Wholphin No. 6
The sixth issue of Wholphin features a documentary about a class of Chinese third graders who hold a democratic election for classroom monitor and end up hilariously, if unintentionally, mocking 300 years of American politics; a beautifully black, comic exploration of 70s England that isn’t, but could easily be, the prequel to A Clockwork Orange; a surreal dating short starring Michael Cera, with alternate audio versions featuring John Cleese and Daniel Handler; a Herzog-ian documentary about the lives of America’s top bigfoot hunters, researchers and enthusiasts; stunning footage of rarely-seen tropical reptiles and insects; a Roddy Doyle adaptation; a top secret government film on the assassination of the president; great white shark and surfboard attacks; and a miniature seeing-eye horse.
13 Films. 141 minutes.
LINER NOTES
PLEASE VOTE FOR ME (EXCERPT)
Directed by Weijun Chen
Produced by Don Edkins and Steps International
Distributed by First Run Features and Netflix
Excerpt edited by Emily Doe
China/South Africa, 2007
Q: Most important question first: I was for Cheng Cheng, but much of the audience we screened the film for in L.A. went for Luo Lei, the dictator! I find that insane. You? Whom would you have voted for?
WEIJUN CHEN: I think Cheng Cheng has more of a desire to be a dictator than Luo Lei. In their deep human nature, Luo Lei is a good executor of dictatorial policy, but Cheng Cheng will be a creative dictator when he has the power. My point is that to be a dictator is human nature, deep in our hearts. Humans are self-serving, and democracy balances the self-serving and altruistic human natures. I always voted for Cheng Cheng.
Q: Do you have any updates on how Luo Lei’s reign is going? Is he still beating his charges? Are they happy with their choice?
WC: Now Luo Lei is no longer the “boss” of the class. No parents want their kids to be a class monitor, because the kids have to study hard so that they can get into a better middle school. Their children are their only hope in life because of the family-plan policy. If you do not have a good college diploma you have no chance in China, after all.
After voting, I asked the class what they thought about the election. Half of them loved voting, and half of them did not like the democratic election because it was too cruel. However, all of them thought Luo Lei looked most like a class monitor. In Chinese tradition, whipping can produce a dutiful son, and they think Luo Lei can keep order in the class.
Q: Do you think there would be any tangible differences if such an experiment were conducted in a class of third-graders anywhere else in the world? What does this tell us about humanity?
WC: As one Chinese elder said of humanity, “When observing a three-year-old child, you can predict what he or she will be like at eighty.” In observing a child’s world, you can see into adult society. Democracy canonizes humanity, but both good and evil are in it, and democracy can’t overcome the defects of humanity. If you choose democracy, you must accept that human nature can also harm or destroy it.
Q: I understand 75 percent of the kids you talked to wanted to be Party politicians when they grew up. Is this more of a practical, economic decision being foisted on them by their parents, or something deeper?
WC: To be a Party official means to have a good life with power, money, cars, houses, everything. Since it is such a good occupation, certainly everyone wants it. In Chinese law, the younger generation is obligated to feed the older generation, and a child with a good occupation means his or her parents will have a good, gray-headed life. Official members can satisfy the demands of humanity.
Q: The concern over China’s one-child policy leading to a generation of “little emperors” seems well founded here. Do you think that the one-child restriction is stressing out parents in China?
WC: When you are obliged to have only one child, your mood is too different for you to procreate freely. You must make your child very outstanding among 1.3 billion people, and parents do not have any preparation on how to educate their “little suns.” The children bear the expectations of several generations. The adults want their children to be more successful than they have managed to be, which creates a painful burden every day for the “little emperors.”
Q: I found the teacher to be very laissez-faire about the campaign shenanigans she was witnessing. If you could change one thing about the way democratic elections in this country are run, what would it be?
WC: I don’t think the teacher didn’t care about the campaign shenanigans she was witnessing. She did not have a wireless headset,
so she did not know everything that was happening among the students. And she did not have the opportunity to enter the children’s homes to find out about the conspiracies going on within the families. I was able to do that, though, and therefore I was able to give the audience a tridimensional and transparent election. I don’t think I could do the same for the U.S. presidential election, though, which is why this film is a sample of democracy, a sample of humanity, a sample of society.
Q: What will your next film be about? Are there any other systems we might test with third-graders to see the inherent flaws more clearly?
WC: We are discussing several projects about culture, about teenagers, and about Tokyo. I think allegorical experiments come
closer to finding the true answers. It’s a good method for documentary
sometimes.
Q: Will the film ever be seen in China? Will they do this experiment again? If so, will you film a follow-up?
WC: A lot of people have watched the film on YouTube, and many people are discussing the film over the internet in China, which creates a lot of pressure on me. I think I have expressed all of my mind in this film, so I don’t think I will shoot the same film again.
Please Vote for Me is available in its entirety at firstrunfeatures.com
and netflix.com.
FORCE 1 TD
Directed by Randy Krallman
U.S.A., 2008
Q: Actual prom photo? True story? What inspired Force 1 TD?
RANDY KRALLMAN: No, it’s all make-believe. My animal-lover
friend sent me a picture of a horse in tennis shoes and said it was a seeing-eye horse. We both agreed that it would be worth gouging our eyes out just to be allowed to have one. After thinking it through I just wrote this story so I’d have an excuse to hang out with one.
Q: What was it like to film with a miniature guide horse? What was Carmine’s disposition?
RK : I liked him and I think he liked me. Other than shitting on the floor of the Escalade every thirty seconds or so, he was cordial and gracious. I was concerned he was going to blow a lot of takes by looking at the “movie hole,” but he was as unimpressed with the camera as he was with everything else that wasn’t hard candy.
Q: I heard David Mamet on NPR talking about some equestrian training he was doing. He said that the trainer told him to “just think” where he wanted to go and then the horse would respond. Is this true for guide horses as well? Do they possess ESP?
RK: Probably, but Carmine’s ESP must be less powerful since he’s so small, because I thought, Stop shitting in here, several dozen times.
Q: Does Carmine have a companion? (We read that guide horses live up to thirty-five years and usually have a companion so they don’t get too lonely.)
RK: He’s just a training horse, so he doesn’t have a blind person yet. He rules a gang of thirty-plus mini-horses on his owner’s ranch in Virginia. He’s either unaware or unconcerned that he’s miniature, and he’ll often try to seduce the full-size mares on his farm. The mares think he’s a child. His trainer, Janet, describes these interactions as “awkward and unfruitful.”
Q: Besides the shoes, how does he roll?
RK: Carm doesn’t really stunt too hard; he’s a simple horse. I think if it were up to him he’d just have a full-time person in charge of unwrapping his hard candies for him.
Q: What was the hardest thing about making this film?
RK : I could go on and on, because there were some real disasters,
but the broad strokes were this cast of fantastic but timeconsuming kids, a mini-horse that wouldn’t stop shitting, a DAT that wouldn’t work, crackheads yelling during takes, a PA named Jesus who totaled our camera truck, etc. We didn’t have permits to shoot the highway scenes, so we had to act all discreet in the turnpike tollbooths where they’re still a little wound up about terrorism. Three seventeen-year-old Dominican kids and a mini-horse up front, then two grown-ass sketchy men (me and my DP) in the back trying to hide the camera and sound equipment. Nothing to see here.
SILENCE IS GOLDEN
Directed by Chris Shepherd
U.K., 2006
Q: Despite some of the comments on the BBC Film Network website, I think there was just the right amount of swearing in your film, Chris. Just wanted to state that up top. Frank Zappa would be proud.
CHRIS SHEPHERD: Mel Brooks said, “What’s the point of walking up to a bell without ringing it?” I think he’s right. If you see it, give it a great big ding-dong. Anyway, you hear much worse in real life. At least I do.
Q: And the art direction is absolutely incredible. The film has such a visceral feel. Again, not a question, but it has to be mentioned.
CS: Catrin Meredydd was the production designer, and she did an amazing job on the sets. We had real problems getting a ’70s look in modern-day Britain, because everyone here loves to spend all of their time doing DIY. So everything is double glazing and extensions. So we
went to a town forty miles from London called Northampton. We
invaded a street and redecorated these poor people’s house with
vintage ’70s wallpaper. One woman had a ’50s room at one end of her kitchen and a ’70s room at the other. The people of Albany Road were so nice to us.
Q: I hear you were asked by The Observer to nominate a film for its 50 Lost Movie Classics and you picked Le Petomane (1979), a true story about a man named Joseph Pujol (played by Leonard Rossiter) who had an elastic anus. What do you most love about this film?
CS: Its deadpan nature. Like the strangest thing ever is just a normal occurrence. Leonard Rossiter plays it so straight, it’s sublime. I love deadpan comedy, like Withnail and I, Dr. Strangelove, or Napoleon Dynamite. I love comedy when it comes out of the characterization.
Q: What is the insurance like to be allowed to ask a kid to repeatedly bang his head into a wall? Did you do a lot of takes of that one?
CS: It did take a lot of takes. I remember sensing that the crew was worried about that scene. To stop Conor (Billy) from hurting his head on the wall we put up board that was supposed to be soft. But it was in fact quite hard. Conor said, “My head’s hurting,” but I knew I had to get that shot in the can—there and then. If the ending was unconvincing we would be sunk. I replied, “We better do another take before it really hurts.” I made him shout and scream as he did it. We got it. Conor was amazing. He can take direction better than a lot of adults. He’s a real talent.
Q: Your films are often driven by voice-over. How do you approach scriptwriting in terms of V.O.?
CS: Each film is different. With Silence I wrote the voice- over first.
Then I did workshops with Conor. From those I focused on his London accent and adapted it so it felt real. I tend to write and work through the scripts. Changing, honing, always refining, like chipping away at a sculpture. I like voice-over. It’s a good way of getting a lot of information in a short time span. It’s good for shorts.
Q: I’m not at all suggesting you should, but did you ever contemplate growing this story into a feature? What are you working on now?
CS: I’m writing a feature for Film4. I hope to shoot next year. It’s different from my other films, which deal with memory or imagination. This one is set in London in the present day. So that is quite a departure for me. It’s nice not to be delving around in the dim, dark, distant past—the present is much more fun.
SAFARI and SAFARI MENUS (excerpt )
Directed by Catherine Chalmers
Sound by Charles Lindsay
U.S.A., 2006
Safari menu 1: Leopard gecko
Safari menu 2: California king snake
Safari menu 3: Pygmy chameleon
Safari: Extra footage and an excerpt from the film
Q: When I first saw this film, at South by Southwest, I almost couldn’t believe it was real. The scenes are surreal in their beauty. The praying mantis eating the fly’s head! The iguana’s eye! How did you do it? What was your relationship with the animals and insects you were filming?
CATHERINE CHALMERS: I raised nearly all of the twenty species that appear in the film. Each lived in a habitat designed specifically to provide proper temperature, humidity, and ground cover. Predators eat live food, so I raised the animals they ate as well. At the height of filming in the spring, when the insects were molting and coming into their prime, I was tending the zoo about four hours a day. I felt a deep
responsibility to keep everyone healthy and as comfortable as possible.
Safari was filmed in the studio on two rainforest sets composed of a lot of dirt and live plants that I tended, maintained, and replanted according to the needs and aesthetics of the animal I was shooting. One set was for the larger animals and the other was for the opening and closing water scenes. Using a lipstick camera, I followed the animals around as they explored the environment.
Q: Safari is part of your American Cockroach series. Tell us a bit about this series and what inspired you to investigate it in the first place.
CC: The near-universal hatred we feel for the roach, which was one of the reasons I was attracted to it, makes for a rich conduit to the complex and often violent relationship we have with the animal world. The American cockroach (misnamed by Linnaeus) is believed to have evolved in Africa, like we did, and it accompanied us as we colonized the globe. In a sense, it is our dark shadow, our alter ego, clandestinely following in our wake. I think one of the reasons we hate the roach is that it challenges our confidence in our ability to control nature and corral it to suit our needs. The roach can trespass our walls at will, upsetting our belief that we can create effective boundaries between ourselves and the natural world. Yet insects, as a whole, are supremely essential.
Q: How long did it take you to make Safari?
CC: Safari took me a year and a half to make. I shot one hundred forty-minute tapes. Ouch. Nature takes its time and can’t really be directed.
Q: How and where did you find all of the animals and insects you worked with, and where are they now?
CC: The reptiles and amphibian came from various breeders, most of whom I met at a breeders’ fair in Westchester County. I gathered the red-spotted newts from our place in the country. I took them into the city, fed them, filmed them, and returned them. Insects are much harder to come by, as their transport is regulated by the government. I worked with an insect specialist (godofinsects. com) who helped me locate insect breeders. He also vouched that I wasn’t a government agent. Unfortunately, insects don’t live very long. But the reptiles and amphibians are still going strong here in my studio. Regarding the roaches, I have to admit I fall prey to many of the same pest prejudices as most people. I kept the beautiful harlequin roaches but fed the remaining American ones to the chameleon and gecko. They loved them.
Q: How has the series affected your view of arthropods? Do you ever kill insects?
CC: Insects are a window into the unimaginable. Their biology and behaviors are routinely bizarre and enigmatic. They are refreshingly outside the human perspective. I’ll kill “wild” roaches I find in the studio, which fortunately happens infrequently. I’m good at catching them, after raising them for all these years. Mosquitoes and ticks are also fair game.
Q: I read that you studied mechanical engineering as an undergrad. How has your education informed the style of your art?
CC: I was in the design section of the mechanical-engineering department, where the focus was on invention, in a broad, classical sense. It’s an unconventional way to go about things, to get a BS in engineering and an MFA in painting, but it was perfect for me, for how I think and work and create.
Q: What are you working on now?
CC: I’ve been working in Panama, on a new series with leaf-cutter ants. It’s my first time working in the field with animals I haven’t raised, and it’s been amazing. I shot the first video, and I have two more to go, plus all the photography, so it’s going to take me a few trips.
I’m also working on a screenplay—full length, with people,
no less. But animals, in one form or another, are intertwined with
the fates of the characters. As is apropos.
NEW BOY
Directed by Steph Green
Produced by Tamara Anghie
Adapted from a short story by Roddy Doyle
Ireland, 2007
Q: What a beautiful film! Is this your first adaptation? What made you choose Roddy Doyle’s story “New Boy”?
STEPH GREEN: I read “New Boy” in the Metro Eireann, Ireland’s multicultural newspaper, as well as in McSweeney’s 18. It is my first adaptation. I had only written original scripts before. I remember
putting a yellow stickynote in the McSweeney’s book and giving it to
my regular cinematographer and good friend, Kevin Richey. I wrote,
“Wouldn’t ‘New Boy’ make a great short?” on the note. After reading it, Kevin put the book back in my mailbox with the word Perfect written over my note. I do think Roddy’s writing is perfect for film, because his dialogue is sharp and so truthful to human character, and he manages
to be poignant without overt sentimentality. Not to mention he’s wickedly funny. This story in particular feels like a complete emotional journey after fifteen minutes of reading, and it is extremely visual. Most people have been the new kid, or been bullied in some way. The universality of that experience is part of the appeal of the story. It also hits on some rich and timely subject matter for Ireland: immigration. But in the end, it’s a story about the possibilities of friendship.
Q: The child actors are incredible. Did they know each other before you started shooting?
SG: A lot of this came down to finding them in casting, looking for attributes of Roddy’s characters: Hazel’s precociousness, Christian’s insecurity, Joseph’s strength and vulnerability, Seth’s alienation. All the kids were so focused and fun to work with.
With so few lines, the boy who played Joseph needed to be able to speak volumes through his eyes and facial expressions. Though the population of African eight- to ten-year-olds is fast increasing in Ireland, very few of them are signed up in theater, or on agents’ call lists. We found the most success through contact with community centers. This was both useful in our casting search and educational in our understanding of the current immigration patterns in the country. All the boys seen in the African scenes are real-life Josephs—new boys who have recently moved to Ireland and gone through the same adjustments. In the end, a casting agent found Olutunji Ebun-Cole in London. He had just shot his first role in Casino Royale (seen in the first scene running to his father with two bottles of cola). Lou Clouter, a great London-based casting agent, sent us a tape of Tunji auditioning, sitting next to a boy who poked and prodded him with “Hey, Live Aid!” Tunji sat straight and stoic, only his eyes revealing the torment, and he immediately had the part. In real life, he happened to end up being one of the best-natured, most intelligent kids I’ve ever met.
For the other parts, we rounded up more than two hundred kids in Ireland and spent a lot of time finding the main characters. Sinead Maguire (Hazel O’Hara) and Simon O’Driscoll (Christian Kelly) were longtime mates (as long a time as possible when you’re nine) who had done theater performance together. Fionn O’Shea (Seth Quinn) was harder to find. But going back through the audition tapes, I noticed this kid who seemed almost like he didn’t want to be at the audition. He leaned back in his desk and (probably nervous) ended up reading as disinterested. There was Seth.
Q: Naturally, I assume the three boys went on to become a gang of bullies, led by Joseph “The Finger,” that terrorized the school for years.
SG: The kids became such good friends. Carpooling to set one morning, Fionn’s mother heard the following conversation from the three boys in the backseat: Tunji (father from Sierra Leone, mother from Zambia, but born and raised in East London, so identifies as English) and Simon and Fionn (both Irish).
[Tunji hears one of the Irish boys say something in Irish]
Tunji: Why don’t you speak the Irish language all the time?
Simon: Oh, because the English took over our country and made us stop a while back.
Tunji: Oh. [Pause—thinking] Sorry about that.
Fionn: Don’t worry about it.
I repeated this conversation to my friend who works for Oxfam in many war-torn parts of the world, and she described it back to me as the peace process.
Tunji, Fionn, Sinead, and Simon became such good mates during rehearsals that we were planning the sequel from the first day on set. They would be teenage superheroes changing the world. Tunji still emails asking how the script is going.
Directed by Matthew Lessner
Rescripted by Daniel Handler, Camilla Cleese, and John Cleese
Sound by Jeremiah Moore
U.S.A., 2005
Q: Since your main character has or wears a horse head for the entire film, we have to ask: Is Breton’s manifesto tattooed anywhere on your body? Do you subscribe to any “isms”?
MATTHEW LESSNER: The tattoo is on my lower back, to the left of the bloody dagger and the naughty Tweety bird, just beneath the gentlemanly warlock. No “isms” for me, at least not intentionally, not consciously. I’ve never been part of a movement, or even a club or a gang, although I did once go on a churchsponsored rafting trip down the Snake River; that’s actually where I got the idea for the film. It was a beautiful day, and as we came around this bend, we hit a patch of rapids, and suddenly this image of a man with a horse’s head doing a Townshend-style windmill off a giant stack of amps in front of these spectacular fireworks just popped into my head. It kept playing over and over, at the gym, Carl’s Jr., wherever… It actually started to kind of haunt me. I just worked backward from there.
Q: Is Darling Darling at all autobiographical?
ML: No, not at all. One time I did pick up a date at her house, but her dad wasn’t there; I don’t think anyone was there. I just watched TV while she got ready, MTV Cribs. Silkk the Shocker’s house isn’t all that impressive. I just wanted to take some very familiar, easy-to-follow, almost clichéd scenario and kind of break it apart and jam it back together. To me it didn’t really matter what it was; this was just the first thing that came to mind, and I liked it because it seemed somehow especially American. Beyond the fact that I like horses
and fireworks, I don’t really connect with the story at all.
Q: Did you write Harold’s character with Michael Cera in mind?
ML: No. When I wrote this film I really had no idea who Michael Cera was. I originally just tried to cast the part online, but all the people that came in were either 90210-style old guys pretending to be high-school age, or super-young “actor” kids, all really saccharine and smiley.
Shortly before we were supposed to shoot the film, I somehow found Michael’s agent’s contact information online. I recruited my friend Max, who’s infinitely more charming than I am, and he called up the agent and convinced him to take this unsolicited student script and forward it on to Michael at the set of Arrested Development. It (the script) was actually hidden in the lining of this multicolored jacket that I had had custom made for Michael; luckily, he found it, cut it out, read it, and much to our surprise, liked it and agreed to do it. He called me up shortly thereafter and we got together. We hung out, talked shop, ate sandwiches, did some spirit questing, just general relaxation stuff. We ended up really bonding; we share a real love for the sun. He’s a complete gentleman.
Q: Ridley Scott credited Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” as a point of reference for the mood of Blade Runner. Was there any particular painting, film, or piece of art that inspired the style and visual look of Darling Darling?
ML: Yeah, definitely: 2Pacalypse Now, 2Pac’s first album. Also this giant painting of a nude woman and a tiger my grandparents used to have hanging at the top of their staircase.
Q: You said that in film school you were instructed to take filmmaking very seriously—big budgets, big staff, lots of production. Did it make you nostalgic for the fun, hobby-like filmmaking you had done previously? Do you see yourself reverting to the more laid-back, organic approach?
ML: Yeah, film school definitely seemed to take a lot of the fun out of filmmaking for a while there. They treated it like a science, like there were explicitly right and wrong ways to do things. I totally understand that commercial films are made in very specific ways for very specific reasons. It’s a business. You’ve got CGI gargoyles and helicopter crashes, I get it, but those don’t apply to every film, so why would you approach every film in the same way? I think there’s value to be had in knowing the rules before you break them, and I understand the school’s intentions, but I just got kind of bogged down by everything and started thinking way too much. Maybe it was my own deal, but for whatever reason I went from making a film a day to making a film a year, and, yeah, even if it was just throwaway stuff, I missed that spontaneous fun that filmmaking can be, just putting on a cape and rolling around in the mud. I approached By Modern Measure, the film
I did after Darling Darling, with all this stuff very much in mind; I wanted to be loose, spontaneous, I wanted to have fun. I think we did. Plus, we eventually got Taco Bell in our corner.
[Editor’s note: In By Modern Measure, an amateur French sociologistpresents his observations of two young Americans who meet by chance outside a Taco Bell in October 2008.]
Q: Could you tell us a little bit about the feature film that you’re writing/directing now?
ML: I’m hoping to approach this film with the same kind of spirit and attitude that inspired By Modern Measure. This is proving to be a bit more difficult in feature form, particularly in terms of raising money and getting producer types on board, but I’m not sweatin’ it; we’re moving forward and acquiring livestock as we speak. I just got off the phone with a guy about a zeppelin.
Q: I feel like there’s something we forgot to ask.
ML: You forgot to ask about the band of hobos that burned down our original location three days before shooting, as well as about the pony who gave his life to make the film possible, but that’s entirely okay.
Please check out darlingdarlingfilm.com to see the original version of
Darling Darling.
BIGFOOT: A BEAST ON THE RUN
Directed by David Thayer
Excerpt edited by Emily Doe
U.S.A., 2007
Q: What first led you to investigate Bigfoot researchers?
DAVID THAYER: My brother-in-law, Todd Limberg, told me in 2003 that he thought he had had an “encounter” with Bigfoot while camping in the Washington forest. Two years later, he showed me a recording he made that he thought was of Bigfoot. This made me curious, and I started reading things about Sasquatch on the internet. I found out that many people believed in and were actively researching many different kinds of Sasquatches: a paranormal Bigfoot, a “living fossil” Bigfoot, a Bigfoot from outer space, a Bigfoot that “the government
doesn’t want you to know about,” etc. I had to meet these people, and I had to find out if Todd’s recording was real, so I went out and asked the experts about it, and I filmed it.
Q: Did you believe in Bigfoot before making the film? Do you now?
DT: I’ve always believed that anything is possible.
Q: We understand that Tom Biscardi was very unhappy about the film and threatened to issue a cease-and-desist, despite having signed a release form in the first place. Have all matters been settled now, or is there still tension between you and Tom?
DT: Mr. Biscardi was unhappy that I called him “bombastic” in a synopsis that I had online. I meant “bombastic” as a term of endearment—I guess he thought that “bombastic” meant “liar.” At best, I meant that he had high self-esteem. At worst, I might have meant “big-talking,” but nothing worse. Many people have accused Biscardi of being a scam artist, of hoaxing Bigfoot photos, and of trying to cash in on Bigfoot. This may or may not be true, but it’s not my problem, and I don’t really pity the people who give him money, because he’s entertaining them. He also believes in what he’s doing, and he faces up to his mistakes publicly. That takes a lot of guts.
At the time I filmed Biscardi, he was saying that he was going to capture Bigfoot “within forty-eight hours.” It didn’t happen. Some weeks after I finished filming the movie, Biscardi claimed on a radio program that members of his team, The Great American Bigfoot Research Organization, had captured a Bigfoot. People signed onto a pay-per-view website of Biscardi’s, hoping to see streamed photos of the captive Bigfoot. No Bigfoot was produced. Biscardi said that the person on his team who claimed to have captured Bigfoot gave him “an abominable snowjob.” Good words. Good entertainment.
Did he lie? I don’t believe he did. I think he puts so much
belief and work into Bigfoot that things have to happen. I believe
that he believes in Bigfoot, and that he perhaps invests too much trust into people who might let him down. I’m not saying he’s innocent—he’s just not pretending anything. Many people in Bigfooting are against him, and this shouldn’t be. Without people like him, Bigfooting would be boring.
Q: Has your search for Bigfoot in the film made you more aware of your surroundings? Do you find yourself more alert and/or nervous when alone in the woods?
DT : No. Bigfoot is shy and doesn’t want to be seen by people. The people who see Bigfoot almost always see it running away from them, and there have been no deaths attributed to Bigfoot attacks.
Q: That’s pretty presumptuous, don’t you think?
DT: If I were in the woods alone at night, I would relax, because Bigfoot would see me before I saw it. They are nocturnal and have good night vision. If, however, I ran into a killer Bigfoot, my death by “large stick” or “stone to head” would probably come before I was even aware of it.
Q: Do you know anything more about Neal Burgstahler’s claims that there was a Bigfoot in captivity at Lawrence Livermore National Lab?
DT: Neal claims that in the late ’60s there were two Bigfoots secretly held captive by a sinister world power at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Little did the captors know that these Bigfoot could transform themselves, at will, into flying orbs of light. The conversion was of a paranormal nature, one that is difficult to understand by way of “normal” science. This type of conversion is typically known as “shape-shifting.”
The two Bigfoots eventually left the lab by slipping through the cages as immaterial orbs of light. It is not hard to conclude that these two Bigfoots could have left the lab at any time, but they chose to stay.
I am no expert, nor can I attest to anything, but Neal has told me that many prominent scientists visited these Bigfoots, including Stephen Hawking.
Q: What are you working on now?
DT: I just finished a fictional screenplay called The Dissidents, and I’m working on a sci-fi paranoia disaster story called The Agenda. I also just started a video production firm in Zurich called Happy Monkey (happymonkey.ch).
ON THE ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT
Directed by Adam Keker
U.S.A., 2008
Q: What is the story behind this? Is it based on fact?
ADAM KEKER: We wanted to explore how certain political fictions get created, how they take on a life of their own, and how the people who create them sometimes lose track of what parts they made up and what parts they didn’t. We wanted to make a film in which every bit of evidence you receive actually makes the world less clear. Is the film saying that there is a real suspect named Daniel Faller, whose face has been altered in this photograph, or is he an entirely fictitious creation? The audience doesn’t know. If this top-secret file is being viewed, does that mean the president has actually been assassinated? There’s no way to tell. Is there a president? Hard to say. We tried to design the movie to feel like it’s been around at least since the 1960s, a file that has been continually updated and re-cut over time. It’s not about any one administration. It applies to them all. Though, put kindly, we could say that the current administration has done its very best to make the film relevant.
Q: Do you know if a tape such as yours actually exists? Are there rumors of such a thing?
AK: One can only imagine that there’s a disaster plan for presidential assassination written up or otherwise recorded somewhere, right? But, no, I’ve never heard of such a thing. It just seemed like a nice Dr. Strangelove–ian premise. We wanted the audience to question who, exactly, made this file, since even the narrator is confused by the information in it. We tried to raise at least the possibility that the file is put together by a machine—that the government’s black propaganda has gotten so convoluted and multilayered that now only a computer can keep it straight.
Q: Are the faces that you use (of Lee Harvey Oswald, Sun Yat-sen, and Ho Chi Minh) really composites?
AK: Well, not to my knowledge. But Oswald always claimed that the photograph of him holding the rifle in the backyard—which we see in the film—was a composite. The government funded more than one investigation of the photograph to verify its authenticity. The state portrait of Sun Yat-sen that we used has been dramatically retouched. Not by us—I mean, the original was retouched in the style of the time. You can see the heavy brushstrokes in some places. So a percentage of that photograph really is fictitious: his face has been somewhat altered, and I love that. We also use the 1969 Pulitzer Prize–winning photo, the famous image of the SouthVietnamese general executing the Vietcong prisoner. Of course, we don’t want to disrespect the seriousness of that picture. But the photographer, Eddie Adams, always regretted the impact this image had around the world, and the incomplete story it told about that day. He said lots of good, semiotic-y things about it: “Photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They’re only half-truths,” etc.
Q: How did you select which archival footage to use?
AK: Since the film plays around with chronology, we wanted images that were difficult to pin down, aesthetically, to a particular decade—photos that might have been taken yesterday, but might also be twenty years old. Whenever possible, just to be really nerdy, we tried to choose images that had a secondary meaning, too, something that most people in the audience would have no reason to know. The photograph we used for the gurney in the mental hospital is actually the lethal-injection chamber of a prison in Indiana, for example. Most of these second meanings are little winks at the world of national security and covert operations. We shot the sniper scene on a former navy base, in the shadow of a condemned facility called “The Pink Palace,” where the military conducted top-secret submarine experiments throughout the Cold War. Or: since 9/11, the DEA claims to have found twenty-one tunnels under the U.S.-Mexico border, like the fictitious drug tunnel shown in the film, but the photograph we used for the tunnel is actually from a Cold War–era Titan missile base in Colorado, a massive secret underground complex that still exists but is now abandoned and sealed off. (I’m not confirming that the photo was taken by members of Subciety, an anonymous organization of underground explorers devoted to “peeking into the nooks and crannies that get left behind as society moves forward.”) Another example: Oscar Urcuyo, the actor who portrays the fictitious Paraguayan drug lord in the film, happens tobelong to a prominent political family in Nicaragua. His relatives, including a former Nicaraguan president, were intimately involved in the CIA’s covert operations in that country during the 1970s and 80s, operations that eventually led to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Q: Are you anti– or pro–conspiracy theory?
AK: Sometimes I’m nostalgic for conspiracies, theoretical or otherwise. At least they’re complicated, and suggest that the government has enough respect for the people to hide things from us in interesting ways. Lately, it seems like the powers that be haven’t been making much of an effort, you know? They’re just offering us card tricks, like the Osama-Saddam bait and switch, and we’ve seen that one before. But for me, this film is a parody of conspiracy theories as much as it’s a parody of government secrecy. I find most conspiracy theories to be completely ridiculous, which means that I like them! In 1992, my summer job was researching the JFK assassination for a big mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald put on by the American Bar Association. That summer I read shelves of JFK assassination books, sat in on expert interviews, charted all the arguments and traced their sources. A high-tech engineering firm donated its scientists for the trial and gave them carte blanche to run new tests. Never give scientists carte blanche. They go insane. (New reality TV show concept: Scientists: Carte Blanche!) They rebuilt JFK’s presidential limo from original blueprints to conduct laser tests. They created the sharpest enhancement of the
Zapruder film ever made. They got a sharpshooter to fire 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano bullets—the same type Oswald allegedly used—at human skulls filled with cow brains and marked with the entry and exit points described in the original autopsy report, so that they could film the impact with a high-speed camera to see which way the brains flew. I will not go on. They spent $2 million dollars. Anyway, the point is: I ended the summer convinced that the conventional story is accurate, that Oswald was the lone gunman. Almost all of the promising conspiracy arguments fell apart so quickly that it was kind of depressing.
Q: Was it fun filming the sniper scene?
AK: We filmed the sniper scene on the former military base. We had cleared the shoot with the local police, the fire department, the property owners, the surrounding neighbors, etc., but no one informed us that army troops just back from Iraq would be bunking nearby that morning. Apparently, when we started firing weapons, half the soldiers dropped to the floor of the barracks, the other half ran to the gun lockers, and we narrowly escaped a full-scale counterattack. So if any of those guys happen to be reading this, I’d like to apologize for making one of your first longawaited mornings home anything less than peaceful and quiet.
THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT
Excerpt from the feature film, Don’t Hold Your Breath
Directed by Roger Teich
U.S.A., 2008
“The man in the grey suit” is a surfers’ term for the great white shark, the landlord of the sea. In the late 1980s, Scot Anderson put a Hi8 camera on a surfboard to get the prey’s perspective of the onrushing shark. At just about the same time, through natural attrition, Ron Elliott became the only sea urchin diver who worked around the Farallon Islands, off the coast of Northern California, great white feeding grounds. In 2003, Ron began filming his encounters.
A conversation between Roger Teich and Scot Anderson
Roger Teich: How did the idea for the surfboard-camera come about?
SCOT ANDERSON: We saw a shark rolling a log off Indian Head, Mirounga Bay. There was an ADD kid out there who said all kinds of crazy things; he just sort of rattled off this thing, “You could put a milk carton out there, and the shark would hit it.” That was the seed of the idea. I tried inflatable pool toys; everything got damaged. The surfboard was durable. I added Styrofoam to get it to roll over. This other guy, Phil Henderson, challenged me, he said, “You have to put the camera under water.” I had to play with the Hi8 angle. It turns out that forty-five degrees is the perfect angle, almost the exact angle that the sharks come out of the dark to hit the thing. It was virgin territory; they were easy to fool. Now they’re not so easy to fool.
RT: Were you ever afraid of falling in?
SA: Well, I thought if I fell into an attack and my boat pulled away, that would be uncomfortable. If I fell in, you’d see the boat trailing away with my dog, good old Flicker, watching me growing small—hello!
RT: How does this fit into your life?
SA: My priorities are basically all screwed up. I’m more interested in chasing around big fish and things like that than anything else. I don’t want to talk too much about that. I’ll get in trouble.
A conversation between Roger Teich and Ron Elliott
Roger Teich: What do you think of Scot’s surfboard-camera?
RON ELLIOTT: Scot was the pioneer, and I give him a lot of credit for that, but it spawned a lot of chest-thumping ego stuff. It’s just not my thing. I don’t wanna show that to my grandkids. But it’s pretty cool to see how they go at you. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one come at me where I see the white lip of the jaw. I haven’t had that kind of encounter in about six, seven years.
RT: Like what?
RE: Jumped on the back of a shark once. Spur of the moment. I’d just finished a dive, and it was idling by the side of the boat. Searching for a storybook ending. I should be able to hold my mud better than that.
RT: How did the idea for the hose-camera come about?
RE: I like diving alone because it’s my own awareness, my own survival instincts. I built the hose-cam to show that other perspective, without having another diver in the water. It preserves the mood that I’m in when I go diving. I still feel like I’m on my own and I’m not performing for anything, just doing it. And the hose-cam picks up whatever it does—bubbles, colors—it’s not always pointing in the right direction.
RT: Why do you dive when the visibility is so low?
RE: I like the haze ’cause I understand the mood of the haze, shadows, looking at mirages. Other people wouldn’t understand it.
Am I willing it to be something because I want it to be something? I like it when the island is lost in fog, and the water is dark; no one can see me, and no one can help. I tremble, and dive right into the fear—that’s my release.
LUCKY
Directed by Nash Edgerton
Australia, 2005
Q: One car?
NASH EDGERTON: Yes. It was my friend Sean’s car. He gave it to me. Now I think he cries a little inside each time he watches the film.
Q: One take?
NE: No. Multiple takes for each shot. Even the explosion was done twice, as it didn’t ignite on the first take.
Q: Stitches?
NE: A few. Truly, only a few above my left eye after a somersault off a mini-tramp incident. I’ve had plenty of cuts from going through windows and windscreens that didn’t require stitches though. And I had little bits of glass vacuumed out of my skin before doing a second take on Lucky.
Q: Cost?
NE: Whatever the limit was on my credit card at the time, which wasn’t much.
Q: Explosives?
NE: You can buy them at most corner stores in Australia. (Okay, I don’t really know.)
Q: C’mon, explosives?
NE: I made them at home from instructions on the internet. Okay, that’s bullshit, too. I got a special-effects guy to do it, and he probably bought them from the corner store or made them at home from instructions on the internet.
Q: Speed?
NE: 50–90 km/hr. (35–55 miles/hour.)
Q: Cameraman?
NE: The road was wide enough to fit two cars. So we had a Steadicam on the back of the camera vehicle, and then the cars kind of did a smooth dance around each other at speed. The key to making it work was Tony the carseat.
Q: Tony the carseat?
NE: Yeah, stuntman Tony Lynch. He’s worked on just about everything I’ve ever made and drove the car in Lucky, dressed as a carseat.
Q: First stunt?
NE: I fell off the bathroom sink when I was three and bit my tongue. I still have the scar.
Q: First big stunt?
NE: The first big unpaid stunt was jumping out of an express train onto the platform because I’d gotten on the wrong train and it wasn’t stopping at my station and I didn’t want to miss my basketball game. I don’t recommend doing that, though. The first big paid stunt was jumping out of an exploding building. I don’t think I realized how big it really was until later that night. I got a little burnt doing that one.
Q: Fears?
NE: Lots, but I’m good at convincing myself otherwise. There’s always some fear attached to doing a stunt, for example, but the fear of fucking it up in front of the whole crew always outweighs the fear of getting hurt. So it kind of works out.
FILMMAKER BIOS
Catherine Chalmers holds a BS in engineering from Stanford University and an MFA in painting from the Royal College of Art, in London. She has exhibited her artwork around the world, including at P.S.1 (a MoMA affiliate), in New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C.; the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in England; and other venues. Two books have been published about her work: Food Chain (Aperture, 2000) and American Cockroach (Aperture, 2004). Chalmers lives and works in New York City; Safari is her fifth short. Her website is catherinechalmers.com
Weijun Chen is a documentary director and producer living in Wuhan, in central China. After graduating with a degree in journalism from Sichuan University in 1992, he joined the documentary production department of the Wuhan regional television station. Chen’s first film, My Life Is My Philosophy, was nominated as the best documentary of the year by the Chinese National Association of Broadcasters.
Nash Edgerton is a filmmaker who has worked as an actor, stunt performer, editor, producer, writer, and director. Nash has earned more than one hundred film and television credits on productions including The Matrix trilogy, Star Wars II and III, The Thin Red Line, and Superman Returns. Nash recently completed postproduction on his first feature film, The Square.
Don Edkins is a documentary film director and producer. He was born in Cape Town and left South Africa in 1976 for political reasons. In 1994, he returned to vote in the first democratic elections. He has directed and produced a number of documentaries, including the multi-awarded Steps for the Future, a collection of thirty-eight films from southern Africa about life in the time of HIV/AIDS. Currently, Edkins is an executive producer for the STEPS global documentary project on democracy.
Steph Green got her start in the film industry working as an assistant to Spike Jonze. She has also worked for producer/director Alan Poul of HBO’s Six Feet Under. New Boy won Best Short Film at both the Irish Film and Television Academy Awards and the Tribeca Film Festival, and received Special Recognition at the Berlinale. Steph is currently working on a feature project, titled Steady, about two young boys who, while riding the subway, accidentally videotape a teenage girl before she goes missing.
Adam Keker is a writer and filmmaker based in San Francisco. As a cinematographer, he has shot numerous documentaries for PBS, the National Geographic Channel, Showtime, and many others. With his wife, journalist Amanda Pike, he is currently directing a feature-length documentary about the Khmer Rouge.
Randy Krallman is a career skullduggerist. He was born in Alaska, raised in Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and Idaho, and is currently based in New York City.
Matthew Lessner came of age in the small logging town of Roseburg, Oregon. Darling Darling, his undergraduate thesis film, screened at a number of festivals worldwide and picked up a few awards along the way. Matthew currently resides in Brooklyn, where he is hard at work preparing for his first feature film and exploring the restorative qualities of crystals and various gemstones. For more information please visit montelomax.com.
Chris Shepherd was born in Liverpool. In 2000 he cofounded Slinky Pictures with producer Maria Manton. His directing and writing credits include a ten-part series for Channel Four called People’s Britain, as well as the multi-award-winning The Broken Jaw, The World of Interiors, Dad’s Dead, and Who I Am and What I Want (in collaboration with artist David Shrigley). Silence Is Golden, made with Maria Manton, won the Rushes Soho Shorts Award for Best Short Film.
Roger Teich has made three short films: Stealing Altitude (1990, codirector), a black-and-white vérité study of a BASE jumper in Los Angeles; Devil’s Teeth (2005), about the sea urchin diver Ron Elliott;
and The Man in the Grey Suit (2008). He is completing a new short film, Jeff Koons is a Fabergé Egg. He is also continually developing the feature length Don’t Hold Your Breath, about sharks and men and women. He practices criminal law in San Francisco.
David Thayer was born in San Jose, California, studied English literature at San Francisco State University, and moved to Switzerland in 1999. He has performed electronic music under the moniker Xeno Volcano, and has been doing freelance work in video production since 2003. Bigfoot: A Beast on the Run is his first long film.