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Saturday

TONY LEUNG - IN THE MOOD FOR LUST

Tony Leung gets to grips with newcomer Tang Wei in Ang Lee's erotic thriller, Lust, Caution.



Tony Leung is one of Asia's biggest and best-loved stars. He is also one of its most versatile. In his acclaimed body of work with the mercurial film-maker Wong Kar-wai, he is as at home in the martial-arts world of Ashes of Time as in the Sixties Hong Kong of their international breakthrough, the dreamily romantic In the Mood for Love.

Able to make silences speak volumes with just his melancholy eyes, Leung became the ideal avatar of Wong's impressionistic style. Now teamed with the Oscar-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee, the actor gives one of his strongest performances in Lust, Caution, subverting the good-guy image that he cultivated with Kar-wai. However, it is probably not Leung's acting masterclass that has been pulling in the crowds in Asia. More than likely, it is the film's seven minutes of graphic sex (although not in mainland China, where the scenes have been excised by the censor), the fleshy frankness of which has been generating shock and surprise ever since Lust, Caution's world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.


Thursday

PAUL RUSESABAGINA: REAL-LIFE HERO OF HOTEL RWANDA

"From the day that genocide broke out I had 26 strangers in my own house and when I left I said to myself, ‘Will I leave these people here? If they die, I will never go to my bed and sleep. I will never eat and feel satisfied. I will never have a drink and feel my thirst quenched. One day, all this will be over. I’ll have to face history and my own conscience. If it ends right now and I face my own conscience and history, what kind of man would I be?’"

You have said that during the genocide you thought there were more people acting like you. When did you realise this wasn’t the case?

“During the period of what you call the end of the genocide, I took a car with my wife and a friend and we drove south, because me, I was born in the central south, my wife in the Deep South, and all along the way there were so many dead bodies. The whole country was smelling, and there was no human voice. There was no human being moving around except for rebels on the roadblocks. I went to my home and there was one of my brothers who was still there. I asked him, ‘What happened with our neighbours?’ He told me then that these ones had been killed by the militia. ‘And how about the others?’ They had been killed by the rebels. 'And how about so and so?' They were burning in a nearby house. It was burnt the previous night by the rebels. He looked at me and told me, ‘Listen, my dear brother, even these trees you can see have got ears, they’ve got eyes, they see. Please, do me a favour and leave this place.’ I drove south to see my mother-in-law. We were very, very sure that nobody could have killed her. She was a wonderful woman who was always helping her neighbours. She was a wonderful person. When we arrived, we saw first of all that the houses were destroyed; she was killed with her daughter-in-law and six grandchildren. I sat down in the ruins with my wife, we looked all around, the whole country was empty of people, and I said, finally, the whole of the country has become a hell.”

Some people find it impossible to speak about events like these or refuse to speak about them. Were you like that and has making this film been a positive experience?

“I think, psychologically, it is a mistake not to talk about it because talking about it is a kind of therapy. It is a cure. It helps to get that out and share it with other people. This is my belief. [Making this film is] a positive experience, although so far it seems strange to see your life on the screen. But I think this message had to get out and we had to tell the world that we have failed.”

Are you considered a hero in Rwanda?

”How can you call a hotel manager, who never changed, just remained the hotel manager, from 1980s to late 1990s, a hero? That would mean being a hero is very simple. Everybody can be a hero quite easily. [Laughs]”

What was important to you?

“What was important to me after a certain time was not getting the hotel clean! You can imagine a hotel where you don’t have running water -- it cannot be as clean as you might think. You can imagine a hotel where you don’t have electricity for months -- it can’t be that clean. You can imagine a hotel which was supposed to cater for diplomats and businessmen, now catering for the peasants, most of them. A hotel which was having a hundred guests, 120 according to its capacity, filling up to 1000, 12 times and more, it was not supposed to be that clean. My main concern was to give, for instance, food. You can imagine having a meal for more than a 1000 people, getting them food, something to eat, that was my main concern. I lowered the standards of the hotel a little bit.”

At the beginning of the film you talk about only saving your family and then you changed. What was it that made you change?

“I never realised that I changed. From the day that genocide broke out I had 26 strangers in my own house and when I left I said to myself, ‘Will I leave these people here? If they die, I will never go to my bed and sleep. I will never eat and feel satisfied. I will never have a drink and feel my thirst quenched. One day, all this will be over. I’ll have to face history and my own conscience. If it ends right now and I face my own conscience and history, what kind of man would I be?’ I had to take them, at my own risk, as you see in the movie. Thank God I succeeded and took them to the end.”

Did you have any sense of what was going to happen before the genocide started?

“Right from the beginning to the end, I said no. I wouldn’t be ashamed of saying no as long as I could justify my no. I can always tell you no, but I have to tell you why I say no. In such madness saying no, you had to go around and show that you’re saying no, without going straight in the subject.”

But did you have any suspicions about what was going to take place?

“Well, I was certain that I would be killed. At a given time I was the only person who could say no and who had many times said no; they had tried to kill the refugees many times, and every time I refused. So the only solution was to get me killed. So I was sure I was going to be killed. The only thing I was sure of was that. But how, when, where, those were the questions I was asking myself. But when was very easy – I know that each and every person dies just once. Then my days on earth will be over. Whether I am killed by the soldiers or the militia, how I will be killed, but when that day comes, I will die. But when that day comes, let me not die with hands crossed, fighting.”

Are you still in touch with the people at Sabena?

“Very much. We kept a very good friendship. Even when I left Rwanda and went to Belgium as a refugee, they offered me a job. But, you know in life, no one was willing to leave his office and give it to me. No one was willing to give me his chair. So I said: ‘If things are like that, if no one can sacrifice his chair and give it to me, let us remain good friends. Our relationships will be always friend to friend and we’ll have nice meals as we have always been doing, but let me do things my way. If I don’t succeed, I will come to you. But if I succeed, we’ll keep our friendship and keep our relations as you and I. And instead of being boss and employee, let us keep it the way it is.’”

What do you do today?

“I’m in the trucking business. I’ve got a trucking company in Africa. I stay in Belgium with my children and wife. We live in the suburbs of Brussels.”

They say in the film that Belgium created the divisions between Hutu and Tutsi. What do you say?

“That is from back in the roots of the Rwandan history. It was there. But when Germans came they made it a little bit wider. They even measured the noses of people and said who was smarter than whom. Who was more like Europeans and whites. Who was more elegant than whom. Who was more clever, more intelligent, than whom. They even said that Tutsis were made to rule and Hutus were made to respect. First of all Germans ruled with Tutsis and when Belgians came, in 1923, they maintained the same politics. They were the ones who introduced the first identification cards. That was a big mistake. In 1959, the revolution in Rwanda was not really a Rwandese revolution, it was a Hutu revolution overthrowing Europeans, the colonisers, and their partner, the Tutsis. Of course Belgians came to Belgium and Tutsis went to neighbouring countries. So it was in the history of Rwanda. When Europeans came in they maintained that politics, that supremacy of the Tutsi race over Hutus. In 1959, when the Rwandese took power, they never removed in the ID’s the words Hutu and Tutsi.”

Today there is no difference . . .

“It doesn’t change anything. Today those two words have become taboos. Do you believe making them taboos is the right way of solving problems? To me the right way is to let a Hutu know he is a Hutu, and a Tutsi should know that he is a Tutsi. And they should respect each other.”

The role of Kofi Annan is not mentioned in Hotel Rwanda and I wonder what your opinion is.

“Kofi Annan has got a lot of responsibilities in the Rwandan genocide. Sometimes I wonder does he go to bed and sleep without nightmares? Does he eat his meal cheerfully and feel a free man? He was the director of operations in the United Nations. He is the one that was corresponding with General Dallaire immediately. He is the one who withdrew the United Nations army instead of increasing the army. So Kofi Annan has a lot of responsibilities. And what took place in Rwanda, he is the one who influenced the United Nations decisions.”

Has he ever spoken openly about his role?

“I think each and every person feels so guilty that many times they don’t want to talk about Rwanda. He, of course, apologised. But was it enough? I do not know. It is for you to draw your conclusions.”

But behind his decisions might have been the Americans and the British.

“To us, he is the one who was writing, corresponding, saying yes, saying no. And yet we do not know the British and the Americans in the United Nations. We know the United Nations as an institution. Of course America has a big share of responsibility; they were the ones that helped with the withdrawal. Instead of reinforcing the mission of the United Nations in Rwanda they just decided to withdraw, because 10 Belgian soldiers had been killed. Why didn’t they say now what we’re going to do is reinforce the mission of the United Nations? You guys go in and get the guys who killed the 10 Belgian soldiers and bring them to trial. [If they had done that], I’m sure no one else would have killed anyone anymore.”

Could you live in Rwanda today?

“Well, according to all I have seen there is no lasting peace in Rwanda. There is an opposition of a winner and a loser. A winner is dictating his conditions and a loser is sometimes saying yes, because he has got to say yes. So if there was a lasting peace, I would be the first person to fly back.”

You basically say that you did what you did because as a human being you had to. Do you understand at all the people that acted in the opposite way?

“This is what I don’t understand. There are many people that I consider as gentlemen, I respect them as people who are respectable and also respect a human creature. So I was very disappointed to see the way all of those people were acting. I was very disappointed by the way many people behaved.”

Your attitude to life must have been changed by this.

“Certainly. You can imagine someone who could trust people, have friends and share life with others, disappointed like that . . . if you’re in my position, it’s obvious.”

Do you see the film making any changes?

“I think so. The main objective of the film is to convey a message about what is happening, and to inform. Hopefully this will help to change what is happening in Darfur. It might help to change what is happening in the Congo where 3.8 million [according to human rights organisations] have been killed since 1986. Even the media don’t talk about the Congo. It doesn’t come on the headlines. Nobody talks about it.”


© Stephen Applebaum, 2006

FROM THE VAULT: BAISE MOI - PORN, POLITICS & PROVOCATION (2002)





France’s constitution is built upon the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, but these seemed to have been forgotten when the Conseil d’Etat, the French state council, banned the violent and sexually explicit thriller Baise Moi (in English, "F*** Me") three days after its release. The action was prompted not by complaints from the public, who were happily handing over their money to see the bloodstained road movie, but from Promouvoir, an extreme right-wing organisation allegedly defending "Judaeo-Christian and family values".


Here, newspapers have been sharpening their knives in anticipation of Baise Moi’s arrival for some time. Outraged articles - mostly written by people who either have not seen the film or who have only seen part of it - have appeared in the press attacking its lurid mixture of stylised violence and hardcore sex, but making no attempt to address the context in which it places them. One journalist I met recently (who had watched the film) was so disgusted by the movie that he refused even to discuss it. Depressingly, the spirit of Mary Whitehouse appears to be alive and well.


Baise Moi is a brutal and deliberately provocative piece of work. Everything about it seems designed to ruffle feathers. It was co-directed by former punk Virginie Despentes, who adapted her own best-selling novel, and ex-porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi. It stars two other adult-film actresses, Raffaela Anderson and [the late] Karen Bach, and looks as grubby as a peep-show floor. Furthermore, it features possibly the most harrowing and realistic rape scene (trimmed slightly by the BBFC to remove a close-up of vaginal penetration) ever shot.


Baise Moi’s high quota of throbbing erections, penetration shots, blow jobs and bare flesh make it easy for its detractors to dismiss it simply as pornography. But the film-makers are actually far cleverer, and have far more serious intentions, than this suggests. For one, they use hardcore sexual imagery in a manner that refuses to fulfil the primary function of pornography.

For example, sex scenes in porn movies have to last a certain amount of time in order for the person watching to be completely satisfied. But this is not the case in Baise Moi, where form and context constantly work to change our (male) perception of and response to the content, by effectively turning the tables in favour of the female gaze. "The sex scenes aren’t done for the spectator; they’re done for the girls, the characters themselves," says Anderson. "If the person watching doesn’t come, that’s just too bad."


It was no accident that one reviewer found it "impossible to have a hard-on" when he watched the film in Cannes in May 2000. If he had not been concentrating so intently on what was (or rather was not) happening in his trousers, instead of complaining, he might have realised that this was the point. Ultimately, Baise Moi is not about sex as much as it is about power - and who has it.


Despentes wrote Baise Moi, the novel, when she was 23 and laid-up in bed, bored, with a debilitating skin complaint. In it, Manu, a sometime porn actress, and Nadine, a hooker, embark on a sex and murder spree after Manu is raped. Dark, brutal and troubled, the book reflected Despentes’s mood at the time.


"I was in a bad state," she recalls. "My clothes hurt my skin, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have any money, bad things were happening to a lot of people around me, like prison and death, and I didn’t think I had a future. Also, I was a prostitute, not every day but occasionally."


Despentes believes she became a prostitute as a result of being raped when she was 17. "They are related," she says. "What you’re saying to yourself is: ‘It can happen again and again and I’m not dying.’ It’s not revenge but, in a very strange way, it’s you re-building yourself again."

Baise Moi encourages women who have been raped not to be a victim. "It’s good to realise that rape is really bad and it’s a crime, these are very important things, but you have to have something extra," asserts Despentes. "You have to say to women: ‘You didn’t want it, you didn’t deserve it, you didn’t look for it, so go ahead and be strong.’"


After Manu (Anderson) is raped in the film, she says that even though her body has been violated, there is an essential part of her being which remains untouched. For Anderson especially, this was an inspiring and, over time, empowering statement, because she had also been raped three years before filming Baise Moi. "For me the rape happened twice," she says, shaking. "There was the actual rape, and then because I was already making porn movies at the time, when I went to make a complaint before the court, they suggested I could only expect this kind of behaviour from men. So I also felt raped mentally."


Although playing Manu was difficult for Anderson, who needed to get drunk in order to shoot the rape scene, she says the film has changed her life for the better. "Before Baise Moi," she says, candidly, "I accepted humiliations. If I was with somebody I loved and they hit me, or something, I’d accept that like a little dog. But when I began to understand the movie, about a year and a half after making it, I found a way of learning to say no and refusing humiliation. Baise Moi has given me the power to say that I have a right to exist, that I’m a woman, and nobody has the right to harm me."


Baise Moi is a cathartic howl of rage from the margins. It is concerned not just with issues of sex and gender, but also poverty and race. In this regard, it follows on from other controversial French films, such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (Hate) and, more explicitly, Gasper Noe’s Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone), in which characters from the fringes of society express their frustration and anger through violence.


The opening scenes specifically locate Manu and Nadine within a working-class milieu where the opportunities for everyone, male or female, are limited. "There is no work in France," Manu tells her brother, who spends his days behind the bar in an empty, dingy tabac. Amèlie this isn’t. "They don’t have any work, they don’t have any money, they don’t have any real education or any real voice, so this isn’t just about gender - it’s more political than that," claims Despentes. "Here rape becomes a metaphor for what rich people do to poor people. I think they really understood this in France, but they didn’t want to hear about it."


Nor, it appears, did they want to talk about the North-African roots of the principal actresses (one is half-Moroccan, one half-Algerian). For Despentes, the newspapers’ silence on this issue spoke volumes. "We’ve still got a really big problem with Algeria and the Algerian War, and people don’t want to see North Africans with guns," she says. "We’re not supposed to talk about racism in France because it’s not supposed to exist, but it does. It’s just very hidden." This interview took place, by the way, before this week’s surprise election victory by Jean-Marie Le Pen.


"No-one in France ever said Manu and Nadine came from a poor suburb," continues Despentes. "All they saw was girls, violence and sex. Perhaps the thing they really found pornographic was that we showed something about poverty and being an outsider, and you’re not supposed to talk about these things either in France. They think if they don’t talk about something, it won’t exist."


Baise Moi could not be silenced, however. After the Conseil d’Etat revoked its visa d’exploitation, Catherine Breillat, who herself caused a stir with another sexually explicit film, Romance, a few years ago, got filmmakers - including Jean-Luc Godard, Miou-Miou and Claire Denis - to sign a petition supporting Despentes and Trinh Thi’s right of free expression. The state compromised by awarding the film an X certificate, confining it to porn cinemas. Then it quietly reinstated the long-abolished 18-certificate, and the film was re-classified and re-released last year.


Now we can make up our own minds about Baise Moi. While there will no doubt be those who simply regard it as exploitative smut, others will perhaps find its defiant, two-fingered punk spirit exhilarating, even cathartic. "I know that when I was 23," says Despentes, now in her thirties, "watching this kind of movie would have made me feel relieved. It sounds strange but it’s a feel-good movie, I think".



First published in The Scotsman, April 25, 2002

Wednesday

FROM THE VAULT: JOEL SCHUMACHER (2000)



"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," said William Blake. So why did Joel Schumacher make Batman and Robin?










AL GORE: ECO MAN

Al Gore wants a word with you . . .





BLOODY HELL . . . IT'S ELI ROTH!


Eli Roth returns to the scene of the crime in Hostel 2













BRITISH BRUTALITY IN IRAQ


Tony Marchant's searing
drama The Mark of Cain
turns real-life abuses into
agonising and essential
viewing.









© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Thursday

HOLY TERROR IN THE HEARTLAND




Kids for Christ



They look like any other American children, but the kids in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's disturbing, Oscar-nominated, documentary Jesus Camp are part of an expanding Christian fundamentalist world where religion touches every aspect of their lives, and God and politics are intimately enmeshed.

When Tory, 10, dances, she is already aware of the shame of "dancing for the flesh". She prefers God-focused Christian heavy metal to the boy-centric pop of Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, she says.

According to 12-year-old would-be preacher Levi's mother, who home-tutors her son, creationism holds all the answers to how we got here, and global warming is not a problem. Levi, who was "saved" at the age of five, reveals that his "spirit feels kind of yucky" when he meets a non-Christian.


Read the rest of the feature at:


http://arts.independent.co.uk/film/features/article2889306.ece

Saturday

JULIE DELPY: FILMMAKER AT LAST



Julie Delpy makes her directorial debut with Two Days in Paris




Julie Delpy felt overwhelmed when her directorial debut, Two Days in Paris, premiered at this year's Berlin Film Festival. The culmination of years of struggle and frustration, it was a day she thought might never come. "It's been really, really hard," the French actress says. "I wrote my first script when I was 16. I directed my first film when I was 36. It took me 20 years to convince people to give me money."


Read rest of story at

Tuesday

INGMAR BERGMAN'S THE SEVENTH SEAL: A TRIBUTE



2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Ingmar Bergman’s classic existential drama The Seventh Seal. Below, Terry Gilliam recalls the first time he saw the film and the effect it had on his career.



When and where did you first see The Seventh Seal?

“It must have been in late 1958, in LA. There were several art houses showing European films then. I had just started college and my taste in movies was rapidly expanding from Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin films. Reading subtitles proved a way to speed the pace of slower, brooding films.”

What impact did it make?


“It blew me away! Here was a film that dealt with the problems of death and the search for belief in something worth believing in - especially since God was proving elusive and humourless to a college student on a Presbyterian scholarship.

Why do you think it was so successful when it was released?


“I'm curious just how successful the film was in financial terms...in terms of actual numbers of viewers. I do know that our generation was searching for new ideas and keen on discovering the world outside of provincial America. We were like young plant shoots in need of nutrients. Foreign films were fresh manure to us. The Seventh Seal seemed alive with so many new shades of humanity and philosophical ponderings. It was intelligent. Simple. Pure. Obviously, the cinema-going public then was interested in more complex ideas than Spiderman 3,4,5 has on offer today.”

Did it influence your filmmaking career?


“Very much. Watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Jabberwocky: I am a victim of The Seventh Seal. It is my seminal film. Along with Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, Bergman's ideas and imagery bounce around my brain continually. Unfortunately, I don't have the simplicity or wisdom of Bergman. The animations in Holy Grail are derived from images in illuminated medieval manuscripts - the same sources that Bergman used for his live-action images. Flagellants, knights, monks keep popping up in different forms in my films. So many of my characters are obsessed with death or trying to understand the lack of meaning of life.”

What is the film’s lasting legacy?


“I hope its lasting legacy is long. It shows us that films dealing with serious ideas can still reach audiences. If it keeps inspiring young filmmakers perhaps it will encourage them to try to make meaningful films as well....to be bolder...to expect intelligence from the audience. Then again, it might just be to remind us of a time when cinema was as important as literature.”

Do you think that the way the film has been parodied over the years, infilms such as Woody Allen’s Love and Death and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, has had a negative impact on the film's reputation?

“Probably more people have seen Seventh Seal parodies than the actual film. Nevertheless those parodies keep the film alive and perhaps occasionally some curious cat bothers to rent a DVD of the film and discovers the real experience. I did it the other day and was once more blown away - after probably more than 30 years since last I saw it. I was amazed at how much I had forgotten.”


INGMAR BERGMAN 1918 - 2007


© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Friday

INGMAR BERGMAN'S GRIM CLASSIC REAPS FRESH PLEASURES AT 50

"It was a dangerous and delicate move, which could have failed," said Ingmar Bergman of his decision to depict Death incarnate in The Seventh Seal. To his relief, "nobody protested" when actor Bengt Ekerot appeared on a rocky beach, his face painted white, to be challenged to a game of chess by the knight (Max von Sydow) whose life he has come to take. "That," Bergman recalled in Images: My Life in Film, "made me feel triumphant and joyous."

Since then, the film's motifs, the chess game and the black-cowled Grim Reaper in particular, have been parodied relentlessly - albeit usually affectionately - in films ranging from Woody Allen's Love and Death to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Monty Python's Meaning of Life and The Last Action Hero, as well as on TV by the likes of French and Saunders.

Settling down to watch the film for its 50th anniversary release, I wondered whether it was possible to take it seriously today.

Read the rest of this article at http://living.scotsman.com/film.cfm?id=1121662007

Saturday

Howard Berger: Escape to Narnia

Special-effects wizard Howard Berger escaped the bloody world of horror features to breathe life into the fantasy fauna of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

For special-effects artist Howard Berger, working on Andrew Adamson’s child-friendly The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was like a dream come true. A fan of monsters ever since his mother read him Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are (a film version is being prepped by Spike Jonze), Berger was now called upon to design, build and breathe life into a vast menagerie of mythological and fantastical beasties to populate CS Lewis’s parallel universe.

As the man who had helped Quentin Tarantino realise his gruesome riff on Hong Kong martial arts movies in Kill Bill, and George A. Romero resurrect his decaying hordes in Land of the Dead, Berger says it was a relief not to find himself up to his armpits in fake blood for a change. “I think I brought a bottle that big of blood,” he says, suggesting a tiny vial with his thumb and forefinger, “which is the smallest amount I’ve ever had on set. I’m used to 400 gallons or whatever. It was nice not to hear on the radio, ‘Howard, we need more blood on the set.’”

Despite the high gore quotient on Kill Bill, Berger still loved working with Tarantino. “He forces you to look outside the box,” he enthuses. “In fact you’re so outside the box, you don’t even know where the box is. But I never want to do another blood effect. I’m sick of it. I hate the feel of fake blood all over me.”

He is also sick of Hollywood, to some extent, and tries to work outside LA whenever he can. The filmmaking ethos in Hollywood has changed, he claims, and it is no longer a team effort. When Berger got the call from Adamson to work on The Chronicles, he was languishing on the set of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. “I really disliked that movie,” he says candidly. “It was a great example of a director letting an actor do whatever he wanted, with no regard to the enjoyment, I guess, that the book gave me or my kids. We just sat in the theatre and went, ‘That was painful. I’ll never see that again.’”

If the film disappointed him, the set experience was even worse. “Because there’s such a strong delineation between departments now in Hollywood, we basically just sat on set for months, waiting,” says Berger. By the time his team were asked to bring on the deadly viper, they were bored stiff. “We had more fun playing Frisbee on the Paramount lot,” he snipes.

Worst of all, in his view, was the way the child actors were treated. On Chronicles, he says, Adamson worked in a way that took the emotional welfare of his young cast into consideration. For example, he broke the traumatic scene where Lucy and Susan, played by little Georgie Henley and Anna Popplewell, weep over the lion Aslan’s dead body, into small chunks of time rather than shoot for entire days. “We would shoot for a couple of hours,” explains Berger, “and then Andrew would say, ‘You know what? That’s enough for today’, which was a magnificent change. Because if we were shooting in Hollywood, it would be like, ‘Just keep shooting, they’re fine.' And then off to the mental ward they go.”

Is that how the children were treated on Lemony Snicket? Berger will not be working on the sequel, so he lets rip. “I thought the kids were treated atrociously,” he spits. “I was offended. The way they seem in the movie, which to me is bored beyond belief, they were bored beyond belief on set. They were going out of their skins, as I was too. You had a director who was yelling in front of children, who was taking six hours for a set up, and just letting the children sit around on set. It was mind numbing. Really terrible.”

Turning his fire on the studios, Berger believes that part of the problem is that they will often hire directors who are “child-like” to direct their family films. “That, to me, means that they’re immature, have no attention span, and don’t have a clue. And it’s true. It’s like I was sat on set and this guy’s ‘childlike’: he’s sat in the corner playing Game Boy and you’ll go, ‘What about the next shot?’ and he’ll go, ‘Hold on, I’m almost at level 10.’”

No one has a bad word to say about Adamson. The laid back New Zealander, and recent father of two, won the hearts of everyone around him, including the kids, who were impressed by how much he mucked in with everything. “To say Andrew got his hands dirty is a total understatement,” says newcomer William Moseley, who plays Peter, "because he was doing everything.” He even “crouched down and became a beaver for a while,” remembers Popplewell, laughing.

Berger cannot wait to get back to Narnia. If this adaptation of the first of CS Lewis’s seven Chronicles takes off, then Adamson et al will reunite for Prince Caspian. For Berger it will be another chance to spend time among the monsters and make his childhood fantasies a reality. But does this hankering for family fare really mean that the man whose recent credits include the make up effects on Frank Miller’s Sin City, Serenity and Cursed is done with gore for good?

“Well, you know,” sighs Berger. “I just did this thing called Masters of Horror and there was a lot of blood, and I just sat there and went, ‘I told myself I wasn’t going to do this. I just did Chronicles of Narnia. Why am I covered in blood again?’”

Old habits die hard, it seems; especially when they’re in your blood.
First published in The Scotsman


© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Luis Mandoki: Innocent Voices


Suffer the Little Children




300,000 child soldiers are fighting around the world at any one time according to Amnesty International. This statistic is staggering but gives no insight into the trauma experienced by children caught up in war, or its lasting impact. And it is not just the kids who fight that suffer, but any child who lives surrounded by the violence, danger, and constant fear of death that war brings. Children are often its forgotten victims. The Mexican director Luis Mandoki therefore hopes that his acclaimed new film, Innocent Voices, will help us remember them.

Whilst the setting is El Salvador during the country’s 1980-92 civil war, the film-maker reveals he had a different arena in mind. “I made this film,” he explains in heavily accented English, “because it tells you what’s happening inside the lives of children inside the schools and inside the houses while the bombings in Iraq are happening, even though it takes place in El Salvador.”

Written by Oscar Torres, who based his screenplay on his own experiences, Innocent Voices is a people’s take on war seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old called Chava. Like all children, he just wants to play. However, his is a childhood marked by the murder of friends, fire fights, bombings, and the knowledge that when he turns 12, the army will try to conscript him. Torres actually avoided capture and stayed with the FMLN rebels, on and off, for six months. When he was 13, he fled to the United States and settled in LA.

Mandoki, who has a string of Hollywood films behind him starring the likes of Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Jennifer Lopez and Meg Ryan, met Torres when the Salvadoran was appearing in an AT&T commercial Mandoki was directing. “I was fed up with the kind of movies that I was doing,” he recalls, “so when this script came I read it, and it was like a wash over. There was no doubt that was my next movie.” He did not know then how much of a roller coaster journey he and Torres were embarking on.

As they worked on the screenplay, it became clear that Torres’ psychological and emotional wounds were far from healed. He had initially wanted to tell the story of the music that inspired him during the war, but Mandoki was more interested in the story of Chava. When he pushed Torres to put more of his life into the piece, the writer’s unresolved feelings about the past made him resist.

“War doesn’t end when it ends,” Mandoki reflects. “It changes people and war survivors carry that war for the rest of their lives. Oscar didn’t know if leaving was the right thing, because he abandoned his family; because he abandoned people that stayed to fight. So there was this guilt.”

The process was forcing Torres to confront thoughts and emotions he had repressed. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Chava picks up a gun and points it at a child soldier. But instead of shooting he drops the weapon and runs away. When Mandoki asked him if he had ever pulled a trigger, Torres brushed the question aside. The director persisted but got nowhere. “I grabbed a chair and launched it against a wall and said, ‘Fine, if you don’t want to go the full way, fuck you.’ And I left the room and got in my car.” Mandoki returned an hour later to find Torres sobbing. He asked him again why he would not talk about not firing when it was such a heroic act.

“Oscar said, ‘I feel really bad about it because I almost killed another boy, and that’s something that’s always haunted me.’ I said yeah, but you didn’t. And then his face changed again and he said, ‘But I should’ve, because that kid killed my friends and other people. I also feel like a piece of shit because I left.’ He couldn’t stop crying, he was very emotional, and then I realised why he’d resisted, because once you go in there, all this stuff comes out. So we spent hours just talking about it.”

Incredibly, Torres’s original screenplay did not include the round-ups of boys by the army. It was only when Mandoki asked him why children were hiding on roof tops that he told him it was to avoid capture. He had not thought it was important. “For him that was every day life,” says Mandoki, “and as we started talking about that, I was surprised. I didn’t know about it. I started researching it, through UNICEF and Amnesty, finding out that that problem was real then, but it’s also real today."

The film damningly implicates America in the training of child soldiers in El Salvador, and both writer and director believe that this partly explains why the film – Mexico’s entry for the 77th Oscars - received little support in the US, despite a strong reaction when it was screened at the United Nations.

“Children were born to play, not carry guns. And I think we need to become aware that all the children of the world are our children,” says Mandoki passionately, “and that we need to stop the craziness, and the crazy world that we’re creating for them.”

Clearly for both him and Torres, working on Innocent Voices has been a life altering experience. Mandoki was effectively counsellor and collaborator, but says the movie was just as therapeutic for him. “You realise how tough life can be. We have it easy and sometimes we take it for granted. Touching on a story like that changes you.”

Mandoki laughs that his agent is now frustrated because he has been turning down projects that he would have done in the past. He was due to direct an adaptation of The Winged Boy, for example, but dropped out to film the left-wing candidate Lopez Obrador during his campaign for the Mexican presidency. When Felipe Calderon won the July 2, 2006, election by a whisker, Mandoki produced footage of alleged vote rigging.

The director now believes that the questions he was driven to ask himself about his life and work making Innocent Voices led him to the documentary. “Now it’s hard to find something that means something,” he says. “So the dilemma is now in terms of which way to go. What I do know is that something has to hit me. It’s like you found your own power in terms of what you can do and how you can give something, and you’re not willing to settle for less.”

Originally published in The Big Issue

© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Friday

Tommy Lee Jones: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Tommy Lee Jones directs and stars in a tragically relevant Western penned by Amores Perros screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga

After a long career in front of the camera, craggy-faced Hollywood veteran Tommy Lee Jones has directed his first cinema feature, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. “It was a lust for creative control,” states the laconic 59 year-old, who also takes starring and co-producing credits on the film. “It’s good to be the king,” he adds tersely, mustering a rare smile. “He’s a man of few words,” Jones’s co-star, Barry Pepper, tells me later. “He’s not a guy who talks just to hear himself speak.”

Shot on and around one of Jones’s ranches, Three Burials develops as a multi-layered existential drama set along the Tex-Mex border. Jones plays a cattle rancher called Pete whose best friend, Melquiades (Julio Cedillo), an illegal immigrant, is shot dead by a US border patrolman (Pepper). When the local Sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) dismisses the case, Pete kidnaps the killer and forces him to accompany him to Mexico, with his dead friend in tow.

The idea for the bi-lingual film, which was originally written entirely in Spanish by Jones’s hunting buddy, Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams), was inspired by the real-life shooting of a young Mexican by US border guards. But the divisions they are protecting, suggests Jones, are more notional than real.

“When you've lived where I live, you think: ‘What border?’” he laughs. Jones knows this part of the United States well; he grew up there and learned to speak Spanish at a young age. “There is one country there, one culture in that river valley, and it doesn’t have a lot to do with Mexico City or Washington D.C. – the Rio Grande valley has its own culture. It is a superficially imposed barrier. A sort of enforced schizophrenia. I live in San Antonio, Texas. I live in a bicultural society. My wife is of Mexican descent. That’s just who we are.”

Given this context, it seems fair to assume that Three Burials is a political statement. Absolutely, confirms Arriaga. Jones is more cautious, however. “There is an argument that every breath you take is a political act,” he says. “I prefer to let the movie speak for itself. I just like to get out of the way, personally.” He is just as unhappy with the Western tag critics keep pinning to the film. “The term has become pejorative if not epithet,” he snarls. “I don’t think it applies to our movie. Maybe people use it because the film has some horses and big hats.”

So what has he made? According to Arriaga, the film is a love story. ”Love is the main theme of all my movies,” he says. “Love is my obsession, and death. Not because of the sake of death, but because of the sake of life. Like in this case, Pete and Mike [Pepper’s character] learn more about themselves through the dead man than from any other thing.”

Indeed, Three Burials is about the common humanity of people on either side of the border, as well as their differences. Pete forces Mike to see Melquiades as a fully-rounded human being, and to acknowledge the loss that his death represents. Forgiveness and redemption are core themes. For both Arriaga and Jones, the film was a chance to shatter stereotypes.

“I’m not a real big fan of Zorro or the Cisco Kid,” says Jones. “Ethnic stereotypes are boring and stressful and sometimes criminal. It’s just not a good way to think. It’s non-thinking. They’re stupid and destructive points of view that lead to all kinds of trouble.”

“I’m happy I wrote this movie,” adds Arriaga, “because I can free Mexican characters from the stereotype. They're always banditos with these bullets crossing their chests, or something. It’s like imagining American characters in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, it’s absurd. It’s important to explore this relationship between Mexico and the United States in a film, and I’m happy to do it in this way.”

Interestingly, Pete’s way of making Mike see Malequiades as a person -- by making him wear the dead man’s clothes, drink from his cup, and so on – mirrors the way Jones made his cast prepare for their roles. It was tough going, by all accounts.

Pepper was packed off to camp in the mountains alone, and given Ecclesiastes and Mary Flannery O’Connor to read. Jones actually wrote his cum laude thesis on the Southern Catholic author at Harvard, and her work informed the film thematically.

“She has been an important influence on my creative life,” he says airily, “and I’ve read every word she wrote, two or three times, and when you mention the word belief or faith, I would offer her definition of it, which is: faith is that which you know to be true, whether you believe it or not.”

Elsewhere, Yoakam was given Albert Camus’s tale of alienation and immigration, L’Etranger, to pore over.

“Why’d I do that?” asks Jones rhetorically. “Because we were making a study of what alienation feels like and what its roots might be in materialism, and how that might contrast with a different point of view that might be happening on the other side of the river, which is also you.” So that explains that then.

Cedillo, meanwhile, grafted on Jones’s ranch, repairing waterlines, fixing fences and herding cattle. “I was getting up 6.30 in the morning and not going to bed until the sun went down.”

One day, Jones insisted on Cedillo joining him for dinner straight from work. “A lot of important key people were there, and they were all nicely dressed, and I show up smelling like cows,” recalls the actor. “I felt so embarrassed and I was very withdrawn. I felt like Melquiades.”

Clearly, it is not easy serving King Tommy. The pay-off, however, has been rave reviews, and acting and writing awards for Jones and Arriaga respectively at Cannes.

Jones plans to go behind the camera again, although he doubts whether any studio will dare give him money to direct Blood Meridian, his screenplay based on the apocalyptic novel by another of his favourite authors, Cormac McCarthy, because of the level of violence in it. He will, though, be acting in the Coen brothers’ film of McCarthy’s most recent work, No Country for Old Men.

When Tommy Lee Jones does direct again, you can almost be certain that Tommy Lee Jones the actor will also be there.

“I do everything I tell myself to do. I can read my own mind," he laughs. "So it’s a lot easier than getting someone else.”

He does have a sense of humour after all.

© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Wednesday

Helen Mirren: An audience with The Queen


Ahead of the Oscars, double Golden Globe-winner Helen Mirren talks about her award-winning performances as Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II.
Venice, September 2006


As a young woman you were always very anti-establishment. Now you’re not only playing the ultimate establishment figure, but you’re also a Dame. Do you now feel like you have become the establishment?

“That’s my great fear. I don’t want to be a part of the establishment as such. That’s not my role as an artist. You have to hold yourself apart because our job, as artists, is not to arbitrarily attack the establishment, I don’t say that, but if that need comes to step up and do it. You have to kind of hold yourself apart. But as you get older, inevitably life [smiles] pulls you into it because the younger generation look at you that way. You become the establishment just because you are established, and the younger generation are going, ‘Yeuch, get rid of them.’”

Have you ever met the Queen?

“I met the Queen very briefly, for about 20 seconds, at a polo match - the first and last polo match I’ve ever been to. I was invited to have tea with the Queen, with about a thousand other people, and me and Chloe Sevigney were taken over to meet her. I had the impression that everybody has when they are meeting the Queen in a slightly informal situation: she is absolutely charming and very twinkly and very easy and very natural. I did use that in the beginning of the film, before the tragedy of Diana’s death, to show this person with a sense of humour and kind of ease about her.”

Did she know that you wanted to play her?

“She did because I wrote to her. I got an answer from her secretary saying, ‘The Queen has read your letter with interest.’”

What did you write?

“I said, ‘I’m sure you’re aware that a film is going to be made and I am playing your Royal Highness. I understand that this is intrusive, especially as the film deals with these very difficult two weeks.’ This is more or less, not verbatim. I’d already done a lot of research at that point, so I already had a feeling. Through my research I had this growing feeling of respect for her. So, I just said, ‘All I can say is that I will do this as honestly as I possibly can and try and reflect the person that I have come to respect.’”

When you looked at yourself in the mirror, dressed up, did you think, ‘Oh my God, I really look like her’?

“Yes, I used to take myself a little bit by surprise. But I really looked like her when I was acting her. I didn’t particularly look like her when I was just being myself. It was when I took on the character and my head went back and the look came that I started looking like her. So when I looked at myself in the mirror, I’d think, ‘I don’t look anything like the Queen. I look like Helen Mirren in a wig.’”

Was there any intention in the film to reflect on where Blair is today because he seems to be in the position now that the Queen was then?

“Indeed. Although I have to say when we started the movie, it wasn’t quite as extreme as it is now. And I love that line, ‘This will happen to you, Mr Blair. And it will come quite suddenly.’ That’s very much Peter [Morgan screenwriter].”

Do you think Blair admired her power because it’s as if he has also now become monolithic, distant and deaf to the public?

“You know, I can’t say anything. That’s maybe what you want to say. I have no idea.”

But you’re a Labour supporter and during the election in 1997 you were vocal in your support.

“Well, I was a supporter of change. And Blair was a wonderful, and he still is, orator, and a great politician. No question. All the resources that a politician is supposed to have, he’s got - including an ability to dissimilate [Laughs]. He’s a brilliant politician. It was time for change, so might as well be him.”

What research did you do to play the Queen?

“I had just done Elizabeth I in Lithuania, I was exhausted from that, but I had to go to the South of France. I went with this big bag of tapes and I spent my whole time just watching tapes and reading biographies. One that I found really, really valuable in particular was the book that was written by Elizabeth and Margaret’s nanny, Crawfie [Marion Crawford]. She had them from about the age of five, even younger, and she was with them through the abdication of their uncle, through their father becoming King, the move to Buckingham Palace. When the girls got to be 16, 17, 18, whatever, she was let go, because she no longer had a job. She wrote this book and it was terrible. The monarchy saw it as the most appalling betrayal, because it was the first time they’d ever confronted anyone going public about what happened in the private life of the royal family. In fact the book is very, very sympathetic, totally uncritical. But it really does show the world that they lived in and she does talk about Elizabeth’s character as a young girl. I found that book totally invaluable because I found myself gravitating very much towards Elizabeth before she became Queen, really up to the end of the Second World War. It wasn’t like she was born and this is going to be the next Queen. Her uncle was King and if her uncle had children there was no way she was going to be Queen. And even when her father became King, her mother and father were young enough to have more children. So if they’d had another child and it had been a boy, she would not have been Queen. So for a lot of her young life she lived without that understanding and that was the person I wanted to look at. Get that Queen thing away from her and just look at the little girl.”

Did you see any similarities between the two Elizabeths?

“Well, I think monarchs have to believe that God wants them there and they are, in general, God fearing or religious. I think if they don’t believe that God wants them there, the whole thing falls apart a bit. And, you know, there’s this thing of how ego plays out within the role of monarchy. In Elizabeth I’s case the ego was so enormous it was incomprehensible. It was like an Everest of ego. And Elizabeth II, there is no ego. It’s very strange. It’s as if she’s let go of ego. It’s like when you pass through vanity, through ego, into another place, which is the place of no choice. I can’t comprehend what that must be like.”

Would you compare her with an actor that has to play the same role throughout her career?

“No, it’s way beyond acting. It’s being, not acting. And I do know that the Queen has an absolute abhorrence of performing. She finds it, and always has, very difficult to, you know, smile the way actors do on the red carpet. Smile and wave. She’s not good at that. And I don’t think she sees it particularly as her role to act. She is being. It’s a far deeper than acting.”

The Queen deals with her grief by putting her energies into the grandchildren. Did anything in your own experience inform the way you played these moments?

“Not really because I’ve never experienced anything like that. I mean I can understand from a human point of view that of course your energy would go towards protecting your grandchildren, especially in a world that wants more anything to eat those children alive. What the public wanted was Harry and William to come out and fall on their knees and sob and say, ‘My mother! I’ve lost my beautiful mother!’ They wanted that photo opportunity. It was disgusting. Some people to this day say, ‘Why didn’t they cry?’ You know, fuck off. I say beware of people crying on television. These guys who come on and cry about their wives missing, usually they’re the ones who have killed them. Why do people think crying in public is a sign of emotion? It’s very often a sign of lying.”

What is your interpretation of the scene where the Queen goes to look at the killed stag?

“That was a scene in the script that I loved the most and I thought really heightened it into being more than documentary, more than a cheeky look behind curtains. It gave it a poetic quality. I think everyone who sees that sees their own symbolism. I know that Jamie Cornwall, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, absolutely saw that as Diana. Saw the death of the stag as the death of Diana. This magnificent wild creature cruelly killed. I didn’t see that at all. My interpretation was that it’s the loss of a generation and a way of life. Not of a monarchist way of life but a way of Britain being. I felt like that because I felt like that when my mother died. What killed me was the loss of that generation. We are losing that generation who experienced the depression, the Second World War, the deprivations of the post war in Britain, and then presented my generation with a National Health System, with an education system that allowed me, a girl from a working class economic background, to have a college education, and gave us this incredible modern world.”

How important to you was becoming a Dame?

“Becoming a Dame was to do with my family, with my Mum and Dad, and the world that I grew up in. They were both dead by the time, and that’s the sadness in getting something like that - usually you’re much older and your parents are dead. But I accepted it for my parents.”

It’s the 25th anniversary of The Long Good Friday this year. Bob Hoskins said he was always embraced somewhat by the underworld after appearing in that film. Was it the same for you?

“Well certainly in the East End, yes. In fact, my mother’s side of the family did come from the East End and, actually, I had had an uncle, not a blood relative but an uncle by marriage, who was an East End gangster. So I had had tenuous connections with that world [laughs] anyway. But certainly for a long time afterwards - it’s only just dissipated - I had incredible credibility in the East End. Any East End pub I went to into, any taxi driver, I had great, great cred. It was great. But I’m not saying they were necessarily gangsters, they were just East End people.”

One of your relatives used to be the butcher to Queen Victoria, didn’t he?

“Yeah, my mother’s grandfather was a butcher, so they came from that East End. I didn’t know a lot about my mother’s side of the family, actually, until quite recently. A journalist, needless to say, investigated it, unbeknownst to me, and did a whole thing on it. I knew that my family came from the East End but then I discovered that actually we came from West Ham. It was brilliant. I actually sent him a letter saying, ‘Thank you. That was great.’ He sent me all the research material.’”

So, you’ve played the Queen. What now? What about a very sexy role?

“[Laughs] Well I just did do a rather sexy film called Shadowboxer. I get to make love with Cuba Gooding Jr. It was fabulous.”

That’s a dark, violent film. What attracted you to it?

“It was the director, he persuaded me. Lee Daniels [producer of Monster’s Ball and The Woodsman]. He calls it a homo-ghetto-euro-movie, because he’s very gay and very black. So, you know, I thought it would be cool to do a movie with a gay black director. And it was fantastic. Macy Gray was in it, Mo'Nique - so I was in this wonderful American black world that was just fantastic.”


© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Saturday

Imre Kertesz: Write to life


2002 Nobel Prize winner for literature Imre Kertesz talks about the film adaptation fo his Holocaust novel Fateless.
Berlin, 2005


Did you have any reservations about your semi-autobiographical novel, Fateless, being turned into a movie?


“In the beginning I had a lot of reservations, I must admit, and then I changed my mind and decided to write the screenplay myself. Then I was able to put an end to all my concerns. So I’m happy with the outcome.”


What were your reservations?


“Of course there were some reservations on my part because a film is a completely different genre and I didn’t want the novel, and the structure of the novel, to be changed in any way. So I think this is just a basic instinct on the part of writers.”


How did you approach the screenplay in order to retain the integrity of the novel’s structure?


“Right from the beginning onwards, it was impossible to use the same language I used in the novel in the film as well, or to transform it or transfer it in any way. That was simply inconceivable. In the novel I use a rather fictitious, analytical, and kind of reluctant language which cannot be used in film in any way. So what I tried to do was to translate one layer of the story of the novel into the film. I wanted to pick up the narrative and focus on a linear development in the film, by telling the story of a person who loses his personality.”


Does the actor in the film look like the hero in the novel, or like you at that age?


“The hero in the novel doesn’t have much in common with me. I gave him a lot of my own personal history but we differ significantly in nature. And the main actor in the film, who is a boy like an angel, also doesn’t have very much in common with me.”


The boy survives by conforming to the concentration camp system. Is our ability to adapt a weakness as well as a strength? It was that conformist nature which, in a sense, allowed the Holocaust to happen, as well enabling people like the boy to survive.


“It always depends on your personal viewpoint and your personal angle. It is positive in the sense that people are simply able to conform to almost anything which helps them to survive. But you can also look at it from a negative viewpoint by saying that people are able to conform almost completely.”


Yes, the ability which enables him/you to survive also brought about the Holocaust in a way, didn’t it, because many people adapted to Nazism?


“Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a very interesting question that an old English writer, Mr Sterne, once put to himself: did he use his suffering and his pain well enough? And that is also a question that people put to themselves after having gone through a concentration camp, for example. Does it contribute to your life, does it enrich your personality, or do you lose a lot? That always depends on the individual.”


At the end of the film the character expresses nostalgia for the camps. Is this something mankind needs or is it a particular nostalgia of this character?


“I think it’s generally true to say this is the case and it’s nothing unusual. If somebody was imprisoned in a labour camp for a long time, once he’s released the feeling of freedom and liberty leaves him too much space that he actually starts to yearn for those times when he was captured and when he was locked up. So this nostalgia, which refers to a written passage at the end of the novel, reflects a certain kind of upheaval of writing on the part of this young boy. Now, he’s travelling this world of confusion, this boy, on his way home. He’s full of disgust and disdain because he doesn’t understand the world anymore, and therefore he’s longing for the times when he was still locked up in the concentration camp. We, as viewers, don’t know whether he feels like going back because the feeling of upheaval is stirred by the heat of the moment, or whether this is of a more general nature.”


Are these invented emotions or did you experience these feelings?


“I personally do not remember the feelings that I had back then. But in the novel, the hero was supposed to feel homesick in a way.”


How much did you contribute to the production of the film?


“I was not involved in the filmmaking at all and I was not contributing to selecting the actors either. I think the director was more apt to do that and, honestly speaking, I’m clueless concerning the Hungarian actors and their specific features or capabilities. So I didn’t want to interfere either when the film was shot, because that’s always the wrong place to be for a writer. He’s always in the way. So I stayed away.”


Three years ago your screenplay was distributed in Vienna with the title Step By Step. 100,000 copies of it were distributed. Was it exactly the screenplay that was used for this film, or how much of it was amended and edited?


“That’s exactly the one we used. The test was not amended.”


You have talked about the “Auschwitz disease” and I'd like to know whether you consider this to be a condition which is curable? Also, has anything been learned from these events, in your opinion?


“It always depends. It depends on your individual personality. There are some people who suffer from this disease for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these events.”


Which group do you consider yourself to be in?


“[Laughs] I’m a writer, so I don’t belong to any one of these three categories, because my metabolism with reality differs significantly from the metabolism of most of the people you normally meet. I view my experience as being raw material and I process it in the process of writing. And as I go along, I get rid of this experience. You know, this is how I go on and on and on and on, until I reach a stage, as a writer, where I will have run out of raw material. Then it’s time to die. Just like the fate of Sisyphus, which I described at the end of my novel called Fiasco, there is this man standing on a rock with three gravel stones in his pocket, and he’s on his way home.”


Lajos Koltai, the film’s director, says the boy experiences a kind of beauty while spending time in the concentration camp. Do you agree with that?


“Yes, I very much share this particular view, because that is part of the whole story. Nature remains unchanged no matter what. The sun is always there, shining. There are the trees bearing fruit. Although I’m not the one who can pick them, they’re there. And the more beautiful nature, the stronger is the horror and pain.”


This film is more neutral, emotionally speaking, than Hollywood films like Schindler’s List. Do you believe that this is a better way to deal with this kind of subject matter?


“Yes, I think it really makes sense to be a bit more neutral, because if you’re too emotional you won’t get anywhere really. People keep on complaining, grumbling, but nobody wants to listen to them. That’s the problem. You have to find the right format, especially if you want to convey a message that relates to so much significant personal experience. If you want to reach out you have to find a different way. You have to stop complaining, you have to stop asking for people’s compassion, because that won’t get you anywhere.”


© Stephen Applebaum, 2007

Wednesday

Joe Dante: "I see it as the dissolution of what used to be the meaning of my country. It’s a sorry sight."

Unlike his President, and target, film-maker Joe Dante doesn't take prisoners. He talks about Homecoming, his contribution to the Masters of Horror series, and the real life horrors bedevilling his homeland.
London, 2006



Were you surprised by the level of freedom you were given on this?

“Well, no actually. The series this is part of is not a political series, it’s 13 episodes directed by different horror movie directors, and because there wasn’t a great deal of money or time, the trade-off was that we were promised creative freedom to do whatever we wanted. So while most of the directors took that as a sign that they could push the envelope for the graphic content of the shows, it seemed to me that it was an opportunity that I wasn’t going to find anywhere else, which was I had a whole hour to play with and no one telling me what to do. So my friend, the screenwriter Sam Hamm [Batman], and I came up with this idea of doing a piece about the war, which no one else seemed to be covering dramatically, so we managed to sneak this by everybody.”

What was the producers’ reaction when you showed them the script?

“Initially we had a short story called Death and Suffrage, which is a Monkey’s Paw type story, although the hook in the story is gun control, not the war. When we submitted that story I think the producers were a little confused and they didn’t understand how we were going to turn this into a Masters of Horror episode. But once they read the script they were completely onboard with it."

So they had no problem with the political content at all? The film deals with these issues more directly than anything else that’s come out of America, or how we often think these issues are debated in America.

“Well that’s true. And usually, certainly in the horror movie genre, the messages are coded. Usually there’s metaphors and symbols, but it seemed to me that this issue was so strong that it needed to be blunt. So we made it as obvious as we could make it without naming real names."

Before the opportunity to do this arose, had you wanted to do something about the war?

"Well I had wanted to see something done. I don’t know if I wanted necessarily to be the one to do it. But it just seemed to me that the political situation here in America is so volatile and so dire that it demanded some kind of dramatic examination and it just wasn’t getting much. There have been a couple of movies – Syriana, and Goodnight, and Good Luck, which is set in the 50s – which sort of grapple around the edges of these stories, but this big elephant in the room is this war; people are dying every day and it’s sort of shunted off to a couple of announcements every day of how many more people are dead, and otherwise people go on with their lives. That just didn’t seem right to me.”

There’s been a lot of press recently about how films like Syriana, Goodnight, and Good Luck, and Jarhead perhaps herald a return to the overt political filmmaking of Hollywood in the 70s. Do you think that is the case? Do you think it’s possible?

“No, it’s not. I don’t believe that. Jarhead is not a political film. The two George Clooney pictures [Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck], I mean he is one of two people in Hollywood who is really willing to put his money were his mouth is. His pictures do have a point and they do have an agenda, and I think that’s great. But for the most part that’s not considered a safe bet commercially, because obviously you’re going to offend half the audience. So I don’t see a groundswell of new political films being made. There is a picture by the Weitz brothers called American Dreamz, which is a satire, which I understand has a lot of contemporary relevance, but I haven’t seen it.”

You’ve said that if you want to see what a country is really thinking, look at its horror films. Is this because they work on an unconscious level?

“Well it seems to be related to turbulence. Whenever times are rough, people seem to want to see horror films. Now I don’t know whether the appeal is seeing someone who has worse problems than you do, or just that there’s a darkness to the national mood. But you have to keep remembering that traditionally the audience for horror films is young. Even in the 30s and 40s, those pictures were made for younger audiences generally. And I think partly that’s because the idea of risking death and going on a scary ride is a lot easier when you’re far away from death, when it’s not staring you in the face. When audiences get older they tend to be a little bit more circumspect about wanting to confront death every day. So I think horror movies have been, and always will be, a young person’s genre. Young males.”

Films like Eli Roth’s Hostel, which is doing very well in America at the moment, and Rob Zombies Devil’s Rejects are very extreme as they’re a throwback to 1970s horror filmmaking.

“Well they’re progeny of the Chainsaw Massacre. They’ve sprung from that particular well. There were Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left, in the late 70s and early 80s there were a lot of films like that; they were gore films but also torture films. I find it interesting that the rise of movies where people are tortured in horror films is now sort of a post Abu Ghraib phenomenon.”

I was going to ask whether you think there is a connection with the events at Abu Ghraib.

“I think there is. And you can’t discount the jaded factor that people have now seen virtually everything that can be done to a human being on screen, and that’s why Saw, I think, used its premise so cleverly, in that people had to do the mutilating themselves. There’s always going to be a market for this kind of thing. And, I think, as long as times are what they are, you can’t go wrong making a $5 million horror picture.”

There’s been a resurgence of zombie movies since 9/11, beginning, really, with 28 Days Later. Why do you think that has happened?

“Well, you know, these really aren’t zombie movies. Zombie movies began with The White Zombie in 1932 and they were usually West Indian zombies. They were dead natives or dead tribesmen who were used in the sugar mills, and there was kind of a class consciousness sub-plot about all of those pictures. Frankly, it’s been a pretty maligned genre. There’s been very few masterpieces, I Walked with a Zombie being one of the few. But then in 1968, when George Romero made Night of the Living Dead, which was a ghoul movie, not a zombie movie, the appellation of zombie started to adhere to the idea of anybody that was a walking dead person. So as a result with all the Italian imitations of that picture, we ended up with sort of a new genre, which is the zombies who aren’t really the original zombies, they’re just somebody who happens to be alive after being dead. So that has really taken off. There are many more of those films than there ever were of the West Indian zombie movies.”

Since Romero especially these movies have been read as political. Are they or are people just reading things into them?

“Well it’s a very malleable genre. Because you’re dealing with blank slates you can impart whatever motives you want to the zombies and the zombie masters. You got to remember there’s always zombie masters; zombies always have to work for somebody or be after somebody. Land of the Dead, which was not a very successful film here, was widely read as a political film. Critically it was quite well received but for whatever reason the audience stayed away.”

Do people want to see political films?

“I think there are always people who will appreciate political content in a horror film but I don’t think that’s the reason why the pictures are successful. They’re successful because people want to see zombie movies. 28 Days Later came out and revitalised the genre because they now moved fast, and some people complained that the reason the Romero picture didn’t work was because audiences are now used to seeing fast zombies. They don’t want to see shuffling, slow zombies anymore. I don’t know how true that is but it could be that the film was perceived as old fashioned.”

In Matinee you showed an era in filmmaking coming to an end with the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you think the current situation will require a new kind of film to address it, or a stylistic shift?

“No, I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of imitations of Homecoming. It’s really a fluke. It’s a fluke that it got made. It happened to come out at a time when the political situation here is so volatile that it got a lot of attention that it wouldn’t have ordinarily gotten. It was first run in Italy at the Turin Film Festival, and the audience reaction was explosive, they just thought it was the greatest thing since chopped liver. I have a feeling that it came from their surprise at seeing any American-backed entertainment that took this stand. I think they’re so used to not seeing that from America.”

There’s a lot of anger in Homecoming but is there also a lot of frustration precisely because of the way discussion about the war has been squashed?

“I think it’s even more frustrating in that it’s not just been squashed but that the majority of the public just doesn’t seem to give a shit. It’s hard for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s to conceive of the public just turning its back, as they did in Germany in 1933, to what’s going on and saying, ‘You know it’s not my problem. It’s somebody else’s problem. As long as I get my three square meals a day and I can fill up my SUV, I don’t care.’ That’s not the country I grew up in. And, I think those of us who have seen the change, are very disturbed by it.”

Does consumerism have a lot to do with it? You know, people are just happy with their lot and don’t really care what’s going on?

“Look, this is the fattest country in the world. It has more obesity here and more waste. We use up seventy-odd per cent of the world’s resources on twenty-five per cent of the population. I mean it’s a pretty unsustainable model it seems to me, in its current form. Prior administrations used to just put them on the backburner and think that they’d deal with it later. The current administration is actively undoing everything that was ever done ecologically or politically, and trying to turn the country back into what they think it should be, which is a model from like the late 40s and early 50s, which is impossible. It can’t happen. We can’t go back there. But, nonetheless, we’re currently having hearings, a new Supreme Court Justice [Samuel Alito] is probably going to get confirmed, and strike down a number of things that my generation has counted on legally. These 5-to-4 decisions are now not going to be 5-to-4 decisions anymore, and the tenuous grasp that we’ve had on civil liberties issues in this country are going to be overturned. There’s no way around it. These people have the votes, they have the majority, and they’re going to do it, because that’s been their goal. This administration didn’t come in with no agenda. Their agenda was to roll back everything that Roosevelt did and return us, I guess, to Herbert Hooverland.

“And they’re right on target. Despite their massive incompetence and their incredible stupidity they have gambled on the lack of interest in the American public, I guess, or the easy gullibility of the American public, and they’re just pushing through with their agenda and there doesn’t seem to be anybody to stop them.”

Why do you think the American press was so supine?

“I find it perplexing and embarrassing. Edward R. Murrow, wherever he is, I’m sure he’s happy they’re making a movie about him but I can’t think he would be too happy about what’s going on in this country. The press has been complicit in this takeover. I think partly it’s because the right wing were very smart in their moving into the media. Once they perceived it was a liberal media, they wanted to change that, and they have now managed to completely overturn that and the media is now largely conservative. The commentators who are supposedly not taking sides simply bring up White House talking points at every turn. It’s as if they’re all reading from the same playbook, which, of course, they are, because talking points are given out to right-wing hosts and all that. But when you watch a programme like Meet the Press, which is supposed to be a bi-partisan programme, and you see that the moderator is not only involved in the various scandals that are going on but has actively shilled for the Republican Party, it’s pretty astonishing. And the fact that people just sit back and say ‘Oh well, I guess that’s just the way things are,’ it’s astonishing to me. In my day we tried to do something about things like this.”

Was there something quite subversive about the fact that Homecoming was on TV because that’s where a lot of the manufacturing of consent went on for the war?

“Well it was on TV but it was on cable TV, which is not exactly the same as being on TV. That programme could never be aired on a network. There’s no way. First of all, in the majority of situations, you have to take notes from your producers, which we didn’t have to do, but then you have to go out and run the film at some mall somewhere and get cards from teenagers, who will complain that everyone in the movie is too old. We didn’t have to do any of that. As a result it didn’t go through the filter that all network programmes go through, which is why it could never have been on network television. Cable television is a medium people pay for, so you have a somewhat more limited audience. Showtime has a smaller audience than HBO. But originally this series was done as a series of DVDs for Anchor Bay, and I think whatever penetration this is going to make is probably going to come when the DVDs come out.”

George Clooney has said Michael Moore polarises people whereas he wanted to bring people together in debate. You, on the other hand, seem to be very much in the Michael Moore camp.

“I’m afraid so. I think what is interesting is that after his movie came out, which you might recall won a lot of awards overseas -- it’s actually a terrific piece of propaganda -- he was pretty much marginalised. He was vilified, as if the things in the movie weren’t true. You know, you look at the movie today and it’s even more devastating now than when it was new, because we know more. But that approach has been effectively marginalised to the point where you don’t even hear much from Michael Moore anymore. He’s such a lightning bolt for controversy that people don’t bring him up, which I think is a shame.”

How did you decide what to put in and what to leave out, because you seem to be taking on the Republicans’ crimes and misdemeanours one by one, and with the recreation of the banned photographs of the coffins at Dover Air Force Base, their attempts at censorship? With so much to choose from, was the problem deciding what to leave out?

“Well we were basically trying to hit as many points as we could in an hour and still have a story. There was no point in pulling our punches because we only had an hour. And we wanted to make an impression and get press, so it couldn’t be a subtle little story that goes by and people take it to their heart and say, ‘That was a well done little story.’ This had to be in your face. So it’s a very rude film that has a lot of satirical stuff in it, and it also has a lot of images that are very loaded, very powerful. When those soldiers come out from underneath those flags, it’s a very powerful image. And we’re not unmindful of how powerful it was.”

What sort of consideration did you have when you were dealing with the zombies for the families who have lost sons in Iraq or whose sons are currently serving out there?

“Since in any horror film you naturally assume that the monsters are the bad guys, and the tradition is that when people come back from the dead they want to kill you, and they’re bad, obviously we had to turn that around, because these guys are the heroes of the movie. I’m sure it’s an offensive movie for people who have lost people in the war, but we did make a concerted effort to try to be dignified, as much as possible in the circumstances, as far as that aspect of the movie went. But there’s a point beyond which you can’t go: they are zombies and they do have to get shot, and stalk people and do all the horror movie things that people do. So, you know, it was uppermost in our minds how we were going to portray these guys, and I think we ultimately made them sympathetic.”

Where did you decide to draw the line?

“Um, I don’t remember consciously doing that. We may have. But there’s also the pressure of making the film extremely fast and extremely cheaply. It is only 10 days, and you don’t get another day, and you can only have X-number of zombies -- because that’s how many we can afford -- and you can only have X-number of bullet hits – because that’s all we can afford – so you’re constantly working with those kinds of strictures while also saying, ‘Well you don’t want to run this off the rails and you don’t want to get too crazy or too campy or too offensive, or too whatever.’ It’s a fine line. But I think it was a line that Sam and I walked unconsciously. We didn’t really have time to do a lot of deep thinking about it. It’s a very intuitive kind of a movie. It really did spring from convictions. So I think it sort of became what it became and we sort of went along for the ride.”

I guess that nothing you did could really be as obscene as the lies that sent the soldiers to war in the first place.

“Well that was kind of how we felt. When people said, ‘Don’t you think this is in bad taste?’ we said ‘Well yes it is in bad taste. But then our actors they come back from the dead, get shot, and then they go home for dinner every night. And the people in Iraq who are getting shot don’t go home for dinner every night, and I think that’s a lot worse.’”

People on some right-wing websites have criticised you for putting anti-war sentiments into the mouths of the dead soldiers, and said that what you’re doing is as bad as what you’re saying the Republicans do. How do you respond to that? Is there a significant enough number of soldiers that are anti the war for you to legitimately do that?

“Well there are. Certainly John Murtha, who has gotten a lot of ink recently, for saying that he thinks the mission is a disaster and the soldiers should come home is being smeared and vilified. He’s a Republican, he’s a veteran, he’s a respected guy, but as soon as you say something about these guys that they don’t like, their initial reaction is smear, smear, smear, and that’s what they’ve been doing. And there are a number of soldiers who don’t feel that this has been going well. Even people who may have thought it was a good idea at the beginning are looking at where we are with the casualty numbers, with the incredible cost, which, of course, we can’t afford because we don’t have any money; we’ve given it all away and we’re borrowing from China now. If they call in their loans I don’t know what we’re going to do. You couldn’t run a delicatessen the way that these people have run this country without having the Board of Health close you down. And yet for some reason these people are not being closed down, and I don’t understand why.”

Over here a former General who commanded the UN forces in Bosnia has called for the impeachment of Tony Blair. There have also been calls in the States for Bush’s impeachment. What are the chances of that happening?

“Nobody takes it seriously because the media won’t let them. The media doesn’t want to take it seriously and they just poo-poo the whole thing. But, you know, when I did this film there was no spying scandal. That happened afterwards. Everything these people touch turns to shit. The impeachable offences go way beyond their attempts to remake the Constitution. I mean the sheer incompetence with which they’ve botched everything they’ve touched is enough reason to get rid of them. I think they ought to go to jail. I don’t think they should just be impeached, I think these people are war criminals. That’s my opinion. Other people might have a different opinion. That’s fine. Let them go make their movie.”

How were you responding to the news as you were writing this? Were you adding things and taking things out as you were going along? I believe that you had the Gold Star Mom in this before the emergence of Cindy Sheehan.

“Well Cindy Sheehan hadn’t appeared but there was a very compelling figure in Fahrenheit 9/11, a woman who lost her son and had been a supporter of the war and then changed her mind, and was a real person and it was very moving. I think she stood in for a lot of people we figured were out there. Obviously where there are casualties there are mothers and so we put that character in. We had no idea that within a couple of weeks of us writing it all of a sudden Cindy Sheehan would appear and galvanise the movement. Although speaking of smears, there’s another character. As soon as she showed up, it was like ‘Let’s get her.’”

Is her son and the way they try to manipulate him in the film a nod to Jessica Lynch and the way the military tried to use her as a symbol for their cause?

“They do use people that way. They’re so cynical. When I introduced Homecoming in Turin, I very glibly said, ‘Well it’s a horror movie because all the main characters are Republicans,’ which is a cheap shot because these Republicans aren’t the same as the Republicans I grew up with. The word doesn’t even have the same meaning anymore. The actions of the people in the movie are so deeply cynical, and yet I don’t think even touch the surface of how cynical the real people are.”

Yes, you’ve said this is satire but when I looked at Ann Coulter’s website, there was very little difference between what she was saying and how she presents herself and the character Jean Cleaver in your film. For a moment I couldn’t tell whether the site was actually hers or something set up by someone like the Yes Men.

“See the pictures of her in her miniskirts? That’s her website. That’s why I think in our film we’re actually nicer to her than we really should have been. She’s one of those strange, cartoonish, by-products of all this -- a person that has found a way to say the most outrageous things so that they can get more publicity for themselves. When our character is asked if she believes all of this, she says, ‘Well, you know, you say what you have to say.’ I don’t know whether Ann Coulter is really as crazy as she seems or whether it’s just an act, but either way it’s like this sort of sideshow and it makes satire redundant.”

Exactly. When I read her material online I thought you were spot on and there wasn’t much exaggeration there.

“No, no, no, our actress is more attractive, I think.”

I read there were certain things you couldn’t do for legal reasons. Was that why you changed the names of these characters? After all, you kill them, too.

“Not at all. I think it’s distracting to name them after the real people. We named them similarly to the real people but to be able to call that character Jean Cleaver is funny. I think it’s funnier than if you used the real name. And if you do use the real name than you really do open yourself up to lawsuits because then you’re really putting words in people’s mouths, and they can say, ‘I never said that and that’s not me,’ and who needs that anyway?”

How easy was this to cast? Were there people who were put off by the subject matter? Is there still a fear among people of the effect that appearing in something like this could have on their careers?

“There were some people who we went to that didn’t want to get involved with it -- people who you would ordinarily have thought would be on the same political page -- but they would read it and just thought ‘This is just too controversial, there’s going to be a lot of complaints about it and I don’t need this for my image.’ So we didn’t end up using anybody with a big name. We just got good actors.”

Do you think what happened to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who experienced a backlash when she made comments about 9/11, has put people off?

“I don’t think it helps when celebrities are vilified for what they say. I would have thought that you could take a stand by appearing in a film like this but I also understand the downside to it. It’s not like you’re going to get a lot of money, and I don’t know how creatively satisfying it is to make a movie in 10 days, and so for whatever reasons the big names that we went to had other things to do.”

How did you and Sam work together on the screenplay because he’s said he’d never written a horror film before and, of course, you had?

“Well, I don’t know, he wrote the first Batman and that was a horror flick. Sam likes horror pictures and we had actually been kicking around some other ideas for some scripts, and then when this came up we had a couple of short stories we thought would make good episodes but we couldn’t get the rights to them, and then finally time started running out and I said, ‘Let’s just do something of our own. Let’s do something about what’s going on. Let’s do something that’s not werewolves and vampires, like what everybody else is doing.’ So in relatively short order we came up with this take on the original story, which was actually put together very quickly.”

And what did your fellow directors think of the film?

“Um, a number of them were in Turin and seemed to be onboard with it. A couple of them sort of wished they’d maybe done something more substantial than the stories that they did. But on the other hand the whole purpose of the show was to do horror stories. Mine is actually the anomaly of the group.”

After Fahrenheit 9/11 people on the right attacked Michael Moore for being, as they saw it, un-patriotic and anti American.

“It’s a very patriotic movie!”

But what kind of reaction have you had?

“Well, it depends on what side of the fence they’re on. If they tend to agree with you they think it’s good. I’ve had some people agree with me politically but think the movie is bad, and I’ve had people who disagree with the movie politically and think that I’m the worst director who ever lived. Which is fine with me you know? Once it’s out there it’s out there. The trick is getting it out there.”

Because horror is still regarded as a diresputable genre . . .

“Well that’s its strength, actually. That’s one of the reasons its’ still around. There are so few things that are still around that are actually really disreputable.”

But is one drawback of tackling a subject like this in the horror genre that the message doesn’t perhaps gets taken as seriously as it should, because horror is not a “legitimate” genre?

“Well, you know, I don’t think about stuff like that. Directors make movies for themselves. They don’t make movies for anybody else. And if they are making movies for anybody else, they’re making a big mistake, because you’re the audience. The trick is never to do anything that you wouldn’t go see. If you start taking on pictures in genres you don’t like or types of pictures that you feel above or whatever, then you might as well stop working.”

This was never going to screen in the Liberty Film Festival, and people on the Libertus website were making the point that they couldn’t make a film where they blow Howard Dean or Al Franken’s head off [Dante laughs]. But could they?

“Well they could if they wanted.”

Would anyone fund it?

“Would there be anybody to see it is the real question. The Liberty film festival is not the most well attended and popular film festival of all time. It’s true that people on the liberal side of the fence tend to be, I think, somewhat more artistically bent than people who aren’t. Funding of the arts is not really a high priority for people on the other side. What they think we think is art is a crucifix in a bottle of urine [Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ”], and that’s pretty much as far as they want to go with it.”

At the heart of the film is the question why? Why were people sent to war? Why do you think America went to war? Are you with the people in the film seen wearing the No Blood for Oil T-shirts? Is that the statement you’re making?

“I’ll stand by anything in the movie. It’s an attempt to catch a little moment in time. I don’t know what this movie will look like in 10 years, but that wasn’t the point. People said, ‘The going to look so dated,’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, fine.’ The point is to try and catch a moment in time that is here now, and hopefully in a couple of years will be different. Everything that is in there is in service of that. Yeah, I agree with just about everything that’s in the movie. I even believe that Republicans have consciences. The lead character finally sees the errors of his ways. If I didn’t believe that then I wouldn’t have a story. So it’s not all about being bad. I’d be very curious to see what kind of a life, if any, this film will have.”

What were your thoughts as America started on the road to war? A lot of people fell into line but there were . . .

"Well a lot of people fell into line because they were lied to. Now their story is ‘Well we didn’t tell you anything that wasn’t true.’ Well you did leave out some pretty significant details, though. You know, after 9/11 they certainly had a carte blanche to do something. The fact that they took out this particular guy who, for all of his evilness, seemed to be running that part of the world in the way that part of the world needed to be run, apparently, because it was somewhat stable, if he didn’t have all that oil, you can’t convince me that they would have gone in there. Why didn’t they go into North Korea? Why didn’t they go into a bunch of other places where there are bad guys doing bad things to people? It’s because this has all been part of the plan. It’s part of the plan before 9/11.”

There were people who were talking out against the administration, though, like Scott Ritter.

“He was pretty widely discredited. And so was everybody who was saying anything. Listen, we have an administration that doesn’t hear what it doesn’t want to hear. And any time that anybody has come up and said, ‘Look, this is what is really happening and you guys should listen to me,’ they’ve been bounced out on their ear. There’s a whole raft of people that tried to blow the whistle on these guys and got cut off at the knees for it. That’s just not the way it works. They don’t want to hear anything that they don’t want, and that wasn’t what they wanted. What they wanted was, ‘This guy’s got weapons, he’s the worst thing that ever happened, he’s going to blow us up, little children are going to be turned into puddles of gello by this guy and if we don’t go and get him there, he’s going to come and do it here,’’ all that crap. So people bought it.”

It’s amazing that people bought the democracy idea . . .

“No, no, what they bought was a consistently different reason for going into Iraq. First it was the weapons of mass destruction – ‘Oh, he didn’t have any of those.’ So now it’s to bring democracy. To bring democracy? These are the people who said they were going to dance in the streets and throw flowers at us, you know? They didn’t do their homework. They were told there was going to be an insurgency. They were told how difficult it was going to be in a post-war environment and they chose not to listen, because they just didn’t give a shit. They figured ‘Well, we’ll just clean ‘em up.’ Now they’re bogged down like a new Vietnam, the have no way to get out, and they’re just constantly trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes by changing the subject. And it pretty much works. When you’ve got the media, and you’ve got that constant repetition day after day after day of the same lies, then after a while people start to think they’ve heard it so often it must be true.”

But as you remind us in the film there was gerrymandering in Florida, possibly . . .

“Possibly? The first time the guy didn’t even get elected, he got installed [by the Supreme Court].”

I was going to say possibly in Ohio.

“Possibly [sneeringly]. That’s another reason: imagine how frustrating it would be if you thought there was no way to win the election.”

Exactly. What do you think people can do if they are effectively disenfranchised?

“In 1776 I know what they did. I don’t know. I really don’t know. But they aren’t going to be able to do it without the media. Somehow they’ve got to try and get the media back.”

You’re harking back to 1776 with the final shot of the zombie fife and drum corps marching against the Stars and Stripes. It’s a warning and a call to arms.

“Yeah, and it was intentional.”

Are you in any sense optimistic about the future of your country?

“[Laughs] No! How could you look at that movie and say that I’m optimistic? It’s bleak. Bleak!”

Not a lot to look forward to then?

“Well, you know, it’s certainly ‘May you live in interesting times.’ It is that. But I basically see it as the dissolution of what used to be the meaning of my country. I think that’s what I’m watching. It’s a pretty sorry sight.”

Homecoming is available on the Masters of Horror Series 1 - Volume 1 DVD

© Stephen Applebaum, 2007