2006 SFIFF—"Who Killed the Electric Car?": The Evening Class Interview

The opening night gala at the Regency with its Perhaps Love circus atmosphere was truly fun! I couldn't resist my Skyy vodka martinis and you know what they say: one is too many and two is not enough! So I arrived at my interview at the W the following morning a little worse for wear but eager nonetheless to have a chat with Chris Paine, the director of Who Killed the Electric Car?, interviewee Chelsea Sexton, gas conservation expert Wally Rippel and executive producer Dean Devlin. Chelsea was overdue, having missed her flight from L.A., but was expected during my interview timeslot so we elected to start without her.

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Evening Class: I wanted to preface this interview with a necessary caveat: I'm 52 years old, and I've never had a car. I've never had a driver's license. I'm not a motorist. But I was so enthused by Who Killed the Electric Car? that—if I were a motorist—I would have wanted the EV-1! Please pardon me if I sound ignorant about cars because I know very little about them but you really don't need to be a motorist to appreciate this documentary. I've been interviewing various documentary filmmakers lately and what seems to be a common theme through the work is the systematic erasure of history by various powers-that-be. The erasure of the history of General Motors' EV-1 comes across excellently in Who Killed the Electric Car?

So my first question is: An audience sees this movie, what are we supposed to do with it? What are we supposed to do with this information that you've given us? The culpability has been narrowed down and spread out among the usual suspects but what does a person do with this information?

Chris: That's a good question! Well, I would hope that people finish this film thinking, "My god, there are alternatives to my gasoline car I've been driving. There are alternatives in the way I think about what transportation is. About what kind of car I want to demand that be available to me. What do I want to do with the car that I currently own?" You don't use a car, which is fantastic, because you're obviously not going to be using …

Wally: You don't create emissions! [Laughter.]

Chris: That's terrific! I even hear about people talking on the radio this morning about $4 a gallon for gasoline and the solution is, "Well, why don't I just drive less?" That's terrific. The auto companies—and you would hope the government would [provide the incentive for] this—should really make it easier for us to use electricity to make cars go because we create that here in the U.S. Our film talks about how effectively that can work if we all put our minds to do it. It did work, in the 90s we had it, and it can come back now. The technology is not gone.

EC: CARB (the California Air Resources Board) initially implemented the Zero Emissions Mandate (ZEV) to ward off California's pollution crisis but then ended up revoking it due to compromises struck with auto industry personnel. Can the ZEV mandate be brought back somehow?

Wally: That's a very interesting question. It is coming back in different ways. We have right now the Prius, for example, and there's a lot of them out there. In many ways that's the same technology as in the EV-1 in some ways. It's updated.

EC: Is this the hybrid?

Wally: Yes, the hybrid made by Toyota. There's a lot of stuff happening. And I think it's being driven in many cases because of high fuel prices. We saw this coming. Remember when the EV-1 was done, fuel prices were much lower than they are now; but, we saw this coming. I think that things are going to happen whether or not government is involved. My concern is this: my concern is not are we going to do the right thing to save the planet, but is America going to be left behind? Are we going to watch as the Japanese do good stuff? As the Chinese move in and start doing stuff? As India does stuff? As Europe does stuff? Are we going to be the odd man out? I'm sensitive to that as an engineer. I want to be in the leadership role. I want to be a participant. I do not want to be an observer. It's like going to a baseball game if you're an athlete and watching the game and seeing people do stuff and feeling, "Hey! I could do better!" You want to be in the game.

EC: My concern—and I think it's a growing concern among people as we're becoming more aware of the current administration and certainly past administrations—is the addiction for oil justifying aggression. The other day I was listening to a news report about the oil resources in Venezuela and how suddenly we have war ships off the coast of Venezuela and just as suddenly we're finding reasons to be angry with them. The transparency of the situation irks me. Who Killed the Electric Car? premiered at Sundance? Is that correct? It was the world premiere?

Chris: It was a first screening, early cut.

EC: I understand it's still not completed? And what I saw was not a finished version of the film? You're working on sound now?

Dean: There's a couple of sound tweaks. But it's basically finished. But, yeah, there's a couple graphic cards when you saw it that are being changed and some sound pieces but by tonight's showing, we'll have the final version.

EC: So I need to see it again?

Dean: You absolutely have to see it again. And again and again. [Laughs.]

EC: As I was reading various print and online press about the film, it appears the audience reaction at Sundance was strong and affirmative. I was talking to your co-producer last night, Richard Titus, and he was saying he was very surprised by the Sundance response. Were you expecting that?

Dean: No!

Chris: No!

Dean: It was stunning. On our first screening there was a standing ovation at the end of the film and Chris and I looked at each other in complete shock. [They laugh.] It was such a fulfilling moment. I've been making films, different kinds of films obviously, for 12 years. Nothing was more fulfilling in my career than that moment. Because not only had we made something that was very entertaining, not only had we moved people but we told a story that we knew that the world didn't know that we wanted to get out. And it was literally one of the highlights of my professional career.

EC: It seems that it has fallen to documentary filmmakers to correct the adage that history belongs to the winners. Certain documentaries, like yours, cause us to re-evaluate what "win" means. At first we trust the decisions of our leaders, they seem to be for the best, but then we take a second look and realize their decisions are wrong and their histories self-serving. A.O. Scott called Who Killed the Electric Car? a "prosecutorial examination" and Grist Magazine's Dan Bree called it a whodunit in the form of a love story....

[Chelsea walks in. After initial introductions and salutations, she settles into the interview.]

EC: Chelsea, I was talking about how Who Killed the Electric Car? has been posed as a whodunit mystery but that it's really a love story. And you walked in just at that moment!

Dean: The love interest!

Chelsea: Hardly….

EC: What are you doing now, Chelsea? How have you continued on with your advocacy of the electric car?

Chelsea: I still do quite a bit of work with Plug In America which was the organization that you saw towards the end of the film. We went through this evolution from saving cars to trying to get more cars built. And so we still continue to do that. We work with policy makers and car companies and the whole point is to get these cars back on the road, to take the lessons that we learned and that are portrayed in the film and kind of keep it from happening again and also figure out how to move in a forward positive direction.

EC: Audiences have definitely been moved by this film. How do you think the American consumer is going to react to this information? Do you think they will rally to the call?

Chelsea: I think they will. And our experience has proven that they want to. They come out of each screening saying, "What do I do? Where do I go? Who do I call? What do I buy?" The whole point is to give them more of those options, it's about creating more choices about different kinds of cars for people to buy. And make them available again.

EC: Why do you think General Motors was so drastic in destroying the EV-1s? That was the emotional part of this documentary. Even though I don't drive a car, I think they're admirable, y'know? I can go to these concourses down in Pebble Beach and look at these beautiful cars of the past; I can admire them. They saved those cars! Right? Why was there such a systematic erasure and destruction of the electric car?

Chris: As we say in the film, I don't think the vested interests wanted to see electric cars running around on the roads to remind people that they're possible and they're now. They just want to take them off the road. So what do you think, Chelsea? How do you answer that?

Chelsea: I think the short answer is that the cars were their own best advertisement. The more they were on the road, the more people wanted them and if that's not the business you want to be in, having them out there and having that advertisement becomes a liability in itself.

Chris: The official reason they claimed was that there were no spare parts and that cars couldn't be kept on the road and that there was a potential long term liability because they didn't manufacture tens of thousands of these cars. But their arguments seem very circular, I mean we could talk for a long time about it. We really came to the conclusion they just didn't want electric cars out there on the roads. What do you think, Wally?

Wally: I think a lot of it deals with what the vision is. Let's suppose you were a typewriter company and it's 1975 or something, and you started a little venture with computers and a little bit of stuff with word processing and, of course, these things are more expensive than typewriters. And you really didn't believe in it but you thought we'll do this anyway, and people liked your product, and you're getting pushed in directions that just don't fit in with your typewriter plans. If you didn't have vision for computers, you probably wouldn't do those things that would move you into the present day world. And this is the big picture that I see. I see that General Motors is doing things that are hurtful, not just to the rest of us but to themselves! Look at their bottom line right now. They're losing a million dollars an hour twenty-four hours a day. Eventually it's going to end up to be some real money. So, it's lack of vision. The thing is also when you tell lies, you sometimes believe your own lies. I'll give you an example of one. In the days when the EV-1 was available, I thought I'd do a little experiment so I called up as an interested party—which I was—and I say, I'd like to lease one of these. Great. Now I have a question for you. These use electricity—I'm pretending to be dumb, of course—these use electricity and electricity is made by power plants and power plants put out emissions. So isn't it possible that the emissions by way of power plants are just as great or maybe even greater than from a gasoline car? There's silence and I said, "Do you have any information that deals with this?" No. I knew the answers! I had studied all that stuff and the answer is it's wonderful!! The benefit of an electric vehicle over a gasoline vehicle—even when you include the power plant emissions—is about 30 times better. It would take about 30 electric cars to create as much emissions as one gasoline car, and I knew that and I had all the numbers. I didn't share it with this person. But this was an interesting thing because here is somebody trying to sell a product, supposedly, and they're not using information that is in their interest. I found out what I wanted to know at that point and that is there's a hidden agenda here. They really didn't want to do this. They were pushed into it. They were trying to make some statement. But what they did in the whole process of trying to get out of this, is they never did get the vision, they didn't see what was happening in the world. And it's like the typewriter company missing what's happening. Computers are coming! We're seeing this happening overseas as I mentioned before and the American companies, I want them to succeed. I'm on the side—you might find this hard to believe—I'm on the side of General Motors! I want them to succeed! I want them to do what's right and what's right will be right for our environment and it'll be right for their bottom line.

Dean: It's interesting talking about General Motors, on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago they did a big piece about how General Motors may be near bankruptcy and they blamed 100% of this on their workers! They blamed it on how much they have to pay in the retirement funds and the health benefits and I thought, "How disgusting! Blame the people who built your company and not even mention that you abandoned the technology that you had before anyone else in the entire world, that could have put you on the map, that could have changed the face of your company, just ignore that and blame the workers. So I absolutely agree with what Wally is saying about the vision thing.

EC: The thing I keep getting from your documentary and it's a question I initially asked them, Chelsea, is I've been seeing a lot of documentaries where they point the finger and you see the wrong that's been done but I keep wanting to bring it back to the American people: what are we supposed to do? You named some actual advocacy groups and you think that's the way to go with this? I was interested whether or not the old zero emission standards could be brought back? If your documentary would in any way lobby for a re-evaluation of that decision?

Chelsea: Right. The advocacy is one avenue, it's one thing. It's something we came to after a lot of other things didn't work. The ZEV Mandate is actually going to be revisited this summer. There are some new hearings to try to figure out what to do with it and whether to include newer things that have come into the fray since they sort of watered it down in '03 to include things like hybrids and all kinds of other avenues. So we absolutely not only hope, but expect this film to have an impact on those hearings and on those long term decisions. And the bottom line is the consumers have got to start asking for what they want. The traditional model of the auto industry that we're going to build something and then convince you that you want it; it needs to be reversed. And the car companies have got to start building what people actually want to buy but people also have to ask for it.

EC: I was also struck in your documentary when you were talking about the advertising and you showed those commercials and they were soooooo creepy!

Dean: They were terrifying!

EC: They were terrifying! And I thought, "Why would I want to own that? I'd be afraid to be in the garage with it!" [Laughter.] Another disturbing element of the documentary is that you do place culpability on the consumer—their lack of awareness—and yet at the same time I'm curious whether it's entirely their fault for not being aware? Your documentary serves a purpose by bringing awareness to the forefront but the average consumer at that time was being bombarded with advertisements for "preferable" products that the auto industry wanted to sell. Can the consumer really be blamed?

Wally: This is such a fascinating question for us. We went back and forth because consumers really didn't have a chance to buy this in 99% of the country, you never ever heard about this, so how can we blame them? It's a close call, but, we decided that those consumers that knew about it amongst our friends, friends of ours who are still very close friends, who may even have hybrids, they made the call that said, "You know what? I need to wait and see." They made the call to say, "I'm going to go with what I see advertised on television." And I think sometimes of Ralph Nader who says, yes, we're all consumers, we should be chasing the best deal for our dollar, we should be maybe getting what the Joneses have up the street, but we're also citizens and we can also say, "Advertising is just advertising. What product really corresponds with my values? What do I want for my vision of the future?" And that requires that we step outside of advertising. I don't mean to soapbox here, but, we decided in the end that consumers are part of the solution. So since the electric car was killed, we're all in this together. And we all need to work together to get out of the situation we're in now.

Dean: There's also the … what was going on at the time. It's a very different world today. Chris and I were talking about this just this morning. If these same things were coming up today as opposed to ten years ago we think the results would have been very different. The consequences of not embracing this kind of technology is much more apparent today than it was at the time for the average consumer.

Wally: Hurricane Katrina….

Dean: When you have hurricanes, and the threat of global warning is palpable now when before it was theoretical, the war in the Middle East where people are dying all the time and it's directly related to our addiction to oil and, frankly, just gas prices! If nothing else, if we had gas at $4 a gallon back then I think the consumers would have reacted in a way that they didn't then. They didn't need to as much. And if you watch how the sales of the Toyota Prius have skyrocketed, it says that consumers can make a big difference. So while it was very painful for us to make the decision to include consumers as part of the guilty party, the fact is to see how much they've done to help the hybrid car, shows what they can do in bringing back the electric car.

EC: Another documentary that's screening at the festival this year is out of Argentina—The Dignity of the Nobodies—I don't know if any of you have seen that? It was another one that really impressed me because here you had the collapse of an infrastructure and basically people voted with their feet, they walked away from the ways they had been taught to complain about something. What I liked about your documentary—along with its exposé of the systematic destruction of the EV-1—was its positive tone. That's why I keep repeating the question: what do we do? You're showing us this, you're giving us hope that we can do something, y'know? I love that you interviewed Phyllis Diller!! How did you get Phyllis Diller; I gotta ask this! [Everyone laughs.]

Chris: We were mixing our sound for the movie and we're in a little room in the back, the documentaries get a special closet at the back of a real sound stage, and we heard the laugh—Phyllis Diller's laugh—in the other room. I thought, that can't be the real Phyllis Diller in this building, I'm going to go over there and find out. So there she was and she was doing a voiceover for an animation series. And she said, "Now what are you doing, young man?" I'm 45, but, I'll take that. We're doing a documentary about electric cars. And she says [doing his best Diller]: "Electric cars?! I drove in one as a little girl!" So I think that's when I called Dean up and said, "Do you have any money for us to go out and film Phyllis at her house?" And Dean goes, "What?!!!"

EC: Hilarious! Which also makes me ask you, Dean, my understanding is that you created the first web site for a movie?

Dean: The first official movie website. In other words, this was back in 1994, and for most people the Internet was still a pretty new thing. There had been fan sites that had come up to support movies but no studio had ever embraced the Internet and done an official website for their film. So when we did the film Stargate, I was having a lot of frustrations with the marketing people at the time, because they wouldn't do the things I was hoping they would do. So I said, "Can I have the Internet? They said, "The what? Sure, it's yours!" And so we put a team together and we created the first movie website.

EC: That's really cool. Wally, you addressed an issue I was going to ask about emissions from the power plants. Another complaint I've heard about the electric car is replacing the batteries, that it would be very expensive: is that true?

Wally: Well, of course that bridge has already been crossed. People are driving Priuses. The battery technology that's developed in the Prius, the nickel metal hydride battery is in California being warrantied for 150,000 miles. The Prius is a little bit more expensive to buy than a conventional vehicle, you're talking about a 10-15% cost difference and the fuel of course you're saving. So when you go through all the numbers at a $1 a gallon for gas, you're right, the Prius does cost more. But gas doesn't cost $1 a gallon, it costs $3 a gallon right now and the arrows are all pointing upward. The bottom line is that there's been a lot of progress on one hand. We're going to see two years from now the Priuses being powered by lithium batteries rather than the nickel metal hydride and we have some spy people telling us that the Priuses are going to have—at least some of them—will have the option of being plug-in vehicles so that instead of getting just 50 miles per gallon, you'll be able to get well over 100 miles per gallon by mixing the electricity in with the gasoline.

EC: Well, I'm going to wrap it up because I know someone else is coming in. Thank you so much for your time. It's a wonderful project. I think you're on Oscar track. I'm serious! Thank you very much.

Chris: Thank you for spending time with us!

Wally: And don't buy a car!!

Cross-published on Twitch.

Phillip Lopate—Mikio Naruse and "Wife! Be Like A Rose"

Earlier this year the Pacific Film Archives ran the touring Mikio Naruse retrospective organized by James Quandt of Cinematheque Ontario. I caught two—Flowing and Floating Clouds. I very much enjoyed the drunken geisha dance in Flowing—it made me laugh outloud in delight—but despite my best intentions, during Floating Clouds I felt like an animal caught in a trap willing to gnaw off his foot just to get away!! I didn't return to see any of the further entries in the Naruse restrospective and I felt guilty about it. What kind of film commentarian had I become that I couldn't learn to appreciate Mikio Naruse?!

So when as part of its Readings on Cinema series PFA recently invited Phillip Lopate to speak about his new book American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now and offered, further, a screening of Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like A Rose with Lopate's introductory remarks, I thought, "Okay, we will try again."

After discussing his anthology and entertaining questions on it for a bit, Lopate turned to the screening at hand, offering just a little bit about "Micky" (as he affectionately calls Naruse) and a few things about Wife! Be Like A Rose. "Having gone through two entire series of Naruse films, first in the 80s and then more recently," Lopate commented, "I'm struck by how—this is the worst word you can use about a filmmaker, but I'm going to use it—how literary Naruse is. How his films feel like novels. He himself had wanted to be a novelist, to study literature, but because of family problems, money problems, he had to drop out [of school] and become a prop man in a Japanese studio." Naruse's interest in writing persisted, and in Wife! Be Like A Rose, for instance, one of the characters is a haiku poetess.

Another Naruse film, Anzukko, is also about a writer, a poet, and Lopate discussed the wonderful "collaboration" Naruse had with Fumiko Hayashi, a great Japanese woman novelist and short story writer. Actually, Lopate qualified, they hadn't really collaborated, she had written all these books, and Naruse just adapted one book after the other; Hayashi had already died before the first film was released. But Naruse was always very interested in the woman's point of view as well as literature. Lopate praised Naruse's beautiful adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata's Sound of the Mountain. As the PFA notes for the touring series highlighted: "The novelist Fumiko Hayashi was his favorite source for plots epitomizing his own vision that modern women are offered only illusory freedom. Audie Bock, who championed this relatively unheralded director years ago in her book Japanese Film Directors and in a monograph, writes of the 'condition of trapped awareness' in Naruse's women. It is this awareness that gave actresses like Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara a chance to show their depth."

"One of the things I love about his movies," Lopate offered, "is that they edge away from redemption, they refuse transcendence. In that, there is also something kind of novelistic. Sometimes the endings have something inconclusive about them, not always. Audie Bock has said that there are no happy endings in Naruse but there are some incredibly enlightening defeats."

But, Lopate quickly added, Naruse also had a comic streak, one might say a wise streak. Lopate explained that sometimes people write about Naruse and they use words like "bleak" and "pessimistic", but when he watches Naruse's films, he's "always enlivened" and doesn't experience Naruse "as a downer." Partly because Lopate does think there is this odd sense of humor in Naruse wherein he shows how people want something. Naruse himself said "people move a little and then they hit a wall." They want something, Lopate amplified, Naruse "shows them wanting it, he shows them deluded that they can get it, then he pulls the rug out from under them. There's something kind of comic in their sense of denial but also in their stoicism and in their resilience. In many ways Naruse characters have a great deal of dignity because they don't expect happiness, but they keep plugging along." Wife! Be Like A Rose is probably lighter and more intentionally comic than most of Naruse's films, something of an anomaly. "And you should know that he married a young ingénue after the film," Lopate told us, "and had a miserable marriage. It really fed his art, y'know."

After the film—which I rather enjoyed!—Lopate returned to the podium and quipped, "Did I say that was a light film? Questions? Comments?"

He was asked if he knew if Criterion was going to be putting out any of the Naruse movies on dvd? Lopate responded that he had been urging them to. "I've done a lot of work for Criterion over the last few years. And I know that it's in negotiation. I would love to see a box set of Naruse." He announced that he would be doing the commentary for Sound of the Mountain, but through another company. Criterion is very aware of Naruse, however, and negotiating for the box set.

Lopate added: "This movie, by the way, was made in 1935. Part of the charm of it, for me, is that it's right on the cusp between silent and sound. You have that strange whirring noise of the microphone starting up."

Lopate was asked to say something about Naruse's directorial style, how he gets such sensitive performances from his actors, and to also say something about Naruse's involvement with the set direction?

"As I said in my essay about him," Lopate answered, "he doesn't have a signature visual style that's very easy to pinpoint in the sense that Mizoguchi has the flowing tracking shots, or Ozu has the tatami mat shot [sorry Acquarello, just reporting!] or Kurosawa has this kind of vigorous energy. His films are very often interior but, as you can see, he opens them up, there's usually a sense of the city life in his films. He wants you to feel that people, as he said, will hit a wall quickly so there's always this feeling of the narrowness of the interiors, the narrowness of the alleys. As far as his directing of acting is concerned, I think he really was interested mostly in the psychology of character, it's his dominant interest. Hideko Takamine—who is the great Japanese actress who worked with him so often—said that he didn't give very much instruction at all. She asked him, 'How do I play this role?' and he would say, 'It'll be over before you know it.' " Lopate's audience laughed. "Which reminds me a little bit about that story of Ingrid Bergman talking to Alfred Hitchcock, asking, 'What do I do? How do I find my motivation?' And Hitchcock said, 'Ingrid, it's only a movie.' " More laughter.

Returning to the question at hand, Lopate continued: "Naruse was silent and glum. He wasn't like Lubitsch who imitated the way that every line was to be done. He didn't give direction. He chose actors who he trusted. That's why he had to have a crew of people that he could depend upon, a troupe you might say—like Hideko Takamine . . . and those people—and once he chose you, you kind of floundered around until you found the part. My sense is that by withholding instruction he forced the actors into a sense of their own solitude and into their desperation that was so important to the Naruse vision of life. I think he gave off a force field that was very Narusean and if you came into contact with it, you understood." Lopate suggested that the solitary poet at the end of Wife! Be Like A Rose was, in a way, a stand-in for Naruse.

Lopate further pointed out: "But there's also that beautiful daughter looking at her mother, which is very similar to the ending of Mother, of Okasan. The child trying to understand the parent. Filled with sympathy and knowing that there's always going to be this divide between parent and child."

Lopate concluded: "What I love about this movie is this sense—and in Naruse in general—that people can only do what they can do. They're not superheroes. They try but, y'know, life breaks them in certain ways. They're not evil. They can only do what they're going to do."

One fellow in the audience stated that he had heard Naruse was something of a cad toward women, which was surprising given Naruse's sensitive treatment of them in his films. Lopate was asked if he had any information on that.

"I don't think he was a cad to women but I wasn't under the bed, so I'm not sure," Lopate answered. "There's a story which I put in my essay about him. He would go out to eat in restaurants, usually working class restaurants. Even though he was a director, he didn't make that much money. Most of his social conversation was reserved for the waitresses who brought him the food and there was one waitress who was in love with him and he did not reciprocate her infatuation and she committed suicide. I don't know if that's being a cad. He was just being typically silent and withdrawn. Which will drive some people—not just women—crazy."

Another fellow likened the thumbing the taxi scene in Wife! Be Like A Rose with Capra's It Happened One Night. He wanted to know how a Japanese audience would have understood that reference?

"The Japanese directors of that period of the 30s," Lopate responded, "were very interested in Hollywood movies. All of them were watching Capra and Ford and early sound films. Sound came in later in Japan than it did in most countries. But there definitely is a Capra-esque feeling here. If he didn't see It Happened One Night, he surely saw somebody thumbing a ride. But I think it was It Happened One Night."

"What is and was Naruse's reputation in Japan when he was making the films and now?" one woman wanted to know. Lopate stated: "Wife! Be like A Rose was pretty much the first Japanese film that was released in America that showed in New York. It was a popular film." At first Naruse was making a lot of movies for the same studio that produced Ozu and they said, "We don't need two Ozus here." Even though his films are very different from Ozu, he was considered "the poor man's Ozu."

"One thing he was able to do," Lopate described, "was to bring in a film on time and under budget. So he basically continued to make films even in bad times. Of course, World War II was a terrible period. But, once he hit his greatest period, which was the 1950s, then I think there was much more of an appreciation." During the early 60s when a package of Japanese films toured America, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs was included, so even then he was considered an important Japanese director. "I think now he's still considered one of the big four: Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Naruse. I don't think he was ever hugely popular but he was respected."

Lopate was asked to speak about the influences and inspirations on Naruse's editing process? He offered: "Kurosawa thought that Naruse was the master editor. Kurosawa compared it to a strong river current that's taking everything. He'll do some movements with the camera, he'll do very short shots sometimes during long dialogue scenes. But he keeps you off balance I feel like, y'know? He keeps you questioning, y'know? Instead of resolving things, his editing is often forcing you to think about something. That's also where I feel he's like a novelist who's commenting on something, with the way he edits a scene. Puzzles. You feel this question mark. In this particular film, for instance, it's all about shifting sympathies. Who's going to get the major sympathy? And in the end, of course, everybody is fairly sympathetic. And he can only do that by this kind of destabilizing editing system."

08/21/07 UPDATE: At Rouge, Kiyoaki Okubo conducts a fascinating reception study of Wife! Be Like A Rose when it was shown in New York’s Filmarte Theater under the title of Kimiko. It was the first Japanese sound film to be shown commercially outside of Japan and didn't fare too well.

SFIFF49 2006—The Dignity of the Nobodies (2005)

The U.S. premiere of Fernando Solanas' The Dignity of the Nobodies (La dignidad de de los nadies, 2005) is being presented at the 49th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival in association with the United Nations Association Film Festival and Global Exchange. The second in a projected series of four documentaries dealing with the plight of Argentina, The Dignity of the Nobodies is—as Miguel Pendás pens for the program catalog—"activist cinema at its best: passionate, informative and uncompromising." Pendás concludes: "The film's power and immediacy make it feel like a hopeful forecast of things to come."

Imagine! A documentary that testifies to hope!! The Dignity of the Nobodies has arrived on these bleak shores none too soon.

"It was hard to imagine," Solanas writes regarding the genesis of the documentary, "that the small women farmers, ignorant of banking or political affairs, would be able to organize a vigorous and original resistance movement confronting banks and stopping over a thousand auction sales. The neighborhood or community soup kitchens, community clinics, bakeries and other social initiatives created by the neighbors to give an answer to poverty and hunger. The dozens of silence marches staged by relatives of the victims of police mafias which managed to unmask the murderers and send them to trial. The factories revived by their former workers showing that under self-management and without the hierarchical structures of managers and foremen, they could produce with efficiency and quality."

All these "stories" are passionately recorded in The Dignity of the Nobodies and any American—fearful of where our so-called leaders are taking this country—should become cognizant of these grass root strategies and project their own future involvement into them.

Where a feature film like Obaba creates a narrative fiction out of the documentary process, Solanas inverts the assertion: "The Dignity of the Nobodies is not only testimonial cinema, it is not fiction either. It starts from reality but uses procedures from other genres, and on telling characters' facts and stories it approaches fiction. In The Dignity of the Nobodies I tried to fuse genres, to approach real facts to narrative stories, to use procedures of the documentary together with those of fiction or of essay cinema. Its narrative structure resembles that of an open book with tales, chronicles and stories, looking for the testimonial to blend with the poetic, the essay with the testimonies, and the characters with life. The idea of the genres has been reversed and the limits between fiction and the documentary cinema are difficult to specify."

Whereas I was entertained by the stately whimsy of Obaba, and its play on who is seeing who, it remains a philosophical reverie on structures of memory, an artistic construct I can look at, enjoy, write about, and ultimately dismiss. With The Dignity of the Nobodies, however, memory and the documentary process forge a progressive alliance, engaging me at a deep level. "The tragedy," Solanas explains, "pushed me to preserve memory against oblivion." These stories are not philosophical musings; they are practical stratagems for survival! Here, voting is accomplished with the feet, with action, and not by passive cooperation with structured party politics. Here, Basta! Becomes a rallying cry. Enough! Enough.

But it is precisely by his bringing the resistance down to personal testimonials that Solanas has achieved universality and solidarity. Each character—Martin, the writer delivery-rider, Toba the teacher, Antonia and Chipi who run the poor soup kitchen, Margarita and Colinche who provide for their children through scavenging and gleaning, Silvia and Carola in the public hospital, Lucy who organized farmer wives against the banks' auctions of their farms, Dario martyred by the police mafia and Claudia his fiance, Gustavo, the young priest turned social reactionary—are introduced via coplas, which have their origin in the 19th century payada. The payador was the chronicler gaucho who traveled through the pampa passing on the news in verse to the music of his guitar.

I was entertained by Obaba; but, I was profoundly moved by The Dignity of the Nobodies. A must-see at this year's festival!

2006 SFIFF—Obaba

As Julio Cortazar is one of my favorite South American writers, Antonio Machado remains my favorite Spanish poet. One of my favorite poems of his reads:

The eye you see is not
An eye because you see it.
It is eye because it sees you.

In gist, this is the lesson any documentarian must learn when they turn their camera onto the world, the selfsame lesson that Lourdes (Bárbara Lennie) has to learn, arriving in the small Basque hill town of Obaba equipped with a videocamera, intending to satisfy a school video assignment by recording the history of this small community. And Lourdes learns her lesson: you can't catch fish without getting wet.

Willis Barnstone, reflecting on the above Machado poem in his book of translations Antonio Machado—Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, writes: "[Machado] tells us that the eye of the other already is, and not because by perceiving it you render it living, but because it is there waiting to come into more apparent being by seeing you. In waking you to its being, it gives you life. And you are companions. Like the world, the eye is on its own. And the world and the eye will go on being, when you are darkness." (2004:xix)

This is the marvelous symbiosis achieved by Montxo Armendáriz in Obaba. Self and other, the documentarian and the documented, create the double helix of identity. It is in equal measures mysterious and revelatory, much like a mask serves to conceal and reveal. The past and the present, childhood and adulthood, walk down the cobbled street hand in hand, counting steps (and time) as they go.

As I mentioned in my write-up of Alica Scherson's Play, the worlds created by magical realism are more alternate than other. If narrative shift can induce a new world, then surely memory can do the same, being perhaps the original narrative shift? As Jonathan Holland writes in his report to Variety from the Toronto Film Festival, Obaba "unlocks the past to study its effect on the present, with results that hauntingly jog things out of familiar perspectives." For it is the story we tell ourselves about our own lives that ultimately creates the fictional construct we call identity, and if the story is continually adjusted, accommodated, all the more to prove that identity is fluid, a continual process more than a static state of being. Lourdes repeatedly prefaces her self-inquiries and her examinations of others with the phrase "quiero decir que" ("what I mean is"), which underscores the thirst for meaning inherent in every story. Exact words become substituted by alternate meanings and we understand ourselves (and others) more by approximation, than definition.

Obaba is structured as a series of flashbacks—three to be exact—which account for the presences and absences of key characters in Obaba. Holland synopsizes them well in his Variety review. Why have some remained in this small provincial town whereas others have traveled away? "You can live anywhere," the film attests, "if you're happy on the inside." Interiority becomes a key piece to the puzzle. Where does insanity come from, Lourdes asks the hostel keeper Ismael (Hector Colome), who promptly responds that it comes from the same place as hate, as reason, from within. Ismael is a subtle character in the film. He is the first Lourdes meets on her way to Obaba, encountered at night on a bending road with a lizard firmly in his grasp. He runs the Lizard Hostel, behind which he raises in a shed what might be considered hostile lizards, reputedly able to crawl in through the human ear to feast on their favorite delicacy—the human brain. Allegedly he has made his best friend Tomas (Txema Blasco) a deaf simpleton by putting one of these lizards in his ear. Or at least that is the accusation of Tomas' sister Begona (Inake Irastorza). Or is it simply that she is bitter over spurned advances from when they were children? In one of the final scenes of Obaba it becomes clear that the wounds of childhood fester into adult consequences. What is inside will find its way out. As Miguel Pendás writes for the festival program: "The people of Obaba are trapped in the past, telling stories from their childhood that involve one another in a complicated web of feelings and relationships."

One other thing he writes seems spot on: "Perhaps we were meant to realize that our technological gadgets are incapable of seeing the essence of reality, and that the only way to really know the world is to surrender to its beauty and mystery." The lens of the video camera by which we enter this accomplished film—and which might be thought of as Machado's eye seeing the subject eye—has (as Machado implies) its inherent limitations. This is poignantly examined when Lourdes reviews her tapes to determine if a lizard has entered her ear. Just when she thinks she is going to discover the answer, the camera fails her.

But for the documentarian it is not only the lens of the camera that has limitations, but the process of editing itself; the eye of the editor. Lourdes' inquiries, predicated on a class assignment and committed to videotape, are brought back into the class room where her instructor advises that now is the time to take the compiled footage and edit the images, to give them whatever meaning she deems appropriate. Reality, he teaches her, is not unique and transparent, but rather multiple and complex. Quoting Balzac, he says that life does not make perfect stories but a novelist can.

Lourdes seems to reach an awareness, however, that what is imperfect in humans is exactly what is essential about them and she begins—not to shape stories—but to allow them to tell themselves. She suggests that what is irresolute about human nature might be that which makes a person happy inside. And once you're happy inside, as we now know, you can live anywhere, even in a quirky provincial little town like Obaba.

2006 SFIFF—Play

As I mentioned in my write-up on En la Cama (In Bed), Jorge Morales' FIPRESCI report from the 2005 Havana Film Festival includes a deconstruction of the so-called Nuevo Cine Chileno, and culls out that what's actually being discussed are three distinct Chilean features making the festival rounds at the same time: Matías Bize (In Bed / En la cama), Alicia Scherson (Play), and Sebastián Campos (The Sacred Family / La sagrada familia).

Acknowledging that Scherson won the Debuts section of the Havana festival (Scherson also won Best New Narrative Filmmaker at Tribeca), and admitting that Play "is probably one of the best crafted of all recent Chilean productions" with cinematography "remarkably executed in a High Definition digital format" and "outstanding" sound and shot composition, Morales then asserts that all this excellence does nothing more than "support a naïf babbling, a sort of urban magic realism in which Scherson seems to be more concerned about making the most superfluous details seem exotic than of telling a story with a minimum support. The calculated idea of accentuating the color palette—with no further sense than embellishing the image—the fact of acutely working the sound but without giving it an expressive value, give away the questionable wish to surprise, of shyly impressing instead of moving, of making rhymes but no poetry."

Naturally, poetry is an extremely personal matter. Some prefer their Robert Frost. Others their Juan Ramon Jimenez. Some prefer their poetry dramatic and compelling. And others look up from the page shyly impressed, their forehead on flight.

When Doug Cummings "discovered" Play earlier this year at the Palm Springs Film Festival, he was "dazzled" by "its formal ingenuity, infectious spirit, and profound humanism." Sensing more poetry than rhymes, Doug evoked: "While the movie exhibits an indulgent playfulness, unlike most contemporary films, its stylistic witticisms increase our emotional connections rather than decrease them. More tantalizing than ridiculing, more Jacques Rivette than Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the film celebrates the way personal curiosity and anonymous compassion can inform and enliven modern, urban lives."

Doug's enthusiastic guidance convinced me to give Play a second chance. I had seen it on screener tape and hadn't been drawn in—as often happens when I'm larger than the screen—but Doug suggested I watch Play projected big at the press screening and, as Susan Sontag has defined, I was "kidnapped."

My enthusiasm was shared by Chris Knipp, who attended the same screening, and who found it "extraordinarily accomplished" and "delightful" as well as "rich" and "delicate". "If Play seems to be about 'nothing,' " Chris opines, "look again. Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La dolce vita were about 'nothing' too. Scherson has modulated Antonioni's boredom into bemused loneliness and Fellini's wealthy idleness into a twenty-first century urban anomie of easy meetings and easy separations."

Since, along with Cathleen Rountree, Doug and Chris have both skillfully synopsized Play's storyline, I'm free to meditate on what impressed me most about the film: its comment on how class is always greener on the other side, its sound design and its gentle inflection of magical realism. As a great lover of Latin American literature and film, what I have come to appreciate over the years is that the worlds created by magical realism are not other worlds distinct from our own, but alternate worlds that share many qualities with our own, often indistinguishable, until something happens—a moth flies out of a rejected man's mouth, for example, and circles around a young woman observing him from across the street; a young woman who understands his loneliness.

For it is precisely in observation that the alternate worlds of magical realism can best express themselves. These expressions can be made so fantastic and over-the-top as in Like Water For Chocolate, or rendered as storybook illustrations like in the starry skies of Viva Cuba, or rendered as simple and nonsensical as dreams that appear to have no importance in waking life. Dreams play a big part in Play. But that's not to say they add much to the plot. Butter melts in the timelapsed sun. A black chick pecks breadcrumbs in the dreamer's shoes, along with his yellow brethren. A mother dreams her daughter gives birth to a chicken. The dreams of night don't seem to matter as much as the dream of fitting in among others in a new place or the dream of configuring a new identity and letting go of an old one.

Alicia Scherson allows the urbanity of Santiago to contain the crisscrossing dreams that don't make any sense, stitching together alternate perceptions of a shared reality, or rather, layering them. The cinematic texture of Play is one of many polyvalent layers. Its weave is nearly hypnotic. Watching Play a second time (which it definitely warrants), I caught so many connections and transitions lost in my initial, confused anticipation.

I love how Scherson uses sound to indicate alterity. Martial art moves practiced in front of a mirror resound with chopsocky swish. She'll show a boat on the shore and you hear seagulls and waves. She'll show a photograph of a nearly-extinct Amazonian tribe in a National Geographic magazine, and you hear their chanting, their drumming. You are, in effect, in two worlds. One of representation. One of evocation. We perceive things not only by how we see them, but how we hear them. And so she plays with the separate universes that individuals live in, determined simply by the shift of one Ipod to the other. I loved the scene where Cristina (Viviana Herrera) and Manuel (J. Pablo Quezada) kiss for the first time, each listening to their own music.

Curiously enough, when I first watched Play at home on screener tape, I watched it along with Underground Game, a cinematic riff on a Julio Cortazar story. I adore Cortazar, of course, I consider him a master of modern fiction because he repeatedly demonstrates that narrative shifts in and of themselves alter perception of reality and, thereby, create alternate worlds. And both films—Play and Underground Game—involved a somewhat necessary stalking or pursuit of one individual by another. One of the fun thrills of any kind of festival or retrospective is the chance cluster of themes that seem to gather movies together within certain circles of perspective. In Dignity of the Nobodies, as an example of a simple man standing up to the police state, another short story of Cortazar's is mentioned, "The Pursuer", wherein a man—who believes he is being pursued—eventually comes to the understanding that he is the one in pursuit. There's something of that resiliency in Play.

As if knowing that she needs to become a nurse for someone new, Christina finds herself someone lonely to care for. And the final shot of her observing Santiago from the hospital rooftop confirms her eye for detail, especially when it involves her future. Variety's Ronnie Scheib writes: "Final scene finds [Christina] high atop the city whistling in the wind as the camera pans over Santiago to end on her face, a very 21st century, feminine version of Balzac's intrepid Rastignac surveying the Paris he vows to conquer." Scheib further attributes the same eye for detail to director Scherson, stating: "Director Scherson tells her story in jigsaw-puzzle fragments—her camera focuses with equal interest on a section of tie or a character feeding rose petals to a rabbit. The devil, they say, is in the details and Scherson has a sharp eye for the telling minutiae and everyday surrealism of Santiago's streets. Moments and objects carry a charge that has little to do with plot, or perhaps are the plot."

My final agreement with Scheib is that Play "has less to do with romance than with class and how the other half lives" but Play's "all-pervasive class consciousness manages to be both gently empathetic and wickedly ironic."

Hard Candy

Caught an advance screening of Hard Candy at the Clay Theater this evening with director David Slade and actress Ellen Page present for a post-screening Q&A. As Juan Manuel Freire reported to the Greencine Daily from the Sitges International Film Festival last October, the awards for Best Motion Picture and Best Screenplay went to Hard Candy.

After the South by Southwest festival last month Micah reviewed the film for Dumb Distraction and Cinematical's Jette Kernion took part in a roundtable interview with writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade.

Todd Brown at Twitch reviewed the film from the 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival.

David Hudson gathered up yesterday's reviews for the Greencine Daily: " 'A schlockfest dressed up in sleek designer duds that feigns gruesome violence and flounders with psychological power dynamics, music video vet [David] Slade's directorial debut desperately tries to shock and disturb by exploiting male fears of castration and feminine revenge fantasies, both of which form the crux of his story about the torturous tête-à-tête between 32-old photographer Jeff (Patrick Wilson) and 14-year-old student Hayley (Ellen Page).' Nick Schager on Hard Candy in Slant. More from Rob Nelson in the Voice. Related: Ray Pride on that red hoody; Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Slade for SuicideGirls and, for Film & Video, Bryant Frazer talks with Jean-Clement Soret, one of the first colorists to be credited in the opening titles."

Reminiscent of Misery and uncomfortably compelling, Hard Candy is a drama-thriller hybrid about a 32-year-old man who takes home a 14-year-old girl he's met on the net. The film is dark, edgy, and primarily seductive because of Page's powerhouse performance. I was fascinated by her character even as she creeped me out. Here's my transcription of the post-screening discussion.

* * *

Director Slade was asked to talk about how Hard Candy came about. He underscored that, first and foremost, Hard Candy is a completely independently-financed film. Producer David Higgins had the kernel of an idea based around a newspaper article he'd read about girls in Japan who would arrange to meet men on line for sex via the internet. The men would come lured and the girls would jump out of the closet and beat them up and steal their wallets. With that he sought out and found an amazing voice in Brian Nelson, the writer, who teaches theater for a living and is a screenwriter and a playwright. Rather than just take the article as read and make a straightforward thriller, Nelson elected to write a multitextural piece. This was the early first draft that Slade read, which he loved. "Usually as a director," Slade explained, "you look for a film that's ready to go because you don't want to go through development and all that stuff and this was a film no one was going to make. I could see that nobody was going to make this. But I loved it. My personal tastes—I grew up on the cinema of people like Nicolas Roeg and the like and it just spoke to me and I desperately wanted to make it so I went and I met with David who immediately attached me. Once we had a little package together, we very quickly financed it, under the specific caveat that we were going to make it for a million dollars or less so that we kept control." They didn't want it to be a studio film; they wanted it to be a "proper" independently-financed film, not one made through Warner Independent or any of the major studio independent labels. "It's a very very tough subject matter," Slade concedes, "and a very very tough film to make and we didn't want to be in a position where we would be told, well, you have to skew in this direction for this audience or skew your argument this way or resolve anything." They wanted to—as you do when you make a film for practically no money in Hollywood terms—make the film they wanted to make and Slade is proud of the fact that they got to do just that. Hard Candy was independently financed. "[T]hen we took it to Sundance," he continued, "where we were fortunate enough to get into a bidding war and Lionsgate Films bought it, again under the caveat that they weren't allowed to change a frame, and they haven't and—God bless them—they haven't asked us to either."

"We're very very pleased to be coming out on the 28th. We come out in New York and L.A. first and then here on the 28th. There was development along the way, but only very little. Brian Nelson and I fought hard to keep the original energy of the script exactly as it was."

Slade was asked to talk about getting Ellen Page involved in this project because—for such a young character and her being so smart in the movie—without the right actress it would have been definitely borderline cheesey. Page was dynamite and she actually pulled it off, so how did he come across her?

He said they saw about 300 people before Ellen was brought to his attention. He watched some of her television work and then sent on the script. "I remember you read with a shaved head," he smiled at Ellen. She had just gotten off of a film where she had shaved her head. The film's producers were quite strong and supportive but a little nervous as producers tend to be, and practically crapped their pants when they saw Ellen with a shaved head but Nelson, Higgins and Slade knew Page was the one. "There were some great actresses who came in," Slade admitted, "but Ellen just brought this passion that no one else did. She read it in a way that was honest and natural and it felt exactly how Hayley should be. She didn't play in a way that many actresses did, overplaying the sexual flirtation, she just played with great passion and that was the most important thing because in this film the actors have their lines, the actors have their points of view, these are not the points of view of the filmmakers, these are the characters' lines, we're not advocating Hayley's point of view, we're not advocating Jeff's point of view, we're leaving this to you as an audience to read into."

They managed to get Ellen to come to Los Angeles, they met in Starbucks and exchanged some notes and then she read "and absolutely blew everybody away, and that was that!" One of the most important things for a director is the casting, Slade insists. He quotes Billy Wilder: "The three most important things for directing is the casting, the casting, and the casting." They spent a lot of time, he adds, it was the longest time in the production of the film, waiting for and getting the right cast.

So then Ellen was asked what drew her to the part? And exactly how she decided to play Hayley.

When she first got the script, she was in Toronto, having just gotten back from Europe where she'd shot a film, and for which she'd shaved her head. "I wasn't supposed to look at anything," she explained, "I wasn't going to work for a while, and of course the first script that I got like three days after I got back was Hard Candy and I read it and I was just completely blown away and completely engrossed. I couldn't believe that a character like Hayley had been written for a teenage girl with so much intelligence and passion. It was really refreshing actually to not have the typical portrayal of the teenage girl that our media has currently. So I was really just inspired and all I wanted was to be in it and I'm really grateful that I got to be."

Asked her age, Ellen responded 19, though she was 17 at the time she made the film.

Asked how she prepared for the role outside of reading the script, Ellen said: "To be honest, I really just wanted, y'know, my heart to connect to her heart really, in the sense of her passion and the fact that she saw something that was happening in society that people were ignoring and justifying and it really angered her and she was going to do something about that and she was sick of peoples' passive natures. Yeah, there's a lot of things that piss me off. It's just channeling that and connecting on an emotional level."

Slade interjected that he believed adults have a "romantic misconception" that people at the age of 14 don't behave like Hayley or can't or somehow can't articulate. "I think this is a romantic misconception that we have as adults—I think this is something Ellen brought in ... this tremendous passion, this absolute belief, and it was so refreshing." There are those who still argue that a 14 year old wouldn't do something like this but Slade insists no, she would. "Really she would, she was so driven, her values were black and white because she hadn't lived to the point in which she'd filled in the greys." The film has been criticized for being an older man's interpretation of what a young 14-year-old girl thinks but Slade states: "In terms of vocabulary Brian will tell you, he will say, well, it was this student on this day who gave me the idea for that line and they were 14 and I always like to say that because it's one of these weird misconceptions we have and I think it's a romanticism that we like to have as adults."

Ellen was asked: Being that you're a younger woman and just ending your adolescence, how did you feel doing the movie knowing that this is based on pedophiles? I mean, did you recall any experiences that you may have had on your own or did you sort of have to imagine what it was like to be pursued in such a way?

"All I really need to think about is the fact that this guy would do something like this," Ellen responded, "regardless of my personal experience or Hayley's personal experience, the fact that this exists hurts her, the fact that these people are doing this damages her and angers her to an extent that she can hardly even articulate it and she is gonna frickin do something about it, y'know? And it was just about connecting with that. I've never been exploited while I was just trying to grow some basmati rice but it really annoys me that people are patenting seeds, know what I mean?"

I had to ask the obvious question about the red hood. Was the script purposely playing with the Little Red Riding Hood story which has been interpreted by some to deal with the sexuality of young women?

Both of them protested no. "The hood was red," Ellen explained, "and I like to put my hood up, literally, and now I keep getting all these analytical questions about Little Red Riding Hood." Slade added that they had a very little budget. The stylist spent most of it on Patrick's wardrobe. "Yeah," Ellen complained jokingly, "his pants were like $600!" And all she got were jeans and a red sweathood. But it looked right, Slade explained, and he asked her if she felt comfortable in it and Ellen said, yeah, and that was that. And then later he thought, "Oh shit, people are going to read this as Little Red Riding Hood." Besides, Ellen added, she recalled that in Little Red Riding Hood the wolf eats the girl and that's not exactly what happened here.

I took them at their word but it didn't truly satisfy me. If the symbol was not consciously used, perhaps it snuck in anyways. It's true that the wolf eats the girl and the granny but the woodsman comes along and cuts him open. And then what most folks don't remember is that the woodsman sews stones in the wolf's belly, which makes him sink in a body of water. The wolf drowns from the weight. I couldn't help noticing that Jeff's big dark secret was kept underneath a bunch of stones. But again, if they say they weren't playing with these images, I'll begrudgingly accept they weren't.

Ellen was asked if there was a scene that was especially difficult for her to film or for her to get in touch with? Obviously the scene being referred to is the grisly castration scene intent upon titillating morbid prurience. Slade answered for Ellen: "You know, we had 18 and a half days to shoot the film. We shot it for under a million dollars which meant that kind of schedule. Every day was emotionally draining. Every day was tough. Every day was hard work. We prepared and prepared and prepared. We had rehearsal which really helped. I would say there were some days that were harder than others because some days were more physically demanding because we were doing physically demanding stuff. There were some days that were emotionally demanding. But when you're stuck with an 18-day schedule, every day is tough and the only solace in that is that in 18 days it's going to be over."

Ellen countered that she thought the 18-day shoot was a luxury in a way. "I'm from Canada and we have no money," she stated wryly, adding that pretty much all the movies she's done have been shot in 18 days, so it wasn't really that unusual for her. At the same time she thought it helped the film because it added to the sense of immediacy and the film's manic nature.

Slade offered that they also shot pretty much in sequence except for the café scene, which was shot at the very end. "That was sheer necessity," Slade explained, "because we had to rip down the—we shot the entire interiors in a tiny stage that we built and then when we went out on location while the art department were ripping down the apartment to make a café, which is why we had to shoot that at the end but the relationship between the two characters, I think between the two actors had to grow over that time and that was very important in that schedule."

They were asked how much time was spent rehearsing before they actually started shooting? Slade said they had five days in a room about the size of the stage kind of square. Or less. The rehearsal period was really good for determining that they all understood what they were doing and they all agreed they were doing the same thing. Ellen and Patrick both were completely prepared so that the rehearsal period was really just diligence and ironing out certain things which might read well on the page but might not come out right. Slade asked Ellen directly: "What was your experience with rehearsal? Would you rather not have done it?"

"No, no, it's good to cultivate trust," Ellen assured him. "I know that sounds cheesey but without it I don't think you can do something as intimate as make a film, which is pretty crazy."

Ellen was asked what she thought about the film's R rating? "Oh it sucks! Yeah, it really makes me go … Balls (pardon the pun)! I mean it just sucks because I really would like teenage girls and boys to see this and to see a character like this. Hopefully, they'll just sneak in or something."

"I'm sure they will," Slade concurred and then praised Patrick Wilson's performance. Trained on Broadway, Wilson hit all his marks perfect, which is great when reined by a tight schedule. "He just acted nonstop because he's used to the stage. And he really went beyond the call of duty body and soul, bodily. People say, 'Oh, the makeup on his hands look great.' No makeup on his hands! His hands were really tied up and blue." Only one stunt was done by a stunt double; everything else was done by the actors.

Ellen reminded Slade that he made her watch Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. "It was my only reference piece," he explained, "I said this has to be real, the performances have to be real, the violence has to be real and so I need you to kind of do it!" And they did, and they did it safely with a fantastic stunt coordinator. The exteriors were shot at the stunt coordinator's house; it was a safer place to do stunts and stuntwork, hence all the roof scenes and running around the house were shot there.

Ellen was asked how she and Patrick were able to draw on such raw emotions take after take after take? Especially Patrick when he had to pretend his balls were being cut off. What did they have to do to get those emotions to come out?

Ellen seemed at a loss for an answer and then replied simply, "I dunno, I just like really really love to do this more than anything, y'know? And I really just like to disappear and lose my mind, it's like a drug. To find those elements and just pull them up and just literally disappear so, I dunno, I totally get off on it so it's just what I love to do. It's hard to explain. It's just … I just dig it and I just love to keep going for it. It's just like something that I love to do, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, he was getting his balls cut off but I'm the one standing there with all the friggin dialogue!"

Speaking for Wilson, Slade added that Patrick has said a number of times that when you're tied to a table there's not a lot else to do but act. You're tied up! You take an inch of pain and you turn it into a pound of pain and you engross yourself in that. All that he asked of them as a director, however, was that both of them come from a very honest place. This has proven kind of problematic for some people; they ask, "Who's the villain?"

"If both characters come from an honest place then they're both the villain," Slade states, "or neither of them are. That's up to you. So chiefly the text becomes about responsibility and how much responsibility does each person take and how much responsibility do you take as an audience and how do you assess your values having gone through the film, having rooted for one character and then maybe perhaps change your mind and had to root for another character because at the end things turn out a different way. There are people who would love to have people like Hayley go out and become vigilante-type people, but, here we show that it's actually quite a complex, very very complex thing to do."

Slade concludes: "You can see at the end of the film that she takes the weight of the whole day on her face, that she's taken on the responsibility that Jeff refused to take. He would rather die than accept the responsibility for what he'd done. For me that's one of the chief things about Western society is that we don't like responsibility because it's scary and it's full of danger. To me, more than the text which is very current right now, the film is about responsibilities."

Ray Harryhausen—The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Ray Harryhausen destroyed Washington D.C. via an invasion of flying saucers. He caused havoc in Rome via the rampaging creature Ymir of 20 Million Miles to Earth, and demolished the Coney Island roller coaster in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. And with great pride in his voice Harryhausen gloated that he pulled down San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge via his infamous sextopus! But after destroying so many cities, and with the Japanese jumping on the bandwagon laying waste to Tokyo via one Godzilla or another, Harryhausen decided he wanted to try something different. He set aside destroying the cities of the world and turned to the adventurous legends of Sinbad from the Arabian classic The Thousand and One Nights.

Last night, to help celebrate the seventh anniversary of the San Rafael Film Center, Harryhausen introduced a restored print of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which—with all due deference to Ingmar Bergman—is the greatest movie with 7 in the title! The screening was also in conjunction with the recent Billboard Books publication of The Art of Ray Harryhausen, written by Harryhausen and Tony Dalton, foreword by Peter Jackson. The Art of Ray Harryhausen is rich with stunning examples of Harryhausen's preproduction panels, which served to secure funding for his films as well as to inspire and motivate the studio writers.

Joining Harryhausen on stage for a pre-screening discussion were Craig Barron, Arnold Kunert and Phil Tippett. Tippett credits The 7th Voyage of Sinbad with being the specific film that kickstarted his career in special effects. Craig Barron moderated the discussion via a slideshow of key illustrations from the book of characters in the film, beginning with the Cyclops.

The one-eyed, one-horned Cyclops of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was Harryhausen's direct response against the man-in-the-Godzilla-suit style of special effects. He wanted to create a creature that clearly could not be a man in costume. Recycled from the armature of the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, the Cyclops strove for a representation far away from the easy notion of pasting an eye on the forehead of an Italian wrestler. Not many people notice that the second Cyclops that appears in the movie has two horns on his head.

The cover of the new book is Harryhausen's concept drawing of Sinbad fighting a skeleton on the top of a ruined spiral staircase. Initially, Harryhausen's choice of Sinbad was almost incidental; it was the skeleton that he wanted to animate. Pursuing that choice, however, forced Harryhausen to ask himself the question most people seldom ask: How do you kill Death? In The 7th Voyage of Sinbad the skeleton falls from the spiral staircase and his bones shatter on the rocks. In Jason and the Argonauts the skeletons plummet into the sea on the presumption that skeletons can't swim. As a Mayanist, I can only ponder the possibilities had Harryhausen explored the Mayan epic The Popol Vuh where the realm of death is harrowed and Death defeated by the clever intelligence of the Hero Twins.


Surprisingly, British censors cut out the swordfight between Sinbad and the skeleton as well as the scene where the Cyclops is roasting one of the sailors on a spit, allegedly for being too frightening for children. Harryhausen doesn't understand that reasoning since, nowadays, there are things in movies that would "frighten the devil"! Besides, every child carries a little skeleton around inside of him or her so what's the big deal?

As a special treat for his San Rafael Film Center audience, Harryhausen shared his model of the skeleton from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. He demonstrated its ball and joint armature and how it could be manipulated into any position. He used the model again—along with six new ones—for the fight sequence in Jason and the Argonauts. He expressed his hope that seeing the small size of the model didn't disillusion anyone. He was a notorious "people shrinker" who would make his actors small to match the proportions of his models.

The next character in the slide show was the "snakewoman", one of Harryhausen's favorite characters in the film. "I had always wanted to add a character at that point in the story who was not only completely different from the dancing girls with diamonds in their navels that feature in most costume adventures," Harryhausen writes, "but who would also show the magical powers of [the magician] Sokourah. The snakewoman is conjured up by the sorcerer to perform a dance of death when he 'combines' Princess Parisa's handmaiden with a serpent. Her upper torso is that of a human female with the addition of an extra pair of arms, but the remainder of her body is that of a snake. I decided to give her four arms so that I could elaborate the snakewoman's dance; with just two arms the creature might have seemed a bit mundane, but the extra pair of arms enabled me to give her whole body an allure and a flow that worked wonderfully with the music." (2006:163) Initially, to animate the model, Harryhausen used the music from the film Salome (1953), loaned by Columbia's music library, as a guide that provided a beat; later, of course, "Bernie" Hermann wrote a wonderful new score that fitted perfectly with Harryhausen's animation. Harryhausen concedes that the snakewoman was a precursor of the incredible Medusa in his later venture The Clash of the Titans.

What did Harryhausen think of Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong? Some things worked for him, others didn't, but above all he states you can't criticize Jackson's point of view. The primary difference for Harryhausen between the original and the remake was Merian C. Cooper whose infectious vitality infused the character of Carl Denham in the original. Cooper was Denham! And there was no way Jackson could have replicated that. One of the highlights of Harryhausen's life was to work with Merian C. Cooper on Mighty Joe Young. Cooper taught Harryhausen about "the wonderful valley of what if?"


Harryhausen praised Wilkie Cooper's cinematography for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The film was made on the miniscule budget of $650,000. To light the scene of the cave on the island of Colossa (Majorca), they had to borrow lamps, which en route fell overboard and sank to the bottom of the sea. It is to Cooper's credit that he was able to light the cave with so little and have it look so fantastic.

Another interesting tidbit about The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is that Ray Harryhausen has never met Richard Eyer, who played Baronni, the genie in the lamp. All of Eyer's scenes were shot in the U.S. when Harryhausen was on location. Eyer has since become an elementary school teacher and he and Harryhausen will finally meet for the first time in a couple of weeks at a special Burbank screening.

Before the screening of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Arnold Kunert recalled how, at an earlier appearance at the San Rafael Film Center (Harryhausen has graced their stage four times), Harryhausen admitted that one of his few regrets was not animating the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Kunert pursued the idea and found a group of stop action animators in Toronto willing to undertake the project. Serving as the project's executive producer, Harryhausen has come somewhat out of retirement to help them accomplish their goal. Kunert was delighted to introduce the West Coast premiere of The Pit and the Pendulum, directed by Marc Lougee, who is likewise maintaining a blog on the film. This eight-minute short will be screened at this Fall's Toronto Film Festival in hopes of securing the backing for a continued series.


During the Q&A Harryhausen was asked what he thought about the Wallace and Grommit films. Harryhausen stated that, even though they were using the same basic process, Wallace and Grommit are "stylized puppet films" whereas he always sought to disguise such puppetry and make his creatures as realistic and believable as possible.

Asked which of his animations were the most difficult, Harryhausen stated that it took him four and a half months to animate the skeleton battle sequence in Jason and the Argonauts. Four and a half months for five minutes footage! Had he known it was going to be so difficult, he probably would never have started. The seven heads of the Hydra were also challenging to achieve. All it took was one phone call interrupting the process to throw everything off!

Asked how he was able to make his monsters so sympathetic so that audiences actually mourned their deaths, Harryhausen reminded that he never called his animations "monsters"; they were "creatures." Clearly, his humanoid creatures elicited more sympathy; but, ultimately, they were the villains and had to be vanquished and/or killed. He remembers being told, however, that when the creature in Beast From 20,000 Fathoms died it was like watching an opera tenor.

Asked if any of his animations had been cut in the editing room, Harryhausen conceded to scenes being trimmed for length. There was one bit in the skeleton fight sequence of Jason and the Argonauts that was cut out because it interrupted the flow: and that was of the skeleton Jason beheads who then falls down on his hands and knees groping and searching for his head. It proved distracting.

Harryhausen admits to having a Zeus complex. He likes manipulating his figures like chess pieces on a board.

It seemed a bit unfair to subject Harryhausen to questions when he admittedly forgets the answers. He credits fish oil for any memory he has left and his quick retort to most questions is "It's in the book!!"