The fourth issue of Wholphin features Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard lying to one another; the FBI mistaking an artist for a bioterrorist; Scottish 9-year-olds singing “Satan Rocks” at their country fair; an episode of the Russian “Married... with Children” re-scripted; an Academy Award nominated short; nuns; retired chimpanzees; plaster casters; and films from France, Morocco, New Zealand and the U.K.

This issue will also include a bonus disc featuring the final installment of Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares. Part Three: “The Shadows in the Cave.”

10 films. 173 minutes.

HIGH FALLS

Directed by Andrew Zuckerman, Screenplay by Alex Vlack
U.S.A., 2007

Q: What was the inspiration for this film? Is it based on any real experiences?

ALEX VLACK & ANDREW ZUCKERMAN: It wasn't inspired by real events or based on anything real. We wanted to explore the idea of trust and communication in a relationship, and we also didn't want to make a bummer. So dead dogs and hand jobs seemed relatable without being too tragic.

Q: When coming up with the circumstances that drive this plot (meaning the hand job and the dead dog), what were other plot devices that you chose not to use?

AV & AZ: Dead dog came first. Andrew had been doing a photo series with animals for a while, and he thought killing an animal in the first minute of his first film would provide a nice break from his prior work.

We first thought, What if someone has an affair while his wife is pregnant? But that felt too nasty. Getting a hand job was less of an offense. It also provides a nice moral ambiguity. If you ask someone whether an affair is bad, the answer is yes. But ask someone about a hand job in a massage parlor, and the answer is more, "It's not that bad."

Q: We understand that this short film is the first third of a feature film that you're working on. Could you tell us about how you see this section working on its own versus as part of the whole?

AV & AZ: If we could tell you that, we would be very happy. We're working on it. We can confirm this, though: it's either the beginning or the middle or the end, and it's either part of a larger narrative or not.

Q: While both of the characters lied, the motivations behind the transgressions that they concealed are very different. April accidentally killed the dog and Pedro intentionally got a hand job. How does this affect the moral righteousness of each character going forward into the feature film? Do you think that a lie is a lie? Or if there are degrees to deceit, how do you measure them?

AV & AZ: April's transgression was not in killing the dog but in not telling Pedro about it. In fact, neither act is terribly important it's the way the characters deal with it that matters. What's wrong with these people? Why can't they talk to each other? Why doesn't she call him right away? Why does he confess as a kind of revenge?

We definitely believe that there are different levels of deceit. That's what we find interesting—not a black-and-white world, but one full of complexity a world that's very difficult to navigate. We're also not so sure he got a hand job in Japan. He seems like a liar. It could have been a half-truth.

Q: What is the biggest lie you have ever told? Did you get caught?

AV & AZ: We don't lie.

Q: What was the biggest lie you told while on the set of this film?

AV & AZ: We refer you to the previous question.

Q: If an adulterous hand job is on par with killing a dog, what would the following actions be equivalent to? Snooping through your partner's email; secretly meeting an ex-lover for lunch; throwing away your partner's most precious belonging?

AV & AZ: We don't think they are equivalent. What we want to know is, if you're snooping through your partner's email, what are you trying to discover that you can't just ask? If you're meeting an ex-lover for lunch, why can't you just tell your present lover? And if you throw something away accidentally, why are you so afraid to tell? Those are the interesting questions for us.

HEAVY METAL JR.

Directed by Chris Waitt
U.K., 2005

Q: How did you find out about Hatred? Were you a satanic metal head? Are you now?

CHRIS WAITT: I am a metal fan, yes, but that's not how I came across the band. I met the lead singer when I was making another film, a fictional one, and happened to be casting at his school. He was perfect for one of the roles but his hair was pretty long, which was wrong for the part, as the film was set in the 1930s. I asked him if he would cut his hair for the role. He said never. I asked him why not and he explained that he was in a metal band. When he told me the band's name I was blown away and knew I had to make a film about them.

Q: What drew you to them as a filmmaker? Were you ever in a band as a child? Did your parents allow you to rebel, or did they attempt to co-opt your own efforts at rebellion in order to vicariously salvage their own failed dreams?

CW: I was in a number of useless bands when I was young, and am still in a semi-useless band now. The main thing about being in a band when you're young is to play loud. My parents have always been very encouraging, and my dad taught me to play guitar - so actually I didn't have to do much rebelling in that area.

Q: How long did you film?

CW: We shot for ten days, spread over the course of about three months.

Q: Did you ever get involved in the band drama? Like, did you weigh in on whether it should it be "Satan Rock" or "Satan Rocks"?

CW: I tried not to, but they asked my opinion a lot, and got me to help out with riffs and chords. My vote went for "Satan Rocks," for sure.

Q: We found this comment online, posted by Paul McArthur on 4/3/2007: "Hey Everyone, looking back on hatred it seems so funny now lol, im now persuing my solo career, but dont worrie, i am much better than 2 years ago, watching the documentary now makes me cringe, and to think that its STILL going round the globe ha!. well add me if you want people and thanks for being so loyal to hatred heavy metal jr." Is this true? Did the band break up? What caused the breakup, in your opinion?

CW: I'm not totally sure they actually broke up - I think they just went to different schools. But, yes, essentially, it is with great sadness that I confirm that Hatred no longer exists. By the time the documentary was finished it was clear that some of the musical differences between the band members were reaching a breaking point. As far as I know, at that time, two members of the band were sacked and Hatred renamed themselves Fusion and went down a more soft-rock/eighties-power-ballad path. I also received a disturbing and, for me, sad phone call from Paul's mum to say that he had finally had his hair cut short.

Q: Where can we buy a Hatred CD?

CW: I'm not sure you can. Hatred were an unsigned band and so never had any official releases. However, I can burn CDs of their music at a very reasonable cost to those interested.

Q: I've heard you're a bit of a recluse, true? Care to talk about it?

CW: I'd like to know who said that. It's not entirely true. In fact, I often go out - generally at night, walking the streets alone in a long cloak.

Q: Americans these days always talk about "British humor." What is Scottish humor?

CW: I'm probably not qualified to answer that one, as I am an Englishman who happened to live in Scotland for a few years. Scotland is cool, but I'm not sure that the film is a great example of Scottish humor. I'd like to think that the eternal struggle to rock like Satan is a universal theme.

HEAVY METAL DRUMMER

Written and directed by Toby MacDonald and Luke Morris
U.K., 2005

We came across the story of fourteen metal heads who'd been arrested and tried in Casablanca for moral and religious crimes - essentially, wearing Metallica T-shirts and having a penchant for death metal. They'd been put in jail for a while, but there were demonstrations that embarrassed the legal system into releasing them early.

We loved the idea of metal in the Arab world and went out to Casablanca to meet some of the guys. Out in Morocco it was like West Side Story with the hip-hop kids against the metal kids. Almost all the kids were into hip-hop, and metal was still the outsider music. The metal kids were into really dark metal; it was Obituary and Morbid Angel. The heavier and darker the better.

We shot the film in three days in Morocco, and cast almost all the actors from the street, often the night before shooting. Our lead, Yassine, came in to an audition we did and played an acoustic version of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" - the lyrics to that song were the only English he knew. We cast him immediately.

We found the vintage clip of superdrummer Terry Bozzio on an old instructional VHS tape but didn't get to the point of clearing it until we were in Morocco. We'd tracked Terry down to London and I called him from the rooftop where we shot the wedding scene. I asked him if we could use the clip for an Arabic-language heavy-metal short film and to his credit he said yes. We sent him a copy of the film after we'd finished it but never heard back from him. Maybe he didn't like it.

We asked some of the guys from Casablanca, most of whom were in bands too, to do the music for the film, so the score, which they emailed over to us, is by Moroccan metal bands The Nightmare and Clear Crisis Act.

Someone described the short as a mix between Footloose, Kiarostami, and Napoleon Dynamite, but we just wanted to make a supershort teen movie in Arabic.
--LUKE MORRIS

Olivo Barbieri

Olivo Barbieri (born in Italy, 1954) started the Site Specific project (photographs and films) in 2003. The project involves several cities: Rome, Turin, Montreal, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Amman, and most recently, Seville. Barbieri's photographs may be viewed in museums, collections and universities in Italy and abroad. He has an exhibit opening at the San Francisco MoMA in the fall of 2007.

Cameron Fay

Cameron Fay is a native Washingtonian of Irish and Persian descent. He began filmmaking at the age of twelve, using a home video camera and friends from his soccer team as actors. This hobby fell into a desperate obsession, one that he brought with him to the prestigious Kanbar Institute of Film/T.V. at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. While at NYU, he broadened his sexual horizons while still managing to write and direct a plethora of short films, which have won awards at various film festivals worldwide. He is currently writing and is set to direct “Unnatural Selection” for Universal Pictures and is repped by UTA and Mosaic Media Group.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson has worked extensively in photography, video, and installation, and interactive and net-based media. She is an award-winning artist, whose work is held in numerous collections, including, but not limited to, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), The National Gallery of Canada, and DG Bank (Frankfurt). She was the first woman to receive a tribute and retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Hershman Leeson is emeritus Professor of Digital Art at the University of California, Davis, and A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University, Artist in Residence at the Stanford Humanities Institute, and Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Gérard Hustache-Mathieu

Gérard Hustache-Mathieu was born in 1968 in Grenoble (France). He realises his first movies in super 8, then he shots his first real shot movie “peau de vache,” which was selected in around fifty different festivals and has won around thirty prices. Nominated for the 2002 San Francisco Golden Gate Award and for the 2001 European Film Awards, he won the 2003 best short movie César. Shot in 2002, his medium length movie, “La Chatte Andalouse,” has also met a strong success in the festivals, awarded many times by the audience. It was also nominated at the 2004 Cesar. His first long movie “avril” was released in France in June 2006, “a pleasingly peculiar blend of sacred and profane that's quite unlike the vast majority of contempo French films” Variety.

Toby MacDonald

Toby MacDonald started as a runner at the age of 17. His first short film 'Je T'Aime John Wayne' was nominated for a BAFTA, chosen for the Cannes Film Festival and won the EFA European Academy Award for Best Short Film. He co-directed the short film 'Heavy Metal Drummer' with Luke Morris, earning a second BAFTA Nomination this year.

Luke Morris

Luke Morris is a twice BAFTA nominated independent producer and also runs London-based short film label Cinema16, which has released classic, cult and award winning shorts from directors including Mike Leigh, Chris Nolan, Gus van Sant, Jean Luc Godard and Todd Solondz.

Jack Pendarvis

Jack Pendarvis's most recent short story collection is YOUR BODY IS CHANGING. His first novel, titled, AWESOME, will be published next year.

Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X (Knopf, 2004) and three story collections, including most recently Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004) and Like You'd Understand Anyway (Knopf, 2007.) In person he seems an odd combination of the listless and the oblique.

Mike Tanaka

Mike Tanaka is a television writer and producer whose credits include Good Morning America, The Oprah Winfrey Show, MSNBC and National Geographic Explorer. He met Jim Shepard at Brown University where they regularly re-wrote sitcom scripts while they watched, strictly for their own amusement. This is their first public collaboration.

Evany Thomas

Evany Thomas is the author of The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple's Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions, along with lots of little things for a variety of publications, including Television Without Pity, The Morning News, and American Girl Magazine. She lives in Oakland with her extra-toed cat, her vertical-jumping dog, her tan boyfriend Marco, and the meanest turtle that ever was.

Alex Vlack and Andrew Zuckerman

In 2006, Alex Vlack and Andrew Zuckerman started a company called Late Night and Weekends, where one of the things they do is act as a creative agency. Andrew's background is in photography and commercial directing, and Alex's is in writing and producing. The company serves as a creative place where Vlack and Zuckerman can do their commercial work, as well as projects that they're personally passionate about. The first project that they worked on was High Falls. Along with the film, they also published a book (Late Night Press) of a series of photographs Andrew made of the actors, in character, but not within the time of the film itself. They are currently producing a pilot for a children's show about environmentalism and a feature-length documentary about Bill Withers, while continually developing the feature-length High Falls.

Taika Waititi

Taika Waititi is of Te-Whanau-a-Apanui descent and hails from the Raukokore region of the East Coast of New Zealand. Two Cars, One Night is Taika's first professional filmmaking effort, for which he received a 2005 Acedemy Award nomination. Since Two Cars, One Night, he has finished another short film, "Tama Tu," as well as his first feature film, Eagle vs Shark, which opened to rave reviews at Sundance in 2007. Taika recently attended the Sundance Writers Lab with "Choice," a feature film loosely based on Two Cars, One Night.

Chris Waitt

Chris Waitt is a prolific writer, director, actor, animator and puppeteer. Chris' work ranges from cartoons to live action documentary. He has a background in comedy as a writer for Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G); as a performer himself and as author of hundreds of extremely poor greeting card jokes. He won a Golden Rose of Montreaux in 2004 for his outrageous adult puppet comedy: Fur TV. Next up from Chris is a feature length documentary.