Wholphin No. 8
Wholphin No 8 features Lauren Greenfield’s deeply disturbing, hilarious, and timely documentary, kids + money, the 2009 Sundance Short Award winner, Short Term 12, Carlos D from Interpol’s gorgeously-shot, surrealist dreamscape, My Friends Told Me About You, Sam Taylor-Woods’ film adaptation of a Patrick Marber short story produced by the late Anthony Minghella, a series of bedroom-trashing menu films starring James Franco, Creed Bratton and Maria Bamford, films from Sweden, England and North Korea, and much more.
10 Films. 172 minutes.
LINER NOTES
Marco was not a preternaturally vindictive girl, but she haaaated Julia. Julia was taller, better looking, and more popular; had whiter teeth, more friends, a powerful father, a pampered mother, and access to anything she wanted; and, to top it all off, was a complete b-word. Once, when they were kids, Marco got too close to a piece of mango Julia was eating. Julia turned and, without hesitation, bit Marco on the cheek so hard she broke completely through the skin. There was blood everywhere. Their mothers almost ended up in a fistfight over it. Marco never forgave or forgot, and whenever she saw Julia, she felt an urge to tense up on her tiptoes and stare down the little princess. Of course, the one time she actually did that, Julia and all her friends ganged up and started screaming insults and throwing things at her until Marco ran away, humiliated yet again.
As far as boys were concerned, Marco, like any awkward teenager, competed as best she could by obsessing over her appearance, eating well, constantly grooming her hair, and, most importantly, keeping her posture perfect. But there’s only so much you can do when you are being completely outclassed by another girl’s resources. As everyone who’s lived through those years knows, it’s almost impossible to get noticed when you’re stuck on the fringe. Marco, though she repeatedly tried, failed to rise up in the ranks of her social group. And because of this, she was constantly stressed out, to the point that her doctors eventually became concerned.
Although Marco didn’t know it, Julia, despite flaunting her privileged life in Marco’s face every chance she got, was just as stressed out by the arrangement. During a routine checkup, Julia’s doctors, who were also Marco’s doctors, were surprised to find equally high levels of glucocorticoid, a.k.a. the stress chemical, present in Julia’s and Marco’s bloodstream. Apparently, these never-ending teen popularity contests are tough on everyone. Even the winners.
Luckily for Marco, two months after being taunted in public, Julia was eaten by a large python. It’s a common problem for baboons living in the Okavango region of Botswana.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the L.A. teenagers interviewed in Lauren Greenfield’s award-winning documentary, “kids + money,” appearing here on Wholphin
No. 8, have no such natural predators to contend with in their own quest for high social status. No night-stalking leopards, no bush-hiding lions, no sneaky hyenas, no lunging crocodiles, no nothing. Their ranks, via their parents’ bank accounts, are largely predetermined.
Or at least that was how things seemed to be at the time of this filming. I wonder if, post-econopocalpyse, any of the kids are now experiencing a form of post-traumatic shopping disorder. I wonder if, in the confusion of tumbling rank and status that has rippled across this country, some of these kids’ rooms now resemble the rooms so artfully destroyed by James Franco, Creed Bratton, and Maria Bamford for “The Room Before and After.” Probably not, actually. It’s hard to imagine even the most notorious room-smasher in history, David Lee Roth (who once famously glued every piece of furniture in his hotel room to the ceiling) wreaking the kind of thoughtful havoc Franco delivers in the opening menu. His is a jaw-dropping and brutally intense performance that makes Martin Sheen’s opening scene in Apocalypse Now look like a yoga meditation. I hope watching him explore the outer reaches of his psyche gives you the same sense of childlike envy and catharsis it gives us. And I hope it translates, because being in that room as James, Creed, and Maria went deep within themselves was an intense and occasionally frightening experience. Like all good artists, they allowed themselves to be entirely consumed by their performances, which we felt lucky to capture.
Likewise, Carlos Dengler’s intent is exquisitely clear in his debut short film, “My Friends Told Me About You.” From the first words out of his mouth, it is obvious that, although working in a new medium, Carlos is no dilettante. He’s written and performed a meticulously crafted, surrealist dreamscape of a film, which is made all the more satisfying by director Daniel Ryan’s lush aesthetic.
Finally, we’re still being moved by Destin Daniel Cretton’s Sundance Award–winning, “Short Term 12.” The intimacy in his scenes is almost chilling. Anyone who has ever been on a film set, or spent enough time in movie theaters, will know how special and rare such moments are.
If this introduction makes me sound like a giddy fan boy, good. We are really proud of this issue. So much so that while putting the issue together, Emily Doe—Wholphin’s now wisdom tooth–free (but always insightful) associate editor—was inspired to proclaim, “Short film is the new indie rock!”
If you share Emily’s enthusiasm, subscribe to Wholphin at wholphindvd.com and help keep this concert going.
Brent Hoff
An Interview with the Director
Q: First off, who wrote the rap? It was perfect.
Destin Daniel Cretton: My sister, Joy, and I used to write raps together when we were kids, and perform them to our parents. They were usually knockoffs of Vanilla Ice, Kid ’n’ Play, or Arrested Development. We had one about stinky socks called “Can Smell This” that was based on MC Hammer’s big hit. I was able to pull from all of that when I wrote the first draft of the rap in “Short Term 12.” I was pretty happy with it, so I showed it to the actor who plays Mark, LaKeith Stanfield (who also writes lyrics), and he thought it sucked, so he wrote another one. The end result is a combination of the two of us.
Q: Are you thinking feature? Why or why not?
DDC: Actually, yes. This is my sixth narrative short, and I’m excited to try something new. But that’s not to say I’m turning my back on short film–making. I think it’s one of the most important art forms of our generation, and I hope to be a part of that community
until I die.
Q: The moments you captured between the characters in your film were incredibly intimate. This is definitely a nod to the actors, but mainly to you. How did you run the set to get such private moments?
DDC: Every decision I made was for the benefit of the actors. We shot the entire film handheld, so they had freedom to move where they wanted. We used minimal lighting and crew to take away as much of the unnecessary stimuli as possible. And we shot on the location of an actual residential facility, which really helped them feel what it’s like for these kids. Most of the time I just trusted them and gave them some freedom to try things and go in directions
they felt were right at that moment. If it didn’t work, we’d do it again. I was very happy with all of them.
Q: As I write these questions, I’m listening to the Christian Bale “Revolution
Remix” on repeat. I have nothing but empathy for him and am completely on his side in the matter. Did you have any technical mishaps during shooting?
DDC: I tried listening to that remix, too, but I started writing a bunch of f-words into my answers, so I stopped. I’m on his side, too, but I think it’s mainly because I’m afraid of him. If he yelled at me like that, I think I’d vomit through my tear ducts. We only had one big mishap, which happened at the worst possible time of the shoot. We were all set up for the scene between Denim (Brad Henke) and Jayden (Phoenix Henke) in the cool-down room, which is the most intimate and emotional scene of the movie. Brad prepped himself for a bit and then said he was ready to go. We pulled the trigger, and Brad moved through the scene perfectly, began to cry, and then… SCRAPE! Something wasn’t right with the film in the camera and we had to stop the scene, mid-tear.
I think Brad was pissed, but instead of punching me in the nose, he went into the next room and sat by himself while we fixed the problem. He used all that frustration in the performance that ended up on-screen, which I think turned out quite nicely.
Q: The film is somewhat autobiographical in that you used to work at a children’s center. Can you talk about that? What led you to work there?
DDC: I graduated from college with a degree in mass communications,
so, naturally, I ended up getting a job as a child-care worker at a residential facility for at-risk teenagers in San Diego. I worked there for about two years before going to film school. I’m not really sure why. I just kind of stumbled into the job. I was a lot like the Scott character in the movie, as I often felt like I had no idea what I was doing. But it was a really life-changing experience for me. Before that, I was pretty naive about the horrible situations that a lot of kids are forced to live through. I think it helped me to grow up a bit.
Q: What do you think of these youth centers overall? What would you do to improve them?
DDC: It’s impossible for me to speak for all youth centers, but the one I worked at was staffed by very passionate people who truly cared about the well-being of the kids, but also people who didn’t want to be there. It’s a strange environment where young adults become the surrogate parents of teens who are sometimes only four or five years younger than them. The resulting relationships are sometimes very beautiful, sometimes awkward, sometimes unhealthy. Like with any system, the idea is wonderful, but the reality is flawed. But I think the alternative for most of these kids is much more horrible than most of us could imagine. So I don’t know. All I have are questions.
Q: What story from your experiences didn’t make it into the film?
DDC: Sometimes I would work the overnight shift and type on my computer as I was drifting in and out of sleep. Here’s an excerpt: “lime worms, white ones with ribbed backs and waves rolling up and down their curving bodies… mmmmm, that sounds delicious.…
I could eat one of those if I had a clown mouth paintedon my butt!!! But I can’t feel anything but the hill-chin that my face is resting on… Hill-chin!!! I love them so much… sooooooo much!!! Why hasn’t anyone told me about the Hillchins!!! They are everywhere!” So yeah. That’s one experience that didn’t make it into the film.
Q: What’s next for you?
DDC: My dream has always been to shoot a film back home on Maui, but right now I’m trying to finish a feature script that takes place in the same world as “Short Term 12.” I’ve also been swallowing heaping spoonfuls of raw garlic in an attempt to battle this cold I brought back from Sundance and the Clermont-Ferrand Festival. And I’m saving up for a motorcycle (but don’t tell my mom).
Q: Is there anything we forgot to ask?
DDC: As for the character names, my older brother’s name is Denim. He’s a special education teacher on the Big Island of Hawaii. My mom was a free-spirited Maui-girl, and Dad was a hippie, so they named their six kids Denim, Destin, Joy, Brook, Spring, and Merrily. I like using names from my family and friends in my stories because it helps me to feel a little less lonely when I’m writing. I’m also just really bad at picking names.
An interview with the Director
Q: Ever since I first saw “kids + money,” I’ve been dying to know if you expected the answers you got in the interviews. If not, what was your composure like, and did you manage to maintain it?
Lauren Greenfield: The most exciting part of “kids + money” was the completely unexpected and unpredictable responses of many of the kids. There are a few that really stick in my mind as magical and revealing documentary moments. One was with Phoebe, who is interviewed alongside her friend Jennie (both sixteen). Jennie talks about her family’s struggles with money while Phoebe talks about the extravagance in her milieu. After Phoebe describes the excess of prom night, Jennie reveals that she didn’t go to the prom because she couldn’t afford it, but she still invited all of her friends to come and get ready for prom at her house. Though the two girls are very good friends, Phoebe learned on camera that Jennie didn’t go to the prom because of money. Since we shot with two cameras, the viewer sees Phoebe’s face when she learns this information, and it is an incredible moment.
In Matthew’s interview, there is also a memorable and unexpected moment. Matthew is a teenage actor who has earned money since he was little. He begins describing how his mother sacrificed her career for his career and how he supports his mother through his acting. From off-camera during his interview, his mother begins arguing with him about this fact and whether it is true. It is a poignant moment that reveals the delicate dynamic of the situation.
With Ashley and Megan (the two girls from Calabasas, at the end of the film), the unique relationship between the sisters and the contrast between their responses was completely unexpected and wonderful. They answer each other’s sentences, but often with a contradictory viewpoint.
I began kids + money as a very modest interview piece intended for the Internet, and when these magical moments happened, I realized we had a film. When doing documentary work, I try to be ready for anything and prepare the crew to roll through the “off” moments, since those are sometimes the most important moments.
Q: If you asked those kids the same interview questions today, in a post–economic collapse world, do you think you would get the same answers?
LG: That is an interesting question. I don’t think the material lives of the kids in the film have significantly changed as a result of the crisis, but I do think the ethos about talking about these issues has. When we did the interviews, it was still cool to be Paris Hilton, and some of the kids from the film joked about mimicking her. Now there is more self-consciousness about having money, and an awareness that it is not acceptable to be extravagant as many people are hurting economically. We moved from a boom time, when the rule was “show off and be seen,” to a new world where it was reported that one banker’s wife asked for a Hermes purchase to be hidden in a plain bag rather than a branded one.
Q: To various degrees, even the kids seem to be aware of how stressful and unhealthy this obsessive treadmill of material one-upmanship is, but none of them seem willing or able to abandon it.
LG: I think many of the kids feel caught in the treadmill of peer pressure, popularity, and fitting in. What I have learned in interviewing kids over the past fifteen years—in my photography books, Fast Forward, Girl Culture, and THIN, the pictures are also accompanied by interviews—is that young people are incredibly aware of their circumstances and the pressures they face. They are often very critical of these pressures; yet that consciousness doesn’t provide immunity. That has always been a very interesting and poignant phenomenon for me. They will condemn the popularity contest and its criteria, but they are still just as vulnerable to its pressures and consequences.
I think the same could be said of many of the parents in the film. They don’t like the pressures, but they also want their children to fit in. I think this sense of the status quo not being right is the reason many of these kids and parents participated in the film.
Q: Money equals status, and status—especially for teenagers—is everything.
Was it ever different? Or is this group of kids just more openly crass, in a part of the country where being crass is accepted as being “real?”
LG: Money is a big part of status in this country. The American dream is about social mobility and the possibility of going from rags to riches. That said, Los Angeles represents the extreme. Los Angeles has always been a place of reinvention. Unlike more traditional regions where family history, education, or occupation also confer status, the social class system in Los Angeles has always seemed to me to be entirely based on money and access. Kids certainly reflect these societal values (also reinforced on television) in a way that is more up-front and honest than how adults tend to express themselves.
Q: Your last movie, the excellent THIN, chronicled body issues in adolescents.
Besides body issues and status issues, what other issues do you think are most harmful to kids these days? Is there a trilogy in the works?
LG: I am working on a new photography book that is actually part of a trilogy, following Fast Forward and Girl Culture. But kids eventually grow up (even me), and now my lens is focused on adults.
The Onset of Celebrity
Celebrity is a kind of affliction, a malaise—in essence, a condition.
It is part of a psychosis derived from the overabundance of positive value assignments made by a crowd choosing a particular visage to carry these assignments.
The wearer of this visage experiences this assignment as something against his will. And thus, understanding that he will never be able to meet all the people who have assigned his visage this positive value within his lifetime, as there are too many to meet in the limited time frame of his lifespan, the wearer of the visage experiences this fact as a wound. This deep wound leads to the psychosis called the onset of celebrity.
The inability of the man to manage all of these positive value assignments within his lifetime is a crisis of identity in that he is no longer in charge of his face; the crowd has taken it from him.
Upon the onset of celebrity, the man experiences a fundamental rupture within his psyche that transforms him into the famed-ego.
From the moment of the onset, the path of the famed-ego leads inexorably to dehumanization. The famed-ego is in a continual state of mismanagement of its relationships with the crowd, as it is powerless to control the gradations of esteem accrued upon the visage of the person ensconced within it. This abject powerlessness produces a failure in causality between choice and consequence, reducing the famed-ego to a state of total arbitrariness.
The visage is the chief signifier of singular, personal identity; it is the meeting-point between the subjective reality of the ego and the objective reality outside of the ego. Since the famed-ego is in a continual state of mismanagement of this gateway, the social reality that has inundated it with positive value assignments has effectively stolen his face.
In this vacuum of meaning, the famed-ego is disconnected from the self’s personhood. The inability to establish meaning for itself places the famed-ego in an interminable bind of nihilism of action, a purgatory where no action or reaction produces stability or stepping-stone to personal fulfillment. This is existential imprisonment, which is to say, a total loss of free will. The self cannot feel its own humanity, know or show love; the crowd has stolen the face, and, with that, the self collapses into the void of the onset of celebrity.
There is no break from this condition, just as a person in a wheelchair may not break from his affliction and walk on two feet for a moment. Because the onset of celebrity is an attenuation of the value of the visage dictated by a social imperative, it places the famed-ego in a space over which it has no control, under a condition of paralysis. The famed-ego inhabits a world in which the social reality blockades its path-choices. These blockades have a logic known only to the collective responsible for positioning them, but the famed-ego has no epistemological access to this logic. Thus, the famed-ego experiences its reality as caprice.
Shackled in the catacomb of a universe of caprice, the famed-ego is barred from participation in the agreement of the crowd; so it continues its life in isolation from the crowd, in its own separate universe. As the agreed-upon social reality of the crowd rubs against the [isolation-universe] of the famed-ego, a rupture from historical complicity occurs. In its isolation, the famed-ego is banned from the shared historicity the crowd enjoys.
Celebrity is indeed a psychosis. But as one can glean from this account, it is no simple hallucination, nor is it a mental condition. It is not treatable by medication or therapy. It is an ontic psychosis, a psychosis not of the mind but of existence, the existence of the merciless electrical current that bonds the crowd with the famed-ego.
The affliction of the onset of celebrity is a result of one of the logics of the ontic plenum established by the crowd via their positive value assignment to the visage. Thus, the famed-ego cannot even locate a point of origin for its psychosis within the development of its own ideation. That point of origin is located from without the famed-ego’s universe, at some arbitrary coordinate within the ontic plenum of the crowd logic.
If celebrity is a malaise, it is a malaise acquiring its élan from social forces willingly conspiring with each other in a type of concealed Totentanz. This interaction congeals to the phenomenal realm, to the universe of things.
Celebrity is not just psychosis, a distortion of cognition isolated to synaptic verities of particular mentation. It is ontic psychosis, a condition in which the psychopath is a unity of social forces that bond the crowd with the famed-ego and thrust the condition of celebrity into the milieu of an ontic plenum established via social contract. Thus, the ontology of celebrity relies heavily on the understanding that existence is an agreed-upon reality.
The famed-ego is entrenched in a hysterical purgatory.
This hysterical purgatory is the ontic node of the famed-ego’s psychosis. It is continually repositioned by the unknowable crowd logic that sets its condition in the first place, like a pebble rolled over and over by the undulating movements of a gigantic centipede.
As the centipede rolls this pebble over, the famed-ego, locked in its purgatory, experiences life as a state of tragedy.
Tragedy is process. Process has procedure. Therefore, the onset of celebrity has a procedure.
“My Friends Told Me About You” is the photographic documentation of the nature of the procedure of the onset of celebrity. It is the synaptic interface through which data transmissions leaked from the onset of celebrity bottleneck into the filmic-narrative apparatus. The real estate the movie occupies within the filmic-narrative apparatus is a display case of the most excessive plot points from the onset of celebrity, the points intense enough to push through the bottleneck and into the display case.
The film recasts the tragic procedure of the onset of celebrity as surrealistic-tragic-melodrama. It distills the highest degree of truthful moments within the conceptual framework of the onset of celebrity and weaves them into an arabesque depicting a collapsible reality across a comprehensive experiential spectrum. It photographs an empirical tableau of excess from the vantage point of a Cartesian ego under the duress of fame. It amplifies the conceptual nodes of the onset of celebrity as a crusade rife with the agonies of the pursuit and acquisition of fame.
“My Friends Told Me About You” deploys the dramatization of this pursuit as a primordial conflict between Man and Woman. It assigns the famed-ego the phallus and instantiates it as a genderized polarity called Man. To depict the rubbing-against of the famed-ego-as-Man with the “city limits” in which the crowd has ostracized him, it places Man in opposition to Woman. In its isolation, the famed-ego cannot see the crowd that has placed it into its purgatory. However, in order to live the struggle of its purgatorial realm, as Man, it contracts the horizon of the crowd forces that constrict it into a gendered locus that opposes it.
This opposition is Woman. The opposition between the famed-ego-as-Man and Woman is characterized in “My Friends Told Me About You” as misogyny. In its tragic fall from grace, once it has acquired a genderized articulation of identity, the famed-ego experiences its purgatorial isolation
as a total loss of love. The absence of love is hate, and thus the opposition this absence spawns takes on the character of disrespect for Woman, or misogyny.
Misogyny in “My Friends Told Me About You” is an effusion of imagination that results from the catatonic rupture occurring in the psyche of the famed-ego from the onset of celebrity. It is a component of the epic complex of suspicion and paranoia that constitutes the empirical tableau exhibited across the photographic slideshow of the film’s display case. The failure to establish a reliable temporal axis of linearity and the excursiveness of the event horizon of the film’s narrative are necessarily symptomatic structures emanating from this epic complex, of which misogyny is but one component.
The process of narrating the procedure of the onset of celebrity involves the operations of the handed-down filmic-narrative apparatus colluding with the conceptual axes of three resonances—
nonlinearity, surrealism, and misogyny—which operate on a metatextual level.
This totality is the instruction of a tragedy.
The onset of celebrity is a tragic fall from grace and dehumanization of the famed-ego by the crowd agreement to assign its visage positive value. It is an atemporal process resulting from the concurrence of psychic-ontic effusions from the social reality. Thus, the onset of celebrity cannot be a story per se, but its illustration requires narration—a specific type of narration. As the onset of celebrity acquires articulation through narrative, its conceptual framework is infused with particularity. As the narration unfolds, we see this particularity, of necessity, as devastation.
An Interview with the Directors
Q: Carlos, for someone who, as I read, only recently started acting lessons, your performance is damn incredible. Seriously. Who was your teacher, and what did these acting classes teach you?
Carlos Dengler: I was fortunate enough to take lessons from two excellent believers in the sanctity of the craft of acting: Valerie Kingston and Angel David. They taught me that acting is really a personal process whereby the actor achieves greater intimacy with the self by way of technique.
Q: Daniel, as your website says, your work emphasizes the surreal. What does that mean to you, and what draws you to the surreal?
Daniel Ryan: A writer from Chicago wrote that description regarding
my work, and to me it translates to mean the way in which I capture images and thoughts is oftentimes abstract from the thought process of others, but it makes perfect sense to me. It is hard for me personally to say my work is surreal or abstract, because it is just the way I view things. I never sit down and say, “This project is going to be surreal,” or “This one is going to be commercial.” If someone interprets the way I view something as surreal, then that is his or her opinion. Not all of my work is described as such, but I do find it interesting that I can film something as simple as saltwater and someone can remark that it is so abstract.
Q: How did you guys collaborate on the film in terms of process? Did you hash it out together?
DR: The collaboration process between Carlos and I spanned the duration of the creative development and allowed us both to voice our opinions and suggestions about what each brought to the project individually. Thankfully, we have worked together in the past and have cemented a comfortable workflow that allows each of us to add to the other’s thought process and creativity. This starts in the outlining stage (before we begin writing the script) and carries over all the way to the scoring stage.
Q: Carlos, does your writing process differ from your songwriting process?
CD: My writing process differs immensely from my songwriting process. My songwriting process in my band involves the absorption of my creativity into a function of the greater process of the collective’s songwriting process. My own writing process, whether it be screenwriting or scoring, is the cerebral investigation of my own creative energy connected to my intuition.
Q: Why did you make this film? What inspired the narrative? Did the music come first, or was it composed after?
CD: The reasons behind the making of this film are varied and complex. They encompass a personal desire on my part to excavate long-withheld artistic impulses and a bonding between myself and Daniel on the nature of film.
DR: We had planned on making a short film in between cities while Carlos was on tour with his rock quartet. Needless to say, our ambitious thoughts outweighed this simplistic idea and snowballed into a much more elaborate concept. The inspiration was drawn from personal experiences as well as characters, scores, and tones of films we both liked and discussed at great length.
The music was composed to the picture and went through several variations. At first, we were planning on using a piece called “Adagio for Strings and Organ in G Minor.” However, we decided to go with an original score, later on in the editing process. We both recommended films or pieces of music to one another; sometimes they started a creative dialogue, and other times they just fell by the wayside. There were definite influences here and there, whether they were referencing a specific scene or just day-to-day things that found their way into the work. We would discuss in great detail, down to me wanting one specific note changed, and which worked and which didn’t. In the end everything seemed to just fall into place.
Q: Would either of you like to comment on the plastic-looking twins in black vinyl? Their commentary, at least to me, seemed to intentionally break the fourth wall, which I thought was really interesting.
CD: The incursion of the twins onto the milieu of the filmic diegesis is the moment when the narrative fabric of the film unweaves itself. It is more than just breaking the fourth wall: they have an empathic function with the audience that delineates for the viewer the film as process and discovery. They serve to activate the viewer out of his or her socially prescribed passivity.
DR: Carlos calls these girls the “television twins,” whereas I referred to them as “Ret” and “Leks” in the script’s early stages, in reference to the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” (combine to spell “Skelter” spelled backward). The concept of these girls and their dialogue acting as a commentary was a very early idea, maybe even one from our first meeting. I think Carlos had this particular vision first, and I added the first draft of dialogue. We felt it would be interesting to turn the narrative over for an intermission of sorts before the story begins to spiral out of control. The girls themselves are perfectly symmetrical, as you can see if you look closely. This was a difficult feat; our visual effects supervisor delivered it on one of our final days of editing, and I am quite pleased with it. People often think they are plastic, or fake, but I filmed the girls sitting still; then we used CGI to complete the shot in post, thus achieving the artificial look you see in the film.
Q: The hair-dragging scene was painfully authentic. How did you shoot that without pulling all of Risa Sarachan’s hair out? Then she gets thrown about a bit. Was she okay with that?
CD: Risa Sarachan’s professionalism is unassailable. Her belief in and devotion to this project was an awesome commitment made all the more tender by the absence of any solicitation on our parts. She took our energy and ran with it, hair-pulling and all.
DR: I’m glad you felt the authenticity. That was something we worked very hard for. This was a tricky shot for me as well, because of the actor’s safety, time constraints, and previous noise complaints at the motel. It was a stressful time, because we only had one take and it was very late at night. However, once it was just the actors and me, we choreographed the most effective way to simulate the violent action. Risa’s prior theater experience was a great help with the violent scenes in general, and she was always a great sport and easy to work with. I can’t think of one time when she was in any serious danger or even breathed a complaint. Carlos, on the other hand, never let me forget one outtake in which he fell over a motel chair and cut his leg open. That was his proudest moment for weeks, and I’d love to have a bloopers reel someday to share Mr. Dengler’s finest artistic achievement with the masses.
Q: I was really impressed with the way the editing came together at the end of the film—how certain actions and events were revealed ahead of time, without actually giving anything away—and I was wondering if you planned everything out ahead of time, or if there were improvisations?
DR: We originally had a much more linear approach but improvised
much along the way, primarily in the postproduction phase. There were hours upon hours of footage and even complete scenes that were cut out for one reason or another. Certain scenes just didn’t feel right, and it was very tricky to get the piece to where it is now. Many late-night conversations and input from our co-producer Todd Eckert helped craft the film as it is today. There are probably several other ways the film could have turned out that we would have enjoyed for other reasons, but I feel that this is what we were trying to say tonally all along.
Q: Daniel, it was obviously the right move, but why did you drop out of film school, and did you have any trepidation about leaving?
DR: Besides an enormous amount of debt, the only thing I took away from film school was the chance to see Seymour Cassel’s rad mustache in Cassavetes’s Minnie and Moskowitz. Nevertheless, the main reason I withdrew from film school prematurely was rather simple: I just wanted to start making films rather than go through the tedious process of “learning” the right and wrong ways to do so. Rather than sit through introductory courses, I just bought my own camera and never looked back.
Q: Daniel, on your MySpace page is a Werner Herzog quote: “You should
not count the difficulties. You should not count the money. You should not count the extras. What counts is what you see from the screen… nothing else.” Have you met Herzog, and have you, in your directing, ever failed to follow his directives? Are you ever forced to let your creative decisions be influenced by financial costs?
DR: That specific quote was something I heard Herzog say in his “Making of Nosferatu the Vampyre” featurette. I remember distinctly when he said those words; I sprang up, got a pen, and immediately scribbled down what I had heard. I still have that note above my desk at my office, and I view it every day. It was the most inspiring comment on filmmaking I have heard to date. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet Herzog, but I still consider his work ethic unparalleled in the film community. The lengths he goes to for his art are more inspiring than anything I learned at film school.
Sometimes my thoughts are a bit too ambitious for budgets that I am provided, but in the end, I always make the most of the tools I am given. I never base my decisions on financing, but sometimes I have to come up with alternate ways of achieving specific goals. That challenge is what I feel separates those who want to be filmmakers from those who are filmmakers.
An Interview with the Director
Q: Do you like a good burger these days? Where do you get the best? I like a Japanese Wagyu Kobe burger with blue cheese on top.
Dominic Bisignano: Japanese Wagyu Kobe burger with blue cheese? That sounds very complicated and delicious. To be honest, I don’t eat much meat these days. Occasionally I will eat some fish or some chipmunk meat, but generally I am a veggie-patty man.
Q: Let’s say you and I go to get a burger, and you drop your fork on the floor. A busy waiter comes by to replace it, but in doing so, he sets the clean fork on an exposed countertop. The countertop may have been smeared recently with god-knows-what (likely a cloth containing the ripening camphobacter-like organisms of countless burgers and chicken dinners before yours). Do you feel the need to wipe the fork thoroughly before eating with it? And does that need cause you to feel any shame or fear of being perceived by others in the restaurant as one of those paranoid, anal OCD freaks, rather than a person displaying common sense?
DB: Can I answer this with a completely unrelated story, which may be more illuminating than any answer I might give? Great! A couple of months ago, my wife and I were walking down Fairfax Avenue, looking for a lamp, and we sort of got distracted. It was getting dark and all of the lamp stores were closed, and then we were approached by this guy.
“Excuuuuse me! Hello! Hello!” he said, walking up to us.
I’m from Iowa and never learned to ignore people on the street, so I stopped walking and said hello.
“Excuuuuse me! Hello! I am a neighbor. My name is Rudy,” he said. He pulled out a sheet of paper and pointed to it as though it showed his official neighbor credentials. I nodded in acceptance of his phony paperwork and he continued.
“I have full-blown AIDS,” he said. Then he rolled up his sleeve to show me how skinny his arm was. It was about the diameter of a hot-dog bun. He rolled down his sleeve and pointed again at his paper. “I need a prescription, and my family is out of town, and I have no money. All I need is twelve dollars for some glycerin suppositories. Don’t worry, you’re not gonna catch AIDS from me…. ”
“I’m not worried about catching AIDS from you,” I said, “but I don’t have any cash.”
And I really didn’t have any cash. All I had was a bank card.
“Okay… thanks,” he said, and walked away.
The crazy thing is that as he said thanks, some spit flew out of his mouth into mine. Seriously. I didn’t worry that he might have given me AIDS, but I did wonder how I might have reacted to that twenty-two years ago.
Q: What do you think is the best animated film ever made?
DB: That is tough, but I can say, without a doubt, that anything Sally Cruikshank directed is amazing.
Q: How do you work? Standing? At the same time every day? Just when you feel like it?
DB: I work in little bits, and I try to do it every day, if possible. Sometimes a few days go by and I haven’t drawn or done any recordings or anything, and I become irritable. Animating is a very meditative, monklike practice, and it amazes me that Americans do it at all. I guess we do yoga and eat sushi, too, but we take along our double tall lattes and Bluetooth headgear, so it doesn’t really count.
Q: In a gas-station bathroom, do you use your bare hands to open the door after washing, or do you cover your hand with a paper towel to avoid recontaminating your hand with—okay, let’s just say it—fecal matter from the hands of other, less sanitary patrons before you?
DB: I know Wholphin is classy; regrettably, I will have to answer this in a way that might not be so. I am neither particular nor conscious of the general cleanliness, or lack thereof, in most public restrooms. I wash my hands when I leave, and I hope other folks do, too. However, I don’t like to pee on other people’s pee. If I go to the toilet and it has pee in it, I flush first. This is less a concern with germs and more of a territorial thing. One time a friend of mine had a little stone come out when he was peeing in a public bathroom, and he collected it from the urinal before flushing so that he could show his doctor. Imagine having to wade through previous people’s urine to get to your stone? Also, at the end of each session, I say, “You’re welcome” to the toilet when I flush (with my foot).
Q: You work with different types of animation, no? How are the processes different? Do you have to be in a different mindset to work on paper, rather than with 3-D computer animation software?
DB: I like drawing, and I am focusing more on hand-drawn animation for my next project. Computer animation takes a lot more steps than I’d like, but sometimes you can get a funny look or a neat effect. I generally approach both methods with the same mindset, which is playful. I like to experiment and try different things; I don’t get discouraged if something is funny-looking, or if it isn’t perfect. I have a very idiosyncratic way of drawing and animating.
Q: Since the film, have you feared contracting any other fatal diseases? Are you more or less concerned with health now than you were when you were young?
DB: I don’t think about contracting illnesses per se, but I do think about death.
Q: What’s your career goal as an animator? How do animators make money, generally?
DB: I like to write, mostly, so eventually I hope to be doing some kind of story development. I like animating, but my approach and technique are not orthodox, which makes it difficult to function in the studio system. My animation and directing skills may be more valuable in my personal work than in work done for another entity.
I have worked recently as a layout artist for 3-D animation. This is the kind of thing an animator can do, but it really requires more of a technical understanding of how to operate computer software than abilities as an artist.
Q: Do you eat while working? Do you clean your keyboard afterward? Because you should.
DB: I used to fix computers for a living, and there was this one secretary who would always get muffin crumbs between the keys. She also said that her computer made a funny sound, but after about seven visits to her desk, I discovered there was no noise and that she just liked having company.
Q: Any other tips on how to avoid catching a deadly disease, or even a nondeadly, noncontagious disease?
DB: Well, I hate to say it, but I think being around other humans is probably antithetical to being contagion-free. If you want to avoid contagious diseases, don’t be around other people. Avoid interacting with things they have touched or been around. Do not keep pets. If you get strange emails from Uganda offering large sums of money or an exchange of cash for bank account information, by all means, use a condom.
An interview with the Director
Q: Is this your first film adaptation? If so, what made you choose Patrick Marber’s short story? Was there one moment in the story that inspired you?
Sam Taylor-Wood: Yes, first adaptation, first short film, first all around. I read about twenty to thirty short stories and finally found one that I vaguely liked, so I showed it to an actor friend of mine, who said he wasn’t sure about it and recommended Patrick Marber instead. So I cold-called Patrick, and he offered me this story. The bit I liked best was when it said “and they sat and listened to the record.” I could see the awkward tension, that nervous feeling of Are we going to have sex, or are we just going to sit and listen to the record? I felt like there were all these moments of just being able to breathe in the film.
Q: As amazing as the Buzzcocks song is, how do you feel about it now? We imagine you must’ve listened to it thousands of times, between shooting and editing.
STW: You know, I never got tired of listening to that song. I run a lot, and if it comes on my iPod shuffle now, it gives me this fantastic feeling of nostalgia.
Q: If there is one, what song moved you the way these characters were moved by “Love You More”?
STW: “I’m Not Down,” by the Clash. That was the one I used to sit and listen to with my best friend, and we would write out all the lyrics so we could sing along. Also, Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which has this line, “It’s a god-awful small affair to the girl with the mousy hair.” I have mousy hair, so I felt like it was my song.
Q: Did your experience of directing yourself in your “Escape Artist” and “Suspended” photo series help inform your direction of Harry Treadaway and Andrea Riseborough in “Love You More”? Both involve these vulnerable and yet potentially very empowering positions.
STW: Yeah, I was so conscious of myself in that series, and I think my sense of control over my own body lent itself to this project. When I was casting the girl, I needed to find someone who was a great actress and who could also do a full 69 in front of a lot of people. Someone who wasn’t intimidated and could take control of the situation. The first girl we were thinking about casting pulled out because she couldn’t handle sex, so I asked Andrea [Riseborough] if she would be okay with it, and she said, “Oh, absolutely. No problem whatsoever.”
During filming I was very conscious about not making her a victim. In the room, it was just me looking at the monitor, Seamus [McGarvey, director of photography] looking through the camera, and our boom operator looking directly at them, and this created an inhibiting direct gaze, so we rigged up a mirror and had him watch through that instead. I really wanted the actors to feel comfortable and just let go.
Q: You did a phenomenal series of photo portraits called “Crying Men.” What inspired you to do this?
STW: The idea came from various places, but you know how everyone
always says “Smile” when they’re going to take a picture, I wanted to hold up my camera and say “Cry.” I didn’t tell the actors that that’s what I was going to do, because I was afraid that they wouldn’t show up, and so of course as soon as they got there, pretty much all of them said no, but we talked about it and built up trust to the point where they felt comfortable.
These actors, they project our lives, but because they were out of character, because they were being themselves, some of them had real trouble. Of the twenty-eight men I shot, there were definitely some who just could not cry. And me, I’m rubbish at it. I felt like I was going around the world asking people to cry my tears.
Q: Next up for you is the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. Can you tell us a little bit about the project and what made you choose it after “Love You More”?
STW: The story is about the relationships John had with his mother and aunt who brought him up. It’s a pre-Beatles story. After “Love You More,” I got sent loads of scripts, and I read so many of them, and I began to think that maybe I just didn’t know how to read a script, because they were all total rubbish. Then a friend of mine, Joe Wright, who directed Atonement, gave me this script, so I read it, and it really was the best thing I’d read in such a long time. There’s this idea that you know you’re supposed to work on something if you feel like you know a secret about it, and this script just sort of melted me on many levels. I knew it was something I should do.
An interview with Patrick Marber
Q: You adapted “Love You More” from your short story, “Peter Shelley.” Can you tell us the origin of the story? Did you originally write it for Nick Hornby’s anthology of short stories Speaking With the Angel or was it already written by that time?
Patrick Marber: I wrote a version of the story around 1990. At the time, I was writing short stories and nothing else. And not many short stories at that. No one read the original story except myself and a friend called Marco. Many years later, Nick asked me to contribute to Speaking With the Angel and I took the story from its very dusty drawer and rewrote it a bit. And then, in 2007, I slipped it to Sam. I do like to recycle.
Q: Is the story autobiographical? Would you describe yourself as a Peter or a Georgia?
PM: I was a sort of Peter. And there was a sort of Georgia. We weren’t at school together. But we did meet at a Buzzcocks concert. It was at Hammersmith Odeon, in London, in either 1978 or 1979.
Q: Why did you choose the Buzzcocks’s “Love You More”? Were there other bands that you considered first?
PM: No other bands were considered. Buzzcocks were my favorite band when I was fourteen or fifteen. I was obsessed with them. I got into Joy Division when I was sixteen. But that’s another story. Why this song? It’s one of a number of impeccable singles they released in the summer of ’78. Slightly less known, perhaps, than some others—and well, I just like it.
Q: The homely toadfish sings to attract a mate and hums through fertilization.
Singing for sex can also be found in birds, male fin whales, and jumping spiders. What do you think it is about music that turns everyone on, from toadfish to humans?
PM: Proust had his madeleine. I have my Buzzcocks. Nothing else evokes my nostalgia like “Another Music in a Different Kitchen.” Music is primitive; music is magic. It’s hard to imagine a human society without it. Why this is so, I do not know.
Q: What are you working on now?
PM: A screenplay based on Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday
An Essay by the Director
When I was researching my film “The Juche Idea” (2008), I read North Korean film texts and watched their feature films and propaganda docs about the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il or his father, Eternal President Kim Il Sung, as well as “tourist films” about life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In “Great Man and Cinema,” I wanted to make my version of their propaganda, which has remained essentially unchanged since the 1970s. At that time, Kim Jong Il consolidated his power by promoting
his father’s cult of personality as Juche [CHOO-chay] ideology, which means something like self-reliance. It is a mix of Stalinism and Confucianism mixed with Kim Thought.
The title “Great Man and Cinema” comes from a small North Korean booklet subtitled “Anecdotes.” It is filled with stories of the Dear Leader writing his tome On the Art of the Cinema as well as visiting sick actors, advising directors, and even helicoptering into a rural film shoot to save the wayward production. If David O. Selznick had ruled a totalitarian southern California, these are the legends that would have become state propaganda. A micromanaging studio mogul, Kim Jong Il, dabbles in scripts and explains how to make films fast and cheap and with the correct ideology. For example, the implacable enemy—capitalist wreckers and revisionist toadies—must be portrayed as serious and well-developed characters, lest the people think they are easily defeated or spotted among the faithful.
For this short film, I re-edited footage about Kim Jong Il’s place in the pantheon of human thinkers as well as his role in the North Korean studio system, then spilled that into a music video I made out of North Korean films with the song “Fucking U.S.A.”—sung by Neung Phak, a Bay Area band and splinter project of the amazing sound collective Negativland. If the North Korean film studio knew what was good for them, they’d invite me to Pyongyang and let me hack at their film archives or make a Juche feature in country. But since I’ve been infected with a lifetime of capitalist irony, that is not too likely. This short is my Juche calling-card film. I’ll be waiting by the phone.
An Interview with the Director
Q: Is Kim Jong Il a symbol of insatiability and hunger for power or is he more an example of our failure to create a system that will keep such human appetites in check? In other words, why is Kim Jong Il still in power?
Jim Finn: He’s in power because he’s a smart paranoiac who’s consolidated
his own power in a family dictatorship. He’s the Ronald Reagan of North Korea—a charming film buff surrounded by people who understand control. Though, if you count up all the dead in Latin America and in the covert wars the U.S. supported along with the economic damage to the poor in the ’80s, Reagan might have been a bit bloodier.
Q: What is utopia to you? Is it more fair, or more free? What form of government would you most wish to live under?
JF: Liberation theologian Franz Hinkelammert says, basically, that governments associate utopian thought with “chaos and death,” and so they use that as an excuse essentially to “crucify the crucifiers.”
In other words, since utopia is something that can never be achieved, and since the idea gets manipulated in countries like North Korea or movements like Islamic jihad, the very idea is corrupt and dangerous and needs to be stamped out. Or rendered friendly to autocratic pseudodemocracies. Or isolated in universities.
My ideal government is a cross between Next Generation Starfleet and Swedish socialism along with the Sandinista murals and literacy campaigns.
Q: Is our failure to achieve a utopian society a failure of imagination or a failure of intention? Likewise, is the repeated historical failure to implement doctrinal Marxism a failure of intelligence or will? Are we, as Stalin and Kim and Mao believed, too selfish and too weak to see it through, or are we not clever enough to inspire such drastic change?
JF: The cold war never ended properly. One side just dissolved, and the other side figured that meant it had inherited the planet. Maybe the biggest problem with Marxism has been trying to impose a system nondemocratically. It takes a lot longer to make fundamental change with democracy, and it’s ugly and not exciting, but no autocratic government is willing to accept that the faults are its own. Failures are blamed on “wreckers,” and we know where that ends up.
Q: Who is the greatest political filmmaker ever to have lived?
JF: My favorite is probably Gillo Pontecorvo. Battle of Algiers (1966), Burn! (1969), and Operación Ogro (1979) are all brilliant films. Though it’s interesting that even revolutionary films can be co-opted. The Pentagon screened Battle of Algiers before the Iraq War. It famously showed the French breaking the Algerian resistance through torture by systematically getting suspects to name names and uncover the cell structure of the guerrillas. Darius Rejali wrote in his book Torture and Democracy that the policy was a failure—torture got a bunch of mixed information and actually worsened the intelligence situation. Though it is still a great if flawed film, this speaks to why film needs to develop its ideas and forms and not just keep making the same works over and over.
Q: Are your films propaganda films? How or how not?
JF: My films play with the idea of propaganda and utopian thought. Often the subjects are discredited even if what they are saying makes sense. In that way I can criticize our capitalist system while acknowledging the autocratic failures of the left. But, really, any source that criticizes capitalism is always discredited. Even now, in the midst of this meltdown, who is really criticizing the economic system? The blame is on Madoff or Bush or ACORN in the ’70s. Criticizing capitalism is like criticizing the air we breathe.
Q: What is your manifesto?
JF: “If the artist is ideologically mature and is fired with creative enthusiasm, he can tackle any task, no matter how difficult, withdaring and confidence, and complete a work, no matter how large, in a short period of time.”
Q: Favorite political quote?
JF: “Sobre todo sean capaces de sentir hasta el fondo de su alma cualquier injusticia cometida contra cualquier ser humano en cualquier parte de la tierra.” (Above all, you have to feel to the bottom of your soul every injustice committed against any person in any part of the world.)
Q: If you could teach your fellow Americans one thing about political theory, what would it be?
JF: We need to be reminded that power does not guarantee immunity. There are people on vacation in Western states right now, in universities in California, and relaxing in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area who need to be on trial. We need war crimes trials if we are going to be a decent, law-abiding country. Rod Blagojevich was just forced out for yelling something about “fucking gold” on his cell phone, but Dick Cheney has yet to be rendered to Guantánamo.
Q: What have you learned about politics and propaganda?
JF: Artists have a responsibility to deal with politics on some level. If not directly in the work, then to use their voices outside of it. Propaganda and advertising are artists working for the state, bending their talents to allow power and control to function more efficiently. Any true democratic system needs to provide for its people. That means health care, clean water, and clear brains.
Q: If you could revive one political thinker to comment on this current crisis, who would it be and why?
JF: Jimmy Carter. The dude was robbed of his second term. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that Oliver North and Richard Secord ran the aborted Iranian hostage rescue mission. Time to get back on track after a twenty-eight-year detour. Peace accords in the Middle East, the metric system, solar panels, and the deimperialization of our foreign policy. That’s for starters.
When directors Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch first met, they planned to write a fictional script based on a true story about a refugee girl who had disappeared in Sweden while living in hiding from the authorities. The project ended up as a radio documentary instead.
In 1999, while working on the project, they conducted an interview with a twelve-year-old boy named Giancarlo, who was then hiding as a refugee in Sweden. The interview never made it into the radio piece, but the directors just couldn’t leave it behind. Giancarlo’s voice strongly portrayed the situations of every refugee kid living in Sweden. David had the idea to make the interview into an audio-based animated documentary, which was the beginning of a long cooperation that would change the way the two worked forever.
David: In animation, we can point out small human things and movements—a sneeze, a cough, a breath—and that, we believe, makes animation feel even more human.
Another reason the directors used this format is that it makes it easier for them to get closer to people in interview situations, especially kids. When doing animated documentaries, these directors never film the interview; they only record the sound.
D: In animation, you can do anything, but we work against that. Even if we had more money, we would not go the traditional 3-D way, with a lot of camera movements and techniques, because that often lacks warmth, personality, and graphical strength. We animate
the actual interview situation, and we just make some subtle illustrative parts to enhance the emotional level of the story, but we add hardly any sound effects or music.
Also important to the directors—even before they begin animating—
is the design. On this they work with Mats Johansson, a prominent illustrator and character designer in Sweden, who also founded the design company Acne.
Hanna Heilborn: We three are a perfect combination. We put extremely hard work into every step. Everything is thought about from many angles. The hardest part, aside from dealing with kids in vulnerable situations, is probably translating Mats Johansson’s sketches into animation. Here we strive to get better and better every time at communicating our visions to the animators. We are not yet totally satisfied. Luckily, the next piece is always more interesting than the one we just did.
For more on the directors, visit their website: www.story.se
An interview with the Director
Q: Where did the idea for this series come from?
Dave Eggers: I just had this thought, I can’t remember when or why, that it would be interesting to see the same room with each menu, and then have a different actor enter that room—as if it were their own—and then trash it. That was the idea at first—a pretty simple one. I figured the actors could approach it however they saw fit.
Q: How did you choose the three actors?
DE: James Franco, we knew, had a sophisticated sense of experimental film and conceptual art, so he was the first guy we asked. Then Maria Bamford, whom I’d seen do some very weird and explosive stuff on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, she was perfect, because I wanted someone who could project a just-barely-bottled nervous energy. And as for Creed Bratton, I had mentioned to Larry Gelpar at CAA that we were looking for older actors with a lot of range—someone who the average viewer would recognize but who hadn’t done something like this—and he recommended Creed, which was such a great idea. I love him on The Office. And on that show he gives off this weird feeling of hidden menace, and I knew that he would do something intense, and that people who know him from the show would be freaked out by this.
Q: What direction did you give the actors?
DE: All I told them was that their characters are at a moment of personal cataclysm when they enter the room. And they should feel free to take out their confusion and rage on the stuff in the room. Beyond that, I left it up to them. We gave them a prop list beforehand, including both the stuff visible to the camera (clocks, mirror, bookshelf, vases) and a bunch of stuff I hid in the closet and the bathroom (baseball bat, gasoline can, staple gun, scissors). The only other direction I gave was that the scene should end with them expressing some kind of regret. I thought that might be interesting, that the viewer would assume that the character was mad at someone in particular, and at the end we realize that the character actually blames him- or herself. So, in a way, they’re destroying all the reminders of their own mistakes; they’re wrecking the life they wrecked, if that makes sense.
Q: Did the films turn out the way you expected them to?
DE: I didn’t have any particular expectations, really. More than anything, I wanted to be surprised. The few times I’ve worked on anything with actors before, I’ve always been happiest when they improvise and improve the scenes, the dialogue. The one thing that surprised me is how few things Maria and Creed decided to break. And how few of the hidden objects they decided to use. But they really had focused scenes they were doing, so it was great, seeing how specific they were. We didn’t even know Maria had hidden that scale until she pulled it out during the scene.
Q: Where was this filmed?
DE: We first looked into doing it on a soundstage, but figured that unless the walls were built incredibly well, chances were they wouldn’t withstand whatever havoc the actors wanted to wreak. We needed something sturdier, so we looked into motel rooms, but then realized we would probably do a lot of damage to the rooms, and we couldn’t predict what kind of bill we’d be hit with. So finally we settled on doing it in a real bedroom. I’d been talking to my brother Toph about the project anyway, so we just figured we’d use his room, or a redecorated version of it. He lives in LA near most of the actors, anyway. Of course, none of us really expected it to sustain the damage it did.
Q: How did you get all the objects back to normal after each shoot?
DE:It was funny, because the initial impulse was just to buy three of every object. But then while Toph and I were out at Target prop shopping, Creed called to talk about the shoot, and he said he was unlikely to break much during his scene. So we decided just to buy one of everything, and then replace whatever was broken, which actually saved us a ton of money in the end, thank god.
Q: James broke some stuff though.
DE: Yeah, it was really lucky that James was scheduled last. We filmed Maria on a Friday, Creed on a Saturday, and James on a Sunday. I’d seen James’s own experimental films, where he destroys things in the desert with explosives and guns, so we were pretty sure he would go to town on just about everything in the room. So it was good that he went last, because we wouldn’t have been able to fix the drywall and everything else in time if there were other actors going after him. When he arrived, and we told him the other two actors had broken just a few things, he was astounded. The breaking was one of the things that had attracted him to the project in the first place. He also asked, “Is there a time limit?” And we said, “No, not really.” I was thinking that beyond ten minutes it might wear thin, but James proved that wrong. The relentless creativity he showed throughout was flat-out astounding.
Q: So did you fix up Toph’s room?
DE: Before James started, we walked around the room and talked about what he could and couldn’t destroy. I figured it was all fair game, except the taxidermied ram head, which I’d given Toph for Christmas a few years ago. But then James destroyed stuff we never thought anyone would destroy. The doors, the walls, the mattress, the suit. I thought he should walk in wearing a suit, so I’d brought my one suit along, just in case. I gave it to him to wear—I get one suit every five years or so—never guessing that he’d cut it to ribbons. We bought so many cheap objects, and they were all dispensible, but we didn’t think about the suit, the mattress, the closet door…. We didn’t think any of that stuff was in danger. And when he broke that pocket door to the bathroom, we all thought, You have got to be kidding. How did he do that? We didn’t even know that was possible. It all had to be replaced. But we hired some drywall guys and painters, and they did it all in two days, and the place looks better than before, actually. James did what we expected and hoped for, which was to completely surprise everyone, continually pushing past any boundary we could have made or imagined.
Q: I noticed that, throughout much of the filming, your hands were covering your face. Can you explain this? Is that a new directing technique to focus on the sound of the scene?
DE: I didn’t know that. I have a tendency to laugh during scenes, so I wanted to make sure no actors saw me laughing if I did. But I ended up just having my hands covering my mouth in a “Holy shit” sort of way the whole time. I had been thinking about the project for so long, but seeing it happen was really intense. I was sitting there in the corner of the room, out of sight, watching the monitor, sort of disbelieving.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that there are prop changes between each of the three scenes. Between Maria’s and Creed’s scenes, we moved, removed, or added ten objects. Then, between Creed’s and James’s scenes, we moved, removed, or added ten more. The first person to account for all twenty changes will win a free Wholphin subscription and a souvenir broken thing from the shoot (we kept most of the stuff). Please submit your answers to emily@wholphindvd.com.
FILMMAKER BIOS
Destin Daniel Cretton
Destin Daniel Cretton was born and raised in Maui, Hawaii. He graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2001, and went on to earn his graduate degree from San Diego State. His work with longtime friend and collaborator Lowell Frank includes the award-winning short films “Longbranch: A Suburban Parable,” “Bartholomew’s Song,” and “Deacon’s Mondays,” as well as the feature-length documentary Drakmar: A Vassal’s Journey. “Short Term 12” is Destin’s thesis project and his first endeavor in writing and directing on his own.
Lauren Greenfield is considered a preeminent chronicler of youth culture and gender as a result of her groundbreaking projects Girl Culture, Fast Forward, and THIN. Her photographs can be seen in many museum collections, including the Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the International Center of Photography. Her first feature-length documentary, THIN, premiered at Sundance in 2006, aired on HBO, and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Direction. Likewise, “kids + money” screened at Sundance in 2008, and has won the Cinema Eye Honor for Nonfiction Filmmaking. Greenfield lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Frank Evers, and her two sons. For more information, visit laurengreenfield.com.
Carlos Dengler is the bassist and keyboardist of the acclaimed NYC-based band Interpol. The band signed with Matador Records in 2002 and moved to Capitol Records in 2006. Interpol is currently working on their fourth record. While on the road in 2008, Carlos conceived of and created “My Friends Told Me About You.” Carlos also composed the original score for “My Friends,” showcasing the work of bass clarinet pioneer Ian Mitchell.
Daniel Ryan
An independent filmmaker and visual artist from Chicago, Daniel Ryan elicits a bold visual trademark composed of stylistic symmetry with an emphasis on the surreal. Ryan collaborated with Interpol for an audio-video installation, which was incorporated into the band’s live set for their most recent European tour. Ryan cowrote, directed, and coedited “My Friends Told Me About You.” He is currently in postproduction editing a short film, entitled “The Diary of Eloise Painter.”
Dominic Bisgnano was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Iowa, he worked for five years as a computer technician. In 2004 he moved to California to earn a master’s degree in experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts. He currently works as an animator and a sound designer/composer for commercials and television.
Sam Taylor-Wood (b. Croydon, England 1967) makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenarios, our shared social and psychological conditions. Taylor-Wood has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997), the Turner Prize (1998), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005). Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Zurich (1997); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2000); Hayward Gallery, London (2002); MCA, Moscow (2004); and MCA, Sydney (2006). “Love You More” is Taylor-Wood’s first narrative short film.
Hanna Heilborn
Hanna Heilborn was born in 1968. She studied film at New York University and scriptwriting at the Dramatic Institute of Stockholm. She is a cofounder of the production company Story AB, and she also works at various art, animation, and design schools. Hanna is currently developing several documentaries, including Territory, a feature-length animated documentary, The Wave, The Two Sudans, Atelier Dinand, and a feature script, Frerunner, about homeless girls in Stockholm.
David Aronowitsch
David Aronowitsch was born in 1964 in Stockholm and has worked with documentary films for almost twenty years. David has done short- and feature-length documentary films financed by the Swedish Film Institute and for Swedish Television (SVT) and YLE. David has also worked as producer of the television series Ikon for SVT, and is a cofounder of the production company Story AB. David is currently working on a feature-length documentary film about the former head of state of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Jim Finn (b. St. Louis, Missouri, 1968) uses humor and historical fiction to examine ideology, capitalism, and revolutionary art practices. His work has screened at festivals such as Rotterdam, Sundance, and Edinburgh, as well as in museums and cinematheques. His latest work is a trilogy of feature-length films looking at Marxist ideology and radical art practices.
In 2008, actor James Franco appeared in David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express and Gus Van Sant’s Milk. That same year, he enrolled in several graduate programs for writing and directing at NYU, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Warren Wilson College. He is studying with Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, Ben Marcus, Jonathan Lethem, Jay Anania, Shelley Jackson, and Tony Hoagland. James’s first book of stories will be published in 2010.
Creed Bratton (b. Los Angeles, California 1943) is a musician and actor who has honed his skills by traveling across the globe in pursuit of excellence. He took up guitar as a boy and has performed with many bands over the years. He also recently released two solo albums. As an actor, he appears frequently as a cast member on the television show The Office, and plays other roles in movies and television. He usually plays hostile, dangerous types with an edge, although his comedic talents are now recognized. For more information on upcoming projects, visit creedbratton.com.
Maria Bamford has two old pugs and they travel the country, fiddling and whittling and accepting apples for payment. Why not listen to her new Comedy Central CD, Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome? It contains fifty minutes of new stand-up as well as twenty tinisodes of the Maria Bamford
Show—a fictionalized account of what happens when Maria has a psychotic breakdown and has to go live with her parents. “The Room Before and After” is her first time “acting” in a “film.”