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Once again Anton Sirius comes through with an absolutely fantastic piece from Toronto. Don't miss a beat on this one, and check out the fantastic interview down below with legendary filmmaker Po Chih Leong! Great work Anton!
Monday the 13th
News Flash #1: Got word on Lars von Trier's (Breaking the Waves, the Kingdom 1 & 2)newest film, which just wrapped principal photography. It's a musical, set in the American Northwest (even though he shot it in Sweden), that stars… BJORK!!!! There apparently a totally kick-ass dance routine on a moving train. Now THAT'S cool.
News Flash #2: The Hand of Harvey has reached down and blessed another film-maker. Miramax picked up distribution rights to Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic, for a tidy sum. Good call Harvey, and good on ya Justin!
As you can see my system has rebooted, and I am back in the fray. I snagged interviews with Ned Beatty and Po Chih Leong (still jotting on the Ned Beatty- I did those first because they are much shorter than the massive Matthew Bright one) and snuck into the European Film Production conference- yet another conference where madly, inexplicably, Blair Witch raised its ugly head. WTF??? Can someone please explain what BWP has to do with young Euro-talent? Bruno Dumont (l'humanite) was the focus of most of the attention, and through the somewhat garbled translations(s) he made some interesting points about American cultural hegemony, and his attempts through l'humanite to get younger viewers to feel something, anything. (Damn, the thing makes sense now.) He described a class where he showed a doc on the Holocaust, and some the kids laughed at some of the footage. (Can't blame the translators for the botch- the man is a university professor, and talks like it. I wonder how many native French speakers in the crowd got all of what he said.)
Yesterday Children (Philippines 1999, directed by Carlos Siguion-Reyna)
David Overbey, influential Canadian critic and one of the driving forces behind the Toronto Festival, made it one of his driving goals to promote Filipino cinema, and as a result I'm now hooked on the damn stuff. The Philippines is one of the few countries left that produces unapologetic melodrama, and speaking as someone who still thinks Bette Davis is the Queen of Hollywood that was great news when I heard it.
The last Siguion-Reyna film I saw here was They Call Me Joy, a searing portrayal of the life of a prostitute, which featured a Fiorentino-in-Last-Seduction level performance from its lead, Rosanna Roces. While Yesterday Children doesn't have any performances quite so incendiary, it does have his usual unflinching eye for social injustice. It revolves around two children, one blind and the other illegitimate, who live in a town ravaged by drought. The other townspeople resort to a barrage of superstitions to help them alleviate the drought. Caught in the middle are the children, the outcasts. Siguion-Reyna's films tend to focus on the outsider in society, and by making the society in Yesterday Children- in this case the village- so insular and conservative he vividly illustrates just how untenable such a society can be without change.
Another solid entry in the Filipino slate, but if you're going to go out of your way to see just ONE Filipino film I'd have to suggest They Call Me Joy- it rocks harder, and I ain't (just) saying that because of the sex. But I do suggest you see some Filipino films if you ever get the chance, as it may be the most vital 'Third World' film industry around.
Les amants criminels (France 1999, directed by Francois Ozon)
Popping out of that EFP conference made me want to see more of Young Europe's finest, so I trotted on over to see this one, by noted short director Ozon. I made a pretty good choice.
Les amants criminels deals with a character familiar to most North American audiences- the amoral temptress, in this case Alice. She's a brainless girl who gets by totally on her looks, and who lives her life according to her whims. These whims lead her to talk her latest admirer Luc into killing another boy, Said. Needless to say the killing is pulled off just fine, but the getting away with it part? Oopsie.
The thing that surprised me the most about this film is how, well, funny it was. Maybe it was just my mood. It wasn't over-the-top stand-up humor by any means, just that French eye for the ludicrous in a character that really sets up the punch line for the movie well- in the end, this is a rather nasty thriller. Nonetheless (and maybe this is just me being sick of all of Hollywood's vicious vixens) I got a great deal of satisfaction watching Alice get put through her paces, so to speak. Bonus points to Ozon for making the leads teenagers- maybe we'll get lucky and some soulless, stupid American teens will see this thinking it's just like To Die For. (Wow, Dumont really got to me.)
In 1999, it's come down to this. A film has to be considered revolutionary because it contains the message Actions Have Consequences. In the words of the Prophet Bill Hicks, "And God wept, I think is the next verse."
Born to Lose: The Last Rock 'n' Roll Movie (USA, 1999, directed by Lech Kowalski)
Johnny Thunders is a giant in the punk scene. From his start in the New York Dolls, he later formed the late, great Heartbreakers, staggered through a few other bands then ended up dead of an OD in a New Orleans hotel room at 38. This doc chronicles his life, death and influence on the scene.
I wish I could get more excited about this picture- I mean, it's Johnny Fuckin' Thunders- but the doc is just too ordinary. It hits the high spots, but rarely does anything other than tell the story, and even that badly at times (a number of important people, including David Johansen, apparently refused to take part, so there is no explanation for how the New York Dolls broke up- kind of important, wouldn't you think?) It plods through Johnny's life with none of the energy he himself displays on stage throughout the film.
But it's that concert footage that makes the film worth checking out. Not only vintage Dolls and Heartbreakers, but also the Ramones, Wayne Kramer and massive amounts of Jayne County (including a spine-tingling Rock and Roll Resurrection.) And as the movie heads for its sad finale, it manages to find a little bit of soul. For there, as we watch Johnny totter around on stage in a Paris shithole and in Japan, looking like a stiff breeze could break him in half, it becomes obvious that even Johnny Thunders could grow up- that Johnny was tired of being rock's Designated Heroin Martyr, that he was maybe looking for a way out. Unfortunately, that way out was at the end of one last needle.
Born to Lose is pretty much a concert footage archive, nothing more. But in an age where punk means Limp Bizkit, that's got to count for something.
PO CHICH LEONG Interview
Po Chih Leong is a Hong Kong legend, one of the founding fathers of the Hong Kong New Wave. This year's festival had him participate in something of a reunion, and he met up with Bill Wang (DP on Millionaire's Express), Poon Hang Sang (DP on Chinese Ghost Story, Once a Thief, and Leong's the Island), Sylvia Chang and Lung Kong (the villain in Black Mask), all here with their own projects. I was able to sit down with Po Chih Leong for an interview.
Anton Sirius: The Wisdom of Crocodiles is your first non-Hong Kong feature?
Po Chih Leong: My first movie in the west, yes.
AS: Was that a big adjustment for you?
PL: It was. In Hong Kong we make movies very much the way Hollywood did, in the silent period. A lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm. You have a rough idea of the story a couple of weeks prior, and then you start filming it. But in England, we actually had a script to work with. Everything was detailed, everything was pretty well prepared. It was actually quite disciplined.
AS: Was that a refreshing change for you?
PL: It was in a way. I think you can tell, in the end. Normally I can go off in lots of different directions, but this one was zero. Focused.
AS: How did you end up doing the film? Did they approach you?
PL: No, I came in right at the beginning. Carolyn (Choa), my producer, she was working in Britain in 1992, and she had a friend there who was working on a novel. He showed her a chapter and she thought it was an intriguing story. She gave it to me, and we thought it could potentially be made into a film. The writer, Paul (Hoffman), had never written a script before but he went ahead and wrote the first draft. He went through the entire process, through to the final draft. We didn't switch writers once. It was refreshing because he came to it with open, innocent eyes. For him there were do rules, he just went ahead and did it. It took two years.
AS: Was there any question of shooting this movie in Hong Kong, or was there no way this story could have translated to HK?
PL: It could have been I suppose, but obviously it would have been a different film. The main thing was to shoot it in the west, because I wanted the story to take place anywhere in the world. When we shot it in London we avoided the normal London locations- no Big Ben, no Buckingham Palace. No recognizable streets, no shops, no exteriors. I wanted it to feel like this story could take place anywhere- Buenos Aires, Tokyo…
AS: The film I thought of with a similar effect is Tenebrae, by Dario Argento. He shot it in Rome but the only things you see are ultra-modern (for the time) office buildings. No Coliseum, nothing even remotely recognizable as Rome.
PL: That's good, that's exactly what I wanted to achieve. I think we must have been thinking similar things.
AS: What were your reasons for doing this?
PL: I wanted the audience to get involved in the story by making the city anonymous, by making the audience care about the characters, not the locations.
AS: Did London affect the look you chose for the film? I think I referred to it as 'retro-Victorian' in my review.
PL: Yes, there were a number of very interesting locations we found. The museum, for instance, with the large pumps moving up and down. I wanted to suggest a heart pumping, or lungs, and of course Anne (Elina Lowensoen) has asthma, so that's a connection to her character as well, and that's where we first meet her.
AS: Was it also a connection to the genre? This is a vampire film, but not the traditional Bram Stoker-influenced vampire film, so…
PL: Yes, true. That gothic feel also provides a connection to the thriller, suspense genre as well, and that's how I wanted to shoot this. It's a vampire film, but I wanted it to look like a noir film.
AS: Now, you've worked with Sylvia Chang, Chow Yun-Fat, pretty much everybody in Hong Kong. And here you're working with western-trained actors in Jude Law and Elina Lowensoen. Was there any kind of adjustment period for you?
PL: In Hong Kong the director is god so I just tell the actor what to do, and he'll figure a way to work it out. Obviously you can't do that in the west. Western actors will question you, they'll say "Well, why is he doing this? Why isn't he doing that?" But we had two weeks of rehearsal, and I was able to make that adjustment. I had two very long sessions with Jude, trying to work out who the character is, because we had no reference to another film. He's not Gary Oldman in Dracula, he's not Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, so who is he? We went to a book by Oscar Wilde, the Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray was a young guy, handsome, who basically kills people, destroys them, but inside he's a dying person. Grlscz (Jude Law) is like that.
AS: The opening shot of the movie- the tree. I thought that was the most 'Hong Kong' of any of the shots in the film in composition- the tree surrounded by mist, and then you close in and pan up the trunk…
PL: Originally in the script, there was a large car accident. But I couldn't pick the image, couldn't find what I needed. And the crash would have been expensive as well. So we came up with the idea- we set the car there, and then it could be anything, the audience is left wondering "How did the car get up in the tree?" It's better not to explain to much, it's just resting there.
AS: What was pouring down the tree, by the way? Was it gasoline, or blood, or…
PL: It was gasoline. I didn't want to be too obvious, I wanted to leave that idea for the blood drop on his hand, the single drop.
AS: For a vampire film you're use of blood was quite striking. No fountains pouring out of people's throats or anything.
PL: Yes, I could have had his face covered in blood in that scene, for instance, from the car. But I think the single drop was much more, it worked much better.
AS: But then, blood was not exactly the focus of his survival.
PL: Yes, it was the crystals in the blood, yes.
AS: What was the significance of the scrapbooks?
PL: What he's trying to do is work out- for each victim he has one book. With Anne he adds "She's impetuous, she has a breathing problem, she's nervous." He's trying to work out how to make her fall in love with him. So he saves all the scraps, like her doodling…
AS: That I thought was really amazing. All through the movie you have him drawing and writing with both hands, upside-down, simultaneously… his physical skills, when he puts his mind to it, are fantastic and yet he was having trouble with that intricate little doodle of hers.
PL: Because he couldn't work out her character. He could have actually copied it, but he's trying to work out the way he thought she would have drawn it and he couldn't work that out. To survive he has to know how to understand people. He figures he can draw a graph, for how people behave. But what he doesn't understand in the end is that people are mysterious. You can't predict what they're going to do in a situation.
AS: Let's talk a bit about your Hong Kong career. What are some of the highlights for you?
PL: One is that we have the ability to work on many different genres. I've doen slasher movies, I've done cop movies, I've done comedies, I've doen dramas, I've done the whole range. In Hong Kong I did a film with Chow Yun-Fat called Hong Kong 1941 in which he doesn't fire a single bullet.
AS: That will come as a shock to some people.
PL: I've worked with Sylvia Chang, she played in my slasher movie.
AS: Which will also come as a shock to some people.
PL: That was a comedy as well.
AS: Working in the west was the way this project evolved, but were you planning maybe on keeping a foot in each industry, or…
PL: A foot in each industry. Right now the Hong Kong industry is going through some bad times. I like the idea of working more in the west because at least you get a script to work with.
AS: Over the last few years there have been a number of 'defections', such as Chow Yun-Fat, and then there are people like you, or Maggie Cheung who has worked a lot in France, who seem to have picked a second home.
PL: As a director in Hong Kong you're working very much in isolation. Everything depends on you. Working on Wisdom we were collaborating, with producers, with actors, with DPs, they all have their input, and I find this fascinating.
AS: A little bit less pressure on you too.
PL: Yes, and a little bit more enjoyable.
AS: Working in the west then, are you just going to approach it project by project, as it comes to you?
PL: As it comes to me. My next film I think would probably be an American project.
AS: What genre would you like to do?
PL: I think it probably would be a suspense, thriller type.
AS: Anybody you'd like to work with?
PL: Lots of people. I saw a movie with Kevin Spacey here, American Beauty…
AS: Oh! That was so fantastic.
