Coen Brothers Et Al Step Out With "Inside Llewyn Davis" at NYFF '13

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 27 September 2013 22:46

Written by Brad Balfour

The Coens, Isaac, & Goodman

Written and directed by Oscar winning brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis offers a glimpse into the life of singer-songwriter Davis (Oscar Isaac), who navigates New York's folk music scene during the early 1960s. With original music produced by Oscar/Grammy winner T Bone Burnett, the film details the permutations and confabulations of this music scene as huge transitions come into play that will not only affect the music but the world at large.

Laden with a sterling cast that includes Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund and John Goodman, the film is built less around a flowing narrative and more of a set of interconnected vignettes that offers a kaleidoscopic experience of that time and place. The film not only offers a sterling set of songs, but a well-played shambling performance by Isaac of a man in perpetual collapse.

Isaac, Goodman, the Coen brothers and Burnett took the Walter Reade stage at the 2013 New York Film Festival press conference for Inside Llewyn Davis and gave all involved a unique performance. What a preview not only for the premiere of this film, but for a special concert of music inspired by the film that was to be recorded and released as a concert film in its own right.

The following Q&A is modified from an appearance before the press preceding the premiere.

Q: During the film’s genesis, when did you two and T Bone Burnett come up with the film’s songs? What’s the story behind the music?

Ethan Coen: A couple of the songs were specified in the script as we were writing it and what might go in a couple places, but certainly not most of them.

T Bone was the first person we sent the script to when we finished it. Basically,  that conversation just started as soon as we were done with the script and knew that we were going to do the movie.

Joel Coen: We were thinking specifically about Dave Van Ronk when we were writing the script. Lots of the songs in the movie are songs he sang or were associated with him or that he recorded, so some of those songs were there from the beginning. And then we do what we always do with T Bone: “There’s this part of the story. What’s going to happen here?”

Q: After you were cast as the title character, were there any songs you brought into the conversation?

Oscar Isaac: I think I brought in “Green Rocky Road” — the one I played in the car. Because it wasn’t in the script, the big song for me was the one I play for F. Murray [Abraham].

On that one, there was some time when we weren’t sure what it was, and I was looking at a bunch of different songs as well. So it was a surprise when that one ended up being the one.

Q: John, you didn’t sing in this film.

John Goodman: [jokingly] I did, but internally. My interior monologue was scored.

Q: How do you pick the subjects in your films — is failure more interesting to write about than success?

JC: The success movies have been done, haven’t they? From a story point of view, it’s less interesting. In fact, I don't even know how to start to think about that one. How do we pick our subjects?

EC: We just talk about whatever; it just comes out of a conversation. Picking a subject implies there's something really specific we're picking, but it's kind of not like that.

We talk about whatever, and in the case of this movie, it was a scene, the Village, the folk revival and the possible ideas about a character. It’s a very, very, very vague conversation that got progressively more concrete.

Q: John, your character, Roland Turner, appears in the scene where Llewyn takes a road trip to Chicago to see if he can boost his music career there. Do you represent some kind of siren?

JG: I thought that was understood. I must work harder.

EC: John’s last couple of movies were Homeric things. We kind of thought of it as an odyssey in which the main character doesn't go anywhere.

Q: An actor portraying Bob Dylan makes a small appearance at the end of the movie. Given so many of the traditional songs compared to Dylan, who wrote his own material, what about people performing other people's material versus original material? Can you talk about that contrast in the movie?

JC: That's a big subject and goes to the heart of what folk music is, in a way. It's the cultural moment we were talking about that was specifically on our minds when we were thinking about the story, because we wanted to do something that was set in the scene before Dylan showed up. We weren't that interested in the period.

He came onto that scene and he changed it. He was such a transformative figure and people know more about that, so it seemed less interesting to us.

But that’s right; there's a big difference. There were people writing songs and singing them before Bob Dylan showed up. But the era of the singer/songwriter, there was sort of a pivot that was happening right around there, in terms of traditional folk music and people who were writing their own stuff. Dylan was one of the big catalysts of that.

There was an obsession with a certain kind of authenticity in traditional music that people who were involved in this early folk revival were very concerned with, and that had sometimes both interesting and ironic repercussions and aspects to that.

That was interesting to us. Yeah, we were thinking about that. It’s a big, big subject.

Q: Oscar, do you have anything to add about Llewyn Davis' struggle with his authenticity in being a musician and what you brought to the character?

OI: The idea of the guy who's trying to be authentic and only play his old songs as the culture around him and the scene are moving on from that. If they're moving on, what he is supposed to do, if playing old songs is how he feels he's most true to himself? What’s interesting is that, in a way, these folk singers were like curators, like DJs that would collect these songs and present them.

And when you started collecting records, it was like, “I’ve got the original there. Why do I need you to sing it to me? I want to hear new stuff.” And that kind of became the new movement.

Of course, Dylan came around and synthesized what the Beat poets were doing, and traditional music, and made this new thing, and people got jazzed about that.

Q: There’s a scene in a coffee shop when Llewyn wrings water out of his wet socks. When during the process of making the film did you come up with that image?

OI: It was in [the script]. And there was a little picture too. What’s cool is that every day you get your sides -- the words you have to say for the day, your lyrics -- and at the back of the sides, they have the storyboards printed out, which is a great way for everybody to understand what’s happening. Not everybody does that.

I do remember the picture of the wet shoe. It seems like, “What’s a horrible thing that you can have in a diner, in a place where you’re stuck? A cold, wet foot.”

JG: I mainly read their scripts for the pictures.

Q: In this film, the atmosphere is pretty bleak, and everyone looks really washed out. The sky is always grey, except for when Llewyn sees his father. Why did you make those color choices?

OI: It was actually a warm winter, so we were rushing around trying to get these bleak shots, but there were leaves coming in the trees. We actually had to fake a lot of that.

EC: We [filmed this] two years ago, so we were fighting the oncoming rain to keep the bleakness. Actually, in most of the shots, it supplied snow. If you look, you can see blooming trees where there shouldn’t be.

When you think about the folk scene, you think about New York in the winter. You don't want to see it in the summer, when the city's green. Basically, the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is kind of that look, and that weather is part of that.

Q: Joel and Ethan, when you first discussed this movie, were you thinking about filming the movie in black and white, like a D.A. Pennebaker documentary? Why did you decide to film it the way that you ultimately did?

JC: That’s interesting. That was an early idea. It’s very difficult to make black-and-white movies nowadays. But that aside, just from a broader, stylistic point of view, we were sitting down with [cinematographer] Bruno Delbonnel, who shot the movie, trying to figure out all of those things.

We found ourselves starting with that idea, but then as we started to break the script down into specific shots, we realized that so much of what we wanted to do from a shot point of view just didn’t lend itself to that.

There’s a bit of a residual idea of that in the coverage in the coffee house. The first shot in the movie starts off with a hand-held shot, actually.

EC: The first shot is actually a very long take, which we could afford to do because all of the performances were so good. It was a quietly hand-held take.

We thought, “All right, we’ll do it at the beginning of the movie, and it’ll feel vaguely good when it comes back at the end.” But it kind of fell away from the rest of the movie.

JC: We started thinking, “We want to follow this cat down the hallway.” You can’t really do that. The idea of doing that, from a visual point of view, or how you design the shot, is sort of antithetical to making it look like a Maysles Brothers documentary. That transition wants to feel controlled.

So those types of things were starting to push us away from that as we started to discuss the idea of what the movie is going to look like.

EC: Also, it’s connected to the other thing: that kind of slushy, gray, New York -- not literally monochrome, but that de-saturated look. That seemed to tug away from that idea of black-and-white vérité idea.

Q: You said in a New York Times interview that you were thinking about switching to digital. Is this going to be the last movie you shoot on film?

JC: It’s possible. I’m not wildly enthusiastic about the idea. This movie was shot on film for a number of reasons. One of them was we were working with a DP that we only had done one short thing with in the past. Bruno also had not shot anything with a digital camera before; he’d done everything on film. We discussed it. We thought it would be one more complicating factor in a new relationship … It was one extra step too far.

I am glad we shot it on film. But you know, it’s all a hybrid thing now. You shoot on film, but it all goes into a box, it all goes into a computer and, of course, gets heavily manipulated.

Still, there is something that looks different between movies that are shot on film, even though they are finished with a DI [digital intermediate], and movies that are shot with an Alexa or some other digital camera. Even the projected is DCPs [digital cinema packages]. But that’s what’s happening. It’s probable that the next [movie we make] will be shot digitally.

Q: This film is the first time that the Coens and John Goodman have worked together in a long time. Why was this the movie to reunite John with the Coens? Do you guys have a sort of shorthand in working together?

EC: We just knew that John would understand it. John turned us on to Charles Portis, the novelist who wrote True Grit. His other novels are contemporary, but all of his novels have an old gasbag character, kind of like John's character in the movie.

JG: The shorthand part is hard to describe, so I won't try. It's something we've always fallen into, I think, since Raising Arizona. They asked me to do a take one time while I was driving an automobile.

I said, "Oh, you mean a Spanky take?" They knew what I was talking about. I knew Spanky from the Little Rascals. Those kinds of little things that help make the day go ever so much faster.

JC: We were also doing a shot in Barton Fink where John was answering the door. Ethan said to him, "John, we have a little bit more ropey snot in our next take," and John said, "I'm your man!"

JG: I think it was, "I'm your boy!"

EC: We asked John to hit a mark, so we said, “John, you Everett Sloane over to that mark.” John knew what we were talking about.

Q: Your films are often anchored in a specific time, place and scene. This time it’s the early ‘60s folk scene. Do you have a list of stories tied to specific times or places that you want to do or are interesting to you?

JC: It's hard for us to imagine stories abstracted or divorced from a very specific locale. I couldn't imagine us doing a story that could happen anywhere or just in a generic city. It's hard for us to get any traction or start anything that way.

Why we were thinking specifically, “Let’s start here in New York in 1961 during the folk scene,” I don't know. We listened to a lot of music, and we were interested.

We got a number of books, including a memoir written by Dave Van Ronk about that period that got us thinking about it. That was one of the things stimulated it.

EC: The scene got us going, but then I was thinking there was this character who seems to fit in that scene. And as much as his concerns are his tortured relationship to success and the whole idea of what you asked about: making new crap out of the old crap.

Those are both things that were concerns of the character in that scene -- not wanting to sell out, but wanting to perform and reach people, and also the authenticity thing. That’s not informative but compact.

James Franco Channels Bohemian Artistry for "Child of God"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 23 September 2013 17:30

Written by Paula Schwartz

“This is the greatest portrait of necrophilia ever,” James Franco was told the other day about his film Child of God.

“Thank you,” he replied to Gavin Smith, who moderated the Q&A following Tuesday’s New York Film Festival screening.

The multi-hyphenate-at-large directed and adapted the film based on the Cormac McCarthy novel with producer Vince Jolivette. It’s a disturbing portrait of a sociopath, Lester Ballard – played by an unknown and fantastic Scott Haze – who lives on the extreme outer fringes of society in the backwoods of Tennessee, where he devolves into a brute creature who craves human connection to the extent that he resorts to sex with dead women. In an understatement, Franco said he knew the film wasn’t for everyone.

The never-seems-to-sleep actor mentioned his inspiration to adapt the novel came after he read it in a class at UCLA seven years ago. It made “the hairs tingle on the back of my neck,” he said. “It was a way to talk about things that I thought were universal, this need for a connection with another, someone outside ourselves, the need to love and to be loved” but “ it told it in a kind of extreme and unusual way, basically through necrophilia.”

Adapting books into movies is not new for Franco. He’s already adapted William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and “The Sound and the Fury” is in pre-production. He also just directed and wrote a screenplay about writer Charles Bukowski’s formative years. Franco’s movie and academic endeavors intersect. Franco is now preparing for his orals for a Ph.D. in English, specializing in American literature, so he said even more literary adaptations  are ahead.

Below are highlights from the Tuesday’s NYFF press conference with Franco via Skype:

What from the McCarthy novel did you subtract or expand on?

James Franco: There’s always a question of how loyal you’ll be to the source and then in what way will you be loyal. Our approach was, yes, we love the book and we want to translate it to the screen in as honorable a way, or to honor the source as much as we can, so almost every scene in the movie you can find in the book, except for the scene where Lester shoots the stuffed animals. He doesn’t have this breakdown moment where he shoots them. That’s one of my favorite scenes.

Otherwise we stayed pretty close to the book. There’s more at the end of the book, there’s a bit of an epilogue that talks about Lester’s fate. Essentially it seemed to be the epilogue in the book was telling or relating one of Cormac McCarthy’s themes, which is this kind of recurrence of violence. There’s something inherently violent about humans, and so he will layer his books with violence, but also traces of violence throughout history. So the ending of the book talked about Lester going to an institution and meeting another man who did even crazier things, ate people’s brains with a spoon.

Talk about developing the tour de force performance of Lester with star Scott Haze, who has to exhibit the qualities of a child but also an animal.

JF: I’m well aware that it’s a movie with disturbing subject matter that’s not for everyone, but I think one thing that anyone that has eyes can’t deny is that Scott gives an incredible performance, so I’m very proud that that exists. I’ve known Scott for over 10 years. He’s a friend of a friend. The actor Jim Parrack from True Blood is Scott Haze’s childhood friend. So over the 10 years I saw Scott go through some very dark, personal things. He was kind of the friend of the friend that I didn’t really want to spend much time with. He was just kind of crazy and then he kind of came through all that and became a better man on the other side. And so, when I finally got the rights to the book, I saw that Scott was a dependable person and so I thought I can have the best of both worlds. He could draw on his dark personal experiences as an actor, but as a director I could depend on him to be a professional and not be a liability.

When I first read the book I imagined Sam Rockwell in the role or Michael Shannon has become a good friend of mine but I already cast Michael Shannon in a necrophilia role for a short film at NYU, ‘Herbert White.’ I thought let’s cast somebody people don’t know, not that anyone will think it’s really like he’s a mountain man or something, but it will just help in the suspension of disbelief even more if it’s like, ‘Wow! Who is this guy? And is he really like that?’ And then I knew if I put Scott in the role… he was in a place in his career - you see this with a lot of actors - the one role where they just go for it. They just go to extremes to prepare.

As soon as I cast him he went to Tennessee. We didn’t ultimately shoot in Tennessee but the story takes place in Sevier County, Tennessee, where I guess McCarthy lived for a while. Scott went out there and isolated himself for three months, before we started to shoot. He met the locals and learned how to operate that rifle and worked on the accent. I wasn’t with him but I guess he stayed overnight in actual caves on his own.And so when I got to West Virginia, where we ultimately shot, Scott was fully in character and as a director, I just cut back and let it be.

Talk about your interest or fascination with necrophilia? You made a short and now this feature.

JF: Okay. It’s true, there’s a weird pattern. In fact, early in my writing life, even before the short at NYU I wrote a script about a man who works in a morgue and has friendships with all the bodies that come in. It’s not necrophilia, it’s communing with the dead. And I think for me, in my personal life I’m absolutely not attracted to dead people or anything like that (laughs).

If I look at some of the other projects I directed, it hasn’t been planned this way but I do deal with characters who are either isolated and/or have a very rich imaginative life and so in case of Hart Crane (from the movie Franco directed and wrote, The Broken Tower), there was a character who was isolated. His work did not work with the modernist kind of writers of the day and (he) was isolated in that way. I view Lester the same way. Not that he’s an artist but maybe he’s a stand in for someone who is unable to fit into civilized society but he wants a connection with another so badly when he stumbles upon this opportunity; he figures out that he can have a relationship outside himself, if he animates it with his imagination and so I guess for me it’s just, necrophilia’s an extreme way to show someone living in their own kind of imaginary world.

You seem to be fascinated with the outcast, those on the fringes or outside respectable society. Why do you want to make these stories now, especially now in a time when our society seems to be moving towards this corporatizes, homogenized kind of standardized representation?

JF: In a MFA program of any kind, art, directing, acting, one of the things you’re taught is to look for your voice, or try to find your artistic voice or your place. What can you do that others can’t do? So one of the things I found is that I’m in an unusual position. I’m in this very commercial film world. I’m in the pop culture world as a performer but I also have these interests that maybe are tangents to that world but don’t really lie in that world so maybe my thing, where I can generate a lot of energy is to bring those two worlds together.

Maybe it’s my place to bring some of these ideas into kind of more of mainstream outlet and why is it important? Making things homogenized is dangerous. We always need to question. I’m not about anarchy. I appreciate structure but we always need to question who we are and why we are and how we view ourselves and how we interact with others. These are things that always need to be constantly questioned and I think that’s one of the things that I try to do.

Do you consider your movies to provide life lessons and if so what do you want to deliver from this film?

JF: When you make a piece of art or film it’s not always kind of a moral enterprise. Films rest in a weird place. For a long time they’ve been mass entertainment. They don’t have to carry the role of educational tools or moralistic tools, at least as a primary function, so when I make one, and one like this, primarily I look to do a portrait, examine sides of what it is to be human through an extreme subject.

This isn’t a film that will guide you in being a better person. It’s not that kind of movie. And it also isn’t to say things should be this way or things should be that (way). But what I think it does is maybe very relevant is that it shows, here’s a person that can’t function in civilized society. He’s kicked off the farm. He goes to the cabin. He loses the cabin. He goes to the cave. He’s literally pushed farther and farther away from civilization. I think that’s a relevant topic today. The way that we socialize, at least we can say that the inner circles of mainstream communication are so bound up in technology that the way we socialize now is so intertwined with learning technological languages and social networking languages that there are many people that just give up, don’t want to do that, don’t want to engage with that. So you can say they are on the outer circles of this kind of communication.

The point of the movie isn’t to say if you don’t tweet or do Facebook you’re going to become a killer, or sleep with dead bodies, but it’s an extreme portrait of somebody on the outside. I don’t know if it’s a lesson per se but it’s a kind of a lens to look at a phenomenon that is happening in our day in its own forms and will continue to happen. People will be pushed outside the inner social circles.

Talk about the connection between your movies and academic studies.

JF: Right now I’m preparing for my oral exams for my English PH.D, so I’m reading a lot of books I’ll be questioned on. Then I’ll move on, if I pass, I’ll move on to my dissertation and I think that will involve American literature. That’s my specialization but also the ways that these different mediums interact with each other, so, yes, adaptation from literature to film (is my interest), but also the boundaries of the medium. What does one medium do that is better than the other?

And thinking about them, transforming to another one and back as translation of medium, rather than just thinking about adaptation, which I feel is kind of a more limited view, but actually looking at them as different kinds of language.

The films that I make are also very informed by my academic work because, like I said, searching for my voice wasn’t planned this way. One of the things about my voice is yes I like to adapt great literature. But also make it feel current or contemporary in other ways. Whether it’s the technology I use or the structure of the film or that kind of film, so I guess what I’m trying to say, is yes, my academic life is informed by my confessional creative life and vice versa.

Talking With Shaun Benson of POPULAIRE

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 20 September 2013 11:33

Written by Matt Oakes