Joe Kosinski's Film Career Kicks In With Tron: Legacy

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 24 December 2010 06:04

Written by Brad Balfour

When director Joseph Kosinski got the assignment to create the science fiction film Tron: Legacy he had a lot to prove. A commercial and feature film director best known for his computer generated imagery, Kosinski became famous for such CGI related television commercials as the "Starry Night" ad for Halo 3 and the award-winning one -- "Mad World" -- for Gears of War.

Read more: Joe Kosinski's Film Career Kicks...

The Jewish-Mexican Experience Via Mariana Chenillo's Award-Winning Film

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 21 December 2010 14:33

Written by Brad Balfour

Though Mexico is a thoroughly Catholic country, writer/director Mariana Chenillo decided that her first feature film, now titled Nora's Will, would be based on her own Jewish experience.

The film tells of a woman who, upon her suicide, uses the Jewish holiday of Passover to confound her ex-husband and makes demands that only a Jewish woman could make about her funeral and seemingly, everything else. In doing so, she exerts her will from the grave and forces everyone involved to confront a chasm of cultural and familial issues--with a touch of humor and irony.

Chenillo won a bunch of Ariel Awards for her film -- the equivalent of the Oscar for Mexico -- and recently enjoyed the spotlight placed on her as one of the 10 next-generation directors included in Revolucion, a feature-length compilation of short films examining Mexico on the centennial of its independence from Spain. As part of this year's recently concluded New York Film Festival, this film had its New York debut. And now not more than a week after the fest ended, Nora's Will made its New York run.

Q: How much of this story is based on elements from your family?
 
MC: This story is real but also completely fictionalized. By this, I mean that a few elements were taken directly from reality, the most obvious ones are the Nora and José's characters, based on my grandparents. Also, the fact that they lived across the street from each other and that she had tried to commit suicide several times during her life.

After my grandmother's death, my grandfather moved away from that street. If she wasn't there any more, there was no use in him living there. He also kept things that belonged to her (and perhaps also to him before they got divorced), and slowly, almost unnoticeably, his feelings towards her changed.

So what brought me to the film was not the memory of my grandmother's suicide, but what followed it. The process of forgiving, even though forgiving doesn't always means understanding.

Q: In a vast Catholic country what is like to grow up in a Jewish family?

MC: My sisters and I went to non-religious schools all of our lives. We understood the meaning and deep symbolism of many Jewish traditions, but were also used to attend our school friends' first communions and other Catholic celebrations. So we grew up with all of it, witnessing how both cultures complemented and contradicted each other.

As my sister Deborah states -- half joking and half not -- we are not only Jewish but Guadalupan-Jewish. Mexican culture is so strong and so profound than even second generations like us have roots as deep and as ancient as the Mexican culture itself.

Q: What was it like growing up in Mexico and how it influenced you becoming a filmmaker

MC: Mexico is a country full of contradictions. Death itself is at the same time feared and celebrated. The humor needed to survive the sometimes painful situation, comes from both: the need to forget and the need to understand.
The light shines so bright that the contrast almost makes things dark. So there is no escape. Reality is there in all its beauty and its crudeness. Filmmaking (or any form way of expression) is just a matter of observing.

Q: The story is a set of convolutions upon convolutions -- what did it take to construct it and how did it evolve?
 
MC: Something that was clear from the start was that I wanted José to take care of Nora's corpse. And also, that I wanted that to be a part of her plan. Therefore, a big reason for him to stay at her apartment against his will was needed.

First, he tries to get out of that situation by attempting to bury her that same day without their son. But the son does not allow it. Then he tries to get out of there by fixing a Catholic burial, but that does not work either. And then he finds that forgotten photograph under the bed (ironically, the only flaw in Nora's plan). So after that, he won't be able to leave, because he will need to know what her desk is hiding from him and he will need to stay in her apartment until he finds out.
 
Q: Where did you come with the cast and did they have to understand the Jewish experience?

MC: Since raising the money for the film took a very long time, the casting process was done quite slowly. The casting director told me I have an unusual technique, because I don't like to see that many actors during the process. I cast every actor as if he or she has got to stay in the film.

So I make many many takes and try with all my might to help them so they will do it right. I don't know why I do that, but every time I cast, I find myself trying very hard to make an actor fit to a part. Which sometimes does not work at all, but at other times, it makes actors more confident and things just work out very well from the very first time.

I do believe I was lucky to have such a good cast. Fernando Luján, the protagonist has done more than 70 films and he is great. So I am grateful that he trusted me on my very first one.
 
I had done lots of research on the Jewish topics such as death rituals, food, Passover, etc. that the film would address. So I made copies for everyone to read. The actors say I gave them a "whole book" of instructions.

And some of them, like Enrique Arreola (the rabbi's assistant), and Angelina Peláez (the nanny) had to learn and practice some special skills like reading psalms in Hebrew or cooking Passover food. They really did work very hard.
 
Q: What was so compelling about this story that it had to be your first feature?

MC: The truth is that all through film school, every piece of fiction I shot, was also about my grandmother. Not comedy, and nothing like this film, but in many ways, they were all about the same subject.

I feel as if then I was trying with different tones and genders, until I found out that humor was the best tool I had, and that I had to stick to it if I wanted to tell this story.

But again, while I was writing and preparing this film, I used to ask myself over and over again: "Why is it that I am doing this old people and rabbi's film as my very first film?"

It was pretty scary, also because being a film about my family, there was much to loose... They could all have stopped talking to me!

But it seems to me now that I almost had no choice. The story was there, and I kind of felt I had to take it out of my way in order to continue telling other stories that were about other subjects.

Q: Is this film getting exposure thru the jewish festivals as well?

MC: Jewish film festivals are quite a good way of sharing this film with specific Jewish audiences, so yes, the film has been through some. But we believe the film, even though being very particular, is also a universal story has proved to attract many different types of audiences.

Q: What are you working on next; do you have plans to make films with further Jewish themes?

MC: Neither of the screenplays I am working on now are based on Jewish themes. I believe the Jewish theme was the result of Nora's will being a family story. I think that each story is already self-contained in its own particular context.

I am currently writing two screenplays. One of them is very personal, and the other is an adaptation of a short story I was invited to adapt, and then to direct. This last project I mentioned, is planed to be shot during the second semester of 2011.

Q: And do you plan to make films in English?

MC: It also depends on the particular project. At the time, I am working on two screenplays that will be shot in Mexico and in Spanish, but I also believe that some of the stories I am interested in telling could also happen somewhere else in the world.

Q: As for the film Revolucion, what does it reflect about the popular mood about the Revolution; how does the popular culture deal with the centenary -- is there a desperate, ironic, satiric mood about it?
 
MC: There's a deep feeling of despair right now in Mexico. We had a huge celebration just a few weeks ago celebrating the 200 years of independence from Spain, and there was a lot of questioning. Why was the government spending so much money on a celebration when the situation of the country is in a big crisis in so many ways?

So I think that the society is really questioning themselves and the government. What should be done now? With so many problems, where's the hope? I think that irony somehow looks for hope because it portrays contrasts. How will we manage to go on living without humor and without irony? And without that sense of that there's going to be something after the crisis then I think that there's no use. So I think that's also shown in culture in general and in this film.

French Director Gaspar Noe Shows How He Enters The Void

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 25 October 2010 10:53

Written by Brad Balfour

The week preceding Halloween provides an opportunity to celebrate the genres of the supernatural, fantastical and horror film. The Film Society of Lincoln Center presents its fourth edition of its annual Scary Movies series (through Oct. 31, 2010) -- including the well-executed Stake Land. Clint Eastwood's neo-supernatural thriller Hereafter has just opened and other film centers around town are offering their share of creepy cinematic fare.

At this time, Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void is still playing in town. Though not strictly a supernatural film, it draws on some of the genre's conventions to offer an surreal, visually odd film with a unique point of view.

Over his relatively short career, Argentinian-born French filmmaker Noe has garnered a disproportionate amount of press for his controversial films. First he made I Stand Alone, then Irréversible. Both provocatively deal with violent men in violent situations; in the first case, incest, and, with the second, brutal rape.

Then he made the mystically-infused Enter The Void featuring the ever-seductive Paz de la Huerta (now starring in HBO's Boardwalk Empire). Though it is rife with violent scenes, it is not a violent film like the others. Based on a reading of The Tibetan Book of The Dead, Enter The Void takes the audience through a man's first few minutes after his death. As his spirit, essence, or whatever you want to call it, travels through the city, over rooftop, we see a series of flashbacks until his "soul" reincarnates in the next vessel that will emerge as another life takes shape in a graphic sex scene.

Q: The idea in Buddhism is what is real/what is not real is illusory; that's why The Tibetan Book of the Dead has connected with people tripping on acid. Both the book and acid raise the question what's real and what's not real. Am I really seeing this, am I not really seeing this? Is that also what you were raising was the question of what is reality in a sense?



GN: Ask yourself what is present and real, why your own memories get so blurry when you have a blackout or even why you try to remember what you did two weeks ago.



Q: The Buddhist notion that life is an illusion or that in life the only unchanging thing is change links with the feeling here that life is cheap, and that these Japanese seem to regard these Westerners' lives as cheap.



GN: What happened in the movie would never happen. It could have happened in some other countries but not in Japan, but I needed some dramatic [element] to start the movie. At the end of the movie you don't know if his memories were not an illusion. He comes back to life to understand that the whole mental state that you were going through actually was just a dream.

All that in the movie is just an illusion but you can think that even his whole life is an illusion before that.

The truth is that you don't know at the end of the movie. You can't tell anymore what's real. But in the case of his dream at the end of the movie you don't know if he's not going to simply just wake up in a hospital and be sent to prison; you can't tell if he died or not. It's making a dream out of all the elements that he went through. He read The Book of the Dead and promised to never leave her so he decided to reincarnate.



Q: Your other films have equated sex with violence. Though there are elements of that in this film, it also has, at least by the end, the flip side, where sex offers a resurrection, reincarnation or redemption. Is that what you were showing in terms of your own evolution and in the evolution of the film?



GN: There is no reincarnation because at the end he comes back through his mother's belly and we don't know if he's going back into the loop and coming back to life through his mother's belly or if he's just remembering or reconstructing a false memory of the most traumatic moment of his life -- the moment he discovered his life for the first time. I don't know if there is any redemption in heterosexual love here but you see a woman and a man making love.



Q: Are you familiar with Wilhelm Reich -- the radical psychologist who posited that sexuality and sex was the most important release of energy.



GN: He constructed a machine didn't he?



Q: The orgone box [orgone accumulator].

GN: I've read about him but never read his books.



Q: This movie deals more with sex as a positive energy release as well as negative energy release; you're looking at both sides of it here. Was that your message, about the negative and the positive of the energy release of sex?



GN: I don't believe in good and evil, I don't believe in positive and negative energy. There is an energy of life or course that fights for the survival of the species, so whatever keeps you alive is good for the survival of the species. There is a meaningful energy which is the sexual energy.



Q: The most important thing though I think in making this movie work was having Paz, because you had to have somebody with that sexuality and that power to sort of reconnect throughout. Was she the toughest person to get for the film?



GN: No, actually I met her almost one year before I met Nathaniel [Brown, who is the man getting killed] and I really liked her and I wanted to have her in the movie. But I had problems, believe it or not, to find someone to play the brother, because I wanted to have some physical resemblance between the brother and the sister. And also I knew that I wanted to avoid a professional actress because as a concept of the movie I knew that if I had a professional actor he would have a vision.



Q: This movie fits into a canon of films about the experience just before death. There's that movie that was one with Ryan Gosling in it. Marc Forster directed called Stay. Have you seen any of those movies -- were they an inspiration?



GN: Of course there were other movies that had complex special effects, like The Matrix but in many ways this movie is simpler than those others.



Q: I see a science-fictional influence in this film. Will you be moving more towards science-fictional films?



GN: Actually I'm going to go more [towards] erotic movies. I shot a documentary but I guess I'll go to a safer place.



Q: Buddhist thinking also involves that peace, satori or enlightenment, the idea of not killing, not damaging life. Do you see yourself moving more in that direction creatively and conceptually as well?



GN: I know that I wouldn't want to kill an animal. Even when there's a cockroach in the kitchen I don't kill the cockroach.



Q: Did you become more Buddhist-oriented in making this movie?



GN: I'm not Buddhist. I don't believe in religion; I don't even believe in the survival of the mind after death. I believe that there are forces and connections between humans in their lifetimes but I don't think they will ever exist on another dimension.