Follow the Money

The Big Uneasy

     The Big Uneasy is both an expose of government dysfunction and a warning that the Katrina disaster in New Orleans may soon be repeated in places as disparate as the upper Mississippi River and the Sacramento River delta in California. 
     Regular readers know that I rarely discuss documentaries on this blog, making exceptions only for those that break new ground and provide compelling insight into the most important issues of our time.  This is one such film.  Filmmakers from Spike Lee to the Academy Award-nominated team of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have made excellent documentaries about the levee failures that led to the catastrophic flooding in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As good as those films are, none of them have exposed the root cause of the disaster as effectively as Harry Shearer.
     Although the spine of the film is based on technical evidence, Shearer has produced a film that is very accessible to the average viewer.  Fascinating computer graphics recreate each hour of the sequence of levee failures that flooded New Orleans neighborhoods.  Treme actor and New Orleans resident, John Goodman, breaks up the technical sequences by conducting entertaining interviews with locals. 
     Shearer uncovers a legacy of mismanagement going back decades within the US Army Corps of Engineers, the principle US Government agency responsible for the construction and management of our nation's flood control infrastructure.  Interviews with a Corps whistleblower and two post-Katrina principle investigators yield damning evidence of the negligence and flawed engineering that went into the original construction of the Mississippi River--Gulf Outlet (MR-GO) waterway and its peripheral systems during the 1950s and continues to plague the repair and rebuilding of that infrastructure to this day.

     Maria Garzino, a veteran engineer with the Corps, provides testimony that the hydraulic pumps that were installed post-Katrina are woefully inadequate to the task and will fail again the next time a storm of similar magnitude strikes the area.  Although protected by federal whistleblower laws, she has faced backlash from her superiors and been assigned to subpar jobs that effectively sideline her within the organization.  See public radio journalist Molly Peterson's 4-part series about Garzino's claims on KPCC. 
      Similarly Robert Bea, a civil engineer affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, has been vilified by colleagues for an investigation that concluded the Corps was chiefly responsible for the disaster that befell New Orleans, stating in his report that the levee failures were "the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl." 
     Dr. Ivor van Heerden, former head of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center, lost his job after coming to the same conclusion in his own investigation.  LSU, a university that is heavily dependent on federal funding, decided to axe van Heerden and the other researchers who staffed the Center after they continued to speak out about the Katrina engineering fiasco.  Strangely, after all of the experts there had been fired, LSU received a multi-million dollar grant from the federal government to establish a similar center. 
     Obviously there's a powerful reason for such an astounding pattern of engineering project mismanagement and cover-up, and it can be summed up in two words familiar to those who regularly follow politics and government in the USA today:  political patronage.
     Shearer uncovers evidence that billions of dollars were spent on unnecessary or inadequate flood control projects going back decades and in multiple administrations.  He calls it "a disaster of bipartisan magnitude."  Little is left over to achieve real flood control after politicians bring home the bacon to the tune of billions of dollars and promote ill-conceived projects that benefit their key contributors but achieve no real solutions.  One contractor was discovered to have purchased millions of dollars in new equipment for a job that the government had not even put out to bid yet. The fix was in. 
     What is most troubling is the Corps mismanagement that undercuts the New Orleans flood control system is not unique to that locale.  The same people oversee every major flood control system in the USA, including the Sacramento River Delta in California. 
     Where will the next catastrophe occur?  Follow the money.

A Teen Romance for Adults

Submarine

     Submarine is a clever coming-of-age film that uses humor and teen romance to explore adult themes about sustaining love in difficult times.  It was adapted for the screen by writer/director Richard Ayoade from the novel by Joe Dunthorne.
     As the story opens, 15-year-old Oliver (Craig Roberts) sets out to achieve two primary objectives--lose his virginity before his next birthday and stop his mother from dumping his father for the new age guru who was her first love.  The latter, effectively played for laughs by Paddy Considine, has recently come back into their lives on the rebound from a tumultuous failed relationship. 
     The object of Oliver's scheming affection is Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a socially awkward and outspoken pyromaniac who is as unpopular in school as he is.  By that measure he expects that she will be his easiest target.  What starts out as a quest to satisfy teen lust gets complicated when Oliver finds himself falling in love with her.

     Oliver has to juggle romance with espionage as he snoops into the lives of his parents, whose relationship is heading downhill fast.  His mother (Sally Hawkins) is unhappy and tries to fill the void by seeking new age wisdom from her former lover.  Oliver is convinced they are having an affair, and he is determined to stop it at all costs.  He gets little help from his father (Noah Taylor), who is mired in depression and unmotivated to do much of anything, let alone save his marriage.  Not to worry, as Oliver is bound and determined to do it for him. 
     This is a funny film with a wonderful dramatic storyline.  It shows that love is not as hard as we sometimes make it.  All the effort we put into being witty, romantic and sexy is not nearly as important as just being there for the ones we love.  I absolutely loved the ending.  It is subtle, witty and right on the mark, but I won't spoil it for you here.  You'll have to see the film.  It's worth it.
     Submarine released in the USA under the Weinstein Company banner on June 3. 

Nobody's Figured That Out Yet

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SAYLES

Part 3: The Future of Independent Film

     I concluded my interview with John Sayles with a discussion about the future of independent filmmaking.  Big screen releases are becoming rare for indies in a world dominated by the push for big opening weekend grosses. 

     In the late '80s early '90s indies got a major boost from the success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape.   That film grossed an estimated 20 times its production budget and sparked the hunt for the next big thing in small dramatic films.  Sayles benefited from the hype by teaming up with Larry Estes, the producer who successfully backed the distribution of Sex, Lies, and Videotape.  Estes ultimately put together financing and distribution deals for two of Sayles' most successful films--City of Hope and Passion Fish, the latter of which earned two Oscar nominations and a Writers Guild of America (WGA) nomination for best screenplay.  

     These days traditional sources of film financing and distribution are not satisfied with the comparatively small earnings from indie films.  That market has all but dried up, and even the direct-to-cable market has downsized considerably.  Direct-to-DVD appears poised to follow with the growing primacy of Internet downloads.  

     Film festivals have increased in number and emerged as top venues for indie filmmakers who want their work to be seen on the big screen, but competition is fierce in first and even second tier festivals that currently receive well over 2,000 submissions per year for no more than 200 slots on average.  A lot of very good films are turned away.  

     Even Sayles is feeling the pain.  He self-financed his last three films, and he professed to me that he does not know how long he'll be able to keep it up.  As bleak as he made it sound, he couldn't bring himself to sound the death knell for the industry.  He recognizes that it's changing, and tomorrow's indie film industry will look very different from what we know today, but he was certain that the independent spirit will remain alive for a long time to come.  

     Although at times Sayles sounded like a tired, overworked filmmaker ready to pass the torch to the next generation, that spark in his eyes never died.  If I were a betting man, I'd lay big odds that Sayles has a few more master strokes left to contribute, and the indie film world will be that much better off when he does.  

  Mary McDonnell and Chris Cooper in Matewan

MD:  What's the future look like for indie filmmakers? 

JS:  There used to be an independent movie business, and money came back in, but that’s kind of dissolved into the ether. Almost nobody’s getting other people’s money to make those little movies any more. Maybe if it’s a horror movie or a vampire movie, and you get the right actors in it, somebody will take a chance on you. There’s not really a straight-to-cable market any more, and I think Sundance got over 2,000 submissions last year.  That’s a lot of people trying to get through a very narrow doorway.  

     If they make two movies, whether it’s as a financier or a producer or a director, and they don’t get a release, it’s really tough to go and try to make that third one, and talk to all of your friends and say “I’m going to do it again. You want to carry all the stuff, and be called the co-producer and get paid nothing?” People still try to do it, but on your second movie you either have to pay people something or get new friends. 

     A very tiny minority will actually get somebody to distribute their film and spend money and time on them, and the rest of the people are going to be like garage bands. If you go on their blog, you can download the movie from them, and they’ll make very little money back from it. With a garage band, you can build up a following that way, tour and sell some t-shirts, and make sort of a living as a musician. I think movies will continue to be made, and people will continue to try to make movies, but I think that the hardest thing is that so many of the professionals that I know are not going to be able to make a living doing it. I wonder how many young people who are starting in the business, working now for free or very little, are going to be able to do it for very long. Remember when there were ski bums? I think in the future there are going to be film bums. Until their knees go, or whatever the film equivalent is, they’ll be able to sleep on friends’ floors and every once in a while make a movie, and support themselves doing other things. 

MD:  You've been able to get top talent to work on your films for SAG (Screen Actors Guild) scale. If you have the right backing and an outstanding script, is that something you can continue to pull off?

JS:  Scale keeps going down if the budget of your movie is down. Recognizing how hard it is, the Guild (SAG) is doing a lot more of these contingency kind of things.  I talked to an actor the other day who is making $100 a day, and that’s a union contract, but the budget is low enough that that’s what the actors are getting paid. You’ve got to be in an awful lot of those to make a living.

     The other thing to be said is that more and more, the kind of medium-level crew people—the PAs (production assistants) and the first ADs (assistant directors)—are all rich kids because they can afford to do it for very little money. Anybody that’s got to pay back their college loan, they’re not getting a paying job—maybe not for 5 years. Then you’re going deeper into debt and not paying off your college loan. 

Angela Bassett and Mary McDonnell in Passion Fish

MD:  Where is distribution headed for indie films? 

JS:  I really don’t think it’s going to sort out into something very consistent soon, because the Internet, which is the future of all entertainment transactions that aren’t live, is just a wild west right now. It’s changing so fast that nobody really knows where it’s going. 

     David Lynch was one of the first guys to do that. He had a movie, and he didn’t think the distributors were going to do much with it. He bought it back from them, and put it on his website. This was several years ago. I don’t know how he did with it, but I think that’s going to be the model more and more. If you’ve got some following, that’ll help, but the part where you get money back for it… nobody’s figured that out yet. 

     Larry's (Estes) first choice was Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and that gave him his mandate for about three years. We made two movies with him, and they were good movies (City of Hope and Passion Fish). It’s just that not one of them made the kind of money that Sex, Lies, and Videotape did. The corporation that owns Larry’s company finally said, “We want another Sex, Lies, and Videotape.  We don’t want you to make a lot of nice, little movies with the profits from that. We want another rainmaker.” And those happen almost accidentally. They were certainly movies as good as Sex, Lies, and Videotape.  When you finish a movie, almost nobody knows if they’re going to get to make another one.   

MD:  You make it sound pretty bleak.     

JS:  I think if you’re young, I wouldn’t be daunted.  In some ways our track record hurts us, because people say, “I’ve heard of this guy, but who’s ever made a mint on any of his movies.  He’s had 17 tries and he never went platinum.  Why would we gamble our money on this guy? Why not take somebody who’s totally new or who has made one interesting film and gamble on him instead?” 

     We’re talking about the impossibility of making independent films, and the fact is that people still do it.

Part 1:  The Making of Amigo
Part 2:  The Craft of the Storyteller

Develop the Muscles

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SAYLES

Part 2: The Craft of the Storyteller

     During our interview John Sayles provided answers to questions I had waited years to ask him. His films provide an overview of ordinary people caught up in the events that shape our times.  As their lives intersect in ways that they may not understand, we as the audience are provided with new insight about the people and places we think we already know. 
     I was first introduced to his films when I saw City of Hope on the big screen during its 1991 release. I drove over 40 miles to an art house theater in Los Angeles based on positive reviews and the subject matter of the film. Political activism runs in my family, and the subject matter had aroused my curiosity. The machinery of political decision-making is more complex than most of the public understands, and like many things in life, the final outcome tends to be more about the individual personalities involved than it is about effective governance.  The other thing I've learned is that it is possible for an idealistic individual to prevail, but the chances are slim without our active engagement as citizens in a democracy. 
     "We’re so often disappointed in our politicians, but you know what, sometimes our politicians are disappointed in us," Sayles told me. 

     City of Hope grabbed me and held me from start to finish.  It was the first time I saw a film that got it right.  It featured an ensemble cast representing the types of individuals you find at every level of urban politics in America, from the construction worker on an urban renewal project and the poor resident he will help to displace to the wealthy developer and the city council people trying to sort it all out, for better or worse. 

     What was most striking about this film was that Sayles was able to present so many points of view effectively in less than two hours running time.  The characters in the film were not caricatures.  They were human beings with their own outlook based on their respective life experiences. Sayles is able to pull this off with exquisite mastery of subtext in both dialogue and visuals. 

     As we get to know and understand the diverse cast during the course of the story, there is invariably a scene later in the film in which characters from completely different backgrounds converse directly with each other but are unable to actually communicate in any meaningful way.  In Casa de los Babys, a young maid speaks to a prospective mother from the States in Spanish about her hopes and dreams for the child she was forced to give up while the adopting mother speaks in English about her dreams for the child she hopes to adopt in Mexico.  Neither understands what the other is saying, but for the audience, who understands both, it is an emotionally powerful scene.  As Sayles said in Part 1 of this interview, the audience gets an overview of the story that the individual characters are unable to see.  

Eight Men Out

MD:  Your films follow multiple characters, and you seem to pull that off in a way that other filmmakers can't.  

JS:  Some people say we have too many characters.  Who’s the hero?  Ken Berry (former pro baseball player), a guy we worked with on Eight Men Out, said "I like movies where the good guys prevail over the bad guys, and you know which is which."  We’re just making a different kind of movie.  If that’s why you go to the movies--to feel great about the outcome at the end of it--you’re going to feel disappointed in our movies.  We often have some people say "what was that?"  It’s because we had an ambiguous ending or the characters weren’t heroic or whatever.  They were likable but not heroic.  It’s a tough thing to do.  

     My favorite thing about that (good and bad characters) is thinking about the corrupt guys.  It’s complicated.  Sometimes they’re just greedy fucks, but on the local level (in City of Hope) it’s often about a no-show job, and (they say) "I know I shouldn’t have it under my administration, but it’s my wife Lucille’s little brother, and when is he going to get a real job?  He’s had the drug problem, and if we can just get him an income, he can take care of my nephew and my niece, and maybe it’ll straighten him up.  So what am I going to do?  Fire Lucille’s idiot brother for some abstract thing where everybody expects me to have some no-show job anyway?" 

MD:  In Honeydripper a wealthy woman who originated from a lower class background talks to her black maid about the challenges she faced trying to fit into her husband’s high society world.  It's an impactful scene on many levels.  I'm amazed by the way you create a bridge between different worlds.  

JS:  That’s not even a bridge. That’s her talking and thinking she’s got this incredible rapport, and her maid, understanding what she’s talking about, but knowing that her employer has missed the last 12 years of her daughter’s life, so she’s kind of surprised when she sees her (the maid's daughter). Oh my God, you’re a teenager already.  

John Sayles directs Danny Glover in Honeydripper

MD:  As you said, it's not a bridge between characters, but a bridge from the characters to the audience.  How do you pull that off? 

JS:  There are a couple of brilliant things that James Cameron did in Titanic. This is the Titanic. The boat’s going to sink—no surprise, but he puts in this... kind of a PBS wraparound thing at the beginning of it where you’re looking at a computer screen, and it shows you how the thing sank and everything. You’re getting all this exposition. I thought, why is James doing this? And then I realize now I know exactly where the kids shouldn’t go. Oh no, don’t go to that side. He’s actually providing you more information, so you’re more worried about these two kids. Are they going to survive what we know is in front of them? We know there’s a monster behind that door. Don’t open that door. And that’s a lot of what you try to do with characters' points of view. Most of our movies are kind of multiples. You try to get at least a couple of characters that the audience wants it to turn out well for them. But you give them enough information that the audience knows a little bit more than the characters.   

MD:  How did you learn to be a screenwriter?  Did you have a mentor? 

JS:   I watched a lot of movies. I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t take many writing courses.  Quentin Tarantino said his film school was working in a video store. When it got slow he’d run movies. The second thing you do is you learn by doing it and develop the muscles. I’ve been writing for 30 or 40 years. I sold my first novel when I was 25. I think I started writing screenplays professionally when I was 28. You write a lot of stuff. Some of it’s not very good, but you rewrite it and you keep writing.      
    It’s kind of like an athlete who cross-trains. You keep the muscles working and you solve problems. Even without remembering where you solved it before, when you come up with another problem, you say “I know how to do this.” And the same thing with listening to dialogue or working with actors. You hope you get better. If you don’t get bored and lazy, you probably will get better. You look at professional athletes, and the smart ones last a long time because about halfway through their career, they realized I’m not going to always have this, and they start to say, “I better develop a screw ball, or I better start taking better care of my knees and ankles."  Michael Jordan hired a trainer to do nothing but tell him about the injuries that most athletes will get in two years.   (The trainer said) "here’s some exercises so you don’t end up with those injuries."  

Tony Lo Bianco & Vincent Spano in City of Hope

MD:  What advice do you have for novice filmmakers? 

JS:  I occasionally speak to film students. I tell them the best thing you can do if you want to be a director is rent three of your favorite movies, turn the sound off, and watch each one of them twice. Stop the thing in the middle of a scene and ask, where is the camera?   What lens is in it?  --not the actual type of lens, so much as the type of shot.  Is the camera moving or not? Why is the camera where it is? How is that telling the story? If you can figure that out, you’re starting on the thing that a director has to go through to make a movie. 
     The rest of it is writer’s stuff, and the rest of it is director’s stuff with actors. There is that part where people come up to you with a blank look on their face and ask “what are we doing?” You have to say, “the camera goes over here… it’s going to be low and then we’re moving here, and then we’re moving there, and that’s all the coverage we’re doing for the scene,” and there should be a reason for each of those things, and the reason should be a storytelling reason.  And I think you learn that stuff from paying attention to other people’s movies.  

MD:  With 17 films under your belt, you're uniquely successful in the low budget world of indie filmmaking.  How have you pulled that off so consistently? 

JS:  You kind of learn an innate sense of what costs time and money and what doesn’t.   When I’m writing something, like in Amigo, I’m thinking I’m going to have five or six weeks to shoot this. What screenplay can I write where I can do it in five or six weeks? What scale can I put this on where I can do it well in five or six weeks?  (For Amigo) how many Americans can I bring over who have lines that we can afford for five or six weeks? Every once in a while you combine a couple of characters, and say "wow, I eliminated an American and a plane ticket to and from... and that’s a hotel room."    
     It’s a pain in the ass to have to think that way, but it’s just part of the job. Even filmmakers who make big movies have to make those decisions. It’s usually not on that scale, but it may be that we can’t afford the insurance to shoot on a train. Let’s stage the shoot-out in the train station. I think that was in the Untouchables. It (the train station shootout) was written for a train. It would have been great on a train. They got the insurance bill for a moving train and saw what even a slow-moving train was going to cost, and (decided) maybe we can shoot this in the train station. Let’s find a great train station, and it worked. 

Next...
Part 3:  The Future of Independent Film

Part 1:  How Do You Disappear a War?

How Do You Disappear a War?

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SAYLES

Part 1:  The Making of Amigo

     John Sayles talked to me about the challenges of making his latest independent feature, Amigo, during a recent stop in Santa Barbara to promote his novel, A Moment in the Sun.
     Although best known for the 17 independent feature films he has written and directed under his own production company, Sayles is also an accomplished author.  He won an O. Henry Award for his short story, "I-80 Nebraska, m.490-m.205," before he ever wrote a screenplay, and his first novel, Union Dues, earned a National Book Award nomination in 1977.
     Like many successful filmmakers in the USA, Sayles got his start working for the king of low-budget productions, Roger Corman, penning the screenplays for Piranha in 1978 and Alligator in 1980.  He won critical acclaim his first time out as writer/director with Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1979, which he financed with his earnings from the Corman films.
     Thus began a lifelong pattern of earning money as a successful writer and script doctor in Hollywood, then using it to finance his own independent films. Over the next 30 years Sayles went on to earn critical acclaim as writer/director of independent features like Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, Lone Star, and the Secret of Roan Inish. 
     Amigo is a historical drama and fictionalized account of events that take place when a US Army unit occupies a village during the Philippine-American War. The film stars Garret Dillahunt, Chris Cooper and D.J. Qualls.  While the novel, A Moment in the Sun, is a sweeping historical epic that follows as many as 45 major characters in the US, Cuba and the Philippines during the period, Amigo is set on a village scale.  

MD:  How did you develop an interest in the historical events that provide the background for both Amigo and your novel, A Moment in the Sun? 

JS:  It really came from running into this phrase, the Philippine-American War.  I was doing research for my last novel and I came across this reference.  I’d never heard of the Philippine-American War.  Asking some of my Filipino-American friends about it, they said, “well, I know that it existed, but it was not taught in our schools in the Philippines.”  How do you disappear a war?  Why is it not taught in America?  We won the war.  We’re usually “hey, we won the war!”  Why aren’t we proud and celebrating this thing?  And that got me intrigued about it, and then what I saw was there were a lot of things going on with the psyche of America right around 1900.  The rednecks can take over the South again.  We don’t care if black men can vote.  We’re not going to stand behind them.  Our Constitution says they can, but you can take that right away.  That was the end of Reconstruction.   
     We had been imperialists before, taking over Indian nations and Mexican lands, but we’d never gotten on a boat and taken over somebody else’s country and said, “you people will thank us for this..."  That happened in a very short time, where we went from the anti-imperialist people who protect the little guy and broke away from those decadent Europeans to being the people who say it’s time we played with the big guys.  We need an empire, too.  It happened in a matter of months and that’s what the big arc of the book is all about as seen through these other characters’ lives.  

MD:  You said that you financed Amigo yourself.  What were some of the challenges you faced to stay within budget for a period piece like this?  

JS:  It’s going to be a little over $1-1/2 million, and you multiply that by three for the United States if you shot it here.  They’ve got real great crew people there (in the Philippines), and good actors and stuff, and we were able to tack onto them.  I realized… that if I can tell a micro-history and set it on a village level, the construction costs will be there, but we’re making it out of what they made it out of back then.  We’re making it out of rattan and palm thatch and bamboo.  All of that grows out of the ground here.  You take a bolo (knife) and you cut it, and you tie them together and you got a hut.  You do that 20 times you got a village.  That’s what our set was.  95% of the movie was shot on a set that we made on the edge of a rice field.  We bought the rice crop out, and that was very good for the farmers because they got rid of the middle man.  We bought it for what it would have been sold on the market.  We didn’t even use all of the rice.  They got half of the crop back to sell again.  So they were happy  we were there, and a lot of them became extras in the movie. 

     I was thinking about the scale when I wrote the screenplay, and what’s going to cost money and what’s going to be hard work and cleverness, which is kind of how I started with Return of the Secaucus Seven.  I had the budget before I knew what the script was... I had $40,000, and back then, that was probably like $200,000 is now.  It’s still not much to make a movie, but I said, “what can I do well for this?”  This is the story I would like to tell, period or not. 
     And finally, the technology helped.  We shot this on a RED camera.  It looks great and saved us a lot of money.  I shot it in six weeks, which is actually a week more than I had on Honeydripper.  I only had five weeks on Honeydripper.  I’ve actually shot movies in four.  Every time you cut a week, you cut a big hunk of money.  You have to put people up and rent the equipment for another week and the other.  You have to keep churning and plan things really well. After 16 other movies—this was our 17^th—you get more out of six weeks than you did when you started.  You learn how to plan things and to have a Plan B.
     I went on the set while it was being built, and the only power tool there was a chainsaw.  Everything else was people tying things in bolos—knives and bolos... The chainsaw was there with a guy in his sneakers or flip-flops standing on a log ripping planks out of cocoa in between his feet, scaring the hell out of us.  The Philippines, I’m afraid, is like a walking OSHA violation.  We would talk to the guys, and they would say, “sure, sure,” and then you walk away, and they’d go back to the way they were doing it before.  Luckily nobody got hurt.  

MD:  When will we be able to see Amigo?

 

JS:  It’s going to be at the New York Asian Film Festival before it opens here (in Southern California), and if you want to go to Manila, it’s going to open the fourth of July.  It’s really not going to show until August... and mostly we’re heading for cities that have a large Filipino-American population first.  It’s a company called Variance, and we’re basically paying them to distribute it.  They’ve done these kind of very narrow-cast distributions before, where they start with all of the Indians, or the Japanese or the Koreans in the States, and then they let it go out the art theaters if that’s appropriate.  That’s what we can afford.  We may make eight prints or something like that, which is kind of how we started.  Our first couple of movies did that.  It’s like a road show.  You move from territory to territory with those eight prints.  Now more of the theaters are showing digital, so you just make a good digital, and then it gets beamed up and beamed down.  

Cooper Resabal's blog, Baryo Amigo HQ, chronicles the filming of Amigo in Bohol, Philippines. 

Amigo releases in the USA on August 20.   

Next...
Part 2:  The Craft of the Storyteller
Part 3:  The Future of Independent Film

In Love with a Fantasy

Midnight in Paris

     Midnight in Paris both celebrates and skewers the romantic ideal of the City of Lights. Filmmaker Woody Allen populates his latest outing with a variety of wonderful characters, each in search of a utopia rooted in their own fantasies and illusions.
     The director's latest neurotic alter-ego is Gil, played by Owen Wilson in the typically verbose style of Allen protagonists.  Gil is a Hollywood hack writer who believes that he was born too late and would much rather live in the romanticized era of Paris between the wars.  When his fiance's parents invite the two of them along on a business trip to Paris, Gil jumps at the chance, hoping that the sights and sounds of the great city will inspire him to finish the novel he has struggled so hard to write. 
     Trouble develops when Gil's fiance, Inez (Rachel McAdams), runs into her former college crush, an arrogant intellectual named Paul, played by Michael Sheen.  Inez has much more fun hanging out with Paul, while Gil prefers to walk the streets of Paris in search of literary inspiration.
      On one of his pedestrian excursions, Gil discovers a place where he is magically transported back in time to the Paris of the late 1920s on the stroke of midnight each evening. On the first night he is whisked away to a party by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and begins a nightly adventure hanging out with a "who's who" of the leading artists and intellectuals of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Salvador Dali, and Gertrude Stein, among others.

     All of these famous people are played as virtual caricatures by actors who appear to be having as much fun hamming up the roles as we are watching them.  Adrien Brody positively steals his scene in a cameo as a rhinoceros-obsessed Dali, while Kathy Bates dominates as "Gert" Stein. 
     Gil falls in love with an artist model and Picasso paramour named Adriana (Marion Cotillard), only to find his romantic notion of staying in the period with her dashed by Adriana's own obsessive desire to be transported back to la Belle Epoque of 1890s Paris.  Gil learns an important lesson.  When we stop imagining that some other place and time is better, we may well find that our golden age is the one we're living in right now. 
     The storyline of this film is simplistic and the camera's lingering focus on Parisian street scenes is positively dripping with romantic self-indulgence.  In spite of that, if you are a lover of Paris or the great artists and intellectuals of its history, it's really going to be difficult for you to hate this movie.  So screw it... go see it.  It's every bit as good as Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona and a helluva lot more fun.
     Midnight in Paris opens nationwide on May 20. 

War is Hell

City of Life and Death

     City of Life and Death is a dramatization of the 1937 Rape of Nanking, and it may well be the greatest anti-war film ever made.  I have eagerly anticipated its North American release since I first saw it at AFI-Fest in November 2009, and now that Kino International has acquired the rights, I'm elated that it's finally going to happen. 
     Director Chuan Lu has created a masterpiece in his balanced depiction of an event so traumatic and polarizing that it continues to drive a wedge between China and Japan some 73 years later.  Although accounts differ on all sides, it is generally believed that somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people lost their lives during the initial six weeks of Japanese military occupation from late 1937 to 1938.  With all accusations, denials and apologists aside, there is a massive amount of historical evidence supporting the existence of a virtual hell-on-earth in that time, including civilian death and rape on a massive scale, and executions and tortures carried out on a scope rarely seen during the course of human history.

     Lu has managed to achieve a remarkable balancing act with this film.  Despite Chinese government backing and strong emotions that linger in China to this day, Lu created a narrative that treats all of its characters with respect and human dignity.  It would have been easy for him to make a jingoistic film, and while he does celebrate the heroism and fortitude of Nanking's citizens, he does it without depicting the Japanese occupiers simply as one-dimensional monsters devoid of human compassion.  
     Although it did very good box office when it was released in Lu's native China in 2009, the film was pulled from theaters following a pronounced uproar from Nanking survivors, their relatives and others.  It seems that they took offense at what they believe to be Lu's portrayal of the film's Japanese characters as not quite evil enough. 
     In fact, that is precisely what makes this film so great.  All of the characters are depicted as balanced but flawed human beings caught up in a terrible situation over which they have little or no control.  Murder, rape and mutilation are almost clinically depicted using stark black and white photography and minimal music that might otherwise drive the mood of the scenes.  Our emotions are processed solely through the eyes of the characters.

     City of Life and Death showcases an excellent ensemble cast, some who play the roles of actual people who witnessed the events.  The major characters include:

• Lu Jianxioing (Ye Liu), a charismatic Nanking militia officer
• Shu Yun Jiang (Yuanyuan Gao), a missionary teacher who repeatedly risks her own life to save others
• Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), a young Japanese corporal conflicted by an inability to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the atrocities he is ordered to commit
• Xiao Jiang (Yiyan Jiang), a beautiful young woman who may ultimately be fated to life as a "comfort woman" for Japanese troops
• John Rabe (John Paisley), the German executive and Nazi party member known as the "Oskar Schindler of China," who saved as many as 250,000 people by using his party credentials to negotiate a protective zone within the city
• Rabe's secretary, Mr. Tang (Wei Fan), who becomes willing to sell out his fellow Chinese to protect his own family
• Ida (Ryu Kohata), a Japanese officer who grows to embrace his cruel and inhumane actions.

     This is a film that depicts war as it actually is--mutually destructive conflict over which the participants rapidly lose control and that ultimately leads to dehumanization and soul-destroying trauma for everyone involved.  At the AFI screening, it felt like my fellow audience members would be grateful for any positive respite from over two hours of human misery.  It came with the end credits, when we were told in summary form the final outcome for each of the major characters depicted in the film.

     Xiaodouz, the little boy who survived horrific events and escaped almost certain death many times during the course of the film, is living alive and well in China today.  A spontaneous and enthusiastic cheer rose up from the audience.

     City of Life and Death releases in the USA following a special screening in New York City on May 11.  See below for the Kino International trailer created for the current tour. 

     Click here for a Filmmaker Magazine interview with Lu Chuan about the making of City of Life and Death.