “Ol Dirty & The Bastard” inspired the rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard. (Not for nothing is Wu-tang Clan producer RZA presenting Yuen with his lifetime achievement award — the crew’s names and lyrics were heavily influenced by ’70s and ’80s martial arts movies, many of them in which Yuen had a hand. And a fist. And a foot.
“This is what my father taught me,” Yuen says. ” He wold being me to the sets and for many years, this was all I knew how to do. But once you are on the set for years and years, you learn from others how to be a director. You experience things you cannot learn in schools.”
Read the rest of the interview after the jump.
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April 28, 2011
Interview: 'In a Better World' director Susanne Bier
Danish director Susanne Bier has had an interesting and at times adversarial history with the film culture of her native Europe. She also has an Oscar.
The director of “In a Better World,” which won the Academy Award this year for foreign-language film, spent the early part of her career with one foot in both the commercial and arthouse worlds of European film.
Though she gained notoriety as a popular filmmaker in Denmark with 1999’s romantic comedy “The One and Only,” her first critical smash, “Open Hearts,” came as a member of the Dogma movement. The loose-knit, avant-garde collective made stripped-down films that did not rely on lighting, costumes or music — among other limitations — with the intention of telling stories that focused on character and story.
After the 2002 critical success of “Open Hearts,” Bier began to regularly defy the constraints of her filmmaking peers from Europe. “Brødre” (“Brothers”), the 2004 drama later remade in America about a love triangle borne of tragedy, and 2007’s English-language “Things We Lost in the Fire” raised the filmmaker’s profile internationally and led some in the European film scene to accuse the director of falling prey to commercialism.
The confident and thoughtful Bier, who visited Austin for the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival in March, makes no apologies for her style or motives.
“There is in Europe a kind of elitist culture — where it is not a good thing if you are actively engaging with the audience,” Bier says. “I think it’s incredible. I think it’s from a time when anything considered innovative had to be rejected by the audience. Like any new school of painting was rejected by the public and then it became sort of recognized. I don’t think the directors who are now never being recognized by the public suddenly will then be recognized in 100 years time. Because that’s not what a movie is about. Movies are a mass media, and the way to treat movies is to tell stories with a real substance and then actually address an audience.”
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Interview: Rainn Wilson and James Gunn of 'Super'
“Basically, all the shots, all the tone, it’s exactly what I intended,” Gunn said. “So there’s nobody to blame but me if that’s something that didn’t work for people.”
Visiting Austin for the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival last month, the spiky-haired and bug-eyed Gunn admitted the thing he hears most often from people about his movie “Super” is how unexpected the genre-twisting movie is.
“I think the element of surprise and disorientation is all a part of what ‘Super’ is,” Gunn said. “I think it’s a little too much, frankly, for some people because it comes at you from so many different angles at the same time.”
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November 4, 2010
Interview: Charles Ferguson, director of 'Inside Job'
CANNES - Despite the glamorous setting of the French Riviera, the movies that played at this year’s Cannes Film Festival portrayed a world that has hit rock bottom.
A washed-up movie promoter takes a group of New Burlesque stars to seedy French towns in Mathieu Almaric’s “On Tour.” A group of monks in Algeria are beheaded in Xavier Beauvois’ “Of Gods and Men.” A low-level Barcelona fixer learns he’s dying of cancer and ends up accidentally gassing a group of Chinese immigrants in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful.”
A nanny is brutalized in Im Sangsoo’s “The Housemaid.” Hundreds of hoodlums are systematically executed in Takeshi Kitano’s “Outrage.” A grandmother tries to figure out how to respond to news that her grandson has been involved in a gang rape in Lee Chang-don’s “Poetry.” And an alcoholic woman watches her life pass by in Mike Leigh’s “Another Year.”
All of these movies are competing for the Palme d’Or, which will be awarded today . But even movies screening outside the official competition had dark implications.
A marriage unravels in Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine,” starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. A nurse for terminal patients in an Hungarian hospital gorges on cream puffs in complete boredom as she watches a wall of heart monitors in “Pal Adrienn.” The world faces unimaginable apocalyptic dangers in Lucy Walker’s nuclear arms documentary “Countdown to Zero.” And if the world really comes to an end, we might all be so poor that we don’t even care, according to Charles Ferguson’s riveting Wall Street documentary, “Inside Job.”
Of all the movies screening at this year’s festival, “Inside Job” has to be the most outrageous, provocative and disturbing.
Ferguson, whose previous documentary was the war analysis “No End in Sight,” contends that Wall Street has become so corrupt that its stench has infected a complicit government as well as academia.
His ambition is monumental. He seeks to explain, in the simplest terms possible, how the financial meltdown of 2008 occurred, and who is to blame. Interviews include a who’s who of alleged economic experts, some of whom come off as being ethically bankrupt.
The basic premise is this: that the deregulation of financial markets that began in the 1980s has led to a series of meltdowns, each one getting progressively worse, and that both Republican and Democratic administrations have aided and abetted Wall Street criminals.
Ferguson is quite insistent on using the word “criminal.”
“I’m not against people making money,” he said in an interview. “But I think the ways of making money should be honest and that people should be doing something useful. That’s not the case with Wall Street. Businesses make real things, and they have to stand by what they make. Banks don’t make real things.”
Ferguson tracks much of the current financial problems to the unregulated financial innovations such as securitization of mortgages and speculative credit default swaps.
If that sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, Ferguson wants to explain it. People buy houses, sometimes even when they can’t afford to. But banks and mortgage companies make the loans anyway because they get paid by commission. Then they sell those mortgages in bundles to investors.
The financial ratings agencies become complicit in the scheme, assigning high AAA ratings even to the riskiest of investments, including subprime mortgages. And Wall Street brokerages aggressively market these investments to clients, even though they know they are quite risky. In fact, these same Wall Street firms simultaneously invest in credit default swaps that will pay them handsomely if the securities they’re selling to their customers fail.
In short, the game is rigged, and Ferguson shows no deference to such power brokers in his interviews.
But Ferguson doesn’t stop there. He says business professors throughout the country supplement their incomes by writing reports favoring deregulation and then get paid to sit on executive boards that profit from deregulation.
He interviews Frederic Mishkin, a professor at the Columbia University Business School, and confronts him with payments he received from the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write a glowing report of that nation’s economic standing shortly before its financial collapse. Ferguson’s big complaint: that Mishkin didn’t disclose to investors that he was taking money from the Icelandic chamber.
Ferguson also corners Glenn Hubbard, the chief economic adviser during the George W. Bush administration and the current dean of Columbia Business School, as well as John Campbell, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Economics. Both end up being flustered and defensive as Ferguson details ethical conflict.
But Ferguson doesn’t stop there. He launches a full-scale attack on the Obama administration for what he sees as a business-as-usual approach, most vividly epitomized by two of his top economic advisers, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. When asked whether he thinks Obama will take any meaningful action to correct Wall Street excesses, Ferguson, who supported Obama in the 2008 election, answers with a flat “no.”
Ferguson said he was well aware that his movie was premiering in Cannes a day after Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” He declines, at first, to criticize Stone directly. “Let’s just say it’s a piece of Hollywood entertainment.”
But when pressed, Ferguson opens up, noting that Stone glamorizes the very world that he is supposedly attacking, using glowing shots of the New York skyline and all the accoutrements of wealth. Such glamorization led to the first “Wall Street” spawning an unintentional icon, the crooked character of Gordon Gekko. And throughout both movies, there’s a notion that Wall Street has a few bad characters among many honorable ones.
In interviews, Stone sounded more thoughtful than his movie did, wondering about the fate of capitalism itself.
“I am confused as to whether capitalism can still work,” he said. “I would love to see some serious reforms. After (the crash of) 1987, I thought it would cure itself, but it didn’t. And there’s still a tremendous inequity and injustice.”
But Ferguson still sees a problem with Stone’s stance.
“There’s an implication in Stone’s movie that this kind of criminal activity is done by a small number of people on Wall Street,” Ferguson said. “In fact, this criminal activity is done by a large number of people, with government and academic involvement.”
Ferguson says he hopes “Inside Job” will help “demystify the current financial crisis. I think it’s essential that Americans understand so that they can take back their country.”
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October 1, 2010
Aaron Sorkin discusses 'The Social Network'
Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman
In a row of hospitality rooms at Austin’s Four Seasons hotel, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actors Jesse Eisenberg and Armie Hammer are being shuttled from one interview to the next. Outside, a heavy rain is about to begin, the kind Sorkin says is perfect for staying indoors and getting lots of writing done.
The three were in town last week for a screening of “The Social Network,” the story of the founding of Facebook and the rise of baby-faced billionaire Mark Zuckerberg (played by Eisenberg). Sorkin wrote the script, which was partly based on Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires,” which was being written concurrently and racing toward publication last year. In the film, Armie Hammer plays Cameron Winklevoss, who with his twin brother, Tyler, would later sue Zuckerberg over the creation of the popular social networking website.
Sorkin, professorial and direct; Eisenberg, thoughtful and full of praise for Sorkin; and Hammer, energetic and dynamic, sat down with the American-Statesman for separate interviews about “The Social Network.”. Here’s our interview with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:
American-Statesman: How are you?
Aaron Sorkin: Very well, thank you.
How’s the press been?
It’s been great. It’s jam-packed. But it’s very fun and very exciting. We’re going to college towns. We do press during the day and at night we screen the movie for college kids, then do a Q&A afterward. Their questions and comments make you very optimistic about the future. They really do. Kids today might be crazy, but they’re also crazy smart.
What kinds of questions are you getting? What are they most curious about?
They’re not asking showbiz kinds of questions. They’re asking about themes. … Some of the people in the crowd will be film students. They’ll want to ask how you got kind of shot. They see themselves reflected in this movie, that this movie is about them and this generation. When you asked them, “How many of you are on Facebook?,” there isn’t a hand that doesn’t go up. They want to know “Are we doing something wrong?”
In terms of social networking?
No, in terms of being people. In different ways they’re asking the question, “are you trying to tell us as the author as the actors…” Unfortunately David Fincher our director, who is our commander-in-chief on the movie, badly wants to be on this tour and can’t. He’s in Sweden making “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” right now. As enthusiastic as they are about the movie, they’re slightly shaken up by it. They seem to want to know are they entering adulthood on the right foot.
The representation of their generation most successful person is Mark Zuckerberg, at the center of this film.
Yeah. They’re beginning to feel… I’m winning some converts, although this movie isn’t a screed, It’s not meant to convert anyone or teach anyone or ask anyone to eat their vegetables. It’s just a very fast and energetic ride. But they’re beginning to see, I think, that socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
That is a disturbing thought.
I know.
What drew you to want to tell Mark Zuckerberg’s story in the first place, and what made you think it would make for that ride and entertaining film?
Because at the center of it, even though it’s set against a contemporary backdrop with a very modern invention at the center of it, the themes of the story are as old as storytelling itself. Friendship and loyalty and betrayal, jealousy, power, class, especially. These are things that Aeschylus would want to write about and Shakespeare would want to write about, that a few decades ago Paddy Chayefsky would want to write about. Lucky for me, none of those guys were available, so I got to write about it. That’s what drew me to it — not the timeliness of it, but the timelessness of it.
As you say, Facebook obviously has a huge global impact, but the film doesn’t really go there to that big macro view.
No, most of the film takes place in 2003 and 2004 when Facebook was being born. It flashes forward frequently throughout the movie to several years later in two deposition rooms. So there is a sense of portent throughout the movie that this didn’t end well. Whatever we’re seeing here, there was a train wreck someplace. What was fascinating for me was that two lawsuits were brought against Facebook at roughly the same time. That the defendants, the plaintiffs, the witnesses, they all came in to the deposition rooms they all swore an oath to tell the truth and three very different versions of the story emerged from that. Rather than pick one and decide that one is the one I believe, that’s the truth, that’s the one I’ll dramatize, or this one is the sexiest and that’s the one I’ll dramatize, I wanted to dramatize the fact that there were three completely different versions of the story. A “Roshomon” quality. The movie doesn’t take a position on who’s telling the truth, who the good guy is and who the bad guy. We want those argument to happen in the parking lot after the movie.
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Jesse Eisenberg on playing Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network'
Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman
In a row of hospitality rooms at Austin’s Four Seasons hotel, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actors Jesse Eisenberg and Armie Hammer are being shuttled from one interview to the next. Outside, a heavy rain is about to begin, the kind Sorkin says is perfect for staying indoors and getting lots of writing done.
The three were in town last week for a screening of “The Social Network,” the story of the founding of Facebook and the rise of baby-faced billionaire Mark Zuckerberg (played by Eisenberg). Sorkin wrote the script, which was partly based on Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires,” which was being written concurrently and racing toward publication last year. In the film, Armie Hammer plays Cameron Winklevoss, who with his twin brother, Tyler, would later sue Zuckerberg over the creation of the popular social networking website.
Sorkin, professorial and direct; Eisenberg, thoughtful and full of praise for Sorkin; and Hammer, energetic and dynamic, sat down with the American-Statesman for separate interviews about “The Social Network.”. In this interview, we talk to Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:
American-Statesman: Hi, how’s it going?
Jesse Eisenberg: Pretty good.
How’s the press tour going so far?
It’s good. People like the movie and that makes it easier.
It’s really not what I was expecting.
In what way, if you don’t mind me asking?
I think I was expecting a really straightforward narrative, but the intercutting with the legal scene make the movie move so much faster. It kept it very lively.
Oh, wonderful. You’re trying to almost keep up with it. I was expecting that as well when I started reading the script, that it would be a chronological telling of the creation of the site. But those deposition scenes really frame the movie in a different way.
Did you have any contact with Mark Zuckerberg during the film or watch videos of him?
Of course, I watched everything that’s available. I read every interview that was available. I didn’t have the opportunity to meet him. He wasn’t involved in the movie, which is too bad because I really wanted to meet him. My cousin has a great job at Facebook now, so I’m hoping he’ll introduce us.
Is he getting any grief about it?
The first week my cousin worked there, we were still filming the movie, and I think Mark Zuckerberg came up to him and said, “Your cousin is playing me in a movie, right?” He said yeah. And I think Mark said, “That’s really cool.” My cousin has really, truly the greatest things to say about Mark Zuckerberg, both personally and professionally.
What were some the challenges of playing a real-life person as opposed to fictional character like the one in “Zombieland?”
Playing a real person you have the added advantage of being able to kind of steal from the real person. For example, in interviews you see what Mark is wearing or how he walks or if he puts his hand in his pocket in a certain way and you can use that to create a character in a way that a fictional movie you kinda have to use your imagination. And I felt that having access to those resources actually made me more creative even though it can be viewed as limiting. Knowing that he puts his hand in his pocket makes me wonder why he puts his hand in his pocket that way. I’m able to kind of use that within the character.
Was there an effort to separate Mark Zuckerberg, the character in the movie, from Mark Zuckerberg, the real-life person?
The director (David Fincher) discouraged us from doing impressions of our characters. There was an emphasis on these being characters in a story that Aaron Sorkin created rather than doing a traditional biography movie where the authenticity of character is of primary importance.
What were some of the things that were key to the character in his personality?
As Aaron has crafted him, he’s occasionally disengaged, emotionally detached, and yet desperate to connect. It’s an interesting dichotomy of someone who feels alienated by society and so dismisses traditional socialization. Instead of going to a party and really trying to connect, he dismisses the party entirely or stands on the sidelines the entire time. But that’s not because he thinks it’s unworthy of him; he just doesn’t know fully how to connect.
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Actor Armie Hammer on 'The Social Network'
Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman
In a row of hospitality rooms at Austin’s Four Seasons hotel, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actors Jesse Eisenberg and Armie Hammer are being shuttled from one interview to the next. Outside, a heavy rain is about to begin, the kind Sorkin says is perfect for staying indoors and getting lots of writing done.
The three were in town last week for a screening of “The Social Network,” the story of the founding of Facebook and the rise of baby-faced billionaire Mark Zuckerberg (played by Eisenberg). Sorkin wrote the script, which was partly based on Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires,” which was being written concurrently and racing toward publication last year. In the film, Armie Hammer plays Cameron Winklevoss, who with his twin brother, Tyler, would later sue Zuckerberg over the creation of the popular social networking website.
Sorkin, professorial and direct; Eisenberg, thoughtful and full of praise for Sorkin; and Hammer, energetic and dynamic, sat down with the American-Statesman for separate interviews about “The Social Network.”. In this interview, we talk to actor Armie Hammer:
American-Statesman: Your wife (E! correspondent Elizabeth Chambers) has some Austin ties?
She went to school there and graduated with a degree in journalism. Her dad lives in San Antonio. We often come visit him in San Antonio and go to the ranch and get the Texas experience. It’s so nice. It’s just the best. He’s got, like, longhorn on the range. When Elizabeth moved in with me, he sent us a big Texas star to hang on our wall. I was like, “Oh, OK! Of course.”
Probably my favorite line in the whole movie is the “Karate Kid” line. That just kills and it’s such a great line. The (Winklevoss) characters have this great self-awareness. How did you and Josh (Pence) set up to play the characters, and what was your perception of how the character should be?
Initially, the greatest research that we had was Sorkin’s script. It was so clearly defined, and it’s so well-written. Whether it’s how the characters respond in a situation where the actual lines they say, they’re all clues because the script is so well-written. On top of that, upon reading It, you see the potential for the Winklevoss twins to come across as the villains chasing the Karate Kid across the gym. We wanted to make sure that in our portrayal of the Winklevoss twins, we portrayed them as human instead of making a caricature of the big, tall, good-looking athletes who pick on the nerd. We wanted their story to have truth as well. And to be honest, because they’re real-life living people and they deserve that and also they’re real athletes and they’re bigger than me and they could probably beat me up.
Do you have a take on what happened to them and what you think is the real story?
Obviously while filming I had to side completely with the Winklevoss twins; they were victimized by Mark Zuckerberg, who was actively ripping them off every chance he could. That had to be my attitude in order to bring truth to it. Now that I have some distance from the project, it’s a little bit like Sorkin said — there’s three different groups of people who all said different things were the truth. And if three different people who were there can’t agree on what happened anybody looking in from an outside viewpoint, it’s just hopeless. I think what you really have is a bunch of young college students with more money and brains than sense who probably all did something that was irresponsible or immature. I don’t think there’s any one person who did anything wrong or at least not one person you could point at and say that’s the aggressor.
They made out pretty well with the settlement.
Dude. Yeah, they made good money.
Did you have any contact with them at all, with the Winklevoss brothers?
With the Winklevii? Not prior to production, but I met them afterward which was insane. It was like meeting somebody that you tried to for the last eighteen months to think like. I met them and I was like “Whoa it’s you and it’s you your member when you were 15 and that happened and that your mom was like ‘Don’t do that’ and then your dad was like ‘you do this,’ that was so crazy,” they were just like, “we just met you and you’re freaking us out.” It was really funny.
Were they apprehensive about the way the movie would portray them?
I think they were excited. I think that their story is not one that a lot of people know. Regardless of how it is portrayed in the movie, I think they’re just happy that their story gets out there a little bit.
Obviously you and Josh are not twins.
We could be fraternal twins, though. I think that Sorkin’s exact quote was he was talking to David Fincher was he said “I think we have to call all of the 6-foot-5 twins in Hollywood who know how to act and can row and are good-looking and who seemed like they’re Ivy League-educated. And Fincher just goes, “Oh, you want to bring in ALL of them?” That was pretty much the end of that idea. I guess we better just hire someone who’s tall. My audition was the same day as Josh. Then we both ended up getting a part portray the twins together. We became like brothers. We spent at least five hours a day together before we actually shot. Whether it was doing our rowing training or discussing the twins or whatever. Whatever it was, we spent a lot of time together really getting to know each other and creating a kind of rapport.
Their idea was very close to what Facebook would be. Do you think if Zuckerberg hadn’t created it, somebody else would’ve stumbled on that idea and created something like Facebook?
Proably. But I think the people have also stumbled on that idea before and have stumbled on it since, but no one’s been able to execute it like Zuckerberg. You really have to give the guy credit. He’s a genius. He can run a website that people want to be a part of better than anyone else on the planet. He’s proved that by having a website that now has one out of every 14 people on the planet as members. I think that if the twins would have done it, it would’ve been successful because they are entrepreneurs. They’re not dim. But do I think they would’ve had the level of success that Zuckerberg has had? No. I don’t think anybody would.
Where are you from originally?
I’m from L.A. I was born in L.A. I lived in Texas for a couple of years (in Dallas). I moved to the Cayman Islands and then moved back to L.A.
Did you have any rowing experience?
No it was insane. They made intentionally difficult for us by putting Josh and I in a pair which is just a two-person boat where one person only gets one or. You can’t even balance like this. The oars would keep us balanced. If you put about in the water and let it go it will flip over. You have to actively balance with your hips the boat. So it’s the entire body. It was the most total body-encompassing workout I’ve ever had. There wasn’t a day in the first three months of training where I didn’t get out of the water thinking I was going to puke. (He makes puking sounds.)
In the book these guys are described like gods.
These guys are recruited into Navy SEALs programs. These guys have to be like that. They can do these exercises. These guys will do it ferociously for an hour and a half. If you’re running, you’re burning like 700 calories per hour. If you’re rowing, it’s like 1,500. It’s more than double the workout of sprinting. Essentially you’re dead lifting over and over, picking up the oar. You’re dead lifting all the way down the race course at 20 miles an hour. But when you really get the boat set and you have a nice pace going and you have a nice ratio, the boat just glides. It goes silent. You don’t even hear anything.
How long did it take to get to that?
By the time we finally shot the Henley Regatta scene, we could row. We were rowing with the British rowers. A lot of the rowers on that scene are rowers on the Great Britain team. We were not necessarily competing with them, but we were holding our own.
You can read my review of “The Social Network” here on Austin360.
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September 8, 2010
'Grand Paris Texas' takes another look at the real Paris, Texas, and its old theater
Yet ironically, the town itself didn’t really benefit. Wenders’ film never filmed in Paris, Texas — the place is only alluded to in the moody story of a drifter trying to reconnect with his long-absent wife and son. Hence, whatever cinema celebrity the little Northeast Texas city might have gained was ultimately tangential.
In ‘Grand Paris Texas,’ a 54-minute film by Austin-based artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, the residual resonance of Wenders’ movie in Paris takes center stage.
The film screens Thursday night for free at the Paramount Theatre courtesy of Lora Reynolds Gallery. After the screening, Hubbard and Birchler will be joined by Blanton Museum director Ned Rifkin for a public conversation.
At the center of the film — which was commissioned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth when the pair of internationally acclaimed artists had a major exhibit there in 2008 — is the Grand, a time-weathered, bird-infested abandoned movie theater in downtown Paris. Hubbard and Birchler shared some insight into the making of their film.
American-Statesman: In a previous interview, you said that you are both interested in how a story can be pieced together and then pulled apart. How does that happen in ‘Grand Paris Texas?’
Alexander Birchler: The Grand Theater has been shut down for more than 15 years and has been home to generations of pigeons and other wildlife. No one had been inside the building since the cinema was closed. When we first got permission to go enter the building, when we stepped inside, we knew immediately we needed to film the Grand and that we wanted to use the abandoned cinema as a way to explore obsolescence. Our film has three interwoven parts. One part follows a film crew while they venture inside to film the theater interior. Another part incorporates interviews with Paris residents who offer reflections about cinema, filmmaking, and what movies mean for them in their specific lives, in their specific town. The third part explores the actual town versus the projection in our minds triggered by the more famous city Paris, France, and by Wenders’ film.
How does the idea of absence function in ‘Grand Paris Texas’?
Teresa Hubbard: When the Grand Theater closed it was supposed to be temporary. People expected the theater to open back up, but it just never happened. Film reels, films and projector lenses were simply left out on table tops. Potted plants, lunch menus and cigarettes are still there on the manager’s office desk as though he and everyone else would return the next day. But they didn’t. The place is held in that void, like a photograph, frozen. I think that the void functions in a kind of perverse state of endurance.
Tell us about some of the people you interview in the film.
Birchler: During the course of about a year, we made numerous research trips to Paris, and during these trips, we spoke to a lot of fascinating people. One of the first people we met was Marcus Roden, a funeral director. Over the course of his long and successful career in the funeral business, Marcus has buried most of the people who lived in Paris, as well as most of the people who worked at the Grand Theater. Marcus compared the similarities between directing a funeral and directing a film. Early on, we strongly felt like these conversations, in some form, needed to be interwoven into the structure of the film.
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November 4, 2009
Interview: David Lang, composer for '(Untitled)'
Does Adrian Jacob’s character compare at all to your life?
I guess a little bit, yeah. The way I set it up is it’s sort of unfolding; he’s learning how to do things, he has a small audience and then he figures out a bunch of things by doing a lot of things in public in front of almost nobody. That’s definitely something I’ve been through, but I wouldn’t say that I got into a relationship and then got dumped and then all of a sudden I was a good composer. I’m not exactly sure that I believe that people who suffer make better art.
So with your music, especially Bang on a Can, it seems that the physical performance is as much a part of it as the auditory and I see a lot of crossovers between that and “(Untitled).” Was this intentional, since they’re both experimental forms of music?
I really wanted to make it so that it wasn’t just like the music was described, but you actually see it being made and you’d actually not just see people doing things with classical instruments, which is sort of secret and arcane, you know, how do you scrape a piece of horse hair across a box and come out with a beautiful sound. There’s something mysterious about that. I really wanted it to be everyday things that people would understand, like ripping paper and dropping glass so that there’s an attempt to make music out of things that are in everybody’s lives all around them. Again, that’s very much like Bang on a Can. The physicality of making the music should be part of the appreciation of making the music.
I also think of Bang on a Can, the actual name of the organization, and then the whole kicking the bucket as correlated? Was that intentional?
Actually it was not part of the original thing and it was not my idea to have the character kick the bucket, that was the director’s idea.
Why did he want that, do you know?
I think he was trying to think of some action which was ridiculous. He was trying to think of a musical instrument that would be ridiculous and I think that’s how he thought of it.
So how were you approached by the director?
The director got in touch with me and his idea was that this composer would write this really idiotic music and then he would have this experience and be changed and that he wanted to see him going through this crisis moment out of which comes this little piece of piano music. And he came to me and said, ‘I heard this piece of piano music of yours and I want to license that for the film, I want him to go through this experience and come out the other end and I want real music there and I want it to be your piece.’ So I had him describe for me what was going on in the rest of the movie and I said you can have all this silly music; I can write the silly music, too. You know, I’m a professional. So I sort of talked him into letting me do the rest of the score, I had never done one before. It was really kind of a leap of faith on his part.
Did you work with Adam Goldberg in helping his performance?
We did a bunch of dummy performances. I wrote a bunch of music that was essentially the same music that they played on screen with the paper and the dropping things and kicking and screaming and yelling. I did all that in a recording session as a kind of model for what they should do and Adam came to that. He watched that whole recording session take place and sort of saw that music and listened to it. I didn’t work with him in that I was sitting there on screen going, ‘Okay, well now at this moment why don’t you try to yell higher or something.’ … But one of the things I did in the recording session, which I thought was so useful was that I recorded him yelling a bunch of stuff. I just made up a bunch of stupid stuff with him yelling, which is what he ends ups doing on screen and so I thought if at the beginning of this exercise of letting him know what this character is about, I’m going to make him yell this stuff and it’s going to be so embarrassing that the only way you’d be able to do it is with complete conviction. So I think very subtly it sort of told him the attitude that he needed to have for the rest of the music, although he’s a musician so he understands all this anyway. He was really great and he really understood what he was supposed to be doing.
I know that you had your initial ideas with how you wanted the score to be written. How much of it changed from the beginning to the end, or did it change at all?
The interesting thing for me about this film was that having never done one before is that the music was used in all these different ways. Music is usually used, in film at least to my untrained, unobservant background, as a helper. … So what’s interesting is that exists in this movie, there is that kind of underscoring that tells you their emotional lives, but there are all these other layers of music. There’s music that’s played on screen that’s supposed to be in a live concert; there’s music that’s composed on screen, where you see him actually writing music; there’s things where he’s assembling the sound through sampling to make a piece of music and there’s also a concert where there’s a real piece of music that gets played. … There’s a lot of music in the film which I wrote really for concert, so I felt that I had all these different kinds of uses for music and I would go back and forth between each world and go, ‘well, which category is this? Is this underscoring, is this live concert, which actually also tells you their inner life.’ It was interesting because the categories could all get blurred. The thing that surprised me the most was that the least satisfying part of it was writing the music that works the way some music works normally. So those things that actually are … okay well here’s 10 seconds where no one is supposed to be listening to the music but you’re supposed to see what is in his mind, or her mind. You know that stuff turned out to be, because it was the most normal, the least fun.
So what did you think of the final film?
I enjoyed it. I thought it was really funny. The weird thing for me was that I’d only seen it really on a computer monitor at a certain size and then you see those things over and over again and you’re writing music to them, so none of the jokes are very funny after you hear them 10,000 times. So what was really great is that I went out to the opening with my wife in Los Angeles at the LA County Art Museum and I got to walk down the red carpet … that was really fun and then you go into this room and there’s 600 people watching this film and a little joke comes on and everyone laughs. All of a sudden I felt like I saw the movie for the first time, because when you see it with other people around you, all your little impulses get completely magnified and I thought that was really beautiful. I had sort of forgotten how funny it was.
At that premiere, what kinds of responses did you get afterward? Were people coming up to you?
Yeah, people really liked it. The music is such a big part of it.
It’s a character in itself.
It is really a character. And again that’s why I was trying to make sure it had a shape from beginning to the end; that it was really kind of respectful to the idea that music and musicians are important.
It seems like a great first film for you to work on as a composer.
It was really great because the music actually was present. The thing I thought was interesting that I didn’t really understand while I was working on it was that it pokes fun of so many things. It pokes fun of art, music and people who aren’t really commercial. Some of those are really easy targets and some you don’t really know exactly where it’s going, but at the end it’s really clear that this composer … after two hours of making fun of everybody, it’s actually really serious.
In your work, “Cheating, Lying, Stealing,” I feel like there’s two different kinds of voices, you know you have your stringed instruments met with the percussive instruments and they each tell a different story. But in the end they come together and complete a whole picture. How much of your emotional input goes into your work?
I never set out to say, ‘okay today I’m really miserable so I’m going to write a really miserable piece, or I’m just going to sit and think about the problems of my life and how I can translate that into high art.’ I never do that although that’s a very kind of traditional way for people to think of what they’re doing. Certainly in the media that’s the way a lot of art is portrayed. In this film the way it’s shown how he goes and has this hard experience and that hard experience makes him better. It makes him a more sensitive artist. I don’t really like that. I don’t really think that that’s the way it works and if it works that way it can’t work that way that directly. What’s interesting about music is that it is about a certain kind of emotional expression, it’s not like working with language where you tell somebody something specific. This is actually something else. It goes some place else other than language. It uses these emotional vibrations and that way it sort of enters people on this emotional level. It comes out of you on this emotional level, whether you want it to or not. So I do spend a lot time thinking about what interests me and what I believe in and what music I love and what sounds I love and about being honest about making sure that all those things are satisfying to me. I do think there’s something fundamentally expressive about that act. And I think that because music doesn’t come in mediated by intelligence or language that’s the place where it goes inside you when you receive it.
Would Adrian Jacobs’ character make a good fit in Bang on a Can since the mission of the organization is for people who are trying things that don’t necessarily have an easy fit in any other art world?
Bang on a Can’s mission has always been to support people who are pushing some boundary, who are experimenting in some way. It’s not really about finding a style of music that we like and saying this is the best style. So a lot of the pieces which I get interested in as a presenter for Bang on a Can are pieces that may not even be great pieces. They may be things, which are just about a great vision. And so I think one of the weird things about Adrian is I wrote that music to remind me of a certain period of music history. … Let’s break down the barrier between instrument and non-instrument, the barriers between sound and noise and I associated that so much with a historical period that anybody working in that mode now, I wouldn’t be interested in presenting their music. I would be interested in presenting the music from the early sixties, which does that by the composers who are figuring that out for the first time.
So how would you describe the music of Bang on a Can now and where it’s headed?
I think it still has the same mission. I think what’s been interesting as a presenter, we started with classical music because that was our background, but we were primarily about looking at the boundaries around contemporary classical music and so over the years, what we’ve been able to do is look at the people in all the other disciplines of music … who’s pushing the boundaries and we’ve been able to expand the area that we’ve been looking at, but the criteria for judgment has always been then same. We don’t want to find a traditional thing in a traditional culture. The mission hasn’t changed at all, but the area that we’ve been applying it to has changed. As far as where it’s going, I don’t know. And I also feel like I don’t want to know where it’s going.
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