Actor David Oyelowo Is Enjoying A Championship Season

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 04 May 2012 14:27

Written by Brad Balfour

Born in Britain, part of a royal Nigerian family, raised there and in England, 36-year-old actor David Oyelowo is enjoying a remarkable run -- garnering more prominent roles and rising billing in films with bigger and bigger actors. This increasingly favorable career surge doesn’t seem like it's going to abate any time soon.

Within this last month, two of his recent efforts have come out either theatrically or on DVD -- the high-profile Lucas-Film produced WW 2 flying airmen story, Red Tails, and the indie-edgy inner city drama, 96 Minutes.

In this drama about a car-jacking gone wrong, Oyelowo play a small but crucial role. Though his appearance is limited, this skilled and committed actor has to drive the momentum in two pivitol scenes. A film about the good and bad decisions one can make in a split second, his character survives with dignity intact though it takes quite a bruising in this one scene.

Read more: Actor David Oyelowo Is Enjoying...

Chimpanzee's Filmmakers Tell A True Tale of Loss and Bonding

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 30 April 2012 18:43

Written by Brad Balfour

While Marvel's The Avengers is tentpole cinema's paean to superhero glory, DisneyNature salutes a different sort of heroics through the true primate story told in Chimpanzee.

British directors/producers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield have fashioned this rousing drama out of three hard years worth of collected footage of our primate cousins in action. 

From hundreds of hours of digitally captured live action they have culled a powerful chronicle of primate society, including the accidental adoption of a young orphaned chimp by the alpha male of his pack. An unheard of situation in the annals of primate research, this remarkable event forms the backbone of a narrative that both reveals much about chimpanzee social life and provides a metaphor humanity.

This material was in capable hands for veteran nature documentarians Fotherfill and Linfield, who previously helmed such films as African Cats, Earth and Frozen Planet -- not to mention the BBC juggernaut Planet Earth.

Q: How did you work out which task each one of you handled in making this film?

AF: It's an organic process, actually. I'd worked with chimpanzees 25 years ago, so I started it off. Mark's a real primate expert as well, and it was very much a 50/50 split. Although I have to say, Mark is quite a lot more technically capable than I, so he took more of the lead with the camera side of things. But we have worked together a lot... including on the TV series Planet Earth.

ML: Alastair's got far better political skills to deal with tricky people.

AF: One of the things about chimpanzees is that in the wild most run from you straight away, so you have to work with what's called habituated chimpanzees. And these are chimpanzees where scientists like Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream in Tanzania, and, in our case, Christophe Boesch in the Ivory Coast have worked with these chimpanzees for literally 30 years. Originally they'd go out in the forest day after day after day and wouldn't see anything.

They'd hear frightened chimpanzees and then gradually the chimpanzees would get used to the people there. Now you can sit as close as we are to each other and they're completely relaxed and ignore you. It’s wonderful and really special.

Q: It seems impossible to script a story like this, yet it’s amazing how it turned out. How did this story come about?

ML: Of course it's not entirely true that we didn't have a script, because you'd be doing really well to get a feature film commissioned by Disney if you don't have any kind of a script. It’s just that the script went in the bin. There was a 60-  70-page traditional Hollywood script, and it was made the way we make most wildlife film scripts.

Through our research and collaboration with scientists, we put together all the cool things that we know chimpanzees do and put them into an order that made sense. And we removed things that we thought ha no chance of being filmed.

Then we fiddled around with it. But in reality, you get there and of course the chimpanzees haven't read the script. Day after day they might not even turn up. And you hope -- and this is always the way it is to some extent -- that they'll do some interesting things that you didn't put in the script.

Probably some of the things that you thought were easy you won't ever see. In this case we were incredibly lucky because the real story that unfolded in front of us was way better than the script [we did]. 

AF: We deliberately chose to follow a young baby chimp because we knew they're very, very cute. But during the first five years of a chimpanzee's life, 50% of those chimps die. We didn't want Oscar's mother to die; that was a real, real problem for us. She was killed by a leopard about two years into the filming and at that stage we thought the film was over.

We genuinely thought that, because Disney movies need a happy ending, so we were really worried. Then the extraordinary adoption by alpha male Freddy happened. In 30 years the scientists hadn’t seen anything quite like that and it's certainly has never been filmed before.

ML: We were quite lucky -- it was probably just short of three years. Had he been orphaned when he was two years old, he probably would have died because they're very reliant on their mother's milk. Freddy was able to give him normal food that he could collect in the forest, but were he just two that might not be enough. Whereas at about three or just short of three, Freddy was able to give Oscar just enough to keep him going.

Q: How many hours were you there and how many hours did you actually shoot in terms of footage?

AF: We were there for about three and a half years. It was an unbelievably difficult place to work because the rainforest is very, very dark and chimpanzees are obviously very dark animals. There’s 100% humidity and the cameras were heavy. Mark and I reckoned it was the hardest challenge that we ever asked a cameraman to do. Martin said if he got one shot in a day he was pleased. It was really like that.

One thing we've been trying to do with DisneyNature is not make documentaries. We've tried to make movies that really work in the way that movies are supposed to work. We have stories and engaging characters. The fact that they're chimpanzees is wonderful, but they've got to work as characters. And with Chimpanzee, more than even African Cats, we really had to get it to work.

ML: And that's down to the chimpanzees. What's so incredible about the chimpanzees is that so much of their lives are mirrored in our lives. We actually joked when we first arrived at the location, obviously Alastair's been there previously, but when we went there for a reconnaissance trip four years ago we sat down with researchers and they'd just come back from a day in the forest and were all talking about these chimpanzees like they were human characters.

And we'd just thought they'd been in the forest too long, but within a few weeks we were doing the same thing. You can't help yourself. Really the kind of relationships they have with each other, the dramas that go on between them...

Q: How do you explain this miracle between Oscar and Freddy?

AF: Nobody can really explain it. The scientists actually did a genetic test and discovered that, as they suspected, they're not at all related. And I think the only thing you can think is that male chimpanzees do have a feminine side to them.

ML: The best way to answer that surely is, Why do humans adopt? -- and actually even humans who have children. Couples will adopt, so why? If you can answer that question, I think you've answered our question about chimpanzees, because we are so similar.

AF: In the past scientists have seen female chimpanzees that don't have their own young adopt other babies, and sometimes an older brother will adopt a younger brother when the mother is lost. But it's almost never, I think maybe on one other occasion, for a big adult male.

And particularly the alpha, because he has a real big role in chimpanzee society. He has to lead the guys against their rivals, and as you've seen in the movie, chimpanzees don't live on their own; they have other groups nearby. And our particular group, unfortunately, had a particularly powerful group nearby called Scar and his big team of males. They were a real threat to Freddy and Oscar and Isha. We were really worried all the way through the filming.

ML: Another thing worth saying on the adoption is that there's a scientific study going on -- from the genetic analysis of the feces, if you must know -- showing that Freddy and Oscar are not related. Because it could be that Freddy was actually Oscar's father, being the alpha male of the group and all the rest of it. But we know for certain that they're not. So it really is an act of altruism.

Q: Could you tell the difference between each of the chimps?

AF: You can recognize their faces.

ML: Easily.

Q: Scar was obvious.

AF: Scar was obvious. It takes a bit more time. But their faces are as distinctly different as human faces. And their character as well, actually. When we first started we knew we were to follow a mother and a baby, and the first mother we went with was very relaxed, but she turned out to be camera shy.

Every time the cameraman went close, she'd just look away from the camera and we thought this isn't going to work. So luckily we chose Isha, who chose to be a really relaxed girl. She was a lovely girl.

Q: Why didn't you say that a leopard killed the mother instead of implying that it was from the chimp attack?

ML: Why didn't we?

AF: Basically what happened was that – this is the true thing that happened – Isha was separated from the group, and we think she was killed by a leopard. We never filmed it. Basically what happened is there was the battle and then the next day there was Oscar on his own and Isha had disappeared.

And we said to the scientist, "What's happened?" and he said, "Well, she's almost certainly been killed by a leopard," which is why we chose to tell that story in the movie.

Q: You left it ambiguous. With these wonderful stories, they always have one animal being killed and here as well, though you didn't see it being torn to bits. Why does an animal have to die? Kids still talk about their traumatic experience of seeing Bambi's mother being killed.

AF: That's the truth in nature.

ML: Yes, and we set out to tell the story of Oscar's life. Clearly the thing that shaped it was the death of his mother; that wasn't our fault. As much as we wanted a good story, we didn't do her in.

AF: But you make a very good point, and I think the important thing is these movies are for every age group. We want children to come with their parents.

It's not just a kid's movie, but we do want families to come. So why dwell on it? Who wants to see a leopard rip up a chimpanzee? There are some people who really hate it. And of course Bambi is a terribly sad story, but my God, it's a good story.

Q: Is that was a Disney rule; you've got to have one.

AF: We need to make a movie about vegetarians.

Curator Stephen Brown Spotlights Édouard Vuillard and His Muses

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 26 April 2012 00:27

Written by Laura Blum

Post-impressionist artist Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) ranks among the more intriguing characters in French art history. His penchant for intimate art and relationships is especially suited to the bespoke spaces of The Jewish Museum in the former Warburg mansion on Upper Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

From May 4 to September 23, 2012, art lovers can cozy up to the intricately patterned interiors, streets and gardens on view in the Museum's much-awaited exhibition highlighting his work and the patrons and friends who supplied inspiration. 

Dubbed Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, the show was curated by art historian Stephen Brown, whose previous efforts at The Jewish Museum include work on exhibitions such as Action/Abstraction (2008) and The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice (1987).

FilmFestivalTraveler.com sat down with the curator at a local French bistro, Pascalou, whose delicate wallpaper -- and vin blanc -- Vuillard would have richly approved of.

Q: Why Vuillard, and why now?

SB: The exhibition was inspired by the acquisition of a painting by The Jewish Museum at auction. We were successful in buying the painting over the telephone from a sale in London.

Q: Can you divulge the mystery painting?

SB: The painting is entitled Lucy Hessel Reading. It shows a woman sitting in a bedroom, although exactly what kind of picture this is may seem unclear, even today. This picture was painted in 1913, on the eve of the Great War (1914-18).

Q: A Painter and His Muses gives Lucy a special wink.

SB: After 1899, Lucy Hessel, who was the wife of Vuillard's dealer, Jos Hessel, became Vuillard's model and "inspiratrice."

Q: And confidante and critic, correct?

SB: And in effect his lover of 40 years. It was a very French situation. It's somewhat removed from our experience in postwar America. But in those days it was not abnormal.

Q: Before Lucy there was Misia. Who were Thadée and Misia Natanson for Vuillard?

SB: Vuillard spent about 10 years trying to figure out what kind of artist he was going to be in the 20th century. And in doing that, he made a transition from the realm of the Natansons and this kind of anarchizing liberal but very wealthy circle of the cultural review called La Revue Blanche. At that time there was a social war on in Paris with the Dreyfus Affair.

[Leftist politician] Léon Blum was writing for the Revue, with pieces from Tolstoy and other great French and European writers.  They were doing Ibsen in the theater. You know, The Master Builder! Enemy of the People! -- all part of the incandescent vanguard at the end of the century. The milieu of La Revue Blanche came to an end because Thadée Natanson's money ran out. Thadée's relationship with Misia came to an end and she was hotly pursued by Alfred Edwards, the owner of Le Matin newspaper and probably one of the richest men in Paris.

Q: And Hessel had been waiting in the wings?

SB: Jos Hessel had been watching the [avant-garde] Nabis from the early 1890s to see who was going to be the new artist. Because in 1890, if you had an eye for painting, you could find young people who were great artists and whose work was still within reach. Jos would go to Vuillard and Bonnard and say, "Look, you guys are good, and I'm buying a few here and there from you, but I'm working at the Bernheim Gallery" -- which was the best gallery in Paris -- "so why don't you exhibit with us?” 

Q: Patrons abhor a vacuum. How did Hessel go about luring these artists?

SB: Jos was making sure that they came over to his Rue de Rivoli apartment. The salon of Madame Hessel was a very welcoming and exciting scenario for artists, writers, theater people and so forth. One of the scabrous tales that has been repeated in the literature is Jos's supposed remark to Madame Hessel, "Dear Lucy, you may count yourself lucky that it was Edouard that I wanted as my artist. Otherwise I should have had to impose Bonnard on you. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Q: Pass the absinthe…

SB: I doubt the Hessel circle drank absinthe, but, whatever it was, if you've seen the film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), there you might find a powerful representation of the human passions and tensions beneath our story. Ultimately what really counted was art. It was a passion. Jean Renoir's film seems to have some points of contact with the subject of our exhibition.

Q: Was it based on this crowd?

SB: Renoir's film is a thinly veiled satire of upper-class French Jewish life between the wars. 

Q: Vuillard’s own family background wasn’t exactly aristocratic, was it?

SB: From his earliest childhood Vuillard was close to his mother. She was a strong woman who ran her own business purveying highly-crafted clothing to wealthy people who could both appreciate it and afford it. Her son made art for the wealthy and discerning also, for the rest of his life!

Q: Given the era’s fascination with psychoanalysis, Vuillard’s “Oedipal Complex” must have come in for quite a probing. To what extent was he attuned to the life of the mind?

SB: He analyzed himself regularly in his journal over a period of 50 years [from 1890-1940] -- analyzed himself and the way that he was feeling about things, his art and the kinds of things that he was doing, and also the people he was with. It's like being there.

Vuillard was in touch with himself in a way that may be difficult to comprehend in our age. The sensitivity of his character -- after 1930, after fascism -- seems distant from social developments. His journals were sealed after his death, until 1981.

Q: What sorts of things do they reveal?

SB: It was marvelous turning the pages of the journal -- they’re held at the Institut de France in Paris, where they remain unpublished. One can see how the artist was making drawings after Japanese printmakers and then transforming their design approach to his own world of contemporary Paris. You can see the transition. Draftmanship is an important part of his activity.

He is said to have sketched continually…this does not generally lead to presentation drawings; he's not doing it to impress you. He's doing it in order to discover a motif, this idea of the relationship between his conception and what could be put onto a flat surface. He's into visual language, as other modernist artists were, but in his own, highly-personal manner.

Q: He seems to be exploring more than just graphic dimensions, no?

SB: I think this really comes out in the photography. It's a very profound philosophy, not only of artistic creation but of being. It's about time and matter. One of the ways that this is transformed in the shorthand of visual art is the emphasis on the surface and the matter. He seems to be talking about the materiality not only of objects but also emotions and the relationships between people. On the other hand, the plunging perspectives suggest duration and time. 

Q: How cinematic.

A: Perhaps. [The artifacts in our exhibition] may indeed suggest a kind of proto-cinematic thought.

Q: New York’s last Vuillard exhibition was some two decades ago, at the Brooklyn Museum. What’s distinctive about The Jewish Museum’s approach?

SB: We believe this is a significant show, not in terms of the number of loans -- we have over 50 paintings -- but perhaps because the concept is somewhat different. The Jewish Museum is interested in returning the idea of social context to the understanding of an artist. But it's also a way of understanding this particular artist, whose work normally might be overlooked other than by connoisseurs.

His art was not a question of searching after trends, nor was it just a question of making pictures for wealthy people and then selling them back through a gallery or independently. What matters aesthetically in Vuillard is that his milieu became his subject matter. Vuillard, who never married, became the family of his patrons, and they were the ones who understood him. You can't really get to this without the context. 

Q: What points would you most want to highlight about the exhibition?

SB: Two things in particular: the artist and his intimates' highly aesthetic approach to life and what the philosophers have called "sociabilité"-- not simply a social view of art but the consideration of social life as a game. In the case of Vuillard, this performance supported his creative activity and provided its content, ultimately leading to the deeper human meanings or "truth" of his artistic creations. That's why he gravitated to the Hessels in particular. He could have gone on being a gallery artist, endlessly. But he needed a milieu because it gave him the source of his subject matter and helped him get his commissions and portraits.

Another point concerns the relationship between realism as the 19th century understood it and symbolism. It was this familiar mélange that Vuillard took with him out of the 1890s from the painter Edgar Degas and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and transformed into exquisitely moving works of the 20th century.

Q: How does The Jewish Museum's current exhibition featuring Kehinde Wiley’s decorative paintings relate to Vuillard?

SB: Wiley too was using elements of decoration in his art -- an art which affirms the expressive potential of the human figure, in his own way. The decoration in Vuillard is interesting as a concept because it reflects how he used his visual language to create the emotional relationship between himself and what he observed, in artistic terms -- and the spectator's relationship to these representations.

Q: Some of Vuillard's interior scenes are deeply intimate. At the time were they seen as something of an emotional peep show?

SB: Perhaps. [Musée d'Orsay president] Guy Cogeval argues that Vuillard's artistic drive implied manipulation of his circle. As the scholarship shows, he was known to sink into social situations as an observer, adapting people to his creations and placing them in situations to feed his own art. He was shooting for aesthetic intensity all the time.

Vuillard didn't talk much. Perhaps photography was a technique that allowed him a kind of social justification, and also a way of distancing himself.

Q: Vuillard would have loved today's mobile gadgets.

SB: Maybe. The issue of interaction, of "sociability," has certainly informed our presentation of the artist. Social context and meaning are important for The Jewish Museum. We hope our focus will help to shed light on the achievement of an important 20th-century artist.