"Harry Potter" Grad Tom Felton Walks, Talks Villainous Ways So Far

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 06 August 2011 03:27

Written by Brad Balfour

British actor Tom Felton may not have expected to perfect his villainous chops, but nonetheless, after nearly a decade in the Harry Potter inner circle, he has done so excellently. Now that the fantasy franchise has ended -- with the 8th and final installment Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 having come out mid-July 2011 -- the 23-year-old faces an uncertain future. He has to ask, should he continue being cast as a villain in blockbusters or go the softer, less financially secure indie route?

Well so far, Felton has taken the safer, bad-guy route, playing the nasty animal keeper in this year's science-fiction film reboot of the Planet of The Apes series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Felton portrays a human character, Dodge Landon, who is more beastly than the genetically enhanced chimpanzee Caesar who is imprisoned in Landon's father's ape "refuge."

Born September 22nd, 1987 in Kensington, London, Thomas Andrew "Tom" Felton is best known for playing the role of Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series, the movie adaptations of the best-selling Harry Potter fantasy novels by author J. K. Rowling.

By the time he had auditioned for the mega-blockbuster at 12, the English actor and musician had been in commercials since he was eight and in films since 10, appearing in The Borrowers and Anna and the King. After being cast as Malfoy he subsequently was in all eight Potter films, from 2001 to 2011. A fishing aficionado, he helped form the World Junior Carp Tournament, a "family-friendly" fishing tournament.

Felton's portrayal of Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 won him the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain in 2010 and 2011.

In late 2010, Felton played the main character, Ray Marsden in the movie, White Other. Ray is a troubled youth in the "ends" of England and Imelda Staunton, who played Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, also appears as one of the other main roles in the film.

Felton had a cameo role in Get Him to the Greek, released on 4 June 2010. In February 2010, he was cast in the thriller, The Apparition.

At the May, 2011, Big Apple Wizard Con in Manhattan, Felton did an hour-long Q&A session with fans and friends -- including myself. This Q&A is drawn from that afternoon's event.

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Q: What is your favorite thing about portraying Draco's character?

TF: I feel very lucky, actually. Draco is the complete polar opposite, so any opportunity for an actor to play someone as far opposite of you as possible is always fun.

The rest of the 12 kids or whatever it is that signed when we were 11 years old, a lot of them were very similar to their characters, and one of the best things that I had to do is to play the complete opposite.

I hope you believe me when I say I'm actually a half decent guy in real life.

Q: When we see Draco, we see a very conflicted character.

TF: Very much so. I remember I was quizzing J.K. [Rowling] after the sixth film saying "What’s going on here?" Don’t build me up to be this evil guy and then flip it in the last few films. Where are we going in the last few films?

I think one of the nicest things she did was she left it to interpretation. She never actually specified whether he was consciously thinking about helping the good side or whether it was just inner turmoil.

I think -- especially [in the previous] film -- we really see him at his peak of confliction, where we see him sort of save Harry’s life.

In this film, he tries to kill Harry and then Harry saves him. So he really doesn’t know where his loyalties lie.

There’s a fantastic bit at the very end when you have the whole evil side and the whole good side. And Voldemort basically has to say "Come to the good side or they’ll kill you," and Draco is the only one. He doesn’t want to do it, but his parents pull him over.

Q: How closely related to the book is the seventh movie?

TF: It's quite hard for me to say because I haven't seen the full film yet. But we shot everything.

A lot of people say "Oh, the reason they wanted to split it into two movies was financially." I promise you, it was that or a six-hour film, and a lot of nine-year-olds can't sit through a six-hour film.

As far as I know, the reason we did it is so we could stick to the book exactly, and as far as I'm aware, there have been absolutely no compromises of this.

However, I do know that the epilogue scene -- the 19 years later -- they shot it, they reshot it, they've got loads of great stuff there.

Q: Which Harry Potter film was your favorite to shoot and why?

TF: It gets better as years have gone on. The first one was obviously a lot of fun because we had no idea what we were doing.

The sixth film was the one I really enjoyed because it's the only film that I'm there from the start to the finish and saw the whole thing being made, and also got a chance to work with some of my heroes in one-on-one scenes.

To work with Alan Rickman one-on-one was terrifying. It really was, actually. He's a very daunting man, to say the least, with a very sexy voice, of course. So yeah, that was the film I really look back [on] with the fondest memories.

Q: How was it filming with Ralph Fiennes?

TF: Terrifying. No, literally. It took me six years to get "Good morning" out of me. I was just like "Hi," and I'd just walk on. He's in full makeup, so it's pretty terrifying. 

It's one thing to see him as Voldemort -- pretty terrifying, obviously. But it's actually even scarier when he's sitting there on his chair having a cup of tea, reading the morning paper.

It's like, oh my god, there's Voldemort and he's reading the Daily Times. And he has a very specific tea blend that he likes. He wears really nice socks. Voldemort rocks nice socks.

But actually he's a charming, lovely, hilarious guy. When I saw him at an event as Ralph, I sort of latched onto him because it was nice to see him as a human.

Q: What is the funniest line flub you've ever done while firming?

TF: On the second or third film, when I was still quite young, there was a line that's supposed to be the end of the film, and for some reason I couldn't say it.

I don't know what it was, but my mouth just stuttered. I used to have a bit of a bad stutter, actually, as a kid. I was very young, and I actually started crying because I couldn't get this right. I was really upset.

The director came up to me and said "Tom, we got it, we got it. It's in the can. Don't worry about it," and I was like "Brilliant. Thank god, thank god."

They cut that out of the film, it's not in it. It's not even in the deleted scenes. It's just been banished off the face of the Earth.

That was the line that taught me: get it right or they're just going to cut you out.

Q: If you had a chance to portray another character from Harry Potter who would it be?

TF: I personally thought I would have made a great Hermione. They thought otherwise.

It's very hard for me to say, to be honest with you. I'm very much impregnated with Draco's DNA; it's hard for me to see it as anyone else.

I'm hoping they're going to remake them in 20 years and I get to play Lucius.

Q: How would you have felt if you got cast as Harry and not Draco?

TF: I went for half a dozen auditions for Harry. They dyed my hair slightly dark brown, gave me the scar, the glasses, everything. Luckily, Daniel smashed me to the post.

And actually I dyed my hair ginger straight afterwards for Ron -- three auditions as Ron.

Finally, they bleached my hair blond and that stuck for 10 years. I'm very grateful.

There is no question that no one could have played Harry as well as Daniel -- or the whole cast really. So I'm very grateful.

Q: Do you think Draco could have been secretly in love with Hermione? And if you don't think so, is there someone else he would have been secretly in love with?

TF: I think he was way too busy with the tasks at hand. Actually, it kind of sucked how Draco didn't get a decent girlfriend. I guess he's in love with himself.

I can't see the Hermione thing, unless Hermione punching Draco in the face was another way of saying ‛I love you‛.

Q: How do you think the Harry Potter series would have been if Harry was your friend? If he didn't turn you down in the first movie?

TF: God knows. I don't know. It would have been a very different book, no doubt.

I don't think Draco would have lasted so long as a character if he was Harry's friend. I guess Harry would have been evil.

I have no idea. I haven't even thought about that one. You've just opened a whole can of worms. I might start rewriting.

Q: What do you think Draco's reaction would be in the first movie if the hat had suddenly said "Gryffindor" instead of "Slytherin"?

TF: He probably would have lobbed the hat on the floor and stamped on it. I'm not sure.

I actually did a similar thing when I was at the Harry Potter exhibition in Los Angeles. They have a hat and they have the voices.

And I put it on my head, and then for some reason one of the guys that works there ran over and ripped it off my head.

He said "If it had said 'Gryffindor' it would have been the worst thing in the world." I was kind of bummed about that.

Anyway, the next day I tried it on; it said "Slytherin." So that kind of still sticks with me. Did you see how quickly the hat called it? It didn't get in my head, I swear.

Q: If you had a broken wand and could only cast three spells what would they be?

TF: Oh no, I've got to remember three spells now. The classic one [is one] of my personal favorites. The first one I ever learned, Wingardim Leviosa.

I was about to say Avada Kadavra, but I suppose I better not say that one. Maybe I should, that's very Draco, actually. There are quite a lot of those flying around in the last film, so look out for that.

Q: Do you guys keep any of your wardrobe or props from the Harry Potter movies?

TF: Officially, no.

Unofficially, yeah. Only a small amount of things. I was very keen on getting a nimbus and a wand and a cloak.

I did get Draco's tie pin and his silver Slytherin ring. It even has the [tape] around it because my fingers were too small to fit normal sized rings when I was about 12.

They've moved most of them to the exhibition here, I think in Times Square. And there's one in LA as well -- they've got a bunch of costumes. And in hindsight, it's probably better there than it is in my attic or in my downstairs loo or something like that.

Q: A lot of people love dressing up in the costumes and they see Draco as a kind of role model. How does that make you feel seeing people dressed up like you?

TF: For some reason, it always seems to be girls. I don't think I've ever had a bloke dressed as me.

I'm always a bit worried, actually, when parents come up to me with exceptionally young children and they say "Draco's her favorite character."

And I always think: I'm not supposed to be, I don't think. I'm pretty sure Harry's the good one. I'm the guy they shouldn't root for.

So yeah, it's always a bit mysterious when people do latch onto Draco. I guess it's a rebellious thing, or maybe they see the inner conflict and feel quite sorry for him. I'm not sure. But it's cool, I enjoy it. It's always fun.

Q: Would you ever consider going to Harry Potter conventions?

TF: Sure. I've never done a convention in New York. But I've done a handful of them across the world, and a big thing for me is actually getting a chance to come and say thank you to you guys.

Everyone thinks that we started off on the first one with eight films in mind. That was definitely not the case; it was specifically to do one. And it was only thanks to [the passion and enthusiasm of] everyone across the world that we ended up doing it for 11 years.

I'm personally very grateful, and I know I speak for the rest of the cast when I say thanks for your dedication and passion. Of course; any opportunity to say thank you is always welcome.

Q: Have you seen A Very Potter Musical?

TF: I’ve only done a handful of these conventions. But every one I go to, there are at least two or three people that ask me this question, and every time I shamefully say I have not seen the whole thing.

It’s three hours long. That’s quite a YouTube video, isn’t it? But I’ve heard fantastic things, and I also heard I was wrongly cast in that by someone far superior. I’d like to meet her because I hear she’s done a wonderful job.

Q: What did you think about any fan fiction that deals with Draco and Hermione?

TF: It’s kind of two sides of the coin here. One, I think anyone that’s felt inspired by reading Harry Potter enough to actually do their own literary work is fantastic. It’s one of the great things that’s come from J.K. Rowling’s writing; she’s inspired so many kids.

However, their topics are often a little strange, and I confess I have not really gone to great depths of reading fan fiction.

A lot of them are very sexual. I don’t know what it is. And also there are alarming pictures that go with them, and let me stress, these pictures are not real. Daniel and I never spooned in bed.

Or we never took pictures, anyway. My brother actually had that as his screen saver on his phone.

Q: What did you think of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter?

TF: That is something special. If you're even slightly a Harry Potter fan, it's pretty amazing and a very cool place to go. I warn you now; you're going to spend thousands in there. I bought everything with a Slytherin bag on it.

Q: What would be your dream role, if you could play any person?

TF: I’d like to say I don’t want to put any constraints, whatever comes my way, but I’m lying. James Bond. If not, I’ll happily settle for the villain. We’ll see.

Q: If you could make your own film to star in, who would be your top co-star and top director?

TF: I have a handful of actors and directors. But I had such a good time working with David Yates, who directed the last four films. He without question is the reason why I'm very passionate about filmmaking.

To be honest with you, I was four or five films in, thinking I'm not sure whether I really want to do this. I thought it could be some other calling for me in life.

But David pretty much singlehandedly made me realize how damn lucky I was and also how much money it is actually to make films.

As far as co-stars, Daniel and I have always said we'd love to do a film where I'm the hero and he's the villain.

I wanted to do music, I wanted to do agricultural work, I wanted to do fishing. All sorts. But evidently I realized that acting’s pretty cool.

Q: You started acting very young. Did you always want to be an actor?

TF: Very much so. My parents felt the complete opposite. They were the ones going "Look, I don’t want you going to a spaghetti commercial at the age of seven," but I was quite adamant on going.

As soon as I got my first video camera, I start[ed] making my own two-hour monologues at the age of six.

I used to watch a lot of theater because my brother‛s in theater. It was always something that seemed very natural and fun. I joined drama groups and I really, really enjoyed it.

It was very different when we started doing adverts and commercials, and my first film -- when I was seven, I think it was. Looking back, it’s a fantastic experience.

Q: How did it feel to be in such a serious movie like Anna and the King and then go into movies like Harry Potter?

TF: I was like 10 years old. It [was] four months in Malaysia. There was no one else out there who spoke English, really, other than the cast and crew, but it was very cool. And Malaysia is fantastic.

The harsh part about it is that I really didn't have any idea who Jodie Foster was because my mom wouldn't let me watch Silence of the Lambs. So it's only actually since then that I realized, oh my god, Jodie Foster was my mom. It was an awesome time.

Q: Do you think you’ll direct later on?

TF: Yeah, I’d love to. I love the idea of directing one day. I’ve recently started writing. All aspects of filmmaking fascinate me: sound, stunts, whatever it may be. So I hope to be involved with it for the rest of my life.

Q: Are you in a band or anything like that?

TF: Not really. I take my guitar wherever I go and I love to jam out and write my own very simple songs.

Q: Are there any graphic novels that you like?

TF: Not really. I never really got too much into comics, not like Marvel comics. We have ones like Beano. It‛s a comic book in England.

It seems to be the trend, isn't it, where every single living comic book in the last 50 years is now turning into a six-film franchise or whatever. Which is great, it's fantastic.

Q: Have you ever thought of doing voice acting? And if so, is there a specific character from a cartoon or an anime that you would like to play?

TF: It's funny you say that, because I was just speaking to a guy about their remaking the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In England, it was not called "ninja".

Q: What was it called?

TF: "Hero". It was the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, because for some reason in the '90s the word "ninja" was banned from TV.

I went to Nickelodeon the other day and saw some of the stuff they're doing. It looks amazing. So yeah, I'd love to do some voice work, definitely.

Q: Is there any advice you could give to someone in the business trying to make it?

TF: A lot of people actually ask me how to do it or what’s the best advice.

Something people often misconceive is just how much luck you need. There are thousands of actors out there who are way more talented, way better looking, way better at certain parts, and yet they never even get seen for a particular role for whatever reason. So a huge amount of luck is in there.

Determination. You need to be turned away a thousand times before one person says "All right, I'll give you a shot." So really you're a bit of meat that walks into a room and they say "No."

And you have to walk out and hold your head up and say "All right, fine. I wasn't right for that part but I'm going to walk up to the next one," which takes a while.

It's hard not to take it personally when someone says "You're great, you're great. No, you're not. We don't want you for the part." It does take a while to get used to that.

I've always said just do it because you love to do it. A lot of youngsters say "I want to be famous." Being an actor is not the best way to go about it.

It's much easier to become one of those reality show stars. That's much quicker; you don't have to do anything. Just get drunk on TV.

Q: Do you watch any TV? What are some of your favorite shows?

TF: Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston -- I love him.

Q: You were in Get Him to the Greek, for like five minutes. Were you called for that or did you just show up or what?

TF: Naturally, we had lots of visitors on the Harry Potter set every day from kids. I think Obama's family came down for a day, which was weird. There were like 160 security guards running around militant style, which is fun.

Jonah Hill came down one day and as soon as I heard that, I kind of latched onto his tour. I clung onto him for about two hours, because I was a massive fan of Superbad.

And then he gave me a call the next day and said "Do you want to be in the last day of the movie?" And I genuinely thought he was joking, and he wasn't.

I came on the set; they did no rehearsals, no script. They just said, "Walk in and he's going to say some stuff to you." It was fun.

Q: What's your favorite film quote?

TF: My favorite film for quotes -- rather than picking an individual quote out from it -- is Snatch. It's a Guy Ritchie film, [with] Brad Pitt. Anything that Brad Pitt says in that whole film has me in stitches.

Q: Did you receive an invitation to the Royal wedding?

TF: I actually landed in Chicago three weeks ago and drove from Chicago to San Francisco in an RV. Love it. And then we drove down the coast and we just got to New York last night.

I was saying I sacrificed my ticket to come over to America to do the road trip, and they were like "Oh my god that's brilliant, man. We love that."

And of course it's not true. I didn't get invited. My girlfriend would not have let me go. I did stay up til five in the morning in Chicago to watch it, so we're very proud of our new princess.

Q: What are your plans after Harry Potter?

TF: We finished shooting The Deathly Hallows maybe a year ago now. I've been lucky enough to continue with acting. I have a handful of films that will be coming out this year.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes comes out in August. I saw a trailer for that a couple of weeks ago; it looks really awesome. A nd there's a film coming out next year called The Apparition with Ashley Greene.

Q: Would you ever consider going on Broadway?

TF: Yeah, I'd love to. Has anyone seen Daniel? I've heard nothing but rave reviews.

It's actually kind of weird, because when we were shooting the last Deathly Hallows, occasionally Daniel would get up out of the makeup chair and bust out a few moves. I hear he's tearing up Broadway and bringing thousands of excited kids to see him, which is fantastic.

Unfortunately,  I'm not going to get the chance to see him [this time]. But I am back for the New York premiere [of Deathly Hallows 2], so I'll make sure I go see him.

Street Chef Ben Sargent Makes The World's Best Lobster Roll

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 01 August 2011 02:58

Written by Brad Balfour

Ben Sargent has established his name through a passion for seafood and on the strength of love for the traditional with a slightly updated spin.

Known as the "Brooklyn Chowder Surfer", Ben Sargent was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He comes naturally by his lifelong love affair with the sea and its bounty through an upbringing in Cape Cod that nurtured his passion for fishing, surfing and cold water. To this heritage he wedded his culinary talents to open two restaurants, Hurricane Hopeful and Surf Bar, both in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York City.

Read more: Street Chef Ben Sargent Makes...

Kevin Macdonald: A Day in the Life of Humankind

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 30 July 2011 20:03

Written by Brad Balfour

A little over a year ago, I responded to the announcement of YouTube's global film experiment, to be called Life In A Day -- shepherded by producer Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions and director Kevin Macdonald -- by writing about it in a HuffingtonPost post.

I blanched at trying to record something of my life on that day, July 24th, 2010, so I didn't. Instead, I wrote about the trauma of making such a public document.

Now, a little over a year later, I find myself marveling not only at what ended up as the 90-minute crowd-sourced compilation curated by veteran director Macdonald, but at the very feat of putting it together.

So however you react to the mix and the feel-good message of the film, it's awesome to think of how the filmmaking process has changed through cheap digital recording and editing tools, and what lowering the bar of entry has meant to the future of long-form movie-making.

That consideration formed a large part of our conversation and made the following Q & A as much a continuation of that discussion on the future of film and media.

While Macdonald has made major fiction features -- including The Eagle, State of Play, and The Last King of Scotland -- the 43-year-old Scottish director won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his 2000 film One Day in September, about the Munich Olympics hijackers. His other feature documentary, Touching the Void (2003), had critical and commercial success on its release.

Such experience informed his curatorial approach and made him a good choice for overseer on this project.

Q: You’ve done documentaries like Touching the Void and action features like The Eagle -- very different things. How do you make a balance between that and your documentary work?

KM: I like to take a little of what I learned in fiction and apply it to documentary and vise versa. But my job is not a traditional director’s job in this film. I didn’t shoot any of the footage here.

My job was a curatorial one, primarily about giving structure to this amorphous mass of stuff and saying, "How do we make this feel like it’s a movie?" -- something that actually works as a whole, rather than just a series of clips, like a ‛best of‛ selection.

Q: A narrative?

KM: Not necessarily a narrative in this case. But actually, feeling like it’s a whole comes from fiction films rather than documentaries.

Q: When did this concept come about and when did you get involved?

KM: I came in right at the beginning. YouTube and Scott [Free Productions] were talking about making a movie.

YouTube wanted to do a movie to celebrate or help celebrate their fifth birthday, which was last year -- amazingly, because it feels like YouTube has been around forever.

So then Liza Marshall, the producer, came to me because we knew each other, and said, "What can we do?" We came up with this idea together, which for me was inspired by something I’d learned about when I was studying documentaries.

There was this man, Humphrey Jennings, who made one of my favorite films, Listen to Britain, which is a 20-minute film with no dialogue, but sights and sounds of different places around Britain during the war in 1943. It’s a classic and beautiful. There’s inspiration in that.

He also was part of creating a movement -- which sounds like something from George Orwell in 1984 -- but it’s called the Mass Observation Movement. And what they did was, they asked people in Britain during [WWII] and just before the war to write diaries detailing the mundane details of their lives.

They’d also ask them questions, actually. They’d ask them, "What do you have on your mantelpiece? What are the names of five dogs you’ve seen this week?"

Things that were sort of seemingly mundane, and they’d ask them these things, get them to write these diaries.

And then they would take those diaries and form [them] into books or magazine articles or whatever, trying to discover the extraordinary, the weird, the interesting in what seemed to be the ordinary.

I thought that’s a great model; we could do that with YouTube. That’s a way of exploiting this extraordinary tool, of all this material that’s out there and all this material that’s uploaded all the time.

Q: Is that where you came up with the three questions?

KM: Yeah.

Q: And that’s the point?

KM: That’s where that came from as well. So I thank this very obscure British filmmaker, Humphrey Jennings, for [my] stealing all his ideas for this.

Q: Were you torn between doing one movie of one question, then one movie of each of the other questions, or did you always want to integrate them? And then how did you decide on how much of each you wanted to run?

KM: Obviously, the point of the questions was to allow us to get a way into talking about important, intimate things. That love question obviously is transparent, the fear question’s transparent.

The question about your pockets or handbag, that’s really a way of getting to talk about materialism, consumerism, inequality, possessions, all those sort of things.

 But that was just one way of structuring the film. Because there’s no real traditional narrative, you find other means of structuring the film.

So there’s the microscopic structuring of a montage about people brushing their teeth and going to the toilet, and [you say] okay, I’m going to make a two-minute thing about that.

Then there’s the structure of pieces of music -- like the end girl and woman who are singing and beating their corn, and that structure’s about food consumption and production.

So anyway, there’s a lot of very obscure stuff.

Overarching it all, you have the structure of the day starting at midnight, ending at midnight, and you have a structure of different characters appearing then reappearing.

That gives you a sort of tension, a suspense. Because you’re not sure -- is that person going to reappear? "I want to know more about them". Then maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and you learn a bit more.

So that was really my role, to try and figure out a way to make the film [all] of a piece.

Q: You had all those assistants. You’ve probably never had so many.

KM: It was great. A megalomaniac’s delight. Nobody could watch all of this material on their own. Well, it would take them two years. I’ve calculated.

Q: How many hours?

KM: 4,500 hours. That’s a lot of material. It took 24 or 25 people who spoke many different languages.

We had a Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Danish, a Swedish one, French, Italian and whatever speakers, and they watched all the stuff that came from their countries or in their languages. And then we had to send some out.

We had some very obscure languages. We had some Pygmy language from Cameroon, and that song of Angolan singers -- actually, they sing three different songs that weave into each other and they’re in three different dialects.

There’s something in a Balinese dialect of Indonesia. [It] was incredibly hard to find someone who spoke that in London.

Those people watched everything, all four and half thousand hours, 12 hours a day. It took them two and a half months.

As they were finishing that, I took a month off after the filming day and let them start, and then came back.

So what they did was rate it from one to five. One star for really terrible -- where they made less effort filming this than we were watching it -- up to five stars, "this is great, there’s something fascinating here."

The editor, Joe Walker, is the unsung hero of this. We watched the four- and five-stars, 350 hours of them. We sat down and watched the best stuff.

Q: You had more bad than good?

KM: By the very fact that there were only 350 hours of four and five stars. It was all just different.

I’m not going to say it’s bad. There was some bad stuff in there. But my attitude is, everyone who got involved in this was being incredibly generous, because they were doing something in which they had no chance of financial gain.

There was a prize in effect, I suppose, that people whose clips we thought were the best got invited to Sundance. Twenty people from the film were there -- the little Japanese boy and his father, the Peruvian boy and his father.

But other than that, people did it because they wanted to be involved in something and be generous and share something from their own lives.

So I’m not the one to say to them, "What you did was horrible."

Q: You show the film of the Japanese kids who recently lost their mother. Part of being Japanese is they are confined in a tiny room. Did you consciously choose this cultural element for them to represent?

KM: I chose the clips that were the best clips, and I thought that that single clip was the most beautiful short film I’ve ever seen. You learn something every second.

You learn something every moment as it’s going on, until you get this [revelation that] his mother has passed away, so he’s in mourning, he goes and lies back down. It’s incredibly moving.

But it’s also a piece of film art, whether it is intentional or accidental. It was almost a single shot; there’s one cut in there.

If only I’d had 10 other films as good from Japan showing people on a farm, on a mountain or in a palace, I would have used them. But I didn’t. So any sense that it’s portraying clichés of any country is purely accidental.

The tricky thing was finding characters like that who made a film or, through a series of very short clips, you felt like you learned something about their lives and you got involved in the story about them and that you related to.

And those few people who managed to achieve that, those were the backbone of the film. Into that we poured all the different ingredients.

Q: How has making this film changed your life -- both you as an artist and as a person?

KM: It’s changed me in both ways. It’s made me even more aware of the use of serendipity, of luck, in filmmaking. I’m really admiring a lot of the visuals in this film. People have shot really beautiful things and there are ideas to steal in there.

I realized there are things that you can only shoot with a home video camera -- that you couldn’t shoot with a professional camera. The fly being picked off the windowpane by somebody [for example].

You film by camera here, fly goes up to his hand, takes the fly, holds it in his hand, films his hand, goes through a door, the iris changes, the focus changes, he lets it go, you see the fly going off.

To do that using a conventional professional camera would be millions in special effects. Maybe not millions, but it’s a big, complicated shot to do something that’s very simple. There’s a beauty to that, there’s a whole aesthetic of the amateur, and I came to appreciate that.

I also think, from a personal point of view, I learned to be less cynical about the world, I suppose. I think about people maybe more positively. I’m a cynical person who’s normally attracted to the dark side of things.

Q: We know from some of your movies.

KM: Actually, in this I felt like: Yes, you confront the dark side of things, there’s a lot of death, pain, illness and tragedy and whatever in there.

But overarching everything in the material I saw, I got this sense of this tremendous life force, that people -- even when they’re in their last hours or days of life, confronting death -- they still have this sense of wanting to live, of life being special and wonderful. That made me more optimistic.

A lot of people who filmed in this were very -- for want of a better term, I would say -- ordinary people.

They were not people who are part of the media, not the kind of people that I would necessarily meet when I come to America or go to Japan or whatever. They’re not people in the film business, not people that are involved in media in any way.

There’s something great about that, about giving voice to people who are just people, first and foremost -- before they’re commentators, before they’re this, before they’re that. And that was kind of lovely.