2006 SFIFF—Nordeste / Northeast Q&A

The two lead actresses of Nordeste (Northeast)—Carole Bouquet and Aymará Rovera—shared the Best Actress prize at the Stockholm International Film Festival, where director Juan Solanas also walked off with the prize for Best Picture. Rovera flew up from Argentina to help present the film at the San Francisco International. Unfortunately, she contracted laryngitis en route and couldn't speak. So she wrote down her thoughts and had an interpreter read them to us:

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My name is Aymará Rovera and I'm the actress in this film. This is my first important role. I'm from Neuquén in the south of Argentina, but, I've been living for many years now in Buenos Aires because of my work. Juan Solanas will come at the end of the movie so that we can talk some more about the film.

For me it is an honor to be here presenting Nordeste. We want—together with Juan Solanas—to say thank you for being invited. When I was on my way up here traveling from Argentina, I thought about all the things that I wanted to say but my voice failed. Actually, I can't hardly talk, but—through the interpreter—I hope you can hear what I have to say.

Nordeste was filmed in the north of Argentina. This is a movie about two stories, two different worlds of two different women, adoption, the lack of justice, human pain and misery and in a way it touches every one of us. Personally, this film gave me a great opportunity. It was a big break. I feel very fortunate of all the things and all the opportunities life has given me. A few people might know actually that worldwide child trafficking falls in third place after weapons dealing and drug trafficking. It happens not only in my country but in any and all countries where there's poverty and low resources. I wish that this changes and I feel that through films we can tell stories.

This film takes us into worlds that we might not want to look at. Nordeste is a film that must be seen. Juan Solanas did a lot of research before writing the book and heard hundreds of testimonies that were later incorporated into this film. Nordeste was made with a lot of love. I hope you'll enjoy it and I hope you can enter into this world and the world of these beautiful characters and this beautiful film. Thank you for coming.

* * *

After the screening Miguel Pendás introduced director Juan Solanas and reintroduced actress Aymará Rovera. Pendas reiterated that Rovera arrived from Argentina the day before, found her luggage okay, but lost her voice.

Immediately Solanas was asked why he left the ending of Northeast so unresolved? He responded that he filmed it that way so that the audience could wonder what might be a positive and realistic ending for the story. Realistically, such scenarios rarely have a favorable outcome and he didn't want to impose one. Though Chris Knipp states that Solanas has "turn[ed] away from the task of completing his somewhat crudely roughed in story", Solanas himself seems to suggest that task is presumptive. Variety's Deborah Young even suggests that to some extent the film's open ending redeems the film's predictability. Whether the film's ending frustrates or challenges will most likely vary upon expectation.

Asked why the nun in one of the film's final scenes was given the most powerful words in the whole film, Solanas admitted he was an atheist, he does not believe in God, but on one hand the film is an homage to Sister Martha Pelloni, a particular nun in Argentina who discovered there was a huge trafficking of children and the organs of children. Of course while preparing for the movie, Solanas frequently visited with Sister Pelloni and their interaction provided rich information. On the other hand, there are many nuns in the Northeast aware of the child trafficking who are working to help the children. It's reality, Solanas responds firmly, and the world of those nuns is moreorless his world, they are both after the same goal, even though he is an atheist and they the brides of Christ.

A woman in the audience noted how the French woman had been tricked and frustrated many times, not the least of which was being given a diseased baby. She wondered if the baby really had the disease? Or was the same baby being used over and over to scam people and to get as much money as possible?

Solanas reminded that he moreorless spent years researching the reality of the topic before even writing the script. Each story he discovered was heartbreakingly unique. Northeast is just one story and not necessarily representative of the rest. For him the child has the disease. Could the baby not have the disease? Possibly. Human beings can be crafty, for good or bad. But for Solanas, no, he has no reason to question the baby's health. The baby is sick. It will die. For Solanas the case is real. In fact, he heard a lot of stories of couples finding their babies were sick when they performed medical check-ups. Carrying his father's torch, Solanas dives for the reality of a story, and whether that is rendered as documentary or as fiction borders on irrelevant. He has assembled a fiction made of pieces of real stories. The genres lean into each other to promote a larger truth.

Solanas was asked what motivated such a well-known actress as Carole Bouquet to become involved with Northeast? Solanas replied that three years ago he filmed a short movie that won a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar. Bouquet was on the jury that voted for his movie. He didn't know that. But after completing his script for Northeast, he set his sights on casting a good French actress for the role. He was considering Carole Bouquet, Isabelle Huppert, two or three women, and decided to start with Carole Bouquet. He phoned her agent. To his surprise, he heard back from Bouquet no less than three days later, partly because she loved his Cesar-winning short movie so much that she wanted to meet him. After they lunched together and Solanas told her the story, Bouquet was very touched and informed Solanas that she was the President of an association named Voice of the Child who fight against child trafficking and prostitution. Solanas knew nothing about this beforehand. Thus, the role was perfect for Bouquet, her dedication to resolving the problem was already determined, and she agreed to do the film the day after their first meeting.

Miguel Pendás asked, in turn, how Solanas cast Aymará in the film? The audience gave Rovera a round of applause and she stepped up to the microphone to bravely croak out a "thank you." Solanas answered that he had a large casting call where he saw nearly 300 women, but, when he saw Aymará, he knew she was the right one for the role. He could feel how deeply Aymará felt for Juana's situation. This deep feeling was essential for him.

Moreorless half of the people in the movie were not professional actors, they were playing themselves, yet another blend between documentary and fiction. Solanas doesn't give the script to anyone on the set, neither the real actors nor the non-actors who—if they learn the words, he complains—sound like robots; it just doesn't work. So nobody gets the script, its created through improvisation among the cast, and following his intuition Solanas realized he needed the help of his professional actors to inhabit their roles with complete and genuine feeling. After the authentic deep feeling is there, then they're free to improvise and become real. Solanas felt Aymará could inhabit and embody the character of Juana. "She's incredible!"

Prefacing that I had the great pleasure of interviewing his father a few days before, I commended Juan for carrying on the beautiful work of capturing the soul of Argentina's country folk. I was curious about the opening and closing music. Were they tangos? Yes, he responded, they were contemporary tangos from Buenos Aires, what they call a piazzolla.

One of the audience wanted to know if it was true that the northeast of Argentina is really a child trafficking capital? Solanas replied that poverty is a sad fact of Argentina and—whenever you have poverty—you find corruption. Because the Northeast is one of the poorer regions of Argentina, there is a high incidence of corruption. There is a city named Goya in Corrientes—one of the three states of the northeast—that is called the capital of child trafficking, because there are incredible cases about that, nightmare cases. But, for example, in Santiago del Estero—which is more in the middle of the country—Solanas was contacted by an association who fights against child trafficking in Santiago. Recently they filed a complaint in the courts for 25,000 children in Santiago who have gone missing in the last ten years. As horrific as that is alone, it's just a small part of the larger phenomenon.

While preparing to film Northeast, Solanas spent a lot of time in Formosa, which is in the northernmost part of the state where it borders with Paraguay. He and his assistant lodged in a hotel named the Home Hotel. Solanas was preoccupied concentrating on casting the film and didn't notice—until his assistant pointed it out to him—that every three to four days a foreign couple would arrive to the hotel. Two or three days later they came into possession of a child and two or three days after that, they would return to their native countries to be replaced by the arrival of a new foreign couple.

* * *

Solanas has joined the ranks of filmmakers blogging about their own projects; a welcome development in my estimation. A recent entry sports a fine photograph of him with his father Fernando. His next project will be Air, a futuristic thriller.

2006 SFIFF—"A Prairie Home Companion" Q&A With Lily Tomlin and Virginia Madsen

Lily Tomlin and Virginia Madsen were on hand to introduce the festival's closing night screening of Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion at the Castro Theater. Tomlin asserted how much they loved making the film and working with Altman and Garrison Keillor and Madsen expressed how wonderful it was to be back in San Francisco again.

"And, of course, I got to work with Meryl Streep," Tomlin boasted, adding as an aside, "Although she wasn't my first choice." The audience laughed loudly and she feigned innocence, "What?!!"

"So enjoy it!" Tomlin encouraged the audience, "We loved making it. And we had a great time in Minnesota—right in Garrison's home town where he broadcast his show—and, anyway, we did good."

Madsen added, "We had an incredible time in a beautiful theater—not much different than this one—and so it's very appropriate to be watching the show in this space tonight and, hopefully, you'll enjoy it."

After the screening they returned to the stage where Graham Leggat launched the Q&A by asking the obvious question: What was it like working with such a brilliant ensemble cast and with such a brilliant director?

"Well, it's easy and fun usually," Tomlin offered even as Madsen stated, "Very difficult!" Tomlin explained that Madsen had a really hard part but that she did it so great. "When I saw it on paper, I thought, no one's going to be able to pull this off." "I didn't have to sing," Madsen countered. "I know, that's true, you didn't have to sing," Tomlin agreed and with just the right touch of smugness added, "but … I did."

"I was worried about it," she admitted, "because I'd never really sung a part. I mean I'd sung as characters, just for fun, like on the television show but I was supposed to sound like I could sing. And I told Bob, I took lessons for two months before I went up so I could sing the harmony and I said to Bob, 'Bob, I'm not sure. What if I get there and I can't sing very well?' And he said, 'Well, if you can't sing well, you just can't sing well.' " That helped ease her worries. "I think you did a tremendous job," Madsen complimented Tomlin and the audience concurred with a round of applause.

"That's kind of typical of Altman though," Tomlin stated, "to be so unflappable like that. Even in Nashville I told him, I said, y'know, I don't think Linnea can go to bed with Keith Carradine's character. And he said, 'Well, if the time comes she has to go to bed with him and she can't do it, she just can't do it.' "

Tomlin was asked if—after working with Altman several times now—if his way of handling her or her way of working with him had changed over the past 30 years from the first film to the last?

Tomlin responded: "I think Bob is absolutely the same artist and the same man." She turned to Madsen, "He kind of leaves you on your own, don't you think?"

Madsen agreed, "Yeah, sometimes that's not a good thing." She continued, "No, he does. He said to me the other day that someone was commenting to him on how—why is it that you just make a phone call and any actor will show up and all actors want to work with you?—and he said, 'I think it's because I allow actors what they were meant to do.' In a way that's true. He gives a tremendous freedom, leaves us alone, but also you always kind of feel this gentle hand, guiding you."

"And he's absolutely in charge," Tomlin added, " but he's just very laid back and quiet about it." She started wiggling her fingers, explaining, "And the reason I'm doing my fingers is because he has beautiful fingers; his hands are gorgeous! I've known him now for over 30 years, even though I've only done three movies and only had a tiny part in The Player, but, it seems the same as when we did Nashville, y'know? He's just an older man now. But he's still just as sharp and the same personality and he just seems to know what he wants and what he's doing. We sort of just have fun. You always have the feeling that you can't make a mistake. And John C. Reilly—yesterday we were in Minnesota—and he said something like, 'And if you are making a mistake it's because Altman wants you to.' "

Tomlin went on: "I've said this too about him: It's like going to a playground with a bunch of other kids who play the same games you do and you know there's not going to be any drive-bys. First of all, his style, if you do something really awful, he doesn't have to use it, he can just cut away from it."

Tomlin was then asked how she got her wonderful Wisconsin accent. "I practiced," she said, "but, I'm from Detroit, it's not terribly radically different but it certainly is different and Meryl and I got together and of course she's an accent master. But I have to say, in this case, her mother-in-law's from Wisconsin. So our biggest concern was would we go too far? Particularly me. Would I go too far? Because I've never seen her go too far with an accent." The audience cut up and, again, Tomlin acted like she didn't know why they were laughing, "What? And we just kind of worked on it. I worked with a dialect coach too. You want to be able to speak as fluently as you would in your own dialect, y'know? You don't want to think about it or else you can't really perform."

Madsen reminded her that she also sang as well but Tomlin noted that singers don't sing so heavily in their accent. "Yeah," Madsen responded, "but you could still hear it in certain places." "A little bit, yeah," Tomlin admitted. Madsen insisting on praising her mastery of the accent until Tomlin, in a perfect Wisconsin accent, stated, "That's mighty nice of you." Finishing up her answer, Tomlin said, "So we just worked on it. We wanted to do it so we did. I still worried, I was thinking, 'Oh God, I think I laid a little too heavy on that part.' But I feel fine about it."

The two actresses were asked about the timeline of the movie because it's about a stage performance. Was it shot chronologically when they were filming or did they jump around like a normal film shoot?

"I can't remember how much it was or wasn't," Tomlin said. "I think it was pretty much but certainly not entirely. The nature of the way it was done, a lot of it was interchangeable. There were just certain moments that you … because you're going onstage and backstage and you could have anything playing in the background so I don't even remember. And in the editing process I'm sure they had quite a bit of flexibility."

"Technically what they were doing on stage was quite remarkable," Madsen offered. "It was amazing. Sometimes they had four cameras going at one time and there'd be one camera—it's not that different from this house here, just a bit smaller—but we had a crane coming all the way from those seats [gesturing to the back of the Castro] all the way up onto the stage and flying around, while there was a track here, another camera on the dolly, and maybe one or two cameras backstage. So sometimes as they were building all of that, I could go downstairs and I could kill someone or Lily could be drinking backstage."

"Not nearly enough," Tomlin countered, "but originally in the script—because Meryl had a knee operation or something—and originally she was going to be in a wheelchair so they had made a hole in the floor to drop her down and bring her up, see? She was supposed to be in a wheelchair a lot of the time and then she said she didn't want to do it and I said to Bob, 'Well, let me be in the wheelchair!' I thought it would have been great to make that entrance, y'know, go up and down, but he didn't do it and I didn't have any dibs on the wheelchair anyway. I was going to be able to be pushing her, pushing her everywhere we were going, and I liked that. Constantly in touch…" Madsen corrected her, "In charge."

"There's certain things that you plan to do for a movie," Tomlin explained, "for your part, that never necessarily make it in at all, y'know, a very small percentage of stuff. That scene in the dressing room, we were the first day to shoot, it was a very long … it was a 20-minute scene and Bob would just let us shoot it from beginning to end over and over again and we loved that because that's where we'd talk over each other because we'd forget part of the story and the other person would pick it up and it just became a real style with us and made that intimacy of the sisterhood…."

Madsen inserted, "It's one of the best scenes I think that's ever been shot on film, that stuff in the dressing room." The audience concurred with applause. Madsen said Tomlin was also modestly leaving out the fact that Altman would shoot maybe one or two pages, three pages a day, and then one day would demand, "You're going to shoot the first 10 pages right now" and they all just had to go in there and do it.

"It was a solid script," Tomlin said and then started laughing remembering the filming of the dressing room scene, "but, yes, we fooled around and a lot of times Meryl and I got to where we had a lot of fun together and we would try to make each other laugh. That's why I had that thing in my mouth, y'know? She wouldn't know what I was doing during the scene because she'd be talking and she was so great and all of a sudden she'd look over and catch a glimpse of me in the mirror, y'know? And another time I put weights on my legs and I got up and started doing my exercises. So we never knew what would be in it. And the best part that was left out was that we had tried out for the Lawrence Welk show when we were four little kids. And I was still bitter, 45 years later, I was still real bitter and sore about it and felt that we didn't get the job because we were more talented than the Lennon Sisters." In summary Tomlin thought she should have just had a movie with Yolanda. The audience liked the idea and applauded. "I'm only kidding, y'know," Tomlin laughed, "kind of."

One audience member commented on how much she loved the radio program and wondered why Keillor did not include his "News from Lake Wobegon" monologues? "He did that on purpose," Madsen answered. Asked to talk further on that, Tomlin said, "I think he's hoping and planning that he'll be able to do a film about Lake Wobegon. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that or not. I think originally he may have been thinking he would do Lake Wobegon and somehow he and Bob decided they had better do the show first and, hopefully, later be able to do Lake Wobegon. Because all of us in the diner eventually … you can see the angel comes and we're probably goners and I guess we won't be in Lake Wobegon. Except that damn Lindsay, she escaped the diner, and she'll probably be in Lake Wobegon."

The actresses were asked if they had listened to Prairie Home Companion before? Were they fans of it? And what was it like to work with Garrison Keillor?

"Yes, I knew the show very well," Madsen answered, " I had been listening to it for years. I'm also from the Midwest, north of Chicago, and so it was kind of comforting settling in, trying to settle in Hollywood, and still having that on the radio. I remember my manager calling me and saying, 'Oh my God, you're not going to believe this. Robert Altman wants to call you.' And suddenly I'm deer in the headlights. And I said, 'Well, what's it about? Is there an outline? Is it all improv?' And she said, 'Well, I haven't finished it yet, it's a little strange, I haven't gotten to your part yet but you're called The Dangerous Woman and it has something to do with the Prairie?' " Madsen excitedly realized her manager was talking about Prairie Home Companion and that, if she was going to play the Dangerous Woman it meant she must be in Guy Noir's world. Then she wondered who was going to play Guy Noir? Would it be Garrison Keillor? Then when she found out Guy Noir was going to be played by Kevin Kline, she got excited to think she would get to kiss Kevin Kline! But then, of course, she read the script and found out she was an angel and so much for the kiss….

Tomlin riffed on what Madsen had said earlier about the multiple cameras and never knowing when the camera was on or not. The one thing that didn't get into the movie that just broke her heart was in the scene where she and Yolanda (Streep) were talking about their mom and Yolanda was describing how their mom would be down on the floor scrubbing, commenting how growing up they didn't have any luxuries, no vacations, nothing, and Rhonda (Tomlin) said, "Yeah, but, we had a lot of fun. Remember when Mom would boil an ear of corn and throw it on the floor and all us kids would play like we were pigs eating the corn?" Tomlin started busting a gut on stage remembering that improv, insisting it "was really heartfelt" but it wasn't on camera, it was just one of those adlibbed moments where she was playing with Streep, trying to make her laugh. Streep was playing it straight, seriously sentimental, and then when Tomlin said that about the pigs and getting on the floor and eating the corn, Streep's expression was priceless! "It wasn't meant to be facetious in any way," Tomlin laughed, "it was truly heartfelt, because it was a family story that I've always loved."

Madsen recalled that moment, sitting out in the audience. "Every day I'd just hang out at work all day. Sometimes they'd dress me up in the morning and decide they could use me and Bob would say, 'Throw the angel over there in the corner.' And I'd go, 'Okay.' 'Nah, nah, get her out!' It was so funny. I could sit in the audience and I could watch these guys perform all day long so I remember the corn."

"And of course Kevin [Kline] was hilarious!" Tomlin remembered. Streep and she would be on stage singing and then the audience would start tittering and they knew "that guy was back there doing something!"

Which reminded Madsen that you had to make sure your microphone was turned off if you weren't in a scene because everyone had a microphone on, Altman was one of the pioneers of all of that, and if you were in the audience, you had to make sure your microphone was turned off or else you'd be picked up laughing at the improvs. "Because all the stuff that you've seen was really performed live. They weren't doing this to playback. Unless it was somehow technically necessary. All the stuff that you're seeing is really performed live." "And no fixes!" Tomlin added. "So if you messed up," Madsen explained, Altman would often like it. "Not that you messed up," Madsen said to Tomlin.

"No," Tomlin responded dryly, "but Meryl did! God!" The previous night at the St. Paul premiere Tomlin sat next to Streep in the Fitzgerald Theater and said it was so much fun because Streep and Kevin Kline are really good friends, and every time Kevin would do something, Streep would laugh loudly, "just tickled to death."

One woman in the audience commented that it seemed like a lot of people in the audience—as well as everywhere else in the nation—have a really intimate relationship with A Prairie Home Companion. It's an oral medium, it's voices, and unless you're lucky enough to see it live, most of the time you're just listening, she said. So she wondered how it felt to actually infiltrate this radio, this medium, and actually change it from within and help its evolution to a picture format?

"I'm not sure if I understood that or not," Tomlin joked. Madsen said, "I was just thinking I never thought of Garrison in quite that way. I don't think we really changed anything. I just think it was really incredible to meet Garrison Keillor. Because, you know, I had seen his picture on a bookjacket. And I guess I thought like many of us, I thought he was smaller. You meet this towering man, he's like 6'6" … and he's totally and completely neat and he's very eccentric and he was wearing these red sneakers everyday and I was always running around taking photographs and I took this really—I thought this really cool picture of his sneakers where one was kind of moving and there was a cool kind of red stream coming off of that because, y'know, it's the most that Garrison will ever dance. And I was like, 'Garrison, wow, check it out, look at this great photograph, I want you to have it!' And he was like [mugging a deadpan face]. And that was his whole reaction to the photograph, it was so strange, and he was like [stated drolly], 'Very interesting.' But he was fascinating to watch and I actually found the picture later taped to the camera thing. But he's a very unique individual and I think he opened up a lot. Maybe that's the only thing we did change, he opened up a lot to us."

Tomlin continued: "Last night in Minnesota he was almost playful. I mean, relatively speaking. It's true we were kind of like intruders into this family that was so solid and that had been working together so long but they made it really easy and comfortable for us. Because they were so well-oiled and worked so wonderfully and easily together, we were just absorbed into it, and the theater, and it was just a big support for us. We were the ones who really relied on them. The band is so exceptional. But Garrison is—well, to answer your question about radio, this is what I wanted to tell you—I went to see him at the Hollywood Bowl last year before we started the movie and I had always listened to the radio show and I loved it and I loved all of Garrison's humor and all the stuff they did, and as I sat at the Bowl watching the show live—which was going to be similar to what we were going to do—it was twice as funny in the theater because Garrison, he has that little scowl that he wears, y'know? You don't get that on the radio necessarily but no matter what they were doing he had that expression on his face and the show was very funny live and I thought [this] will go well for the movie, visually."

Someone asked if the duct tape scene with the man who was making all the different sound effects was improvised. Tomlin answered, "No, not entirely at all. I'm sure it was scripted, I can't remember now, but because we had to like kind of make it … we didn't really learn it and know it, we were kind of reading it and fooling around with as it was on the page as they often do in radio, y'know? You saw Garrison reading stuff too as if he's reading commercials and so on. I think with that gong thing, that came after a couple of takes, I don't know if Meryl had that idea, or somebody finished that section, but, that came up and it worked well to button up that sequence."

An audience member asked what they thought the bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald represented? Madsen said, "Altman would tell you that the movie is just about death" and offered that maybe Fitzgerald was just "another dead person." But then she furthered, "The theater is called the Fitzgerald theater. And it is Garrison's base, it's his hometown, it's where they often performed the show for obvious reasons."

"Maybe in contrast…" Tomlin ventured and then switched gears, "I don't know what it meant frankly. It just was. Altman is very, y'know, he treats things as a matter of serendipity anyway. So, y'know, the fact that the bust was there and everything, somehow it's just going to work into and become part of the play. He takes what comes. So they certainly didn't plan it, y'know, I mean they didn't say, 'Well, let's pretend this is Fitzgerald, we have the bust of Fitzgerald here and it will be metaphorically … something very important.' I think it just happened to be there and, I don't know, Kevin read those lines as if he didn't get who Fitzgerald was entirely. I mean, I knew he did as Kevin but as Guy Noir, he didn't get it." She capped off her response with saying Fitzgerald was "a local boy", qualifying that such a distinction wasn't that impressive, since "even Jesus was just a carpenter in his hometown."

Graham Leggat cued them to speak about the previous night's premiere in St. Paul. Madsen offered, "They built a screen like this [gesturing to the Castro's screen] in the Fitzgerald Theater that we filmed in so you were sitting in the audience watching the audience and the show that you were watching while you were watching yourself watching yourself. It was very surreal and very bizarre."

"Because a lot of the audience were sitting in that film!" Tomlin explained and then she and Madsen proceeded to overlap dialogue comparable to any of the film's funniest sequences.

Madsen: And they also had a parade, which we were all picked up by horses and carriages….

Tomlin: White carriages!

Madsen: White carriages and the high school marching band…

Tomlin: …the high school marching band…

Madsen: …with the big feathered caps and…

L: Thousands and thousands of people from St. Paul, thousands on the streets, thick, thick, and they were so thick that the cops on the horses had to say, "Get away from the back of my horse. Get away from the back of my horse."

V: It was like being the Beatles for example.

L: I felt like I was an astronaut!

They started joking about what it was like to be in different carriages. Tomlin exclaimed, "I wish I had been in your carriage, you don't know what it's like sitting next to Meryl. She got bouquets and people running up and throwing flowers at her."

Madsen: And she was on the cover of the newspaper this morning, did you see that?

Tomlin: [Jokingly disgruntled.] Yeah, I did. She was on the cover and Lindsay was on the cover.

Madsen: Lindsay's picture was this big and Meryl's was half a page.

Tomlin: And then it was like this … like some big teeth on the side, which was my profile. [With weary resignation] Oh, that's okay.

The laughter finally calmed down and the actresses were asked about Dusty and Lefty's song, if it was a collection of old jokes or were they written for the movie? And if they were written, if Garrison wrote them?

Tomlin answered, "No, I think they were—unless Garrison did write them many years ago—to me they're familiar old classic bad jokes, y'know. At least I've heard of most of them." She turned to Madsen, "Have you?" Madsen responded, "They were really bad old jokes." Tomlin qualified, "I think the PMS and Mad Cow was probably not as old as three boobs." Madsen then admitted that some of the jokes were not as funny to her as they were to the guys, that one of them had actually upset her, but she wasn't going to repeat it though people in the audience wanted her to.

"That's also the eccentric thing about [Garrison]," she noted, "is he has this incredible political wit and sarcasm and such intelligent humor, especially in his commentaries and monologues, but then he has like potty humor. [Her Chicago accent comes out in the word "potty".] He has like this ten-year-old boy humor and—when you listen to the show, you're like—How are you even doing that?"

Tomlin suggested it was because they were "refined girls." Madsen laughed, "Oh yes. It's too insulting to us. We're too sophisticated." Tomlin summarized, "The cowboys were pretty cute, it's true. They're like bad kids but they're really cute." Madsen then brought up that there was a fart machine on the set, which reminded Tomlin of when there was a fart machine on the set of Huckabees which the guys—Mark Wahlberg and Dustin and everybody—were totally into. "Especially Dustin, you think he's going to be the most intense, serious artist in the world and there's nothing he enjoyed more than dragging out that fart machine!" Topping off the audience laughter Tomlin shouted out, "And sometime he didn't even use the machine!"

One woman in the audience asked Madsen about her role as The Dangerous Woman, how it was interesting to watch a femme fatale and an angel of death character being woven into the film. She wondered what it was like for Madsen to play that part, especially given what she had said to Tomlin earlier about Robert Altman thinking the movie was about death.

"I think that also kind of grew as we were shooting because I don't think anybody really knew what was going to happen, or what I was going to wear, y'know? He wanted me to glide so … and I kind of walk like a truck driver so they were like, 'Maybe we should build her a platform on wheels. Maybe she should be on a string and fly.' It kind of grew as we were going along. He then decided to kind of have me here and there and then just see what would work in the final cut. I was really kind of at a loss because how are you going to play an angel? I went to him one day and I said, 'Well, you know, it seems like I don't remember humor.' I was trying to figure out what made me stay, after I take Chuck, what makes me stay? Am I just so attracted to these wonderful people, is it making me reminisce about life? And I'm going on and on and on, all my actorspeak and he said, 'Well, I think that all depends on how long you've been dead.' And I then I said to him, 'Right!! Right.' I started thinking about it, I was writing in my journal, it could be years, a month, and then he said, 'Stop thinking about it so much. Just be dead.' But really, then we started doing it in different ways and it was gradually—to answer your question—it was gradually woven in like day to day, giving me something to do because I wouldn't leave."

Another audience member asked Madsen if she had patterned The Dangerous Woman after Sally Kellerman's character in Brewster McCloud?

"No, he specifically didn't want me to pattern it against anything. He just wanted it to grow day to day because I was even saying the way that I speak and the way that I look and, y'know, I had a lot of questions but he just wanted me to be a blank slate and I think he wanted it to grow out of the experience that was going on in the theater and I don't think I was that much a part of it in the beginning but then suddenly I was over there, then I was in the window of the house, then I was up there, it just kind of grew."

Tomlin offered, "I think it's so typical too because Altman, he was really fixed on you being the angel. I think that's a big part of his gift. He just knows that, somehow he's intuitive and he knows if he casts Virginia he's going to get what he's going to need. …He just trusts enough that it's going to fill out and come to fruition because he's picked the right person."

Finally, the two were asked what the reason was for the constant camera movement throughout the film?

"I think that's very much Altman," Madsen answered. "I think the cameras in his films are always like a character in the film. At least, I feel that way. He's always experimenting with new technology and new ways of watching people and new ways of telling stories with the camera being very much involved so I just think that this time it was even more fluid motion that he could do with more cameras."

Graham Leggat then leaned in to Tomlin and asked if there's anything further she'd like to say.

"No!" Tomlin said succinctly and thanked the audience for coming, waving with a huge, radiant smile.

2006 SFIFF—The Evening Class Interview With Carlos Bolado

The Evening Class: Carlos, first I want to commend you on continuing to create films that are spiritual sojourns. Bajo California, which I saw back in 1999, I believe—it's been a while since you've been here!—I was very impressed with that when I saw it and am likewise impressed with Sólo Dios Sabe.

CB: Thank you so much.

EC: I had a lot of fun interviewing Alice [Braga] when she was here and I have to praise you for being prescient enough to cast this beautiful young actress as your character Dolores! Alice is definitely going to do a lot of fine work.

CB: I think so, yeah.

EC: How did you find her? What drew you to Alice?

CB: A photograph! She's very photogenic. I was looking for the actress for the movie because I already had Diego [Luna], the main guy. So I went to Sao Paolo and I did a casting and I saw a few actresses, very famous ones, but didn't feel like I was finding the right people and I came back to San Francisco and they started sending me emails, photographs, and one day [Alice] showed up in my computer and I went like [gasp]. I think I said, "She's the one!" Because she looks so similar to Ana Mendieta and, at that moment my movie had more of Ana Mendieta, this Cuban artist. At the end we didn't get the rights to use [the Mendieta material] because the gallery—she's dead now—the gallery's very [protective].

EC: Notwithstanding, I respected that you mentioned her and had Dolores simulate Ana Mendieta's work. One of my favorite themes is the presence of absence, which was one of Mendieta's main themes.

CB: Exactly! The presence of absence, yeah exactly, I like it! But anyway I want to use parts of the Super8 and things of Ana Mendieta … because she was close to Santeria and because she was killed. I wanted to put in the story a little bit of her but it was not possible because the gallery said no, we don't want to do that. Because I really get some of the material from her and talk more about Ana Mendieta, so it's just like a mention in the film, an homage in some way, which is a pity because I want to use it more. So anyway, so Alice she has [a similarity] to Ana Mendieta, especially in the photograph that they send it to me. So when I saw her it was like [gasp] there's something, there's something here. So I asked for more images of her, they sent me some more, and I said, "Can she move? Can she act?" They just finish a movie called City of God. So they sent me that movie and some images of her. I saw the movie and I liked her.

EC: She's fantastic! And getting to see the two films here at the festival was a wonderful introduction to her work so, again, you were really sharp to catch her early in her career.

CB: Exactly. It was fortunate.

EC: Obviously you are a man who thinks and feels deeply and considers the Spirit and finds the Spirit in various elements. I love how the movie starts with water and ends with water.

CB: The river and the ocean. Because it's the river that goes to the ocean. And this Oxum, she's the Orisa, the spirit of the river basically and the river is the sweet water that always goes to the ocean. It's the fertility too. In that way that's why it has to have water and why it has to end in the ocean. And it's like Heraclitus—you don't wash yourself two times in the same river. It's always like a flow.

EC: Yes. Are you a practitioner of Santeria?

CB: No, no. I was very interested. I knew something when I was in Cuba in 1989, actually, I was very interested, so I went there a few times and I went to certain ceremonies because I always wanted to make a film about that, a documentary, but it was not possible at that time so I went to Brazil … and I started doing my research and I said, I want to make it about this. But I was close to trying to understand it, because the animistic religions they were always interesting so it was more for that animistic side, that you give this spirituality to the rivers, to the mountains, to the rocks, to the trees. They do the same in Japan, with the Shintoism in the same way. Or so many first religions start with that. All of them are animist. The hispanic religions, the Aztecs basically you have the same idea.

EC: Perhaps that's why I was so taken with it. When I was younger, one of my instructors was the mythologist Joseph Campbell who taught me a lot about syncretism.

CB: Ah, yeah yeah yeah. I've read a lot of Joseph Campbell.


EC: And I also had the fortune of studying with shamans in Mexico. I was pleased that you put the same truths of these different practices but layered them in the different geographies. One of my favorite scenes in the road trip through Mexico was when Damián accidentally hit the zopilote. He then proceeds to give it a proper burial which Dolores doesn't get at first. She mocks Damián's ritualism and criticizes his attention to a scavenger bird. Damián responds by saying that the scavenger bird survives but never by killing. That was a great insight. The kind of gift the desert gives you. The turkey vulture, like other scavengers, recycles. It's that symbolic premise that often places the vulture in the mythic role of a Mother Destroyer/Creator goddess. I've never seen anyone depict that in a film before. That was a powerful image that you commented upon there.

CB: That's great.

EC: Diego Luna, how did he become involved?

CB: He became involved because we always talked about making a movie. We knew each other but in a festival in Guadalajara we really started talking more, deeply, about movies. He was coming to make a movie that he didn't like … and I was [there] after doing Bajo California and we talk and we find out we were orphans, we both lost our mothers in car accidents, and that night I said I will write a movie about the orphans, I will put that in a story, and [Diego] said, "I will do it, so just call me." Years later, two or three years later, I called him and I said I have the script that I talked to you [about]. "Ah, send it to me!" So I sent it to him and he really liked it. He was doing Havana Nights, or something like that, so he really liked the story and said, "Let's just do it." So he was involved and from there he started being involved a lot because he's a producer/director too. He has….

EC: … a keen eye on projects.

CB: Yeah, exactly. I think he will end [up] directing basically, so he became involved as a producer, as an associate producer of the film.

EC: Excellent. Why was there such a gap between Bajo California and Sólo Dios Sabe? What have you been doing? I know you did the one documentary….

CB: Promises.

EC: Yeah, Promises.

CB: We spent a lot of time with that documentary. It's very difficult to raise money to make films, especially in Spanish. I finished Promises in 2001. So I was already doing Promises when I was doing Bajo California. I finished my relationship with Promises in 2001 basically [but] I was already working on this project but I [thought] I would be shooting this movie in 2003. But the money was impossible. It became so complicated to get the money, to raise the money.

EC: It's a complicated script, it covers a lot of territory, and you presented a lot of information to your audience. That's what I liked. What I came away with and why I think the movie might do well is because it's hopeful, it leans into faith. Dolores basically starts out as someone who has been used, and is cynical, and is scoffing what other people believe in, but, by the end of the film, she's the one who really believes.

CB: Yeah, exactly. They go like this [he gestures a crisscross], they change in some way. They cross paths. She begins having faith and believes and he does not so much. So it grows in that way.

EC: I also appreciated your recognition of the spiritual concept of the longbody, that it's grandparents and grandchildren who are connected.

CB: Yes, exactly.

EC: Which made me interested in the role of Olivia the mother, Cecilia Suárez, it's a very strong role that she plays. She changed also by the end of the movie.

CB: Yeah, exactly.

EC: Can you talk about her as an actress?

CB: She was a theater actress. I was looking for that kind of actor but I didn't want a mother that was like—even some people in Brazil [are] like so classica, y'know?—I want to change in some way, they were thinking of two people or something like that and I said no, but she's not, maybe we should paint her hair, frivolous things, but the way that they saw themselves, Brazilians no? I said, no. I want to look for her. I did a casting and [Cecilia] came to do another role. And I saw her and I said let me see you, and I did another test with her, and I liked her and I went to see her theater. She's a well-known theater actress and I liked her work so it was interesting to work with her. She's very smart. She does a lot of improvisation at that theater that she does and she works a lot with a famous director. I think there was a lot of understanding. She was a very receptive actress [with] this background, this dedication or whatever, this preparation.

The other thing about Alice too, they sent me that day, I like her and I found out that she was the niece of Sonia Braga so I was like, "Ah! So maybe…", and I even think like, we tried for a while to be like the mother would be Sonia and [Alice] just to have the mother and daughter, but it was mother and niece. But it didn't work out because of the dates and it was good because I found this woman, that it was more clear, it would be a little bit of a miscast—Sonia Braga as the mother of Alice—even if they are related; but, the age, she has to be younger, but now Sonia did an operation, she looks amazing.

EC: She always looks amazing; she's radiant! So the preparation for this movie—this script is a very complex, rich script—how many years have you been working on this one?

CB: Like two-three years. I had the outline in 1999-2000. I still made corrections [up] to 2004 because when you don't shoot you start going crazy and you just move things around. But, you know what the thing is? There's something that I miss in this story …. I had to reduce the script a lot because it was too long. So there was more scenes, more dialogue, and more, to tell a love story, and to make it more dense. There were 180 to 200 pages but I had to get it into 110, or something like that.

EC: That must have been so difficult to do!

CB: Yeah, exactly. Especially after two, three years of working and you have to go down because there was no way to produce it, there was no money. No way to make it. They feel like it was long. We was still working with Diane Weipert, my co-writer. Finally we had to go there. I always had a feeling when I was shooting, how much I trimmed of the story to make it, how many layers, because that's a layer that is the love story, the Damián side, the two of them, because there were more layers. So I don't know how much of the layers I lost doing that and go to make the film, cutting all these things. It was a very complex story. It was long. So many, in two places.

EC: I would be intrigued to think how many more layers you could have added on to the story because it was already rich, and a lot to absorb, especially because I think that—though Santeria has a certain cachet—most people do not really understand the religion, myself included, though I'm intrigued by syncretic Catholicism. Within the film you include a Mexican celebration of the Moors which is a very early Spanish-colonial syncretization of indigenous and Catholic beliefs.

CB: Exactly, the Others!

EC: And then you carried it over to show that this same syncretic process is in the Orisa. Also the fact that you used—I call her Purgatory: the Soul in Flames but you called her the Saint of the Orphans—was very interesting.

CB: Exactly, yeah yeah.

EC: Another scene that struck me was when Damián first loses Dolores and he's crying in his apartment listening to music…

CB: …to Jose Jose.

EC: That's a moving scene. Because I know many men who could only express their grief that way.

CB: Exactly, a lot of people! That's right. It's very Mexican, that way.

EC: In terms of the music, it's very current. I was not familiar with either Otto or Julieta Venegas. So thanks for turning me on to both of them.

CB: Julieta is very famous in [Mexico]. Even here. She won two Latino Grammys. She has a record called Sí where she is dress[ed] like a bride. They were records that you could hear on the stations here, on the alternative Latino stations or even some other stations they put her music…. When they do compilations of Mexican things they always use Julieta; she was kind of alternative rock. But she made a record that was very pop and it was very funny and good and it became like a big seller, people love it in Mexico, like a young crowd, and it won two Grammys. She's more famous, even in Mexico, she was on the trucks, the Pepsi ads, with her face.

EC: I admire that you gesture to all of these artists, relatively young artists, that you cast Alice, that you work with Diego, that you profile these musicians. I have trouble with seeing so many movies and having too many recognizable actors.

CB: Yeah.

EC: I like more when someone's new, and young.

CB: Yeah, it's true.

EC: When I saw Alice, I was wowed, I thought, "Look at her!" She's really a remarkable talent. You're a Bay Area person?

CB: Yeah, I spend a lot of time here lately because I'm trying to find more jobs. But, yeah, I live here.

EC: And the distribution of the film?

CB: It's Palm Pictures out of New York.

EC: When can we expect it out?

CB: Probably in the Fall. That's what they say. They say that date, the Fall, which, you never know but that sounds right.

EC: All the more reason for being happy to talk to you now because the festival's put a hold review on me so I can't review the film, they only allow me 50 words or something, but in an interview I can talk about the film…

CB: Ah, great!

EC: … which is really what I enjoy much more. Were you pleased with the movie? Is it the movie you wanted? You said you had to trim a lot, is it basically the movie you wanted?

CB: No. Not really. But I'm never happy. It seems to me that the challenge was—the thing was [it was] very complicated to make the movie. There were so many problems to make the movie happen. I feel like I lost something. I think it would be a better movie. I like it. People like it. I'm happy that I [made] it; the challenge was very complicated, it was a challenge to do it. But I feel like, if I would do it again—which doesn't normally happen all the time—I would just try to not produce. The problem is I had to be the producer of this film, I am one of the producers. I was so involved in the production. So involved with the budget.

EC: It distracted you?

CB: Exactly. It was very difficult to keep my mind [focused]. If you're producing, fine. If you're directing, fine. But producing and directing, especially—well, everywhere!—like in Mexico and Brazil.

EC: You were fighting yourself?

CB: Yeah, exactly. So in some way I feel like I wish I would have more time and I didn't. And more money. We were always five minutes late and one dollar short.

EC: You were talking earlier about wanting to work with the story of Ana Mendieta. Do you think that will happen? I would love to see a film on Ana Mendieta.

CB: There were a few things in the script [about] Ana Mendieta [but] rights [were] complicated. So yeah, the gallery didn't want to… I would love to do a film about Ana Mendienta too but it's still not possible and especially because there are still so many stories, like even the way that she died.

EC: The controversy…

CB: Very controversial that story. But the gallery is very closed. And this was very traumatic for the family, for her sister. Basically, she doesn't want to be involved, and the gallery in New York manages all [Mendieta's] work and all her permits and everything. They were very protective. We talked a lot with them. And finally, we didn't agree on anything. So, we had to take out—we didn't even have to shoot things that we were thinking to shoot and to ask for, we didn't do it because we knew that we would not get the rights.

EC: I hope when that finally gets the green light that you get to be the one who handles that because I think you understand the essence more than most of Mendieta.

CB: Hopefully. I would love to do it. I like her work a lot. I followed her for years. First time I saw one of her works it's like, "Who is this person?" I started to find out it was Ana Mendieta.

[Carlos receives a phone call from Brazil which he has to take. I take a few minutes to cruise the hospitality suite.]

EC: To help me understand better, Dolores' grandmother directed her to a personal altar in the city where she found the stones and these were the stones that needed to be returned to the water.

CB: Yeah, to the same place.

EC: What is that? Can you explain that to me. I'm not familiar with that tradition.

CB: The stones. These are stones that they settle them in that place. You take them and you make your altar. They had to take it back to the place that they came from and they came from that terrain. So she put an altar there because she was a Santeria priest. They had to take these things back because she's related and the grandmother died so [she] has to do it. She's not directed to the—and probably that's a mistake of the movie—to another place in the city, she's directed to the top room of the building of the grandmother.

EC: Oh! I wasn't sure where the altar was.

CB: It's in the top room. The thing that you do not see is the thing in the shooting, you see the building from here and you don't see the back part of the building, so when I show the shot of the back part, you [don't] make that connection so clearly that it's the same place, which I feel there was a possibility but I said, "Oh, that is not important. The important thing is that she goes to the room and finds these things from the grandmother, no?" That room [that] was in that scene was not in the same apartment but in the same building. But anyways, she goes there and she found [the stones] and she has to take [them] back because she goes and asks and that's what you have to do basically. You can't keep a place like … only people that are related or have some relation with the religion can touch [them], but all family and she has to take that there because there's a curse. Bad things will happen to you if you don't do what you have to do. Like a threat in a strange way. If you don't do the right things, bad things happen to you. It's like a karma too in some way.

EC: And the ants on the altar? What's with all the ants?

CB: I wanted to put something organic. There were ants everywhere. There were more image of ants that I didn't [use]. At the end of it, finishing the cut, it was kind of stopping the story. But I wanted to keep the ants because they were something organic, they transform, they move, they're animals too. They move things, the animals, they're the organic side of life. And I liked to put something alive there.

EC: It worked very well. So what's the next project? What are you working on next?

CB: Basically trying to direct a movie that maybe I will just be a director, not writing the story. So I'm looking for something like that. In Los Angeles. Which obviously I like it. Those few projects that I will direct the script I like because I want to start working with a writer, so If it's possible, that would be great. That's my idea. And I'm writing a thriller.

EC: A thriller?!!


CB: A thriller that has some spirituality there but it's more of a thriller like—it's about, I guess, fatherhood in some ways. So that's a story that I'm writing. And I'm trying to finish two other documentaries that I've been working.

EC: Wow. A lot of work.

CB: Yeah, a lot of work. But writing takes a long time to do. For me, writing's a long process. This movie took me so much time and energy so when I finish it I have just a synopsis of my story that I'm writing. So to really write a good script it usually takes me more than a year. …And I have to see how I will be making my living too.

EC: There's always that, huh?

CB: Exactly. So I have to be thinking on directing something.

EC: Well, I'm going to be monitoring this movie. I want to see how the public reacts to it because I think they're going to really be intrigued by it. Thank you so much.

CB: I hope you can make it to the screening and the Q&A.

Photos courtesy of WireImage.

2006 SFIFF—The Evening Class Interview with Alicia Scherson

The Evening Class: Alicia, I want to congratulate you on the festival success of Play. You've been doing well! You've been getting awards for your first narrative feature, at Tribeca, Havana, you got the audience award at Montreal.

AS: Thank you.

EC: Since we have such a short time to talk this morning, I wanted to focus on the design of Play—which I found so fresh and interesting—not only the visual design of the movie but the sound design. Could we talk first about the sound design?

AS: You mean incidental music?

EC: Yes, incidental.

AS: Incidental's only three songs. They're all made by [Marc Hellner, who's also attending the festival]. You know that in the movie [Christina is] Mapuche, which is the Chilean indigenous from the South, and he's a Chicago-based musician who I met when I was living there. So what he did was he took some Mapuche music and remixed it and made this composition loosely based on Mapuche music, there's lots of samples taken directly from their music, and that's both at the beginning and at the end which has drums and more weird-sounding rhythms.

EC: Your movie has a texture of shared spatiality, which I very much liked. I think I mentioned in my earlier write-up how you present an image then texture it with sound; the audience sees a picture of the sea while they hear seagulls and waves, or look at a photo in a National Geographic while they hear indigenous drumming. I like how the senses share this cinematic space. But the film also presents the shared space of the city, your characters and their crisscrossing lives and lonelinesses, and also the shared space of the dreams, sometimes the audience is not sure who is dreaming what. Can you talk a little bit about the design? Do you have a background in design?

AS: It was all scripted, the dreams and all that, and a lot of the sound references were scripted already.

EC: Did you have an influence in doing that? You wrote the script?

AS: I wrote the script, yeah. No, I mean, I think I really had a lot of freedom during this movie. Because I studied film and then I studied art and right before making the movie I was making more video art. But I always like narrative and characters. Even my video art always has a character and dialogues, very narrative. But I think that gave me more freedom in terms of what I wanted to do. It was my first movie. Nobody was paying for it. I was just raising the money whereever. So I really felt like I could do whatever I wanted.

EC: That must have been a wonderful feeling?

AS: Yeah, I just did exactly what I wanted basically. I always wanted to shoot dreams that didn't look like dreams, y'know? It's a cliché in filmmaking to have your own dream sequence. How you shoot a dream, how you shoot sex, how you shoot a fight. I guess I had this opera prima thing where I did all that, I did the sex, I did the fights, I did the dreams. [Laughter.] Had to prove it was something I could do.

EC: But you did it subtlely. It wasn't like you were hitting the audience over the head with these things though you were going into their heads.

AS: The dreams, people get really curious about them.

EC: They want to interpret them, don't they?

AS: I always get the question, "What do the dreams mean?"

EC: The whole film has that quality of being receptive to projective interpretation; you've left the images open-ended. I had to tell myself as an audience member to just let the movie be. To let the movie be what it is. To not try to understand what Christina is doing. To not try to understand what Tristan is doing. Just watch them. And it's within that watching, that observing, that I felt Play was magical. You're obviously aware of magical realism, and yet the movie wasn't a magical realist movie except for maybe that one moment when the moth flies out of Tristan's mouth.

AS: We grew up with this magical realism being the Latin American literature and we sort of hate it in a way. And so, after I made the movie and I started getting reviews where people were using the term, I had to sort of fight my own prejudice and say, "Okay, I guess I did something that was sort of magic realism." Because for us, of course, magic realism is like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende who are all great writers but—as one of the younger generation growing up under the shadow of those huge writers—you always kind of hate them, in a good way. But it's true that there is this mix of magic but I guess the difference is [that it is] not based on the folkloric, y'know, it's just very subjective.

EC: Exactly. What I was trying to point out in my review—I'm not sure if I did a good job of doing it—is that most magical realism is hyperdramatic and obviously fantastic, but—what I appreciated about Play—was its lighthandedness. It was more like the magic was in the shift of the narrative eye.

AS: Yeah, there are only two moments that are clearly unreal: the moth and the fight with the woman that is like a video animation game. I had that dialogue of the moth written before, y'know, just the dialogue, I write dialogues all the time and so that was one bit of dialogue—"I got a moth in my mouth last night." When I was adapting it for the movie script, I was like, "Well, what if he just has the moth?" It seemed like the best way to resolve the scene.

EC: I have an observational question because I wasn't sure if I saw this or not. You do a narrative backswitch where first you show Christina on the bench watching Tristan and Irene across the street….

AS: Yeah, and the moth goes by.

EC: And does it actually fly by her?

[Alicia laughs, pleased, nodding her head yes.]

EC: That is so brilliant!

AS: Very few people see the moth the first time.

EC: I only saw it the second time! I had to see the film a second time and I thought, "That is so brilliant!"

AS: It's very subtle because it's actually 3-D too. It's animation but it really looks real because it's so fast. Few people notice the first time.

EC: That moth sequence underscores what I mean by the shared spatiality in your movie because that moth connects the space of Tristan and Irene with Christina's space. Christina's story is that of a woman who is new to Santiago and trying to make a new life for herself, trying to become a new person. That was heartfelt for me. I empathized with her character. Can you tell me about the actress, Viviana Herrera?

AS: She was a theater student by that time, now she's a professional actress, but it was two years ago, she hadn't graduated yet and she had never acted before a camera before. It was really impressive how she acted. She felt really comfortable with the camera. I guess that's just something some people have or not. I always say how I learned a lot of little things she did in her acting that I didn't see in the shooting but I discovered in the editing room, which was great. Like, she would do this little gesture with her hands or her feet. During the shooting—sometimes it's so crazy on the set—I didn't see all those details, and then I was editing and I noticed all these little things she gave to the character, which was great!

EC: What Viviana created was a character who you might first think was humble, docile, but who had incredible self-sufficiency and strength. She was able to reunite Tristan and Irene. She was able to correct perceptions. I know some people thought in the ending rooftop sequence that Christina was going to jump off the roof, but, I couldn't imagine how anyone would think that! How could they possibly think that?

AS: That was my fear, and the producers. I shot an alternative ending for that scene which was her whistling the same song at a bus stop, standing there and just whistling, instead of on the rooftop. Because my producers were thinking that people were going to think [she was going to jump off]. We didn't decide until the very end. It was so much nicer—the rooftop shot—like nobody will think [she's going to jump off], she's whistling, she's happy….

EC: She was claiming Santiago!

AS: She was just overlooking it. And it was the first time you saw Santiago. But still, some people in the audience think that [she's going to jump off], but just until she starts whistling, then I don't think anybody keeps thinking that during the credits she's jumping off the building.

EC: Some of the subsidiary characters—the blind mother. Why is the mother blind?

AS: [Chuckling but grimacing.] I don't have an answer for that.

EC: It's a question you get a lot, isn't it?

AS: Yeah, and I really don't have a track of how that came to be. I could invent some stuff? I do know that the scene where the mother's lover is with another woman and she's sitting right in front? That scene I actually stole from an early Nabokov novel which is called Laughter in the Dark and it's a story of a blind man, a man who becomes blind and his fiancé brings another man to live with them but he doesn't know, but he sort of senses they are all there in the house, he's sensing there's a third person in the house but he can't see him. I always thought that was really creepy and I always wanted to do a scene like that. But there's also this thing about being visible or invisible that Christina has, Christina's sort of invisible in the city, but it's all about her eyes.

EC: Yes, her eyes are large and beautiful!

AS: Having a blind woman in a way made sense in those terms.

EC: In terms of the mother and the lover relationship, and again in terms of your visual language, I loved when Tristan feeds the rose to the rabbit, a rose which his mother's lover gave to her. Such a simple, lovely image—a critical comment upon his mother's relationship—that has really stuck with me.

AS: I love how you pick up on these little things that no one comments upon!

EC: That's what is so fresh about Play. If a person can relax and stop anticipating what they think the movie is going to be, you provide a sequence of engaging poetic images. What's next? What are you working on now?

AS: I'm working on an adaptation of a Chilean novel about two orphans, brother and sister orphans in the big city, they are like teenage. So it's like a loneliness story too.

EC: When can we expect that?

AS: I will try to shoot next year so I don't think it will be released until the end of 2007 or 2008, because things take time.

EC: I'm always curious about how young directors perceive the festival circuit. This is your first year as a festival darling and you've been traveling with the film from festival to festival, is there a commonality among the audiences? Do people react to the movie differently in different parts of the world?

AS: You know what's curious, I think the American audience is the one that reacts best to this movie, even better than the Chilean one. I think it has to do with the sense of humor. This is what I have discovered in this year of festivals. I think Americans find it more funny—like fun—they laugh a lot at all the jokes, y'know? Which, let's say, in Germany the people weren't laughing.

EC: The stalking scene is hilarious!

AS: There are some scenes that always get people but I think here people find it more light-hearted. I think there is some kind of sense of humor which I connect with that might be more North American, like Wes Anderson or Hal Hartley or maybe people more used to that sense of humor. But I've noticed here in the States, and in Canada too, in North America, people find the movie more of a comedy. At the Vancouver film festival it was catalogued as a comedy and I was so happy about that! Even more than the rest of the world where people find it more heavy, or pessimistic, like in Europe or even Latin America.

EC: That's interesting! There was some commentary of your being grouped together with other first directors coming out of Chile as if there's a new movement going on, I think that's been deconstructed; that's not really happening, right? It's just timing?

AS: Were you the one mentioning this Jorge Morales article? We have this enemy at home.

EC: I had to comment upon it.

AS: I'm so happy that you—not attacked—but commented upon that article because we were really pissed at that article because it's on the FIPRESCI webpage and I think he's not making a favor to anybody. And it doesn't really matter. Movements are not real movements ever.

EC: They're applied afterwards.

AS: They're generational moments. This thing that Chile is now popular is very good for everybody there, for the industry. We're not connected stylistically, we don't consider ourselves part of a movement. But we do share like the age, and we use digital, and we do urban personal stories and I think people in the world are talking about this, there was an article in Cahiers du Cinema talking about this, there was something in Variety, and we have this critic trying to destroy this, for what? Why? I don't understand. Because we're not claiming any kind of big statements, people are saying it's new Chilean cinema, it's new it's Chilean and it's cinema, that's it, you know what I'm saying? It's not that we are the neorealistics. It just happens to be a group of people making movies now and it's good for everybody. And [Morales] has such a bitter feeling towards the whole thing.

EC: I thought he was unfair. That's why I had to comment upon his view. What I like to do when I'm reviewing a film is to monitor the critical commentary.

AS: I'm okay if he doesn't like my movie. He's the one critic that has constantly published bad reviews of my movie, which is great to have somebody [like that], because it's suspicious if everyone likes your movie. The only time I disagree with him is when he attacks this … he tries to go to the world to say, "Hey, there's no movement in Chile, it's a myth!" Why is he doing that?

EC: It's an unnecessary distraction. Going back to the digital, the look of your movie is beautiful. A comment I've heard frequently is that you've achieved a striking palette using this digital technology, anything you can say about that?

AS: Just my art director [Sebastián Muñoz] and my DP [Ricardo de Angelis], I guess, there was a very good triangle that we created there. The DP was the only experienced person on the whole crew…. He's done movies like Man Facing Southeast, [which] was an Oscar nominee for Argentina, he's Argentinian, he had a background in huge 35mm classical, beautiful Argentinian movies, but, he was interested in digital. So I think he makes sort of this new media—this is high definition—with his classical background in 35. And the art director also did a great job with him. They really had a lot to do with this. Ricardo de Angelis, my DP, it was an honor to work with him. He works with Subiela all the time.

EC: I love Subiela! Well, Alicia, I look so forward to the work that you're going to do in the years to come. You can count on me picking out all the little details. Your work is lovely. Enjoy your visit in San Francisco. And, again, congratulations!

AS: Thank you.

2006 SFIFF—Gabrielle

Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle, with—as Beverly Berning has noted in her program capsule—its ready comparison to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, was just opening in Paris when I was there last September, trailers were screening in the cineplexes and posters were ubiquitous in the metro, so out of a sense of nostalgia I felt compelled to catch the screening at Pacific Film Archives. Press had been teased that Isabelle Huppert might actually attend so I also went on the slim chance that tease would manifest. Alas, no Isabelle. Nor, if I understand correctly, will she be showing up for the Pacific Film Archive's Huppert June retrospective. A pity. I would have loved to have seen her in her incandescent pale flesh.

Winning a special jury acting award at the 2005 Venice International Film Festival, even though the film itself was assailed with boos after its screening, Huppert maneuvers Chéreau's cumbersome chamber drama with customary aplomb. Shifting from a restricted interiority to a scandalously candid resignation, she is a complete pleasure to observe even as she withholds motivations. The skin beneath her left eye flinches in nervous recognition of distasteful insights. Her nostrils flare as if the atmosphere of her strictured life smells foul.

As Moira Sullivan reported to the Greencine Daily from the Venice International, "Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle, based on Joseph Conrad's The Return, proves to be an overambitious project that literally doesn't work on screen." One of the film's primary problems is "the decision to project letters and plot developments onscreen as text. The effect is poor, even embarrassing for its lack of ingenuity." I must agree, as does Daniel Kasman, reporting last September from the 43rd New York Film Festival who felt Gabrielle was "inconsistently energized by title cards yelling dialog [her husband] Jean fails to say."

Kasman, however, does commend one of the film's best scenes, and perhaps the gist of Joseph Conrad's concept of "the return": "[P]erhaps the most incisive and invigorating remark in this dully antiquated drama is a rare moment of self-inquiry from Gabrielle . . . who tells her husband that loving the man she was going to run off with was 'too demanding' and that if she truly loved Jean she could not have been able to return; she is only able to come back, face him, and live life as normal because their lack of love makes such interactions easier. These are stunning spoken admissions, and ones far more candid and insightful than any of Jean's bumbling attempts to explain or repair the clarity of his marriage's loveless basis."

Though writing about Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times, Juan Manuel Freire notes: "The initially intrusive use of silent movie subtitles becomes another successful stylistic flourish, emphasizing the artifice of intercourses in a society that hides every passion and truth beneath luxurious costumes and furniture." In regretful hindsight, I wish I could have seen Three Times to compare these stylistic intertitular flourishes with Gabrielle. A pity they were not more successful in the latter.

What worked for me the best, however, along with Huppert in the title role, was the film's disturbing score by Fabio Vacchi. Reminiscent of Hermann's work for Hitchcock, the score leant an anguished and jolting anxiety to the film's depiction of social complacency.

2006 SFIFF—The Evening Class Interview With Lev Yilmaz

At the opening night party—inbetween my first Skyy martini that was already enough and my third which made me thirsty for a fourth—I was introduced by my filmbud Gustavo Fernandez to Lev Yilmaz, creator of Tales of Mere Existence, which will be included among the collection of animated shorts—Drawing Lines—this coming Thursday noon at the Kabuki. Sample sketches of Tales of Mere Existence—"The Times I Have Smoked Pot", "Horny", "My Successful Friends", "Goodlooking" and "Pickle"—can be found online. They only whetted my appetite, however, so Gustavo loaned me his copies of the first two dvds of Tales of Mere Existence available from Lev's website. I found them hilarious and approached Lev for an interview.

* * *

The Evening Class: How did you start going with Tales of Mere Existence? Did you have training in college?

LY: To a degree. I went to art school. I didn't really study film. I studied art video and other forms of drawing, painting and whatnot. I really did wind up adding an unusual approach to it. I never learned anything about doing the proper narrative. I've been doing my own video work for a while and then I did the first piece in this style just completely as an experiment. But it was so simple and it was so much fun that I just did another one. And then after maybe about three or four I started thinking that it actually could be a series because I had never really done anything that was a series before. So through the evolution of that I think is really when that—the more I did it—the more important the story became to me every time and now it winds up being absolutely the top of everything. Everything is very story-oriented.

EC: A perfect voice for you! Just as an aside, have you seen Art School Confidential?

LY: Sure.

EC: What'd you think? Any similar experiences with that?

LY: Some. Weirdly enough, even though I did go to art school, I think I related to Ghost World more. Art School Confidential has, perhaps, a lot more normal moviemaking sensibilities to it. To me, anyway, Ghost World was one of the greatest little portraits of this general sort of alienation that really really hit home to me, probably I think one of the best documents—one of the really best high-profile documents of freak pride that I've ever seen.

EC: The technique that you use in your animation, how would you describe it? Is it parchment paper you're using?

LY: I actually completely lifted the technique really from an obscure old arthouse movie called The Mystery of Picasso where the filmmaker [Clouzot] spent a few days with Picasso in his studio. Picasso painted on transluscent canvases and [Clouzot] shot him from the other side, shot the canvases from the other side. I sort of took that and just added narration to it. Naturally, my drawing style is incredibly crude and I only care about getting the point across then I will stop the drawings there.

EC: The point getting across is the point! The narrative. I'm sure Picasso did not have your acerbic witty narrative.

LY: He made up for it in other ways. [Laughter.]

EC: That's what is pleasing people. When I first saw it I just busted a gut because there's something about the combination of the simplicity of the line drawings in process, and then the voiceover. So what I was wondering was, do you film first, and then you add soundtrack?

LY: Oh no. The part that takes the longest is definitely getting the story right. It's not just getting the story right, but it's also just making sure that there isn't a single wasted word in there. Generally the way that I'll do it is I'll write it and then I'll do a mock recording. I'll just read it out, and then I'll listen to it, I'll listen to it a few times. Usually, I'll drink about a half bottle of wine. I figure if it holds my attention if I'm half-drunk it will hold anybody's attention when they're completely sober.

EC: So it's real-time as it's filmed? You're actually drawing and talking at the same time?

LY: No. Because I record the soundtrack first.

EC: Gotcha. That's what I was wondering about.

LY: If there's any animator in the world who doesn't record the soundtrack first, I don't know about them. Somebody must do it but very very few people do.

EC: That just draws focus on just how excellent the timing of the editing is, the way you've already structured a picture and then just add a few things, then the voiceover, it's so skillfully done. Are you really that character? Who is that character?

LY: It's definitely like, y'know, it's part of me. I think as a person I definitely cope better than I think the character does but it's probably definitely the part of me that doesn't feel like coping. That sort of thing.

EC: What I like about him is he's a guy with dark thoughts. Your portraits of envy, of bitterness, of jealousy are acute and spot on. I was watching it again for about the fifth time, every time I show it to a new friend because I keep turning them on to it, and it's always interesting to me to see them go, "I know that! I know that!" Especially the most popular ones are "Procrastination". Everybody knows that one. I've had several guys relate to the one about the ex-girlfriends and the sex they're having with their current partners. A lot of people like that one. I've only seen the first two and you have a third one coming out?

LY: Yeah, it's going to be coming out pretty soon. The more that it goes on, the more that it expands. And probably my favorite piece which I am going to be showing on Thursday at the festival is a piece called "Conversation" that is probably one of my favorite episodes of the series, I think. It's different because it's a conversation between two people and I'm saying, "And then I said" "and then she said" and just kind of narrating it out like that. But it's the conversation that the couple has in the video store trying to figure out what to rent and it winds up completely bringing up all this fucked up stuff that's happened in their relationship.

EC: Great! So where do the ideas come from?

LY: Where do you think that one came from?! [Laughter] I almost didn't have to write that one. That one was taken moreorless verbatim from a conversation with a girl … a wonderful girl that I was with for a few years, but it didn't work out. But it was taken essentially verbatim from that.

EC: I enjoy the pacing of the humor. Especially I noticed by the second one, I watched the first one and you had developed certain ideas, but by the second one you got a little tighter and you started to do this very rapid delivery. The timing is hilarious. Do you have certain comics that you emulate or that you picked that up from, that kind of comic timing?

LY: The funny thing is that a lot of the influences that I wound up having are influences of probably a generation before mine. I was very much a loner when I was a kid so the sorts of things that … and really, more than watching t.v., I stole a bunch of my dad's old comedy records so that a lot of—I bet you that a lot of the pacing kind of comes from just listening to comedians from the early 60s. I was a huge huge fan of the early Bill Cosby comedy records, the ones that he did before he became America's favorite t.v. dad. He was just an outstanding stand-up comedian, a storyteller really. Him, and a bunch of old Mike Nichols and Elaine May records. It's just something that I began to just sort of … the more that I was playing with material of my own, I began to really realize that even a quarter of a second can be the difference between not funny and funny.

EC: Exactly! That's what I'm saying. The timing is impeccable and it's counterpointed against a drollness, kind of a throwaway delivery. That's what makes it work. It's perfect.

LY: The droning delivery, that I definitely started in the early pieces. Everybody starts from somewhere and that delivery was absolutely influenced by Stephen Wright but then it changed after a while, it really evolved.

EC: Tell me about the Comedy Central gig; what's that about?

LY: What happened was that I was on a—it still shows every once in a while, I don't think very often—but it was this late-night stoner program called Jump Cuts. Usually when they first brought it out it was on at midnight and now every once in a while still they'll have—they only made four episodes of this thing, I was in all four episodes—but now they have marathons every once in a while starting at two and ending at four and just show all four episodes of Jump Cuts. Since then, now that a lot of the material is out on their podcasts, you can get it online. If you find it, let me know. I don't have a video Ipod so I haven't actually even seen it myself.

EC: I'll go looking for it. You're primarily a completely independent entrepreneur, right?

LY: Absolutely, I'm a one-man band.

EC: I'm impressed with that. How is the website working for you?

LY: My website?

EC: Yeah, do you have outreach? Are you getting orders through the website?

LY: Absolutely! That's one of the things that's been pretty amazing is that I've really managed to move a remarkable number of copies of the books. It is completely doing it myself. I'm surprised that it's worked as well as it has. I'm not really part of the comics community much but guys in the comics community have said that the number of copies I've been able to sell just entirely by myself without a distributor even has been very competitive to like the average—not like a Marvel comic release but an alternative comic release—that I've really given them a run for their money.

EC: That's great! Is that an independence you want to maintain or are you looking for a distributor?

LY: I would love to find a distributor! I would love to find a publisher! The thing is people are just … how easy do you think it was for the first guy who invented the smoothie to get it off the ground? It's an apple, right? No, it's not, it's kind of an apple and an orange. But is it an orange or is it an apple, I can't tell? People will freak and fuck out anytime you do anything that is even a little bit out of the ordinary like that. It's been hard to get your normal comic strip distributors or your book distributors to pay any attention to it. If I don't find a distributor, it's really not that bad to continue to do it myself. Whatever.

EC: Would you do stand-up comedy, anything like that? Is that something you'd be interested in?

LY: When I hear the term "stand-up comedy" I practically twitch because I've seen so few stand-up comedians that I really like. But I've got a great admiration—instead of stand-up comedy I kind of wonder when I don't know if I want to carry on this form of thing—I wonder if storytelling appears to sort of work in this same kind of vein, closer to the way when you hear David Sedaris talking, it's hilarious, his delivery is great.

EC: Or Guy Maddin! Have you heard Guy Maddin?

LY: I'm not sure.

EC: He's hilarious.

LY: The ones that I've heard the most of is mainly Sedaris. I've heard Douglas Adams reading a few of his books, which were wonderful, so I wonder about that. I've started to give that a little bit of thought. I've done … there's a few … because I've started to do it actually, to do some storytelling live, and it's totally fucking nervewracking but it's also an awful lot of fun.

EC: Where do you do that?

LY: You're a local, right?

EC: Yes.

LY: I did Porchlight once and that was a blast! It was really really a lot of fun. And then I did a reading over at—I don't even remember what the show was—sometime late last year. And then did it again over at some smaller places, these like small performances that my friend puts on. But I'm thinking about getting more into it.

EC: Do you ever go to the Bad Movie nights at the Dark Room on Mission?

LY: Jesus Christ, of course!

EC: You would be a great funny guest commentator. You know how they have three or four guys, usually in front, commenting on the movie?

LY: You know something? There are very different kinds of senses of humor that people have. I'm not one of those people. I'm lucky that, occasionally, if I'm really comfortable with people then I can be a fast commentator. Do you ever know some of those people who are incredibly incredibly funny on their feet and can react and respond to anything and really make you laugh? And you would think, wow, I betcha this person would be a great comedy writer! It almost never works. Because since their sense of humor they're able to express in this way, they don't have a need to express it in another way. The people who are funniest on paper are just because they're frustrated, they can't think fast enough on their feet, they're funny in another way, another avenue. It's something I've seen a million times. There are exceptions of course, but, it's a tendency I've seen.

EC: You have the third disk coming out. So what's in your future? What are you aiming for? What do you see going on?

LY: I would really like the most if I could find a publisher or distributor or whatnot. I wonder if it would happen easier actually in Europe rather than here because the stuff has gone over rather well in America but the audiences respond even stronger in Europe.

EC: You've tested that?

LY: I actually did a little French tour early last year!

EC: Cool! That's cool! I think you're one of the finest young comic talents that I've seen in a long time. And I watch a lot. I really appreciate that you give me the time to talk a little bit. I want to watch what you do. I'll definitely see you this coming Thursday at noon!