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June 2024 volume 34 issue 5 Richard Linklater Alice rohrwacher the fall guy black film bulletin £6. 50 The many faces of From Slacker to Hit Man. the big career interview | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
STARRING KOJI YAKUSHO mubi. com/perfectdays NOW STREAMING “Achingly lovely... advocates not just a new way of looking, but also a new way of living” THE OBSERVER “A film of profound gentleness... Koji Yakusho delivers a sublime central performance” LITTLE WHITE LIES “Rich and resonant... surrender to its intimate, contemplative rhythm” TOTAL FILM “R h a d resonan... urr de to it int at, c nt mpla ve r yt m” TOTAL FILM “Ac ingly vely... a vo tes not ju t n w w y f lo ing, b t als a n ay of li in ” THE OBSERVER “A fil of pr foun entl ne s... Ko Yak sho d liv rs a s bli c ntral p form nc ” LITTLE WHITE LIES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
IN THIS ISSUE CONTENTS 56 36 RICHARD LINKLATER As Hit Man hits UK screens, the director talks to Hannah Mc Gill about the myth of the everyday assassin and looks back over the highlights of his career, from his Sundance breakthrough Slacker and his early battles for independence from studio control in the 1990s50 THE FALL GUY Director David Leitch and producer Kelly Mc Cormick, who have created a comic celebration of stunt performers, talk to Lou Thomas about stuntwork's lack of status and why, even in a CGI-dominated industry, nothing matches the real thing Alice Rohrwacher's Alice Rohrwacher's enchanting tale of tomb-enchanting tale of tomb-robbers and magic offers robbers and magic offers an insider's portrait of the an insider's portrait of the culture and landscape of culture and landscape of the central Italian region the central Italian region where she grew up. She where she grew up. She tells Lee Marshall why tells Lee Marshall why capitalism is destined to capitalism is destined to end up in a museum, while end up in a museum, while Josh O'Connor talks to Josh O'Connor talks to Arjun Sajip about what Arjun Sajip about what drew him to the film and drew him to the film and the joy of getting dirty the joy of getting dirty LA CHIMERA 27 BLACK FILM BULLETIN In this issue, June Givanni talks to Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh, Joanna Abeyie assesses the climate for diversity and inclusion in the industry, and critics Leila Latif and Ellen E. Jones ask whether film and TV really can save the world | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
IN THIS ISSUECONTRIBUTORS HANNAH MCGILL is a writer, broadcaster and critic based in Scotland. She also teaches and lectures on film studies and film festival history. She was the artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival from 2006 to 2010. LEE MARSHALL is a film critic, travel writer and cyclist based in Città della Pieve, between Rome and Florence. ANNABEL BAI JACKSON is a freelance writer based in London. She writes about films, books and visual culture. She also works as a curatorial fellow at the National Gallery, where she focuses on modern and contemporary art. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Lou Thomas, Jonathan Romney, Nick Bradshaw, Anne Billson, Imogen Sara Smith, Kate Stables, Adam Nayman, Jessica Kiang, Henry K. Miller, Kim Newman, Guy Lodge, Ben Nicholson, Megan Feeney, Beatrice Loayza, Michael Brooke, Arjun Sajip and more JUNE 2024 6 EDITORIAL A tribute to a woman ahead of her time, Eleanor Coppola 9 OPENING SCENES · Opener: There's Still T omorrow · Editors' Choice · In Production: Agnieszka Holland's Franz Kafka biopic · In Conversation: Marie Amachoukeli on Àma Gloria · Festivals: CPH:DOX and Visions du Réel · AI Spy: Spotlighting artificial intelligence in film and TV · The Ballot of... Luna Carmoon · Mean Sheets: Anselmo Ballester's lurid poster for Rome, Open City and more 20 LETTERS 22 TALKIES · The Long T ake: Pamela Hutchinson celebrates the silent nostalgia of Robot Dreams · TV Eye: Andrew Male wishes music dramas would stick to the drama and leave the music alone · Flick Lit: Nicole Flattery on Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and other fictions that look through a scammer, darkly · The Magnificent '74: Jessica Kiang on the road movies that helped to define the greatest year of American movies ever 98 ENDINGS · The giant beast in Jacques T ourneur's Night of the Demon has taken its place in the hellscape of horror imagery REVIEWS 64 | FILMS · Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger · Hit Man · La chimera · Civil War · T wo Tickets to Greece · A House in Jerusalem · Y annick · There's Still T omorrow · Rosalie · Nezouh · Riddle of Fire · The Beast · Four Little Adults · Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg · Omen · Elaha · Challengers · Here · The F all Guy · The First Omen · Immaculate · Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire 80 | DVD & BLU-RAY · L'Amour fou · Raging Bull · Misunderstood · That Cold Day in the Park · Lost and Found: Quick Millions · The Lavender Hill Mob · Behind Convent Walls · Patrick · Dogfight · The Shape of Night · T wo films by Ozu Y asujirō 86 | WIDER SCREEN · Laura Staab on the fascinating moving-image work of Y oko Ono, as seen in a major retrospective exhibition in London 88 | BOOKS · Alex Ramon on Ellen E. Jones's writing on racial representation in film and television; Hannah Mc Gill on David Forrest's thought-provoking BFI Film Classic on Kes; and John Bleasdale on Roger Lewis's extravagantly entertaining doorstop about the enduring power of T aylor and Burton90 LINDSAY ANDERSON A 1989 interview with the director FROM THE ARCHIVE 96 THIS MONTH IN... 1984 John Huston's Under the V olcano on the cover, plus The King of Comedy | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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EDITORIAL Mike Williams @itsmikelike Eleanor is the film's sole voice of reason, surrounded by men in different stages of unravelling: Dennis Hopper, Martin Sheen, Sam Bottoms and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola himself Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the 1991 documentary co-directed by Eleanor Coppola about the tortured production of Apocalypse Now, begins with her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, addressing the media at a Cannes press conference. It's 1979 and a three-hour work-in-progress has just been screened, the first and only time an unfinished film has been shown in competition at the festival. All that's visible against the black background are his bespectacled eyes and pallid forehead, the rest of the director disappearing into the darkness like an echo of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz. Agitated and intense, he speaks with the same hubris as the unhinged US Army officer: “My film is not a movie,” says Coppola, staring out into the void. “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Viet-nam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane. ” This journey into madness of cast and crew, this explosion of ego, genius and paranoia, was cap-tured in all its reeking grandeur by Eleanor who, along with daughter Sofia and sons Gian-Carlo and Roman, had travelled with Francis to the Phil-ippines to shoot footage for the studio's publicity department. That footage, at times intimate, other times captured in secret, is the soul of the film, gar-nished by co-directors F ax Bahr and George Hick-enlooper with talking heads. It's a Greek tragedy, with Francis as the fallen hero, riddled with pride and self-pity, playing God and almost destroying his own world. “A film director,” he says near the end, “is one of the last truly dictatorial posts left in a world getting more and more democratic. ” Eleanor is the film's sole voice of reason, sur-rounded by men in different stages of unravelling: Dennis Hopper, Martin Sheen, Sam Bottoms and, of course, Francis himself. “Everyone who has come out here to the Philippines seems to be going through something that is affecting them profoundly,” she says at one point, “changing their perspective about the world or themselves, while the same thing is happening to Willard [Sheen] in the course of the film. Something is definitely hap-pening to me, and to Francis. ” She is also the mooring that ultimately keeps Francis from disappearing over the edge, her prag-matic sense of duty in contrast to his anxiety of having plunged his Godfather fortune into a jungle nightmare. “I really support him as an artist,” she reasons, “and I feel that whatever the artist needs to do in order to get his artwork is okay. And I always felt confident, what's the worst that can happen, they take away your big house, they take away your cars, so what?” The children, as we know, all entered the family business. Gian-Carlo was an actor, killed at 22 in a speedboat accident. Roman is a writer and pro-ducer best known for working with his father and Wes Anderson. Sofia is the Oscar-winning director of Lost in Translation (2003). Cousins Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman are also in the movies, as are numerous uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces. Eleanor Coppola died in early April at the age of 87. A few days earlier I'd been reading a New Y orker profile of Sofia, published months before to pro-mote her latest film Priscilla. Something Eleanor said had stuck in my head, about her role in the family and the sacrifices to her career that she had to make to facilitate the creative ambitions of others. She and Francis met on the set of his debut fea-ture, Dementia 13, in 1962. As the piece states: “He was the director, she was the assistant art director, and she thought that they might work on films together for years to come. Instead, within a few months she found out she was pregnant with Gio. She and Fran-cis were married the following weekend, and Fran-cis, as Eleanor put it to me, 'made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and the mother'. ” Sofia then recalls her mother visiting the set of Priscilla, observing a scene in which Elvis is prepar-ing to go on tour, while his wife will stay home with their daughter. Eleanor tells the writer, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, 'Y ou have everything you need to be happy,' that's exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, 'Why am I unhappy?' Not one single person said to me, 'Y ou are a creative person. '” For Hearts of Darkness alone she should be remem-bered as brave and, yes, creative. Her eye for detail and ear for conversation are what make the film the most compelling documentary about the making of a movie. And she leaves behind more than one film. Eighty hours of behind-the-scenes foot-age from Sofia's Marie Antoinette (2006) are being turned into a documentary. In 2016, at 80, her first feature, Paris Can W ait, was released, making her one of the oldest American women to make a directorial debut. In 2020, she released her second, Love Is Love Is Love, featuring Cybill Shepherd and Rosanna Arquette. Hearts of Darkness won several awards, including two Emmys. Apocalypse Now won two Oscars and the Palme d'Or. At the age of 85, Francis is back at Cannes this year with Megalopolis, an idea he first dreamed up during the filming of Apocalypse Now. Again, his own fortune is on the table; again, the production has been blighted; and again, the first reactions have been mixed. “This is exactly what happened with Apocalypse Now 40 years ago,” he told the Daily Beast, insisting that the film will “stand the test of time”. The hubris is still there along with the big ideas, a fitting closing act of a remarkable career made pos-sible by the sacrifices of his wife. Farewell, Eleanor, the heart of the Coppola dynasty ILLUSTRATION BY FERNANDO COBELLO; BYLINE ILLUSTRATION PETER ARKLE | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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OPENING SCENES Y esterday's tomorrow Paola Cortellesi's hit comedy drama There's Still T omorrow borrows the language and settings of 1940s neorealism-but the themes of feminism and domestic violence remain dismayingly contemporary BY JONATHAN ROMNEY It is more than a little ironic that it took a highly commercial feminist film to outdo Barbie. Paola Cortellesi's There's Still T omorrow was the No. 1 attraction in Italian cinemas last year, grossing more than €36 million (£30 million) at the domestic box office following its release in October and chalking up 5. 4 million admissions-which is especially impres-sive for a film in black and white that imitates the style of post-World War II Italian neorealism. Esoteric as this might sound, There's Still T omorrow has all the ingredients for domestic multiplex appeal. It struck a chord with audiences not just because of its distinctive bravura style and its first-time director's established popular-ity as a TV comedian, star and co-writer of domestic comedy hits, including Don't Stop Me Now (2019) and the two Like a Cat on a Highway films (2017, 2019). The film's success is also very much to do with its accessible, emotionally involving and surprisingly entertaining treatment of tough subjects-domestic violence and traditional gender roles. Written by the director with regular collaborators Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda, Cortellesi's comedy-drama is set in Rome in 1946, the year that women were first given the vote in Italy. The director herself plays Delia, a woman who copes with the demands of family life while enduring brutal treatment from her domineering, violent husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea) by secretly dream-ing of possible escape. The film was shot partly on set at Cinecittà, partly on location in Rome's T estaccio district, resulting in a vivid recreation of a working-class community centred around a courtyard. Speaking in a video call, Cortellesi says, “What every single region in Italy had is that shared way of life-people living in tenements around an internal courtyard, people shouting across balconies, children play-ing outside, with all the good and bad aspects of that. Because obviously there was no privacy, gossip was rife, everybody knew about everybody else's lives. In the location where we shot, those houses are occupied, so they're a sort of time capsule of people still living that type of life. ” With its period detail, local dialect (some of it archaic, specifically of the period) and Davide Leone's evocative cinematography, There's Still T omorrow feels in many ways uncannily close to the golden age of Italian neorealist cinema, as practised by Roberto Rossellini, Vit-torio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. But Cortellesi insists, “I didn't want to ape a neorealist film-they're masterpieces, why do that? I wanted to adopt a certain type of language to treat a very contem-porary subject and make a contempo-rary film. ” Even so, she says, “Neorealism is part of our DNA as Italians-that ABOVE Paola Cortellesi in There's Still T omorrow9 OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
language is ingrained in our collective culture, it's the way we see the past. So when I heard the stories [about the past] from my grandparents, I would translate them in my mind into the visual language of neorealism. ” In fact, There's Still T omorrow is nei-ther strictly a forgery of neorealism nor a parody, and nor is it quite the kind of revisionist reappropriation of the sort that T odd Haynes performed on Doug-las Sirk in his Far from Heaven (2002). It's perhaps closer to Michel Hazanavicius's use of silent cinema in The Artist (2011), an irreverent emulation of a certain film language. In Cortellesi's case, the approach is precise but also flexible, able to accom-modate melodrama, broad comedy and anachronism (as in the opening credits, set to a number by US indie veterans The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion). Cortellesi also uses hyper-stylisation, as in the elegant but deeply unsettling scene in which Ivano assaults Delia, played out as a balletic dance duet. In fact, the director points out, her film's funny moments owe more to a slightly different cycle of films, the com-media all'italiana associated with direc-tors such as Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi and De Sica in his lighter mode. “ Com-media all'italiana is not the comedy genre per se-it is a way of treating subjects which can be very hard and very serious in a cynical, humorous register,” she says. “Humour is the ideal vehicle to usher the audience into a really tough subject with-out antagonising them. For instance, as in that scene of violence as choreography, which gives this sense of not witnessing just one moment, but conveying the idea of something happening cyclically. ” Neorealism famously made an impact -in Italy and internationally-because of its emphasis on ordinary people and stories from the street. Cortellesi says that it marked a decisive break both with the propaganda films of the Musso-lini era and the glossy lifestyle escapism of the ' Telefoni Bianchi ' ('white telephone') films of the 30s and 40s. “Neorealism was a slap in the face. All of a sudden, stories were about real people that the audiences could recognise and identify with,” she says. As There's Still T omorrow reminds us, many of those stories were about women. “When we see [Rossellini's] Rome, Open City [1945], and Anna Mag-nani just breaking through that screen, we see a relatable woman and a real woman: she belongs to that strange [Ital-ian] matriarchy, where women were very strong and could deal with the outside world in a very competent way. But then in Visconti's Bellissima [1951], she plays an exceedingly strong woman who still gets slapped around by her husband. Nevertheless, she is the protagonist of her story. So women are not restricted to being chambermaids or secondary char-acters, but can hold the screen and be the real protagonist of the movie. ” Delia-played by Cortellesi with a poignant, tender, comic touch-is, the director admits, the exact opposite of Magnani's toughness. But Magnani remains Cortellesi's reference point for women in the Italian cinema of the period, along with Giulietta Masina, who co-starred with her in Renato Cas-tellani's 1959 prison drama Caged (aka ... And the Wild, Wild W omen ). She also mentions Monica Vitti, comedy star Franca Valeri and Sophia Loren; for Cortellesi, Loren represents, among other things, a breakthrough for screen actresses in terms of being able to be both glamorous and comic. A favourite scene of Cortellesi's comes in Pane, amore e... (Dino Risi, 1955), which starred Loren and De Sica. “She's this perfect goddess, he smells her scent and asks, 'What sort of perfume do you use?' And in a perfect Neapolitan working-class accent, she goes, 'It's Lavanda Cannavale'-a really cheap brand. She owns up to the fact that it is exactly what it is. Without giving up on being beautiful and glamorous, she's able to deliver the punchline and steals the scene completely. ” While Cortellesi's film is set in a work-ing-class milieu, the oppression faced by Delia was not only a phenomenon in Italy. “It was all-pervasive that women were not supposed to voice their opin-ions. At the time, women belonging to the bourgeoisie, or even the nobility, had a subordinate role with respect to the men in the family. ” At the moment, the director says, the topic is very much in the spotlight, fol-lowing the death last November of a young woman named Giulia Cecchettin, who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend -an event that galvanised national pro-tests and discussions. Recent reports have estimated that in Italy a femicide happens every 72 hours: by the time her film was released in Octo-ber, Cortellesi notes, 100 women had already been killed in the country that year. Because of the Cecchettin case, she says, Italians are currently very aware of the issue of gender-based violence; but her film “is also paying witness to all of the women that went before, and who were never acknowledged for what they went through”. A film that plays with the past, says Cortellesi, was the ideal way to do that. “I wanted to cast a light on what has changed and what has remained the same-and what has remained the same is the toxic mentality that, unfortunately, forces us to still be talking about these subjects. ” There's Still T omorrow is out now in UK cinemas and is reviewed on page 70. A season of films, 'Chasing the Real: Italian Neorealism' plays at BFI Southbank, London, throughout May and June BELOW Anna Magnani in Luchino Visconti's Bellissima (1951), with Walter Chiari and Tina Apicella (background)'Women were not supposed to voice their opinions. Women belonging to the bourgeoisie, or even the nobility, had a subordinate role with respect to the men in the family'10OPENING SCENES IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
EDITORS' CHOICERecommendations from the Sight and Sound team FLATPACK FESTIVAL flatpackfestival. org. uk, 10-19 May, venues across Birmingham I'm always intrigued to see what Flatpack, which is committed to showing film in all shapes and sizes, has assembled for its annual festival. Think crafty cross-cultural invention with no manual rather than factory readymades. Alongside cine-inspired sound and art events, this year's slate includes a programme of classic Ukrainian animated shorts scored by experimental band Potreba Group; an audiovisual 'entertainment spa', which aims to “stimulate the brain by projecting patterns and colours directly into your eyeballs”; and 'regular' screenings of such gems as a 4K restoration of Bridgett M. Davis's 1996 comedy Naked Acts (pictured above), about a Black woman's challenging experiences on a low-budget indie shoot. Isabel Stevens, managing editor SNAPSHOT Twelve-month season running from May tapecollective. co. uk Grassroots UK distributor T ape Collective is running a season focusing on 'snapshots' of Black girlhood, such as Ayoka Chenzira's 1994 Brooklyn-based Bildungsroman Alma's Rainbow (1993), and Milisuthando (2023), Milisuthando Bongela's documentary-memoir about her childhood in apartheid South Africa. A highlight is the 10 May rerelease of Drylongso (1998, pictured above), the only feature film by artist Cauleen Smith. Lo-fi and scrapbooky, it mirrors the artistic searching of protagonist Pica, a young Oakland woman who takes Polaroids of Black men as “evidence of existence” while the threat of a “Westside slasher” looms. It pulses with saturated colours and 1990s hip-hop needle drops that set the warm tone for Smith's ambitious genre-blend. Katie Mc Cabe, reviews editor GASOLINE RAINBOW Streaming on Mubi from 31 May Brothers T urner Ross and Bill Ross IV follow 2020's Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets with a whirlwind road trip through Oregon, shot in their trademark docufiction style, where the narrative is planned but the dialogue is entirely improvised. As a five-strong gang of teenagers take to the road in a minivan -their chimeric coastal destination is a “party at the end of the world”-we get to know them intimately, including their musical tastes, which makes for an energisingly eclectic soundtrack. Most impressive is the cinematography (by the Ross brothers themselves), which is nimble enough to follow the teens in their wildest moments but finds oases of calm during the comedowns. Thomas Flew, editorial assistant THE PLOT THICKENS SERIES 5: DECODING JOHN FORD Available from 6 June I wouldn't ordinarily recommend a podcast I haven't listened to, but the consistent brilliance of the previous four series of TCM's The Plot Thickens lets me stick my neck out. Ben Mankiewicz returns, having hosted deep dives into Peter Bogdanovich, The Bonfire of the V anities (1990), Lucille Ball and Pam Grier, promising: “It hasn't been easy getting to the bottom of John Ford, but as you'll hear, it was worth the trip. ” Ford was a famously difficult man and visionary filmmaker, winning more Oscars than any other director while cultivating a reputation as a domineering drunk. The never-before-heard interviews with John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Ford himself are sure to be fascinating. Mike Williams, editor-in-chief PETER STRICKLAND: A CURZON COLLECTION Available to pre-order, £69. 99 A decade since The Duke of Burgundy (pictured above) and the appetite for Strickland's rich sensory cinema, steeped in filmic references and high-concept horror, only increases. This lavish Blu-ray box-set will do nicely to tide us over until his next project. Across six discs, it comprises his five features, beginning with Katalin V arga (2009), plus seven further hours of extras, including commentaries, interviews, deleted scenes and, most delectably, a collection of his short films and music videos, some newly restored, some previously unseen-all painstakingly sourced by the director via “old negatives or hard drives that were left in a friend's ex-spouse's apartment or in a lock-up garage after one of my colleagues fell in love with someone thousands of miles away”. When you're not gorging yourself on the films, admire the essays by the filmmaker himself, Sight and Sound contributor Anton Bitel and Romanian actress F atma Mohamed, who appears in every one of the films. All this and an enamel pin, so you'll know a fellow Stricklandite when you pass on the street. Pamela Hutchinson, Weekly Film Bulletin editor INCLINATIONS FILM CLUB CCA Glasgow, @inclinations_film_club Set up by Glasgow-based writer and filmmaker Rastko Novaković, the Inclinations Film Club, held at the CCA's cinema in the centre of the city, has been running for little more than a year but is already a beacon of exploratory, politically inflected programming, with post-screening discussions a key element. Recent highlights include Alain Cavalier's lacerating Libera Me (1993), inspiringly paired with James Kelman reading a selection of his own stories on film before joining a talk about Cavalier's film in person; a three-film tribute to Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard; Nurşen Bakir's rousing Those Roads of Fatsa (2021); and John Gianvito's Her Socialist Smile (2020), to name a few. There's a Scottish premiere of Angelo Madsen Minax's profoundly affecting family portrait North by Current (2021, pictured above) on 21 May; and on 11 June two exquisite films by Nina Danino, Solitude (2022) and Maria (2023), which focus, respectively, on Nico and Maria Callas. Inclinations is a model for what can be done on a shoestring budget in straitened times. Kieron Corless, associate editor 11 OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
I see Holland, I see Franz BY THOMAS FLEW Her refugee drama Green Border is coming to cinemas in June, having had a prize-winning Venice premiere last year, but Agnieszka Hol-land is already deep into production on her next feature, Franz, about the German-speak-ing Jewish writer Franz Kafka, played by new-comer Idan Weiss. During a weather-enforced break from filming in the writer's hometown of Prague, Holland spoke about the project by phone, beginning by distinguishing 'Franz' from 'Kafka': “'Kafka' is some kind of brand- after the fall of communism he became the pride of Prague and an important tourist attrac-tion-[whereas] Franz is a very special human being and artist. Both 'Kafka' and 'Franz' have been very strong inspirations for me since I was in high school. One of the reasons I dreamt of coming to Prague to study film was because it was Kafka's city. The paradox was inspiring for me-that a very neurotic, shy and fragile human being, who wrote these things which are still so relevant and can be interpreted in thousands of ways, was reduced to an attraction. ” In 1980, Holland adapted Kafka's The T rial for an episode of the long-running Polish TV series Television Theater (1953-). The experience was “extremely interesting, because I had to destroy [the novel] to build it up as something audiovisual”. Her process for recreating Kaf-ka's life as a film could be described in a similar way. Holland-who co-wrote Franz 's screen-play with her Charlatan (2020) collaborator Marek Epstein-describes the film's structure as “fragmentary, with several layers, including the contemporary layer of Kafka's reception. I think that it [would have been] just wrong to make a classical biography. ” These layers will also include partial recreations of some of Kafka's early short stories, but will avoid his later, more famous works. Given this narrative complexity, Holland expects to take longer in editing than normal-“The film will be made in the editing,” she says. It is unlikely, then, that Franz will be ready to premiere in this signifi-cant year for Kafka fans, the centenary of his death. WAVE OF SONG On the way from Sebastián Lelio ( Disobedi-ence, A Fantastic W oman ) is The W ave, a musical inspired by the feminist protests that began in Chile in 2018. He says: “I am fascinated by the idea of using the musical genre, with its aura of romance and splendour, to speak about the inspiring young feminist movement in Chile, mutual consent in the post-#Me T oo era and the political potential of the individual or col-lective voice. ” PETER'S ENDS Dustin Hoffman and Helen Hunt have joined Peter Greenaway's forthcoming, as-yet-untitled project, on which filming has com-menced in Italy. The film will centre around a man making plans for an “elegant and sensible” death. Greenaway said that the film asks “if death is necessary, and if it is, should we not be available to decide where and when?... If we truly are going to die, shouldn't we be involved in the decision-making?” ROBOT DETECTIVE Resurrection, the new film by Bi Gan ( Kaili Blues, 2015), has begun shooting. A presenta-tion at Chinese Cinema Con revealed that it will be a science-fiction film with a “bionic man” at its centre and elements of detective fiction in its plot. ABOVE Agnieszka Holland and Idan Weiss shooting her Kafka biopic IN PRODUCTION News in brief CINEMA RETURNS TO E17 Walthamstow will once again have a picturehouse, with operator PDJ Cinemas taking over what was, until last summer's permanent closure, the Empire. PDJ runs four other venues across England and will be naming its new location Forest Cinemas. Upgrades will include new digital equipment and screens and a themed bar dedicated to nearby Leytonstone's most famous son, Alfred Hitchcock. A MOVE FOR SUNDANCE? After more than 40 years in its host town of Park City, Utah, the Sundance Film Festival is opening itself up to relocation pitches. Any potential move would take place from 2027, with no offered locations having yet been revealed. Sundance confirmed that patron Robert Redford will be involved in the process and that a final host city will be revealed by early 2025. REANIMATORS The Seth Mac F arlane Foundation and Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation have collaborated to restore a collection of nine animated shorts dating from the 1920s to the 1940s (seven of which are by Betty Boop creators Max and Dave Fleischer). Included are Koko's Tattoo (1928), Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936, pictured below) and The Three Bears, a 1939 T errytoon. CORNISH FILM GRANT Screen Cornwall has announced the first four recipients of its new Cornish-language feature film development line-up. All four projects will be supported to treatment stage. T wo will then go on to receive further funding to reach script stage. Callum Mitchell, assistant director on Bait (2019), was one of those awarded, for Lanow (Rising Tide), which focuses on a father and young son who are victims of the housing crisis. NEWS ANATOMY OF A FALL Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936) 12OPENING SCENES IMAGE: @MARLENE FILM PRODUCTION, MICHAL UREŠ | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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IN CONVERSATION Q Y our family employed a nanny while you were growing up. What do you remember most about her? A She's still in my life, she still calls me 'daughter' all the time. It took a long time for me-too much time, actually-to understand or even ask myself who she is, where she came from, who her family were. Q The nanny-child relationship doesn't have an established social form in the way the nuclear family does. How did you tease out the boundaries of this relationship? A That was one of the questions of the movie. Y ou're paid for a job, but what happens when you move beyond its boundaries? Cléo and Gloria have a covert relationship in a way, one that can't be official: they don't talk about it, because others won't accept it. Q Can you talk about casting Louise Mauroy-Panzani and Ilça Moreno Zego, who had never acted before? A I asked the casting director [Christel Baras] to avoid agencies [for child actors]. She basically found Louise fighting with her little brother near our office and then asked her to audition. Louise was the first actor I met and I was very, very impressed by her. When I looked at her, I felt like she was 80 years old. She has an old soul; she seems to come from outer space. I met a lot of nannies from Morocco, Chile and Thailand, and they all had the same story: they had to leave their children to come to Western countries and raise the children of people with more money. And then I met Ilça, and it was her story too. I rewrote the movie with her backstory, her village and her language, Creole-I took Creole lessons for a year and a half. Q There's a very clear postcolonial reading of the film, about how the legacy of European colonialism informs Cléo and Gloria's relationship. How important was that broader political narrative?A That's funny, because it's always foreign countries where people ask me that directly. I'm never asked that in France, which is part of the problem. There's something taboo about it: we don't want to use the word postcolonialism, but yes, of course it's the result of colonialism. That was the point of the movie, to say that [this type of relationship between Cléo and Gloria] exists. Q How did you balance the intensity of Cléo's perspective with the film's documentary qualities? A I always shoot like that, trying to put my fiction into documentary sequences. I write a very simple structure, I go and meet people, and then I rewrite everything. I'm adjusting all the time between what [stories] I want to tell and what the actors bring to me. But the film is also based on sensations. The camera is so close to Cléo that you have to become her yourself: you feel like her, you eat like her, you love like her. We used a 50mm focal length, which I love because you can feel the texture and the movement. That was the whole point of the mise en scène : feel the world, don't just see it. Q Can you talk about the animated sequences that punctuate the film? A The sequences were painted on glass, frame by frame, by twelve painters. The technique was really scary-I couldn't see the results until the end-but it felt like I was at the beginning of cinema, like in its early days. I wrote these sequences to express the feelings that Cléo herself couldn't express: they are totally her subconscious. Q Y our previous directing work was with other people. What changed when you shifted away from that collaborative model? A When we were three directors [on 2014's Party Girl, with Claire Burger and Samuel Theis], there was no place for other collaborations with the DOP or editor. It was almost too much: we were monsters! But with Àma Gloria, I discovered for the first time what collaboration was, because I was alone. We were a very small team, but I had the luxury of choosing them. Q What films did you watch when you were a child? A My favourite movie when I was a kid was Mary Poppins [1964]. And when I was around ten, my favourites were James Ivory movies. I watched Maurice [1987] 200 or 300 times, maybe more. Q What can stories about children tell us about love or jealousy or pain that stories about adults can't? A There's something about the sincerity of feelings-something you can't fight against. Y ou're very humble when you see a child playing the main character. Àma Gloria is released in UK cinemas on 14 June ABOVE Louise Mauroy-Panzani and Ilça Moreno Zego in Àma Gloria MARIE AMACHOUKELI WRITER/DIRECTOR INTERVIEW BY ANNABEL BAI JACKSON The French-Georgian director brings out an astonishing performance from a six-year-old girl in family drama Àma Gloria In Marie Amachoukeli's bittersweet coming-of-age drama Àma Gloria, Cléo (an extraordinary six-year-old, Louise Mauroy-Panzani) leaves France to spend a sun-drenched summer in Cape Verde, where she visits her former nanny, Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego). Living in Gloria's hometown alongside her family, Cléo jealously discovers that she isn't the only child who Gloria cherishes. While the film is exquisitely tender and shot with an enthralling tactility, over a brisk 83 minutes, it's also awake to the social circumstances that have shaped the intricate, and somewhat taboo, love between its main characters. Amachoukeli, in her first solo feature, empathetically captures both the passions and politics of this unique bond. ABOVE Marie Amachoukeli 15 OPENING SCENESDIRECTOR PORTRAIT: NOEMIE GUILLAUMIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
FESTIVALS indelible damage of wars deeper back in time, as if to warn our belligerent present. Both festivals' main competition winners were cases in point. At CPH:DOX, the DOX:AWARD went to Alessandra Celesia's The Flats, a deftly attentive and empathetic portrait of besiegement and bruised survival among a ragtag cast of neighbours on Belfast's republican New Lodge estate. There, people live with the ghosts of terror, strife and sacrifice from Northern Ireland's T roubles as well as the persisting depredations of poverty and exclusion. At Vd R, Swiss director Nicole Vögele's The Landscape and the Fury took a formally more distanced, slow-burn approach to its Croatian-Bosnian borderlands, through which refugees from farther-flung wars now pass, over ground still etched with the traces of native conflict from three decades ago. Buried truths of the Bosnian war, and specifically life in Srebrenica, before and after the town's 1995 genocide, are also exhumed in Ado Hasanović's My Father's Diaries, probing a family's silences and traumas with the aid of a survivor's home videos and letters. The jury prize for Vd R's more experimental Burn-ing Lights competition went to Kamal Aljafari's A Fidai Film, a reclamation of the film and photo archives of the Pal-estine Research Centre, plundered by the Israeli army during the 1982 Leba-non war in an effort at cultural erasure, which the film countermands, replaying evidence of historical Palestinian lives and persecution dating back to the Brit-ish Mandate. In Anas Zawahri's My Memory Is Full of Ghosts, given a special mention by the Vd R international competition jury, the filmmaker returns to her broken home city of Homs in Syria. It mixes stark, plaintive long shots of bombed-out ruins with signs of tentatively resuming life and individuals' shell-shocked testimo-nies, not least her own. Reaching back further, Laurence Lévesque's elegantly measured Okurimono follows an expat Japanese woman, Noriko, back to her childhood home in Nagasaki, where a box of her late mother's letters, readings of which are arranged across the film, unfolds the secretly shared horror and shame of the city's hibakusha, or atomic What was striking was how many films bore testimony to scars and traumas, the indelible damage of wars deeper back in time, as if to warn our belligerent present Last spring, reporting on the documen-taries gathered at Copenhagen's ever-eclectic CPH:DOX, I remarked here on the darkening worldview, especially for young people and especially those seeing their futures mangled by Putin and his fellow autocrats, expressed in films such as Queendom, Motherland and Silent Sun of Russia. A year on and the world has become no more peaceable. The pulverisation of Gaza may be too raw or fraught for swift distillation, but it was an inevitable backdrop to the rolling acclaim for No Other Land, the portrait of Palestinian expulsions in the West Bank made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, which, after winning Best Documentary at the Berlinale in February, continued to collect back-to-back audience awards at these two leading nonfiction festivals in March and April. However, what was striking this year at both the cosmopolitan CPH:DOX and Visions du Réel-an approachable and equally inquiring mid-scale gathering in the Swiss town of Nyon on the shore of Lake Geneva-was how many films bore testimony to scars and traumas, the LEFT Kamal Aljafari's A Fidai Film ABOVE RIGHT Juan Pablo Polanco Carranza and Cesar Alejandro Jaimes's Carropasajero CPH:DOX, Copenhagen Visions du Réel, Nyon With war dragging on in Europe and the Middle East, both these nonfiction festivals found themselves dealing with conflict and atrocity, from Nagasaki to Belfast, Srebrenica to Syria, and the ways that catastrophe casts its long shadow into the present BY NICK BRADSHAW 16OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Spotlighting artificial intelligence in film and TV BY THOMAS FLEW As Alex Garland's Civil W ar battles at the box office, its production company and distributor A24 is losing the PR war, having become embroiled in controversy over a series of posters reportedly created using generative AI. The artworks, which depict five US cities either in a state of destruction or being swarmed by armed forces, are photorealistic but lack geographical accuracy (such as Chicago's Marina City twin apartment towers being erroneously separated by the city's river). Further ire has been drawn from the fact that none of the images depict events or scenes shown in the film. An unnamed source has confirmed that the images are AI, but there has been no official response from A24. Netflix is facing allegations that it used AI-generated images in its true-crime documentary What Jennifer Did. The images, depicting the film's subject Jennifer Pan before she arranged to have her parents killed, are intended to show her fun and carefree side, but contain telltale signs of AI (producer Jeremy Grimaldi says the changes were down to Photoshop). Any use of AI or digital image manipulation is not disclosed in the film, raising ethical concerns about the creation of images within a documentary context. Also from Netflix comes the first ever AI reality series contestant. For Season 6 of The Circle-a reality show which sees contestants interacting via social media only-players were joined by 'Max', a chatbot-scripted player whose personal details were generated by an algorithm to have broad appeal; this included his age (26, which allowed it “to leverage life experience and maturity while still playing youthful”, per its own explanation) and profession (a veterinary intern). 'Max' only played for one episode, remaining undetected by the other players, who complimented him on being “so real”. AI SPY UNREAL CITY Detail from a poster for Alex Garland's Civil W arbomb survivors. Visits to other survivors and their families are interspersed with Noriko's task of packing, clearing and selling the now-vacant family home, which makes for a digni-fied and heartbreaking study of the irretriev-ability of the past. Sometimes the darkness filled the frame visually. From the Colombian/Venezuelan border, Juan Pablo Polanco Carranza and Cesar Alejandro Jaimes's Carropasajero con-jured a trancelike, incantatory odyssey from a bumpy, canopy-covered trip in a pickup truck through the La Guajira desert with several Wayúu people reversing their exile from their ancestral village, decades after a paramilitary massacre drove them out. Echoing time, con-fined and soaring spaces, weathered faces bur-nished in pools of light and the touch of skin on skin are the components of this communion with the past. Pedro Costa's influence could also be seen in the similarly slow rhythms and luminous photography of Inadelso Cossa's The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, a journey back to the filmmaker's grandmother's village and memories there of Mozambique's bloody post-independence civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992: the filmmakers linger, meditating on their project, in the silence of the nights. Like the Belfast-set The Flats (or Joshua Oppenhe-imer's The Act of Killing, 2012, with its use of re-enactments and reflexive elements being a touchstone for both films), Cossa's film is con-cerned less with litigating past conflict than with observing how past anguish continues to occlude the present. T wo other films recorded present-tense catastrophes as journeys through darkness, shooting their upheavals entirely at night. Nelson Makengo's Rising up at Night, which won Vd R's special jury award, records months of nights without light in Kinshasa, where interminable power cuts combine with unprecedented torrential rain to turn the city into an apocalyptic water-world. Local people's efforts at physical and democratic salvage play out by torchlight, in waist-high floodwaters, making a mockery of what the radio reports are drawn-out government negotiations for a giant hydropower station. In Night of Nights, at CPH:DOX, the early stages of China's Covid response are recorded as an extended social eclipse in a series of vignettes of human trial and anguish, and are as remarkable for their solidarity as for their access amid lockdown. The director, 'T ruman', finds patients, carers, doctors, sanitary workers, migrants, vagrants and eventually survivors young and old return-ing to their stations. There's little sign of help from the mighty Communist Party, but the focus here is as wide as you want it to be, from on-the-ground glimpses of individual battles to a panoramic portrait of humanity in one of its darkest moments. Finally, or conversely, at Visions du Réel two essay travelogues tried to peer out from our present worries into deeper time, widening both lens and timeframe to let in light. Vadim Jendreyko's The Song of Others: A Search for Europe worries at the resurgence of European nationalism and its menace to our wavering vows of enlightenment, wending from Hun-garian border fences to World War I bomb defusers deep in the fields of Flanders, a job for many generations to come. It finds signs and lessons in the rocks under Hitler's castle and by the Acropolis in Athens, where fisher-men's livelihoods have now been sold to Chi-nese investors; at Bosnia's national library in Sarajevo, where wanton cultural destruction and restoration take place on utterly differ-ent scales; and in Norway's Arctic sea waters, where another fisherman breathes freely as the film pulls back our blinkers. Sofie Benoot's more playful Apple Cider Vinegar, voiced by actor and former nature-doc narrator Siân Phillips, also looks, thinks and travels laterally, in this case from the alien incursion of the narrator's kidney stone to rock life in volcanic Cape Verde, California's San Andreas fault and the cliffs of Palestine, Y orkshire and Cornwall. T aking a lead from the many geologists she almost trips over, the narrator considers the fate of our planet- and the wildlife she still “keeps an eye on” by webcam-in geological time. Human impact looms like a meteor, she proposes-without ever mentioning the word Anthropocene-but the film practises a more whimsical and hope-ful outlook. It's attuned to coincidence and connection, porous to different outlooks and invites us to tread with greater wonder on the ground on which we stand. 17 OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
THE BALLOT OF... Each month we highlight a voter in our Greatest Films of All Time poll. Here the English screenwriter and director of Hoard, her first feature, which is out now, shares her choices Luna Carmoon I'm sure I will kick myself for many others, but I weirdly wrote and chose quite fast, and for that it's probably come from my deepest self, so here it is. BITTER RICE (GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS, 1949) This, for me, is simply a perfect film. It is simple in its storytelling. That's something which has been forgotten in the modern noise of moviemaking, of who can make the loudest, most innovative film of the year and all this bollocks. In its silent moments, with its characters who all float in these grey spaces, and with Silvana Mangano's performance, this film is timeless. I think how lucky I am to be alive and to have had the pleasure of watching this in my lifetime. WOMEN IN LOVE (KEN RUSSELL, 1969) How can you fucking NOT! It is, if not the best adaptation of all time, otherworldly and unearthly in its gorgeousness. W omen in Love is everything you could want a film to be; it's beastly and hysterical. If I had to choose between a last meal on earth or watching a movie, of course I would choose a movie, and this bloody one at that! OUT OF THE BLUE (DENNIS HOPPER, 1980) Collage moviemaking has lost its way; everything has to be defined, polished, perfected and intentional, nothing is allowed to breathe as funding is squandered, everything must be justified. We will never have another movie like Out of the Blue and for that I'm deeply melancholy. A world where these films had the space in which to breathe and be ugly and messy, like scrapbook cinema: I miss it so! RIP LINDA MANZ: a genius, a beauty, a rebel. ONE DEADLY SUMMER (JEAN BECKER, 1983) God, to see this film for the first time again as a teenager on a sweaty, hot summer day, to love every grey area and the condoning of revenge. Isabelle Adjani is entrancing; the movie encapsulates a livid, brutal summer that has been brewing in a stark, evil winter. I adore this film. I love the characters, the world, Thousands of women and men each year rewatch Practical Magic ; everyone who you talk to who loves it, they burst with passion for why they do all the bad and good that they rotate in, how generational trauma never heals and how sometimes to break the cycle you must be as violent as men. And, of course, it looks GORG!!! BREAKING THE WAVES (LARS VON TRIER, 1996) I think Lars is a genius, understated and misunderstood-he is messiah of the other world, he understands the numinous, both light and dark. His work... if ever five DVDs were to be chosen and sent into space to another world, one of his should be included. He understands the night time in us all, the darkness we harbour and, in that, the softness and the truth. Y ou can tell he's a warlock with words and can conjure the most unforgettable performances and scenes that will have ever been born on this planet. I could only dream of casting scenes like that wedding scene with [Stellan] Skarsgård and [Emily] Watson- what raw, ugly, honest, human beauty. AT CLOSE RANGE (JAMES FOLEY, 1985) This one is for teen me. Finding this film erupted something inside me, still remnants of the collage-making of film. It's brutal and beautiful. It's human and leaves you sore and sad. Again, one for the generational trauma guys and how breaking those cycles takes a violent form. There is not one scene or shot that's unintentional; it blisters like the end of summer sun. I get sweetly sad thinking about the first time I watched it and how it rocked my world. Mr [Sean] Penn and [Mary Stuart] Masterson's romance is what I cling to after. DEEP END (JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI, 1970) FUCKKKKK, Jerzyyyy is a genius. This film is absurdly sexy and wrong, and Diana Dors is a dirty minx, I love it. It encapsulates entirely how the 7)s and its filmmaking feels to me-no rules, it soars, it crashes with bloody skulls! I love Susan and Michael [Jane Asher and John Moulder-Brown], both grey in nature, and I condone none of it, but love it in all its messiness and sauciness. Ugh, just such a fucking fabulous film. It swims forever in my psyche. MADEMOISELLE (TONY RICHARDSON, 1966) This is a gem, an anomaly of Woodfall [Film Productions] and Richardson himself-him speaking barely any French but making this film entirely in that language is insane and breaks the formula of all the famous Woodfall [films], which I love and cherish. But in this film, like none of his or the others of that tree, is an alchemy of darkness and an undercurrent of something otherworldly. With hardly any dialogue, the story is told in silence and looks, as if the trees talk and nature gives us signs of the badness running inside Miss Moreau. I love wrong women with no reason -why should there always be one? We are the same as you and some of us are rotten. This film, to me, is full of black magic. THE OUTSIDERS (FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 1983) The skies, the bois, the blistering love for one another. Say no more. PRACTICAL MAGIC (GRIFFIN DUNNE, 1998) Thousands of women and men each year rewatch this movie; everyone who you talk to who loves it, they burst with passion for why they do. I've watched this film more than any other as a child and as an adult. I ruined the DVD cover from all its watches. It doesn't matter how many times I've seen it (could be three times a year, even), it feels fresh, like it is wiped from my brain each time I watch-how practical magic of it! “My blood, your blood. ”ABOVE Jane Asher and John Moulder Brown in Deep End (197)) BELOW Linda Manz in Out of the Blue (198))18OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
MEAN SHEETS The Rome-born painter Anselmo Ballester created lurid, pulpy posters that were bursting with the promise of sex or violence- even when the film wasn't On the W aterfront (1954) Salome (1953) The Man from Laramie (1955)BY THOMAS FLEW Anselmo Ballester (1897-1974) was a legend of Italian poster design who spent more than two thirds of his life working as a cartellonista (poster artist), creating more than 3,000 designs. Many of his most memorable pieces were local art for international features, including On the W aterfront (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955), both designs which portend violence. As is expected of such a prolific artist, his style would change dramatically to suit the needs of each film; he was particularly admired for his glamorous posters for Rita Hayworth films (including for Salome, 1953). Yet his original poster for Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1946, pictured right) shows scant regard for the film's neorealist mode, focusing instead on its dramatic subject and using fiery reds and oranges to depict a heroic Aldo F abrizi facing up against the shadowy figure of a Nazi soldier. This quote from Ballester, featured in a 2016 exhibition of his artwork at the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, indicates how seriously he took his craft: “The film poster artist must combine all the qualities of a painter, portrait artist, illustrator, decorator... and must possess a 'lavish palette' of colours and a fertile, preferably brilliant, imagination. With his work, he must succeed in capturing the interest of a special, cinema-going audience. ”19 OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
READERS' LETTERSGet in touch Email: sightandsound@bfi. org. uk T witter: @sightsoundmag By post: Sight and Sound, BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London, W1T 1LN David Thompson's complaint ('Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark', Sight and Sound, April) that Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) features a piece by Vivaldi at a date when his music was out of favour brings to mind Dickens's stout defence of an anachronism in his description of a stained-glass window at the end of Little Dorrit (1857). “As the window in St George's Church appropriately carried out the pervading spirit of the tale at its conclusion, Mr Dickens made refer-ence to it. He knew it was not as old as the date of the story, but did not consider that slight anachronism of any importance. ” Paul Colbeck, via email GABIN FEVERSAY IT AGAIN, SAM ROYAL SLASHDATE CRIME? STREAM PREJUDICEA TRIBUTE TO LOURDES PORTILLO CADDING ABOUT Malcolm Mc Dowell and Britt Ekland in Royal Flash (1975)Lourdes Portillo's The Devil Never Sleeps (1994) PICTURE PERFECT Celiné Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) I was pleased to see Sam Wigley recommending the 'Women in New Hollywood' season at The Garden Cinema in central London (Editor's Choice, S&S, May). Since becom-ing a member, I've been consistently impressed by its retrospective pro-gramme, which brings real depth and knowledge to each topic. I'm eagerly awaiting its 'New Central American Cinema' season this month, which brings rare screenings of Costa Rican, Nicaraguan and Panamanian films. Even more cheeringly, every screen-ing I go to seems to be sold out, or nearly-a far cry from my barren local cineplex. Hopefully, this points to a bright future for both bold repertory cinema and independent cinemas in general, and shows that people are still crying out for unique experiences. Alice Kitchen, W anstead, London The reprint of your 1973 interview with Richard Lester ('I don't find filmmaking fun', S&S, May) men-tions that his cherished Flashman project failed to get off the ground after a year's preparation. However, the recap of Lester's later career did not mention that he got George Mac-donald Fraser's novel to the screen in Royal Flash (1975). Sadly, it was ruined by the general release being heavily cut, reportedly to pair with a Burt Reynolds film. Sheer vandalism. Dave Hayward, Kenilworth Aside from Tim Collins's bizarre suggestion (Letters, S&S, May) that the music in Stanley Kubrick's films is overlooked ('The Blue Danube' in 2001? Beethoven's Ninth in A Clock-work Orange ?), I am in complete agree-ment that Barry Lyndon (1975) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) deserve the 4K treatment. The former, especially, is, in my eyes, one of the most beauti-fully composed films ever made. On a related note, it's been disap-pointing to see how few of the recent big releases have made it on to disc at all, let alone a 4K Blu-ray. Netflix is, of course, not in that business any more (a shame, I would have loved to add Bradley Cooper's Maestro to my collection), but must I really stay subscribed to Apple, Amazon, Disney, etc, in order to retain access to the best new films? It's infuriating (and infuriatingly expensive). Tim Harper, via email Delighted as I was to read Adam Scovell's appreciation of Jean Gabin's wonderful performance in Jacques Becker's T ouchez pas au grisbi (1954) (Endings, S&S, May), I was surprised to read the statement that after this film “Gabin would enter a fallow period in his career”, only becoming a great star again in the early 60s. On the contrary: it is generally agreed that Grisbi revitalised Gabin's career after years in the doldrums, to the extent that by the late 50s he was making four or five films a year, many of them major box-office suc-cesses. His range during this period was extraordinary, playing roles from lorry drivers to captains of industry, from Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (1958) to Simenon's Inspector Mai-gret in three films, and the depth, power and sensitivity of his perfor-mances are absolutely consistent. It's a pity that so few of his films from 1954 to 1959 are well-known outside France, with the exceptions of Grisbi and Renoir's French Cancan (1955), because for me at any rate, his work during this period fully equals that of his heyday in the 1930s. Howard Curtis, via email The film director Lourdes Portillo, who passed away on 20 April at home in San Francisco, had been a beloved friend of mine since the early 1990s. She took a chance on me right out of film school. I worked for her on The Devil Never Sleeps (1994) and then sev-eral other film and television projects. This started a lifetime friendship, even after I moved back to Mexico City and, then, San Miguel de Allende. As Maya Angelou wrote, “If you're going to live, leave a legacy. Make a mark on the world that can't be erased. ” Lourdes Portillo was an extraordinary human, contributing not one but myriad marks during her lifetime through filmmaking and social activism. She was an unconven-tional, artful talent-a chingona whose life will continue impacting others for many generations. Lourdes was born on 11 Novem-ber 1943 in Chihuahua, Mexico. When she was 13, she immigrated with her parents and four siblings to Los Angeles. The last three months were chal-lenging for her, but she was a warrior at her home in San Francisco and during our regular phone calls. Until the very end, she brought joy and laughter into this world. Soco Aguilar, via email It's been disappointing to see how few of the recent big releases have made it on to disc at all, let alone a 4K Blu-ray David Thompson's complaint brings to mind Dickens's stout defence of an anachronism in Little Dorrit20OPENING SCENES | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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Robot Dreams is a silent wonder, crammed with visual references celebrating classic films Pablo Berger's wistful, comic animation Robot Dreams is set in a very familiar place, a colourful version of 1980s Manhattan. Gridlock, graffiti and rollerskates-it's a milieu I recognise well from the movies of my childhood. And just like in those films, in which big city life was complicated by the occasional ghost, superhero or wide-eyed time traveller, there is a whimsical twist. The citizens of New Y ork are all anthropomorphised animals: elephants drive cabs and an octopus busks a drum solo on the subway platform. Our hero is a dog named Dog, and he has classic 80s hobbies: he plays Pong, he rents VHS cassettes from Kim's Video and, in a listless mood, he channel-surfs. Lonely and in desperate search of enter-tainment, Dog is nevertheless discerning. He skips straight past a sitcom with a clas-sic custard-pie-in-the-face gag, which gave me a little comic pause. Robot Dreams, you see, is a silent movie, or rather a dialogue-free film. Adapted from Sara Varon's word-less graphic novel of the same name, Robot Dreams is Berger's second foray into the techniques of silent cinema. In this scene, early in the film, Dog is hopping channels from the comfort of his sofa, positioned underneath a poster for Pierre Étaix's 1965 black-and-white homage to the silent era, Y oyo -too large to miss. So I thought I had an inkling where Berger was headed. But no. Berger's 2012 film Blancanieves was a ver-sion of the Snow White story that revelled in lush monochrome photography, the practice of early film techniques and the melodramatic mode. It was not a pastiche but an exercise in immersing both film-maker and viewer in the language of 1920s cinema. Robot Dreams swerves this brand of nostalgia entirely, reaching back into film history, but pointedly not as far back as the days of Chaplin and Keaton. When a housefront falls on Robot, we await a rerun of the precision stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), but instead, his head bursts through the wall-it's only a flat, it's only a movie, it's only a dream. Just for the avoidance of doubt, when I talk about contemporary films such as Robot Dreams or, say, The Red T urtle (Michaël Dudok de Wit, 2016), All Is Lost Pamela Hutchinson @Pam Hutch dream of their reunion. Chaplin would rec-ognise this as a riff on his 'park, policeman and pretty girl' formula, in which the park is Coney Island, the policeman the un-cooperative municipal authorities and the pretty girl a beloved robot-lover or best friend, or maybe Dog hasn't decided yet? But Robot Dreams, animated in tooth-some pastels and primaries, is primarily a fantasy, not a physical comedy. Its most prominent, and avowedly T echnicolor, reference point is The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), another tale of unlikely cross-species comradeship and other-worldly visions. But there are many, many more. I adored a Busby Berkeley-inspired sequence of a daisy chorus line, in which the multiplying flowers stamp and jump and circle Robot until they form them-selves into a portrait of his canine compan-ion's face, as seen from above, of course. There are nods to everything from Manhat-tan (Woody Allen, 1979)-do I even need to tell you that it is the bridge shot?-to the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitch-cock, 1960), as Dog rinses off his trick-or-treating makeup on Halloween night. A snowman takes a trip in a bowling alley in a psychedelic scene straight out of The Big Lebowski (Coen brothers, 1998), and our pals spin around holding hands, captured in the circling reverse-POV shots from Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). These references are deliberate and joyous -and no talking is required. The film's musical motif is Earth, Wind & Fire's 'September', first heard on a port-able stereo as Dog and Robot rollerskate through Central Park on their first 'date', kicking off a montage sequence that takes in boating on the lake, chomping hotdogs from a cart, sightseeing and posing in a photo booth. I grinned, both at the movie and the memory of the power the montage sequence had over the movies I watched as a child. Just like all those more elevated cinematic citations in Robot Dreams, it's a reminder that all the best talkies, from any era, have these pockets of dialogue-free delights within-waking dreams that cel-ebrate the power of images that move. Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance critic and film historian There are nods to everything from Manhattan to the shower scene in Psycho. There's a psychedelic scene straight out of The Big Lebowski and a riff on shots from Saturday Night Fever(J. C. Chandor, 2011) or Blancanieves, as silent films, that is not a disavowal of their soundtracks, which are all very sophisti-cated. It's in the understanding that these films are exercises in visual narrative, tell-ing stories with every cinematic instru-ment except the spoken word, borrowed from literature. Dialogue-free cinema is what I mean, pictures without captions. And it's everywhere. Robot Dreams had already caught my attention with the fluency of its visual sto-rytelling when this throwaway moment seemed to slip a banana peel under the obvious allusions. The film is a platonic romance: Dog cures his loneliness by building a robotic friend from a mail-order kit. The new pals enjoy one fun-filled day out at the beach, but are separated when Robot catches a bad case of rust and is stranded on the sand. Dog cannot return to save his friend until the beach reopens in the summer, and all winter, the friends BELOW Dog and Robot in Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams 22 BYLINE ILLUSTRATIONS: PETER ARKLETALKIES The Long Take | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
This T own, like so many other band dramas, hits a bum note when it comes to the actual music Andrew Male @Andr6w Male There is a thrilling point, half way into the chaotic final episode of Steven Knight's This T own (BBC i Player), when it looks as if this overambitious drama about the formation of a post-punk ska band in 1980s Coventry is going to refuse to show us any actual performances from the band in question. Over the previous five episodes we've seen budding Birmingham poet and dreamer Dante Williams (the utterly charming Levi Brown) repeatedly threaten to form a band with his various friends and family members. But that central story and its concomitant banalities have been consistently sidelined by ludicrous sub-plots concerning Dante's cousin Bardon (Ben Rose) trying to free himself from the IRA activities of his bullying father Eamonn (Peter Mc Donald) and Dante's older brother Gregory (Jordan Bolger), a sergeant in the British Army working undercover for Special Branch. But in those secondary storylines, and through the series' penchant for narrative filibustering, This T own arrives at a curious truth: that band stories, when adapted for the screen, small or otherwise, are always far more interesting when they avoid the 'authentic' recreation of actual band activi-ties (songwriting, live performances, etc) and concern themselves with the related existential banalities of youth. If the budding band members in This T own had never made it to the stage, never played a single note, Knight's story would possibly contain more emotional veracity, acting as a representative tale for all the countless 80s teenagers (myself included) who wrote lyrics, endlessly revised band names, fruitlessly searched for a good drummer and never set foot on a real stage. Sadly, when This T own finally bites the bullet and gives Dante's band a name and allows them a debut gig at the Birming-ham club of unhinged gangland overlord Robbie Carmen (David Dawson), it louses everything up. Their name, Fuck the F actory, is embarrassingly dreadful while the one song they perform on stage, 'This T own', (written, in actuality, by post-punk producer Dan Carey and the poet Kae T empest) is a studio-produced con-fusion of ska and sprechgesang, which sounds more 2022 than 1982. This would all be fine if the band remained as a fantasy in Dante's head, or if the audience response was in keeping with how a 1980s Birming-ham crowd would truly respond to the first song by the first band of the night, but the song is met with rapturous applause and a stage invasion, which seems at odds with both the tenor of the times and the quality of the song. Plus, in its use of such tired rock platitudes, it denies Dante (and the series itself) the flawed complexity of its earlier episodes. It's inauthentic at the exact moment when authenticity matters. A similar problem wrecked another recent fictional tale of band life, Daisy Jones & The Six (2023, Prime Video). Adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber from the 2019 American novel of the same name by T aylor Jenkins Reid, this ten-part series concerned the rise and fall of a fic-tional 70 rock band loosely based on Fleet-wood Mac and centred around its lead singer and songwriter, the titular Jones. It's not a good show but a viewer might be willing to forgive Neustadter and Weber's reliance on rock-doc clichés (“And then one night, everything changed”, “We're gonna be the biggest fucking band in the world”) and the reduction of Jones to a series of patronising rock-chick banalities if the music were convincing. But it's not. Written by super-producer Blake Mills, with contributions by Marcus Mumford and Matt Sweeney, these songs never sound like anything more than what they are: bland 21st-century Nashville rock with sub-par lyrics. Whether celebrating 80s 2 tone or 70s soft rock, the whole conceit of these shows is undone when the quality of the songs (both sonically and lyrically) does not justify the audience response. If you don't believe in the band, you won't believe in the story. However, get that right and you can take an audience anywhere. Perhaps the best rock band TV drama of recent years was Danny Boyle's Sex Pis-tols miniseries Pistol (2022, Disney+). The show was famously branded by ex-Pistol John Lydon as a “middle class fantasy [that] bears little resemblance to the truth” and it's true that if you come to Pistol look-ing for absolute veracity you won't find it. Adapted from the autobiography of Pis-tols guitarist Steve Jones, Pistol is not about a quest for one single truth but a recogni-tion that punk was as much about perfor-mance and reinvention as it was about the authentic. Crucially, his main act of rein-vention is to reposition the women of punk -Jordan, Siouxsie, Chrissie Hynde, Helen Wellington-Lloyd (aka Helen of T roy), Vivienne Westwood-at the centre of the Pistols narrative, depicting them sympa-thetically and intelligently, but also empha-sising their uniqueness and, in many cases, their superiority. It is an act of reinterpretation that some might consider 'inauthentic' but it works. Stipulating no lip-syncing and insisting that the actors who played Lydon, Cook, Jones and Matlock developed their char-acters during band rehearsal time and played live on stage during all the filmed band performances, Boyle created a base-line of sonic authenticity against which he could reinvent the tired blokeish tru-isms of punk history. It's a rule that more rock dramas would do well to obey. Band stories are only ever believable when they sound true. Andrew Male is a freelance critic who lives in South London TV Eye Band stories on screen are always more interesting when they avoid the 'authentic' recreation of band activities -songwriting, live performance -and concern themselves with the existential banalities of youth 23ILLUSTRATION BY MARC DAVID SPENGLER | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Nicole Flattery @nicoleflattery Flick Lit We live in a time-perhaps because of social media, which allows, even encour-ages, a proliferation of selves; or because of sheer brazenness bred of desperation in our capitalist landscape-in which the fraudster occupies a central role. Patri-cia Highsmith's T om Ripley is back (on Netflix); The Tinder Swindler (2022) was on everyone's watchlist. The story of the fake German heiress Anna Delvey first dominated magazine newsstands and then became a television series (the over-stuffed and overlong Inventing Anna, 2022). If there has been a defining trend of this decade, it's the rise of, and enduring inter-est in, the role of the scammer. What's the appeal? Why do they have this hold on the collective imagination? We admire their stamina, enjoy their transgressions, puzzle over their motivations: they exist outside the boundaries of normal behaviour. I think that's partly why Abbas Kia-rostami's film Close-Up has only grown in reputation since it was released in 1990 (it appeared at No 17 in Sight and Sound 's 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll, even in the wake of allegations of sexual and psy-chological abuse made against the direc-tor that year by fellow Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari). The film tells of an every-man who commits a bizarre deception. Although the crime is largely innocent, it enacts an emotional toll. People, it turns out, don't like being lied to. The blending of fact and fiction and the instability of real-ity in the film now seem ahead of their time and hugely influential, not only on cinema but on literary genres such as autofiction. As Kiarostami has said, “We can never get close to the truth except through lying. ” Hossain Sabzian is a lover of cinema and, one day, as he's reading the screenplay of the film The Cyclist (1989) on the bus, a woman interrupts him. She tells him that her sons are a fan of this film made by the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sabzian, in turn, tells her that he is in fact Makhmal-baf. From there follows a rolling, unstop-pable lie that Kiarostami eventually reads about in the newspaper and decides to recreate on film. Everyone in Close-Up -the guards, the journalist, the cinephile family Sabzein duped-are played by themselves. It lends everything an eerie layer, with the The blend of fact and fiction in Close-Up helped pave the way for modern autofiction tricks), who have the means and time to pursue it; on the other hand, that engage-ment with art is powerful, transformative, allows you to forget your circumstances. At the trial, when Sabzian speaks about the effect of cinema on his life, it's profound and moving. Why shouldn't this man play the role of director? In another, fairer life, he might have been one. Close-Up has an affecting ending: the real Makhmalbaf meets Sabzian (who is overcome with emotion) and they return to the home of the family he deceived. Kiarostami films the pair on a motorcycle, as the dialogue cuts in and out, suggesting the eternally elliptical nature of the truth. Close-Up, with its dissolution of reality and authorial tricks, reminds me of the work of writers such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgård. In autofic-tion the author typically writes about his or her life, but not entirely truthfully, bending certain events, adding fictional flourishes, adopting, like Sabzian, a persona. But the book Close-Up most strongly brought to mind is one I think about often: the French writer Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary (2000), which has often been imitated but never bettered. Carrère finds out about the crimes of Jean-Claude Romand, who murdered his wife and children in 1993, the same way Kiarostami found Sabzian: he opens the newspaper. What follows is Carrère pursuing Romand, on the surface a respectable doctor and family man, as he unravels his considerable web of lies. So far, so true crime. What gives The Adver-sary its real power are the parallels Carrère draws between himself and the murderer: both lie, exaggerate and hoodwink-but only Carrère gets paid for it. Both Kiarostami and Carrère seem fascinated by the idea of doubles, the lives you could have had if you were more or less fortunate. It could easily be you in the intimidating setting of a trial. Perhaps this is the enduring appeal of scammers: even if they fail, they still show us the multiplic-ity of our various selves, and how little the descriptors of our roles in life-worker, brother, son-ever align with how we feel. Nicole Flattery's novel 'Nothing Special' is published by Bloomsbury If there has been a defining trend of this decade, it's the rise of, and enduring interest in, the role of the scammer. We admire their stamina, enjoy their transgressions, puzzle over their motivations'actors' sometimes not wholly convincing in their 'roles', the result of the occasional faint smirk or leaden delivery. The film raises questions about art-making and who owns what story, and Sabzian is absolutely the star of the show, mesmerising and more than sympathetic. Throughout the trial Sabzian, with a quiet dignity, relates how being treated as a successful artist made him feel: “It was difficult enacting the role of director, but it gave me confidence and I gained the fam-ily's respect. ” The thrills are obvious: Sab-zian is fitfully out of work and separated from his wife. He and one of his two chil-dren live with his elderly mother. His world is small, enclosed. He's not the sort of man who gets to make art, which explains why he continues with the ruse, “That was why, when I woke up the next day, I still wanted to go back and play that role. It was very difficult but I still wanted to do it because of my love for the cinema and also because they respected me. So I went about the job very seriously. And I came to believe I really was a director. I was not acting any more. I was that new person. ” The film manages to hold two positions: that art is accessible only to the bourgeoi-sie (represented by the family Sabzian 24 TALKIES ILLUSTRATION BY BETH WALROND | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
While the gas crisis was not as detrimental to the country's morale as the protracted horror of the Vietnam War, or the disgrace of Watergate, energy instability added a new flavour of volatility to the mix Why the American road movie in 1974 had begun to run on empty Jessica Kiang @jessicakiang the magnificent '74 “Nobody loses all the time,” spits Benny (Warren Oates) in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, before going on to prove incontrovertibly that some people do. By the time Peckinpah's mag- nificently fucked-up road movie premiered in August 1974, American motorists on the real-life road also knew how it felt to be on a losing streak. Since the previous October when Arab oil exports to the US had been embargoed, a chain reaction had occurred. Average gas prices rose 14 cents per gallon between 1973-74, to 53 cents-peaking in some places close to $1 at times. Queues and rationing at gas stations became com-monplace, while trucker strikes caused goods scarcities across the nation-not to mention that, in January, in a move designed to curb energy usage that must have seemed like yet another killjoy gambit by The Man, a national speed limit of just 55mph had been introduced. The symbi-otic, quasi-existential relationship between Americans and their cars was being tested as never before. But at the movies it was a different story -for a time. The road movie boom that started with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) was still going strong in 1973 with The Last Detail, Scarecrow and Badlands. And in 1974 it gave rise to two of the year's most auspicious first features. Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (actually his second road movie after the excellent made-for-TV Duel in 1971) and Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot are, as debuts, paradoxically the most pol-ished films in the genre of the year. But if they've aged well-aside from the homo-phobic tendencies of Thunderbolt, which are an attempt to either redress or reinforce the film's homoerotic undertones-both also feel faintly impersonal. The hallmarks of Spielberg's emotive, populist storytell-ing, and his preoccupation with broken families, are present in Sugarland, but in nascent form. And not till the final Mid-night Cowboy-esque moments of Cimino's gorgeous but derivative Thunderbolt does it hint at the more epic Greek-tragic canvas that would be the making of his career with The Deer Hunter (1978) and the break-ing of it with Heaven's Gate (1980). T aken as a pair, the films mark a transition between the truly subversive, troubling-to-the-main-stream road movie and the lighter, more domesticated late 70s/80s version. And yet 1974 started out with one of the bleakest iterations ever. The same week the truckers reached a settlement, there opened to little fanfare a tiny, grimy indie called-what else?-Road Movie. Directed by Joseph Strick, then best known for his well-received if quixotic adaptations of Ulysses (1967) and T ropic of Cancer (1970), Road Movie is a fascinating curio, as wilfully ugly in its portrayal of the joyless industrial landscapes of the mid-70s Midwest as it is nihilistic about the grasping relationships between its three leads. Starring Barry Bostwick and Robert Drivas as bud-dies who co-own an ill-fated refrigerated truck, it is most notable for a rivetingly unsavoury performance by Regina Baff as Janice, the prostitute/bad luck charm they pick up, abuse and cannot get rid of. One contemporary review by the legendarily caustic Judith Crist can best be described as 'livid', especially toward screenwriter Judith Rascoe, for a movie that “indicates at most that the vision of woman as whore and destroyer of men is not restricted to the male chauvinist pigs of filmdom”. Records are silent, sadly, on what Ms Crist thought of John Hough's Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a scrappy pretext for some fine stunt driving, which gained hit status that even star Peter Fonda struggled to account for, and wherein the saving grace -Adam Roarke as introverted sidekick Deke-doesn't even get his name in the title. However, one hopes she'd have taken an equally dim view of threats hurled at Susan George's Mary, such as the logisti-cally baffling “I'll braid your tits!” But few 1974 films attracted as much feminist critique as Alfredo Garcia, largely due to its deeply strange rape scene, which, coming just three years after Straw Dogs, helped seal Peckinpah's then-reputation as an inveterate misogynist. (Also of note: the would-be-rapist biker is played by Kris Kristofferson, who was Ellen Burstyn's sensitive rancher lover in Martin Scorsese's quasi-road movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Any-more, released in December 1974. ) But if you read Oates's Benny as Peckinpah-and it's hard not to, given Oates is wearing the director's sunglasses throughout-Alfredo Garcia becomes a far more complex propo-sition, radioactive with self-loathing, but underpinned by the thwarted romanticism of a no-hoper guy in a clip-on tie who gains a head but loses his mind and never knows quite what to do with the overwhelm-ing tenderness he feels for the woman (a superbly self-possessed Isela Vega) he has loved and lost. Peckinpah was shooting in a state of post-divorce alcoholic devasta-tion, but the resulting film is clear-headed in crucial ways, locating the masochism in machismo, and filled with scorn for the seedily glamorised life-on-the-road nar-rative that even Peckinpah himself had indulged in (with The Getaway in 1972) but that 1974, bookended by Road Movie and Alfredo Garcia, saw thoroughly debunked. That cannot be attributed solely to the gas crisis, of course. But while not as det-rimental to the country's morale as the pro-tracted horror of the Vietnam War, or the disgrace of Watergate, energy instability added a new flavour of volatility to the mix. Because to hit America in the gas tank is to hit it in the solar plexus, and the same goes for the movies: almost as much as the west-ern, the road movie fed into a mythos of restless libertarian self-sufficiency so inte-gral to the national identity that it would have seemed that you couldn't put a price on it. But it turns out you could, and it was 14 cents on the gallon. Jessica Kiang is a Berlin-based freelance film critic BELOW Warren Oates as Benny in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) 25 | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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In this issue, Dr June Givanni talks to the actress Adjoa Andoh, Dr Joanna Abeyie assesses the climate for diversity and inclusion in the industry, and critics Leila Latif and Ellen E. Jones ask whether film and TV really can save the world THE BFB EDITORS: DR JUNE GIVANNI, JAN ASANTE, MELANIE HOYES. @BLKFILMBULLETIN T umultuous times, at times, necessi-tate a contemplative strategic pause: a moment to recalibrate, to rebal-ance the righting of wrongs or even to appreciate the manifestation of the extraordinary. In this spirit, we dedicate this first Black Film Bulletin of 2024 to extraordinary moments, mat-ters and mavericks. In a stunning achievement, our founding editor June Givanni began the year making history at the British Academy of Film and T elevision Arts awards, becoming one among too few women, and the first woman born of the African Caribbean diaspora, to receive the Bafta for Outstanding Brit-ish Contribution to Cinema. She was honoured on stage by Adjoa Andoh, the star of Net flix hits Bridgerton (2020-) and Queen Charlotte: A Bridger-ton Story (2023). Overleaf, Givanni and Andoh discuss history and drama, exploring the way films and television series can help to inform and impact people's understanding of the past. Meanwhile, having forged her own path cultivating talent, formerly as head of creative diversity at the BBC and now back at the helm of her company Blue Moon, Joanna Abeyie takes the temperature on a precarious climate for equity, diversity and inclu-sion and offers expert reflections on the road ahead. It continues to be a lamentable fact that despite making up 50 per cent of the population, women remain alarm-ingly underrepresented in the execu-tive echelons of the global film and TV industries. In 'Critics on Critics', the first in our series of sharp takes between intuitive minds, writers Leila Latif and Ellen E. Jones lean in on life and the noble aspirations behind Jones's book debut Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the W orld. BFB BULLETINBLACK FILMBELOW Adjoa Andoh (left) and June Givanni at the Baftas IMAGE: DIONNE WALKER27 | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
ADJOA ANDOH: SWINGING THE LENSJune Givanni: Y our character Lady Danbury is central to both Bridgerton [2020-] and the Queen Charlotte [2023] historical drama series. How culturally significant was it to have these come out of the Shondaland development stable? Adjoa Andoh: I don't think there would have been that interest in 'swinging the lens' on the narrative in this way without someone like Shonda Rhimes [the creator of Grey's Anatomy, 2005-; and Scandal, 2012-18]. She's got a dramatic instinct that's curious to look at narratives in a fresh way. JG: Can you explain 'swinging the lens'? AA: In film terms, when you swing a lens, you change the camera lens because you want to have a slightly different perspective on whatever it is you're shooting. My production company is called Swinging the Lens because I want to literally imagine you're looking at something through a camera lens and then you swing it to somewhere else. I'm interested in [figuratively] swinging the lens on stories and the way we light them, dress them, locate and imagine them. So either we tell other people's stories, or we look at the same story through a different lens. It's what Shonda did when she read the Bridgerton novels, because there's no mention of race in any of them. She swung the lens of her eye on those books and went, “This is interesting. What if we told this Regency story, and we added in the head of the ton [high society in the era] who is the Queen; and added the fact that many historians believe Queen Charlotte had African heritage? What does that do to the story when we broaden the roll-call of characters and viewers?” While it's been an overwhelming success, some people are still pushing back hard against that. JG: In what way? AA: Well, it's very hard for people, if they think the world is shaped in a certain way, to cope with coming to understand there may be more nuance and complexity in that shape. Stories tell us who we are in time and space. They tell us the value society accords us, and they tell us how we are expected to flow through the world. People of all races have always been in this country. The 'great' in Great Britain has a lot to do with this nation's overseas adventurism and the benefits Britain acquired from the rest of the world, not least in terms of free labour, culture and raw materials. All of those things contributed to making Britain great and in the Regency era, Britain was in its pomp. Go to I was honoured to be presented with my recent Bafta Award by an actress whose work, ambition and passion in film, television and theatre I admire greatly and who I had the pleasure to interview recently BY JUNE GIVANNI RIGHT Adjoa Andoh as Lady Danbury in Bridgerton (2020-)28BLACK FILM BULLETIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
'There were a lot of Black artists coming through theatre, TV and film at that time who never received the recognition they deserved. That's why, in our era, Spike Lee just blew everyone's minds' ABOVE Leonie Forbes and Adjoa Andoh in Frances Anne-Solomon's What My Mother T old Me (1995) America or the West Indies and look historically at all those places: Virginia, Georgetown or Charlottesville. JG: I was born in Georgetown, Guyana. AA: Exactly! The George and the Charlotte they're talking about are our George and Charlotte. Look at the delicious irony of that. Charlotte came to Great Britain and brought the Christmas tree; not Albert. She brought that European tradition from her home in Germany. At the same time, here was a woman who was complained about for having “ugly thick lips”, “an ugly wide nose” and “a mulatto complexion”- features that were powdered down for portraits. Having all these places in the world that were oppressive to people of African heritage named after her speaks to life's complexity. When you start destabilising the history like that, it's hard for people. Some people may say, “This is woke history gone mad. ” I'd say, “History is great! It's the story of us all-so lets learn all of it. ” But our show is an entertainment, it's not a documentary. The Featheringtons are not wearing Regency colours-there is no psychedelic orange in a Regency colour palette, but theirs is a Regency cut. So drama has scope to play with form and say things in different ways. I would say the great cultural shift for me has been that people of colour for the first time see themselves in a historical romantic drama, where they are engaged in the central narratives of the story, and this audience can be entertained by it. That's not to say there aren't other stories to tell from this period about people of colour, but we are many stories and the breadth is important. JG: Indeed. Y ou mentioned your company earlier-please tell me about its role and ambition? AA: I set it up with my friend Juanne Fuller, who's also my publicist. I named the company Swinging the Lens because I wanted to be playful. As I mentioned, swinging a lens changes perspective. But it also sounds like 'swinging the lead'-a colloquialism meaning bunking off! As an actor I am conscious of how I have bunked off from a regular work life and how lucky I am to have a working life based around play. I also wanted the company's purpose to lead in its name -to tell the stories that are on the roads less trodden, narratively, the outlier or less viewed stories. The feature film we have in development at the moment, The Painter's Friend, based on the novel by Howard Cunnell, is about class, art, grief and dispossession. That covers a lot of people. It covers poverty, care-leavers, refugees, mental health, a lot of lives not generally in the centre of narratives; and it's funny and tender because all our stories contain complexity and richness. JG: As you've been speaking, I've felt something resonate back to Jesse, the rebellious character you played in Frances-Anne Solomon's What my Mother T old Me [1995], who came with a different perspective to her role and place in a powerful family. AA: Well, Frances-Anne was born to be a powerhouse. She was a beacon as a woman of colour director, producer, writer, coming out of BBC radio and TV drama where she was hugely impactful. What was interesting creatively in this film was that I played both the mother and the daughter. For us, the daughter was a collaborated version of Frances-Anne and me. It was her story imagined in a different way. And yet the elements of a young person trying to find their voice, or a mother trapped in a barren destructive marriage-these are universal stories. JG: It was great to see Adjoa the young actor in her early twenties in that film. What about working with another of my favourite people, the great Jamaican actress Leonie Forbes? AA: Miss Leonie was the gift of that job for me. I played the young mother in the past and she played that same mother in the present. I remember we had a scene on a boat and Miss Leonie was frightened of being on the water, so I sang 'Moon River' to her to distract her. When I hear that lovely song, I always think of Miss Leonie and this film. I loved how skilful she was, how wise, how absolutely electric she is on camera. I felt very honoured to work with her. But I also felt frustrated because Miss Leonie should have been an international superstar, with such skills and insights on theatre and on screen, and a hugely significant actor in broadcasting and radio-everything! There were a lot of Black artists coming through theatre, TV and film at that time who never received the recognition they deserved. But you have to be in the space on a regular basis and that demands the writing of a variety of stories that have a narrative that's interesting and meaningful. That's why, in our era, Spike Lee just blew everyone's minds with his work I love the fact that there are certain [trademark] Spike Lee shots, eg, the one where he put someone on the other end of the dolly and then he travels the dolly. I love his cinematography. I love the way he would light Black skin. That you have a range of colours. The humour. I loved Bill Lee's scores. There's a musical language to his stuff. Then when Wynton Marsalis came on; Stevie Wonder came on... Malcolm X [1992] is one of my all-time favourite films. Denzel should have got his Best Actor Oscar for that, not for playing a violent criminal Black man [in T raining Day, 2001]. Malcolm X is a work of absolute beauty and genius. Everything about that film is lovely. It was so epic and so playful! I do feel that Spike Lee has not been given all the flowers over the years, over the decades. If he was angry then, I can't imagine what he's feeling now. Did his bravura get punished? 29 BLACK FILM BULLETIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
African American actor, producer and showrunner Issa Rae's thoughts on the ever-changing television and film land-scape in a recent interview with Porter magazine provoked my own personal reflections on representation, account-ability and fairness in the UK TV and film industry. Rae referenced a number of Black equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) professionals in Hollywood who had moved on from their roles, coinci-dentally as V ariety announced news of my own departure from the role of head of creative diversity at the BBC. I loved my role at the BBC. It felt like I could-and indeed was-making head-way. I left with confidence that several key stakeholders and commissioners were committed to making programmes with, and for, diverse talent and audiences. So why did I leave? Unfortunately, loving a role and being committed to its purpose isn't always enough. A psychologically safe working environment is crucial in any role, and especially important when levelling the playing field for underserved talent and audiences, which requires huge amounts of empathy and compas-sion. It's not a role for the faint-hearted, and without that safety, it's incredibly troubling work. The list of reasons why these roles are challenging is pretty long, but signifi-cantly they can become untenable when autonomy, influence and decision-making is minimal to absent, when there is no sign of improvement and when the role is only created because, optically, 'it's the SPEAK-EASYON REPRESENTATION AND EQUITY IN THE UK TV AND FILM INDUSTRY SINCE 2020 Has 2024 seen the industry backtrack woefully on diversity? Dr Joanna Abeyie, MBE, former head of creative diversity at the BBC, offers sobering reflections on the current terrain BY JOANNA ABEYIE right thing to do'. These roles become even harder when not afforded sufficient resources to be effective and strategic. Essentially, if the role doesn't provide the EDI executive with the true ability to change anything, they are alone in their pursuit of making sustainable changes, which is almost certainly a shortcut to burn-out. The silence and lack of changed behaviour following the publicity about this pattern of resignations in the UK and US suggests complicity in allowing such crucial roles to become untenable for individuals, and calls into question the intention behind their creation. Without true commitment from leaders right at the top of the organisation and the effort to help EDI leads succeed, these roles are performative and set up to fail. ABOVE Dreaming Whilst Black (2023) OPPOSITE TOP Mangrove (2020), part of Steve Mc Queen's Small Axe anthology series OPPOSITE White Nanny, Black Child (2023) 30BLACK FILM BULLETIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Significantly, the Porter article points out the dwindling investment in earlier commitments to increase authentic Black stories on screen and the development of Black talent off screen. Rae states, “Y ou're seeing so many of these Black shows get cancelled, you're seeing so many execu-tives-especially on the EDI side-get canned. Y ou're seeing very clearly now that our stories are less of a priority. ” In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd accelerated, in knee-jerk fash-ion, the response to racial equity, with many organisations promising that their embrace of anti-racism was part of a movement and not merely a moment. Yet what impact have these promises had? Have we seen an increase in Black TV and film talent on and off screen that feels sufficient considering the grandiose commitments made four years ago? We have witnessed hit series like Sir Steve Mc Queen's Small Axe (2020), Adjani Salmon's Dreaming Whilst Black (2023-) and Candice Carty Williams's Champion (2023), and films like Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023), The Little Mermaid (2023) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-V erse (2023) engage audiences from all backgrounds and showcase Black and global majority talent-but is that enough? At the Royal T elevision Society's 2023 event 'The Legacy of the Black Square', I was quite rightly taken to task-along-side colleagues from Channel 4 and Amazon-over the inequities Black and global majority talent on and off screen are facing, despite the promises made by industry giants that this would change. A report by management consultancy Mc Kinsey, Black Representation in Film and TV: The Challenges and Impact of Increasing Diversity, published only ten months after Floyd's murder, said of the US: “While a certain amount of progress has been made with on-screen talent in recent years, and although several entertainment companies are starting to make strides toward diversity and inclusion, our new analysis shows that inequity persists and is deeply entrenched across the film and TV ecosystem. ” The report underscores the complexity and scale of this challenge in the US, which mirrors in many ways the barriers to racial equity in the UK. With regard to what it calls a “system-level challenge”, it notes: “Tight-knit, interde-pendent networks dominate the land-scape; unlike in many other industries, a single company's efforts to change the racial dynamic inside its own four walls can do only so much for the entire ecosys-tem... real and lasting change in film and TV will require concerted action and the joint commitment of stakeholders across the industry ecosystem. ” Thinking back to 2020, in the after-math of the UK film and TV industry's pledges to increase racial equity, those commitments still struggled to make an impact on the number of Black and global majority talents being hired on or off screen. In fact, in 2021, Deadline 's article on the Creative Diversity Network Dia-mond-the online system used by UK channels to obtain consistent diversity data on programmes they commission -delivered damning data showing evi-dence that “diversity went into reverse in the British television industry last year”. It's true that the industry is operating in unstable times. Bectu, the union for crea-tive ambition, has outlined various recent factors it believes will result in deepening inequalities, including funding challenges at the BBC, redundancies at Channel 4, ITV's recruitment freeze, a significant decrease in advertising spending, stalled streamer subscriptions and the increased cost of film production. Its new report UK Film and TV Industry: A Sector in Crisis, states: “The current crisis is amplifying existing inequalities across the industry. Many respondents recounted concerns that there was a doubling down of nepo-tistic practices, with the little work that is available going directly to a small 'inner circle' of friends. We found that BAME respondents were less likely to have worked at all over the past three months than their white counterparts. ” The crisis facing our workers is a real one. Anecdotal evidence and qualitative research suggest quite a gloomy future for TV and film, but I am reassured that the winners at this year's Royal T elevision Society Awards included White Nanny, Black Child (2023), T op Boy (2011-2023), Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the W orld (2023) and Black Ops (2023). While these wins do not alter the reality of the inequities facing Black and global major-ity talent, they do demonstrate that such stories and talent are valued by audiences in the UK and abroad, and can pro-duce award-winning programming that impacts audiences across generations. I am now working on an independent review for the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity into the BBC's £112 million commitment to diverse programming, which was launched fol-lowing Floyd's murder to provide the broadcaster with recommendations for it to continue its commitment to diverse programme-makers on and off screen. I would implore the industry to do the same: to encourage film, TV, media and entertainment organisations to review their own commitments independently, transparently and in consultation with Black and global majority talent. While we are facing tough financial times, our industry is resilient, and with sincerity, accountability and commit-ment we can maximise the resources we do have. With a renewed commitment to anti-racism, and with equity and a structure for accountability, we can once again start to rebuild efforts to level the playing field. Dr Joanna Abeyie, MBE, is the founding direc-tor of inclusive executive search and consultancy firm Blue Moon & Partners, co-secretariat of the creative diversity all-party parliamentary group and author of the forthcoming book 'Inclusion Needs Y ou'The murder of George Floyd accelerated the response to racial equity, with many organisations promising that their embrace of anti-racism was part of a movement not a moment. Y et what impact have these promises had? 31 BLACK FILM BULLETIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
JONES PORTRAIT: MARTINA LANGLeila Latif: How has the reaction to the book been so far? Ellen E. Jones: I anticipated it being more confrontational, but people seem to be on their best behaviour. I occasionally do interviews where it's obvious that the person understands the topic and we can develop the ideas in interesting ways, but sometimes it's clear they don't really know what I'm talking about. LL: I was surprised recently by the number of people who had never heard of 'magical negroes'. EEJ: That, or 'misogynoir'-I have to explain quite a lot. Many haven't encountered the idea that 'diversity' at a surface level might not be the end of the conversation; that all we need to do is give a few more opportunities to actors of colour and we're all good. Part of the reason I wrote the book is because a lot of people haven't encountered the idea that race is a social construct. People want to contain racism in the manageable form-the stereotypical racist in the antebellum South, or a National Front thug-and not contend with how it's embedded in systems we're benefiting from or complicit in. They can call themselves anti-racist very proudly, but that doesn't go any further than not saying the N-word. LL: Should language evolve? When, say, Michaela Coel spoke at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2018, she purposefully didn't use buzz words because she thought people get numbed by them. Instead of 'racist ' she'd say 'thoughtlessness'. Or 'under-represented people' became 'misfits'. EEJ: I understand that, but we need the specific language. Y ou have to be able to describe the problem before you can solve it. Language that is both descriptive and communicates a base level of respect for other people is important. I do like to fight for it. I'm a journalist and language is important. LL: But it does seem through the dominance of African American cinema globally and American terminology, you risk buying into the framework of their specific oppressors. EEJ: I hear a lot of white people accusing anti-racist activists in the UK of thoughtlessly appropriating the context of racism in the US to our struggle here. What they really mean is that racism doesn't exist in the UK because it's not of the kind we see in American movies. There's obviously a distinction, but the history is significantly linked via colonialism. It may be different, but it still exists. LL: Britain does seem to have a less sophisticated understanding of it. Just after Cynthia Erivo was announced as vice-president of Rada earlier this year and an old clip emerged of her talking about feeling a bit freaked out when she was touring Sister Act in Sunderland, people in the UK criticised her for being elitist. It seemed nobody twigged the discomfort outside of diverse spaces that happens to queer Black women... EEJ: Yet it was immediately obvious to me. I've had the experience of growing up in London, which is very diverse and where my presence is more welcome. So going to places in my early twenties where they've never seen Black people before and stare at you is uncomfortable. I think so many of the people who accused her of being anti-regional just had no concept of that. Maybe the more cynical contingent were like: “Let me leap on this to further my agenda and shut down a Black woman talking about their experience. ” LL: So it's great that in 2024 Erivo is Rada's vice-president, and there are more Black films and TV... but this idea of, “We did it!” is frustrating. EEJ: Yes. “What more do you want?” I certainly see that in our industry, and I want people to get past thinking of diversity as something they do for other people as a charitable act, rather than seeing it as something they stand to benefit from. At a basic level, a more diverse film and TV industry means better films and television. It means more original films and television; it means a wider pool of talent. It means more thorough self-reflection in the art and more rigorous filmmaking. It allows them to exercise the empathy muscle just as those of us CRITICS ON CRITICSLEILA LATIF ELLEN E. JONESSeldom in the male-dominated sphere of cinema do the voices of women speak loudest, not least when those voices belong to women of colour. So to inaugurate our new BFB series in which critics excavate the minds of fellow critics, film journalist Leila Latif meets Ellen E. Jones, the author of Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the W orld32BLACK FILM BULLETIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
who've been historically marginalised do when we go to the cinema. That's the great power of film and television. When we start thinking about it as something that enriches everybody's experience and see there are also lots of commercial incentives to connect with different audience groups, you'll get rid of that attitude of 'one person in and we're done'. LL: Donald Glover has said Tina Fey told him he was hired on 30 Rock [2006-13] as part of that sort of box-ticking exercise. EEJ: That period in liberal American comedy was very complacent about race because Obama was in the White House and blackface was on 30 Rock numerous times. It's a great show but one of the things I wanted to do with the book is challenge people out of that complacency-reminding them there was blackface on television and other kinds of racism very recently and some of it continues to this day. Unless we look it in the boot-polished eye, we can't move on. LL: I agree, but I understand people's reluctance to sully memories of art they love. Even myself, with an icon like Sidney Poitier, I want to acknowledge respectability politics, but sometimes it feels like that's diminishing his legacy. EEJ: It's not Poitier's fault, it's the system's fault. People are put in positions where in order to get ahead and do something culturally important, they have to work within the system which is demeaning or oppressing other people. I want people to have more nuanced conversations because it's not just that blackface is in bad taste, but also that dehumanising and demeaning mass entertainment has a direct effect on Black people's rights. It leads to knee-jerk criminalisation of Black people; it affects the educational standards in communities of colour. This isn't just a matter of good taste, good comedy or opportunities for filmmakers of colour. It's about how we absorb and perpetuate these attitudes in real people's lives. LL: I thought American Fiction [2023] was so great at depicting how narrow the perception of Blackness still is, and how awards shows love art about people of colour suffering. EEJ: The only way in which Black people were depicted at all in a sort of awards-level film would be as slaves or servants... Hattie Mc Daniel or Chief Dan George or Anna May Wong, who respectively were essentially standing alone as movie stars of colour at a time when the roles available were so narrow. Yet what's magnificent about them in films like Gone with the Wind [1939] or Little Big Man [1970] is that you see the constraints put upon them by the writing and the genre conventions, but simultaneously you see their charisma and talent. They bring a sort of defiant humanity to it. LL: Director Barry Jenkins asked his Black friends and family about making The Underground Railroad [2021] and they all said, “Please don't!” I think Black audiences can differ from white audiences in what they want to see and reward. EEJ: It's the same for most journalists of colour. There's a reluctance to write about race at all in case you're stuck writing about it for the rest of your life-and you want to do other things too. But at the same time it's important and you care about it. I found writing this book fascinating, but behind every book or film about race or TV show about a person of colour, there's a lot of additional labour. Filmmakers and writers have to mediate how the film's going to play with white audiences, Black audiences, mixed audiences, liberals and conservatives. It's as T oni Morrison said: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. ” LL: A professor of African American studies recently shared his frustration about the assumption that Black writing and filmmaking is always autobiographical. EEJ: Y ou see that in music criticism as well. Grime was criminalised because if a young Black man tells a story about some criminal activity, [it's assumed] he must be talking from his own personal experience. Whereas if Johnny Cash tells a story about murdering a woman, he's obviously being creative. But I 'I understand people's reluctance to sully memories of art they love. Even myself, with an icon like Sidney Poitier, I want to acknowledge respectability politics, but sometimes it feels like that's diminishing his legacy' LEILA LATIF ABOVE Thuso Mbedu and Barry Jenkins shooting The Underground Railroad (2021)33 BLACK FILM BULLETIN | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
guess an anxiety in myself that I've had to overcome in writing the book and talking about the book is asking whether I, as a light-skinned, mixed-race person, had the experiences to talk about racism? There's cultural cachet which comes with being the oppressed group sometimes and people want to kind of muscle in on that, so that's a legitimate concern. But we really have to resist this conflation of being anti-racist with Blackness. It's everybody's problem to solve, particularly the white people benefiting from it. LL: There's always concern about taking a more worthy person's seat at the table. I've had a lot of privilege, but in journalism, imposter syndrome sets in when I'm positioned as the voice of the marginalised. EEJ: The important thing is to be aware of it. Director Ngozi Onwurah says something I really relate to in that she used to feel like the acceptable face of Blackness for the BBC. In contrast to if a big Black bloke with dreads was trying to pitch documentaries; she was a light-skinned, mixed-race woman and that gave her access. But it also allows the institution to say that they're doing something without too much change or discomfort. I grew up on a council estate, but I had various privileges. I go on about going to Cambridge University, not because I'm showing off but because I want people to know what I've had access to that got me to this position. Cambridge teaches you how to participate in this system. Y ou're learning a new language, and there's a confidence you acquire from seeing behind the curtain. LL: It's funny that you became adept at making these institutions feel comfortable with you, and then wrote a book that asks them to have uncomfortable conversations. EEJ: The deeper you get in the system, the more you realise quite how unjust it is. Working in national newspapers and seeing how many people there were the son of someone important, or how a lot of the hot young 'outsider' directors have parents in the film industry-we have to talk about class in conjunction with race to develop an understanding of oppressions other than the ones that directly affect us. LL: Even now, having succeeded in this industry-are there misconceptions about you? EEJ: I had a lovely childhood and an advantage in growing up in a multicultural place with people from all around the world and different class backgrounds. Part of the book addresses the misconception that if you grew up in a little village and went to a private school, you should feel sorry for someone like me. No. It's the other way around. I feel sorry for you. It's funny, we don't talk enough about that as film critics: how you bring in personal life experiences every time you view a film. There was a recent film where there was a gender divide in the reviews, and that dynamic seemed to me quite obvious. If you understand and appreciate it, it makes the film more interesting. But if I said that to any male critic, I think they'd be hugely offended. The problem is, for many of us, our whole identities are politicised. So every time I speak for women or for people of colour or for working-class people, that's seen as political, while a white middle-class man's personal experiences are seen as neutral. LL: When I hated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [2017], I felt the assumption was that it was because of my race, rather than that it fell apart in the third act. EEJ: Y our opinion gets de-legitimised because the opinion of a Black woman must be biased, even though there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion. The only thing we can do is to acknowledge our biases, be upfront about them, and then the reader or the audience can take it in that context and filter it through their own systems of truth. The next Black Film Bulletin will appear in our December issue. For additional BFB features, visit bfi. org. uk/articles/category/black-film-bulletin 'I want people to have more nuanced conversations- it's not just that blackface is in bad taste, but also that dehumanising and demeaning entertainment has a direct effect on Black people's rights' ELLEN E. JONES BELOW Vivien Leigh and Hattie Mc Daniel in Gone with the Wind (1939)34BLACK FILM BULLETIN IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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As his blackly comic thriller Hit Man hits UK screens, Richard Linklater discusses the myth of the everyday assassin for hire and looks back over the highlights of his electrifying career, from his Sundance breakthrough Slacker and his early battles for independence from studio control in the 1990s WORDS BY HANNAH MCGILL. PHOTOGRAPHY BY HUGUES LAWSON-BODYRICHARD LINKLATER: In the grounds of the Louvre, Richard Linklater is being sanguine in the face of some intensely Parisian café service -the kind where they look at you as if you are complètement fou for thinking they might seat you at a table and serve you food. Delay is accepted with good cheer, rudeness with amusement. Equability and resilience have been elements of the Linklater brand ever since he began calling in friends and favours to make no-budget shorts in his hometown of Austin, T exas, in the early 80s. In 1985, he set up the Austin Film Society, partly as a means of extending his own film education; and then in 1990, with his second feature Slacker, he emerged as a hotly tipped Sundance star in his own right. Linklater has also had time to accustom himself to Parisian attitude, having been resident in the city for several months while he works on Nouvelle V ague, his French-language period piece about the making of À bout de souffle (1960) and the youthful personnel of the French New Wave. I remark that the French will either love him or hate him for this incursion into sacred territory. He acknowledges the daunting nature of the undertaking, but says he feels that he and his team have by now been “anointed” to make the film. F anny Ardant has dropped by the set; so has Catherine Deneuve, who lives nearby. The French New Wave was key to the development of Linklater's own cinephilia-“It's important to everybody,” he says with force -and just seeing his lookalike actors embody the young Godard, Seberg, Rohmer, Demy, Varda and T ruffaut is an evident thrill. “This film is a séance !” he says. “Not one of them is alive any more-but we brought them all back. ” Associated though he is with sometimes confronting levels of naturalism (the impact of seeing familiar characters age for real on screen is strangely intense, and you should watch the raw domestic arguments in Before Midnight with a long-term significant other only if you dare face what it might scratch up), Linklater also has an eye for a skilled impersonation. His previous showbiz period piece Me and Orson W elles (2008) centred on a justly celebrated channelling of Welles by Christian Mc Kay. Before Nouvelle V ague, however, comes Hit Man, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last autumn and will now screen on Netflix, after its cinema release. Loosely based on a true story, Hit Man tells of affable community college philosophy lecturer Gary Johnson, played by Glen Powell, whose casual work advising the local police escalates into a hazardous undercover gig as a fake hitman. Gary elicits enough incriminating information from the would-be contractor; his police colleagues swoop in; Gary-ideally- melts away into the crowd. Gary takes to the performance element of the job like a natural, soon incorporating elaborate disguises and accents. But when he's approached by the ravishing Madison (Adria Arjona), the real Gary can't help wanting to help her for real-and not by killing her possessive husband as per her initial request. The solidity or otherwise of what we call the self is a theme that runs through many of Linklater's films, from the looping philosophical conversations of Slacker, through the coming-of-age lessons learned in the youth ensembles Dazed and Confused (1993) and Everybody W ants Some!! (2016), to the blown minds and scrambled identities of his rotoscope-animated projects W aking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), 'We should all have sympathy for each other, no matter how badly someone acts. We love to condemn people-but what would you be if you'd been dealt the same hand? Some people are just more lucky than others' OPPOSITE Richard Linklater in Paris'I WANT TO TAKE YOU ON A CRAZY RIDE'37 | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Hannah Mc Gill: What was the origin of Hit Man ? It wasn't a ten-or twenty-year project, but it was a long-term one... richard linklater: Like so many of my movies, yeah-years and years. It was a 2001 article by Skip Hollandsworth [in Texas Monthly ]. I called Skip-“What a fascinating story. ” I just had my eye on it forever. I love that character, Gary Johnson, so much-but I also love this notion that pop culture has bled into the real world and had real-life consequences. Everybody thinks they can have someone bumped off if they spend the money! I had read that one of the most famous hitman manuals was written by, like, a Southern Californian housewife, so I was already on to that, when I read Skip's article. And he said: “Yeah, there's no record of a hitman ever being real. ” Wait-I can't hire a hitman? People are always a little disappointed! Shouldn't that be good news? Look, if you're a gang, or you run a drug cartel, you have people working for you who can kill people. It's the notion of the private meeting, one to one, with someone who's not working for anyone, who's unaffiliated. Retail hitmen. That's the myth. I want to make that clear. There are drug killings, there are gangs, there's all that Good Fellas stuff-but the notion that it's available to the general public is just silly. People try, though. They do, all the time, and they end up in jail, and that's what makes the headlines. But having studied it all these years, I'd never seen an article about a hitman being arrested. Never even the police report with “We think this is a professional job. ” The darkest thought is that we all like the idea. Like anyone who pisses you off is only here because you're letting them be! Hit Man has coincided with a few other new titles about contract killing, including David Fincher's The Killer and Harmony Korine's Aggro Dr1ft, both of which were also at Venice. Y ou also reference within it a few celebrated ones, like Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract [1958] and George Armitage's beloved John Cusack-starrer Grosse Pointe Blank [1997]. But yours is set apart by the fact that it debunks its own central trope. Way back then, John [Cusack] really wanted me to direct that. I wasn't interested-I mean, [that character] is not a good guy!-but we've got it in our little montage. The good news is, it's a really safe time to be alive. It's a really safe world. My previous movie, Apollo 10 1/2 [2022]-for a long time its title was 'Portrait of a Free-Range Childhood', because it's about when kids could just be outside in the neighbourhood, playing, and parents not even know where they were. That era could come back if parents would allow it. We think we live in a much more dangerous world than we do. So that intrigued me on a cultural level. But Skip's article had a repetition to it-not much really happened. In a way there's a movie there. It's kind of fun, but it doesn't really have a third act-it's a character piece. I'd thought about it over the years and it didn't quite work. When Glen Powell called me over lockdown-the article had come up for option, and it floated his way, and I was like, “Yeah, I've been on that since you were in junior high!” It was fun to engage with an actor about it, who'd thought about it. And the more we talked about it, the more of a playful attitude we had. It was like, “Let's, you know... who cares?” When you make a film exactly historically accurate to the tee, no one gives you a certificate that says: “Y our Film Was Really Accurate”. It took Glen to jostle me and say, “What if we just use this as a basis?” I was kind of in the mood. Why not? It's a great character. Let's just own it. The article ends when Gary meets this young woman who's trying to solicit the murder of her husband, and he knows she just needs help. He doesn't want to see her in prison for the next twenty years, so he lets her off. The idea was: what if she got back in touch with him to say thank you and he doesn't come clean? And she's clearly attracted, and attractive? That's when our themes really kicked in: about identity and self and-can you change? I've thought about this a lot, and seen it in myself. If you go back to Before Sunset, there's a part where Ethan talks about us having set points [His character Jesse says, “We just have these innate set points; nothing much that happens to us changes our disposition. ”] That's what I really believed in, for years: that you could win the lottery, but six weeks later, you'd still be yourself. That you're stuck with yourself. But just in the last few years, I've read a lot about personality. I think it's become more of a notion, that it's of the times. There's something really exhilarating in that moment when Gary suddenly unveils a whole different way of being. Everybody has a fantasy of that. Could I really be someone else? We're good at accepting ourselves, but... what's that old joke, I think it's a Woody Allen line, about his one regret in life being that he wasn't someone else, with a slightly different personality? Y ou do read about willed personality change but it usually relates to a terminal diagnosis, or a head injury... And that takes you on to neurological disorders-how we're mind-wired, how that can change. ON HIT MANthe latter based on the 1997 novel by Philip K. Dick. The two monumental experiments in cinematic time for which Linklater has been most celebrated-the trilogy Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), which track the relationship between Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) from meet cute to midlife, and Boyhood (2014), which follows a family over 12 years-also mull on identity formation, free will and the nature of self. A further temporal experiment, Linklater's forthcoming version of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily W e Roll Along, will shoot over 20 years and unspool in reverse, taking its hero-played by Paul Mescal-from who he is to who he was. Even Linklater's chunkiest mainstream hit, the delightful middle-school comedy School of Rock (2003), begins with the assumption of a false identity, as Jack Black's hapless aspiring musician appropriates his friend's supply teaching job and unlocks a whole new life. It's not difficult to map Linklater's fascination with hustlers, fakers and forks in roads on to his own origin story and attitude to his art. The magnanimity for which he's known is also the adaptability of someone who forged his career without much institutional backing and with no nepotistic networks. T o the casual observer, he has looked like an insider ever since the time of Slacker -a status affirmed by the film's prominent inclusion in Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes, John Pierson's 1996 chronicle of the transformations wrought upon American independent cinema during the 1990s. Linklater's own experience, however, has always been that of an interloper. He's not from New Y ork or Los Angeles; not from money or arty origins; not even from film school. His identity as a T exan also remains key to his work and life. “I always get drawn back there,” he says. He remains closely involved in the case of convicted murderer Bernie Tiede, about whose complex history he made the 2011 film Bernie, and for whose release he continues to campaign. Linklater has also contributed a standalone film to the HBO documentary series God Save Texas, alongside films by Alex Stapleton and Iliana Stosa. His contribution examines the pipeline from the joyful teen sport scene he participated in and portrays in Everybody W ants Some!! to the local prison. This piece has been described, he says, as “a bit of a Rosetta Stone” for his own film work. This is said with a touch of self-consciousness, for while he's aware of his own contribution, elder statesman status still seems like an itchy fit for Linklater. Numerous times in our conversation, and despite a distinctly affable and open demeanour, he refers to himself as insecure or shy. T alking about his 30-year career, meanwhile, has become “kind of abstract. High points, low points, biographical signposts... at some point, it's like, is that even you?” Well, that's the question. 38 | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Which Jesse is writing a novel about in Before Midnight-remember, I've just watched all of your films! Very much so! I can usually reference these things without anyone noticing -“Y ou touched on that. ” But yeah, these are the themes I'm interested in. The most frightening one I read-this looms for everybody, and it might be worse than a terminal diagnosis-is the little brain tumour that turns you into a gambling addict, or a paedophile; that changes your personality. So now I'm in the camp that [believes] we're not that fixed. We don't have that much control. I don't know if I believe in free will. We should all have sympathy for each other, no matter how badly someone acts. We love to condemn and judge and seek retribution against people-but what would you be if you'd been dealt the same hand? Some people are just more lucky than others. And there's wilful change. We all know that jerk as a kid who grew up to be OK. Something happens, and you're a fine adult. And then, conversely, some people get worse and worse and worse. I don't know where I fall on that spectrum, but I like to think you can get better. And changing or concealing your identity can be part of that. Like Wyatt Russell's Willoughby in Everybody W ants Some!!, who's a fraud in a way-he's passing himself off as a college kid even though he's thirty-but who uses it for good. He just turns everybody on to the cool Pink Floyd album [ Meddle, 1971], yeah. I like con men, people who aren't who they say they are. I like that in earlier centuries, before everything was computerised, you could really get away with that. My county in T exas, right outside of Austin, it's called Bastrop. It was founded because they were giving out land grants, and this grifter guy came along claiming to be a European baron, Baron Something de Bastrop. And they gave him all the land. It's still named after his fictional title. If you had the balls and the gumption to do it and get away with it... that's kind of the American way. We reward a con if it works. If it works, and we like you. I mean, T rump is the greatest con man. LEFT Glen Powell as Gary Johnson in Hit Man'My county in T exas is called Bastrop. It's named after the fictional title of this grifter guy who came along claiming to be a European baron. If you had the balls to do it and get away with it... that's kind of the American way' 39 RICHARD LINKLATER | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Likable, though? He is, actually... he has a certain charm. In the way the wrestler is, the bad guy-you love hating them, they willingly play the heel, they're just funny enough, they can deliver a line... I don't wanna talk about T rump. The tone you take in Hit Man is quite breezy, it's delightful-and that creates a space where you can allow these characters to do pretty bad things without losing our affection. Absolutely. That's called the power of cinema! For the gangster films and film noirs of the 30s, 40s, 50s, there was a moral code. Yes, you could do all of that, but Barbara Stanwyck was going to die at the end. That's long gone. Y ou can actually have people get away with it. Once we got going with this story, I had every film genre going round in my head, and it was really fun to play with those. That moral code, even though it's not really the thing any more-there's still a puritanical, maybe religious-based, order in all our brains that wants to see justice done. But my take was... give people some latitude. Everybody's got their thing. Behind every fortune, there's a crime, if you look back far enough. Every corporate CEO had to get started... And I see it in myself. Those first couple films-I was doing some illegal shit! [ Slacker was filmed without any shooting permits, for example. ] But it was for the greater cause, of me getting to do what I wanted in this world. And I kind of respect that, because the world is set up for you not to really achieve what you want. Y ou have to find a crack in the universe to achieve it. Especially if you don't come from privilege. It's the strivers who need to do that, and I see both Gary and Madison in that category. We don't know what kind of relationship she's coming out of; we know less about her than him, but she's clearly troubled. I thought it was interesting to go the screwball route, and say: “What if these people are totally meant for each other?” Then it becomes: “What's keeping them apart?” There's all this stuff. There's barely knowing who the other is... that's just funny to me. So that's how it became a mash-up of noir and screwball. When you're managing tone in that way, are you thinking commercially at all-where the film will fit in the market-or just about the story? I think just story. I was always thinking of a dark comic tone-a comedy that got scarily real at times. I wanted to take you on a crazy ride. And again: cinema can really do that. It can make you go to the edge of your seat, it can make the walls close in. I haven't done a lot of that-suspense-so it was fun to be in a story that had that element. Films are all about tone and perspective. This film is absolutely Gary's perspective. He tells you everything you need to know -even though he's not a completely reliable narrator, because of his lack of self-knowledge. The tell is right off the bat, when he says, “There I was, minding my own business... ” Y ou're not minding your own business! Y ou're setting up an operation to put a guy in prison! That's the opposite of minding your own business. So he's not the most reliable narrator, but he's doing the best he can-as much as any of us can be believed when we're talking about ourselves. The dark comic tone, I've been in before, primarily with Bernie. It's a sweet spot that's hard to hit and maintain-but that's in the acting. Y ou've often worked very closely with actors on script and character, as you did with Delpy and Hawke, and here you had a collaborator in Glen Powell, who has a screenplay credit. Yeah, it was a great thing. Our collaboration was an ongoing thing, and it took different forms. During the pandemic we were on the phone and on the laptop. Then we changed 'Cinema can make you go to the edge of your seat, it can make the walls close in. I haven't done a lot of that- suspense-so it was fun to be in a story that had that element' BELOW Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man 40 | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
roles and were actor/director, but we were both just grinding through every detail, the whole way. Was he someone you had always wanted to place in a lead role? I mean, I knew him as a teenager-but it was when he auditioned for Everybody W ants Some!! that I was like-“Wow, when did Glen become this?” He's got quick synapses, quick neural firing, and I love that in an actor. Because I do such talky movies, I need people who can deliver quickly and coherently and still be funny. There are some actors who are... not that fast. Then Adria came in, completed our little triangle, and jumped in in the same way-she joined us later, but it was just awesome, her voice, her brain. She had strong opinions: “I would never say that. ” She had it all worked out. My worst is an actor who just looks at you and goes, “I don't know, you wrote it. ” I need a little more. I like actors who come with something, and then you can redirect as necessary. Something your films bring out a lot, because of all the talking, is the idiosyncrasies of informal communication-the way people joke and tease, silly voices, in-jokes. When you're thinking of bigger themes, there's no room for that. But I want it all to be about that-specific, real-life details. Sometimes it's in the script, but a lot of it is just my process: I get actors together and build relationships and start seeing how their personalities spin. The script-every phase of it is super important, but it's a roadmap to get better, and to be more real. Y ou can't achieve that with actors just showing up, hitting their marks and saying their lines. And you were never pressured to work with better-known leads? No, we never were on the market in that way. Glen and I wrote it on spec alone, so we never had anyone in our ear. That's the advantage of being truly independent: you don't have anyone influencing you. We were low budget; the money was scraped together internationally. The industry always shrugged its shoulders at this project, quite honestly... But I can't really even begin to think about film like that. I've created a bubble for myself; I kind of feel like market forces don't really enter my film world. Netflix picked it up, which we're grateful for; they're very passionate about it. Every filmmaker would love a studio sitting there saying, “We're gonna put it in in 2,500 screens and spent $50 million on TV ads”-whatever they do. But that's a bit of a fantasy in today's world. It's kind of wonderful and harrowing with every film: your little baby that you gestated and incubated has plopped into the world, and you've got to deal with that world-and that world is changing all the time. I find that fascinating, but I try not to get too obsessed. This is the world we plopped into! And I can't complain: everyone will be able to see the film. Film culture can be a doom-and-gloom-focused thing, because it's always pressured, it's always in competition with other forms, and it's so vulnerable to technical innovation. It progresses so fast. But I've read too much film criticism. Y ou go back to any year, read the quotes, and it just sounds like the sky is falling. Jump back to 1951, when, I don't know, The Red Badge of Courage came out. Was the market a little soft? Did they have to cut it? Y ou don't know or care. Really doesn't matter. Y ou've got to think big picture, long term. Difficult market conditions can particularly exclude people without material privilege, though. Y ou're very often counted as someone who made it despite being 'self-taught'-does that not make the hustle harder? I don't know if I agree with that. There were four thousand submissions in the narrative category last year at Sundance -that sounds like a lot of access. Well, in the UK the conversation tends to be about who has independent wealth and who has to rely on vanishing public funding. American filmmakers...... know from birth there is no money. Right, that's when you go through official channels. I mean, I was that guy too; I applied for grants. And I started a grant programme in the later 90s [the Austin Film Society Grant, for T exas filmmakers], and we've given out millions of dollars. I'm a big one on public funding. It's just a partial bit, but it helps you. And it's good for filmmakers to apply-it makes you articulate your film. It matures you, for having to deal with other people in relation to your film. Even if you don't get the money, it pushes you; and if you do get the money-a lot of artists are out on a limb, in their personal lives, and it may be the first affirmation they've had. If a granting agency says, “Hey, here's a few thousand bucks, we like what you're doing,” you can take that to your friends and relatives and go, “They think I have talent-why don't you give me a little more money?” We didn't have any money, but I could get loans from family members... they believed in me just enough. The fact is, no one wanted me. I'm here because I crashed the party. I was never invited. That goes for my life in general. I was an unwanted kid, ask my mom! I did apply to film school-I just didn't get in. So I got the best lesson early: no one's gonna help you. That's how it should be: there's too many people who want to do this. So there's no easy path. And that emboldened me. That's the great thing about the arts-you're self-motivated. Y ou're your own toughest critic, your own best friend. I was so enjoying my twenties -being in a realm of something I was so committed to, so absolutely passionate about-I didn't give a fuck what anybody else thought about what I was doing. I knew what I was doing: I was making a bunch of shorts, teaching myself. I knew they weren't, like, good; I didn't bother entering them into festivals. I didn't need anyone to look at them and say, “Y ou have potential. ” I knew exactly what I was doing. Looking back, I'm amazed how systematic and patient I was-but that's my own neurological makeup, my ADHD fixed focus. The same thing that made me a mediocre student. 'The fact is, no one wanted me. I'm here because I crashed the party. I did apply to film school- I just didn't get in. So I got the best lesson early: no one's gonna help you' ABOVE Arjona and Powell with Linklater on the set of Hit Man 41 RICHARD LINKLATER | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
In your early learning about cinema, was your focus on watching films or amassing technical expertise? All of the above. I just read a Godard quote recently about his early twenties, watching a thousand films a year. He said, “The cinema screen was the wall we had to scale to escape from our lives. ” Exactly. The people who do this are the ones who are manifesting an alternative universe for themselves. That's what I was doing. I started a film society; I just created a bubble. There was no money involved. It runs on pure interest and passion-to this day. That's what the arts are-an alternative universe where this little thing you're doing is important. Isn't that all that matters? Every young filmmaker is insecure. “Is this going to happen for me?” Well, it's going take the world a lot longer than you think to discover just how great you are. It won't be at the rate you want. It'll be when you actually maybe are great, after a lot more work than you can possibly imagine. There's a pragmatism and resilience there that might be at odds with some artistic sensibilities! Yeah, I think you can be too sensitive. I'm plenty sensitive, but I put that in the right place. Y ou've got to have this other element. I realised early on, it requires a multiple personality-you can't just have one skill-set. Y ou have to be a bit of a hustler, a charmer, a bit of a manipulator. The best book I ever read about that was Elia Kazan's A Life [1976]. He talks about qualities he had that made him feel kind of phoney: he was something to everybody. But what is film but adapting- making it work with this person, convincing that person to trust you?Do you remember first realising that a film was directed by a person-that that was a job? Not really. I didn't fully understand it for a while. When I was a kid, the one famous director was Alfred Hitchcock, and I didn't know what he did. I knew it had something to do with these scary, thrilling kind of movies we'd watch on TV... but I didn't know. I always thought I was going to be a writer. By high school, I was writing plays and short stories, and I thought, “I wonder if I could write a movie?” I think seeing Annie Hall [1977], I was like, “Oh-Woody Allen wrote that. And he's in it, and he directed it. ” It started to all make sense a little bit. I saw Eraserhead [1977], that was another one, my senior year of high school. So it started occurring to me. And then my dad explained the auteur theory to me. He wasn't a cinephile, but he had vast knowledge, he was aware of stuff. So he had some notion of the American studio system versus the European auteur. And I thought: “That sounds pretty interesting. ” So I started watching everything. Subtitled movies, for the first time. Going to movies alone. Y ou know, these little leaps you take. The day it becomes not a social mission, but what you do. Go in the afternoon, buy tickets, sit alone. It felt weird the first time, and then then you realise: this is wonderful. And setting up the film society- what inspired that? This was the mid-80s, so film societies were all kind of dying, because of video. But I just wanted to see the movies. It was completely self-serving. I realised I could rent them for a hundred and something dollars, and I could get fifty people to pay two or three dollars... Did you do the projection yourself? Me, some roommates, whoever wanted to help out. They were 60mm prints. Have you never wanted to make a film about a film society? The film freak film! Well, I'm making that right now [with Nouvelle V ague ]. They were good years. Living in your cinema, showing films, watching films. I learned a lot. Y ou learn how to go find an audience. And I think it fit my personality. I was fundamentally shy; not that outgoing. But I could do it on behalf of a F assbinder series. I could do it on behalf of cinema. I didn't mind asking for favours. Cheating. Stealing. So you knew how to do all of that when it came to making your own films. Well, parallel to that I was making my own-I was making shorts, I made a Super 8 feature [ It's Impossible to Learn to BREAKING IN 42 FLYERS COURTESY OF AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
a speech, things like that. That's completely lost these days, of course. I think the mainstream back then was still a little more avant garde, indie-curious, and now they just can't afford to be. The regional divide you mention wasn't so apparent from outside the States. As a UK teenager getting into film, I would definitely have imagined that you and Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley were all of equal status and hanging out together. I was far away! Looking up to the Jim Jarmusches and Spike Lees going, “That's that world, and New Y ork loves them and the Cannes Film Festival loves them, and here I am in the boonies: we're the flyover no one thinks about. ” But I think it woke them up: cool, crazy ideas can come from anywhere. We became like indie music. We were like the indie band from a little town, like REM from Athens, Georgia. Music can come from anywhere; why can't film? We fit that niche. In fact, I was kind of thrown in at that moment with Nirvana, with Douglas Coupland's book [ Generation X, 1991] -we were the film exponent of that whole Gen X grunge thing. Y ou gotta give editors and writers something to make cultural trends out of, so we filled a niche. I, however, didn't fill a niche in terms of, “Do you want to go on TV and talk about... ?” I was like, “No. ” Because you were shy? Yeah. Just my personality. Plus, I was already into my next film. And I knew it was a momentary thing... I ran from it immediately. But you are still widely perceived as having been part of a significant generational moment. And that can help, and it was a great time. I hate to say the last good time, but there were still those opportunities. This is what never happens any more: an executive at Universal called me up. He had heard about this rock 'n' roll, teenage, riding-around movie I wanted to do. And he called me up and said, “This sounds like it could be a real movie. ” And I'm like, “Yeah, it is a real movie. ” So I thought I could sell that and get a budget to make it and that's what happened, rather quickly. Now, you get the call and they say, “Hey, do you want to direct Spider-Man 5 ?” They never ask, “What do you want to do next?” Y ou get, “Do you want to come join a franchise?” Or, “The next film you want to do, can it be a series?” No one's looking to make your next indie film. Maybe if you're genre; maybe A24 will do your horror. But the human, adult, relationship film? No. Dazed and Confused was a period film with a large ensemble cast and many music clearances- a major logistical step up. I knew it was going to cost at least a million dollars. But I thought I could get that, maybe, because Soderbergh had gotten a million to make sex, lies and videotape [1989]. There were deals to be had. And then I just got lucky, that a studio gave me $6 million, which is what it really cost. That was a low budget too for a studio, but I got the opportunity that Spike Lee got: let's give an indie a budget. Now studios just don't do that; they're out of that business. I hate when I talk to young filmmakers about what they need to do to get an indie made, because as a producer friend of mine says, the real answer is, be born twenty-five or thirty years earlier. It's similar talking to young film critics. Y ou could probably say it in every industry. Except maybe technology. The thing that's eating all of us is the only thing that's current... And was the experience on Dazed traumatic, or did you enjoy it? Both. Here I am thirty years later making a film, and if I have a little PTSD flashback, it's always to Dazed. That one was the fight. What were you fighting? It's not how it should be, and it never has been since, but there was Plow by Reading Books, 1988]. Making sure I made a separate feature in there. Did you feel when you made Slacker that you'd gone up a level? It was probably the biggest leap I ever took. It was still a no-budget film, but I'd made films privately up to then. With this one, I was asking people to give me their time-cast and crew. That's very hard, with no money. Y ou have to really manipulate and charm when you're not able to pay people. Man, are you dancing. It was tough. Yeah. But it was also: “Can I do this? Can I lead a group, can I articulate my ideas?” Especially as it was a film that was hard to describe. Did acting in it yourself help with that, or was that more of a necessity? It was a natural offshoot of the design of the movie, but I thought I'd be the first one in the pool. I had been in acting classes for all that time, too, and you do a lot of monologues. I liked the monologue, and I also saw actors of all kinds be able to do it-even not very professional actors could still hold court on one thing. It feels like improv, but of course, it's not: it's all really tightly structured. That film... no one really knew what it was except me. I was having a little private revolution. But we all believed. What did it feel like when it was not only accepted, but embraced? I've found myself in this same headspace since: “This is a film that may not work; maybe no one will understand it; it doesn't have a story; it doesn't have a recurring character. ” But I had such deep belief in the experience it would be watching it, I thought I could keep an audience. I come back to the power of cinema. I bet the whole thing there. And then when it... I say 'worked', it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but people who knew cinema saw whatever was fresh about it. A lot of teachers showed it: here's a film that breaks every rule, and yet somehow works. And I had no faith because at that point, the indie world was truly a New Y ork phenomenon. I thought, “I'll make this film from T exas and because it doesn't have cowboys in it, no one will take this film seriously at all. ” I guess on an anthropological, social level, I was amazed that we would be accepted in places like New Y ork. I always had that little Southern chip on my shoulder: the left-behind, the lower class... I thought it just wouldn't be accepted in the official film world. And I was just amazed at how open they were. That's a real tribute to our business. So that was wild, to see it get picked up and become part of the cultural conversation -President Clinton quoting it in ABOVE & OPPOSITE Early flyers for the Austin Film Society, which Linklater founded in 1985'I hate when I talk to young filmmakers about what they need to do to get an indie made, because as a producer friend of mine says, the real answer is, be born twenty-five or thirty years earlier'43 RICHARD LINKLATER | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
something on that film... Let's start with my own lack of experience. That creates an insecurity and a paranoia. And I'm stepping out of the indie world, and I'm Mr Indie with a chip on my shoulder. I've seen this story, that you go Hollywood and they fuck up your movie, and I was determined for that not to happen-so I'm looking over my shoulder all the time. That's not a good way to be. And like I said, that leap from Slacker, from me and my friends getting somewhere together... now it's money people, executives, a huge crew, department heads, trucks. I would visit friends on movie sets and look around and go, “What the fuck is all this? Y ou don't need this. I just need a camera and I'm good, I don't need any of this. ” Then you make a period film and it's like... I kind of do need all this. But I'm still driving up to the first day on my own production, seeing all these trucks and people and I'm like, “Y ou better be ready, man. Y ou better be ready. ” But did you have the sense that the film was going to work artistically? Yeah, I was really excited. It's a bifurcated thing: I love the movie, but everything around it was volatile and precarious. And the culture is kind of gunning for you to fail. Even people in the studio-they see some dailies, and the rumour comes out that it's not working, that it's going to go straight to video... a lot of comments, a lot of studio notes. There was also a notion that like, “Here's this punk kid, now he's Mr Sellout”-the 90s were very sellout-averse! When the film dropped into the world, it was a studio production that was seen as an indie because they distributed it like an indie, which is sort of the worst of both worlds. Dazed has certainly passed into the lexicon, partly thanks to early glimpses of future megastars like Matthew Mc Conaughey and Ben Affleck. It doesn't seem, from the outside, like it flopped. It was what was called an industry hit. Everyone in the industry loved it. It's a misperception when people say, “No one saw it; it was a bomb. ” It wasn't. It made eight point something million, so that's an indie success-it just wasn't a studio success. It opened in 183 theatres, not a thousand. It didn't have ads... So, I learned a lesson there. Dazed never quit giving me lessons all the way down the line. Because I had an expectation. We had these great preview audiences, with everyone applauding, so you think, “This is the response!” And then the studio would look at it and be like, “It's a bunch of people nobody knows. Who's the audience for it?” I said, “Everyone who's been to high school!” But they were just so negative. I just went through the wringer with the bureaucracy. And again, I'm insecure. At that point I didn't even have final cut. So it hovers over you, that they could just say, “We're taking it off you and we're going to recut it to make it better. ” I don't think they ever actually threatened that... but the power dynamic hovers. So I was just determined to get out with my movie intact, and I did that. It's like in every boxing career... there's the title fight, but the real title fight was back here. There's the fight that makes or breaks you, and that was Dazed for me. If I can get through that, I can get through anything. And I did. And from then on it was like-“OK, I don't need that guy on my set, or yelling on the phone, I don't need that... I've really realised how to do it, how to take control of the whole thing and bring it completely under my personality and wants. ” And it's been like that ever since. So I've never had the same problems. But that was the one I just had to learn-I just got thrown in there. I was glad to survive. I still feel very close to the cast. I love them. But, you know, I came up short in my own ways. I set the bar very high for myself and I achieved in some areas and underachieved in others. Y ou know, with the women. If you read the script, I had much more... I kind of let the boys run away with it a bit. So after that, what I wanted to do was to bring my acting theories and this way I work to just two people. It was somewhere in the process. ABOVE Matthew Mc Conaughey, Joey Lauren Adams, Rory Cochrane and Deena Martin in Dazed and Confused (1993) 'In every boxing career... there's the title fight, but the real title fight was back here. There's the fight that makes or breaks you, and that was Dazed and Confused for me'44 IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Conversation became a clear focus- at least as important, in much of your work, as plot. Was this about developing philosophical ideas through your characters, or more about the dynamics of the conversations themselves? Conversation is my default, and I think we're all kind of philosophical. I was always like that: even among all my partying, I always found deeper things going on. That was just my own brain, and having good friends who aren't stupid. That whole thing of trying to figure out the world- I found a form for that, although it's a challenge to make it work cinematically. Slacker, Dazed... and Before Sunrise all take place over specific time periods. Y ou continued to restrict and expand narrative time, culminating in the unique project that was Boyhood ; you're at it again with Merrily W e Roll Along. Was this a conscious undertaking, or did it develop through the stories? It was just the way those stories played out in my head. I wasn't wedded to it- I had scripts that were more traditionally structured that I just hadn't made yet -but it happened enough times that it was like, “Y ou're the guy who does that!” So I started saying that one day I'd do a real-time movie, like Bergman's Winter Light [1963]. I was joking, but I ended up doing two in ten years, Tape [2001] and Before Sunset. And then it was like... “I think I'm good at that. I like that. ” The intensity of our engagement with Jesse and Céline, including the fact that they can each be exasperating, is what makes the Before... films so compelling-but it must have been a gamble. At the first rehearsal, when Julie and Ethan came in, it was like: “This film lives or dies with this, with the two of them. ” It was such a tightrope walk. On Dazed..., if something didn't work, I just cut it-I was shaping it constantly. But there was no shaping this material. It's got to all work, and it's got to work in long, long takes. The bar that they had to hit was so high, and yet it had to seem effortless. But I did what I always do: process the material through them. We rewrite and we find new things. So the actors might tell you, ON HIS LATER FILMS“I wrote that!”, but... I'm writing up to the day we're shooting. I want to wake up with a better idea this morning, based on what happened yesterday -it's a living, breathing thing all the way. And at the point of shooting, I want that to be maxed out: we explore everything, and the result of that is what we film. That's the methodology. It's really demanding; it's like, you're going to give everything of yourself to this film. We're going to reach a certain perfection that would be fine for most -and then we're going to keep going. We're going to keep rehearsing; we're going to know it better... I joke that it's like a Steely Dan song. Reach what you think is perfection, and then keep going. Put on another layer. Find something new. Bring in Michael Mc Donald. Steely Dan is an interesting analogy: incredibly skilled and knowledgeable musicians, striving to make something that communicates across the board... Yeah. It's all at the service of a catchy pop song. We're here to entertain. I want people to laugh with and be moved by Jesse and Céline, and to see themselves in them. I don't want to be boring. A lot of my films probably sound boring-a bunch of guys hanging out!-but I want to be the opposite of boring. BELOW Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Céline and Jesse in Before Sunrise (1995)'I want people to laugh with and be moved by Jesse and Céline. A lot of my films probably sound boring- a bunch of guys hanging out!-but I want to be the opposite of boring'45 RICHARD LINKLATER | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Something I love in your films is extended depictions of people having fun-whether it's Jesse and Céline, or the boys in Everybody W ants Some!! singing 'Rapper's Delight' in the car. It's the kind of thing that often gets consigned to montages... Before getting back to the real drama that means something! But you give it time. And that also applies to the rough stuff, the arguments, like the soul-scourging one in Before Midnight. That was the most fun to write, because it was like the greatest hits of every fight we'd been in, and we can go back and find the perfect rejoinder. What I kept saying to them was, “This fight is over, but you just have one more point. ” The fight-the whole film-also shows the audience the cost of what it's been so invested in, the real-life cost of Jesse and Céline's great love. ON BALANCING LIGHT AND DARKThe vast shift of becoming a parent is also a running theme. But you've dealt with the other side of that too, by making celebratory films for and about children. Can you talk about the appeal of doing something like School of Rock ? My daughter at the time was exactly that age. And it came to me-it was the first film I did that came to me. I was in a place of: “I've done OK, here's another leap to take. Can I come aboard something and have a good creative experience?” And that's exactly what happened. Jack Black, Mike White and I were like the Three Musketeers, trying to make a good movie, cool movie or whatever. I remember as a kid, the adults I liked were the ones who didn't pat you on the head and treat you like a baby. They treated you like an equal. That's what Jack does: treat them like contemporaries of his. And Jack is the most extraordinary performer I'll ever work with. So it was about that tone, that performance, and again, the idea of finding yourself. Y our A Scanner Darkly for me honours Philip K. Dick's tone in a way other adaptations of his work haven't. 'There have been good Philip K. Dick adaptations. But I wanted to capture the weirdness, the drugs. It's dark territory, for sure, but it was such a blessing to get to do it authentically'We leave it [in Before Sunset ] at that romantic moment, but then you go, “Oh, shit. ” He's not happily married, but he is married. And she's in a relationship too. One of our producers had moral problems with that. I said, “T rust me, everyone's pulling for them. The film has investment. ” But we couldn't treat it glibly. That's why it fades out, right? Because everything that happens from this point on has real-world consequences. And the perfect place to begin again is with those consequences: the kid. It's the San Andreas F ault under the relationship. It's always going to be there. Just the other night, Ethan Hawke told an audience that he wants to make a fourth one. Someone sent me that! I think we all just kind of say that. It's a routine question, once you've made three films, and we always say yes. We've missed our nine-year deadline, but you never know the future... That last one was so hard. It's hard to make a film about middle age. It's just not sexy. Y ou're older; you're kind of set in life... I made another film sort of about a long-term relationship drifting and coming back together-Where'd Y ou Go, Bernadette [2019]. It isn't romantic, fun, cinematic territory, but it's very real, especially to people of a certain age who've had to live it. So I felt it worth honouring. People are interested in getting together and in breaking up-but what about the middle bit: how you right the ship? No one makes films about that. BELOW Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood (2014) 46 IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVERICHARD LINKLATER | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
They always grab the idea and make it a serious movie. And there have been good ones. But I wanted to capture the weirdness, the drugs... it was all so personal. I got to know his kids, one daughter in particular. She gave me his own copy of A Scanner Darkly. And she said, “This was a real world. This was my dad, this was my mom, I knew these guys, we lived in that house... ” It's his most personal work. It's dark territory, for sure, but it was such a blessing to get to go there, and to do it authentically. A faithful adaptation- not to try to make it something else. Are you less attached to films where you didn't write the script yourself? No. I process the script the exact same way. Whether I've written it or co-written it or not written it, you find something, you find a new level. Some of them change more than others, but you always have to find what the story is, so I don't really see much difference. I think most directors would say that. It's not a put-down on screenwriters: it's just it's a directors' medium. TV is the great place for writers and actors, but films-you've got to barrel towards an ending. On TV, you can just string it out forever, but film has to tell tight stories. Everything has to make sense. Directing is problem-solving. If you look at the history of cinema, what's the background of the early directors? A lot of engineers. A lot of construction. Architecture. And that was my goal on Hit Man : it was an engineering feat, a lot of effort to get it tight. He's got this problem. Now he's also got that problem. How do you solve those in a satisfying way? Every film is a massive challenge that way. So you thought you'd simplify things by making a film in French? Every filmmaker should at one point make a film about making films. So, yeah, I'm making a French film from 1959. It's my same hanging-out vibe, but it's 1959. But it's also a depiction of somebody making their first film, which they can't explain to anybody; someone who's trying to do something different and driving everybody a little crazy... so I relate on a couple of levels. Y ou sometimes seem to be sticking up for people or groups who aren't at the fashionable end of the discourse- jocks in Everybody W ants Some!!, whiny white guys in the Before... films, French auteur directors... It's all going out of fashion! Film's going out of fashion! Every film, I've felt like I was getting away with something. Now I feel I'm getting away with something making a film at all. Yeah, the New Wave was kind of male. Point me to the industry that wasn't, in 1959. History is a horror show. Y ou can't go back and correct it; all you can do is deal with it. And women were never not there. They just never got top billing. Who could be nostalgic? Only a really conservative person. Y ou also seem to go against the grain by not being preoccupied with dark underbellies. Y our films often skew positive, or at least optimistic. What's your idea of dark? Scanner 's dark... Tape... Fast Food Nation [2006] is dark. There's plenty of darkness! But if I'm making one of my autobiographical films, those just aren't the stakes. That's not what happened. We've all seen phoney dark drama. I just wanted to document what it feels like to be alive-that's the bigger project here. What it was like to be in a certain place in time. Hit Man is released in UK cinemas on 24 May and on Netflix from 7 June. It is reviewed on page 66 ABOVE An animated Keanu Reeves in Linklater's Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly (2006)'Directing is problem-solving. What's the background of the early directors? A lot of engineers. A lot of construction. And that was my goal on Hit Man : it was an engineering feat, a lot of effort to get it tight ' | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
ON TEEN MOVIES “[With Dazed and Confused ] it was fun to be in a genre that I knew pretty well. There are a lot of good high-school movies. My favourite ones are really the edge movies, Over the Edge [)979, starring Matt Dillon, left], River's Edge [)986]. I like If.... [)968] a lot-the true way to end a teenage movie is complete apocalypse, whether it's imagined or real. Like in Over the Edge, they're fire-bombing the school-that's the ultimate teen thing. ” ( Sight and Sound, May )995)ON HIS FAVOURITE HITMAN MOVIE “It was weird being at Venice this year, because everyone was saying to me, 'So there's four hitman movies here this year!' [ The Killer, Aggro Dr1ft, Knox Goes Away ], and I was like, 'But... is mine a hitman movie? Am I not deconstructing this?' And I was pointing out: 'Isn't it interesting that ours is based on a real character, someone I knew, and it's a comedy; and the ones based on, like, comic books [David Fincher's The Killer ] are very dark and serious?' But, the one I do suggest is Murder by Contract [)958]. It's an Irving Lerner film-he was mainly an editor. My editor Sandra [Adair, who has cut all of Linklater's films since )993] worked with him actually, early in her career-she was his second assistant. He did this super-low budget in New Y ork, with Vince Edwards, who was in [Stanley Kubrick's )956 film] The Killing and in a bunch of TV shows, this good-looking, young man. Anyway, he's a hitman and... it's really funny. Not a comedy, no-I laugh because he's kind of this Übermensch who's above the common morality. It's Dostoevsky all over again. ” ON ORSON WELLESSCHOOL OF CINEMA ON ÉRIC ROHMER AND MARIE RIVIÈRE “I love that movie [ The Green Ray, )986]. Yeah! They catch the last ray of light... I saw the green ray once-a green flash. The end of that film is beautiful. I love that actress, Marie Rivière [left]. There's a later Rohmer film, A Winter's Tale [)992], where she shows up on a bus or something. With Rohmer I sometimes forget the exact plots, but I remember the feeling of all of them. But you see her and you think, “Oh, she's aged. ” It's kind of like [ Before Midnight, 20)3]: boom! Y ou get a nine-year jump and how people look different! They're the same, but they're different-like all of us. ( Sight and Sound, July 20)3) The director picks a hitman movie to die for and-over the years-outlines his admiration for Orson Welles, Marie Rivière and Éric Rohmer, and his penchant for teen movies with an edge 'The true way to end a teenage movie is complete apocalypse. Like in Over the Edge, they're fire-bombing the school-that's the ultimate teen thing'TOP LEFT Orson Welles and Suzanne Cloutier in Othello ()95)) TOP RIGHT Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract ()958) ABOVE Marie Riviére in Éric Rohmer's The Green Ray ()986) RIGHT Matt Dillon in his film debut, Over the Edge ()979)“He's the progenitor and the martyr [ of independent American filmmaking]. That's how the US looks at him, and I think he took on that role to a large degree. He was a guy out of time. He would have done so much better if he'd been working in the )980s and 90s, when he would have been like an Altman character who could have gotten funding worldwide for his little Shakespeare adaptations. It's heartbreaking when you see a masterpiece like his Othello [)95)], which I think is the greatest Shakespeare adaptation ever made, or Chimes at Midnight [)965], which is even more obscure. T o know that they were so neglected, and the way he financed them himself. What Welles was going up against in the )940s was still the full-blown studio system, which I love. I would like to have been Vincente Minnelli or Howard Hawks, making a film or two a year in the studio system. But Welles was too enlarged a talent to fit in. We know who had the great careers in and around the system: Wilder, Huston, all the Europeans that came over, like Lang. Y ou had to sublimate your own ego. Secretly you were making your film, but on the surface you had to appear to be a company man. Welles was bad at hiding his genius, which was a little too big and obvious and wilful. That scares studio heads. ” ( Sight and Sound, January 20)0)48 RICHARD LINKLATER IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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Maybe,” David Leitch says, “we're entering a new golden age of stunts. ” If this seems unexpected amid a blockbuster cinema landscape under threat from the rampant use of CGI and artifi-cial intelligence, keep in mind who's saying it: Leitch was once one of the most respected Hol-lywood stuntmen-he doubled for Brad Pitt in five films and Jean-Claude Van Damme in two-and his lengthening directorial CV includes John Wick (2014, co-directed with Chad Stahelski), the Charlize Theron Cold War thriller Atomic Blonde (2017), self-referential Marvel superhero comedy Deadpool 2 (2018) and 2022's Pitt-led hitman comedy Bullet Train. He's also just directed The Fall Guy, which provides a record-breaking car stunt and-along with his producer (and wife) Kelly Mc Cormick-he is a key figure in the campaign to get stunts recognised at the Oscars. Leitch is adamant that it's the human element that “makes the movie magic”: “Even when we look at big superhero movies, you see dozens of stunt perform-ers, whether in motion-capture suits, on wires or in green screen,” he says. “As CGI improves, so the stunt department has a different relationship with it. ” He may believe that stuntwork has a wonderful future, but The Fall Guy is thor-oughly grounded in the past. The TV series of the same name, which starred Lee Majors as a movie stuntman and part-time bounty hunter called Colt Seavers, ran on American TV network ABC from 1981 to 1986. The show was a touchstone for stuntmen from Leitch's generation, and he says that the film carries a lot of its DNA: “The fun, blue-collar, working-class hero, the underdog story-and the truck. ” He and Mc Cormick both love Richard Rush's The Stunt Man (1980), in which Peter O'T oole got a Best Actor nomination for playing an egomaniacal director pushing a stuntman to the edge. He also acknowledges that Burt Reyn-olds in Hooper (1978)-a comedy about an ageing stuntman, which emphasises the physical wear and tear and the camarade-rie that go with the job-exercised a “ton of influence”; for stuntmen, he says, it's “like Citizen Kane ”. The 2024 The Fall Guy is, for Leitch, “a celebration of all these practical big stunts that sometimes we now do in different ways”. The plot has Colt-played by Ryan Gosling-doubling for A-list action hero T om Ryder (Aaron T aylor-Johnson) until a horrifying on-set accident forces him to take an ignominious job as a valet. Some 18 months later, mendacious hotshot pro-ducer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) lures him out of retirement to work on bonkers alien-invasion/cowboy film Metal-storm by telling him his skills have specifi-cally been asked for by first-time director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt)-who is also his ex-girlfriend. Having landed in Sydney, where the film is shooting, Colt is soon drawn into solving the mystery of Ryder's disappearance from the set, meanwhile getting his stunt mojo back and rekindling his relationship with Jody. One reference point for the funny, bick-ering affection that characterises Jody and Colt's relationship is George Armitage's hitman comedy Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). Jody's anger at Colt reaches a climax in an amusing scene in which she has him The F all Guy is a thrill-packed comic celebration of the work of stunt performers. Its director David Leitch and producer Kelly Mc Cormick talk about the film's origins, stuntwork's lack of status and recognition and why, even in a CGI-dominated industry, nothing quite matches the real thing BY LOU THOMAS repeatedly set on fire and thrown against a prop rock. Mc Cormick says, “The sequence is supposed to be like Minnie Driver at her radio show when she dresses down John Cusack coming back into town after being ghosted. That's our interpreta-tion of that, with our spin on it. ” Overt chemistry between the beauti-ful, bantering Gosling and Blunt not-withstanding, what many viewers will be most excited to see on screen will be the spectacular stunts. While filming a beach chase, Gosling's stunt double Logan Hol-laday broke the world record for the most cannon rolls in a car: he made eight and a half rolls, one and a half more than the previous record, set during the making of Casino Royale (2006). For the uninitiated, Leitch explains why it's called a 'cannon' roll: “It used to be we would use black powder, a log and a tube. Y ou would weld that into the inside of the car, and special effects guys would blow the cannon-that would punch a log through the bottom of the car, it would hit concrete and flip the car. Now it's more sophisticated. We use compressed air and a metal cylinder, so it's a hydraulic cylinder, compressed air and that metal pole goes into the ground. The car's going 35 miles an hour, you put a pole on the ground and it launches you. That's the cannon part. ” Holladay's stunt was made trickier by natural forces. The previous record roll took place on a hill-far easier to manage than a beach, where the sand changes daily. “The tide comes in, the tide comes out, it's organic material,” Mc Cormick says. In a prelude to the stunt in the fin-ished film, Colt complains to his boss and friend, stunt coordinator Dan T ucker (Winston Duke), that he'll have to post-pone because of the density of the sand. Leitch says, “The whole line is a joke Ryan came up with because he heard us talking about it all the time. The density of sand is a problem. ” That fitted right in with a script (by Drew Pearce, who co-wrote Leitch's 2019 Fast and Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw ) that is packed with stuntman insider jokes about everything from guns firing blanks to fake sword fights to actors claiming in interviews that they do their own stunts. The film also raises the issue of the lack of recognition for stunt performers at the Academy Awards-as Gosling and Blunt noted at this year's ceremony, when they presented a montage of stunt clips pro-duced by Leitch and Mc Cormick. Stunt performers haven't traditionally been given an award, though behind the scenes many in the industry have been working towards it. Mc Cormick says there's a lot of positiv-ity around the idea of stunt recognition, with efforts now beginning to reach “a pin-nacle”. It may be helpful to those lobbying OPPOSITE Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy BELOW Emily Blunt as Jody Moreno and Gosling as Colt Seavers OVERLEAF (From left) Ryan Gosling, Aaron T aylor-Johnson, Ben Jenkin, Logan Holladay, Justin Eaton with director David Leitch on the set of The Fall Guy 51 | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
the Academy that there is now a precedent for a new category: in February, it was announced that from 2026 an Oscar will be awarded for Best Casting. Mc Cormick says, “There could be a conversion if we follow the blueprints of casting directors and what they've just achieved. ” Pondering why stuntpeople historically haven't had official recognition, the pro-ducer says: “It's complicated. These guys are stoics. They don't really talk that much, they hide their faces and merge into a hero at any given time. There's also the false narrative that it's a technical skill. There's really such artistry to stunt performing. ” T o make it clear that stunt work is an artistic endeavour as well as a practical one, Chris O'Hara, stunt coordinator and second unit director on The Fall Guy, was given an additional credit as stunt designer. Even if the Academy agrees in principle to giving stunts their moment in the Oscar spotlight, there will be some thorny mat-ters of detail to sort out. Mc Cormick won-ders, “Who gets the award? How do you determine what the award would be? It's a really tricky question. ” There are ongoing talks with the Academy about the possibil-ity that any award should go to the head of the department, a co-ordinator and/or designer figure, as happens with hair and other areas of production, rather than to the individual performer. The campaign for this more prominent acknowledgement of the human efforts required to make action look and feel real has seemingly grown in part because of For Mc Cormick, Gail is “a great vil-lain”: “This film she's responsible for is so important to her, her career and her star, it gets a little messy around the edges as to what should have, could have, would've happened with regards to your moral code. ” Mc Cormick highlights diversity and gender issues in the film crew's struc-ture. “A woman getting her first opportu-nity to direct and make her dream come true, that needs to happen more: giving a female character agency. [The use of] Winston Duke as a head of department, as an African American,” she says. “Those are the things that we're trying to populate as conversations within the movie without commentary on hierarchy. ” The fall from a great height that begins the film, sending Colt to hospital and self-exile, happens because T om Ryder, the star, insists Colt does yet another take of a dangerous stunt-apparently to satisfy his own vanity. This fictional situation is the kind of thing that probably happens in Hollywood. But so is Ryder's talk of having a sacred bond with Colt and writ-ing him into his contract when he stars in new films. Aside from taking falls for stars they double for, stunt performers often teach and train them, and the relationship can yield genuine friendships, not unlike the one Quentin T arantino depicted in Once upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) between Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Cap-rio) and Cliff Booth (Leitch's old pal Brad Pitt). “Aaron T aylor-Johnson's character was about toxic celebrity,” Mc Cormick says, “but that bond is really tight. ” The Fall Guy is out now in UK cinemas and is reviewed on page 79opposition to the creeping influence of AI in film production. A contributing factor in last year's strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of T elevision and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra) was a pro-posal by the Alliance of Motion Picture and T elevision Producers (AMPTP) to use 'digital replicas' of extras. Union chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said that the the proposal was that “back-ground performers should be able to be scanned, get one day's pay, and their com-panies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want. ” (The AMPTP said its proposal was only for reuse within the picture for which the actor was employed. ) Anxiety over ways AI might be abused finds an outlet in The Fall Guy, in which Colt is scanned and the nefarious way in which his likeness is reused plays an important part in the unfolding plot. Viewers seeing Waddingham's enor-mously entertaining portrayal of producer Gail-notable for her disdain for those lower down the food chain-and the acute depiction of film-set and wider industry hierarchies in The Fall Guy might wonder whether Leitch and his team are trying to make a point about how the system is set up to treat workers. “We even have this weird term, people are 'below the line', these people are 'above the line'. It's awful when you really think about it,” Leitch says. Within the film, the hierarchical tendency is exaggerated: “A lot of it is heightened in the sense that we needed strong villains to create heightened reality, but not all of it is. There's Hollywood truth in it. ” David Leitch on his favourite stunt performer, Jackie Chan “When I go to the well for inspiration, I go to Jackie Chan and his legacy of stunts. There's so many gags and sequences he's done that are amazing. He's a student of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The thing that's so compelling about Jackie is that it's always defining his character. His stunts are practical and they're real. Y ou always saw it and he showed in the credits how he did it, sometimes the mistakes he made and how much it hurt. That was super-compelling to me and inspiring for me as a stunt man. Also, he's a stunt man turned director. He's an inspiration to me as a whole, but when you look at his action, it's always 'underdog-hero, overcoming impossible odds'. The sequences are laced with character-defining moments. Sometimes these big action movies just do action for spectacle, but Jackie doing it and allowing his characters to get beat up and overcome things was really just masterful. ”'Even when we look at big superhero movies, you see dozens of stunt performers... As CGI improves, so the stunt department has a different relationship with it' Lessons from the master52 THE FALL GUY | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Six sublime cinema stunts Three Ages (1923) Buster Keaton said that if he couldn't make a stunt work without cutting he'd throw it out, but when he mistimed a jump between buildings in Three Ages, he decided to expand the gag instead of dumping it. After failing to grab the ledge, Buster continues to fall, crashing through awnings and grabbing a drainpipe that swings him into a window, where he skids across the floor and down a firefighter's pole. When he finally sits down to catch his breath, the firetruck he's resting on starts up and drives away. What began in failure developed into a beautifully constructed and hilariously inventive comic sequence. Shot in the early hours of a Sunday morning with a camera fixed to his bonnet, Claude Lelouch's high-speed drive across Paris (below) feels stunningly modern; a precursor to our era of Go Pro and dashcams. We spend eight minutes on Lelouch's Mercedes as he weaves through the streets at top speed, only hearing the roar of his engine and the screech of his tyres, and flinching when he takes a blind corner or narrowly skirts another vehicle. The director jumped numerous red lights and his Wheels on Meals (1984) Jackie Chan's fight scenes are customarily imaginative, energetic and dazzlingly athletic, but his face-off against Benny 'The Jet' Urquidez in Wheels on Meals (above) took things to another level. The speed and intensity of the action is breathtaking. The two men move with the precision of dancers but the blows they land have a bruising impact; Urquidez, a karate world champion rather than an actor, wasn't adept at pulling his punches in the usual fashion. T o watch Chan and Urquidez go head-to-head is to witness a masterclass in martial arts, stuntwork and choreography, although the most memorable moment in the bout wasn't planned-Urquidez throwing a kick with such velocity he extinguishes a row of candles. Stunts have been a crucial part of cinema's allure since its earliest days. Philip Concannon chooses just a few of the boldest, most difficult and most stunning stunt sequences in film history Claude Lelouch's flouting of traffic laws sparked outrage in France, but Rendezvous stands as an exhilarating expression of liberationrendezvous (1976) flouting of traffic laws sparked outrage in France, but Rendezvous (aka C'était un rendez-vous ) stands as an exhilarating expression of liberation. 53IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992) The Police Story films were primarily showcases for Jackie Chan's acrobatic stunts, but the third instalment was stolen by Michelle Yeoh, returning to the screen after a five-year hiatus. As Chan fights henchmen on a train, Yeoh (below) races alongside on a motorbike, negotiating tricky terrain before speeding up a steep incline and leaping on to the roof of the moving train. In a film packed with wild action-Quentin T arantino said it has “the greatest stunts ever filmed in any movie”-Yeoh's daring feat was the standout moment and it made her a star. Not bad for someone who had never ridden a motorbike before being asked to make this jump. T aking advantage of a construction-related gap in Florida's Seven Mile Bridge, James Cameron delivered a blockbuster sequence for the ages in the first movie to cost $100 million. As Jamie Lee Curtis fights Tia Carrere in an out-of-control limousine, Arnold Schwarzenegger follows in a helicopter to rescue his wife before the car crashes. Curtis performed much of this sequence herself, climbing on to the limo's roof as it veers wildly, and we see her hanging from the helicopter at the end of the scene (right), but credit is also due to stuntwoman Donna Keegan. She's the woman we see in an amazing aerial shot being plucked from the limo just as it plunges into the sea. Mission: Impossible- Fallout (2018) T om Cruise's obsession with performing outrageous stunts has become the chief selling point of the Mission: Impossible franchise. The Halo (high altitude, low opening) jump in Fallout (above) necessitated more than a hundred rehearsal jumps, and there was just a brief window of fading daylight in which this footage had to be captured. The sequence is thrilling and visually spectacular, but like all of the best Mission: Impossible set-pieces, it's also driven by narrative and character, deepening the tension between Cruise's Ethan Hunt and Henry Cavill's Walker. Mind you, if you think Cruise's work is impressive, just consider the operator who had to do the same jump, but backwards, and while pulling focus on his helmet-mounted camera. True Lies (1994) Jamie Lee Curtis performed much of this sequence, climbing on to the limo's roof as it veers wildly, and hanging from the helicopter54 THE FALL GUY | sfx.issue.379.june.2024.pdf |
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