Defiant Danish Director Lars von Trier Tackles Antichrist

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Sunday, 25 October 2009 18:41

Written by Brad Balfour

However you assess the New York Film Festival, now in its 47th year, it certainly doesn't shy away from controversial films or directors. As the festival entered its final weekend, there were still several fine and provocative films yet to see such as Claire Denis' White Material and Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces--the closing night film.

Topping the list of shockers shown this year was Lars Von Trier's Cannes Golden Palm nominated film, Antichrist. Released this October, the film shocks with a scene of deteriorating madwoman Charlotte Gainsbourg (She) performing a clitorectomy on herself--after bashing, then jacking off, her semi-conscious husband Willem Dafoe (He) who spews semen mixed with blood.

Viewed through the prism of the horror genre, this is a disturbing tale using some of the best horror film tropes. It makes  more than a plunge into the dark sexually charged region between guilt and insanity. Addressed through von Trier's unique vision, the film truly explores madness as it slides into the demonic realm of the possessed.

During his Cannes Film Festival press conference, the ever-provocative Danish director was asked to justify his movie as stirring the ire of a lot of confused journalists. Though he wasn't called on to do so this time, he did conduct an unusual press conference at his NYFF press screening--broadcast over a huge screen via a Skype connection--prompted some journos to offer some of strange, off-kilter questions.

Q: You're often called a provocateur as a director; are you upset if people don’t walk out of your films? I didn't notice anyone walk out today.

LvT: If there are not any walk-outs then I have failed [laughs].

Q: You said you were suffering from a serious depression when you made Antichrist. Did it affected your process in writing and shooting the film; how did it affected the end result?  Was it different this time from previous films?

LvT: It was different in the way that I am normally excited. Normally I’m extremely happy about my own abilities and talent and what I’m doing. But I felt almost maybe human, so I was not excited.

What it has done for the film... I tried to bring myself out of the depression but it hasn’t really worked. But I’m very happy to see all you people in New York; if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere [laughs].

Q: Where did you get the idea for the film?

LvT: I don’t really know where it came from. The idea was to make a horror film, which I know it was not really. I think I started with that. Normally, I know what to say, but I can’t tell you [this time].

Q: This seems to be the most cinematic movie you've made in a long time. Was that intentional? Were you trying to move away from the concept of dogme (a cinematic approach developed by von Trier to exploit the low-budget aspects of digital filmmaking) and away from artificiality of the staging you used in films like Dogville?

LvT: I feel the best when I do something that does not look too much like [something I did before]. I must say, I’m not completely happy with the film. I would have wanted more of a dogme link to the documentary past. I cannot work by way backwards.

Q: You said you wanted parts of the film to be more dogme-like in their aesthetic; if so, what parts were you referring to?

LvT: There was meant to be a bigger difference between normal action scenes and the more stylized stuff. There was to be a big difference between the fixed-camera and the handheld stuff.

Q: The sound design of Antichrist recalled a lot of David Lynch’s films, and the scene where she asks him to whip her reminded me of a similar scene in Blue Velvet. Did you take any inspiration from David Lynch?

LvT: I was very very taken by Twin Peaks, I thought that was a fantastic piece of whatever it was. [laughter] The feature films; I was very happy with Mulholland Drive, but the other feature films I haven’t seen. I’m a big fan so I think I have similar things. Maybe Lynch and I share a fetish.

Q: like Twin Peaks, the film is also set in the Pacific Northwest.

LvT: It is a very naïve idea we have when we shoot in Europe that it can only look like the state of Washington. It’s only because we seem to have a common interest in replicating that. When we did Dancer in the Dark it was done in a place that had a double gallery.

Q: Could you expand a bit on the biblical connections in the film--obviously, you refer to Satan, the Antichrist, and Eden.

LvT: If the film has anything to do, it has to do with that there is no God; that is how I see it. You have a conscience toward Eden, I know, and I’m sorry for that. Normally I would have gone through this quicker, taken all that shit, but I didn’t this time. I was relatively uncritical of the script, that means that all these things stayed.

I think the idea was that it came from her research [on women and possession]. But I’m sorry about the Eden stuff, it came up and I just let it be.

Then it’s very easy since it’s [about] a man and a woman and all that. I have not worked in a way where I was thinking [of] Eden; the reason why it’s called Eden, it was a place that was supposed to be very romantic.

Q: There is the question of the guilt of the Charlotte Gainsbourg character; did she felt guilty because she was a woman of pleasure, because in that scene where she and he are having sex, it goes back and forth between her seeing her child was falling, and yet she didn’t stop to do anything.  She didn’t do anything because the pleasure prevailed. Is that the way you saw it and her?

LvT: You say that she’s not really a mother. Then you should have seen my mother [laughs]. This is nothing compared to what I’ve been through. I don’t know. I think she’s struggling with some guilt from the sexual pleasure, but I believe that from society there has always been a lot of guilt from these things.

I don’t know if she saw him falling. Somehow I felt very much like her when I wrote it. She’s struggling with jealousy but she has a lot of pressure.

Q: Were we supposed to have sympathy for Willem Dafoe’s character? As her therapist we are supposed to trust him, but soon as he changes his wife’s medication, he deserves anything bad that happens to him after this point.

LvT: One of the ways you can write it is that you take your own personality, or your beliefs about your own personality [and put them] on the people in the film--on the characters. And yes, I understand him.

We had some lines in the film where he acts more sympathetically, and then he became extremely unsympathetic, and we had to cut them out otherwise it would have been a very one-sided film. So he ends up with a lot of violence and a lot of stupidity.

Q: What about the casting of Dafoe?

LvT: Dafoe is a very very good friend. While I was trying to cast this film, he sent an email and asked if I had anything for him. I said, “Yes, thank God, you suddenly showed up.” I’d worked with him before, and working with him as a director and a good friend, so that was a miracle.

Q: The film definitely was a horror film--or at least definitely has lots of horror influences. Did you have that clearly in mind, certain antecedents that influenced you in the process?

LvT: At a certain point in my confusion I started seeing Japanese horror films and liked them very much. But maybe I liked them not so much for the horror, but thought the cultural differences, it’s interesting to see images that are definitely not from the West. I like them very much.

And yes, I’m influenced of course by The Shining, also, Rosemary’s Baby, absolutely. And for me, “Carrie” was a very good film when I saw it.

Q: What are the basic elements that turn a horror film into a classic?

LvT: I think that Psycho is a classic not because it was scary, though I thought I was quite scary. But I don’t think it’s the scary things that I remember, I remember style.

The good things about horror films is they give you room for a lot of things; room for strange pictures or whatever. And I didn’t find The Shining very scary. As with all other films, it has to do with the personality that you feel in the film.

Q: You give the audience symbolic clues, but they are also clues as to what’s going to happen. When we piece them together, we feel smart about it. Do you do this consciously, when you are in the process of creating a script and/or editing the film? In addition to the role of being creator, do you put yourself in the role of being the audience for your own work.

LvT: I believe that I am the audience, but I am, as myself, a very stupid audience. I went to university to study film and we did a lot of new things, but that is definitely not the way I work. The cinematic impact, it comes from other sources, poetry, or just some strange kind of logic that is maybe only in my head. I do not think of the connections between water drops and acorns when I write it.

Q: Are there specific coping mechanisms that society uses that you would like to see stripped away for your audiences?

LvT: I don’t think I have an agenda like that. I do films very much for my own sake, and I don’t have any idea to reflect on society.

Q: You had some interesting researchers listed in the credits, including a researcher on misogyny. In the writing or making of this film did you learn something about misogyny in yourself, in your work and how to depicted in the film?

LvT: Well it has mostly to do with the things that the female character in the film was working with. Some of the quotations. She did a very good job; I didn’t do very much. I don’t know if I learned anything about if I hated women more. I like to be with women. I don’t think the film really has so much to do with, it could have been the other way around. I of course believe that women are as bad as men.

Q: Was Friedrich Nietzsche's The Anitchrist an influence?

LvT: I don’t know enough about Nietzsche. I had this Antichrist book lying on my table for 40 years and I hadn’t opened it yet, but the title I liked. I don’t want to say anything about Nietzsche.

Q: When did you decide to dedicate the film to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkofsky and why?

LvT: I must say, [that guy] has been very important to me. I discovered him while I was in film school. I have stolen so much from him over the years that in order not to be arrested I dedicated it to him [laughs]. I should have done it a long time ago, and it’s sincerely meant; I’m a very big fan.

Q: Will there ever be part three of your USA Trilogy?

LvT: About the American Trilogy [part one is Dogville; part two is Manderlay]; that’s the problem about trilogies, there has to be three of them [laughs]. I do not have the exact idea; when it comes I will make the film, if it is possible.

For more by Brad Balfour: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-balfour

 

Acclaimed Doc Director Robert Stone Reviews Our Earth Days

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 03 September 2009 21:38

Written by Brad Balfour

In light of the on-going ecological crises we seem to face daily, it was not only a massive task that veteran doc director Robert Stone tackled by making his latest film, Earth Days, but it was crucial for a movie like this to have come out this summer (it debuted as the closing night film for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival).

The film documents the history of environmental activism from its roots nearly four decades ago through the eyes of some of its key participants. To Stone, the modern ecological movement began with the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and is moving on to a new and hopeful phase today. To illustrate such a globe-spanning movement, Stone chose to focus on a small set of its crucial players and thinkers.Employing interviews, a strong historical reference and beautiful scenes of Earth's natural riches, Stone draws on his own personal commitment to the subject to propel his film forward.

Stone's witnesses includes former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; biologist Paul Ehrlich; Congressman Pete McCloskey; astronaut Rusty Schweickart; writer Paul Ehrlich and Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, among others.

Q: Your film is at the center of all those films that covered the panorama of ecological issues; it looks at the roots of it all.

RS: A lot of what people are talking about are symptoms of a larger problem. What I tried to do is to step back and look at the root causes of it. All of what's going on now has a context and a back-story. If you just look at each of these little crises that these various films represent or book, it's almost like throwing paint at the wall. And what I'm trying to do is step back and put this all in context so you can understand what's going on now.

Q: It's almost like you're there at the core of it all and every other feature or story emanates out from here.

RS: Exactly. The root cause of all of it is that there's too many of us, and nobody talks about that anymore.

Q: How did you choose the specific people you focused on? There are a lot of others you could have used as well. Orville Schell is one who comes to mind but these people provide an interesting set of choices.

RS: A film dealing with a subject of this magnitude had to be grounded in personal narrative in order to work. So I wanted it to be personal stories that would carry the film forward. The fewer people you have the more personal the story's going to be. I thought nine people would be the maximum the film could carry.

There are three main characters in the film and the rest are sort of secondary. With each of them, their personal life stories mirror the journey of the film. You see them in their childhood and they undergo a personal change which mirrors the changes that happen in the society at large. Also, taken together they represent the different strands that came together to create the [environmental] movement. I wanted the film to be a personal story, not one where the subject dominated it and you just have this brief chorus going on, just interviewing experts. They're experts but it's also about their personal experiences.

Q: Were you conscious about environmental issues from an early age?

RS: My mom read [Rachel Carson's] Silent Spring to me when I was eight years old so that had a pretty profound effect on me. Then [the original] Earth Day absolutely was a big turning point. I grew up in a college town and was really exposed, even though I was a young kid, really exposed to the demonstrations against the war and the political activism. Though I wasn't really a part of it, I saw it.

When the environmental movement came along with Earth Day, it was like a children's crusade in some way--kids got involved and that was our revolution. Kids have a natural understanding about the environment and a fascination with nature in a way that grownups don't, I think. When you're a kid you're interested in animals and the world, so the environment is something that children immediately glom onto. I certainly did.

Q: You picked some of my cultural heroes; Stewart Brand has been here since The Whole Earth Catalog came out. It was like the internet on paper--"this is the coolest."

RS: It was. He ended up becoming a real pioneer of the internet, but that's been his whole thing from the beginning.


Q: Former Arizona Congressman and, later Secretary of the Interior Udall (under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) was really fascinating. What was it about him and the others that you felt A) were really important to you, that focused you on them, and B) why did you think they'd still resonate to people now--for the historical context or because you want people to see the continuum culturally?

RS: Each of them plays a different role. Authors Paul Ehrlich and Dennis Meadows wrote two of the seminal books that had an enormous resonance in the culture and the whole debate. Though Rachel Carson's dead, she's in the film. Those three books: Silent Spring, The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth are the three seminal books, so those guys are in it.

Former astronaut [Russell Louis] "Rusty" Schweickart has an incredible story that's one of the great astronaut stories that's not been told. People know about the guys who landed on the moon but his is really remarkable. I'd met Rusty about 15 years ago and heard his story. I always was amazed by it and surprised that so few people knew about it.

Rusty's another example of why I chose my characters. He's a minor character in the film, but not only does he go up in space and have this amazing revelation, he comes back and puts it into practice and becomes the Commissioner of Energy for the State of California and does all these radical innovations with energy conservation. So all the characters reemerge throughout the film in different phases.

Q: I could talk to you all day about Stewart Brand. He is one of the most fascinating personalities in the world. The Whole Earth Catalog came out and changed everybody's thinking in this time when the movie starts.

RS: Yeah, that's one of my favorite people in the world. Stewart had a profound impact on me and the visual palate of the film. Originally, when I started delving into this and finding archival footage, the first thing we did was find news footage that covered the topics in the film. It became clear early on that that wasn't going to work visually for this film because a lot of what they're talking about is almost unfilmable.

The whole message Stewart's been putting forth for 40 or 50 years now is that technology can enhance our perception of the world and by enhancing our perception, is the only way we're going to get a grip on the problem. You have to understand the problem to perceive the problem before you can start to find solutions.

He's always been pro-technology when the rest of the movement was really anti-technology. He said, "Look, rockets can get us into space and that can allow us to view the world from above and get a new perspective on our place in the universe. Airplanes can lift us up in the sky. Stop-motion photography, you can look at a smokestack and it might seem rather benign; you speed it up 100 times and you see how awful that amount of pollution going into this tiny veneer of an atmosphere we have."

So we started using those simple visual techniques to not only visually depict what was being talked about, but also since so much of the film is about this change in perception that we had going from the '50s into the '70s, [it shows] a revolutionary change of perception about our relationship to the earth. So Stewart had a really profound impact on how the film actually ends up looking.

Q: You talk about pesticides, Carson and President Kennedy. How significant was the President in an environmental issue?

RS: It was hugely significant. Because she didn't have academic credentials, she was a scientist, a woman--a single woman--so at that time the pesticide industry went after her with a real concerted campaign to discredit her, calling her a hysterical woman, that she didn't know what she was talking about. They were trying to destroy the message by destroying the messenger.

Udall had given Kennedy a copy of Silent Spring. He read it and was very moved by it so he came out and publicly supported her and set up a scientific panel, a commission, to study what she had done. He ended up supporting her and backing all of her research. That really silenced the critics and it went on to become a huge international best seller. Carson and the book had a profound impact on starting the whole environmental movement.

Q: If it had been Al Gore instead of George Bush becoming President would there be a whole different perspective right now?

RS: It goes back to Reagan really. I don't think you can just blame Reagan as a person, it was a whole movement. Reagan was elected by an overwhelming majority of the American public; America adopted a very conservative ideology that was easy. It's very easy to say the magic hand of the marketplace is going to solve all of our problems because then you don't have to do anything.

Reagan basically said we can go back to a 1950s mentality and the marketplace will take care of things, and people bought into it. As Hunter Lovins says at the end of the film, "We lost 30 years. For 30 years there was absolutely no movement forward In fact there was movement backwards, and we're just now resetting the clock and getting back to where we were."

Q: Ironically, the marketplace has been the one area where there is some movement in that people are trying to come up with new technologies to try to get ahead. Even during that 30 year period.

RS: It wasn't a fair market; it wasn't a market, that's the thing. The free hand of the market actually will solve these problems if it's a real market. If when you buy a car, you're paying the full value of that car including the damage to the environment that went into making the car and all of the pollution that's going to come out of that car, that's the value of that car. If you pay that, if it's a real market, that will solve the problem. And that's where the environmental movement is going now.

Q: The irony is that if they had allowed proper market forces to allow for technological innovation, there would have been alternative energy sources years ago. But there's a sort of corporate totalitarianism; they're not free marketers; they're corporate socialists.

RS: That's absolutely true. That's addressed in the last part of the movie when Dennis Hayes talks about the solar entrepreneurs as being crushed by these giant corporations who wanted to control the power industry.

Q: Pete McCloskey was a sort of liberal to moderate Republican but I didn't realize he became a Democrat. It must have been fascinating to talk with him and see his cultural and personal evolution.

RS: It's not that he's changed, it's that the Republican Party just shifted so far to the right and completely abandoned all the principles of environmentalism that it founded. And he's not the only one, there are other people I interviewed that didn't make it into the film; I interviewed Russell Train who was Richard Nixon's environmental advisor and the second head of the EPA. He's a staunch Republican was a big supporter of George Bush Sr. and everything, but he voted for Obama and is just appalled by how the Republican Party has abandoned environmentalism.

He's like, "We started environmentalism, this was our cause." Talk about conservation, this is conservative. And this corporatism you mentioned, corporate socialism, is exactly what bothers them; that the Republican Party has just shifted into this craziness. Republican environmentalists have just abandoned the party in droves.

Q: It amazes me sometimes, how could a Republican think that environmentalism is bad? I don't get it. Did you figure it out?

RS: It got caught up in the culture wars, and the Left has some blame here as well in that what you saw happening in the '70s with that initial burst of legislative success coming out of Earth Day, is that these minor, marginal environmental organizations became huge, they moved to Washington, they became these giant Washington lobbying organizations doing battle with corporate lobbying organizations. And the American public outsourced their activism to these Washington groups and they lost because they were overwhelmed by bigger forces.

I see the same thing happening now, and that's a warning of the film. Right now, the current battle over climate change, all it is being debated by Washington lobbying organizations, and how much money can you put into The Left versus The Right? Who has got the most amount of money and the most clout?

As long as that's where the movement is going, it's a recipe for disaster. That's what happened in the 1970s. Right now you almost have a complete reversal of how things were then. In the early '70s, it was a grassroots movement, with the mass public demanding change on a political level. And in the late '70s, as it is today, it became more about scientists, environmental activists, and a segment of the political class who were leading the whole thing. But they'd lost the support of the mass public who didn't understand the problem.

I think you see the same thing today. So unless you get back to it being a grassroots movement, it will be like the recent climate change bill that passed by what, three votes in Congress? With Obama in power, and the Democrats in control of the House and Senate, everybody's talking about climate change, yet with everything that we know about it, it passed by only three votes? That's not good.

Q: We have the nuttiest strain of Republicans in power that we've ever had.

RS: That's true. The film addresses this moment in time where there was a big focus on the environmental movement about perceiving the larger problem. In the case in the environment, people can get their heads around the big issue, and it's not a Republican or a Democratic issue that we need to care for our planet and that we're all in the same boat here. That's a big picture thing; when you start to get into arguing about the minutiae and the details about how we get from point A to point B it becomes politically divisive. So I would hope the environmental movement could get back to focusing on the big picture and not the minutiae.

Q: Many politicians prefer to tackle other issues because they usually resolve those issues in a short time. In order to get elected you have to solve a certain issue. Do you think that's part of the problem?

RS: Yeah, they're not going to tackle long term issues unless they're forced to do so because there's no political advantage to tackling long term issues. So again, as long as it's a battle of lobbyists in Washington it's going to be a losing battle for environmentalists. And I think the lesson of that is clear by what happened in the late '70s.

Q: Do you think that movies like yours and these other ones will help on a grassroots level? Because they don't make the larger political issues, they give it a more personal connection.

RS: I hope so. I don't think anybody can say that documentaries don't make a difference anymore. An Inconvenient Truth undoubtedly made a difference. Some films do and some films don't. My film is designed to reach as wide an audience as possible and not be a polemic. It's an effort to put this whole thing into a larger context, so for anybody who wants to really understand the environmental movement now, [they have] to understand how we got here.

Oscar Winning Director Ang Lee Has His Retrospective

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 14 August 2009 14:15

Written by Brad Balfour

Oscar-Winning Director Ang Lee Enjoys Two Retrospectives

With his feature film retrospective going on at the Lincoln Center Film Society's Walter Reade Theater and the August 28th release of Taking Woodstock, Taiwan-born director Ang Lee is being put into an ever-bright spotlight. A premiere was already held in Woodstock and Manhattan to commemorate the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival's 40th Anniversary. And now, Lee, with primary screenwriter/producer James Schamus (also CEO of Focus Features), will unveil a new 138-minute long director's cut of his fascinating western, 1999's Ride with the Devil tonight.

Detailing the underexamined conflict between the pro-Union Jayhawkers and pro-slavery Bushwhackers along the Kansas/Missouri border, the film focuses on friends Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) and Jake Roedel ("The Ice Storm vet Tobey Maguire) as they wrestle with battle, romance and death. Lee and Schamus will appear on stage following the 7:30 pm screening to discuss their careers and filmmaking process.

Read more: Oscar Winning Director Ang Lee...