Electric Arcade--February 2009

AFRO SAMURAI (Surge-Namco Bandai/XBox 360, PS3) An action-packed, eye candy extravaganza based on the acclaimed animated series starring and exec produced by Samuel L. Jackson. You play the title character, a lone warrior who walks the Earth (yes, like Kane in "Kung Fu") in search of his father's killer, while adhering to the strict laws of the samurai code. Featuring innovative graphics described by the publisher as "cross-hatch," it also features cut scene paneling, just like in a graphic novel or comic strip.



And when we say "graphic," we mean that literally as well as figuratively: "Afro Samurai" features blood-letting of an extreme nature, reminiscent of the "Lone Wolf and Club" films with geysers of arterial spray chugging from your opponents severed limbs, hacked up torsos and eviscerated viscera. Take the "M" rating seriously, folks!


Great fun for older teen or adult gamers, blending inventive visuals and storylines with some really top-notch AI from your adversaries. This is no simple run and gun (or run and slice) game: it requires some strategy, and some thought, otherwise you'll be the one who looks like they're ready to be served up at Benihana! Features great voice work from Jackson as well as a terrific hip hop soundtrack from The RZA. Rated M.

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WATCHMEN Press Day Photos

(Above, the character of Rorschach and an around the corner look at the soon-to-be-famous Owl Ship. They were doing interviews in it, so I didn't want to get too close. The damn thing actually can light up an entire street.)


(Above, magazine and newspaper covers from within the film. At the bottom, they were actually serving Night Owl Coffee by Veidt Enterprises at the junket! Veidt Enterprises is the huge conglomerate owned by former super hero Adrian Veidt, who basically manufactures every possible product. Including, it seems, coffee.)

More photos from the junket to come!

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BILLIE PIPER: The Hollywood Interview

Billie Piper Returns to America (and this time we might actually be ready for her.)
By Terry Keefe

[Note: This article is appearing in this month's issue of Venice Magazine.]

Once upon a time, back in the late 90s, there breathed a beautiful teenage queen of the pop charts who could dance up a storm and create hysteria in her millions of fans. In the United States, you’d be correct in assuming that we’re talking about someone with the first name of Britney. But on the other side of the pond, Billie Piper also reigned in the pop kingdom. She was big in the UK. We’re talking near-Spice Girls big. Three number one singles. The first single, “Because We Want To,” gave her the distinction of being the youngest artist to debut at the top spot of the British charts. Considerable efforts were also made to break Billie Piper as a pop artist here in the U.S., and her videos did get airplay on MTV, and particularly on MuchMusic. But the ground had become over saturated for her type of material by decade’s end, and she never became the musical household name here that she was at home. That was probably not the end of the world, in Billie Piper’s eyes, because, as she has stated numerous times in recent years, all she ever really wanted to do, anyway, was act. Piper had been plucked from acting school as a teenager and given the opportunity to become a major pop star, which she understandably embraced, but it was a somewhat roundabout way to where she wanted to be all along: in front of the cameras but without the backup dancers.


In 2003, Piper made the decision to once again pursue acting full-force, and reintroduced herself to British audiences, with no dance moves this time, in the BBC series “The Canterbury Tales,” as well as roles in period films such as “Mansfield Park.” Two years later, in 2005, her casting as the spunky Rose Tyler in the wildly successful revival of “Doctor Who” solidified her cross-over as a star actress at home, and truly introduced her for the first time to many American viewers of the show, who embraced the new series and made it a hit over here as well. It was then in 2007 that Piper took on the series role which probably came as more of a shock to the British fans who had sort of grown up with her - as the lead character of Belle, known to her friends and family as Hannah, in “Secret Diary of a Call Girl.” The show is loosely based on books written by a real-life, high-class prostitute, known only as Belle de Jour. (Showtime subsequently picked the series up for distribution in the States, and the second season is just now debuting here.) The first season was largely constructed around showing “how the gig works,” with almost every episode featuring a different type of sex that Belle is hired for: a menage a trois, an S&M encounter, a sex party, and the “Girlfriend Experience,” in which the client wishes her to pretend that they’re a normal couple, complete with holding hands, cuddling, and ordering out for Chinese. Although Season One was heavy on the sex and nudity, Season Two has cut back, somewhat, on those elements to focus more on Hannah’s attempts to balance her two lives, and that has been a blessing for the series, although I’m sure there will be those who will disagree (and for you, there is always Cinemax). Hannah falls in love for the first time in quite a while with an Irish doctor named Alex (Callum Blue), who is not aware for a long while as to how she makes a living. She also finds that her best friend and childhood sweetheart Ben (Iddo Goldberg) is still quite romantically protective of her, creating a triangle of sorts. And she reluctantly takes under her wing a ditsy young call girl wannabe named Bambi (Ashley Madekwe), who provides Hannah with an uncomfortable mirror into her own persona at times. What has emerged this season is a show with strong elements of romantic comedy and farce, which still keeps its provocative elements by the very nature of its subject matter. You know that Hannah likely can’t have it all, not the way she wants to at least, and that attempting to balance her job and any type of meaningful relationships is likely to end in disaster. The character is like watching a very slow train wreck that you hope somehow manages to right itself before impact, and Piper is charming, sexy, and sometimes tragic, all at once.

I just watched the full first season of “Secret Diary,” and they gave me the first four episodes of the second season. From what I’ve seen, the series seems to be concentrating more on her relationships outside of the call girl job, and less on the sex-capades.

Billie Piper: Yeah, that’s exactly right. She’s got a dual life. She plays a character when she's a part of her intimate adventures. But when she's at home alone, she's Hannah. Herself. And this year, the biggest change is that she falls in love, for the first time in a long time. And it's also the first time she really questions her choice of profession, because she's trying to marry these two worlds, and failing. And there are often head-on collisions between the two. You know, prostitution isn't really conducive to a happy relationship. Surprise, surprise! [laughs] So, it's more complex this year, and there's a lot more tale, and story, than the other year, and it's less about her profession.

Is that direction something you’re happy about?

I am. It was nice to kind of explore the character, other than just taking my clothes off all the time. And also, I think it's really interesting to get the other side of the story, because I think it's interesting to know how one lives with that vocation, and not letting anybody else know, and what that does to them mentally, and why they make the choices that they do. So, I think it's a part of her story that was worth exploring in greater detail.

The way the show is going now reminded me of a quote from Paul Thomas Anderson about shooting Boogie Nights, and I’m paraphrasing, but he wanted to put a scene of them shooting the porn early on in the film, so he could sort of get it out of the way, to show the mechanics of how it‘s shot, and then concentrate on the characters from there.

Yeah, that’s great! It's…kind of, in a way, the sex is the least interesting thing. You know, sex is sex, and at the end of the day, what's more interesting is the exchange that comes before, and post-sex, you know, because it's just...sex. I mean, it's interesting to see what people want, and what turns people on, and all of those things, but you kind of just want to know about the person before and after. And what it takes to make someone want to pay a woman to have sex with them, and the reasoning behind it, so, it's a definitely good way to approach it, basically just setting it up, and then getting to know the people behind it.

(Piper, above, in a scene from Season One where she attends a rather wild party.)

How much involvement do you have with where the plot of the series goes?

This year, I'm executive producer on the show. And [laughs] I don't want to be this, you know, dominating force that kind of starts snapping my fingers, and demanding less nudity and…that's just an example, but at the moment we're talking about the stories, we're meeting with the writers, and talking, meeting up with escorts again to source new material, because there's only two books from the original, from Belle, and we want to incorporate other stories, because there's some fascinating stuff out there. And we always want it to be based on facts, so there's no fictitious element to the story. Everything that you see has actually happened.

Has it really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which makes it more compelling, you know? It's always more interesting when it's based on a true story. And then, we're meeting directors next week, so I love it. I love being involved, because I like being massively creative, and I know the show really well now, as well as anybody else, so it's a nice new role for me.

Did the life of the actual Belle go in the direction that it's going for your series character? Did she ever find love that you know of?

I think she had on-and-off relationships, but I think, you know, a common complaint when I've met the escorts is that they do find it incredibly hard to form relationships with men….general relationships. Because…either you lie to the guy you're seeing about what you do, or you confess, and run the risk of him going, “Well, I think it's over.” Or sometimes, he goes, “Okay, that's fine, I'm quite turned on by that.” And then, the girls don't like that, you know? “Why does what I do turn you on? I don't like that.” So, often, they're kind of quite lonely women, even though they have company of men all day long.

Have you kept in touch with Belle?

No, not really. We met her once. She's a helpful source, but she's very keen to keep her anonymity. And she doesn't do that for a living anymore, so she has to be really careful. I haven't seen her since we met.

Was she what you expected when you met her the first time?

Yeah, I think she writes her voice very….her writing is really brilliant. It's so good that, when I saw her, I thought that this was the image of her I had in my head. And when she was speaking, I thought, “Yeah, that's her!” She's very well-turned-out, and very smart, and, you know, you usually hear the horror stories about women who have no education and are drug-addicted and are sex-trafficked---so it's interesting to see a woman like her who has a degree in all of these things, and is very well cultured, and well read, and also does this for a living. It's quite fascinating.

I do imagine you must have had some concerns that young women would think this is a great idea for a job though.

Yes.

The show made a joke about Pretty Woman in the first season, which I felt was long overdue in the media. Now, there is a movie which has likely helped inspire a few young women to take up prostitution.

Really?! Oh no. Unbelievable.

Yeah, Pretty Woman has come up by name in a few articles I’ve read about prostitution, specifically in Los Angeles. It’s the fantasy version of what things are really like. So, I thought it was a great knowing reference when you’re proposing a friendship with one of the other prostitutes, and she asks you, and I’m paraphrasing, “We're not going to watch Pretty Woman, are we?" and you're like, “No!”

Yeah, yeah...I know, that's weird, isn't it? The thing is, what I learned about it, is it is a really hard job to do, and the thing that all these women possess is this ability to emotionally disconnect, and I don't have that, and you don't have that, and my friends don't have that, so you can't just go and do that job without possessing that quality, or whatever you want to call it. You know, I'm sure it looks easier than it actually is. Really, you're handing over your body to another person, and as much as you may think you’re in control--- So when people say to me, “Are you scared that you're advocating prostitution?”, it's…well, it was that easy, I think we'd all be doing it.

I don't think the show advocates prostitution at all, by the way.

No, not you, but I've often had that criticism. And I kind of think, I mean, I'm only acting the sex, but at the time I was thinking, “I couldn't do this.” I just couldn't. It would ruin me as a person. But these women have this thing, that it doesn't affect them. And that doesn't make them less...it doesn't make them failed human beings. It's just that we're all very different, and some things affect us differently.

I like that you’ve added the character of Bambi this season as a sort of reflection of your character, but younger and more wild.

Yeah, and it's good to see the different extremes of these girls' natures and what they're like. Bambi is really reckless and impressionable, you know, but refreshing, in a way. And Belle is slightly more jaded, in a way, and very controlling, and micromanages everything.

How involved was (series creator) Lucy Prebble with this season?

She wrote the first two episodes of the second season. And then she went on to do other things, because we had to split up the show when I got pregnant, and so, time and prior commitments meant that we couldn't make it work together. But I still see her, and she's a really amazing girl, and very talented writer. She's only about twenty-seven!

Really? And she wrote a lot of the first season, right?

She wrote pretty much all of the first season, and was like the head writer, so she kind of oversaw the entire project.

How many different directors do you typically work with in a season?

Two directors. The first director will do four episodes. The first block is four episodes, and then the director will change.

Do you find the show changes significantly with a different director?

I do. It may look differently, but it ends up having the same feeling about it. Different directors approach the sex differently, and others, you know, are more keen to kind of make more of the domestic side of things, so it does alter, yeah, according to who's directing. But, you know, there is a general kind of continuity to the whole purpose. It's nice to have a change, I think. It's too much work for one director.

You and Iddo Goldberg, who plays your best friend Ben, have a strong unspoken chemistry between you. I really believe that you’ve known each other since childhood.

Yeah, we just got on really well. I mean, Iddo and I have a similar sense of humor. We bonded really intensely pretty much straightaway. And so, yeah, it wasn't forced. And, you know, I was with him while he was auditioning, and they kind of whittled it down to a few guys, and then I went and read with those few guys, and he was the right man for the job.

(Iddo Goldberg, who plays the long-suffering best friend to Piper's Hannah, above.)

You came to the show as a name actress. Did you have the power to say, “These are the ground rules in terms of what I’m willing to do, or not do?”

Not at that stage, and also, it was being…I thought it was being handled very well. And, even though I've done a few jobs, I'm still relatively new at this. And, I think one of the reasons they made it work so well is because I had no, kind of, rules. It's a really…it's not the kind of role where you can kind of set out limits. You can't suddenly go, “I'm not going to do this-this-this - I won't be naked - I won't do the sex - you'll have to use someone else” - because I'm playing a prostitute. And that would just make everybody's life really hard. I was very up for it, which was a relief to them, I'm sure.

You must have had real faith in the creative talents of the writers and producers though, because there's a fine line between art and exploitation.

Well, most of them are women, as well. We’ve had one female director, so it's very female. So it never feels like it's going to get gratuitous, or nasty, or, you know, blokey. It comes from women, so I was in good company.

I’ve never heard that term “blokey” before. That’s funny.

“Blokey,” yeah [laughs]. There’s very little testosterone on the set.

Was there any point that you became more comfortable with doing the sex scenes?

Yeah, you get…well, we were doing one a day, and they just become part of the job, you know? It becomes very…it's like a dance, it's like learning a dance. It's very choreographed. You talk it through to the point where it would almost feel false, you know, on a stage. But then, when the cameras are rolling, you can just go for it. You really want to go for it, and nail it the first time, so you don't have to keep repeating it [laughs]. And by the end, we all managed to hit the nail. And it worked out, and it was pretty pain-free. You know, obviously there are days when you're just like, “Oh, god, I just don't want to be that close to someone else!" Do you know what I mean? But it's only eight weeks. And the other actors are very sweet, and very gentle, and just as nervous, you know, because they're only coming in for one day! And I'm there for the duration, so I'm at home with the crew and everything, and they've seen me in underwear for weeks. And the other actors come in and they have to be starkers on the first day! So it's really hard for them, so I have to be very patient and giving and compassionate.

I hate asking you about that, for the record.

That's okay! I don't mind [laughs]. That's the show.

Cool. And so, Hannah is starting to write herself now at the end of the season, like the real Belle.

Yeah, she's becoming the real woman. And it's funny also because she kind of gets writer's block, and I'd say she has to keep doing the work to feel the writing, and also she's obviously trying to top what she's written before…which means that her sexual encounters become more radical and out there.

Oh, god!

Yeah [laughs]. That’s more in the third season, which we're about to shoot. But at the end of Season Two, we see her as an established writer.

Have you read the scripts for the third season?

Well, we're developing them now, and it's very funny….her approach to writing. She kind of realizes that some of her afternoons spent with men are actually quite mundane and quite boring, and that's not really material for her new book. So she starts lying about what they've done. And then, she does start just going to town, and just, you know, cranking it up a notch, and going full-out. And forcing men to do things that they hadn't even imagined. Suggesting things, actually. “Should we try this? Should we try that?" and he's like, “No, I just want missionary position.” Yeah, so you're basically frightening off her shy clients, and it gets really funny.

And how does her search for love go?

It changes, and something new happens with a guy, and it's very different to her relationship with Alex. She's suddenly…she finds herself really out of her depth. But Season Two is all about her quest -- well, not really her quest for love, because it just comes, and it's really unexpected and not really something she really wants to get into, so it's desperately sad, and it's interesting to see which way she goes.

I wanted to talk about your music career a bit. I remember the first time I saw you, I was in Dublin, about 11 years ago, for a film festival, and there was this music video which was on every television station. Endlessly.

Oh my god [laughs].

And it was something when you were dancing around a pool table.

I was always dancing around something! If it wasn't a skateboard park, it was a pool table, and that was my second single [laughs]. Yeah, it's called "Girlfriend.” It was me and some other girls, and then the guys playing pool. I was really young. I was like fifteen, or something.

(Piper as a teenager, above, on the cover of her single for "Girlfriend," when her stage name was simply "Billie.")

Your initial goal was to be an actress, and the music producers discovered you at your acting school, I believe?

Yeah, and I liked singing, but I never thought I had the strongest vocals. And so, I was kind of reluctant, but you're offered that opportunity at fourteen -

Of course you take it.

And you're like, “What? I don't have to go to school anymore. Yeah!” [laughs] And I also got to work, and I was just desperate to work as a child. I mean, I was freakishly ambitious, and that's kind of calmed down now. I still have ambitions, but they've slightly changed. I'm happy as an actor. I much prefer that.

It’s always hard to make the jump from one medium to another, in the public’s mind. Was it “Doctor Who” that made people start taking you more seriously as an actress?

Yeah, I think so, I think so. Because I'd done a few things, like I did “Canterbury Tales," but “Doctor Who”---the part was written so well that it gave me a great opportunity to really kind of showcase what I had, and I know that people liked it, and so that was that was the one that got me started, really.

(Piper and Christopher Eccleston as the good Doctor in "Doctor Who.")

That must have been very satisfying, because you knew you had the ability as an actor, but people sometimes have a hard time perceiving a performer as more than one thing.

Mostly you're having to prove so many things to people, like “I am passionate about it. You can rely on me, and I think I'm good at what I do. You may have a different opinion, and that's fine, you're entitled to it.” But, you know, it's just like, it's hard for people to get their heads around the idea that one actually wants to do more than one thing in life [laughs]. And then, you know, some people in the U.K. have a problem with this show [“Secret Diary"], because they were used to seeing me as a family entertainer, or in period dramas, and then they had to kind of get used to the fact that this is the new thing, and this is the new part that I'm going to play, and, you know, I'm jumping ship again [laughs].

In “Doctor Who,” you were the lead in many ways. Because the story is sort of seen through her eyes. And she's the one that changes the most, at least in the beginning.

Yeah, and it's kind of, like you say, she's all the children, basically. She's the one showing the kids what Doctor Who is like. She's human - he's an alien, a Time Lord, and she makes the kids think that they could be there. Because she's sort of the domestic side of sci-fi, you know?

I never really watched the earlier series of “Doctor Who” growing up, although I remember it was always on around midnight in the States. Did you watch it growing up in England?

Oh, I had to have. And I remember it being on, because the theme tune is really spooky.

You’re right. That song is what I remember most too.

Yeah, it's really creepy [laughs]. And it was always on, but I would never really settle down to it. It was just never my thing. But you knew it. If you were English, British, you know “Doctor Who.” But I had no idea what I was getting into. And, you know, I'm still not that up on my sci-fi knowledge. Lots of Whovians get really upset because I'm not really…I find it hard to kind of keep it all in my head [laughs].

You can't keep all that stuff in your head!

I know, but some of these guys really can. They have this brain capacity. I spoke to the new guy, Matt Smith, who's playing the Doctor in the new series. He called me, “What am I going to do?” It's really hard. It's just, your life completely changes, and it's such a huge show, especially in our country. It's about the biggest show on TV. And it's frightening, you know, being in that type of production, and having people suddenly know everything about you. He's just about to embark on that.

And what are you planning on doing next?

Well, we're just doing Season Three in the UK. And then, I'm going to just take some time to maybe look at some films. I just got an agent here.

Congratulations on that. You were known over here as a pop star, but not on the same level of fame as you were at home. But then, television audiences in the United States, seeing you for perhaps the first time, are introduced to you without preconceptions.

Which is great. It's easier, yeah. Because I don't come with all this baggage. And people just go, “Oh, there's this new actress, and she's doing this…,” and I find people embrace change here more than they do at home anyway.

Is that right?

Yeah, like, when you look at all the singers and actors and working people in the U.S., you know, they do more than one thing. They've got this brand, and that brand….

In America, it’s sort of considered a given that you’re going to be juggling a bunch of different things in the air, particularly when you’re in the entertainment business. You don’t know which one will break, so you try a bunch of routes.

It's amazing, and it's inspiring, and it's the way life should be. But in the UK, people get very upset if you try and do more than one thing. It's like, “Oh, you smug bastard.” [laughs] And so people don't really like that, so here, it gives me an opportunity to kind of do whatever I want to do.

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Eric Singer: The Hollywood Interview

Screenwriter Eric Singer and the one-sheet for his first produced feature, The International. (Photo by Jeffrey Fiterman)

ERIC SINGER:
THE SCRIBE ARRIVES ON THE INTERNATIONAL
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appears in the February issue of Venice Magazine.

For many, Eric Singer would seem to be one of those lucky few who struck gold in Hollywood almost immediately. After dropping out of Boston University, Eric returned home to his native Los Angeles, determined to break into the business as a screenwriter. Taking a job as a night janitor, Eric spent his days writing, ultimately creating his first screenplay, The Sky is Falling, which immediately sold and made Eric an in-demand writer. Flash forward more than a decade later, and Eric Singer has written and sold many screenplays, made a very comfortable living doing what he loves, but has yet to see a single one of his scripts turned into a motion picture. Until now.

The International was penned by Eric after he became fascinated with the BCCI banking scandals of the 1980s and 90s. Realizing that the he had the makings of a crackerjack thriller in the details of the events that rocked the world of international high finance during that period, Eric penned a script that had some of the biggest stars and directors in Hollywood circling it hungrily. Starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, with German auteur Tom Tykwer calling the shots, The International is one of the smartest, most exciting thrillers in many a moon, reminiscent of the best work of John Frankenheimer, deftly combining action, political intrigue and complex characters who deal in many shades of gray. The Columbia Pictures release hits theaters February 13.

But the story doesn’t end there. Nor does it begin there. As in all things Hollywood, there is much smoke and many mirrors in the story of how The International came to the big screen. Read on…

Most screenplays have interesting backstories as to their gestation. The International is no exception.
Eric Singer: (The Writer’s Guild) was about to go on strike in 2001, and I had just come out of writing a movie that had been a crazy experience. So I was late in the game, and everyone was just rushing to book a job because it was fixing up to be a long, brutal strike. So I went to Columbia and met with a friend of mine named Shannon Golding, who’s an executive there. They were looking to do a remake of a Hong Kong action film. I wasn’t really that big a fan of the original film, but I was scared, and I knew what they wanted to hear, so I decided to go off, and put a pitch together, and met with the producers and the studio. They liked it, and boom, I’d booked the job to do this re-write. And I felt fortunate, because a lot of guys hadn’t booked jobs, and were scared shitless. It was the first time I’d ever booked a job just for the job. Up to that point, everything I’d worked on I was in love with. This was my first time taking an assignment, my first time doing a re-write, my first time taking a job that I wasn’t absolutely passionate about. About a month into it, I realized I’d made a mistake, and we also found out that we weren’t going on strike. But I’d taken the money, and I was struggling with it, and struggling with myself.

Director Tom Tykwer (L) on the set of The International.

Then you had a couple major blows in your life.
Yes. My sister and father were both diagnosed with cancer at the same time. My family just went into a tailspin. My sister has two kids, who were really young at the time, and it was a really dark, horrible time for my family. And it put a lot in perspective for me, caused a lot of shifts within me, and dropped my tolerance for bullshit to zero. I had lots of friends before I went into that tunnel, and once I went into that tunnel, I had two friends. I was already getting in trouble with the studio because my draft was so late, and I was thinking ‘I’m taking time away from my family to work on something I don’t love. Is this something I want to do?’ And the answer was an immediate, definitive “no.” So without telling the producers, the studio and my agent, I threw away the movie they hired me to write, and I went back to this idea I’d always had, based on the BCCI banking scandal back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It had always fascinated me, and I’d always wanted to do a movie set in that world of high finance, and a bank that was like the Chase Manhattan Bank to the underworld. And I wrote The International, which was literally an original screenplay. I was so late with it, that the studio--and Columbia couldn’t have been cooler by the way, knowing what my family was going through—was about to pull the plug. I understand completely where they were coming from: they had a job that needed to be done.

So what happened when you finally finished it?
My producer, Chuck Roven, is the best producer I’ve ever worked with. We didn’t really know each other that well, at the time, but I kind of handed in the script to him, and then my girlfriend and I went to Mexico. I knew that my career was either going to be over, or they were going to love it. It fell in between those two. When Chuck first read it, it was like a fuckin’ bomb went off. (laughs) He was furious. So was my agent. She said “This isn’t what they paid you to do. What are you doing?” “But you like it, right?” “Yeah, I like it, it’s amazing, but…” But after the smoke cleared, to Columbia’s credit, they decided that they liked the script and went forward with it. But they also sat me down and sort of “had the talk” with me (laughs) about methodology and protocol, and all that. I owned up to the fact that it was out of order and unprofessional, but that I was also in a crazy place. They all kind of got it, and from that point on, we were all on the same page. It terms of a collaborative experience, once we got past the point of that initial shock, it was amazing.

Clive Owen (L) confronts Armin Mueller-Stahl in The International.

Originally it was set in the early ‘80s, right?
Yeah, I totally wanted that kind of ‘70s and early ‘80s paranoid thriller vibe. Godfather III was really the only film up to this point that dealt with the banking scandals, because it was really gangster warfare on a corporate level, and I thought that was the best part of the film.

Gangsters wearing Brooks Brothers.
Exactly. And in the original draft (the Clive Owen character) Salinger was a much more brooding, messed up guy. He was also a Holocaust survivor, which added another layer of darkness to the character. I did a lot of intense research, and talked with a lot of people who were leaving the Justice Department at the time, just as George W. Bush was taking office. They gave me all these details about BCCI, and how it went down. So it had a lot of elements of Coppola’s The Conversation. It was a thriller, but also a character study.

Naomi Watts and Clive Owen share a rare moment of levity in The International.

Then the script had a rather serpentine journey.
Yeah, about a year before Tom came on, Chuck calls me and says “Ridley Scott read the script, loves it, wants to do it.” That’s always an exciting phone call to get, and literally the next day, I was in a meeting with Ridley. Then a couple days later, we were at the studio meeting with all the top brass, and they gave us the green light. It was like lightning in a bottle, just crazy. Whenever things happen that fast, I always get uneasy, whenever it’s too good. I remember coming home and telling my wife, then my girlfriend, ‘Oh my God, it’s insane! We’re gonna have to move to London…’ And within two weeks, it was over. Ridley had fallen out, and went on to do another movie and all this tidal wave of excitement just dropped down to nothing again.

How did Tom Tykwer come aboard?
Tom’s agent at the time was a guy named Josh Donen, Stanley Donen’s son. Really smart guy. Josh had bought my first script, called The Sky is Falling, when he’d left to become a producer. Josh had gone back to being an agent, read the script for The International, and sent it to Tom, and he really responded to it. I’d always thought Tom’s work was really interesting. So when we met, the energy at the meeting was odd, because Tom had never done a studio picture, was very anti-studio, and has this amazing thing going in Germany where he can basically make anything that he wants, and is very insulated. He lives the life of a pure auteur. It’s amazing, his set-up. So he had very interesting things to say about the script, but the one thing we locked horns on, is that he wanted to contemporize the movie. (laughs) At the time, I was so attached to this period thriller, but in retrospect, it was really nothing more than that. All of Tom’s arguments of why he wanted to contemporize it turned out to be really legit. So that’s what we did. I went back and did more research to see how it would work today, as opposed to the ‘80s. The more I worked with him, the more I began to see him as the General that you want to follow into battle. Also, I really wanted to finally go make a fuckin’ movie!

You’d come so close numerous times before to having your work produced.
I’d been in pre-production on three different movies that ultimately didn’t get made at that point. I was at the altar, but the wedding just didn’t happen.

This is an interesting point you bring up. For almost a decade, you’ve been in the very enviable position of making a good living as a screenwriter, even though your work wasn’t getting produced, but after a certain point…
After a certain point there’s this threshold that you hit, where if you don’t have something made, something tangible to show for all your work, you begin to feel like you’re shoveling smoke, money be damned. Granted, I was very grateful to be getting paid to do what I loved, and I never forgot how lucky I was, but after a while, that just wasn’t the point anymore. What’s the point of spending your life in front of a computer, writing stuff that everyone tells you is great, that no one is ever gonna see? I had a friend at the time who was a carpenter. At the end of my day, I knew I’d just written something no one was ever gonna see. At the end of his day, he’d built a wall—something solid, something tangible to show for his labor. I was kind of envious of him. I had this thought that if I didn’t make a movie before I hit 40, I’d really start to rethink if this is what I wanted to do with my life.

Clive Owen takes aim in The International.

But it sounds like with this project you struck gold, and that Tom was a great collaborator.
Anytime I start working on a new project, I always go down to Hennessey and Ingalls, which sells art and architecture books. I’d always had this idea, going back to the original script, of having this architectural schematic to the script, where all the architecture in the film would come from what they call the “International School of design.” It’s something that most directors I’ve worked with are annoyed by, that sometimes I’ll write one scene where I direct it within the writing. Tom liked it. There was this one particular book I’d found at Hennessey and Ingalls, when I started to germinate the idea of the story. It was this really obscure book from Sweden, but when I looked at the book, I said ‘This is the movie.’ So I bought the book and used it as this visual touchstone throughout writing the script. When Tom came on as the director, I went and found another copy of the book. I wrapped it up, and after we closed the deal for him to direct, I gave him the book. He opened it up, and his face just blanched. He starts saying “Oh my God” in German. He tells me that the night he read the script, he went to his bookshelf, and pulls out the same book, brings it back to his girlfriend, and says “This is the movie.” It was one of those spooky moments where we both realized that this was fated.

Not only that, you had Clive Owen in mind for the lead when you were writing it.
Yes, exactly. I always saw Salinger as a Gene Hackman kind of character, and Clive is sort of an English version of that. He’s better-looking than Hackman, but has the same kind of volcanic, brutal intensity. He’s got some mileage, man. There was another star prior to Clive who was circling the movie who’s a great actor, and the biggest star in the world, but he wasn’t right. So when Clive came on, I was so happy. All the pieces just sort of fell into place. Then Naomi signed on and Armin, who I also wrote that part for. Armin is from East Germany originally, and had some scrapes with the Stasi when he lived there, so he was coming from a very real place.

There’s some great dialogue in this film. How do you think you developed your ear for it?
My father, who’s this great, Damon Runyon-esque character, always had these great metaphors and aphorisms he’d come up with. Actually, there’s a lot of my father in this script. He never trusted banks or bankers, so I think a lot of my own paranoia and fascination with crooked dealings in high finance came from my father.

The shootout in the Guggenheim Museum is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
That idea came to me once when I was at the Guggenheim, checking out a Matthew Barney installation. I just started looking around and thought to myself, ‘Wow, this would be a badass setting for a gunfight!’ (laughs) For years, I just kept that in my pocket, waiting for the right film to frame that kind of sequence around. I actually spent months working on that scene, getting it right. And Tom was very receptive to my ideas. I told him, if you have any Bruckheimer-type stuff in this, any slow-mo or trick shots, anything but handheld, completely objective reality, you’re going to fuck it up. And he just nailed it.

That’s almost unheard of, for a writer to give a director notes, especially on the set.
I’d never do it in front of the cast and crew. We had this system where I’d hand him notecards, and if I had a suggestion or need to make a point, I’d subtly pass them to him. Or if I needed to talk to him privately, we had a signal. Tom is the sort of guy who feels that you’re all in the trench together. There’s no pretention about titles or power. He just wants to make the best movie possible. When you’re on the set of your first movie, it’s this kind of orgasmic experience, and you want to be friends with everyone, but you also want the movie to be as great as you know it can be. But then you have to realize that the film is no longer yours, and you have to let go and trust the people who are making it. I was lucky that I got to trust the right people.

It’s even rare for a writer to be allowed on-set.
Yeah, sometimes the studios will send the writer for a week or two as a sort of little perk, but generally they’re not too thrilled with the idea of having the writer there, whereas the stars’ trainer and personal assistants get carte blanche. They’re doing the junkets for The International right now, and no one wants to talk to me. No one cares. They want to talk to the producers, the director and the stars. That’s it. They could really care less about me. And one part of me wants to say “Hey, none of you guys would be here if it weren’t for me!”

Trailer for The International.

Do you really want to be in the public eye, though? It seems that one of the perks of being a writer is that you can have name recognition and your work appreciated by the pubic, but still retain your anonymity and privacy. You don’t have to be a celebrity to be successful, whereas the actors do.
Being a celebrity definitely doesn’t interest me, but there are certain things I’d like to communicate, which is why I would have liked to have been a part of the junkets. There are specific things about the world we live in today, and how it pertains to the movie, that I would like to have heard in a larger forum, like the stuff with the Chinese that’s in the movie. This stuff is actually happening now, in the Sudan. They’re using proxy banks to fuel war in the Sudan, so they can control the resources in that country. Things haven’t really changed much since BCCI, except that the banks have learned from BCCI, and gotten more sophisticated. They represent an enormous amount of money and power. When you look into what some of these banks are doing, it’s some really unsettling, spooky shit. What we’re experiencing now, is just a different emanation that the bank in the movie is using, which is the idea of debt. Debt really is where all the power and control is. We’re now sort of on the other end of experiencing what predatory lending and debt manipulation can actually do. We’re not talking about a Third World country. We’re talking about the fact that it can ravage the biggest, most robust economy in the world. So what we’re saying is “Have you heard about these evil motherfuckers, and what they’re doing to the world, what they’re doing to you? Would you like to see Clive Owen shoot one?” (laughs) On the most base level, if you’re pissed off at bankers, come see our movie.

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Matteo Garrone: The Hollywood Interview

Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone.

MATTEO GARRONE TAKES IT TO THE STREETS WITH GOMORRAH
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appears in the February issue of Venice Magazine.

Born in Rome in 1968, Matteo Garrone graduated art school, then cut his cinematic teeth as an assistant cameraman and spent several years devoted to painting full-time, before directing his first award-winning short film, Silhouette in 1996. Garrone’s eighth film is the internationally-lauded drama Gomorrah, which won the Grand Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, among other plaudits. Based on journalist Roberto Saviano’s best-selling expose of the same name, Gomorrah shows the effect of the notorious Camorra crime family in the Naples and Caserta regions of Italy. The book caused such a sensation, on both sides of the law, that Saviano was forced to go into hiding, once it was learned the Camorras had put a price on Saviano’s head.

An Italian mobster gets some sun the new-fashioned way in Gomorrah.

In transferring a non-fiction subject to the screen, Garrone followed the lead of his filmmaking heroes, Italian neo-realists such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who were noted for casting non-professionals in their gritty, true-to-life stories of Italian peasants struggling to survive. “Most of the cast were from a local theater company, some from a prison theater company, and some were not actors at all,” Garrone explained recently during a stopover in L.A. “It was very important for me to choose the right face, as it was for Pasolini, so I always start with the actor’s face, then hopefully the rest of the actor would follow.”

The price of gangland violence strikes close to home in Gomorrah.

A tableaux-like story, Gomorrah follows six characters: a local “Don” who finds that his power is quickly slipping; a 13 year-old boy who finds the mean streets of his neighborhood steering his destiny in the wrong direction; two dim-witted young men who idolize Brian de Palma’s Scarface and foolishly try to start a criminal empire of their own; a college-graduate with a seemingly bright future who finds that working with the Camorras tests his moral fiber to the breaking point; and a gifted tailor who finds himself in the middle of a war between the Camorras and their Chinese competitors.

The film's most iconic image: two teens take target practice with a cache of guns foolishly stolen from gangsters.

“I had a lot of very rich, complex storylines to deal with, so I tried to film them in as straightforward a style as I could, as if I were a passerby with a camera who happened to be there by chance,” Garrone explains. “Also, I’m hoping that, like the films of Pasolini and De Sica, it will make the film always feel contemporary.”

Garrone lines up a shot on the set of Gomorrah.

Garrone’s admiration for author Saviano is palpable as he talks about the young writer. “It’s a very sad situation with Roberto Saviano: he’s 29 years-old and remains in hiding. There’s no coming back from where he is because he’s become a symbol against Camorra. Roberto grew up there, and wrote this best-selling book, and denounced not only the crime family, but the police were aware of most of the things he wrote in the book, so it made them look bad, too.” Garrone is aware of the parallels between Savino and other authors who have had to suffer to bring their story and their message to light. “It’s similar to what Salman Rushdie went through. The book was so explosive, the government in Italy brought the army into Naples, declaring war against Camorra. So literally, they are at war.” A brutal war, in fact that, over the last thirty years, has cost the lives of over 4,000 people, which is a higher body count than notorious groups like the IRA, ETA, Islamic terror organizations and La Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia) have ever racked up.


The trailer for Gomorrah.

Garrone hopes that, like Saviano’s book, his film adaptation of Gomorrah will have a lasting, positive effect for Italy and its people. “As Roberto says, ‘It’s not the book, but how many people read the book, that makes its message powerful, and helps weaken the Camorra in some way.' I’m hoping that the film has the same effect.”

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Sony Releases New Stupid Piece of Sh*t That Doesn't F**king Work--From The Onion.com

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DARREN ARONOFSKY: The Hollywood Interview

(Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, on the set of The Wrestler, above)


Into the Ring with Aronofsky
By Terry Keefe

[Note: This interview will appear in the February issue of Venice Magazine.]

As someone who has spent quite a bit of time researching the backstage goings-on of professional wrestling for two different screenplays (most notably a script called Mat Wars, which was a biopic of wrestling super-promoter Vince McMahon), I can say that director Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler captures the lives of professional wrestlers with an authenticity that has never been seen before in a fiction film. It is also, somewhat incredibly, the first major fiction film in recent memory to really begin mining the pure narrative gold inherent in this strange showbiz netherworld where sport and spectacle collide. Although there have now been a number of landmark documentaries on the subject of wrestling, of which Barry Blaustein’s Beyond the Mat and Paul Jay’s Wrestling with Shadows are my two favorites, studio fiction films about professional wrestling, such as 2000’s Ready to Rumble, have either played the wresling world using broad, and largely unfunny, comedy; or as a real sport, such as in the 1989 Hulk Hogan-starrer No Holds Barred, where the wrestling matches are presented as a genuine athletic contest. But, the “real” world of professional wrestling contains all the drama, and dark comedy, that any single story needs, without having to gild the lilly in any significant way, and it is in depicting that world in a straightforward, almost neorealistic, style that Aronofsky finds the strength of The Wrestler. That, and the performance of Mickey Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, which is a case of a performer meeting material that fits him perfectly for where he is in his actual life and career. The film is partially about the attempted comeback of the Ram, but it’s impossible to totally separate the Ram’s comeback story from the real-life arc of Rourke himself. That’s not to call this stunt casting on Aronofsky’s part, as that would cheapen a performance which will be admired for years, long after audience awareness of Rourke’s career path has diminished; but both the Ram and Rourke are former big stars from 20 years prior, pretty in their youth and pretty ragged-looking at times today. The Ram longs for his heyday of the 80s, and when the well-chosen soundtrack of hair metal tunes from that period plays throughout the film, it is far more related to character than the typical soundtrack assemblage. The songs of Quiet Riot and Ratt play constantly in the Ram’s head anyway; we the audience are just privy to it during this part of his life. And similarly, you can certainly imagine Rourke himself pining for the days when he was Harry Angel of Angel Heart. Lost youth. Lost promise. But with the chance of redemption.

One of the most heartbreaking things for me when researching my own wrestling projects was the discovery that many of the wrestlers who I watched, and idolized, as a child had met tragic ends before ever getting out of middle age. To call the wrestling lifestyle tough defines understatement when you know some of the elements that it entails. Wrestlers for the big companies are on the road for a large number of days each year. Inevitably, that seems to take a toll on their home life and personal relationships. Although wrestling is staged, this isn’t like being a movie stuntman, because performing before a live audience requires that the moves look real without any special effects. When you see a wrestler being dropped from the ring to the concrete, he often is really hitting the concrete. Night after night. A famous professional wrestler (I believe Terry Funk) was once quoted as saying the reason his punches looked so real is because he was really hitting his opponents. Pain killer addiction is common, as is steroid addiction. When we meet Randy the Ram 20 years after his peak, he is wrestling on the small indie show circuit, where wrestlers often get paid $100 per performance, if that, for a crowd that demands they continue to take big and bloody risks with their already-broken bodies. The Old-Timers Day of professional wrestlers, as depicted at the autograph-signing show that the Ram attends, is a sad affair, with many of the former stars crippled or on their way. But the Ram can’t let go of his glory days, and although he suffers a heart attack after a match, he is determined to have at least one last big payday in the ring, a rematch against his former rival from the 80s, an Iranian villain called the Ayatollah but played by an African-American in the film (wrestler Ernest “The Cat” Miller). Although the Ram makes his ring entrance to Guns ‘n Roses “Sweet Child ‘o Mine,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” was also playing in my head. The Wrestler is a reinvention for both Rourke and Aronofsky himself, who has taken on a much more objective style with this film. It’s gritty and fly-on-the-wall, and it suits the story well.

I can’t write an article about Aronofsky without mentioning his landmark 1998 film Pi, which for me at least, was one of the Top 5 indies of the 90s. For those who have never seen it, the story is about a computer and mathematics genius named Max (Sean Gullette) who has possibly stumbled onto the name of God, causing a bunch of different posses to pursue him for it, including the intelligence community and a group of Kabbalah-obsessed Orthodox Jews. Pi doesn’t actually provide the answers to the universe, but it does manage the deft trick of making you feel as if you touched the spiritual yourself during the lead character’s journey. And it also serves as a launching pad for the discussion of some mighty big ideas. That the plot is structured as a thriller gives its metaphysical tangents a framework to play in, so that the film never becomes so esoteric that it loses sight of entertaining the audience. It’s a marvel of independent filmmaking and one worth seeing in a theater if possible. The grainy, but high-contrast black and white photography by Matthew Libatique is exquisite at times.

Aronofsky and I met for shrimp burritos at the famous Tortilla Grill on Abbot Kinney in Venice, on a very rainy, cold day in mid-December of 2008.

What were the origins of the idea for The Wrestler?

Darren Aronofsky: I had the idea when I graduated from film school. I made a list of ideas for films, and The Wrestler was one of them. It just came out of an observation that no one has ever done a serious picture on wrestling, so that's where it all began.

At the time, were you thinking of presenting wrestling as a real contest in the story? Because until the mid-90s or so, there was very little information available as to what really happens behind-the-scenes.

That’s true. I wasn't sure at first. But I think, the more research I did on it, and the more I got to meet the world, and the more access I got backstage...I realized how real it all was.

What I always say is that professional wrestling is staged, but not exactly what you would call “fake.”

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Did the screenwriter Robert Siegel have a script that he brought to you and then was developed further, or did you commission him for the original work?

We commissioned him. We gave him a few ideas, and we gave him the aesthetic of the world, and then we just let him loose.

How long was the development process on the script?

Well, we developed it all the way up to the day we shot. And even on set, we were working on it. Rob Siegel was on strike (during the Writers Strike), but we did a lot of improvisation and stuff.

Had you been a fan of wrestling when you were growing up?

Not really. I think I had, like, an eight-month romance with it.

That's about what I had. But because I was a kid, it seemed like forever.

Right [laughs]. I went to one match at Madison Square Garden. This was before Wrestlemania even began. In fact, Hulk Hogan was a bad guy at the time.

I remember that. That's when I was watching in the early 80s.

You remember Tony Garea and Rick Martel?

Sure, yeah! The tag team champions. I loved those guys.

They were my favorite. Tony Garea would get beat up forever, and then Rick Martel would come in and save the match.

Yeah, he would come in after what they call the “hot tag.”

Is that what that was called?

Yeah, the guy who comes in after being tagged and rescues the guy who is getting beaten up.

Right, that was always how it happened [laughs]. And the Moondogs, I was a fan of theirs also. It was funny, because, you'll appreciate this…Mickey was trained by one of the Wild Samoans. Afa [Anoa’i].

Yeah, I read that!

Afa was the sweetest guy in the world. Just a sweetheart. But he was always a bad guy on the shows, wasn't he?

The Wild Samoans were always bad guys, yeah. The worst of the bad guys, actually.

It's fun to meet a lot of these guys, like we also got to meet Nikolai Volkoff. He’s also a sweet guy. And Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. It's just wild to see these guys who were heroes, you know, but also… seeing where their lives have taken them, from where they once were, these legends. It's just so…a fascinating story, I thought.

(Afa Anoa'i, the former professional wrestling star, and a bloody Mickey Rourke, who Afa trained for The Wrestler. Below is a promotional pic of Afa in his 80s heyday, as part of the tag team The Wild Samoans, with his partner Sika.)


I know that Mickey was your first choice for the role, and then there was some point where Nicolas Cage came along and was attached. But ultimately you went back to Mickey.

Yeah, it was a small window [with Nicolas Cage]. It took a really long time to get the money to make it with Mickey. In fact, for many, many, many months, we didn't think it would be possible. No one believed in him, and no one wanted to make the film. But then, as soon as we had a movie star, it became a movie, and overnight, or within two weeks, we had the funding, and the green light. It was a lot more money, but it just didn't work as well, so…you know, eventually, we went back to Mickey, and took a lot less money, but we were able to make it.

Even with Mickey’s role in Sin City, it was hard to get financing on this. That's surprising.

Yeah, and all we wanted was six million dollars. It was tough.

So how much training did Mickey do for the role?

He did six months of bodybuilding.

He is big in this.

Yeah, he put on thirty-five pounds of muscle. And then he did three months of wrestling training.

The press isn't picking up on that enough. I wish they would give him a little more credit for how good his wrestling looks. How polished it looks.

Yeah, when we finished the film, some wrestlers came up and said, “There's not a wrestler in the world that won't believe you're not a wrestler.” And he did some great moves, and if you look at it, it's all him. Mickey did it all.

Did you stop in a bit while he was training with Afa, or did you just see Mickey when he was a fully-formed wrestler?

Oh no, it was a little scary at first. It took a long time. I thought that the fact that he was a boxer would make things easier, but actually, I think it made things twice as hard, because he had to sort of unlearn how to move like a boxer. They move so much differently than wrestlers, so that took a long time for him to let go…to learn how to just basically move in the ring and ham it up. So that part was tough.

There was always the serious possibility that he could get injured during that training, too.

True. Well, he did. I don’t know…it was somewhere between actually getting hurt, and…he's a bit lazy, Mickey [laughs]. He's so talented, but for years he's been able to just walk through roles, sort of put his feet up on the desk. When I kind of talked to him about going out there and doing the wrestling, I think he was up for it, but didn't realize how much energy it would take. So I had to push him a little bit.

(Rourke wrestling Ernest Miller, in his role of the Ayatollah, in the final match of the film.)


How much of the “extreme wrestling” stuff, such as the razor blading and the weapons, did you guys do for real, and how much of it was, for lack of a better word, staged?

Well, there's movie magic happening. There's a lot of make-up, of course. I mean, Mickey's not bleeding, but that guy Necro Butcher (Editor’s Note: Mickey’s opponent in the bloody extreme match and a real-life wrestler), he's a real dude. He's a cult American hero.

That's a great way to put it.

He is. He's the top-billing guy. You go to any of these matches, he's the last match always. And the crowd loves him, they go crazy for him. And so a lot of stuff he did was real. Because it's what he does every day. But we did it in a very safe way. There's movie magic, but there are also real stunts happening, but nothing very, very dangerous.

You shot the wrestling matches at actual shows with a live crowd, in between the regular wrestling cards that they were there for. What was that experience like?

The wrestling fans, you know, well…the hardcore wrestling fans are a different breed than the other wrestling fans. That was the Combat Zone Wrestling (CZW) promotion, and they, and the other two promotions [which included the promotion Ring of Honor], they were all great. The fans, they get the theatrics of it, so they knew what to scream when different things happened, they just really played with it. CZW was the Philly crowd, and they were a tougher crowd [laughs]. They were pretty brutal and aggressive, but we did our best to sort of keep them entertained, and to keep it going, and we got it done.

How much time did you have to shoot with these live crowds? Were you able to do multiple takes, or did you have to use a couple of cameras at once because of time constraints?

We had to shoot with one camera. At CZW, we really limited how much stuff we had to actually do in front of a live crowd. There's a lot of stuff that we were able to cheat when the crowd wasn't there. You can see in those scenes that there are a few angles into the mat, and a few other things we played around with, to make it do-able. But in the other matches, we did shoot a lot of it in front of a crowd: the slapping contest, the coming out to the ring, entering the ring, the exiting the ring, you know. It was a lot of difficult things to get, but I think the crowds were all psyched, in general.

(Above: Aronofsky directs Rourke in the ring.)

Did you go out of your way not to use very recognizable wrestlers in the supporting roles? I recognized Ernest “The Cat” Miller, but that was about it.

That’s exactly right. The Ayatollah was a hard role to fill, so I had to get someone….how big of a star was Ernest? Was he that big?

He was popular in the WCW wrestling promotion , but more of a mid-card guy.

Yeah, that's what I thought. But yeah, I totally wanted to avoid using the big stars on purpose, because I thought, if you saw some legends show up, it almost pulls you out of the movie. We never mention Hulk Hogan, nor any of the other [real-life] wrestlers. We just wanted to keep the fiction alive, and not pull people out of it.

Was there anyone from the wrestling in particular that you were thinking of in regards to who Randy the Ram was? He’s got a little bit of Hulk Hogan to him, but not quite completely.

Not quite. He was never that big. We always saw him more as an Intercontinental-level Champion type of guy (Editor’s Note: The Intercontinental Championship was the second-level championship belt for years in the WWF, after the World Championship), or a tag-team champion guy. Never the biggest star, more in the middle-range. Like a Ricky Steamboat, or a Brutus Beefcake type of level guy, was the idea. That's how we always pictured him in our heads. Also, because he just didn't have the [physical] immensity of what some of those other guys would've been like. I mean, Mickey got big, but he didn't get big like Lex Luger, who was probably like 280, 290, something like that.

It was such a great nod to the 80s wrestling world that you had the ring nemesis be the Ayatollah. Wrestling in the 80s, in particular, was filled with Middle Eastern villains like the Iron Sheik, and it also would've been completely true to the history of wrestling that they have someone who isn’t even the same race as the character, in this case an African-American, playing the Ayatollah, and the crowd just goes with it.

Yeah, yeah. I always love that. I don't know if you heard, but Iran has condemned the movie.

I did. Did you want to speak about that?

I mean, it's upsetting to me, because it's not in any way…it's not meant to be disrespecting Iran or its people in any way. I mean, this is pro wrestling, and Arabic-slash-Iranian characters are kind of stock in the trade, and so we're not in any way, you know, lauding it and saying, “This is great.” We're just sort of making a comment: “Hey, look, we've got a black guy playing an Iranian guy. Don't you realize this is all like a joke, and a sham?” And it plays into America's….how guys like George Bush oversimplify things into good versus evil.

Right, mainly you're making a comment on how ridiculous it is.

Yeah, yeah, so, anyway, I think they missed the whole charm of it. All right. A little extra press for us, I guess.

Were you inspired at all by the real-life story of wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts as it was portrayed in Barry Blaustein’s documentary Beyond the Mat?

We were deep into our development when that film came out, and I didn't see it until much later. I didn't even know about it until much later, many years later, but I think I saw it on DVD. We were deep into the development of the character at that point, but the sad thing about a lot of these guys is…Jake's story is kind of cliché.

It's unfortunately very common, yeah.

Yeah, so, there are a lot of guys like that. You know, all these guys were on the road three hundred days a year, and their home lives, by the time their careers were over, were just shot, so they came back to nothing.

(Above: Rourke performing his off-the-top-rope finishing manuever.)

I’m going to guess that, as an actor, Mickey works pretty loose?

That's where a lot of the whole visual style of the film came out of from. I thought that we should just let this guy be free, and just try to be in the moment with him, and surrender to that.

Does he give you, typically, takes very different from each other?

Absolutely. Yeah. He's pretty free, and between “Action” and “Cut,” he's really open to exploring.

In terms of the choreography of the wrestling, how specific were you in plotting it out, or were you able to sort of capture it on the fly?

No, we spent a lot of time on that, actually, even though, in general they're kind of improvising when they're in the ring…we couldn't really do that, because, you know, Mickey wasn't really a wrestler. These guys train for years, so we choreographed a very simple match, and that's what we trained and taught Mickey. And then we brought the opponent in, right at the end. With Ernest Miller, I forget where Ernest lives, but he wasn't living in New York, so we brought him in a couple of weeks before. Ernest, of course, learned it in a day, you know, because any professional wrestler could pick it up, and then they rehearsed a bit. We were very well rehearsed before we went into the ring, but still, even when we were in the ring, Mickey had to be reminded of which piece it was, and how to do the hits, and so, during a live promotion, we'd run out there, and the crowd would watch us. We'd work through it pretty quickly, and then I'd figure out where to put the camera, and then we would shoot. That’s basically how it worked.

I just re-read the interview you did with the late, great screenwriting magazine Scenario, back when Pi was released. You spoke a lot about the very specific “film grammar” you set up during the preproduction stages. In Pi, you kept to a very subjective point of view, in part, by only shooting over the lead character Max’s shoulder when he was in conversation with another character, never over the shoulder of that other character. The Wrestler has a much looser feel to it, but there’s definitely a consistent grammar here as well. What were some of the rules you set up with your Director of Photography?

Unlike the subjective direction of Pi, this was all about being objective, so it was all kind of observing and watching and we never cut away to inserts or any of that stuff. Things that I would've done in the past. I just really wanted to change and do something different. Like when Marisa [Tomei] reads the greeting card, normally I would cut to an insert, but there was just no place for it in this one.

I love the opening, where, for the first time, you see Mickey in the present day. He's sitting in the locker room in that long shot, you don't see his face very clearly, but his body language says it all. He’s slumped and then his reaction to getting the money from the promoter, which is clearly disappointing to him…that half-shrug speaks volumes about where he is in life.

Thank you. Mickey did a great job with it, you know.

The scene going into the deli, where you hear the music, where it's like his ring entrance, was that something that was planned from the beginning, or when you guys...

What, the music?

More the walk through the curtain.

That came when we were doing our tech-scout with the entire crew. I just saw the hallway, and I was like, “Oh, we gotta work with this,” and so we did.

I understand that the deli was actually functioning while you were shooting.

Yeah, we didn't have the money to close the supermarket and the meat counter, and people just started coming up, and I just got Mickey to start serving them, and so half those people in the scene are real people, half are actors.

The soundtrack is loads of fun. And I think there's going to be some kind of hair metal revival because of this movie, that you’re responsible for, one way or the other.

I'm sorry [laughs]. I send all apologies to the world. I don’t know, it's fun. It was interesting because this isn't sort of the A-list hair-metal anthems.

Right. That’s something that I loved about it. These were songs that you remember from that period, but not the biggest, overplayed hits.

Yeah, well, we couldn't afford them [laughs]. And it's funny, because it shows you how you can turn your financial limitations into strengths. We couldn't afford the big songs, the Def Leppard and Motley Crue songs, so we had to go to that next level, you know, the Ratt and Cinderella level -- but it was a lot of fun, because they were great bands, and they have a lot of heart and a lot of soul, and a lot of their songs, you can remember them pretty well.

Did Bruce Springsteen see the film and then write the song “The Wrestler” that runs over the end credits?

No. He based it off of the script, and a letter that Mickey wrote to him about it. Mickey wrote him a two-page letter, and told him why he was interested in doing the project. I think the Boss really is a big fan of Mickey's, and heard about this and wanted to help, and that's why he did it. He ended up giving us the song for free. It's coming out on iTunes tomorrow, I think. As a single.

As a big fan of Barton Fink myself, I have to believe that there were a few “wrestling picture” quotes thrown about the set during this production. Yes?

It's funny, when I got into the Venice Film Festival, they ask for a director's statement, and that was my statement….I took a quote from Barton Fink [laughs].

The Wrestler is in a very different genre and style from your previous work. How much of a conscious decision was there, in terms of career, to reinvent yourself somewhat with this movie, or was it not even thought about at all?

It wasn't really a reaction to anything. It was more that the first three films were kind of a chapter, and I had just, a lot had changed in my life, and my filmmaking team kind of got dispersed. My producer moved out here to Venice, actually, and was doing his own thing, and my DP was working on something, so I just decided to put a whole new team together, and it was just time to do something radically different.

What film gauge did you shoot The Wrestler on?

16mm.

That's what I was thinking. Super 16?

Super 16. Widescreen, though. So it's a little bit less of a negative and it gets a lot more grain, but I really like that.

It looked fantastic. I really like the grain. And the colors of Super-16.

Yeah, there's just something about it.

There have also got to be some limitations to working with it, I imagine.

But it's quick. It's quick, you know, and it gives you much more of a real documentary feel, because you can really move with the characters. 35mm is a lot heavier, it's hard to move, and so I was excited about the 16.

Did you have any concerns about working with Mickey yourself, before going into this?

Not really. I had a very, very honest conversation with him. Straight up. I knew he was going to be tough. I knew he wasn't going to be a walk in the park, that he was going to have a lot of opinions, and have a very strong point of view. But, you know, I didn't think there was anything else I could do.

I think you gave him his comeback, which a lot of guys have tried to do in the past, but this is the one.

Thank you.

Let’s talk a bit about what you’re working on next. You’ve been announced as attached to a new version of Robocop.

We’re developing a script [on Robocop], but we’ve got a long way to go. We’re also developing a few other ideas. I don't have anything that's set in stone, that's ready to go, but I’m working on a lot of stuff, and I really want to get back to work.

There have also been reports about a new edit of The Fountain.

Oh yeah, that's just a slight...I'm just doing a slightly changed version. That'll hopefully come out at some point. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to put that out there.

Will it be using footage that you already have, or stuff that you're recreating?

There's some new stuff, but, no it's all footage I have. I wouldn't be able to recreate stuff. But we shot it a lot of different ways, and there were a lot of different choices, and I think the version that's out there is definitive, it's the version I wanted out there. But this is another kind of version of it that has sort of haunted me. I don't know if one supersedes the other, but I think fans of the film would appreciate it, so that's why I'll put it out there.

Cool. And you’re also developing something revolving around the story of Noah’s Ark?

Yeah, that's a dream project that we've been working on, and we're probably going to do a graphic novel first. We're getting that off the ground, and hopefully someone will give me the money to do it. We'll see. It's complicated.

I read that you won some type of poetry contest when you were a kid with a Noah’s Ark-related poem?

Yeah, that was a long time ago [laughs]. It was just…it was a contest for the United Nations, and I probably was thirteen or fourteen, and I just wrote it and I won this big contest, and so it's kind of just always been with me, that character, that story. Like a lot of people, you know, but I had a personal thing with it, so at some point, hopefully, I'll get to tackle that one.

Do you still have the poem?

Oh, yeah. I'm sure I could probably dig it out of somewhere, but I don't think anyone will ever see that [laughs].

Just a few quick questions about Pi. I’ve always admired how you were able to examine so many big and rather cosmic ideas, but also keep the film moving by using a thriller structure.

Well, that was, that was always the concept: to have a really good skeleton, some type of genre that pulled you through it, but then to kind of hang on it as many interesting ideas as you could. It was a lot of stuff that me and my friends had been talking about over the years, and stuff I was interested in, and I just researched it all, and it kind of took off.

(Above: The Orthodox Posse that pursues the hero of Pi.)


I remember seeing the symbol of Pi all over Los Angeles when the film was being released. It was everywhere, on posterboards and on the sidewalk. And I remember thinking that it was the greatest marketing scheme for an indie film ever. The symbol was everywhere, and so evocative that you had to see the film.

You got it [laughs] ! Yeah, it was fun. I mean, me and, I hired a bunch of guys I knew that did graffiti, and six of 'em….I think I paid them each fifty bucks a can. I gave them the paint, and I said, “Finish this can, I'll give you fifty bucks,” so I got like six guys with all these cans, and we just went all over New York, and I won't forget it, because, you know, I was up all night, doing it, and they were all up all night. But each time, you gotta squat, to get down, so you're doing squats all night, every like ten feet you're squatting. I got home, I got so sick for three days, because I was dehydrated. And I was in bed for three days, and then the phones started to come, the calls started to come: “oh, man, I saw this Pi symbol -- it's all over the place,” so you know, it was great.


They were here in L.A., too. I remember...

Yeah, I think we tried to repeat it here, but we didn't actually do it. I think probably the film company tried to repeat it.

I wanted to ask a little bit of your background. You're from Brooklyn, and your parents were both teachers. Do I have that right?

My dad was a science teacher. He taught geology and earth-science. My mom taught fourth grade, public school.

And then you went to Harvard, followed by the American Film Institute?

I went to public school in Brooklyn for all those years, then I went to Harvard for four years, then I went to AFI for two.

Were you able to start studying film as an undergrad at Harvard?

Yeah, I started. I got into the arts, I think, when I was a sophomore. My freshman year, I didn't know what the hell I wanted to be. And then my sophomore year, I started drawing, and that kind of changed my life, that class. Made me look at the world differently. It was just basic drawing class, but it was a great class. The first day of class, you would draw a self-portrait. That was your homework assignment. And then the last day, the last assignment was that you'd also draw a portrait, and then everyone would hang them up, side by side. And it was radical, how much, in whatever it was, four or five months, people's skills would change. You know, it was a great class. This teacher taught me totally how to look at the world, a three-dimensional world, and interpret it in a two-dimensional way. It was great.

(Below: The official trailer for The Wrestler)

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