Charlie Kaufman Gets Animated

Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tom Noonan talk about the Oscar nominated animated feature, Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman is “a genius”, enthuses actor Tom Noonan. He has “an imagination unlike anyone,” gushes actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. We're talking at the Venice Film Festival, where Kaufman's second directorial outing, Anomalisa, has just screened, and their comments are irrefutable.

Co-directing with Duke Johnson, Anomalisa takes Kaufman into the world of stop-motion animation, with stunning results. However, the Being John Malkovitch writer hasn't suddenly gone child-friendly. Anomalisa's story of Michael, a depressed inspirational speaker who has a brief encounter with Lisa, a shy telesales agent, touches on grown-up themes, is peppered with salty dialogue, and features full-on puppet sex.

Anomalisa began as a stage play read live by Noonan, Jason Leigh and David Thewlis. When Johnson received the script, he was thrilled. “I could see how it could be stop-motion in the sense that it wasn’t specific to anything," he says. "And I thought it would be really exciting because it wasn't like anything I had seen before in that medium.”

Taking “the pulse” of a couple of studios, Johnson realised they'd have to fund the project independently. Studios are conservative by nature, agrees Kaufman. “As an executive you get fired for making an eccentric decision that doesn't work . . . If you make a superhero movie and it doesn't work, you were right to try.”

He started talking to Johnson about how to translate the play following the launch of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign to raise seed money. Left alone, they were able to follow their own vision. Using 3D printed facial components, expressive lead characters were created. When naked, Lisa (Jason Leigh) and Michael (Thewlis) look like animated Ron Mueck sculptures. They had to be “fleshy”, says Kaufman. “Not idealised. Just real human.”

In a typically Kaufmanesque touch, Michael is experiencing a psychological condition based on Fregoli Syndrome (the protagonist of his directorial debut, Synechdoche, New York, had Cotard's Syndrome), which causes him to see everyone (except for Lisa) as the same person. He is bored by life, which Kaufman regards as depression.

“It's like a removal from life, which I experience quite often. I feel like there's a numbness that Michael has that I certainly recognise.”

Explaining his approach to writing characters, Kaufman says: “I think everyone has a mental disorder. I think everyone has got a subjective psychology and just trying to get inside that and create somebody struggling, it seems like the only way to present a human being.”

A talking point of the film is likely to be Lisa and Michael's realistic sex scene. Tender and awkward, it has an erotic charge that the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey could only dream of. Kaufman believes its power comes from us seeing “the entire experience, from the flirtation until the end of the experience. That is unusual in a movie, and I think that is what gives it some of its tenderness and it’s vulnerability.”

This takes the movie deep into adult territory, and reminds us that animation wasn't always for children. When I mention the success of Ralph Bakshi's saucy Fritz the Cat, Kaufman says that while it was released in 1972, “that was a hundred years ago, in terms of what's happened to the culture since then.” Could Anomalisa make a difference?

“If it’s successful there’ll be a hundred Anomalisas,” he says drily. “Until they stop making money.”

Ultimately, Kaufman has never followed a formula, he hates labels (like Kaufmanesque), and has never followed fashion. And he is not about to start now.

“I just keep stumbling. I try to do something new, I don’t exactly know how to do it, and I get frustrated. I get depressed. And I have to keep stumbling because somebody’s paid me money. I can’t stop stumbling. I just keep doing it and eventually have something to turn in, and see what happens.”

One of his strengths is that no matter how strange or surreal his films become, the feelings, anxieties, emotions, and fears that characters like Lisa and Michael experience are always recognisably part of our shared human experience.

“It doesn’t feel foreign,” says Jason Leigh. “He somehow taps into something that is so universal, and yet so out there, that it blows your mind.”

A shorter version of this article appeared in The National

Marty Baron Discusses The Story Behind Spotlight

“I didn’t decide to take on the Catholic Church. I decided to pursue a story"

By Stephen Applebaum, January 29, 2016

One of the hottest contenders for the Best Picture Oscar, Spotlight tells the powerful true story of how the eponymous team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe exposed a decades-long cover-up by the Catholic Church to protect priests guilty of sexually abusing children.

That the investigation took place at all is credited to the Globe's first Jewish editor, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the film), who, on his first day at the paper, saw a story that he felt needed to be pursued.

Baron had come from the Miami Herald and was an unusual appointment. “The newspaper had been accustomed to having people who have a strong connection to Boston be in charge of it,” he tells me from his office at the Washington Post, where he is Executive Editor, “and I think the entire community was accustomed to that as well. I had spent almost no time in the city and so I was labelled an outsider; and made to feel like an outsider.”

While being “somewhat the object of wariness” created discomfort, he had the advantage of being able to “see things through fresh eyes”, he suggests. “I didn't have any attachments to the community at all. I had no allegiances, no obligations as a result of friendship, nothing like that. So I think that allowed me to approach things with some level of distance and objectivity.”

Miami had been somewhere “all kinds of crazy things happen” and he didn't know if Boston would be “as wild and woolly”. However, that quickly changed.

The day before he started work, the Globe ran a story by columnist Eileen McNamara about a priest, John Geoghan, who'd been accused of abusing 80 children. In it, a lawyer for the plaintiff claimed that Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew of the abuse, and yet had allowed the priest to be reassigned to different parishes.

“The response from the Church, via its lawyer, was that these were irresponsible, baseless charges,” says Baron. “So you had duelling commentaries about these serious allegations.”

What intrigued him most was that McNamara said the truth may never be known, because the internal Church documents that might reveal it were under seal and subject to a confidentiality order.

At his first editorial meeting the following day, Baron proposed trying to get the seal lifted through legal channels. He then asked the paper's Spotlight team of investigative journalists to explore whether Geoghan represented a bigger problem.

The probe would bring the reporters and the paper up against the Catholic Church, whose buildings dominate the Boston skyline in the working-class areas where most victims came from, physically illustrating its influence over the life of the city. Baron, however, is not a man to be cowed.

As the editor of his high school newspaper in Florida, he refused to back down over a story that upset the administration. Since then, as well as the Catholic Church, he has stood up to the White House over stories about lapses in Secret Service coverage for the president, and resisted pressure to not publish confidential National Security Agency memos leaked by Edward Snowden.

Neither of his parents, who emigrated from Israel to the United States in the mid 50s, was in journalism. But they had a keen interest in news about the public affairs of their adopted home - “As a matter of routine in our household we'd read a local newspaper and watch the television news” - and this rubbed off on him.

At school he was aware of “people of a certain status in life who felt that they were entitled and privileged”, and says: “I think I've always been conscious of elites in society, and very leery of elites, frankly.”

Today, he sees it as a “special obligation of the news media to hold powerful individuals, powerful institutions, accountable. Because my view is if we don't do it, nobody else will.”

As a result of the movie, people have asked him why he went after the Catholic Church. The question irritates him. “I didn't decide to take on the Catholic Church,” he says firmly. “I decided to pursue a story that was in front of us. It was a journalistic impulse . . . It became apparent to me, fairly quickly, that we had not pursued every possible channel for getting at the truth. And that's my job.”

However, he did insist that they wouldn't publish until they had evidence of institutional malpractice. Simply reporting how many priests were involved would have struck people as sensational, he insists. For him the more powerful questions concerned why they had been allowed to get away with the abuse for so long.

The facts uncovered were so damaging and so shocking that they didn't need to be sensationalised or conveyed with emotive language.

Baron and his team were expecting “blowback” when the first part of their (ultimately Pulitzer-winning) series of reports ran on January 6^th, 2002. “We actually stepped up on the switchboard because we were expecting a lot of criticism, and people to call and complain and accuse us of being anti-Catholic.” Instead, as portrayed in the film, “there was an eerie silence”.

“I think there was a strong feeling of betrayal amongst Catholics in Boston,” offers Baron, “and they were able to feel that sense of betrayal especially acutely because we were able to put in front of them the actual internal Church documents that showed how the Church had deceived, had obstructed, and had ignored this problem for such a long period of time.”

The pain that had been inflicted on children over many years was finally laid bare. Survivors now came forward in huge numbers to relate their stories, achieving what Baron sees as another key part of the “journalistic mission”: breaking the silence.

“I do think that we have to be especially attentive to people who are at the margins of our society, who don't have power, and who have not been given a voice,” he says.

“One of the great lessons of this movie is that people who have been left voiceless can have very powerful things to say, and it's important that we listen to what they have to say. And at times act on it.”

The message could hardly be more timely.

Spotlight is on general release

This story first appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, January 29, 2016

Niklas Frank Discusses His Life And My Nazi Legacy

Read the story online here http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/150258/we-still-live-fathers-evil-legacy

David Leon Talks About Making His Feature-Directoring Debut With 'Orthodox'

Stephen Graham as Benjamin

 As an actor, David Leon has appeared in films including Oliver Stone's Alexander and Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla. His hard-hitting new film Orthodox, starring Stephen Graham as a boxing Orthodox Jew, marks his feature-directing debut.  

Getting people to open their wallets for a first feature is never easy, says actor-turned filmmaker David Leon, whose provocative debut, Orthodox, is playing in the UK Jewish Film Festival. “You know no one is going to give you that opportunity on a silver plate. So you have to find innovative and dynamic ways of working around the system."

He started by making a short version, as “a kind of pilot”, to give potential investors an idea of what the feature-length movie would look and feel like. Also called Orthodox, it starred Stephen Graham (This is England, Broadwalk Empire) as an Orthodox Jew called Benjamin who's alienated himself from his community by becoming a boxer. The short was self-contained and existed in its own right. However, by making the material part of the longer version, Leon, who had gained experience in front of the camera in movies such as Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla and Oliver Stone's Alexander, only needed to raise funding for a 70 minute, rather than a 90 minute, feature. 

Whilst it was a clever (and ultimately successful) strategy, getting a feature off the ground was still difficult. The film's Orthodox Jewish backdrop could be regarded as somewhat niche, but Leon always saw this as a strength. 

“It was my intention that it would be niche,” he says. “I think when you make a micro-budget film like this, you have a responsibility to deal with subject matter that is niche, and probably in an unconventional way, because it is the only thing that allows your story to stand out, quite often."

 Leon was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne and is Jewish on his father's side. His religious upbringing was “moderate”, with neither parent forcing their different point of view on him. “As a consequence, it made me much more inquisitive,” he says. “And as I grew older, I became more intrigued by the conflicts that presented. And there certainly was conflict when my mother and father got together.” 

He describes himself as “half Jewish”, an identification which is “a very personal thing”, he says. He knows that to the Orthodox community he is in no senses Jewish, and this informed some of the feelings surrounding Benjamin's situation in the film. A proud and dedicated family man, he longs to be fully acccepted by his community, but the choices he has made in his life – including marrying a secular woman who converted – and his inability to meet the standards of observance demanded of him, have landed him between worlds. 

His troubles begin when he defies his father and takes up boxing, following a violent anti-Semitic attack. Leon witnessed such an assault on a Hassidic boy by “secular kids” in Stamford Hill. The fact that it happened in liberal, cosmopolitan London made it seem all the more “archaic and barbaric”, he says. 

“What was interesting was that that boy was literally wearing his beliefs on his sleeve. We all believe in various things but we don't all dress in a way that projects that for the world to see, and that's an incredibly brave thing. I wondered whether [the attack] would make him more intent on his values, or whether it could make him question them.” 

That Benjamin's father effectively cuts his son off for (reluctantly) pursuing boxing as a response to his attack, seems extreme.

Leon, though, spent 18 months in Orthodox communities in Newcastle, Gateshead, and north London doing background research for the short and feature, and says he learned that “the idea of one man inflicting pain upon another was frowned upon in the context of the Jewish faith.”

Stephen Graham (Right)

He found this fascinating. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, Jewish men used boxing as way to escape from being part of an underclass, and to assimilate and confront anti-Semitism. The sport turned them into heroes. But times change and Saul's reaction has to be seen in the wider context of the challenges now facing a community whose cultural cohesion, Leon seems to be suggesting, is under threat from modernity. 

“The intention was never to make an observation on the religion,” he explains. “It was much more about the culture. And not just about Jewish culture but about 21^st century culture and the demands that are placed on people within the Orthodox Jewish community as a consequence.”

The community is not monolithic but composed of individuals. And while they may all live under the same umbrella of shared beliefs, “some will believe in certain things more extremely than others”, says Leon. “I think what that does, in this day and age where we have access to information at the touch of a button, particularly to kids and those that have less strength of character, or those that are more inquisitive, is present a real conflict that I think the Orthodox Jewish community has never had before.” 

Benjamin represents this as a character and, in some respects, in the choice of actor playing him. Stephen Graham ties on Tefillin and wears a kippah like he's been doing it all of his life, but he's not Jewish. In fact the question of whether a Jew should play the role never came up, says Leon. 

“In many ways the character is as much secular as he is Jewish, because of the way he chooses to live his life. So there was something interesting, as a film-maker, in taking somebody who is not Jewish and introducing them to that world, because here is a man who to all intents and purposes is not living his life as a Jewish man; he is living his life as a kind of a halfway house.” 

Benjamin's predicament – inspired by someone Leon met – allows the film to reveal some of the different sides of the community, which is portrayed honestly, seemingly accurately, and without sentimentality. It offers people love and security, but can be tough on those who don't observe its practices.

“That was my experience,” says Leon. “The community can be a very safe environment and somewhere people feel very close, and there was a real sense of people looking after one another. But it's fair to say the demands placed on the individual are very restrictive and very unrelenting. And I think if you don't toe the line, you can be cast aside and ostracised.”

Many do meet the demands, of course. For Leon, as a film-maker, however, “those who fall through the cracks and fall by the wayside” are more interesting. 

That said, he stresses that he came away from the process of making Orthodox having encountered a “beautiful feeling of being willing to forgive. There is an unremitting attitude towards forgiveness, and I think that is something that the Jewish faith, particularly, upholds.”

An edited version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, November 13, 2015 

Joshua Oppenheimer on The Look of Silence

THE FOLLOW-UP to Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary film The Act of Killing shows Indonesia is far from healed, he tells Stephen Applebaum

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence returns to the slaughter of around a million supposed Communists in Indonesia in 1965, explored in his disturbing Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing. Whereas that film concentrated on the perpetrators, Oppenheimer’s focus this time is a family who lost a member in the purge, and have suffered in silence ever since.

This is the documentary he always wanted to make. However, when he first started speaking to survivors in the plantation belt outside Medan, in North Sumatra, the workers were warned off by threats from the army. Unable to co-operate themselves, they encouraged Oppenheimer to meet the killers instead.

These men lived without fear. Hailed as heroic defenders of the nation – a narrative, Oppenheimer shows in The Look of Silence, still being taught in schools – they had no shame and, in encounter after encounter, boastfully recounted their grisly atrocities to him in horrifying detail.

Out of these encounters came The Act of Killing, which helped to foster a new openness in the way the mainstream media in Indonesia talked about the events of 1965 and their legacy. The government, though, resisted until the Oscar nomination gave them no choice.

“They said, ‘Look, we understand the killings were a crime against humanity and we will deal with them in our own time,’” says Oppenheimer. “Now the government’s said it’s wrong, how long can they continue to teach history the way we see them do it in The Look of Silence?”

That history is explicitly challenged in the new film by Adi, an optometrist in his mid-forties, whose brother, Ramli, was murdered by a death squad in North Sumatra, two years before he was born.

Oppenheimer first heard about Ramli from the plantation workers. His name “was virtually synonymous with the whole massacre”, he says, because despite being badly wounded, Ramli managed to escape his captors and return to his parents’ house. Tragically, he was recaptured and left for dead in a creek, from where he was heard screaming for help. “That led passers-by to gather. Eventually the death squad came back and killed him. They left his body in the plantation. So his death had witnesses and in that sense was irrefutable.”

Adi was keenly interested in what Oppenheimer was trying to do. “Over the seven years of filming with the perpetrators, 2003-2010, he would watch as much as there was time for,” says the director. “He would visit us in our house in Medan to view rushes from The Act of Killing, and he would watch it with a mixture of devastation, curiosity, anger and distress.”

Oppenheimer always knew there was another film to be made. But also that he’d have to move fast and shoot it before The Act of Killing was released, because afterwards it would be too dangerous for him to return to Indonesia. So, after he’d finished editing The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer set about filming meetings between Adi and some of the perpetrators he’d filmed years earlier. These included Inong Sungai, one of Ramli’s killers, who talks about drinking the blood of his victims to stave off madness, and Amir Siahaan, the commander who oversaw the death squads where the murder took place.

Concerned the men might tip each other off, Oppenheimer worked quickly, filming one confrontation per day. He’d then spend the evenings between meetings with Anwar Congo, the greying killer from The Act of Killing. “I believed that if perpetrators were speaking to each other, Anwar would be told first because everybody knew he had been working with me for years. I know Anwar well enough that I would be able to tell if something was wrong, and we could stop the confrontations then and there."

He let Adi decide whether to reveal his connection to Ramli. Most important was that the perpetrators voluntarily told Adi what they’d told him in 2003/2004. “He had viewed my old footage, so he could’ve confronted them saying, ‘I saw what you said to Joshua,’ but the perpetrators would feel trapped. It was important they know that they told Adi what they did.”

Adi doesn’t want revenge but to see some sign of remorse. Instead, his dignified challenges to the official history and taboo-breaking accusations of murder are met with anger, defensiveness and threats.

In his last confrontation, with the widow of one of Ramli’s killers and her sons, Adi’s quest for some kind of closure is snuffed out as he is stonewalled by the woman’s denials about her husband’s guilt, despite Oppenheimer’s filmed proof and a book the killer wrote about his gruesome activities.

“That’s an important scene,” says Oppenheimer, “because it’s saying to viewers who want a comfortable ending, ‘No, there is a mess lurking under the surface.’ It exposes the tension and fear that cuts across Indonesian society, the abyss of an unspeakable past that divides neighbour from neighbour.”

These tensions and divisions were evident when the film opened in Indonesia. Unlike the release of The Act of Killing, which had begun with closed events, the first screenings of The Look of Silence were sponsored by government bodies (The Jakarta Arts Council and the National Human Rights Commission) and open to the public. However, as the film spread, there was a backlash from the army.

“They organised thugs to threaten to attack the screenings,” says Oppenheimer, “and then used this as an excuse to demand screenings be cancelled. Only when university students in Yogyakarta defied police orders to cancel the screenings, barricading themselves into their campus, did this intimidation end.”

He is clear about what this means: “This is evidence of the army and police’s opposition to addressing the past. This opposition is shared among all who have enriched themselves through corruption and plunder, because they fear that as the truth of their plunder is exposed, people will question the legitimacy of their spoils.”

After shooting The Look of Silence, Adi and his wife and children had to “move thousands of kilometres to protect their safety,” says Oppenheimer, showing that despite some progress in the public discourse, “little has changed”.

The Look of Silence ends messily, but it is truthful. And Oppenheimer hopes that by witnessing – or more to the point, feeling – the truth, viewers will have their eyes, hearts and minds opened further.

“I am confident any human being watching is likely to be touched by Adi and his parents’ experience of 50 years of fear and silence, and even viewers from the army, or from perpetrators’ families, will feel in their bodies how torn the social fabric is, and how urgently needed are truth, reconciliation, and some form of justice and healing.”

Article appeared in The Scotsman June 8, 2015

Related:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/tribunal-opens-hearings-into-mass-killings-in-indonesia/2015/11/10/bc865780-878f-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html