Posts Tagged interviews
Time Out Cinema
The Time Out juggernaut recently reached Melbourne, and I’ve been writing features, interviews and the occasional review for them. The best part? While you can still ride your dinosaur to your local newsagent and buy it in print, all its content’s online as well! You can’t search by author if you want to find my stuff, unfortunately, but here are some of my personal highlights spanning the first few issues.
I interviewed writer / director Andrew Haigh about his enormously moving drama Weekend and asked him what movie he finds genuinely romantic.
Inspired by Hugo and The Artist, I wrote about other films that wistfully look back at their own ancestors.
I talked to nomadic French filmmaker Vincent Moon about how his famous ‘Take Away Shows’ capture music in a way that regular concert documentaries can’t.
I reviewed the docos Bill Cunningham New York and Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard.
Something non-film: I profiled the inspirational Father Bob Maguire about 38 years of fighting the good fight.
And my favourite – because it did what all my favourite interviews do and exposed me to a world I’d never really considered before – I was taken on a walking tour of Melbourne’s cinema graveyards:
According to Dean Brandum, the multi-storey car park next to the Forum theatre is “hallowed ground”. It was once the enormous Majestic Theatre, retooled and refurbished as The Chelsea in 1960. By the mid-70s, however, The Chelsea had become Melbourne’s home of exploitation cinema. “Lots of pornography,” says Brandum, “and lots of European horror like Giallo films. The story goes that you could always see more rats than customers.”
Check out Time Out Melbourne here.
Fan Loyalty and Artist Betrayal
In a recent issue of triple j magazine, I interviewed Tyler Labine about his subversive horror / comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. He also played ‘Sock’ on the cult TV hit Reaper; a show that was cancelled after two seasons to the dismay of its avid audience. (It’s definitely worth checking out, especially its second season, where it develops more ongoing storylines and greater depth while retaining its knockabout slacker charm.) Anyway, conversation turned to the loyalty of genre fans.
Your Tucker and Dale co-star Alan Tudyk [from Firefly and Dollhouse] has that crazy Joss Whedon love behind him!
We just went to Comic-Con. I’d never been before. It was nuts there. I was like a superstar – and Alan is like the God of Comic-Con. It was insane! Those fans are the best fans you could have. If you get in with them, you’re good for life.
Was it particularly hard seeing Reaper cancelled when you knew this passionate audience was out there? Absolutely loyal to the show?
We were really hitting our stride, critics were pricking up their ears, our ratings were actually really good for the CW – so we were like ‘what the hell was the problem?’ To this day, I still don’t know. We didn’t fit into the idea of what the network wanted and got the axe. And it sucks because when a show’s cancelled, the actors are the ones left to deal with the fans. I ended up on another show right away, and to some fans it looked like I’d jumped ship…
Like you’d betrayed them?
Yeah. These people who’d been my fans were suddenly, like, “you suck! You’re an asshole! I can’t believe you have another job!” The show had been canned for months – they just didn’t know it yet, because we weren’t allowed to announce it. It sucks. And I myself was a fan of the show, regardless of my involvement. I thought the show was supercool. I would’ve watched that show even if I wasn’t in it. So that kind of pissed me off. But also Reaper was like my fifth television series, so I understood how TV is a fickle bitch. Onwards and upwards I guess, you know?
The problem with loyalty is how it can so quickly sour into feeling betrayed. Fans give so much to these stories. They just expect the cast and crew and creators to do the same. Treating a role just like another job won’t cut it: it has to be a passion, a calling, the dream of a lifetime. Everyone on set must be the best of friends, too.
Remember the outpouring of anger when Michael Rosenbaum said he wasn’t going to appear as Lex Luthor on the final episode of Smallville? Or the ire directed towards George R. R. Martin for not writing his next Song of Ice and Fire book fast enough? At least that resulted in Neil Gaiman’s fantastically quotable clarification of the contract between writers and readers: ”George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”
Neither’s Tyler Labine, damn it.
Morgan Spurlock on The American Way
Supersize Me’s Morgan Spurlock is no stranger to brand warfare. (He and Ronald McDonald probably still aren’t speaking.) Spurlock’s new documentary, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, is both about the evils of product placement and entirely funded by product placement. The Guardian just reviewed it, saying “We onlookers seem to be expected to wallow in a kind of knee-jerk indignation that we don’t actually feel” and “For your next trick, Morgan, why not try something less tricksy but a little bit more consequential?”
I interviewed Spurlock about this little while ago for triple j magazine, and found him A) very charming and B) pretty candid about the film’s goals. Here it is.
So this interview is just part of the ‘media impressions’ required by your sponsors, right?
That’s right. You’re complicit in this whole process.
I feel like a DVD extra or something.
You are a walking, talking DVD extra! But it’s not just you. What I love about the film is that it shows you how things are marketed, how that marketing turns into awareness, how that awareness turns into attendance…
In Greatest Movie, we see you getting your Don Draper on and trying to sell the concept to brands. Is this something that comes naturally, or do you hate the business of movie-making?
What I’ve learned is that if you’re going to be in this business, you really need to understand how to manoeuvre in this business. Pitching is one of those things that they don’t teach you in school. You’re thrown into the deep end as a filmmaker when you graduate from college and you’ve got to figure it out. I made it up as I went along.
Your last film, Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden…
Question answered by the way. President Obama, you’re welcome.
…that movie was also a kind of sales pitch, just one for tolerance and understanding. Greatest Story feels different because you’re compromised from the start.
Yeah. That’s part of what makes the film work. You see the corruption take place. After making this, I told people that when you get into business with a brand it’s not a 30% or 40% chance – it’s a 100% chance they’ll somehow infect the content.
“Transparency is the new objectivity”. Do you agree?
I think we live in a time where people have been jerked around and lied to for so long that the new thing is just to not jerk people around and lie to them. To finally say: “You know what? I’m going to do something nuts and tell you the truth.” We’re at the end of that rope, and people are tired of being bullshitted.
Is that really where we’re setting the bar? “I know you’re going to screw me, but at least you’re honest about it”?
Yeah! I think it is! That’s exactly where we are!
The movie shows how everyone has their own line between ‘what’s okay’ and ‘what’s selling out’. Where’s your line?
The line I didn’t want to cross was giving up control of the film. The greatest asset they got out was the movie marketing their products, but the greatest asset I got was the film itself. The minute I gave final cut over to a brand or a company, I compromised my ability to tell the most honest and open story I could.
Did a number of sponsors want final cut?
All of them. Every single contract.
They should at least put more money on the table. “Final cut? Ten million dollars!”
I would happily have given it to them for ten million dollars.
Are you worried the film makes product placement seem sort of fun and harmless?
There was a great thing that happened after the premiere of the movie at Sundance. We got a standing ovation for the brands. It was one of the most insane things you’d ever seen. A woman came up to one of the brand representatives and said “First I want to thank you, all your companies, for supporting this movie. I’m going to buy more of your products because you did – but I’m conflicted about it.” Luckily the irony wasn’t lost on her. And I hope that when people watch the movie, just like her, the irony of the situation isn’t lost.
While a lot of the doco is funny, I found the last ten minutes strangely moving, especially with that OK Go song rising up behind it.
What I love about the film is how it comes full circle. Everything I’m critiquing at the beginning of the movie are the tools I’m using to market the film at the end. So you see the snake eating its tail. The lyrics of that OK Go song are “We solved all our problems with bigger problems”. That’s the American way.
This interview first appeared in triple j magazine #53.
Outtakes: Matt Fraction
Over at Bookslut this month, I forego my usual column for an epic interview with writer Matt Fraction about the return of his comic Casanova. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when someone happily gives you over an hour to chat instead of the twenty minutes common to film and TV interviews. I hope you agree.
As always, there was plenty we talked about that didn’t make the final cut, mostly because I try to keep my Bookslut stuff from becoming too seeped in superheroes. (I fail at this with embarrassing regularity.)
Here’s a little more of our conversation about comics as cinema, accelerated storytelling, his superhero writing on Iron Man and Fear Itself, and his appreciation of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.
One thing I admire about Casanova is its crazy economy of storytelling. And that’s one reason why I can’t imagine Casanova: The Movie – unless it was something like Total Recall was to Philip K. Dick. Casanova feels more comic-specific than, maybe, your superhero stuff. Would you agree?
I hope not. I think that’d mean the superhero stuff fails on some level.
Perhaps it’s just that your Iron Man seems born out of the Robert Downey Jr. take on the character.
That’s an illusion of publication schedule. I had four or five issues in the can when the first film came out. I had no special access; I saw the trailer when everybody else saw the trailer.
So why does Iron Man feel more ‘cinematic’ to me than Casanova?
I think that’s the grammar of superhero comics right now – or, rather, it was when I came in. Over this last year, from issue #500, Iron Man’s started to change. You can see the pages changing, the density change. As Fear Itself came along it kind of had to grow backwards a little bit, but you’ll see change coming out the other side. That’s my own proclivities as much as anything else. That was the grammar – or the accent, maybe – of the language that superhero comics were speaking. Three, four panel pages.
I got a really fascinating note from Joe Quesada on the first issue of Fear Itself: that I write so close to the bone, I carve away so much, we had a 48-page event that read like a 22-page comic. And that was a problem. I’d cut away so much in the interest of keeping things super-accelerated that I’d crossed the threshold and he found it too brisk. Fear Itself #1 is huge. It’s a big comic where a lot of things happen. It’s not slight – it’s lean. So I did a draft where I went back and added, which I hardly ever do, you know? And he was absolutely right. It was an incredibly trenchant observation. My natural instinct is to cut away, cut and cut and cut, until acceleration is almost a character.
It’s funny that in blockbuster crossover comics like Fear Itself – or Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis – you get to have an economy that you mightn’t in regular titles. They deal with so many characters, so much appearing on every page…
Final Crisis is a great example. Look at what Morrison cut out, and look at the backlash that particular book received. Now, I’ve studied Final Crisis like the Torah. I love it for what’s not there as much as for what is there. I suspect that’s why people wail and bitch and moan that they don’t get it, they don’t understand it. Never mind the inherent absurdity they can keep track of, say, thirty years of Legion continuity or four series of Star Trek or thirteen different Doctors Who – but a single Grant Morrison comic that doesn’t take the time to point out that those are Eclipso Gems? It somehow causes paroxysms of confusion and rage.
You can read the rest of the interview at Bookslut.