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Saturday

Director Justin Chadwick on his pre-Mandela excursion into Africa, The First Grader

A former Mau Mau fights for his education in The First Grader, with Mandela star Naomie Harris


The Scotsman, June 21, 2011

The world's oldest primary pupil is the focus for a new film touching on colonial crimes

In April, damning new light was shed on one of the bloodiest episodes in British colonial history. That month four elderly Kenyans, who are claiming compensation from the UK Government for their mistreatment during the Mau Mau uprising 50 years ago, forced the release of undisclosed documents revealing how we abused, tortured and murdered thousands of detainees in a bid to crush the movement for Kenyan independence.

As the Mau Mau veterans await a High Court ruling, a new film, The First Grader, directed by Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), is revisiting the rebellion as part of the true story of Kimani Nganga Maruge.

Maruge, who died in August 2009, made news when he took the Kenyan government's 2003 promise of free primary education for all at face value and, at age 84, demanded a place at his village school in western Kenya.

He got one, thanks to its sympathetic principal, Jane Obinchu (played by Naomie Harris in the film), but not everyone was happy. While some viewed Maruge as an inspirational figure – he would later give an address to the UN on the importance of education – others bitterly complained that at a time when classes were heavily oversubscribed an old man had deprived a child of a place. Some even claimed that Marugem a former Mau Mau fighter, and Obinchu were pocketing donations on the back of international interest in his story (they weren't) and demanded a cut.

"People attacked Jane's house, they abused her," says Chadwick. "She herself said she went out on a real limb… and the consequences of that were great. She lost her job. Her husband lost work."

Nothing, however, could crush Maruge's spirit or his desire to learn. And when Chadwick flew to Kenya to meet him in March 2009, after reading screenwriter Ann Peacock's loosely structured take on the story, he found a man who was still full of life, despite being in a Nairobi hospice for displaced persons, with cancer. "He was 89, he was very sick, but he had amazing energy," Chadwick recalls. "I think he responded (to me] because I went in with two guys that were Kikuyu, which is the same tribe as him. So immediately he wanted to talk."

Their first encounter convinced Chadwick that they had to make the film in Kenya, and not in the more film-friendly South Africa, as the producers were planning. "I just phoned the BBC that night and said, 'I've got to stay. Please let me stay.'" Persuaded, no doubt, by his passion, they agreed.

Unlike Chadwick's grandfather, who had been tight-lipped about experiences in the Second World War ("He disappeared on the first day of war and came back six years later, and never, ever, talked about what he'd been through to any of us"), Maruge was eager to discuss his past.

"This is partly why I was drawn to this," he says. "Because here was a man who was in his eighties, that wanted to tell his story, that wanted to understand what happened to him."

Some of what happened to him is revealed in the film as brief but powerful flashbacks that come directly from Maruge's testimony. He had lost his wife and children, and been "incarcerated for eight years, and tortured every single day for those eight years", as the British tried, unsuccessfully, says Chadwick, to extract the blood oath that he had made to the land as a Mau Mau. "They would not utter a word of that to their wives, to their children, anybody. And even at 89, he wouldn't utter a word or phrase from that oath."

Maruge showed him the evidence of what he'd endured. "He had no toes, they cracked his skull, he had scars on his back. He personally showed those things to me. When you have a man sitting there, holding on to you, and telling you these stories, I felt a responsibility to do them (in the film]."
He says he isn't blind to the horrific violence perpetrated by the Mau Mau, against whites and their own people, but asks: "Who knew that 1.2 million Kikuyu had been incarcerated in concentration camps?"

Even in Africa, the team of young Kenyans Chadwick worked with were largely ignorant of what had taken place. When Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya's first premier in 1963, Chadwick explains, he had said: "'We forget the past, we move on' – and a lot of Kenyans had done that. What happened was that (his team] started – over the weeks that I was going in to see Maruge, going in to the school that I selected (to film in] – going back to their parents, to their grandparents, and opening up these conversations about these very upsetting times. It helped them understand their grandparents. It helped the young understand the old."

The film talks about the danger of not learning from the past, which seems to be something the British signally failed to do, because less than a decade after the end of the Second World War, we had built a network of detention camps across Kenya.

"How could we do that?" asks Chadwick. "There is evidence, with the Mau Mau they brought over (for the court case], that concentration camps happened all over Africa, where they rounded up people and put them in terrible, terrible conditions."

Although Maruge was not directly involved in the current claim for compensation, he knew about it, says Chadwick, and "would have been a part of the movement for that". He was also aware that Barbara Castle had called for Britain to acknowledge its past in the 1970s, but that it had just "been swept under the carpet by everybody". All Maruge wanted, he says, was recognition.

"He'd been an ordinary person, a farmer, who'd seen people systematically pulled from their villages in this kind of frenzied obsession with naming Mau Mau, and he just could not take it any more. I think that made him go off into the bush and become Mau Mau. He just wanted acknowledgement for what had happened and that he was a part of it."

The idea of understanding the past in order to better understand the future, and the role that education plays in, hopefully, making each generation better than the last, runs through The First Grader. Maruge knew education was empowering, and he wanted to learn to read, in English, to be able to understand what politicians said, and to be able to read the Bible, because, says Chadwick, "he didn't trust the preachers". Murage was determined to carry on learning until he had "soil in my ears", and was as good as his word. Even in the hospice he never stopped taking lessons.

"We'd finish a conversation and he'd go, 'Right, where's my teacher? Where is she? You'll have to hold on, I'm having my lesson,'" Chadwick laughs. "So there was this great thirst for education. He was an amazing man."

Copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2013 

Tuesday

Emma Stone Talks The Croods, Breakthroughs And The Dark Side Of The Internet

After a rocky start, Emma Stone broke through with her first film role in the Judd Apatow-produced comedy Superbad. Now one of the Hollywood's brightest rising stars, she talks about her performance as the feisty cave girl Eep, in her first animated feature The Croods, and reveals why she tries not to read about herself online.

This was your first animated feature. Was it what you were expecting?

“The experience was a lot more like traditional acting than I expected. The first year of the project I would go in and I would voice Eep in this higher cartoonish register. And then once I saw some of the animation and I saw her build, it felt like she should have a lower register. So I ended up having to make it a lot truer to life.”

Did you have to record it again?

“Yeah, but they kept elements. And that's part of the difference in animation, too, that you do want to have that range of character in your voice and not necessarily just because you can't express everything physically, even though the animator is incredible and is animating to your facial expressions, a lot of the time.”

Eep's athletic, brave, curious and independent – did you relate?

“Am I athletic? No. Brave? I hope so. You know, I've never been incredibly physically strong. I'm a bit more willowy in build. But I like to think I'm strong in character and in spirit.”

Read the full interview here:  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/emma-stone-dating-andrew-garfield-makes-living-in-la-a-lot-less-fun-8993640.html

Nicolas Cage Talks The Croods And Why Tim Burton's Superman Didn't Fly

The 49-year-old actor has had a prolific career that’s included an Oscar win and four Razzie nominations. He recently played a caveman in animated film The Croods.

Is it true that before he asked you to play a cowardly Neanderthal, Croods producer Jeffrey Katzenberg had asked you to voice Shrek? Yeah, and I’d said: ‘I don’t want to look like that guy.’ Now I wish I had done it. When he showed me pictures of Grug and said: ‘You see how I see you, Nicolas? What do you think of that?’ I had enough presence of mind not to say anything but yes.

Did you see yourself the way he did? No, I have trouble with the idea of living in fear. That’s never been who I am. Grug is an overprotective father and takes it too far, to the point where his family feel like they’re surviving, not living. But any father who cares about the ones he loves is going to worry. I have those feelings too.

What are the two biggest risks you have taken personally and professionally? Did they pay off? Well, in both cases I have no regrets. And yes, in terms of emotional wisdom, I guess they paid off. In my work, the risk was to be a dramatic actor who’s acting like an action hero and that was a challenge because no one thought I could do it. And if you say I can’t do something, I have to do it. And in my personal life, I have been a romantic and I have followed my heart. That can get one into trouble as we all know, three marriages later.

Read the full interview here:  http://metro.co.uk/2013/12/10/nicolas-cage-i-dont-take-criticism-seriously-and-i-dont-take-praise-seriously-both-would-be-a-mistake-4223576/

Friday

Daniel Radcliffe on Life After Hogwarts

Daniel Radcliffe Excels As Allen Ginsberg In Kill Your Darlings

If ever there was an actor who seemed in danger of being trapped by a role, it is Daniel Radcliffe. After playing Harry Potter in eight movies, there cannot be many places on the planet where his name is not associated with the Hogwarts hero. But Radcliffe is refusing to be boxed in, as his new film, Kill Your Darlings, amply demonstrates.

It is all a matter of attitude, he says, when we meet in London. Potter had been “the most incredible opportunity in the world as a start to a career. For me, that’s the only way you can see it,” he explains. “Because otherwise, it becomes whatever everyone else seems to want to see it as, which is a handcuff or a hindrance.”

Read the full story here:  http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-features/113581/there-life-after-potter-and-radcliffe-does-not-miss-a-beat

Thursday

James Corden: Comic Timing

James Corden stars as Britain's Got Talent winner Paul Potts in the comedy drama, One Chance


James Corden didn’t do himself any favours when he allowed the awards and plaudits for Gavin & Stacey to go to his head.

He became, in his own words, brattish and behaved in ways that threatened to flush away the love he’d won with his award-winning sitcom.

The savage reviews for his TV sketch show with pal Mathew Horne and their horror spoof, Lesbian Vampire Killers, made 2009 a chequered year. Corden, though, rallied with a brilliant, Tony-winning performance in the Broadway production (following its acclaimed London run) of the stage farce One Man, Two Guvnors.

‘That was such a gift of a role,’ he says, when we meet in London. ‘I used to say to people, when I was doing it, that it’s not that it plays to my strengths, it ignores my weaknesses.’

Without the show, Corden believes he wouldn’t have ‘even had a look-in at doing Into The Woods’ – a movie of the Sondheim musical being filmed at Shepperton Studios – with the likes of Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp.

And nor, probably, would the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein have tapped him to play Paul Potts in One Chance, a Billy Elliot-like comedy/drama about the diffident, opera-singing Carphone Warehouse salesman who became the first winner of Britain’s Got Talent.

Read the full story here:  http://metro.co.uk/2013/10/25/james-corden-acting-is-such-a-weird-thing-to-want-to-do-its-so-silly-4160319/

Revisiting Robert Greenwald & Walmart: "I am very comfortable with David versus Goliath battles."


Robert Greenwald discusses Wal-Mart, consumerism and what you can do to make a difference.
London, 2006


Do you regard the Wal-Mart: High Cost of Low Price as an extension of the work you did in Uncovered and Outfoxed, in the sense that they are all deconstructions of spin, image-making and doublespeak?

“I think it’s certainly that. Also, what I do is I pursue these things instinctively and sometimes later realise the intellectual framework, and I also think, certainly between Outfoxed and this, there is a very strong line about the negative effects of large multinational corporations: Fox News being the poster child in the media world, and Wal-Mart being the poster child for bad behaviour, but they both have a connection to the issue for all of us, all over the world, about how much power we’re going to allow these large corporations to have.”

Are Fox News and Wal-Mart leading what’s been called the ‘race to the bottom’?

“Very much so. And they both have enormous power and money and therefore finding a way to tell a story that can reach people and go against their power and influence is a challenge. But I also am very comfortable with David versus Goliath battles.”

At the start of the new film we see Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott saying that what is important is to tell people the Wal-Mart story, and then what you do is deconstruct that story, in a sense, point by point.

“Yes, we’re definitely . . . I tried to get an interview with Lee Scott. He wouldn’t agree, and then I ultimately thought we’ll put him in the movie anyway and he’ll become our announcer.”

What was their response to your request for an interview because they’ve actually co-operated on a far rosier version of the Wal-Mart story by the director Ron Galloway?

“Basically they said, ‘No’. I kept saying, ’We’ll post everything he says on our website and what a great opportunity for you to reach your critics who you’re always trying to reach.’ But, ultimately they hired some really very, very expensive spin doctors, who treated it as a political campaign rather than as a retailer whose job it is to sell products. So they treated me like an opposition candidate who they didn’t want to engage with, which was really odd, but that’s their choice.”

There is a campaign attached to the film. Was the film conceived as part of a campaign or was the campaign built around it?

“Well they come together. What I’m learning with each of these films is that because they’re about social change then you need to be married to the groups working social change. It’s the reason I don’t put my primary focus into the movie theatres. As much as I love seeing movies at movie theatres and buying popcorn and stuff, if the goal is social change then you need a sort of varied strategy. So we do movie theatres and we do the internet and we do the media campaign, and we do the social groups, and we put all of this together rather than in the more conventional approach, which would have only been movie theatres.”

And does the different viewing experience of seeing it in a context other than a multiplex inspire a better level of debate, and engagement with the issues?

“Well, I certainly think that when films are by design married to the groups working for change, you get a much more substantive focus on what you’re saying. I mean the first time I went to one of my films and saw it at a house party – we have these house parties where people come together and have discussions, and the same thing in the theatre, actually, where we have discussion afterwards – I was astounded at the different experience, because it wasn’t just a matter of going with your date and walking out quickly afterwards to get a drink, or falling asleep with the remote clicker in your hands; people engaged afterwards about what they wanted to do and how they could do things as a function of having experienced the movie. In terms of satisfaction about doing one’s work and people paying attention to it, it was off the charts.”

In this film and Outfoxed there is an effort made to galvanise people to act. After the elections in 2000 and 2004, and the voting scandals in Florida and Ohio, do some people feel like they don’t have a voice and they can’t change things?

“Well, I think it’s even bigger than that. The people that are voting, the percentage, I don’t know in your country but in the United States it keeps dropping. It’s horrible the way people aren’t even engaging in the political process. So I think that it’s important to let people know that democracy is not a spectator sport, that there are many different ways that we can get involved, and should get involved, and really can make a difference getting involved. So my focus is not even so much on the candidates, because I believe the candidates are a function of the issues. If you look at the United States the big social change has always been driven by social movements, not by individual candidates. Whether it was the labour movement or the women’s movement or the civil rights movement, the movements have spawned the candidates, who then took another step if you will. My belief on these films and the social movement work that I do is to encourage people to get involved on the issues they care about, and from that will come the candidate.”

Do you see Wal-Mart as a symptom of something bigger, as an example of a particular culture writ large, or as the disease itself?

“Yes, they are definitely a symptom of – it’s hard to say larger problem because Wal-Mart is so large [laughs] – but there is no question that citizens of the world must deal with large multi-national corporations which now have more effect on many people’s lives than their own governments do. You know the numbers are just staggering now. I’m going to paraphrase this slightly but like the 30 largest economies in the world, 15 of them are private corporations and only 15 of them are nation states. In the United States, corporations, by legal design, are required only to function on maximising profitability. It’s actually against the law for them to have a larger social vision. So over the long tem, and people of all political persuasions are up in arms about this, over the long term there’s no question we have to do deal with that and deal with the fact that corporations, which are legal entities, have been given the rights of people, which is obscene and absurd.”

Were there things that you didn’t know when you started this project and which particularly shocked you?

“Well I knew very little about Wal-Mart, I was incredibly ignorant, so it was a huge learning experience for me. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t know much but it’s also what made making this film so amazing for me, because I’m coming in, in a sense, with the audience’s eyes. So the amount of influence they have over so many people, in so many different ways, made an accumatively huge impact on me and all my colleagues working on the film, and it really gave us this incredible sense of responsibility in terms of trying to do it and trying to do it well, and trying to reach as many people as we could. Because whether you’re a home owner or a worker who’s being exploited, or someone where the environment’s being affected, or working in a sweatshop overseas, or a family business that’s been driven out, Wal-Mart is an equal-opportunity abuser and its spread is quite amazing.”

Obviously you felt it important to show what the people in China are experiencing in the sweatshops. But did you specifically want to open people’s eyes in America? At the beginning of the film someone complains about all the cheap Chinese imports that are coming into the US through Wal-Mart. However, what you show is that the Chinese labourers who produce them are as much victims of Wal-Mart as the Americans who are put out of business.

“Exactly right. In the United States, unfortunately, there’s been a pretty strong anti-China environment, including other workers who have seen the Chinese workers as the enemy. And without being preachy, I felt very strongly that I wanted to make the point that workers, like workers here, are being exploited, and our job is to deal with the multi-national corporation that is leading the race to the bottom, not try and punish the Chinese worker who is trying to do what we’re doing, which is try and make a living and provide for our family.”

Do you think people are in denial about how the low prices they’re paying are achieved?

“Yeah, I think people definitely are in denial and don’t focus on it. You know, we have that little moment in the movie when the lady says she is shocked about the illegal undocumented workers being locked in, and Jon Stewart says, ‘Lady, you just bought a refrigerator for $5!’ There is definitely denial, or productive ignorance in this case.”

Have we effectively been turned into a society of consumers who instinctively go after low prices without really thinking about the reason why those prices are so low and do we somehow have to be broken out of that mindset?

“Yes, we’ve become consumers over citizens and we have to take the citizenship back for all of us.”

Is the problem with something like Wal-Mart that people only really get excited when it’s in their own back yard, not really realising that wherever stores are built they are affected because of the impact on the economy and the influence Wal-Mart has on bringing standards down across the board?

“Absolutely, and that’s a key reason for making the movie. Exactly that.”

For me, one of the most shocking things in the film is not simply the rapacity of Wal-Mart and the way that it targets businesses like an assassin, but that it is aided and abetted by councils through subsidies, in effect failing the small businessman.

“Yes, I think that’s exactly it. And the fact that it’s so amazingly widespread, too. It’s all over the country, all over the world: so many different home owners, so many different workers, so many different family businesses.”

Someone in the film says that once small town quality of life has gone, there’s no getting it back. Do you believe that to be true?

“Well I think you can’t ever turn back the clock. But because I think it is a human instinct to desire community, I think the species will continue to find other ways to do it. Ultimately, for most large things, there is a time when they fall, and I believe the same will be of Wal-Mart. And I think we will find, it’s a larger issue, but I think we will find ways that don’t go backwards but where people do figure out how they can congregate and connect. Again, maybe it’s my space on the internet, just bought by Rupert Murdoch, by the way [laughs at the irony of the owner of Fox owning his web space], or other ways that we haven’t dreamed about as we’re having this conversation, but somebody else is finding that people can come together. But I don’t think you turn back the clock. I don’t think that’s possible.”

You have said that this film was the most demanding project you have ever worked on. Why?

“Well it was the combination of both the size and scope of it, the political demands of taking on something so large, and the creative demands of trying to find a story in an essentially formless situation.”

How did the subject matter inform the approach?

“Well I decided to go small. I felt that the way to deal with something of this enormity was not to use facts and figures or even talking heads, but to go as deeply into the human psyche as possible.”

How did you find the various people you interview? Did you match them with the issues that you wanted to address or did the issues arise out of the interviews?

“Um, it was a combination. There was some we had before and some we found as we were talking to people that they just raised on their own, and we said, ‘Boy, we got to go down this road.’”

How difficult was it to get people to talk on camera given how powerful Wal-Mart is and the way people’s fear becomes a means of control?

“Um, it just is really, really hard, and lots of labour and lots of phone calls, lots of travel, and ultimately we found these amazing folks that were willing to come forward.”

Were people that were no longer employed by Wal-Mart afraid of speaking out?

“Yes, they were.”

What did they fear happening?

“Because they feared they would hurt them get other jobs, they feared they would spread the word about them, they would be blacklisted in the retail industry, they would cause grief among their friends that still worked at Wal-Mart.”

What about people to whom you went for money? Was there any concern raised about what could happen to people who put money into the project?

“Oh yeah, it was horrible. One of the big financiers pulled out at the last minute and I had to borrow several hundred-thousand dollars, which, fortunately, it looks like we’ll be able to pay back.”

Watching the film, I couldn’t help feeling that Wal-Mart increasingly became like a metaphor for the current administration in terms of the way that it uses fear and articulates values it doesn’t put into practice. Was this intentional or is it just one impression one could have?

“Well, you know, with this film, since there are probably more Republicans in the movie than Democrats, I have made a conscious effort to present the material and let people make their own decisions about that.”

Another feeling that comes through it is that Wal-Mart is in some ways an un-American entity and I wonder whether you can comment on that.

“Yes, I do think the company, in the basic way, is leading an attack on some of the best of American values, which are hard work, independence, kind of go-get-‘em attitude, and they’re pulverising that. I think that’s awful.”

They also wrap themselves in the flag and articulate Christian values which they don’t appear to put into practice.

“Yes, and that, I think, is the ultimate hypocrisy.”

Have any of the current Wal-Mart employees that were interviewed in the film suffered because of their participation in the film? I’m thinking of Josh, for instance, the young chap who tried to unionise the tyre express centre at one Wal-Mart.

“Um, well, um, they did attack them. They did like a 30 or 40-page attack on the film, line by line, and they attacked a bunch of these employees and former employees. But fortunately nobody’s been hit by a car.”

Has anyone lost their job that you know of through appearing in this?

“I don’t know of anybody.”

You’re one of the leading people using the internet and new technology as a tool for activism. How has the new technology changed activism, would you say, or at least the possibilities?

“Well I think it’s giving an amazing tool to our side, to progressives, who want to talk about things of substance, and the primary media becoming a 30-second sound-bite media. So I see it as a big plus, if it’s used properly. It’s a tool. It’s a tool to get people together and it’s a tool to explore deeper issues, and I’m excited to be a part of that, really, in a major way.”

Can a film be effective without the sort of campaign with which you’re backing your documentary?

“Um, well I think it can make an impact in the thinking of maybe people and possibly opinion makers. The next step is to take that change in opinion and galvanise it so that it turns into a movement for social change. So I’ve made a decision to do my work more closely connected to that social movement. But I think everyone does what they are comfortable with and what they know how to do. I think all of it’s positive.”



You can learn more about Robert Greenwald at www.robertgreenwald.org


Read Wal-Mart's version of the story at www.walmartfacts.com


Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is available to buy on DVD.





© Stephen Applebaum, 2006



Wednesday

Hugh Jackman: Darkness Visible

Hugh Jackman goes over to the dark side in the harrowing thriller, Prisoners

Hugh Jackman knows how to please an audience. While facing journalists at a press conference for his new thriller, Prisoners, at the Zurich Film Festival recently, he declared that without Switzerland, "I literally wouldn't be here. My parents met at Interlaken. My father was a ski and dance instructor, and completely swept my mother off her 19-year-old feet."

He wasn't actually conceived there - that happened after his English parents emigrated to Australia as "£10 Poms" - but he still thanked the country for his existence. The next night, the love-in continued when the festival presented him with a lifetime achievement award.

Read the full story at:  http://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1339798/hugh-jackman-explores-dark-side-prisoners

Tuesday

Lea Seydoux: Frankly French

Lea Seydoux on the trials of making this year's Palme d'Or winner, Blue is the Warmest Colour

The first time I met Léa Seydoux was at last year’s London Film Festival, when the busy French star was nervously ‘looking forward’ to watching her new film, Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

Making the loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, about a high-school girl’s lesbian love affair with an older, blue-haired art student (Adèle Exarchopoulos and Seydoux respectively), had been ‘extremely difficult’, she said, describing the three-hour, intimately photographed drama’s explicit sex scenes as ‘humiliating’ and ‘gross’ to shoot. ‘You have to be out of your body. It’s too difficult,’ she sighed.

Almost a year to the day, we’re talking on the phone while Seydoux is tied up filming a biopic of Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. It is fair to say a lot has happened in those 12 months.

Read the full story here:  http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/19/lea-seydoux-the-sex-scenes-in-blue-is-the-warmest-colour-were-humiliating-to-shoot-4191389/

Could All is Lost earn JC Chandor another Oscar nomination?

JC Chandor's follow up to Margin Call is an epic battle of man versus nature 

Last year, the writer and director J C Chandor received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Margin Call. The low-budget, multi-­character film was, and arguably still remains, the best attempt to dramatise the beginning of the financial crisis that has plunged many ordinary households in the West into ruin.
While his breathtaking follow-up, All Is Lost, couldn’t be more different – it is virtually wordless, and set entirely at sea – there is, perhaps, a connection. Stripped to the bone narratively and cast-wise, the film’s story of a lone sailor (Robert Redford) struggling to survive in a stricken yacht, feels like an allegory about life post-2008.

For the full story, go to:  http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/robert-redford-confronts-mortality-in-all-is-lost



Friday

Revisiting Robin Williams: His Greatest Comeback

How I got back on the road to recovery
 
Stephen Applebaum
Thursday 9 September 2010
 

What a difference a few years can make.
 

Take the last time I met Robin Williams, for instance. It was 2004, in Berlin, and the Oscar-winning comedy icon was a happily married family man celebrating 21 years of sobriety. If there were any cracks, they weren’t visible. His life seemed enviably blissful.

Like many people, then, I was surprised when Williams checked himself into an alcohol abuse clinic two years later – as, his publicist stated, a “proactive measure” to deal with a drink problem. It was his first time in such a place. When he kicked a cocaine and alcohol habit more than two decades earlier, he did it alone – “easy as that”, he’d said in Berlin. Back then, two factors had compelled his turnaround: the death of his friend John Belushi from an overdose (Williams was one of the last people to see the actor alive; “He was like a bull and the fact that he died scared me,” he said) and the imminent birth of his first son, Zachary.


Fast forward to 2010 and I’m sitting with Williams in a dimly lit room in a London hotel to discuss his new movie, World’s Greatest Dad. Stocky and dressed entirely in black, he looks much as he did in Berlin. His mood, though, is more subdued and reflective. He says he is jet-lagged; I suspect there is more to it than that.


Indeed, the past four or so years must have felt like he was living his own version of the Book of Job. First, there was the drinking. Then, in March 2008, his (second) wife of nearly 19 years, Marsha Garces Williams, filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. And, as if all this wasn’t bad enough, 30 dates into his first stand-up tour in six years – ominously titled Weapons of Self Destruction – he started experiencing breathing difficulties, accompanied by a persistent cough. An angiogram revealed the need for heart surgery. When he hit the road again last September, for a gruelling final 50 dates, it was with a new bovine heart valve, a stack of fresh material – and a heightened appreciation for life and the people around him.


Having worked his problems into his act, up to a point – “It’s an open book with edited areas” – Williams doesn’t flinch when asked how he fell off the wagon. He was working in Alaska, he says, away from his family and friends, and was unable to do the things he enjoys back home, such as taking long bike rides. “All of a sudden I thought, ‘I’ve been 20 years sober, I can drink a little,’” he says.


He gives what is more of a grimace than a smile. “It’s like, ‘I can be somewhat circumcised,’” he says. “It’s that idea that you can have one drink – and no, you can’t. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, ‘Wow!’”
He found ways of covering it up. “I was at a bar and I bought a drink, and the bartender said, ‘I thought you were sober.’ I went, ‘Yeah, this is for a friend.’ And I went behind a pole and …” He mimes slugging a drink. “So you just go and you go and you go, and you lie and you tell yourself all these things, and you think, ‘I can deal with this.’”


Although he was convinced he could battle the bottle again on his own, it became increasingly apparent to people around him that he was in trouble. His family eventually issued an ultimatum that led to his checking into rehab. “And thank God they did,” he says. Zachary has said he believes his father would be dead if he’d continued drinking.


“I would do this thing of drinking for a week and going, ‘Ah, I can stop,’” Williams explains. “So you stop for a week, and then a week later you drink more.” He now realises that, in quitting on his own in the 1980s, he had not addressed the underlying causes. “Finally you have to literally surrender and go, ‘I can’t do this alone’. And that’s where you have to really admit: ‘I’m an alcoholic. I can’t drink.’”


Williams has been married twice. Speaking on a chat show recently, he said that living with a comedian was like “owning a pet cobra”. What exactly did he mean?
“Basically, there’s a certain amount of novelty, and the novelty is showing the cobra to your friends – but comics can be nasty,” he says. “Along with our desperate insecurity, sometimes we’re equipped to be vicious.”


Unsurprisingly, the events of the past few years have made Williams look at his life and work from a new perspective – and anyway, after rehab there weren’t scripts waiting for him. So he did what all stand-ups do when they need money, and went gigging. Yet Weapons of Self Destruction also turned into a way for him to process “all the s**t that had gone on in my life – and then after the heart surgery it became even more kind of, ‘Yeah, baby! You’re alive! You’re alive!”


If his first movie after rehab, Old Dogs, was panned by the critics, World’s Greatest Dad has seen many searching for superlatives. Made on a shoestring budget, and written and directed by Williams’s friend of 30 years, Bobcat Goldthwait, it tells the story of a teacher with an obnoxious son, who realises his dream of connecting with people through his writing in the wake of a family tragedy. To reveal much more would weaken the film’s impact; suffice it to say that, despite the warm and fuzzy title, World’s Greatest Dad is no queasy schmaltz-fest but rather a pitch-black adult comedy in which Williams does his best work since the acclaimed One Hour Photo in 2002.


Some commentators regard the new film as a risk that paid off. Williams, on the other hand, says he never felt safer making a movie, thanks to Goldthwait, who would not move on until they were satisfied with a scene. “This was perfect timing,” he says with enthusiasm. “I needed to do a film like this. I needed to reaffirm that this is what it’s about.”


In the past, his choices have often seemed erratic and wayward, with films such as Jack threatening to obscure the wonderful work he did early in his career, in movies such as The World According to Garp; Good Morning, Vietnam; Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting, for which he won the 1998 Best Supporting Actor Oscar.


With luck, World’s Greatest Dad will mark the beginning of a new phase in his career, while his stint in rehab will hopefully have put him on the road to conquering his addiction once and for all. Like all recovering alcoholics, he knows sobriety is a daily struggle. But he also knows that one need not be ruled by their demons for ever.


Billy Connolly experienced a whole litany of horrors as a child, yet being around him today, Williams laughs, “is the closest thing to walking pot you’ll ever get. If you’re around Billy for more than five minutes you’ll start to feel giddy. He gives me a hope of going, ‘Yeah, there’s a whole other life waiting for you’.”


Originally published in The Herald, 2010

Wednesday

Oliver Hirschbiegel on Diana: No Regrets

Oliver Hirschbiegel scored a hit with a film about the last days of Hitler, but his portrayal of  Princess Diana's affair with the Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, has been attacked by critics and her former lover. Stephen Applebaum met the director at the Zurich Film Festival to find out why.

British film critics lambasted Diana. Do you regret making it?
Were you disappointed by the Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan’s refusal to talk to you?

"I never wanted to speak to him, because the minute you meet the real people you become emotionally involved on a personal level, which alters your vision. I wouldn’t trust myself anymore – and that is a bad thing for a storyteller."


Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/director-of-princess-diana-film-accepts-controversy#ixzz2hGDt2wig

The 57th London Film Festival Opens

BFI 57th London Film Festival 2013

Can the 57th British Film Institute’s London Film Festival (LFF) emulate the success of last year’s edition? The 2012 event – the first to be held under the stewardship of the former director of the Sydney Film Festival, Clare Stewart – was almost a total sell-out, boasting 151,000 attendees, a 13 per cent increase. That was an Olympic year, of course, when the UK was on a high. But with tourism still benefiting from a post-Games bounce, 2013 could be another hit.

The LFF was already in rude health when Stewart was appointed, but the energetic Australian still saw room for improvement. She spread the festival across a larger number of venues, which now total 15, in different parts of the city, and, controversially, divided the programme into nine themed strands: Love, Debate, Dare, Laugh, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Sonic and Family. Although some cineastes protested that this cheapened the event, the Australian insisted that the categories would make the programme’s contents clearer for visitors not au fait with current trends in world cinema, and encourage people to take risks with their choices. Attendance figures and audience feedback from last year suggest that she was right.


Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/nothing-succeeds-like-success-at-bfi-london-film-festival#ixzz2hGBnyvGX

Sunday

9th Zurich Film Festival, Day 3

Scenes from the 9th Zurich Film Festival
 
 
 
 Brazilian Party
 
 
 Dior Party
 
 The Corso Cinema

Monday

Marc Wiese Interview - Camp 14: Total Control Zone

German filmmaker Marc Wiese throws a light on North Korea's labour camp system in the feature documentary, Camp 14: Total Control Zone. At the centre is Shin Dong-hyuk, a young Korean who was born in Camp 14, where he would also have died if he hadn't escaped, in 2005. His tales of horror are given extra weight by Hyuk Kwon, a former officer in Camp 22, and Oh Yang-nam, an ex member of North Korea's secret police.

Marc, is Camp 14: Total Control a film about how people can be conditioned by a system?

"Yes, exactly. There is one scene where Kwon is shown at home. It is 50-60 seconds, and it took me three months to get the access. But it was very important to show that he is a regular family father, like you and me. This raises the question, I say at every Q & A, of: 'Okay, it's very easy to talk about human rights; to live it is another thing. So, how would we react in a system like that?' So Camp 14 is, for me, a film about how a system is able to format three people."

The extent of Shin's conditioning is shocking.

"A little episode: Shin was being beaten every day - and a lot of times he was beaten really badly - so one day I said to him during the research, 'Hey, every day, 20 years, means more than 7000 times.' But he was not, and until today he is not, able to develop a real anger against the guards. He still thinks, 'I'd done something wrong, it was their right to beat me.'"

The line between perpetrator and victim becomes blurred in the film. In that respect it reminded me of Primo Levi's The Grey Zone.
 
"Yeah, it's fascinating. I know Primo Levi very well, and I like his work very much, because it's similar in a way. It's never so simple that you can say you have perpetrators, you have victims. And, of course, for me as a filmmaker it was very, very interesting to work with Shin and go into his world, and begin to learn more and more, and to find out more and more of his way of thinking."

The two guards seem like ordinary people. Is the film a warning, on one level, that under certain conditions, we might all be capable of acting like them?

"No, it's not a warning. A warning is too much. I just want to make people think. I don't want to give a warning. But don't take me the wrong way, it's a film about how the guards are formatted but still, in the end, you have to be able to act like that as a perpetrator. Me, personally, I never say I would be a hero in a system like that, a dictatorship. But, I am convinced that I am not able to rape a woman just because somebody is telling me, or the whole system is showing me, or the reality in the camp is showing me, I can do it.

"So, no, the perpetrators are no warning. I want to make people think with this scene with the family; I want, in a way, to confuse them in that moment. I told my assistant that if we use the interview without the scene, he's like a monster, a Hannibal Lecter, and that makes it very easy for the audience to distance themselves."
Is working with perpetrators something new for you?


"No, I've worked this way in other documentaries. I showed the audience people that appeared very kind and very sympathetic, and they said, 'What? Great guy!' And then suddenly they realised he's a real war criminal. Or they realised, from Palestine, he has sent 21 suicide attackers who blew themselves up in Jerusalem. I like to work that way. The audience has to think about it."

Read the entire interview here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/stephen-applebaum/camp-14-total-control-zone_b_3961984.html




Interview copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2013

Sunday

Zurich Film Festival

Zurich Bound

Launched in 2005, the Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) is a mere infant compared to Venice, the oldest film festival in the world, and Cannes, the glitziest.

Yet, in the short time that it has been operating in Switzerland’s largest metropolis, the ZFF has grown rapidly in size and reputation and now attracts some of the world’s most exciting new and established filmmaking talent.

Possibly because Switzerland has fared better than most European countries during the economic downturn (it has remained outside the eurozone), the budget for this year’s event has been increased, said ZFF’s co-director Nadja Schildknecht, allowing the organiser to scale up the cinematic programme, develop the content, invite a larger number of guests and schedule more industry events.

For the complete story, visit http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/zurich-film-festival-is-on-the-up-and-up#ixzz2fcyk4uoT

Saturday

Camp 14: Total Control Zone

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in a North Korean punishment camp, where he endured appalling brutalities until he escaped, aged 23. Now his story is told in a harrowing documentary

by Stephen Applebaum
The Guardian, September 20, 2013

Documentary-makers generally tackle torture at a distance. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, for instance, introduced us to a charismatic killer from Indonesia's anti-communist genocide who dances the cha-cha on the rooftop where he murdered hundreds of victims almost 50 years earlier. Camp 14: Total Control Zone is different. The German film-maker Marc Wiese's film tells of horrors that could be happening as you read this, in North Korea, in prison camps so vast that they show up on Google Earth.
 
Some are "re-education" facilities, where the inmates can hope to be released after a period of hard labour and immersion in revolutionary doctrine. The "total control zone", however, is a life sentence, with death the only exit.
 

Thursday

Thomas Dolby Illuminates The Invisible Lighthouse

Thomas Dolby moves into filmmaking with the multimedia project, The Invisible Lighthouse.

What is The Invisible Lighthouse about? It’s about this lighthouse that was closed down this year, on Orford Ness, Suffolk, and it pulls together threads from my childhood and things from the local mythology, from the Rendlesham Forest UFO sightings through to the World War II invasion threat.

It sounds very nostalgic. It is, because the closing of the lighthouse has touched on a lot of childhood memories, and made me think about how we amplify and distort them. For example, I remember the beam of the lighthouse being blindingly powerful. It would sweep across the landscape and light up the clouds. But it was quite wimpy at the end and I thought maybe I just invented this thing.



Had you? It turns out that when I was a kid it was 30 times brighter than it was at the end.

You wrote, directed, shot, edited and appeared in the film – you must’ve known what you were doing… I’d never held a camera before, really, but I wrote and directed my early music videos and I love the editing process. And, actually, we’re working with software that has a lot in common with music software. At the same time, I’m not one to read a user manual – I just dived straight in. It was all shot within ten miles of where I live so if I screwed things up, I’d just go out the next day and do it over.

To read the full interview, visit  http://metro.co.uk/2013/09/18/thomas-dolby-my-lighthouse-project-touched-a-collective-sense-of-grief-4036929/

Thursday

Kicking off over level of violence

STEPHEN APPLEBAUM, The West Australian August 22, 2013, 8:59 am
   
The West Australian ©
 
With a title like Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn's 2010 film of Mark Millar's cult comic book was never going to pander to finer sensibilities.
 
Like its source, the movie's tale of an ordinary teen turned wetsuit- wearing crime fighter was funny, foul-mouthed, and filled with deliriously splattery ultra-violence that exposed the phoniness of most Hollywood superhero movies. Bullets and knives did real damage. Characters got hurt. And died.

Oddly, though, it was a C-bomb dropped by Chloe Grace Moretz's 11-year-old assassin Hit-Girl that caused most outrage. Never mind that she also lopped off limbs with a double-edged blade and coolly shot a line of goons in the head.

Read the whole story in The West Australian: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/-/entertainment/18605505/kicking-off-over-level-of-violence/

Wednesday

Review: The Conjuring

Thrills and scares in The Conjuring

Stephen Applebaum

Aug 21, 2013 



The Conjuring
Director: James Wan
Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
***

Ed and his psychic wife, Lorraine, had been involved in the Amityville horror case – which spawned books and movies – and he believed the Perrons’ harrowing experiences were a perfect fit for film. DeRosa-Grund agreed.

Read the full review in The National: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/thrills-and-scares-in-the-conjuring

Tuesday

Peter Sarsgaard: Getting Sleazy In Lovelace

Peter Sarsgaard: Doing sex scenes is uncomfortable. Doing violence is even more uncomfortable


Does your wife Maggie Gyllenhaal like it? Yeah, my wife’s groovy.

An Education and Lovelace suggest you’re drawn to nasty characters. Is that true? I don’t think of the guy in An Education as nasty. He just wants something he can’t have. The guy in Lovelace, Chuck Traynor, suffers from wild insecurity. He never grew up from being six years old and little boys hit out if they don’t like something. The only similarity is I’m an older man and they’re both younger women.

Could you relate to Traynor’s flaws? It’s so easy to tap into feelings such as jealousy and envy, they’re right up any actor’s alley. And everyone has those. You can lie to yourself and say you’re someone who doesn’t have inappropriate desires but it’s about acknowledging that you have and saying that you do.

Read the whole interview in Metro: http://metro.co.uk/2013/08/20/peter-sarsgaard-doing-sex-scenes-is-uncomfortable-doing-violence-is-even-more-uncomfortable-3929525/

Barbie Mariposa & the Fairy Princess DVD launch at ZSL London Zoo, August 18


Barbie comes to life at the ZSL London Zoo
 
Children were wide-eyed with amazement when Barbie visited the Butterfly Paradise at ZSL London on Sunday to celebrate the release of Barbie Mariposa & the Fairy Princess.
 
The new Blu-ray and DVD release offers a classic computer-animated tale of good  versus evil, filled with action, slapstick comedy, music and dancing.
 
As well as watching the film, the throng of excited youngsters invited to the special event at the Regent's Park attraction had their picture taken with Barbie, and enjoyed designing personalised jewellery boxes and face painting, among other activities.
 
Meanwhile, Barbie opened her exclusive Mariposa Butterfly Trail at the Zoo, wearing a bespoke dress made in colours known to appeal to butterflies. Its attractiveness to the insects was further enhanced with various natural oils - including Lavender, Heliotrope and Sweet William - and ultra-violet patterns invisible to the human eye.
 
Until August 22, the Mariposa Butterfly Trail transforms the ZSL London Zoo Woodland Walk into a magical space for children and parents to explore.

Nestled in the heart of the Zoo, visitors will find out lots of fun facts about butterflies and are then encouraged to end the trail at the Zoo’s Butterfly Paradise. The giant caterpillar-shaped enclosure contains hundreds of butterflies from the tropics of South-East Asia, Central and South America and East Africa.

A free limited-edition spotter sheet that encourages children to find six specially hidden butterflies, including the stunning Barbie Mariposa butterfly, is available from the entrance gate.



Barbie Mariposa & the Fairy Princess is released on August 26
 
Certificate: U
Format: DVD and Blu-ray
RRP: £10.99 (DVD)/ £17.99 (Blu-ray)


For information about London Zoo visit their website:
 
http://www.zsl.org/zsl-london-zoo/



Copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2013