Tag: filmmaker

Our dirty questions to Bernard Rose

Posted on by victorfraga

Rose has been a director since the 1980s, when he became known for the original video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax – the one that was banned, and made the song a hit from club play. He had worked with Jim Henson on The Muppet Show television series and the film The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson and Frank Oz, 1982) previously, and snagged a deal with the BBC. His first full-length feature film as a director was Paperhouse (1988), a cult hit mainly on video, but was well reviewed by several critics, including Roger Ebert, who raved about it when he caught it at a festival.

Paperhouse was made with Vestron Video, which did have some theatrical hits like Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardoline, 1987)but expected to make their money back on video. He is still probably best remembered for Candyman (1992), the most original horror movie of the 1990s. Based on a Clive Barker story, it also had something to say about race and class. Candyman is due for a reboot/remake with Jordan Peele later this year, with Tony Todd reprising his role as the titular character.

Rose did Immortal Beloved (1995) with Gary Oldman as Beethoven, which garnered a mixed response, and unfavourable comparisons to Amadeus (Milos Forman, 195). His next film Anna Karenina (1997) was a tremendous flop. It started a string of films inspired by Tolstoy, but that was the only one set in Russia. Rose followed it up with Ivans XTC (2002), one of his very best, also based on story by Tolstoy but set at the turn of the Millennium Los Angeles. Danny Huston made his name in the lead. It was an extraordinary film, one of the very few that was shot on high-def video before the technology improved that was really good. It’s about the last week in the life of a film agent on a booze and coke bender.

Rose did a few horror films in the late ’00s, plus the Howard Marks biopic Mr. Nice (201) and a film about Paganini. Before Samurai Marathon (2019), his most recent project was an interesting, low-budget Frankenstein (2015) set in modern LA, also starring Huston, who has appeared in almost every film Rose has made since Ivans XTC, including his latest. Samurai Marathon is a Japanese Samurai film set in the Edo period. It’s probably the largest scale film he has done in some time.

Samurai Marathon is out now on VoD. You should be able to find it on Amazon, Apple, TalkTalk TV and the Sky Store (Amazon and Apple are the cheapest options).

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Ian Schultz – How did your newest film Samurai Marathon come around? It’s certainly a change of pace for you.

Bernard Rose – Well, basically, Jeremy Thomas—the British half of the producing team—emailed me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go to Japan to do a Samurai picture. I thought the answer to that question had to be YEAH! It really was as simple as that, I then went to Japan and met with Toshiaki Nakazawa, the other producer. We got into some discussion about the screenplay they were developing. I then rewrote the screenplay, and then we rewrote the screenplay I wrote into Japanese. That’s the short version, but it was pretty much that. The unusual thing about much of it was me going into a Japanese production, rather it being a Western project going over there to shoot.

IS – Is this the first time you’ve directed for hire, at least in a feature film sense?

BR – Well, in a sense you are always in effect ‘for hire’ if you’re doing the film and are being paid a fee. We spent a good year and a half working on the screenplay, so it wasn’t just like a “here’s the script, do the job” kind of thing.

IS – What was the most challenging part of making a film in Japan, and in Japanese?

BR – It was actually a lot of fun, to be honest with you! It’s interesting to go into another culture in that kind of way. I didn’t know that much about the Edo period when I started the picture, other than what I had seen in movies. I then realised after a while that most of what people know, including the Japanese, about the Edo period comes from the movies. I think in a sense that world of the Samurai has become a kind of mythic arena that has been taken as much from Westerns: Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford. It’s an arena where you can tell mythic stories rather than it being necessarily being restricted to one specific culture, and there’s always been this weird kind of cross-cultural fertilisation in the Samurai movie… between the Samurai movie and the western, certainly. I think all cultures have a weird kind of “Golden Age” mythical path they revert to. In Europe, it’s kind of Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953), and in America it’s the West, and in Japan it’s the Edo period.

IS – What were some Samurai films you looked at, besides maybe the obvious Kurosawa films?

You say we all know them, we all know Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), but they don’t necessarily know the more obscure ones. There are lot of interesting, more recent Samurai films, and some that are in a more classic vein, like Twilight Samurai (2002) by Yoji Yamada and things like that, which has an almost Freudian quality. The things Jeremy and Nakazawa made before such as 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2010), which is much more an action picture, I suppose. The parallels with the Western: one influenced the other, and then it was influenced back. I think Kurosawa came up with the modern concept of violence in cinema with slow motion, which was very much picked up on by Peckinpah, of course. It first appeared in Seven Samurai, and of course Lucas basically based Star Wars on The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 2002; pictured below). It was interesting to go back and inject something a little different—but not making a western film, it’s still very much a Japanese movie.

IS – How was it working with Jeremy Thomas for the first time? Because he seems like such a logical choice for you, with his track record of working with Nicolas Roeg, Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Bernardo Bertolucci, etc.?

BR – He is one of the greatest producers of all time, and is a lovely guy in all respects. He is incredibly helpful and respectful at the same time, two incredibly unusual characteristics for a producer. He is the greatest! What can you say? Jeremy started in the cutting room: he was an editor, so he is very good in post-production too. He just has so much experience and knowledge, and just knows how to deal with people in such a kind of supportive way. He is really the best.

IS – Have you been consulted on the new Candyman movie or not?

BR – Yeah… I’ve had some conversations with Jordan Peele about it but… I don’t think I can tell you anything. It’s coming out this year, and I think it will be rather good, I hope it’s good. I haven’t seen it, and they must be close to being done with it.

IS – When is the remastered Ivan’s XTC coming out?

BR – Hopefully later this year—there’s been some discussions, but we’ll see.

IS – You were a pioneer in digital filmmaking with Ivan’s XTC early on. Do you have any regrets that you didn’t wait till the technology had caught up?

BR – I don’t think it was just about that for me—it was just about the ability to make something that was different in its very nature. Yes, of course the technology has improved massively since then, but the idea you can just go out and make a film with equipment that’s not exactly to hand, but more readily, was more exciting than the technological aspect of it for me. Wait till somebody else does it first? That doesn’t sound very smart.

IS – You made a lot of music videos back during the “golden age,” with most famously the banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. What did you learn making videos then that you still use today?

BR – I loved doing music videos. What was wonderful about them, especially in the early 1980s, was the record companies pretty much let you do what you wanted to do, because it was so new to them. It was like making little silent movies, and it was such a great era for pop music, the early 1980s, which was part of what was so fun about it.

I think everything changes all the time, certainly for me. In the videos I made, it was all about visual storytelling: essentially making little silent movies with musical accompaniment. That was also a part of the challenge of doing the Samurai picture. Although obviously the film does have Japanese dialogue in it, I really wanted the picture to pretty much work with visuals and music primarily, and the dialogue was there just to add a little something. I wanted the film to be self-explanatory—there are some films you can understand with the sound off, and some films you can’t. That’s always been a thing for me. You should understand the film without understanding what people are saying. It’s a shame that sometimes with films with subtitles, you just end up reading the movie, because you often miss so much without looking at people’s eyes. What people are saying is never as important as you think it is. When I was cutting the movie, we didn’t have subtitles. It was kind of a slightly different experience when you put the titles on, and obviously you have to, people need to know what’s going on, but there is always less info than you think there is.

IS – Do you see any trends in horror movies at the moment that you find kind of interesting?

BR – The horror business is very interesting, because it’s very cyclical. It’s obviously went through a huge upswell recently, with people like Jordan Peele and all the interesting new directors, and other people too. I think that one of the great things about horror is essentially it’s a way of telling a story that you’re saying to the audience: at least you will get a thrill out of this instead of just sitting through a drama. A lot of the drama and arthouse films I really enjoyed in the 1970s were really horror movies. It’s such a cinematic genre, because you’re expected to make an impact, basically, first and foremost. That’s what people love from a movie, when they feel something viscerally, and suspense, horror and comedy are the biggest things you can make an audience feel. All great horror movies have comedy at some level, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) is one of the funniest films I can remember, The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) is an extremely funny film… so is The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1974) – it’s full of jokes!

I think there is a wonderful compliance between horror and suspense and fear, it’s really the most entertaining thing you can give an audience. That’s why people love them and don’t tire of them. I think genre labels can be reductive, like for most people there is nothing more repulsive than that awful label “elevated horror,” as if it’s somehow better for you. It’s like saying “somebody won’t like this”—if a movie is scary, people will love it! One of the most frightening movies I’ve ever seen in my whole life is Sátántangó (1994) by Béla Tarr: all seven hours and 45 minutes of it. You probably have to accept that’s probably an “art movie.”

IS – I always say one of the most terrifying films ever made is 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

BR – It’s very frightening, no question! there are more obvious ones, like Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) and all that. Horror movies have always been the province of the very best filmmakers, it’s weird that somehow when people say just “horror,” people’s immediate response is it’s something very exploitative and cheap. Of course there are cheap, exploitative horror films, but that doesn’t mean in its essence it’s cheap and exploitative.

IS – Is there a film that got away from you, one that you were desperate to make but it never happened?

BR – Not really. There are some things I’m planning to make and haven’t given up on, so I don’t think those really count.

IS – Any new films you have been impressed with? (Note: the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced the day of the interview).

BR – It’s always controversial when they put out the Oscar nominations, but this year seems a better bunch of films than I’ve seen in some years. Some years, without naming names, you kind of go WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING?

There are some films I would’ve liked to have seen in there that weren’t nominated, but that’s always the case. A lot of them seem pretty interesting: kudos to the people who got the nominations. A couple of them I like very much. I liked Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019; pictured below), I thought that was a really terrific movie. I liked Parasite, and that’s already two really good movies, and sometimes there’s not even one! I don’t think there was any real stinker this year.

Another film I liked was Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019), I thought that was really good, and it’s a shame it didn’t get anything. And it was different, too. I liked the Adam Sandler film Uncut Gems (Safdie Brothers, 2019), the gambling thing is a little similar to Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1993), but it’s also Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. Bad Lieutenant was such a classic, I think I just like anything with Harvey Keitel in it. That’s my only criticism of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019), I wanted Harvey Keitel in it more. Every film should have Harvey Keitel in it, really, shouldn’t it? I want to see Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1998) recut with Harvey Keitel in it!

IS – I think that footage has been destroyed, sadly.

BR – I actually don’t think they actually shot anything, but it would still be great.

IS – So obviously, with Scorsese and The Irishman, I have to ask you: are Marvel films cinema?

BR – The obviously answer is: “of course they are!” I think there are two real issues here. One is positive, and one is problematic. It is fantastic that theatrical movies can take over a billion dollars in less than a month: it’s still such a mainstream, vital business that can happen, and that’s really significant, given all the technology and all the things distracting young people today—it wouldn’t necessarily be the case. It’s fantastic that power is still there, and the vitality of feature film is still so important to the culture.

The flipside of that here in the UK and the in the US, still very healthy in just pure total numbers, is that all of the money is being sucked up by the giant tentpoles that are coming out of Disney, so there isn’t money left for anybody else, and others are struggling for the awards season’s pennies on the floor. I would say the third aspect of it is that it was purely expected to make its money back theatrically: is The Irishman really economical at 165 million dollars? The answer is probably no.

IS – But with Netflix, they pay all the directors and actors upfront, and they get nothing in the back end.

BR – You never get anything in the back end anyway! Anybody who is making films at that level is extremely lucky and privileged, and it’s not a right for anybody, it’s definitely a privilege working and doing the stuff. I certainly feel really privileged that I’m still working, still doing stuff that’s interesting and sometimes has a little bit of scale to it. Nobody has given me 150 million dollars to make a film, but you know, that’s OK, you don’t need that much money… That’s an awful lot of money.

IS – I think the big issue is distribution.

BR – It’s a big issue, and one of the things everybody forgets is that everything is much more available now. Inasmuch as if you want to watch all the classic arthouse films, you can go on the Criterion channel and just see them all—that wasn’t true before, not even slightly. I love that certainly in Los Angeles there are still some fantastic repertory houses, like the American Cinematheque, the Egyptian Theater and Tarantino’s theatre, The New Beverly. These places show really interesting, unusual programming. And here you have some really good repertory places, like the BFI. People want the big screen and communal experience, and they want the feature films. There is so much stuff you can’t watch it all, and half of the time I want to catch up with stuff from the 1930s that I haven’t seen. The other thing that always strikes me is that people forget that sound movies have only been around since 1927, so 93 years, it’s not very long. Everything going on now is still basically early cinema, in historical terms.

IS – Do you think there will be some kind of new technological event that will change how films are made, like with DV?

BR – Probably there will be things that will change, but there is something about the way a movie works and the way we watch that does seem to fit with the kind of alpha rhythms or brainwaves of dreaming and the imagination in such a kind of conjugate and powerful way that I don’t think people will ever tire of it. All films have secret content that is only apparent years later, and a film like Ivans XTC is a perfect example of that. If you look at the film now, it’s not just a story, it’s a perfect little time capsule of 1999. When films have that, it’s one of the most powerful things, the way that they are time capsules.

IS – I have one final question from my friend Dan Waters, who wrote Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1979) and Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992): is there any way one can see the HBO Inside Out short with Djimon Hounsou that you did?

BR – You know what? “I don’t know” is the honest truth. As far as I know, they are available on video, but I may be wrong.

IS – He says it was the one he couldn’t find.

BR – Then unfortunately I don’t think I can help, I don’t think I have any copies.

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If you enjoy this interview, you may want to check out his Trailers From Hell segments, where he specialises in Ken Russell films but has also done some on If… and Sorcerer.

Thirza Cuthand Retrospective

Posted on by victorfraga

Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Saskatchewan and grew up in Saskatoon, and she is of Cree origin. Starting in 1995, Cuthand began exploring short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, using national, sexual and Indigenous experiences to showcase in unfiltered raw exteriors.

Make no mistake, there is purity at play here. Collecting the confines, conditions and contractions of Cuthand’s milieu, the varied works slip together into one continuous narrative written years, even decades, apart. More to the point, the essays cross genres from the pointedly visual into the realms of performance arts.

In a life’s work, we are testimonies to a great becoming of life, love and failings, fearlessly guiding the wills and witnesses of expectations over a twenty four year story. The feelings, frailities and failures are true of all our lives, but Cuthand has the courage and power to be real about them. In a peerless recall of honesty, the collected works speak so mournfully with a communal power absent even in Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Boyhood (2014). Though they could be easily overlooked, the works radically question the everyday division between the artful and the mundane. In an art form traditionally more recondite than visual, Cuthand’s work sprawls through ages, genres and documentaries.

Early clips use archive footage of films and puppetry, playfully positing the questions of truthfulness from the companionship Disney princesses traditionally have provided women. Detailed in black and white, Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement (1999) finds a subject discussing the frustrations of a bottom position. Bravely opening the chartered path of self discovery, the narrative continues in the striking Just Dandy (2013), an essay of entrapment read through a diary. Performances play with ease, ebullient in energised ease as the author describes her innermost thoughts at a talk more potently lit in colour.

Then there’s 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017), opening and centred on the butch director in the flirtatious pose which too often stamps itself on pornographic websites. From the confines of these video-confessionals, the films progress narratively and thematically in evolving the woman’s body from the shaded to the candid. In its own way, it’s a riff on the inhibitions a person feels in their comfort’s both in their naked thoughts and naked bodies. In their way, the audience grows in confidence with the naked exteriors with the subjects. Reclamation (2018, pictured at the top), the fieriest entry, imagines a dystopic future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the palpable consequences of the large scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. Visually inventive, the majority of the short films focus mostly on the experiences which the audience members find themselves longing to hear.

Topics and themes also explore the sadomasochistic lesboerotic subtexts in children’s entertainments, the temporal horrors migraine blindness inflicts and the dismal loneliness a young lesbian must endure in a Canadian school. Added to that the realities of an everyday struggle, the essays explore the different worlds an Indigenous person must walk. It’s not so different, yet completely different, to the worlds everyone else inhabits. A revelation of a series.

In addition to the short films listed above, the Thirza Cuthand Retrospective also includes the following pieces: Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (1995), Sight (2012), 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015), Thirza Cuthand is an Indian Within the Meaning of the Indian Act (2017) and the more recent Less Lethal Fetishes (2019). The event takes place on October 13th at the Horse Hospital as part of the 13th Native Spirit Festival. Just click here for more information, and in order to get your tickets now!

Our dirty questions to Peter Strickland

Posted on by victorfraga

British filmmaker Peter Strickland’s fourth feature film In Fabric stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill, and Gwendoline Christie. Set mostly around an antiquated Thames Valley department store, the film follows the journey of a killer red dress from its first wearer to its last. Lavishly stylised, In Fabric sees Strickland flexing his inimitable style and challenging orthodoxy once again with satire and horror, this time exploring themes concerning consumerism and the rituals, superstitions and fetishes that surround clothes and retail culture.

Just as the film gets released on Curzon Home Cinema, Lara C. Cory had a word with the director in order to find out where his inspiration came from, the mythologies behind the movie aesthetics, his relation with music, working with Stereolab and much more!

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Lara C. Cory – Please tell us about the department store that inspired the setting of this film? What elements particularly captured your imagination?

Peter Strickland – A department store in Reading called Jackson’s was the main inspiration for the film. Everything from its pneumatic money chutes to the mannequins was pivotal to the script I was writing. The film is essentially a childhood’s perspective of department stores, evoking the perceived mystery of these places when one is too young to know where a dumb waiter goes.

LCC – The film had an unusual story arc of two stories, one long, one short. Was this intentional or simply a result of budgetary limitations? How did you choose whose stories or which strands to follow?

PS – I did have more stories, but that all fell by the wayside. It ended up feeling strange with three victims, but in two stories. I could’ve incorporated more victims for the dress had I made each story shorter, but the problem with that is the characters feel more dispensable. I wanted the audience to relate to the characters and not want them to die, and by spending time with each character the audience hopefully connect more.

LCC – Talk us through some of the themes and mythologies that fed into the story and aesthetic of the film?

PS – The ultimate thing for me was to explore the darker side of our connection with clothing – unspoken fetishes, superstition, body dysmorphia, things that clothing often emphasises. I love the idea of an inert piece of fabric provoking such strong reactions in people. How a dead person’s clothing has its own haunted power. How another piece of clothing can disgust someone or turn them on. Clothing is this strange conduit between one human and another. Without the human imprint on it, clothing is not so interesting for me as a subject.

Of course, the allure of clothing and its aspirational or cosmetic ability to hide or reveal who you are is of relevance in the film, but ultimately, I was fascinated by the visceral nature of a human’s presence found in clothing and even in second-hand clothing. You can often smell the previous owner’s body odour in the armpits of jackets and shirts. If you dwell on it long enough, it’s a very bizarre form of proxy intimacy. All this is not exactly a mythology, but that was my preoccupation for the film.

LCC – The time-zones in the film felt rather fluid and difficult to pin down and I was told you gave the various crew members different time periods to work within. What can you tell me about this and the significance it has in the larger narrative?

PS – The film is set in January 1993 and only has one flashback to a man’s childhood in the 1970s in which an erotic twitch is ignited by a sales rep’s hosiery. What I loved about Jackson’s in Reading was the feeling of stepping into a different period and I wanted to maintain that anachronism with In Fabric. I didn’t give anyone different time periods. I gave numbers to the actors according to the reality of the environment they were appearing in. A one was close to social realism, while a nine was close to completely surreal.

LCC – There are some very disturbing scenes in this film, some explicit and some more subtle. How do you know how far you can push the boundaries when it comes to graphic bodily function? Do you ever worry about being gratuitous or are you waving the flag for uncensored self-expression?

PS – I don’t know about uncensored. I’d fully respect any individual’s choice to walk out of In Fabric or not see it, but that’s not for censors to decide. It’s an incredibly complex thing and censorship can only be on a case-by-case basis. It’s really hard to write about unless one writes an essay. I sound as if I’m contradicting myself and a lot of films I admire are extremely troubling or toxic, but there are things that I personally would find too distressing to see and in a world without a censorship body. You open up a Pandora’s box of transgressions way beyond what we’re already accustomed to. But when do things shift from an infinite variety of personal limits to something clearly defined as unacceptable?

In Fabric might push its eroticism into uncomfortable areas, but on a purely technical and legal level, all the ‘sex’ scenes in the film are consensual, which is why I feel this particular film shouldn’t be cut even though the cuts were minimal. I disagree with the US censor on In Fabric, but I’d still rather have a world in which I disagree with a censor than having no censorship at all. I find the normalisation of extreme violence in film far more troublesome than Fatma’s character from In Fabric tasting a bit of menstrual blood, but still – the vast majority of films with extreme violence shouldn’t be censored either.

LCC – In Fabric feels like a series of obfuscated mysteries more than a haunting tale with a traditional story arc, did you set out to tell such a diffuse and abstract tale? Does sharing only portions of the ‘bigger picture’ make for more intriguing cinema?

PS – To me, the film is not abstract, as long as one accepts that the dress is the protagonist and everyone else plays second fiddle to it. The characters are disposable, but that doesn’t mean I can’t invest all my love in them. The three victims of the dress might have their flaws, but I couldn’t write those characters if I didn’t believe in them or didn’t see something of myself or people close to me in them. That doesn’t really answer your question. Only sharing portions of the ‘bigger picture’ does make for a more intriguing cinematic experience, but I think In Fabric does share pretty generous portions, in which case it’s probably not an intriguing cinematic experience.

LCC – I really love the music in this film. I understand you engaged Tim Gane (of Stereolab) to work on the score before the film was made. Can you tell us some of the triggers or ideas that you gave him for the soundtrack and was there much adjusting to be done or did you find yourself bending to the will of the music as you wrote and shot the film?

PS – Tim initially made a series of long pieces for me to immerse myself in. There was no story at that point, but I knew I wanted to work with him. Some of the demos were remastered for the film and I didn’t want much to change there, but other pieces of music were created by Tim and the band after they saw the rushes. Sometimes the music would inform the images, such as with the ‘fire alarm’, which is a slight mutation of a demo Tim did for me several years back. Otherwise, it was a back and forth with Tim adjusting music for a scene and adjusting the edit for the music.

In terms of references, I tried to avoid them as much as possible. Of course, there were a few [musical] references, such as Merry Clayton, Mick Jagger and Bernard Parmegiani, but even then, we tried to allow ourselves to deviate as much as possible. A lot of our conversations were about mood and instruments. Tim suggested the celeste and that worked out really well.

Initially, we spoke a lot about the score being very drum-machine heavy, which felt quite cold and hard in a good way. Tim sent a lot of rhythms, but in the end, we didn’t use so many, as I eventually felt that cold and hard was not the way. I wanted something more romantic, but not to always use that music where you would expect it. The sex ritual with the mannequin has the film’s most romantic music (which was initially composed for the love scene with Sheila and Zach), but I really loved the counterpoint of that dark sexuality with lush, romantic music and the Sheila/Zach lovemaking with more ominous music. I wanted Tim to take the lead as much as possible. Of course, I had my thoughts and suggestions, but I can never tell a musician what notes to play and even if I could, there’d be no point in asking someone to do a score. When you ask someone to do a score, it’s important to remember why you asked them and not try and mould them into a Hans Zimmer or Ennio Morricone prototype.

Picture at the top of this article by Marek Szold. The other images are stills from In Fabric.

Binders full of men???

Posted on by victorfraga

One year after the #MeToo movement swept the world, the Academy finds itself in the notable situation that none of the best director nominees were female. Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here offered an esoteric perspective on violence, Mimi Leder’s On The Basis Of Sex a thorough look through the legal field, Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? a mercurial montage of deception and conceit, while the boldly impressionistic The Rider demonstrated Chloe Zao’s formidable talents. None of these brilliant female filmmakers were recognised.

Yet the Academy did recognise one female director among the Best Short Film nominees, for the riveting Marguerite ( an elderly woman curtailing her suppressed feelings for another woman). The Quebeqois actress Marianne Farley switched to directing, helming on a generational study masked by illness and love. She spoke to our dirty Eoghan Lyng about her about receiving an Oscar nomination, generational themes, gender representation and much more!

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Eoghan Lyng – Congratulations on your Oscar nomination. How do you stand on the knowledge being the only female director nominee?

Marianne Farley – Thank you. I have mixed feelings, I’m very proud to be the one, but there should be more than me. There should be at least half. I think it will change over the years, I’m really hopeful. I cannot believe Lynne Ramsey didn’t get in, as a director, every shot was perfect. She really is a role model to me [her film You Were Never Really Here is pictured below]. We tend to think of women who direct, like my film, to make very feminine and sensitive films. What she did, she made such a violent film., but with such humanity.

EL – There are generational themes at play. How did you comprehend voicing a generation separate to your own?

MF – The whole premise is based on what I went through and what my grandmother did. She was very religious, got married and had kids. It’s what she wanted to do, but very different to the reality I grew up in, women from my grandmother’s generation didn’t really have choices, unlike mine, we have more choice. So, I was investigating the reasons, just trying to shed light between those experiences and moments.

EL – Where did your experiences as an actor aid you in your experience as a director?

MF – Obviously how vulnerable you are in front of the camera, how you’re trying to find the character on the first day. On a short film, you’ve got three, four days. I knew how the actresses would feel, they’d feel vulnerable. I really wanted the crew to respect the bubble I wanted to create. As an actress, actors have to be bold and vulnerable, trying to shield yourself and staying open at the same time. It’s a strange one, because I understand what it’s like to be in front of the camera.

As a writer, I wanted Marguerite (Béatrice Picard; pictured above) not to be conscious of the memories suppressed, of the life she once had, while [her nurse] Rachel (Sandrine Bisson) had her daily job, she’d do that and go home. I wanted the characters to have an arc, so the payoff at the end worked. I’m very character oriented as a writer, so that was always on my mind.

EL – The film stars two steely leads. Where did you come across them?

MF – The nurse is a really good friend of mine, usually cast as ballsy, comedic outgoing characters, both of them do, I like taking them somewhere else. I wanted to prove to Sandrine that she could do it, because she told me that she could only do this and that. I wanted to see how far she could go, she’s a sensitive, compassionate woman, a vulnerable woman, everything she does, I told her, is really interesting, which she didn’t know she could do. The other, Béatrice, usually does comedic, theatre stuff. Still,she was very, very open, courageous as an actress. She was really happy to go along with it and see where she could go.

EL – What type of story lends itself to the form of a short film?

Has to be concise, a moment in someone’s life, had I made the arc larger it would have been a feature.A short film is like a moment, the character arc is super important, there had to be a transformation. In the first draft, Marguerite was totally closed off , before changing her personality over time, which I couldn’t do in fifteen, twenty minutes. It would have been too much of a change of pace, so that needed re-drafting A short story should be a snapshot, a snapshot of people or this case the elderly in the LGBT communities, which is something nobody ever talks about.

EL – How would you encourage a greater diversity of gender representation and proportion?

MF – That’s a tough question. Men have been making films for more than 100 years, we need to make space for women, we have stories to get out there. I don’t see it as a competition. We need to open the door for women, more finances, big budget films are traditionally given to men. It’s a complex question that we have to address, rather than we gave it to her because she is a woman. I don’t want people to think I’m there at the awards because I’m a woman. I want to be there for the film.

Canada is working towards achieving parity, the quality’s getting better and better from Canada and Quebec, there’s more about racism and LGBT. I might be naive, but I feel films really can change the world. It’s going really well here in Canada. True, films like Batman and Spiderman are grossing like millions of dollars, but hopefully the niche will grow to show stories about human beings, which is important to show. I think that’s what stories should be about.

Our dirty questions to Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Posted on by victorfraga

With a career spanning nearly four decades, the 62-year-old Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has directed more than 40 films, and he has navigated a wide variety of genres, ranging from horror and suspense to romance and family drama. He directed four films in the past two years alone. The filmmaker, who is not related in any way to Akira Kurosawa, is also a film writer, critic and professor.

Kurosawa has recently stepped on European cinema soil where he directed the French ghost story Daguerrotype. This classy art house feature tells the story of a contemporary photographer who employs 19th century daguerreotype plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. And that might give uninvited entities the opportunity to manifest themselves! Daguerrotype is part of the Walk This Way Collection, which DMovies is promoting in a partnership with The Film Agency and Under The Milky Way. You can watch it at home right now on all major VoD platforms!

In our short existence of less than two years (we celebrate our second birthday in a few weeks, on February 6th), Kurosawa has flown under our radar three times, firstly with Creepy, in 2016, and twice last year, with Daguerrotype and Before We Vanish. So we decided to ask him a few questions about his experience in Europe, his connection if any to Western filmmakers such as Spielberg and Hitchcock, what genres he wants to work on next and whether he can predict the future!

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Jeremy Clarke – How would you describe your experience working with a French cast and crew in Daguerrotype (2017; pictured above)? Was it a good experience? Would you like to work with foreign casts and crews again in the future?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa – It was an amazing experience. Against my perceptions the attitudes of the French cast and crew were very similar to those in Japan. All of them understood their job was “to realise the director’s vision with all their abilities and efforts”. I really appreciated it.

JC – Could you please explain the writing process of Daguerrotype? I see two other names besides you in the screenwriter credit.

KK – Based on an idea of a story which I had been working on over 10 years, I wrote a script set in modern France. The script was translated into French, and then the brilliant French screenwriters rewrote it, so that the script would fit well into the situation in today’s France. So it was a complicated process.

JC – You seem to be a director who enjoys working on a vague idea or theme, and then shapes the movie during the production process bringing in various images, effects, scenes and sequences. Pulse (2001) or Before We Vanish (2017, pictured below) would be examples for this. In which way does this approach specifically appeal to you?

KK – The very base of cinematic expression is to film the reality in front of you using cameras. So, the similarity with the reality would be the feature of a movie. This could be also its limitation, but anyway, I am particularly interested in the fact that a movie is almost the same as reality, but at the same time is slightly different than reality. This difference or unreality is always my starting point when I create my work.

JC – Could you please explain the reason why a low altitude plane comes often at a climax of your works, such as in Pulse or Before We Vanish?

KK – That’s an interesting observation. I never realised it myself! It might be because a movement of a protagonist looking at the sky seems to me very cinematic somehow. However, I can’t explain it that well.

JC – In Before We Vanish, I see influences of Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). Do you appreciate the movie?

KK – Spielberg is one of my favorite filmmakers and I also appreciate E.T.. However, I don’t necessarily consider it as the best work in his filmography. There’s no particular borrowed motif in Before we Vanish. However he has created many human-alien encounter SF movies and my favorites would be Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and War of the Worlds (2005). So it’s possible that there are Spielberg influences at some unconscious level.

JC – Creepy (2016, pictured below) recalls works by Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho; 1958 and 1960 respectively) as well as Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999). To what degree were you aware of these films when you filmed Creepy?

KK – Sorry, but I was aware of neither Hitchcock nor Miike.

JC – You have been working in various genres. For crime, Creepy and Cure (1997). For drama, Tokyo Sonata (2008) and Before We Vanish. For romance, Tokyo Sonata, Journey to the Shore (2015) and Before We Vanish. What genre or genres would you like to revisit on future movie projects?

KK – In the future I want to work on genres I haven’t worked on yet. I haven’t worked on genres such as musical, historical and comedy movies.

JC – When you join a project (as a screenwriter or director), what makes you do so? How do you know if a story makes you want to tell it?

KK – That’s a difficult question. I cannot name a core element which makes a movie. It also means that there are too many factors. One thing I can say would be meeting people. It might be a producer, an actor or an original writer. Meeting someone, in the end, boosts the production of a movie, I guess.

JC – Looking back at Pulse, that movie catches the historical moment in which people used dial-up internet connections and the internet itself was still new for most of us. In today’s cultural development phase is there anything particular which inspires you?

KK – This question is also hard to answer. When I’m told that Pulse predicted the future, I have to say that was not my original intention at all. How a movie is interpreted by society after its birth is purely accidental.

JC – When you write a screenplay, what is your typical writing process?

KK – When it comes to screenplays, I read the original book or/and hear the ideas of others at first, then play with them a while, and, eventually, write it by myself without asking anyone else’s opinion.

JC – Which qualities do you look for in actors in order to cast roles? When and how often do you refilm?

KK – I don’t refilm. Even if I wanted to, there is no capacity for time and budget in Japanese commercial movies. As for casting, I consider it some sort of destiny. We think somebody is good for a role, she/he also likes the script and the role. And it has to go well with the schedule and guaranteed fee. When everything works well, it becomes automatically the best casting.

JC – In Japanese movie culture, in what kind of position are you or your works placed? And how about in the global movie culture?

KK – I myself cannot say objectively where I would be positioned in Japanese movie culture. However, I feel that I’m at the middle. Not at the top, not at the bottom. This doesn’t mean that I’m in the centre of the culture, of course. I understand myself as being at a small corner of the culture. And in the wider, international world? Many Japanese movies are introduced abroad – and my works would probably be positioned also at the middle of the edge of them.

Image at the top by Bittermelon