Daily Archives: May 6, 2008

Nonfiction Captures Life on an Errol Morris Film Set

Interviews

What happens when a documentary photographer who has developed his own fly-on-the-wall approach to his subjects is invited into the bizarre, disturbing and humorous world of a filmmaker who tells true stories through the use of reenacted scenes? The interesting result is Nonfiction, acclaimed photographer Nubar Alexanian’s collection of more than 70 beautiful and unnerving black-and-white photographs from the sets of Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris‘ films, including Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death and his latest project, Standard Operating Procedure, about the scandalous prison photographs from Abu Ghraib prison. In conjunction with a forthcoming piece on Morris and the film, I conducted an email interview with Alexanian about Nonfiction, and his impressions of and collaborations with the filmmaker. To wit:

Brent Simon: Have you ever discussed — broadly, in more theoretical terms — composition with Errol, and if so, and/or based on your own judgments, what has he indicated as a unifying style or vision in the structuring of his work?

Nubar Alexanian: Excellent question, although Errol and I have never discussed this. Since film and stills have different requirements in terms of style and vision, it’s an enormous topic. In my work on Errol’s sets, the most important thing has always been the unlimited access he has provided. This is highly unusual on any film set, for the still photographer to roam freely. This allowed me to produce photographs that describe my experience of what I see in front of my camera.  In terms of my still photographs from the set of Standard Operating Procedure, the comments I hear most of the time have been: “I’ve never seen photographs like this,” or, “I really loved looking at your photographs, until I realized what I was looking at.”

BS: Which of Errol’s film sets that you’ve visited has provided the most amusement? Strangeness?

NA: All of Errol’s sets are both amusing and strange. The set of Standard Operating Procedure was strange because he created an exact duplicate of the cell block of Abu Ghraib. So all of us working on the set were in Abu Ghraib prison, and we were not.  This was, in part, due to the fact that the events of Abu Ghraib have been part of our recent history.

BS: Was there a sense of the Abu Ghraib recreations — a standard part of Errol’s films — for Standard Operating Procedure being somehow different from previous reenactments?

NA: Yes. These reenactments were much more complex and exact. Errol had a military expert on set to make sure the reenactments of water board were exact and precise.

BS: I’m intrigued by the notion of sought-after ambiguity in still photographs, and how that principle informs Errol’s work as well. To your mind and in your experience, does it? Or is this achieved more through the post-production manipulation (sound, editing, etc.) specific to film?

NA: Although I believe that ambiguity is the well that feeds still photographs, it’s not really something that can be actively sought after, not while you’re shooting. Errol is interested in irony; I am interested in ambiguity. This is not an semantic difference so much as a difference in the requirements of the mediums we work in. This is a complex issue, which I’m happy to discuss if you’d like to pursue it.

BS: What are any other impressions you might have of Errol as an artist?

NA: Standard Operating Procedure is a movie about a subject we all know something about, that the press thinks it’s covered. But what Errol Morris has is the truth.

For more with Errol Morris, click here. To purchase the book Nonfiction via Amazon, meanwhile, click here.

First Sunday

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

First Sunday costars Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan teamed up previously… sort of. In 2005’s Cube-fronted Are We There Yet?, erstwhile Saturday Night Live player Morgan voiced a Satchel Paige bobblehead doll that was of special importance to Cube’s character, a sports memorabilia dealer. Writer-director David Talbert’s First Sunday, though, is a much better pairing of their yin-and-yang energy, casting the duo as reluctant thieves who find their hand called after trying to stick up a church.

It’s a steamy summer day in inner-city Baltimore when Durell Washington (Cube) learns that his baby mama (Regina Hall) plans to take his son to Atlanta to live unless Durrell can come up with $17,000 to help her keep her hair salon afloat. A dedicated if chronically underemployed father, Durrell has spent years trying to give his boy better chances in life than he had — trying to turn his gift for tinkering into a full-time job, and all the while resisting the harebrained criminal schemes of his lifelong pal, LeeJohn Jackson (Morgan).

In a moment of weakness, though, he agrees to help LeeJohn deliver a truckload of stolen wheelchairs for a local thug. The job ends in chaos, and arrest, and Durrell and LeeJohn are sentenced to 5,000 hours of community service. While the aforementioned thug wants $12,000 for his undelivered wheelchairs, Durrell is more concerned with the pressing demand of money that will keep his son in town, and thus close to him. Rationalizing that the Lord helps those who help themselves, Durrell eventually decides to help himself to the neighborhood church’s building fund.

LeeJohn joins him, but the two down-on-their-luck men are dismayed to discover the cash has already been stolen, so they hold the congregation hostage in a Hail Mary attempt to learn who amongst the supposedly righteous has already taken their targeted loot. Katt Williams, Chi McBride, Michael Beach, Rickey Smiley, Keith David, Loretta Divine, Malinda Williams and two-time Flavor of Love reject and certified hot mess Tiffany “New York” Pollard also appear.

Morgan and Cube are of course basically playing the same, most popular versions of themselves that they’ve traded on for years of screen work, but what works here is that First Sunday is (fairly) realistically pitched; the amount of money Durrell needs may be in the savings accounts of many members of the middle-class, or at least somewhat within reach, but it’s just not a reality for Durrell. This isn’t the reinvention of the wheel, of course, but Talbert takes great care with his characters to present them as real people with real needs and motivations, not merely shrieking joke peddlers whose rationale shifts with each new scene. The injection of the additional mystery of the missing money, meanwhile, gives the proceedings a slight Clue-type bent, and the movie’s gifted ensemble is more than game in teasing this set-up along.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, First Sunday is presented in anamorphic widescreen, and comes with a bevy of supplemental extras, kicked off by a feature-length audio commentary track with writer-director Talbert, who comes across as supremely humble. A 16-minute making-of featurette includes cast and crew interviews — many from the movie’s Long Beach location shoot set — and does a good job in such a short period of time of hitting all the bases with respect to the project’s history. Cinematographer Alan Casso, meanwhile, talks about lighting the movie as more of a drama than a comedy, and “letting shadows fall where they may.”

Running four-plus minutes, a gag reel showcases plenty of Williams’ improvisations, and finds a crew member amusingly exhorting Cube by quoting one of his rap rhymes (“You can do it, put your back into it!”). There are also a couple outtakes and deleted scenes with optional commentary; again, most of these showcase Williams’ snippy choir teacher, though the aforementioned Pollard, guesting as a bickering client of  Durrell’s hairdresser ex-girlfriend, also makes an appearance here. Most unique and moving, though, is a three-minute wrap speech by Talbert after completion of principal photography; the playwright and son of a pastor gets choked up talking about his affection for his cast (name-checking them along with Poitier, Cosby and Pryor), and this nakedly emotional glimpse behind the curtain of production is a cool addition.

Also, though it’s touted in accompanying print materials as being only part of the movie’s Blu-ray release, there’s also an optional “Almighty Version” fact track, which includes pop-up, subtitled, random trivia about the cast and film. Some of this is very broad and pointless, but other tidbits point out location filming (Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, on Pico Boulevard, serves as the restaurant in which Durrell and LeeJohn hatch their scheme) and other anecdotes that are cool in particular for Los Angeles-based fans of Cube and Morgan. To view the movie’s trailer, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)