Mother! - The 74th Venice International Film Festival

Mother! Press Conference

Venice Film Festival

"This is my howl to the moon" - Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky - DA

Jennifer Lawrence - JL

Javier Bardem - JB

Michelle Pfeiffer - MP

Darren, you have said the film poured out of you. There is an urgency to it, and a stream of consciousness quality, as we experience it through Jennifer's character. Can you describe this urgency?

DA: “It was a strange experience. Most of my films take many, many years to come to life. Black Swan was 10 years, Noah was 20 years, and this film was five days. It was a strange thing, and I think it came out of living on this planet and seeing what's happening around us, and not being able to do anything. I just have a lot of rage and anger and I wanted to channel it into one emotion, into one feeling, and in five days I wrote the first version of the script. It just sort of poured out of me. And after that I showed it to Jennifer, and Jennifer was really excited by that idea, and suddenly we were making a movie.”

The soundscape in the film is very powerful. How did you work with your sound designer? And how did you work on the colours?

DA: “It was interesting because we started the process working with Johann Johannsson, one of the greatest composers working today, and both of us, as we experimented for months with music, realised that whenever you put music into a scene, it immediately told the audience how to feel. And the entire purpose of Mother! is it's a mystery where you're surprising the audience, you don't know where it's going to go, and we didn't want the audience to ever feel safe because Jennifer's character is constantly trying to find out what is happening to her. Any time you put music in the movie, it leaned into a certain emotion. 

"I've always been interested in sound design and I worked with Craig Henighan, my sound designer on this one like I have the last six ones or so, and it was all about bringing the audience into Mother's point of view. Because I wanted the audience to experience Mother and her take on this invasion that was happening to her, because that was the point of the movie.

“And the design of the film was all about starting in a place and making it very natural and of the Earth, because we were making this big allegory, and then slowly as humanity invade they start to bring in all the different types of colour and materials that are not natural to the planet.”

Jennifer, you're used to playing strong women. Why did you sign up to play a woman playing second fiddle to a man and his needs, and what was it for you to play that?

JL: “It was a completely different character from anything I have done before, but it was also a completely different side of myself that I wasn't in touch with and didn't really know yet. We did a really rigorous rehearsal process for three months, and there was a part of me that Darren really helped me get in touch with. It was difficult. It was the most I've ever had to pull out of myself.”

Darren, about the house. Was it Paradise?

DA: “Look, we all know it, it's an old idea, that something that happens in Beijing affects us in New York City and it affects us in Italy, and you can have a beautiful place like Central Park, in New York, and then you can have Aleppo in Syria, all done by human hand, and yet most of our immediate fights are with our neighbour over where the fence is going to go. So I kind of wanted to take the idea of here we are, on this one home, and to actually reduce it to a home, and say, 'Here is our home.' Because something everyone can identify with is somebody comes over to your home and throws a piece of garbage on your floor, or burns a hole in your carpet with their cigarette, but they don't understand when they throw a piece of paper out on the street. It was very inspired by Luis Bunuel's Exterminating Angel; it took the social structure and stuck them all in one room, and watched it as it sort of unwinded (sic). So the idea was to take and sort of unfold human history. I don't want to give you all the metaphors, but you're well down the path. But the working title we used as a codename, because we didn't want the name to get out, we wanted to be secretive, was Day Six. So if you think about Day Six in your bibles, then you'll kind of figure where the film starts.”

Michelle, can you talk about your character's relationship with Mother?

MP: “I think in a review I read today they described my character as a “gargoyle”, which I rather liked. At first I thought, 'Ooh that's rather insulting', and actually it's kind of good. I guess she is somewhat of an invader but I look at it as if she's Jennifer's guardian angel, and she shows up and awakens her in a way, and becomes a mirror. She immediately sees that there's trouble in Paradise. She's a little older and a little wiser. I think she's trying to help her, in my point of view.”

JL: “I thought it was interesting because during the entire process I kept saying, 'I, Jennifer, would love this character. Somebody who blows into my house.' That's the kind of the personality that I would get along with. But as my character it was so assaulting. My character is so private and so kind of meek that it was very assaulting.”

Darren, when you take on a new project, what do you look for to push yourself as a filmmaker, and what advice would you give to a 20 year old aspiring filmmaker?

DA: “When I was 20, I didn't know what filmmaking was. But the most important thing for filmmaking is persistence and it's also you offering a story that you think is important and original, because that's all you have to offer. If you're trying to create something for a mass audience you'll never do it. You just create the story that you want to tell. That only you can tell.

“With this project, there's never a preconcept of being controversial or being different, or something like that. It's always about something I feel, that comes from inside. That I go, 'Oh that's a really exciting idea.'And I can start to visualise it and I can start to hear it, and I can start to see the actors that can be in it, and it sort of all starts to come to life. And it's usually that passion, that you can't stop thinking about it, that keeps you going. And the result ends up being something the audiences receive, but that is not fully conceived when it all starts.”

One of the metaphors in the film is the vampiric quality of the artist. Javier, do you share that interpretation?

JB: “Yes. I think it's extreme, where the story goes, for us to make a reading out of it. But, as Darren said, there are many readings and it is up to you to choose the one that has the most meaning for you. At the same time it is a relationship between a creator and his creation. Call it a writing piece or a house or the Earth itself. I think it's multilayed and that's the richness of this story.”

Darren, can you talk about women coming undone by the patriarchy in Mother!?

DA: “I don't know if it's the patriarchy; I think it's becoming undone by humanity. I don't blame one gender over the other gender. I think it is about how people are insatiable. There's this endless consumption. As far as influences, I talked about Exterminating Angel. There's also a great children's book called The Giving Tree, which is a huge influence. Bluebeard, the folk tale, was an influence.

"So there were a lot of influences. But none of them really influenced it – it just came out in those five days of fever dream. And then as we tried to understand it, we ran into other influences. Like Edgar Allen Poe, of course. But it all happened in a very unconscious, fever dream type of way. And that, I think, as a result, is why the film feels like a fever. Another major influence was a book called Woman and Nature, it was a book of poetry in the 1970s by this feminist writer named Susan Griffin, who basically, back in the 70s, was making incredible connections about the environment and about feminism, which I didn't know there are actually people out there studying it, thinking about that. ”

What are your interests outside filmmaking and they have any influence on this?

DA: “I'm a pretty avid environmentalist and I'm on the board of directors of the Sierra Club, which is the oldest environmental group in the United States. We went to the Arctic, which is the last piece of wilderness of the United States, to do an expedition, and the day before we were going out we met with the nation whose land it was, the native nation, and it turned out that the chief's sister was this woman named Princess, who was a friend that I met through Sundance 20 years earlier, just randomly I bumped into her, and she told me she was working on a doctorate connecting how aboriginal women are treated and how that's directly connected to how the environment's treated. So that was intriguing and she sort of led me down this path of all these different books about it. So I think there's absolutely a connection between that and stuff I read."

Are you also talking about life after death in the film and are you an optimist about the future of the planet?

 

DA: “If you want to know my understanding of life and death, my big Venice hit The Fountain [said ironically], that's all about life after death. But am I an optimist? I'm completely an optimist about it and that's why I work undyingly to hopefully change things. America is schizophrenic. We go from backing the Paris climate agreement to eight months later pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. It's tragic but in many ways we've revealed who the enemy is. And now we can attack it.”

Where did the stuff, the nightmares, in the film come from, and is this entertainment?

DA:”Just read the newspaper, you know? Really read the newspaper and try to feel what's going on in the newspaper. Look, there's a lot of ways to entertain people. I guarantee that if you ask all those people that were engaged with the film, were they ever bored by the film? I'm pretty sure what the answer would be. There's always going to be a level of taste about how far you can go with it. But it's funny because tonight, at 3am, it's the full moon, which is perfect because I've been saying this is my howl to the moon. So, you know, I think it's a very strong cocktail, and of course there are going to be people that are not going to want that type of an experience, and that's fine. I've been making it clear that this is a rollercoaster ride and only come on it if you're prepared to do the loop-the-loop a few times.”

Mother! is released in the UK on September 15th

Mockingjay - Part 1 Story: The West Australian

 Mockingjay - Part 1 story in The West Australian

Mockingjay - Part 1

The Hunger Games stars talk about saying goodbye to the series

Stephen Applebaum 

 

November 19, 2014   

The release of Mockingjay – Part 1 marks the beginning of the end for the box-office-smashing franchise based on Suzanne Collins’s popular Hunger Games trilogy of novels.
Following a trend set by the ­bisecting of the final Harry Potter tome, Deathly Hallows, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Mockingjay has been split into two movies, made back-to-back during one epic shoot. 

This means that fans will have to wait a year to see the series’ explosive finale. For Jennifer Lawrence, however, playing Katniss Everdeen – the girl from District 12 whose courageous stand on behalf of her younger sister, Prim, put her on a collision course with the repressive ­president of Panem, Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) – is ­already a thing of the past.

“I cried on the first day of our 10-month movie shoot,” she says. “Francis [Lawrence, the director] was like: ‘What’s wrong?’ I said: ‘I can’t stand thinking about it being over.’ He goes: ‘You won’t feel that way in a year.’ He was wrong. I was still crying.”

Mockingjay – Part 1 is the series’ toughest episode yet. Left traumatised by two Hunger Games – televised contests in which children from different districts in the fictitious country of Panem fight for their lives – Katniss is in a dark place. Literally, because she’s been taken to the subterranean District 13 after surviving the events of the second film, Catching Fire, and psychologically and emotionally because of her experiences thus far.

“She felt almost like an entirely different character, because she is so stripped down and feeling so empty,” says Lawrence. “She’s suffered from post-traumatic stress. She wakes up in a district she didn’t even know existed. She’s completely bare and has to rebuild herself.”

Although fiction, the world of The Hunger Games has always touched upon reality. Collins wrote the novels as a way of communicating to a young audience what she had learnt about war from her father, who served in the military. In Mockingjay – Part 1, all-out war looms as a rebellion – ­unwittingly precipitated by Katniss – against Panem’s rulers gathers pace. She reluctantly becomes the face of the revolution and, via a propaganda campaign, a lightning rod for uniting the country’s divided districts. While the story of people rising up against an oppressive regime is nothing new, things are not as black and white as they might ­appear at first.

“War is always messy,” says Francis Lawrence. “It’s much more shades of grey – it’s never very clean and there are always ­consequences.”

A key idea in the films, as in the books, though, is that individuals can make a huge difference. The actress Julianne Moore, a newcomer to the franchise, believes that part of the reason for the success of The Hunger Games comes from Collins’s engagement with questions that are important to adolescents.

“There’s that point in your life where you’re still under your parents’ control and you can see the future and you’re like: ‘Once I’m out there, who am I going to be?’ This series is really about that,” she says. “It’s about a young woman who moves from adolescence into adulthood and she changes the world, which is every kid’s hope.”

Sutherland says that he got involved because he hoped the films could be a “catalyst for young people who had been dormant [politically] for a generation or two, particularly in the United States”.

“The Occupy movement fizzled out because it didn’t have a leader,” he says. “I hope that these films will, in some way, become or create a leader who will put young people together in a way that they will understand.”

 This perhaps sounds a little fanciful and ambitious, but there is no denying that the films are making an impact. In Thailand, for example, protesters have adopted the three-finger, pro-freedom Mockingjay salute in demonstrations against the military junta. Francis Lawrence admits to having mixed feelings about this.

“It is thrilling that something that happens in the movie can become a symbol for people,” he says. “The thing that’s disturbing, though, is that it’s this kind of weird reflection where we’re mirroring what’s happening in the world and suddenly it’s mirroring back.

“When kids start getting arrested for it, there’s a lot more at stake and it takes the thrill, obviously, out of it, and it becomes a lot more dangerous and just makes the feelings much more complex. It’s troubling.”

Be that as it may, with Mockingjay – Part 2 still to come, and a Hunger Games stage show planned for London’s West End, Katniss Everdeen’s influence looks likely to get stronger.

From The National

From the Vault: Director Debra Granik On The Film That Launched Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone

Close To The Bone

Debra Granik discusses her adaptation of Winter's Bone and rising star Jennifer Lawrence

June 2010

The winner of the grand jury and scriptwriting prizes at Sundance in January, Debra Granik’s gritty adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel is a tense, occasionally wrenchingly violent, thriller, wrapped up in a sensitive and sharply observed portrait of an often maligned and misrepresented section of American society.

Like Granik’s only other film, Down to the Bone -- a winner at Sundance in 2004 -- it features a powerful central performance from a soon-to-be-star. Last time it was the then little-known Vera Farmiga (Up In the Air) wowing critics with her raw performance as a working-class mother in upstate New York battling drug addiction. Now it is 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence (Charlize Theron’s daughter in The Burning Plain) who is garnering the plaudits under Granik’s guidance.  

Mixing strength, stubbornness and girlish vulnerability, she plays Ree Dolly, the eldest child of a poverty-stricken family in the Ozark Mountains in south Missouri. Life there is tough at the best of times; however, it becomes even tougher when her crystal-meth dealing father vanishes after putting their home up for bail bond. With a week to eviction, Ree sets out on a dangerous mission to find her missing pa that challenges clan codes and blood ties.

The film’s authentic evocation of Ozark life belies the impression that, on paper at least, Granik and her source material seem mismatched. After all, what could a woman raised in Boston and Washington DC, and who now resides in New York, possibly know about hillbilly life beyond the usual cliches? 

Initially the film-maker drew confidence from the knowledge that the book’s author was a native south Missourian. “But I came to find out that because I’m not from that region, that’s not enough,” she admits.

“I then went down with these very big fears about perpetuating something that’s already had a very rough deal over time, especially in film.” 

That said, there were aspects of Granik’s background that in some ways made her ideally suited to the task of adapting Winter’s Bone in a way that would transcend condescension.

At university she studied documentary film history, and after graduating made educational films for trade unions. While doing the latter she developed an almost ethnographic fascination with the minutiae of other people’s lives, the legacy of which now informs every frame of the new movie.

Basically, Granik did her homework. First, she and her producer scouted the area around Woodrell’s home in south Missouri, and, with the help of the author and his wife, met everyone from singers and storytellers, to scholars, folklorists, and a sheriff who described the devastating impact of crystal-meth in the region. 

Later, they were introduced to someone “embedded” in the Ozark community who agreed to liaise between the film-makers and a dozen families living in the region, so they could look at their properties, observe their lives, and explain what they were trying to achieve with Winter’s Bone. 

As outsiders, Granik says they inevitably made mistakes. And there were a couple of occasions, she recalls, “where we thought we were being so gracious or appropriate or following a certain kind of protocol and then, all of sudden, we got a call saying, ‘We don’t want you to film up here.’

“We had to go on six different visits over a period of two years to ask, progressively, ‘Can we photograph? Can you read the book? We need you to tell us you understand what’s in this book and that it’s still OK.’ We then went back and asked if we could do this and this and this?”

Eventually a family came on board who allowed them to film on their property, while their connections with other families opened up access to more pieces of land. 

“A family compound is called a ‘holler’,” Granik explains, “which usually refers to a piece of land that several members, like grandparents, brothers or sisters, all have houses on. We used one family’s land, primarily, so the houses were the family’s houses, and then the primary house belongs to the little girl that plays Ree’s younger sister.”

Virtually everything appears in Winter’s Bone as the film-makers found it (they even swapped new clothes for lived-in ones); the only things that weren’t real were the firearms, says Granik, because “you can’t use a live gun on set”.

Seeing the number of guns people owned -- 280, she appears to suggest, in one family’s case -- unsettled the director.

“I had to learn about that aspect of hunting culture and that was a really huge awakening for me,” she says, comparing her own experience. “I live in a place where gun control is very vital to a lot of people’s politics and where there’s a lot of anxiety about guns, and a lot of people don’t know how to operate them ... So I came to it with, like, hesitation and fear, and that was a really big challenge for me.” 

It was worth it: Winter’s Bone was a triumph for Granik at Sundance, although the experience proved rather more bitter-sweet for her young lead. Five years earlier, Farmiga had won a special jury prize for her performance in Down to the Bone, and people were now tipping Lawrence to follow in her footsteps. This year, though, the festival did not award an acting prize, and she walked away empty handed. Granik believes that it was a confusing time for the teenager. “I think it screwed with her emotions in some ways,” she sighs. She hopes it was enough for Lawrence to know that people were engaged by her performance, and that she doesn’t need awards to feel validated. “In some ways it’s good not to get awards and keep working, keep hungry, keep going, you know?” 

The actress is undoubtedly an exciting new talent, though whether she will branch out into predominantly more mainstream film-making -- she will next be seen alongside Mel Gibson in Jodie Foster’s quirky The Beaver -- remains to be seen. “I think, personally, what Jennifer wants and what people may want for her, she could run into a disparity there,” says Granik.

“The American system can take people and eat them up, make them It Women and It Girls, and we have such a profound malaise with celebrity culture and that machinery that just gnashes people up, chews them, spits them out, puts them out in a field. I hope she will stay interested in work that really challenges her.”

As for Granik herself, she would not be averse to making a more mainstream, “so-called industry film”, and would put everything she has into it, she says, if the money she made from it could “then be put in a pot to make a film that no-one else is going to greenlight except a bunch of us that work together”.”

So far, though, the “so-called dream way” of making ‘one for them, one for you’, has alluded her. “I have yet to see that kind of arrangement,” she laughs. “God knows, I’d take that like anyone else would.” 

Winter’s Bone could just be the film that gives her that chance.

First published in The Herald, June 2010

X-Men: Days of Future Past, reviewed for The National

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Director: Bryan Singer

Starring: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Peter Dinklage, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen

****

The original X-Men director Bryan Singer returns to the franchise that rescued the superhero genre from the campy, Day-Glo nightmare of Batman & Robin by showing that films based on comic books could be genuinely dramatic, intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, as well as action-packed and fun.

With X-Men: Days of Future Past, he has given fans the boldest and most

ambitious entry so far. Newcomers could find themselves occasionally feeling

lost among the in-jokes and allusions to previous instalments. But even if you

don’t know Blink from Beast, nor fully grasp the roots of the love-hate bromance

between Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, and Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto,

there is enough spectacle, invention and incident to keep even casual viewers

hooked until the film’s eye-popping climax.

Read the review in full here: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/review-x-men-days-of-future-past