German-born director Uwe Boll is a filmmaker in the grand, throwback tradition of the snake-oil showmen of the medium’s traveling circus infancy. Derided by some (okay, many), he’s made 10 genre flicks in the last eight years, challenged dissenting journalists to boxing matches and inspired an online petition to ban him from cinema. In his latest movie — a freewheeling adaptation of the videogame Postal, his first (intentional) comedy since his 1991 debut, German Fried Movie — Boll slaughters dozens of sacred cows, mocks himself by claiming his films are financed with Nazi gold, and finally commits to celluloid the scene that Mike Meyers has been too cowardly to include in any of the Austin Powers films: Verne Troyer being sexually assaulted by monkeys. For New York Magazine‘s Vulture, I spoke with Boll last week about Postal, his failed bid to box Michael Bay and why he’s exactly the right guy to direct the inevitable Grand Theft Auto movie. A sample of the conversation:

Brent Simon: Even though it takes place a very heightened and exaggerated world, Postal has a lot of radical things in it — not just of the gross-out or outrageous variety, but also, say, complicity between George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Was that a sticking point at all for Running With Scissors, the videogame’s production company, and/or potential domestic distributors of the film?

Uwe Boll: Yeah, it was. Running With Scissors in the beginning wanted only a hard rampage movie where a guy flips out, basically, a little like Falling Down meets Taxi Driver. And then I said, “I think that the videogame is cultish and funny, because you can [play as] Bush or bin Laden, and the guy lives in a trailer park with his 500-pound wife, you can use cats as silencers.” I mean, it’s totally absurd, in a way. And I felt that it was an opportunity for me to first of all make something that was funny, but secondly put also a lot of my frustration in the script. So there’s the frustration about myself, and how I get bashed in the Internet about my career and about the reviews, and I used that to put myself in the movie. Then there’s the frustration about the whole political landscape since Sept. 11, like we’re all running in between fundamentalist terror and George Bush craziness, in big danger — not only financial disasters, but who knows what will happen? When I wrote the script, we were almost on the edge of a war with Iran after the unsolved Iraq war. At this point, we all felt like if the Iranian president [says] one wrong thing, there will be the next war starting, and this will end. And at the same time, I wanted to make a comedy like some of my personal favorites, which are all a little bit older, like Naked Gun or Life of Brian, Monty Python-type of stuff. Or Blues Brothers. And I felt like this is all missing in the last few years — that everyone wants to be so politically correct, and all the Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell comedies have their moments, but overall they are all kind of clichéd, they have happy endings where families are back and weddings are the best, and it’s all about being nonpolitical or whatever. I wanted to make a ruthless movie and hit everybody with a hammer. This is what I went for.

For the full New York Magazine piece, click here. More from the interview later in the week, including Boll’s thoughts regarding the American political landscape, and his pending litigation against Billy Zane.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall has been a solid hit ($51 million and counting, domestically) for debut director Nicholas Stoller, who helped screenwriter-star Jason Segel get the story on its legs. Their off-screen friendship will bear more professional fruit, too, in the form of the comedy spec script Five-Year Engagement, which he is attached to helm for Universal.

“It’s kind of an Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally-type story,” says Stoller. “With Sarah Marshall, a lot of what was a little bit frustrating about the narrative of that was that we couldn’t really get into the relationship as it was happening, we were sifting through the wreckage of the relationship. With Five-Year Engagement, we want to watch it implode in real time. It’s kind of that couple we all know that gets engaged and then takes five years to get their shit together and get married. Both myself and Jason, we’d been in relationships — I’m married now, and this is not my wife I’m talking about — for years where it didn’t go anywhere, and it was just almost right. So we kind of wanted to make the movie about a relationship that’s 60 percent right.”

There have been literally dozens of documentaries made about the war in Iraq, and almost without exception they’ve been rather famously ignored by a filmgoing populace seemingly too ground down by a combination of their own economic anxieties and generalized, numbed depression or despair to care about a cinematic rehashing of what they now overwhelmingly judge as a from-day-one fuck-up.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, though, is mad as hell, and thinks others should be too. “I would often say when I was making this movie that I don’t know, really, whether Americans care about torture. I care about it,” he says, stressing the personal pronoun and leaning back in his chair, “but I don’t know whether most people care, in the sense that they tell themselves, ‘Well, it’s an implacable foe, a ruthless enemy, and you have to do what you have to do to win the war.'”



Among other works, Morris is the director behind The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and, perhaps most eerily timely and insightfully, 2003’s The Fog of War, which used former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his decision-making in the waging of the Vietnam War as a prism through which to assay the missteps of American military aggression and intervention. His latest film — the “this movie” referenced above — is entitled Standard Operating Procedure. It’s about a series of photographs at Abu Ghraib prison that changed the world, changed the nature of the Iraq war and changed America’s image of itself, or at least dragged into the light of day the yawning gulf between a nation’s soaring rhetoric and its actions. A hundred years from now, these photographs in all likelihood will define the war in Iraq, in particular three iconic photographs taken by soldiers in the 372nd MP Company — soldier Lynndie England posing with a prisoner on a leash, a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers, and a pyramid of naked prisoners.

In his perspicacious new film, Morris shows how the photographs served as both an exposé and a cover-up — the former because the photographs offered everyday Americans a glimpse of the horror of what was happening at Abu Ghraib, but the latter because they seduced people into thinking what they saw was an aberration limited to a few rouge soldiers working the night-shift. “The photographs became politicized immediately — the left would say one thing, the right would say something else,” Morris says. “And it very, very quickly devolved into an argument about rogue soldiers versus administration policy, without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. It became political football.”

“I wanted to make a movie about… the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs,” Morris continues. “There are lots of other movies to make [and] other stories to tell, including those that involve the higher-ups. I think there’s so much anger and frustration about the war that [people] want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail (former Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld to the wall, and if I haven’t done it they’re just pissed off, like, ‘That’s the job, guy! Why are you fucking around with a bunch of pictures?’ And it’s because I’m actually fascinated by those pictures, and photography, and I’m fascinated by the fact that there are things in front of our eyes that we can’t see. The scary thing about pictures to me is that they can be used to reveal and to hide. They can [both] make you think you know things that you don’t know, and they can certainly show you things that you cannot have seen otherwise.”

While it’s built chiefly around unblinking interviews with the actual subjects at the center of the controversy, Standard Operating Procedure, like most of Morris’ other films, also includes exacting reenactments. Because of this, and also because it’s in part about the inherent ambiguity of still photography — which after all captures only one moment in time, and in subjective fashion — it only stands to reason that the documentary arrives on the heels of Nonfiction, a 100-page book of photographs taken by Nubar Alexanian on the sets of Standard Operating Procedure and other Morris films.

The photographer, who has a relationship with Morris spanning more than 15 years, says he got a feeling early on that this project was different in substantive ways. “Errol 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 [yet] we were not,” says Alexanian. “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 a longer question-and-answer interview with Morris, click here.

Will Ferrell’s proudly lewd period piece basketball comedy Semi-Pro didn’t exactly light up the box office earlier this year, but he’s going even further back in time for director Brad Silberling’s big screen adaptation of Land of the Lost, which he’s shooting this summer for a release next year. “(Costar) Danny McBride and I have been replaced, we’re totally CG characters now,” says Ferrell, jokingly. “But the adventure part of the movie is the straight man to the comedy that we’re doing. It’s actually kind of a perfect backdrop, because you have yet to see that kind of movie with people running throughout it, and realistic looking danger and stakes, and (comedic) comments the whole way through.” He’s right, in a way… I guess Alone in the Dark doesn’t really count.

Danny McBride, Hot Rod scene stealer, star of Paramount Vantage’s forthcoming The Foot Fist Way and a sharer of several cracked scenes with Nick Nolte in this autumn’s very funny Tropic Thunder, won’t be limiting himself to work on the big screen. In fact, after a very busy summer, he’ll be re-teaming with Jody Hill and Benjamin Best — fellow North Carolina School of the Arts alums, and his Foot Fist Way costars — for the tentatively titled Eastbound and Down, an HBO series about a fallen baseball hero who returns to his hometown to try to find some answers in his life.

“It’s [about] a John Rocker-type guy,” explains executive producer Adam McKay. “He’s used ‘roids and made inappropriate comments, burned every bridge in his life, so he goes back home, sleeps on his brother’s couch and has to teach gym class. But it’s on HBO, so it’s really fucked up — boobies, cocaine, all that stuff.” Add McBride, with a smile and shrug: “I said, ‘I don’t think you can name a TV show after the theme song of Smokey and the Bandit, but we’ll try it!’ And he’s not even headed east — he goes south. It makes no sense whatsoever.”

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.

A Critical Moment’s Brad Schreiber, a longtime friend of the site, has beaten me to the punch with his own fleshed-out feature piece on Errol Morris and Standard Operating Procedure, and it’s a good one, don’tcha know. To access it, click here. More on the documentary in the coming week-plus, however.

Another feature piece will soon follow, but in advance of that, I thought I’d go ahead and post a straight Q&A session from an interview with Errol Morris about his new film, Standard Operating Procedure, an exploration of the infamous photographs at Abu Ghraib, the soldiers who took them and the decision-making and chain of command that created the environment that made them not just possible but in some ways inevitable. For many, the fire over the war in Iraq — not just its inception, but the almost systematic and shameful bungling of its prosecution — has cooled, but the Oscar-winning documentarian (below) is still fire-poker hot. Talking to him is an intense experience; he gets riled up, and there’s a palpable frustration that comes through with what he feels is America by and large refusing to rise up to even try to meet its ideals. The long conversation is excerpted below.

Question: When I first saw the Abu Ghraib pictures, in one sense I wasn’t terribly surprised, because horrible things happen in war, and of course this administration’s competency has been spotty across the board. In talking to people have you found that attitude dominant?

Errol Morris: I don’t think there was any disagreement over whether these were horrible things. The disagreement, of course, was who ordered them? The photographs became politicized immediately, and people would argue — the left would say one thing, the right would say something else. And it very, very quickly devolved into an argument about rogue soldiers versus administration policy, without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. It became political football. I’ve pointed out a couple times my surprise that no one really bothered to investigate the photographs per se. No one had bothered to talk to the people who had taken the photographs, bothered to figure out what had happened in these photographs. Instead people simply argued about them, each assuming that they knew what they were about. And to me that’s the underlying problem. I don’t think you want to get into a discussion about whether bad things happen in war, I don’t think there’s much of an argument. Of course bad things happen in war. We’re talking about pictures and what they mean, and the question of policy.

Q: And yet Americans have always considered themselves above something like torture. Was there a certain sense to you, as you spoke to the people you spoke to, that maybe that line has been irrevocably crossed, that [nobler notions of] what Americans will or won’t do are no longer applicable?

EM: Well, I agree with you, but I feel I have to say one thing to qualify what you just said. When I say that the pictures were politicized, they were politicized for exactly that reason. Do these pictures have something to say about us as a country, the current administration or the military, or are they pictures that say nothing more than these were rogue soldiers with behavior initiated by themselves, no one else, and they have nothing whatsoever to say about us or the war in general? If you’re asking me what I think, I made this entire movie to figure out what I think — what are these photographs showing us, what are they about? …My answer is they have a lot to tell us. I remain shocked. But [one] can look at the photo of the hooded man on the box and say, ‘Rogue soldiers, administration policy, administration policy!’ Well, let’s ask somebody, and actually try to come up with some evidence of what was going on there, other than conjecture of what the photographs represent.

Q: Is it an overstatement to say that the pictures represent, to the public at large, the end of an American innocence about the manner in what this country wages war on behalf of its people?

EM: I would say the beginning of the end, or the end of the end, the two being one and the same in this instance. I think there’s little doubt that the pictures are so deeply shocking because they run counter to what this country is about, or what this country should be about. But oddly enough I think there’s something much worse than the pictures, and bothers me much more, and says to me something about my country and this juncture in history, and that’s the fact that we’re willing to punish a few lowly soldiers and allow all the higher-ups to walk away scot-free. And we have aided and abetted it — not a pleasant thought, but in fact we have — by not looking further than the photographs, as if the photographs was all there was to say about Abu Ghraib.

Abu Ghraib has never been thoroughly investigated. It’s ironic, of course, because there were 13 separate investigation. I was writing this essay for the New York Times last night that will run in a week or so, and I described it like the blind man and the elephant, each of which is given a piece of the elephant to explore and then collectively asked to come up with a conception of the whole, and they fail miserably. It’s very interesting, these investigations into Abu Ghraib, all 13 of them. Taguba looks at the MPs, Fay/Jones looks at the MIs, Schlesinger looks at DOD detainment operations and on and on. Nobody really, really wants to discover anything. It’s almost this investigative filibuster that goes on and on, without resolution. Resolution isn’t the intended result. The intended result is obfuscation. What I find really disappointing is that we don’t see the crimes. At Abu Ghraib, we don’t see the people in the photographs as people, we see them as monsters, and the  photographs have stopped us from going further, almost as if we’ve gone into this state of shock, and nothing further is needed. Well, it’s a democracy still, and I still have some residual faith in that democracy, and I believe that part of moving past the stain of Abu Ghraib is confronting what actually happened there. Not scapegoats, but what actually happened.

Q: What was your sense of Janis Karpinski (below, Brigadier General in command of the 800th MP Brigade in Iraq)? She seemed to have a lot of emotion during her interview. What’s your take on her, and her responsibility with respect to Abu Ghraib?

EM: Yeah, she’s pissed off. I have my own view about her. I’m not sure that everybody in my office even agrees with me — in fact, I’m sure they don’t. I was always struck — and in fact it’s in the movie, with Jeff Frost saying that the Red Cross would come, Karpinski would come, and they would clean everything  up. And when she left they would go back to whatever it was that they were doing. They were hiding stuff. Karpinski was a reserve soldier, she wasn’t part of the general army, she was a woman and she wasn’t particularly liked by the central staff of the military in Iraq. She had trouble with (Lieutenant General Ricardo) Sanchez and with Wojciechowski, his aide, and she wasn’t in control of anything. Abu Ghraib was, for all intents and p
urposes, an intelligence operation. It was the center of intelligence in Iraq, and the MPs were there as an afterthought. There’s so much information dished out by apologies that it’s hard, I think, in even one viewing of the movie, to see the damn thing, but you learn — and I think this is surprising to many people — that Karpinski was given the job of reconstructing the entire prison system of Iraq. I mean, this is really nuts. The one thing that I believe will be remembered about this war is that we sent a military into Iraq that was untrained, under-equipped, understaffed, to fight a war. Remember that Saddam in the fall of 2002 freed all the prisoners. Immediately the prisons were trashed, much like happened to Baghdad in the aftermath of “shock and awe.” The prison system of Iraq was basically destroyed, there was no prison system. So they have to build another one. The CPA. Abu Ghraib was just one prison in a system of many, many prisons, and it was a prison that had been given to military intelligence. It’s one of my favorite expressions that I learned in doing all of this, that people in the military say, “It’s not my lane.” Well, it wasn’t her lane. It was and it wasn’t. I suppose on paper that it was, but the reality of the situation is that it was very quickly turned into a military intelligence facility, and operated as such.

…When Brent Pack (a special agent with the Criminal Investigations Division, tasked with analyzing the photographs from Abu Ghraib) says that it’s standard operating procedure, that it’s not a violation of the policy that they were given, it’s an expression of it, that in itself is extraordinarily powerful. So I’m going to write more stuff. I’m going to write my essays, if I ever have the time to do it. I wanted to make a movie about the photographs and the people who took [them], and the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs. I wanted to make that movie. There are lots of other movies to make, there are lots of other stories to tell, including those that involve the higher-ups. I think there’s so much anger and frustration about the war that [people] want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail Rumsfeld to the wall, and if I haven’t done it they’re just pissed off, like, “That’s the job, guy! Why are you fucking around with a bunch of pictures?” And it’s because I’m actually fascinated by those pictures, and photography, and I’m fascinated by the fact that there are things in front of our eyes that we can’t see.

Q: So to your mind —

EM: (continuing) There’s all the evidence in place, that’s the question you should ask yourself — how many torture memos would you like to see — three, four? Would you like to see eight or nine? Eleven, maybe 17? I can pick some prime number. How many torture memos does someone have to put in front of you before you start to think that the administration is promulgating torture? What does the public need, what does Congress need at this point? You think that this is some kind of strange aberration? Not everything that happened at Abu Ghraib was directed from the Pentagon or from the White House. Rumfeld never told Chuck Rainer, I believe, to stack prisoners in a pyramid. I don’t think that happened. But all of the policies of sexual humiliation and abuse, all of that stuff doesn’t come from a few rogue soldiers. We know all too well that it comes from higher up, that it was orchestrated.

When Sabrina Harman and Javal Davis (soldiers both prosecuted for participation, sentenced to prison and given bad-conduct discharges) talk about walking in …and seeing prisoners shackled in cells in distress positions… with underwear or women’s panties on their heads — these soldiers didn’t create that, they walked in on it. And what are they supposed to do? I love people sort of temporizing with these guys. It actually does piss me off. You have this picture of Sabrina smiling with her thumb up over the corpse of (Manadel) Al-Jamadi. …No one says, “I wonder how the guy got to be a corpse?” Well, we’ll blame her because she’s in the picture. “I don’t like that fucked-up smile on your face. Wipe that smile off your face! You killed him, didn’t you? And you’re smirking and enjoying the fact that you did it.” Well, she’s taking a picture that exposes the U.S. Military, she had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder, and the people who committed the murder have never been charged or prosecuted and we the public don’t care because we’re happy just looking at a photograph and being outraged by it, without any desire to know further.

Q: You talk about the misdirection created by the photographs, but speaking in the broader sense, to your mind is there a correlation between the increasingly technological world in which we live in and a sort of emotional distance or deadening in the public?

EM: I don’t know. My first inclination, whenever I hear questions like that, is to think about people who find a causal connection between television and violence. I like to remind people, of course, that the Holocaust occurred before the advent of television, so I don’t believe that TV can be implicated. People have always been violent, they haven’t needed technology. But technology does give it a new twist. This story, of course, we know would never exist without digital photography and technology, which I think is a good thing. I’m actually a great believer in technology. The photographs would never have been distributed around the world the way in which they were. You know that Sabrina burned a CD shortly after the death of Al-Jamadi, and she was sent back to the U.S. on leave. She tried to show the photographs to someone at CNN, who didn’t really want to look at them, she got back to Iraq, and when the photographs were given over to CID, the Army started panicking and sent police officers to her girlfriend’s house in Virginia to try to recover the photographs, which seems so naïve in this current world because… now there no prints, there are CRT screens, and LED screens and LCD screens. A photograph can be sent a hundred million places with a click.

Q: And it’s worth a thousand words, or more. So are the pictures of Lynndie England (below) ultimately more destructive as a tool of propaganda against America, or for the psychological barriers that they may cause us to erect, to avoid confronting these issues that go beyond just the photos?

EM: Interesting — the scariest thing about pictures to me is
that they can be used to reveal and to hide. They can make you think
you know things that you don’t know, they can certainly show you things
that you cannot have seen otherwise. Part of it is that I think we need
to be aware of how images work, and how they can be used for and
against us. But if you ask me the wide dissemination of knowledge is a
good thing, I think it is inherently a good thing. I’m a populist,
actually, I think by inclination. I would often say when I was making
this movie that I don’t know, really, whether Americans care about
torture. I care about it, but I don’t know whether people care in the
sense that they tell themselves it’s an implacable foe, a ruthless
enemy, and you have to do what you have to do to win the war. I think
you can argue endlessly about the question of torture, but one thing
that America still stands for is the idea of a level playing field for
the little guy — that there is not absolute equality, but something that
pays lip service to equality. And here is a story where the little guys
took the fall and the big guys just ran for cover, and we all bought
into it in a certain way. And I keep trotting out my theory — and I
know my co-writer on my book, Phillip Gourevitch, does not necessarily agree with me —
that Bush won in 2004 because of the “bad apples.” I think scapegoats
are very powerful. Why wouldn’t you like such a thing? Here you had the
perfect set of scapegoats and in the end he could simply say, “The war
is going south, the insurgency is growing, but blame only these guys.”

Q: In 1998, I believe, The Siege that had images in it that could be from Abu Ghraib — a naked
prisoner with a black hood over his head being tortured about a
potential terrorist plot. This is three years before September 11, so
if some Hollywood screenwriter could imagine it back then why are we really so
surprised that it’s part of the American character?

EM: Because we’d
like it not to be. We don’t like it in our face, we like to pretend
otherwise. In the same sense, I can understand why the administration
would like to pretend that they’re following the Geneva Conventions,
even though they’re not. I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories in life,
I’m a great fan of self-deception as an explanation for much of human
behavior. I think the sad thing about the human mind is that we can
convince ourselves very easily of our own rectitude. We can convince
ourselves we’re doing the right thing, we can deny things that are in
front of our very eyes. That to me is somewhat appalling and
frightening.

Q: Are you surprised that the film’s dramatizations of torture, or enhanced interrogation techniques, have drawn some criticism, and generated controversy?

EM: I’ve done the dramatizations, for better or
worse, in almost every single movie I’ve ever made, and am I surprised
that now people are paying attention to them? I mean, there was a Yewen
cry when I made The Thin Blue Line about so-called reenactments. I have
no problem with them, obviously. You’re telling people that photographs
really don’t show us the world, they de-contextualize things, they
allow us to read into them, to imagine things about them that might not
be true. Part of the idea — and maybe the central idea of the movie,
something that’s still on my mind, by the way — was what if you could walk into a photograph and its [complete] history? Nicholson Baker has just written this revised history of the period between the wars, and the advent of World War II, with his radically reinvented
version of Churchill, the anti-Martin Gilbert version of Churchill, and
it’s really, really interesting and worth reading. He does something
that interests me — he seizes on little details which he attends to,
and then puts them together in a historical collage. History is always
written from the outside in, and I wanted to take these very specific
moments and bring them to life and explore what was the inner world and
thinking around them. And the re-enactments help me to take an audience
into that moment of photography.

I had coffee with Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller last week, in advance of his movie’s release, for a forthcoming Q&A magazine piece, and I had a chance to pursue a small strand, asking him about the interesting undercurrent of
abandonment and emasculated male depression that comes surging to the forefront in particularly one scene late
in the movie, where Kristen Bell and Jason Segel’s characters rehash their relationship and she (almost tearfully) asserts how hard she tried to punch through his hermetic veneer. Was there a deeper exploration of this, either in scripted or captured form, I wondered.

“I think narratively what was complicated with this movie was that you’re looking at everything in flashbacks — you’re not experiencing the relationship as it’s happening, it’s already over,” says Stoller. “We kind of pinpointed this being the problem — that when you’re in a relationship and you get dumped, you wallow, you think that the other person is solely at fault, and so we wanted that to be the moment of revelation both for [Jason’s character] and the audience, that this was the problem, that he just wasn’t [present]. And we tried to lay it in subtly… well, I don’t know about subtly, but visually early in the film, like when he’s eating cereal at home. We shot so much of that stuff, but we found that it was an interesting balancing act. We had an entire sequence where he answers the phone one night and says, ‘Oh, I’m kind of in the middle of stuff right now,’ and then hangs up the phone and goes back to surfing the Internet, but we found that if we added too much of that stuff then he just seemed mopey and unlikeable, and people didn’t want to watch the movie. So it was a balancing act, setting up that he’s kind of lost his way and become something of a loser homebody,” but also keeping him enough of a proactive and sympathetic figure for later.

Stoller, a first-time director, also confessed that he was surprised by just how fun his first behind-the-camera experience was — something the movie’s three-month Hawaii shoot probably helped. “I was terrified that it would be boring,” says Stoller of the production. “But when you’re directing you’re just doing everything, and it was very, very thrilling. And having written for many years, it felt like the natural creative conclusion of the creative process. The shoot was pretty mellow, there wasn’t much that went off the rails. But I’d get confused by really basic stuff like angles of coverage. The most complicated sequence was probably them jumping off the rock (featured in the movie’s trailer), but we planned so far ahead that it was fine.”

“Shooting the yoga sequence, which isn’t in the final movie but will be on the DVD,” Stoller continues, “was pretty complicated, because there were a lot of angles. We shot some crazy number of set-ups that day — like 70 set-ups, which is a lot. In the scene, Peter goes to try to do yoga, and Kristen Wiig is the yoga instructor, and it’s a really funny scene, actually, it just didn’t fit exactly in the story. And Kristen and Russell (Brand) are there. It’s hard to describe in a funny way, because it’s physical comedy, but they’re both incredibly good at it and Peter isn’t, and he accidentally kicks her in the face. Because he’s drunk when he’s doing the yoga, too, I should say.”

Multi-hyphenate Neil Mandt’s Last Stop for Paul is getting some major cable channel run in big city media markets, as well as some positive advance notices from Richard Roeper and other critics. In advance of its theatrical bow this weekend, Mandt submits to a brief email Q&A about his interesting indie travelogue, which chronicles an in-a-rut bathroom supplies salesman who sets off on a four-corners-of-the-world adventure to spread the ashes of a recently, suddenly deceased childhood friend.

Brent Simon: So what was the first seed for the idea of the movie?

Neil Mandt: I’ve traveled the world extensively, and my first big trip was backpacking Europe alone the summer after high school. It seemed that every trip I took left me with at least one crazy story I would tell at parties. It was only a matter of time and trips until I started to think all of these stories put together would make for an interesting movie. So I came up with the sprinkling of the ashes as the through-line and bingo, we have a movie of my crazy adventures.

BS: So I’ve seen the ads for the film all over MSNBC, which is impressive saturation for any indie. How exactly has that worked on your modest budget?

NM: When my brother and I decided to release the movie ourselves we knew we would have to find some affordable way to get the word out. As I was poking around trying to investigate all of the traditional forms of advertising, I remembered that I had seen spots on local cable for local restaurants. Time Warner is able to sell off some of the left-over inventory on the national shows. When I investigated I was shocked to learn that spots were as cheap as $1 on the Travel Channel. MSNBC was $5 in the daytime and $7 at night. Crazy!

BS: What country, or countries, presented the most logistical hurdles during production?

NM: There were many logistics that I had to deal with in making this movie. In addition to being the producer along with my brother Michael, I was the lead actor, writer, director and travel coordinator. Coordinating the travel for the people who participated in the movie as well as producing the movie was very complicated. Once we were on the road shooting, the biggest concern was to avoid getting arrested in every country. Since we were stealing shots everywhere, we were essentially breaking the law everywhere. The Acropolis in Athens was especially tight on security, and numerous signs [were] posted warning against any type of filming. We made an extra effort to be stealth there.

BS: Let’s say you’re graced with the powers of Hayden Christiansen’s character from Jumper, and you can jump around the globe effortlessly — where do you go for Last Stop for Paul that you weren’t able to go, for whatever reason?

NM: We went everywhere I wanted to go in the filming of Last Stop for Paul. There were additional countries which I considered shooting in, however, they were decided against because I knew they would just get cut out of the final product. It’s important for a comedy to move swiflty and I didn’t want to have wasted time in the movie.

BS: What’s it been like traveling to so many festivals with the movie?

NM: I am the first to admit that I am surprised (happily) that Last Stop for Paul has been such a festival success. When we finished the movie I thought it was good, however I knew I was very close to the picture. I never expected that it would connect so well with audiences. Once we started getting invited to so many festivals and then winning award after award, we started to feel very confident with the movie. Looking back at a year of having the movie at over 100 film festivals I feel very honored and appreciative of every single one of them.

Last Stop for Paul expands nationwide throughout March; for more information on the movie, click here.

From 1982’s First Blood to its third entry in 1988, Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo films
collectively pulled in $615 million worldwide. The fourth film in the saga, the
forthrightly titled Rambo, opened to
$18.2 million this past weekend, good for second place behind 20th Century
Fox’s latest first-quarter spoof flick, Meet
the Spartans.

For an action franchise out of the public eye for almost two
decades, and starring an actor eligible for AARP solicitations, that’s not
necessarily a bad haul. A lot of box office reportage, though, took potshots at
the cobbled-together, $50 million-plus production, and particularly its
multi-hyphenate leading man, characterizing Stallone as more or less washed up
— a fading analog star in a new digital world. The cruel, hard kernel of that analysis may or may not be true, but what does it say about Stallone and the Hollywood
press corps?

Though generally (and not incorrectly, it must be stressed) rejected by critics (at
last check, it sported a Rotten Tomatoes fresh score of a dismal 36 percent), this
dismissive response toward Rambo can’t
all be judged by the reaction to the product itself. After all, Meet the Spartans was saddled with a
fresh score of 3, yes 3 percent, and
it’s been generally given the free pass equivalent of a what-are-you-going-to-do? shrug. Similarly, 2006’s Rocky Balboa, Stallone’s final chapter
of the other signature cornerstone franchise of his career, actually won
significant critical approval, with a 75 percent fresh rating.

At the crux of the dismissal is some scorn for and derision
toward the man himself; Stallone has always been a figure of hearty
contradictions — a mumbling, muscle-headed guy’s guy almost as likely to quote
Dickens as give a monosyllabic, rambling reply. Though twice Oscar-nominated,
and embraced early on for the ways in which his own rise to prominence mirrored
that of his pugilistic protagonist in the original Rocky, Stallone still was never taken very seriously in superseding
years because the bulk of his choices were seen as lazy.

Cretinous would be too harsh of a word, but his movies and
characters were all too frequently and undeniably set aside as pandering
populist trash. The rep on Stallone reflected that of a star athlete with a very
dodgy work ethic. (In that regard, he would mirror another adopted son of Philadelphia,
Allen “We’re talkin’ about practice?” Iverson.) The disbelief was clamorous when
writer-director James Mangold rolled the dice on Stallone for 1997’s Cop Land, about a small town New
Jersey sheriff overshadowed and bullied by the New
York cops in his burgh. Old, latent prejudices even subtly
raised their head at a recent press conference in advance of the release of Rambo, where sample questions included,
“Are people surprised by your artistic motivations since the characters are so
physical?” and “So how did all the various production companies come in?” The
questions themselves are innocuous enough, but their oblique meaning comes
through.

For Stallone, now 61, Rambo is a bit of a legacy project. “The ponderousness that comes with aging, the
sense of weight, the sense of knowledge, of knowing too much, the lack of
naiveté, which happened in my life — all that sort of set the stage for me,” he
says. “I wanted Rambo to be heavier, bulkier. That’s why his first line in the
movie is pretty negative; he’s given up, he has nothing. The other Rambos I felt had a bit too much energy,
they were a little too spry. I’m not trying to run myself down, but there was
much more vanity involved: tank tops, it was all about body movement rather
than just the ferocity and commitment of what he was doing. This character, to
me, is much more interesting. I like First
Blood and I like this one, just like the first Rocky and the last one, Rocky Balboa. Everything in between was kind of trying to figure out what I should
do.”

For Stallone, that meant setting out to make a movie that
was “just man against man, [about] their intolerance of each other.” He
rejected ideas that put Rambo in the middle of more fanciful conceits,
insisting that real-life strife was the proper backdrop to bring this franchise
full circle. (That’s why Rambo opens
with actual images from the quelled pro-democracy demonstrations in late
September of last year, protests which were met with brutal force.)

That led him, along with a crew of roughly 570, to shoot on
location in Thailand,
under arduous conditions. “There are 165 different snakes in Thailand,
90 [of which are] poisonous, so we lived with the constant problem of people
being bit,” says Stallone. “There are centipedes the size of your shoe being
found in your shoes. It was rough,
but welcome to action films. You know what it actually reminded me of? I was just
watching the making of David Lean’s The
Bridge Over the River Kwai, and how much they just had to chuck, and use
brutal manpower to get inland. There’s nothing glamorous about it.”

If there’s little glamour, there is plenty of violence,
however, something that attendees of the press conference were certainly abuzz
about. “I did have a caveat with the MPAA,” explains Stallone. “I said, ‘Guys,
this is happening today. If we’re ever going to do something responsible where
art has the ability to influence people’s awareness and impact the lives of
these people, don’t dilute it, don’t water it down. It’s got to be uncomfortable.
It is uncomfortable — it’s miserable,
it’s distasteful, it’s horrifying. But [to] do violence light, it’s just wrong.
Don’t cut away too soon. Just let it sit in. I want people to feel it.’” Stallone’s hardcore audience of devoted fans may be
diminishing with his age, but they seem to still feel it. Hollywood
journalists, on the other hand, are another matter…
For the full, original feature, from FilmStew, click here.

Coming as it did on the heels of Denzel Washington’s
high-profile on-screen turn opposite Russell Crowe in American Gangster, and given that it was Washington’s follow-up
behind the camera to a well received directorial debut, 2002’s Antwone Fisher, The Great Debaters was expected last fall to be a major player at
this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.

Its critical reception, while not fall-out rapturous, was
solid across the board, and there was the line of reasoning that, particularly
when stacked up against other critical consensus picks that might be perceived
as less mainstream accessible (There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men),
the movie could be a big, heartstring-tugging crossover hit in the vein of Million Dollar Baby, which would give it
a flush populist sentiment come Oscar time. Having kingmaker Oprah Winfrey on
board as a producer certainly didn’t hurt.

While the movie opened respectably, and has grossed over $28
million thus far, The Great Debaters
didn’t quite carry its argument with viewers. It was relatively
anonymous on many critics’ year-end lists, and one of six Golden Globe nominees for Best Picture Drama — a prize it lost,
to Atonement. While the cancellation of the attendant, glitzy awards ceremony certainly didn’t help the movie,
there’s no evidence to suggest it hurt The
Great Debaters more than other movies with lower profile stars and/or
stories.

In this context, the film’s snub at the recent Oscar
nominations comes as no surprise. Still, The
Great Debaters proves something unequivocally: it confirms Washington’s
skill at adapting and shepherding to the big screen emotionally resonant dramas
that might otherwise be derisively classified as movie-of-the-week material.
Lacking any affectation or postmodern shading, Washington’s
years of experience behind the camera make him an excellent arbiter of
emotional truth, and his skill as a filmmaker lies in an ability to ferret it
out and showcase it without over-relying on gimmickry.

Set in the mid-1930s and inspired by a true story, The Great Debaters chronicles the
journey of college professor Melvin Tolson (Washington)
and his charges. A brilliant but somewhat volatile instructor, the controversial
Tolson challenged the social mores of the time and was under constant fire for
his unconventional teaching methods, as well as his radical political views. Using
the power of words, Tolson set out to shape a group of underdog students — a
group including Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett) and
James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) — from his African American college in small
town Texas into a nationally significant and historically elite debate team.

For Washington,
the film was a four-year journey — most of it pleasant, if slow-moving. “This
was just a really good story, I call it a sports movie,” says Washington
at a press conference in advance of the film’s release. “In those days, that’s
what they considered a spectator sport. It was a very popular event to go to;
there were only 360 students at this college and they were going up against
these big schools. That was very fascinating.”

“I worked on the screenplay for a long time,” he adds.
“Between jobs I would shoot and come home, I would sit with the writers. I
worked a lot with Bob Eisele, who had written the original screenplay.” That
was rewarding, if tedious. The problem is that Washington,
as with Antwone Fisher, was very
reluctant to appear both behind and in front of the camera. “The acting part of
it?” asks Washington with a
good-natured sigh. “Well, I didn’t want to be in the movie. It was just in
order to get enough of the money I felt we needed to make the movie, I had to be in it. So once I knew that was
the case, I said, ‘Okay, well, Denzel, just embrace it. Don’t be negative about
it, just do it.’”

“And I think had a good sense [of things],” continues Washington.
“I usually do two, or three, or four takes, and if I felt good, I’d just move
on. I was more concerned with getting everybody else’s performance. I’m pretty
good, so I figure three takes and I’ll be okay.” He pauses and laughs. “With
me, I always thought, ‘I’ll cut it together later on, I’ll build a performance
out of it.’”

For Washington
and his costars, the success of The Great Debaters lies in the message it promulgates — that we have a responsibility
to ourselves, individually, but also collectively, as a society. “An
environment was created for these young people at Wiley
College,” says Washington.
“One of the things that was important to me, and a big part of this story to
tell, was that this young boy thought that his father was being less than a
man, or that he had to kowtow or shrink himself when he comes up against these
pig farmers,” says Washington, describing a scene in which young James Farmer,
Jr. sees his father (Forest Whitaker) humiliated after accidentally striking a
swine with the family’s car.

“Maybe he thought Tolson was more of a rebel, and the sexy
guy, the hipper guy,” Washington
continues. “But in the eleventh hour, it was James’ own father that got Tolson
out of trouble. So it is still our responsibility as adults to create a
supportive environment, which we have not done. If you look at politics or
anything else, we spend so much time dwelling on the negative. These characters
[and the real people upon whom they’re based] did not excel in a vacuum. It was
because somebody was there and someone made the sacrifice for them to excel.”

If the art of debate (over win-at-all-costs rhetoric) is
being lost, Washington is
ambivalent about where that takes us as a society, and what that ultimately
means. “I just know we aren’t developing that muscle and magic [of speech and
writing] like we used to,” he says. “We went from spoken word to radio to
television to film to computers.” Sliding scale or devolution, it’s hard to
say. Washington’s muscle memory,
however, is well developed from his decades as an actor, and he’s utilizing it
as a director to bring evocative, emotionally effective dramas about the human
condition to the big screen. If he keeps it up, one of these days, he may not
even have to appear in front of the camera as well as behind it.
For the full, slightly re-tweaked feature piece, as published by FilmStew, click here.

Frank Langella’s Oscar evening plans were finalized this morning — or at least defined by the absence of more specific plans — when his richly drawn, artfully understated lead turn in director and co-writer Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening failed to score a Best Actor nod.



While Tommy Lee Jones’ somewhat surprising nomination for In the Valley of Elah, a miniscule arthouse release ($6.7 million take, domestically) whose time had come and gone earlier in the fall, probably took the last up-for-grabs spot, Starting Out in the Evening, from indie distributor Roadside Attractions, never really could punch through, either at the box office — where it’s grossed only $600,000 to date — or with a string of critics prizes that might have caught the attention of enough Academy members. Langella was awarded the Best Actor prize from the Boston Film Critics Society, and crowned the runner-up to There Will Be Blood‘s Daniel Day-Lewis by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, but otherwise found himself on the outside looking in, done in by fickle big city arthouse audiences whose indifference played a part in making sure that the film never saw an expanded release much beyond several dozen theaters.

Still, much like Naomi Watts’ critically lauded but Academy-unrecognized turn in Mulholland Drive, Starting Out in the Evening could be the profile-raising film that lays the groundwork for an Oscar nomination in the near future. In the case of Watts, an exhilarating fresh face, it was 21 Grams, from 2003; with savvy, respected veteran Langella, the possibility looms at around this same time next year, courtesy of his wrapped performance as Richard Nixon in Ron Howard’s adaptation of Frost/Nixon, a role for which the actor has already won a Tony Award on Broadway. Either way, Langella — who also appeared recently as CBS President William Paley in George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck. — is clearly enjoying a mini-renaissance.

Langella, who just turned 70 years old earlier this month, comes across as intelligent and exceedingly well spoken in person, and radiates a calm rootedness that comes from total self-assurance — a surprisingly rare quality in a lot of young actors. Langella explains he’s by nature fairly private, since work on films is so collaborative, involving on-set interaction with many departments and people. In Starting Out in the Evening, though, he had to muzzle what he calls his natural Italian gregariousness to portray a private, very internalized man with no such outlets for freewheeling openness. “I don’t like the word challenging because I think it’s always overused,” Langella says, “but it does require of you a sort of consistency of intent from beginning to end when you decide that someone is as imploded as this man, as old world-mannered as he is — the way he dresses, the way he thinks, the way he speaks. It requires you to be vigilant about every single moment.” For the full feature interview piece, from FilmStew, click here.

At the recent press conference for the forthcoming Rambo, multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone was asked if he ever imagined having shot the original ending of the
book First Blood, which would have robbed him of one of his career franchise cornerstones. Says Stallone: “Yeah, I think about it all the time. I had that
debate with Quentin Tarantino, who thought I made a mistake. I said, ‘You
know, on an artistic level, you’re probably right.’ But at the time, I had
spent a lot of time doing research with veterans and it seemed like this
terrible, nihilistic ending that just reveled in complete despair. At that
time, we had almost a quarter of a million Vietnam
suicides. So I thought, do I want to just end it on that note? Or make him more
of a victim who has been created to do a job, does the job, comes home, and gets
[told], ‘You know what? You no longer fit in.’ It’s like you train a pit
bull, take this dog, turn him into a killer — now what do you do? You’ve got to put
him down. What happens if that pit bull gets loose? And you realize it’s not as
bad as you think. You can somehow redeem him. I thought that was more of an
interesting story. Again, as Kirk Douglas says, ‘Not artistic, but
commercial.'” For another blurb on Stallone and Rambo, which opens nationwide on January 25, click here.

L.A. Weekly‘s Scott Foundas has up a nice chat with director David Fincher, about Zodiac and its commercial reception, of which Fincher says, “Five years from now is more important than five months from now, in my humble opinion. I’ll trade the opening weekend for a movie that can stand scrutiny five or ten years down the road.” For the full piece, click here.

In a Beverly Hills hotel suite, filmmaker Danny Boyle is scarfing down
a sandwich and sipping on tea while also holding forth on some of the
particulars of theoretical physics, notably non-topological solitons
and the self-reinforcing pulse waves that maintain their own perfect
shape while traveling through space at constant speeds. “These Q-balls,
as they’re called, are enormous forces of matter that just fly around
the universe,” Boyle explains.
“The only thing that stops them are incredibly dense stars. They just
pass through planets. When you go into this stuff, it’s mind-boggling
what you don’t understand.” Another quick bite, and he dives back into
his explanation. “If they hit something as dense as a star, though,
they stick,” he adds, smacking his palms together for effect. “And then
they start to eat the star from the inside out. That could happen, and
if it does the sun would begin to die.”

Boyle’s doomsday offerings are intimately sketched out for good reason. Scripted by frequent collaborator Alex Garland and shot largely at London’s famed Three Mills Studios, Sunshine — which arrives Tuesday, January 8 on DVD — stars an intriguing
international cast, including Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Cliff Curtis and Hiroyuki Sanada. Set in
the year 2057, the movie concerns the dying sun, as loosely described
above. The spacecraft Icarus II, with an eight-person crew aboard, sets
out with a nuclear device in hopes of resuscitating the fading heat
source, seven years after the disappearance of Icarus I while on a
similar mission.
Though it made $28.2 million overseas, Sunshine scrounged up only $3.7 million stateside when it opened in July. The movie was essentially eclipsed by the likes of Transformers, the latest Harry Potter, Hairspray and The Simpsons Movie,
which opened a week later.

While Boyle’s roots in theater and own
intellectual curiosity have fed an admirably diverse filmography, this
genre wasn’t one that, on the surface, he was looking to tackle. “I
didn’t realize quite how much a fan of sci-fi I was until I looked at
my track record and I realized I’d watched everything, and that makes
me a bit of a geek,” says Boyle, whose previous film credits include 28 Days Later and Trainspotting. “But I love them, and so the chance to make one with an original idea was fantastic.”

“I tend to make high-energy pictures that disrupt things with odd
camera angles and things like that,” Boyle offers. “Sci-fi tends to be
much more classical, and this kind of sci-fi — which is classic,
serious, ’70s sci-fi, which [is rooted in] philosophical ideas — isn’t
like a playground, it’s very serious. It’s much slower, it’s the
slowest film I’ve ever made in terms of the first half hour. But you
can’t speed it up. I tried, and you have to go at that pace. It’s
something about the eternity of the distances involved. That was a big
difference for me, how elegant that first part of the film has to be to
convince you that they are weightless in space, and traveling.”

Naturally, pictures set chiefly in outer space have their own notable
big screen ancestors, and for Boyle it was a matter of embracing rather
than fleeing from those influences. “There are three in particular that
are there at every turn,” he says. “Every time you think you’re being
original, they’re there waiting for you, and they are 2001, the first Alien film and (Andrei) Tarkovsky’s Solaris,
for different reasons with each of them. But they’re all there, and in
the end you have to either stop filming and give it up or you have to
acknowledge, ‘OK, nope, this is borrowed from Alien.’” For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.

Reelz Channel has up an exclusive interview with Doug Jones in which he discusses his work as Abe Sapien in Guillermo del Toro’s forthcoming Hellboy II: The Golden Army, including the fact that David Hyde Pierce is out of an easy paycheck. In fine collaborative tradition, Jones also plays two other characters in the film.