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Talking With Director Mark Goffman: The Man Who Pulls the Strings of DUMBSTRUCK

(A waiting room of ventriloquist dummies, in Dumbstruck, above.)

by Terry Keefe

For any of our Hollywood readers who are struggling to succeed as a writer, actor, director, or musician, you already know that it's hard. If you've been at it for a while, you also probably love your chosen art form enough to continue to pursue it against some pretty long odds, because otherwise, it would be easier to just hang it up.

Now just imagine how long the odds of success would feel if the art form you loved so deeply, and were willing to give up everything else for... happened to be ventriloquism.

The world of ventriloquists, or "vents" in their own parlance, is the focus of director Mark Goffman's funny, and extremely poignant, new documentary, Dumbstruck, which is being released tomorrow (4/22) in New York and Washington, D.C., followed by a Los Angeles roll-out the following weekend (4/29).


Goffman, an accomplished television writer and producer who currently executive-produces White Collar, follows five different ventriloquists over a few years, and his subjects come from a variety of age groups, as well as success levels:

Dylan Burdette is 13-years old, living in rural Kentucky, and appears to have some budding vent chops, although it's clearly going to be a long road for him to master them; the highly likable and good-hearted Wilma Swartz is middle-aged, practices her ventriloquism most frequently for children and the elderly, and is also on the verge of eviction from her house; Kim Yeager is an energetic former beauty queen who is attempting to land a cruise ship gig, which is considered one of the plum positions of the vent profession; Dan Horn is a highly-skilled, multi-decade veteran who has, in fact, had a cruise contract for many years, and is considered to be near the top of the profession; and finally, Terry Fator, who during the course of the film becomes as successful as any ventriloquist alive when he wins "America's Got Talent" and lands a multi-million dollar headlining gig in Vegas.


(Dumbstruck producer Lindsay Goffman, superstar vent Terry Fator, and director Mark Goffman, above.)

Goffman quickly establishes the heart that underpins Dumbstruck by making it clear that he takes his subjects, and their dreams, as seriously as they do. Another director might have gone for the cheaper laughs that could easily be mined from watching individuals with varied levels of talent honing their acts with ventriloquist dummies, but Goffman allows his subjects the screen time to demonstrate just how difficult it is to be even a ventriloquist of average skill, much less one with the ability to achieve the Cinderella-level success of a Terry Fator.

Goffman never sugar-coats the reality that there is only room for a limited number of Terry Fators, and the chance of most ventriloquists sustaining a paying career at the art form is slim. But he also always shows respect for their passion, and consequently, so will the audience.

We spoke to Mark Goffman at the end of March.

Did anything in particular spark your interest in ventriloquism to the point that you became interested in making a documentary on the subject?

It actually started at my wedding [laughs]. My wife, Lindsay, and I were married four years ago, and at the wedding, her mother was asked to give a toast. Now, Lindsay’s mother is a bit shy, and so when she came up to the microphone, instead of doing a normal toast, she raised her right hand… and she was wearing this white glove. And her glove started to speak and give the toast [laughs]. Her lips didn’t move and she wound up giving this really charming, heartwarming, funny toast that I never would have expected from her.

So, in addition to wondering what type of family I had married into [laughs], I really wanted to talk to her about ventriloquism and how she had become interested in it. She’s a school teacher and she did ventriloquism to entertain her kids in class, but she also found that it was fun to do for people at parties, and she can express herself in this different way.

She told us about this convention ("Vent Haven") in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky, where 500 ventriloquists gather every year, and share their secrets, and learn from each other. She said that it was a really vibrant community.

So then, Lindsay and I decided that we had to see this for ourselves. It was kind of like a Christopher Guest film in the making [laughs].

I was inspired by films like Spellbound and The King of Kong. I think there’s this really rich area of documentaries that explore subcultures, and I thought that this would be a really fun project for Lindsay and I to do together. So, she produced it. We went to the convention and we found five people who we just fell in love with… and followed for the next couple of years.

(Terry Fator, above.)

Had Terry Fator done “America’s Got Talent” already when you started following him with your cameras?

It’s interesting… when we went to the convention, Terry had never been to the convention at that point. He had known about it and had always wanted to go. But he typically worked during the summers, because that’s when the state fairs were. When we were at the convention, we were asking who some of the really talented ventriloquists were, that we could follow for the film. “America’s Got Talent” was just airing and I think his first appearance happened while we were at the convention. People told us that we should watch him next week, because it seemed like he was going to the next level. So, we saw him on the show and instantly thought that this was a phenomenal talent, and seemed like a terrific person. We contacted him and he was more than happy to invite us in and let us spend some time with him.

His presence in the film really changes the dynamics of your story quite a bit, because he demonstrates that a struggling vent can make it huge. Unlike a top singing star, the niche of a top ventriloquist isn't necessarily one that the entertainment world needs filled, but Fator does rise to that position. And you have it on film.

We really feel like we caught lightning in a bottle. We feel that we captured this incredible moment in time, one that was really rare. As we’ve been saying: the most unusual year in a very unusual art form. If we were shooting any other time, it would have been hard to capture this. But it [ventriloquism) is really on the rise, and Terry gave everyone in the whole community hope. And it was just a phenomenal success to see him go from playing the state fairs, and really struggling… to his talent really being recognized, and getting to play larger and larger stadiums. And finally, getting the headlining deal in Las Vegas, which has been a dream for much of his life.

Did success change Terry Fator’s personality at all? He seems to have handled it pretty well from what we see in your film.

The whole time we filmed… what you see in there is what we got. He was able to ride it really well. What you see in the film is a very accurate representation of his life at the time.

(Kim Yeager, above.)

Something that struck me is that the different strata of the characters in the film felt like a microcosm of the larger entertainment industry. Some of the ventriloquists have a lot of talent, and are then dependent on getting an elusive break. Others aren’t quite as talented, but continue practicing the art form anyway, and are willing to struggle maybe indefinitely, because they really love it. You could say the same thing about the different strata of struggling actors, writers, and musicians out here. I’m sure as someone who has worked in show business for a long time that you noticed those parallels pretty quickly.

Yeah, I definitely related to it in that way. It’s very hard to make it in any form of entertainment. It’s a dream. And these are people who are following their dreams. Their ability to persist, and their determination… I think it’s inspiring.

Some of them do it in spite of their family… or with the support of their family. And that’s really one of the things that we tried to capture: the support systems that some people have, for doing something as brave as this art form.

They all seem stable, and even-keeled in personality, for people who are pursuing what many would consider an off-beat art form.

Well, up until the 1950s, this was one of the most popular art forms in America. Paul Winchell, Howdy Doody… this was mass entertainment. Then, it kind of disappeared. And then, with movies like Magic and The Twilight Zone, it became something that wasn’t really in the mainstream, and the people that did it had dummies that they thought were alive [laughs].

And, I hope that one of the things this film does is to show that the people who practice this art form are entertainers, and performers... and people. That’s what the film is about. It’s them and their families. It just happens that their careers are in ventriloquism, which we found fascinating.

Another theme in the film that we found, with ventriloquism, was because it was so popular in the 50s… it’s almost this throwback art form where the people who do it are all very family-orientated. Their shows are family entertainment. It kind of takes people to a simpler time. I think people are responding to that now, the way that they wouldn’t have a few years ago, and I think that’s partly why Terry has become so popular. And other ventriloquists: Jeff Dunham has become enormously popular; Jay Johnson just won a Tony for The Two and Only, his show in New York; and Ronn Lucas. There are a number of vents who have broken through.

In terms of the shooting schedule for the documentary, how did you manage it with your other professional writing and producing obligations?

This became part of my “strike project” back in 2007, when I was working on “Law & Order: SVU” at the time. I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, and not able to write, so this was a good time for Lindsay and I to start the project. So, we started the film back then, and we just kept following these people… I worked over hiatuses, weekends, and nights. It became our joint project together, aside from our 1-year old [laughs].

You have a terrific soundtrack.

Yeah, we’re really proud of it. Bird York, who did the end credit music, she’s an Oscar-nominated composer. I knew her from “The West Wing” and invited her to come to a screening of a rough cut of the film, and she just fell in love with it and said that she wanted to write the music for the ending. And she wrote the song “Special Friend,” which is an incredible gift.

And Daniel Licht, who is the composer for “Dexter,” he did an original score for the entire film.

His score is just the right tone, understated but also animated.

Yeah, it’s beautiful, it’s playful, it’s heartfelt at the right moments.

Okay, the secret everyone in Hollywood wants to know: how did you get Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors) involved as an executive producer?

[laughs] We had been working for some time on the film, about a year into the project, and we knew we had something amazing, as Terry was just starting to really hit. I had been telling Elon about the project, and he’s just an amazing person, and he really responded to the material. And the more I told him about it, the more he seemed to enjoy it. We thought we had the whole thing financed, and then, unfortunately, one of the doc financing companies backed out at the last minute. And so, Elon stepped up, and said he believed in the project, and we couldn’t have been more grateful.

Dumbstruck opens theatrically tomorrow in New York and Washington, D.C.

A FEW LINKS:

- The official Dumbstruck website.

- SHOW TIMES IN NEW YORK AT THE CINEMA VILLAGE

- SHOW TIMES IN WASHINGTON, D.C. AT THE LANDMARK THEATRES

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Tim Hetherington In His Own Words. Rest in Peace.

(Tim Hetherington, above, during the shooting of RESTREPO.)

By Terry Keefe

News reports are stating that Tim Hetherington was tragically killed today in Libya. I interviewed Hetherington twice during the past year, along with Sebastian Junger, for Restrepo, the Oscar-nominated documentary they co-directed while embedded with an American platoon in Afghanistan.

Together, Hetherington and Junger created what I believe to be the most important film of the year. It is required viewing for all Americans, to be sure. Rest in peace.

I spoke to Hetherington and Junger two months ago, right before the Oscars, and prior to that, did a much longer interview with them on the shooting of Restrepo. I've reposted the entirety of that interview below.

BEARING WITNESS IN AFGHANISTAN: AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM HETHERINGTON & SEBASTIAN JUNGER, CO-DIRECTORS OF RESTREPO

I’ll just come out and say this - Restrepo is one of the best films about war ever made. My statement includes fiction and non, although Restrepo’s power is inseparable from the fact that it is a documentary. Filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington embedded themselves for a year with the Second Platoon of Battle Company of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan to shoot the bulk of Restrepo and have created a non-fiction film which approximates the experience of a lengthy military deployment in the country as much as would be possible without actually going there oneself.

The Korengal Valley is a remote mountainous region utilized frequently by the Taliban for staging operations and for movements over the close border with Pakistan. In an already highly dangerous region, the Valley could be considered the epicenter of danger and has been dubbed “the Valley of Death” by U.S. forces. Junger and Hetherington made ten trips to the Korengal between May 2007 and July 2008, sometimes working together, and other times separately. The film is named after Army Private First Class Juan S. Restrepo who was killed in battle at the age of 20, during the platoon’s deployment in the Korengal. The platoon named their Korengal outpost, constructed and held at great peril, “Restrepo,” as well.

(The Korengal Valley, above.)

Junger and Hetherington deliberately keep Restrepo non-partisan, and consequently, the film contains no discussion of the political backdrops of the Afghanistan conflict. Instead, the filmmakers sought to open a window onto the lives of one group of very brave soldiers, and simply “bear witness,” a phrase that Hetherington uses in our talk to describe their objective. What makes Restrepo such an achievement is that it captures the day-to-day existence of soldiers in a manner which only fiction films about war have been able to in the past. The nearly unprecedented length of the embedment was key here, in that the filmmakers became such an accepted presence around the company, that the soldiers let all guard down, allowing for the true fly-on-the-wall feel that every good documentarian hopes for. Intimately shot, the battles are often harrowing, particularly one in which a soldier is killed, sparking the temporary mental anguish of another, all as the bullets keep flying. The daily tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop permeates the film, much as it did in Platoon, the difference here being, again, that Restrepo is real.

Junger rose to prominence as the author of The Perfect Storm, has reported extensively from war zones around the world – including Monrovia and Sierra Leone, and recently released another best-selling book, War, which also covers his time with Battle Company in Afghanistan. UK-born Hetherington is a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair, lived behind the rebel lines as a photographer while the Liberian civil war raged, and has received four World Press Photo prizes.

The film has been justifiably short-listed in the Documentary Category for the upcoming Academy Awards, and won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

After watching Restrepo, it is almost a surreal contrast to be sitting with Junger and Hetherington at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, sipping coffee on a sunny day, but here we are.

You chose not to editorialize one way or the other on the merits or politics of the war in Afghanistan. Was that a choice you made going in, right from the start?

Tim Hetherington: Well, we're journalists, so our default position is we're not writing editorial. We're trying to bring information to readers, viewers, so that they can make up their own conclusions.

It's refreshing to hear somebody say that these days.

Sebastian Junger: Good. Yeah, we're making a documentary, but we're making a documentary as journalists. And we had a very specific mandate that we'd given ourselves, to bring the experience of being a soldier to viewers. And soldiers aren't political. We really didn't want anything in the movie that wasn't part of their reality, so we don't even ask the general how he feels. We never tried to get an interview with the general at the main base, about the strategy, because the soldiers don't have the opportunity to ask those questions either. So that was our sort of central ethos with the movie, to create their reality onscreen.

Hetherington: And you know, part of this is that we're bearing witness to what’s happening. And in bearing witness, by not having opinions, then we're just recording everything that we come across. It’s not like we're sort of saying, “Oh, we've got to present soldiers, and this film is glorifying soldiering.” It's not, it's just that this is bearing witness to what happens, this is what their reality is like, the good and the bad. That they [the soldiers] responded to that, when they saw the film… it was really gratifying, because it was true to their experience, both the good and the bad.

Was this length of embedment difficult to get authorization for?

Junger: I don't know. It wasn't for us -

Hetherington: Well, you did something different, though, I think people just don't do that kind of thing.

Junger: Yeah. Well, I had been with Battle Company in 2005, and so I went back to the military and I said, “I want to follow a platoon from Battle Company for a whole deployment -- when they go back to Afghanistan.” And someone signed off on it, and then I think they forgot about it. And so the public affairs officer that I dealt with, he knew me: “Ah, here you are again. Okay. Good luck in the Korengal” - but I think, higher up than that, they weren't really focused on it.

If someone had put the question to some general: “Okay, there's a couple of journalists who are going to follow a platoon for ten one-month trips,” it's possible that that general could get uncomfortable with the idea, because we're going to see stuff that a journalist doesn't usually see. Soldiers are going to become open in a way that they aren't when you're just there for two weeks and you leave. But the issue never rose to that level in the military.

Hetherington: The average embed is like a week. Two weeks. Friends of mine who did rotations regularly in Iraq, and Afghanistan, the longest they're there with a group of soldiers is two weeks, and then they don't really ever see them again. So I think what we did was kind of just unusual.

Well, you guys were part of the company, basically, in many ways.

Hetherington: Yeah. Apart from pulling guard duty, which they tried to get us to do - you know, in the middle of the night - or carrying a gun. We were at a screening last night, a Q&A, and we were talking about this - because in the film you see a moment where the guy's shooting somebody - and then they're cheering him. As journalists, because you don't carry a gun, you sort of become this observer.

Last night, guys who are Iraq veterans were watching the film, we talked in the Q&A about their interests, and it was kind of cool to have a very open conversation, like, “Why do soldiers cheer when they shoot someone? What is the idea behind that?”

Junger: Because they're not sociopaths. You need some other explanation, other than a psychological disorder, because that's not what it is.

What were some of the things that came out when you posed that question? Were they able to put it into words?

Junger: You know, in the movie, the kind of movie we did, we didn't tackle that question directly. We let it unfold. In my book, I tackle it directly, I ask [a soldier], “What was that about?" And he said, “I know it doesn't look good, but that's one more guy who's not gonna kill one of us. And we're cheering, we're really cheering that fact, more than his suffering or whatever.”



(A firefight at the Restrepo outpost, above.)

One of the things you notice immediately in the film, is how young these guys are. The fact that soldiers are young is obviously something you know, but as a civilian, I think you forget about it. And you have this young captain (Captain Dan Kearney) who has the most difficult job in the world. He has to deal with his own guys, the enemy, and the village.

Hetherington: The captain's like twenty-six, twenty-seven.

Junger: The lieutenant was twenty-three.

Hetherington: And I mean, that was part of the point [of the film]. Again, we just thought we'd eschew the political point of view, because we wanted to create a paradigm-shift in thinking, really, about a war, which is…people at home need to understand what these men experience, what we're asking them when we send them to war. What does that actually mean? And, you know, polarizing it politically is not really a useful strategy to getting as many people as possible to understand their reality, so we can understand, “What are we asking them to do?” And “Is it right?”

As you've said, you look at the guys, and they're eighteen to twenty-three, and they're dealing with some of the existential questions of living and dying that we only deal with as we get old. It's astounding.


(Capt. Dan Kearney meets with village elders, above.)

What was an eye-opener for me is that you would think the war in Afghanistan is all smart bombs and high-tech warfare from watching the pundits speak on the news domestically, but the actual experience on the ground is a lot closer to Vietnam.

Hetherington: As a photographer, when you say to me, “Picture the war machine,” I will say to you, “Oh, give me a picture of an Apache attack helicopter or missiles or an aircraft carrier - that's the war machine.”

The real war machine is taking young men, training them together, putting them on the side of a mountain in Korengal, and they're gonna kill and be killed for each other. And there's something very intimate and very human about that. In society we want to sanitize war, or we're asking to dehumanize that, to make it very inanimate. It's actually doing a disservice to the people, and to ourselves.

It’s interesting that the soldiers, and we as the viewers, rarely seem to actually see the Taliban. Was that because it was difficult for you to shoot images of the Taliban? Do the soldiers see them fairly frequently?

Junger: No, they don't. They almost never saw them. So the film reflects their reality.

It's almost an invisible enemy.

Junger: They say the same thing. I mean, the guys in Iraq, that's urban warfare. That’s probably a little closer and uglier -- but yeah, in the Korengal…the thing is, if you can see someone you can kill them, so each side is going out of their way to not be seen.

(Lighter moments at the outpost, above.)

One of the soldiers says that, before going to the valley, he didn't want to do any research on it. To what degree did you two research the Korengal, or did you take a similar approach?

Hetherington: Yeah, that should be my line. I didn't want to read up on it – [laughs] - but, initially when I went in there – in 2007, I had been doing undercover filming in Sri Lanka, for Human Rights Watch, doing a film about right-wing death squads, and suddenly I was going to Afghanistan, to work with Sebastian, initially for Vanity Fair, and so I really didn't have time to catch my breath, to think about what I was doing.

And I thought, “Oh, Afghanistan, it's gonna be quiet out there, we're gonna walk down the mountains, we're going to drink cups of tea and occasionally we'll get shot at.” And we met in Heathrow Airport, and we went over, and a couple of days in, I remember looking at each other, “What is going on here? This is insane.”

It was incredible, the amount of fighting. It was very obvious Afghanistan was slipping out of control, and we were also with this group of guys who were pretty incredible, just really interesting, and we were suddenly in this crazy little outpost on the side of a mountain.

It was really, really unusual, and I was just, like, “Wow.” That's when [we decided] we were gonna make a film.

And you made a number of trips. Was it difficult to get back on that plane each time? Or were you excited to go back?

Junger: I always dreaded it a little bit, because something bad always almost happens. But it was also, physically it was hard, the patrols were hard. But I got really close to those guys, and when I wasn't there, I missed them. I never was happy to have to leave.

You obviously had to build the trust of the soldiers. Did it come quickly?

Hetherington: I mean, all journalism is predicated on access, and the press and the military have a prickly relationship, you know, historically. But, we're used to going into those situations and integrating ourselves into people's lives, that's what I do as a documentarian. And as a good documentary filmmaker, you want to be inside that experience. You seek that emotional “inside-ness,” and I think once they saw that we were just going to do everything they did, they were like, “Okay, these guys are in for the long haul.”

It wasn't a case of being there for four days. They had no running water or electricity, just a bunch of sandbags, and we were sleeping out in the open. Very dirty, dusty, no hot food, no hot showers, no internet or phone, no electricity. We would go on every patrol and every combat situation, and after a couple of those kind of trips, they got it.

In terms of what you would shoot and what you wouldn't, during Operation Rock Avalanche, there's a death -

Hetherington: Yeah.

Did you take the attitude: We're just gonna shoot it, and then request later if it's okay to put it into the film?

Junger: Yeah, we showed them.

Hetherington: I mean, we showed everything. There was nothing where it was like, “I shouldn't be filming this.”

Junger: There was no request process. We never checked with the military if anything was okay. We would just try to use our own sense of, uh, well, morality, really. “What's appropriate to show, particularly in light of the fact that veterans and mothers will watch this?”

Hetherington: And also, we wanted to make sure, again, that the film is inclusive. That doesn't mean you've got to water it down, but sure, I've got a picture of a soldier with the back of his head blown off, I've got a more graphic picture of wounded Afghans or dead Afghans. You do see dead and mutilated Afghans, you do see a dead American soldier. You just see it in a way [in this film]…that doesn't seek to shock you. It does shock you emotionally, but…seeing someone's brains leaking out of the back of their head… you don't need to see that.

This is what I do for a living. I film this for a living. I've worked for Human Rights Watch in Chad covering massacre sites, or, you know, in Liberia, and there is a utility to stuff. It's important to film everything, so it's on record, and it's accessible to people, if you want it and need it professionally, but it's also trying to build bridges, for people trying to understand these realities. You have to kind of work out a realistic way to do that.

In terms of directing together and shooting together, did you set out a shorthand in advance, in terms of who would film what and when?

Junger: We weren't always there together. But when we were there together, if there was a scene unfolding that would benefit by two cameras - I mean, sometimes I had to take notes, and Tim would shoot, or sometimes Tim had to shoot, or take stills, and I would shoot - but if there was a scene, like when they were negotiating about the cow, Tim and I would sort of whisper to each other a lot about, okay, who covers what, because we knew this was going to be a kind of interesting scene.

Were you editing the film as you went along?

Junger: No.

Hetherington: No. We shot it, and then we came back. I was on the last helicopter out with them. We went to Italy three months later, where [Battle Company] was based, and did the post-interviews, as a device because we wanted them to be the narrators of their own story, in a way.

We weren't company shrinks, and we weren't the authority figures, we weren't in their family, but we were friends, we could ask them very good questions about particular moments, like, “When that happened, what were you thinking? How did that make you feel?”

Those are amazing interviews.

Hetherington: At the end of the five days, we did three a day, we were just brain-dead. It was this intense emotional intensity.

Did you show them any of the Korengal footage before the interviews, or did you wish them to speak entirely from their own recollections?

Hetherington: No, we didn't show any footage. It was just a black background, two cameras, and, you know, let's go for it.

As you were cutting, were there a number of different possible films that emerged?
Junger: Any film could have been a million other films. The events that happen are in historical sequence. We didn't pick up one battle, drop it in, and--

Hetherington: Yeah, winter follows the Rock Avalanche [mission], which it does, and then goes into the spring.

Junger: We emphasize different things, more or less, than other things. One of our sort of central ethos in editing this was there was no one in the film that's not fighting in the Korengal. No generals, no wives, no diplomats, just the guys. But the other one in terms of editing, was - for me, one of my guideposts - was “Does watching the movie elicit the emotions to me that I was having when I was out there?” We’d cut together some scenes that were clever and sort of revealing or whatever, but something about them would feel false, and I realized what felt false was I wasn't having the same emotion that I had out there. Something that's clever isn't…that's not an emotion I had out there. You know what I mean? So it's not in the film. There were a lot of things that were pretty charming, or painful, but it wasn't quite true to those same feelings, and so -

Hetherington: That's why we had humor in the film.

Junger: Yeah, yeah.

Hetherington: Because some things out there were really funny. It kind of shocks people, but it's funny. People's conceptions of what war is, people who have never been there, who've only been studying it or whatever…it's completely different from people who've experienced it, and we just wanted to bring that home, try to mediate that experience in an honest way, and so the film is funny.

The sequence with the dead cow comes to mind, with the villagers looking for compensation from the soldiers. There’s a lot of humor, but it’s also a legitimate problem for the soldiers…which makes it funnier.

Hetherington: Somebody asked me the other day about that, because in Apocalypse Now, there's the scene when they brought the cow in by helicopter, and I was asked, “Did you notice that?'” and I said, “I've never thought about that.”

Another moment that reminded of Apocalypse Now was that a soldier reads a surfing magazine. Francis Copolla was criticized by some for putting those absurdist moments in that film, although your film shows those contrasts are real.
Hetherington: Right, right.

Is the outpost still manned? Or when they left, was it destroyed?

Hetherington: Taken over by insurgents. And, in fact, there was an Al Jazeera caravan embedded with the insurgents, and now the place is on the internet. And I saw it, and a lot of the local people they [the American soldiers] were doing business with were in that video, milling around with the insurgents, or carrying weapons or part of the insurgency, so that was kind of really interesting.

You were both injured during the shoot.

Junger: Yeah.

Sebastian, it was your Achilles?

Junger: I ruptured my Achilles tendon.

That's a horrible injury.

Junger: I mean, it wasn't a complete rupture, it was a partial tear. But it was enough to mess me up for a couple weeks.

And were you able to get to a hospital or leave?

Junger: No, no, I stayed out there. I just crawled the first day, hopped the second day [laughs], limped the third day, and I could sort of go on patrols the fourth day.

Hetherington: The terrain was really unforgiving, you know.

People that have blown an Achilles say it's incredibly intense pain.

Junger: It wasn't. It wasn't a complete blow. Because if you rupture your Achilles down here, where it's a real cord, I imagine that's pretty bad. Mine was torn higher up, where the Achilles branches out, and feeds into the muscle, and it tore halfway through, in that part that spreads out. So it still functioned, but not very well. Like, I couldn't, I could put weight on my foot, but I couldn't push off at all. I couldn't do anything with my toes, I could not push off, so it's very hard to walk without pushing off your toes. So I sort of flopped my foot forward, then just rolled over it.

We were in the middle of a climb up to Restrepo with bags, with gear. Within a few hundred yards, I realized I was actually tremendously straining my right leg, and I was like, “Shit, something else is going on.” And it was a really horrible, horrible walk, to get to Restrepo. And there was shooting in the valley, and I just didn't want to slow people down -

Hetherington: I was just thinking about the mountains and climbing, and how many other films have been made where you carry the equipment on your backs? You now have these new lightweight cameras to film with, but I'm talking about, like, you know, everything. So if you actually put together a film kit, normally, it's quite a lot: You've got a tripod, and chargers, and stuff -- but everything that we had to make the film, we had to carry on our backs.

Junger: Along with our bullet-proof vests. I mean, it was a lot of gear. I would occasionally get questions from people about our “film crew.” [laughs]

The gaffer and best boy.

Junger: Yeah, I was gonna ask 'em about the catering service [laughs]. So it was what we could carry, along with the rest of the stuff we needed to carry, to just be with those soldiers.

Hetherington: There’s no electricity in Restrepo, so we'd have to charge batteries.

Do you know what you each are working on next?

Junger: I might go, probably go back to Afghanistan this spring. Not necessarily for a film.

Hetherington: Going to do some Vanity Fair camera stuff.

I'm not sure who first said this, maybe it was Oliver Stone, but if you make a war film, it's almost by nature an anti-war film, even if it's as objective as possible. Have you gotten that reaction from people?

Unger: Yeah.

Hetherington: Yeah. That's what's so funny, when people are upset that we haven't made a kind of voice-over/moral condemnation -

Do you need it?

Hetherington: Yeah. Do I need to tell you what to think? Isn't it enough just to show you what it's like?

The thing that a lot of people misunderstand, a misunderstanding about war is that war…and it was Murray Fromson, who's a very respected journalist, he covered the fall of Saigon, covered the Year Zero in Cambodia, you know, Korean War, Vietnam War. And he said, that war abases you, it kind of humiliates you, but you also find a kind of humanity. And I think that people that want the outright moral condemnation of the war [in the film] feel conflicted with the kind of position, where [we] actually also reveal the humanity of the soldiers, and I find that really confusing. Well, it's not confusing, but the nuance of war is that all of these emotions actually do exist in the same place, and that, you know, it's not just one thing or the other, it's a mixture of the stuff.

Restrespo is now out on DVD.

Restrepo website.

Two Vanity Fair articles by Sebastian Junger about his time in Afghanistan are online, and include photos by Tim Hetherington.

“Into the Valley of Death”

“Return to the Valley of Death”

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A Dance to the Tune of Economic Decline: Big Audio Dynamite Rock the Roxy

(Mick Jones of Big Audio Dynamite, above, at the Roxy. Photo by Gregory Weinkauf.)

By Terry Keefe This past Thursday, I had a concert experience that I never expected was even possible, when Big Audio Dynamite reformed to play a pre-Coachella show at the tiny Roxy Theater on Sunset Blvd. B.A.D. were the first post-Clash project of Mick Jones, and their influences can be seen everywhere in the last few decades of popular music. Gregory Weinkauf's show review at the Huffington Post says it better than I can, with some great pics.

They were ahead of their time in other ways. One of the biggest sing-a-long moments of the night came during the mid-80s dance hall smash "The Bottom Line":

A dance to the tune of economic decline

Is when you do the bottom line

(Those lines always struck me as fun irony, back when the song was released. Heh.)

Nagging questions always remain

Why did it happen? And who was to blame?

In answer to that last question, I suggest you watch this year's Best Documentary Feature winner, Inside Job. And don't take your subsequent rage out on your television, as I nearly did.

The Dance Mix version of "The Bottom Line" below:

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Bertrand Tavernier: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier.

BERTRAND TAVERNIER: TAKING RABBITS OUT OF HATS
By Alex Simon

Bertrand Tavernier was bitten by the cinema bug at a tender age, falling in love with a diverse slate of films and filmmakers like Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton. Born in Lyon in 1941, Tavernier abandoned his law studies to write for the now-legendary French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinema, which also launched auteurs like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Making his directing debut with The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul in 1974, Tavernier’s career has been a prolific one, with 35 films to his credit, and dozens of awards, including the Best Director prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival for A Sunday in the Country.


Tavernier’s latest film is the sweeping epic The Princess of Montpensier, an adaptation of a 1662 novel which was published anonymously, but later credited to French noblewoman Madame de La Fayette. Set in 1562 during the reign of Charles IX, when religious wars are tearing apart the fabric of Europe. Young Marie de Mezieres (Melanie Thierry), heiress to one of the kingdom’s greatest fortunes, loves romantic soldier Duc de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), known in the annals of history as “Le Balafre” (“Scarface”) from the dueling souvenirs on his cheeks. To increase her family’s fortunes and prestige, however, her father has promised her to the Prince de Montpensier (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), whom she has never met. A violent, passionate rivalry soon erupts between the two men, with Marie’s hand as the prize. Beautifully shot, impeccably directed and designed, with a talented young cast of Europe’s best, Princess is one of the year’s cinematic highlights. Sundance Selects opens the film in New York and Los Angeles April 15, when it will simultaneously be available on Sundance Selects’ video on demand platform.

Bertrand Tavernier sat down with The Interview during a stopover in L.A. last month. Here’s what was said:

This is a beautiful and epic film. You wrote the script with Jean Cosmos even though there was already a script in place.

Bertrand Tavernier: Yes, and it wasn’t a horrible script, but the portrait of the princess was not good. The original writer described her as a femme fatale, as in film noir, and that wasn’t correct. I saw her as a victim, not as somebody who wanted to seduce the man. If I have that, I have a very ordinary character. If I have somebody who is trying to survive, who is trying to fall in love with her husband, which is not expected, but can’t help love her the man she truly loves, that is a character that is very interesting, and very complex.

You take a very feminist point-of-view with this film.

Well, I am a feminist! (laughs) That’s where I disagree with Madame de La Fayette, that love is the most inconvenient of all emotions. I found that statement terrifying.

Lambert Wilson confers with Tavernier on the Princess set.

Was it difficult finding an actress who would embody all those qualities?

Yes, because Marie had to be beautiful, she had to look good in period costume, which not everybody is. You have a great actress like Sigourney Weaver who, when she played the Queen of Spain, just didn’t look right for the period. Rarely do you find an American actor who looks correct in a (16th century) setting, whereas most British actors fit the part very easily. Cate Blanchett, in the newest Robin Hood, even in a thankless part, she’s extremely believable. But Robert De Niro in 1900 and Al Pacino in Revolution, they were so bad. They felt too contemporary to fit in. The only actors in America who could very easily fit into period films were those who did lots of westerns, like Burt Lancaster. In Il Gatopardo (The Leopard), he was the best Sicilian prince you could dream about. He didn’t look disguised in costume, so I had to find somebody who had all the colors of the part: the sensuality, but also the teenager. She’s a very young girl who likes to have fun, to flirt, behave like a young kid in school. Then in the next minute, she becomes class-conscious and aristocratic. And Melanie fit that perfectly.

Tavernier and Melaine Thierry as The Princess of Montpensier.

As a celebrated filmmaker yourself, as well as a devoted cinefile, how do you see the state of cinema today?

First, I have to be clear that I am not a cinefile anymore. Even if I gave DVDs to a few of the actors as gifts, it was for them to discover great actors and films. But when I make a film, I don’t talk about other films. I’m not a critic, or a historian. I’m a filmmaker, period. The state of cinema is such that there are moments when I’m optimistic and then equally pessimistic. When I started out, even if you had people in the business who were stupid, vulgar, cheap, they made decisions quicker, and it was a lot more fun. Now you are dealing with big corporations and you wait four months because you have committees studying your screenplay, making abstract predictions based on figures, but they never in their lives take into account the real price of filmmaking. For example, in Princess we had a ratio between a shooting schedule of eight weeks, and then what you see on the screen. Then you have the ratio between the actual cost of the film, which was about eight million Euros less than a few modern films that took place near a river outside of Paris. But never in their eyes, do they see the reality of what it takes to make a film. So it’s less exciting now. Plus there’s no room for compromise anymore. Darryl Zanuck was legendary for compromising with directors. When William Wellman brought him The Ox-Bow Incident, Zanuck said “This won’t do well for us, because it’s a bleak film about lynching, but I think it’s a great project. I’ll do it if you’ll agree to direct these three other pictures for me.” And Wellman agreed, and did the film for free! No committee. That would never happen today. But, some great films are still being made: Winter’s Bone, Frozen River, you have the Coen brothers, whose film A Serious Man was, to me, a masterpiece. Most of the popular films in Europe now are American, but American movies always dominated after World War II.

What changed in terms of films being funded nationally by the French government?

It’s not that anything shifted. The government never gave its own money to film production. It is something that goes back to 1948 which was a brilliant idea by some public servant that was put in place to fight against an American dictatorship in France. The American government said that in order to pay for the Marshall plan, after World War II, no cinema in France could play French films more than twelve weeks a year. This was a demand from the American government. When you speak about Imperialism, this is completely forgotten. So the whole profession fought back: directors, writers, actors, cameramen, and took to the streets. So we got one week more out of that: from twelve to thirteen weeks. Then they came up with the great idea to take 13% of the price of every movie ticket sold, and give it back to French productions. So that’s where the money comes from, and it’s still in effect today. So it’s not government money. In many ways, I should thank Steven Spielberg for all the money his films make in France, because he’s helped to finance my movies! (laughs) It was a very clever way to create a national act to fight against a rule that would’ve absolutely destroyed French cinema.

You’ve done a few films in English. Have you ever had the desire to make a Hollywood film?

Never. I’m a French filmmaker. I’ve done French-financed films here because the subject matter interested me, like Round Midnight. And I did In the Electric Mist because I’m absolutely passionate about the work of James Lee Burke.

You’re one of the few directors left who still uses Cinemascope.

Yes, and I use real Cinemascope, not the one you do in the lab. I love it, and never understood people who said it was only good for snakes. (laughs) It is good for epics and intimate settings. In the close-up, you still have the décor on the character. You can feel it. The character is not cut from the world. I think I’ve done about 2/3 of my films in Cinemascope. It causes more problems with the focus, but this is not my problem. It’s the problem of the focus puller. (laughs)

When you left law school and started writing for Cahiers du Cinema, had you always had a love of film or was it something you discovered at university?

Oh no, I had always loved film, and wanted to be a director from the time I was 13. I was also an avid reader and listening to a lot of music, jazz and classical. The film that made me decide I had to make movies was John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. I said “I want to be like John Ford. I want to film the sky. I want to film the landscape.” I love the cavalry films of John Ford. I’m moved by the music, too. Cinema is magic, it’s like taking rabbits out of hats, and Ford made us believe that you could have a ranch in Monument Valley. Nothing could grow there, but everyone still believed it! (laughs)

Tavernier's book "Amis Americains," a collection of photos, essays and interviews.

You’ve written books about many directors and their work. What would you write about if you did an autobiography?

I wouldn’t do it, first of all. I’m not so much interested in looking at my own films once they’re done, or examining the past. I remember meeting Nicholas Ray in Paris toward the end of his life. He was a very sad figure who was only looking at his old films, talking about the past and very much a prisoner of his own image, in addition to being a prisoner of drugs and other things. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be like that when I got older. I wanted to be like Michael Powell or Andre De Toth, who were still vital and curious and seeing new films and talking about them. That’s how you stay young. (laughs)

British filmmaker Michael Powell.

Did Powell ever talk to you about his time in exile, so to speak, after the controversy of Peeping Tom?

This is interesting. I went to meet him in London and I had no idea initially of what had happened to him after 1960, when he was effectively blacklisted in the business for making this film. We spent a lot of time together, and I had no idea how broke he was. He invited me to his club, he was full of life and always very positive. It turned out that he was so poor during this time that he sometimes wasn’t even eating two meals a day. But he was hiding this very well. He was very proud, very laconic, very funny. I loved Michael. I love his films, and when I have a moment of depression, I always watch one of his films because they show such tremendous confidence in the intelligence of the audience. They are not films done by committee. I published his books in France, his autobiography, which is one of the great books ever written about filmmaking, and about life.

The first film of yours I ever saw was Coup de Torchon (aka Clean Slate), which was also how I discovered Jim Thompson, who became one of my favorite authors. Tell us how you took this very American novel, and re-set it in Colonial Africa.

In those days I felt that I hadn’t the knowledge to do an American film. I didn’t know enough about West Texas to do it there. I tried for about five years to think of a way to transpose it to France, with no luck. Then one day, I read a comparison of West Texas to Senegal, and I thought: perfect! I’ll transport it to Africa, just before the war. Jean Aurenche, the screenwriter, had worked on my three first films and had been in Africa before the war, and I wanted to use his knowledge in the script. He brought many original, great, and surreal ideas to the script. Later on, he said it was “a screenplay dictated by God. If you don’t like it, complain to Him.” (laughs)

Philippe Noiret and Tavernier on the set of Coup de Torchon, 1981.

The star of the film, Philippe Noiret, is someone you worked with several times. What was he like?

He was…I have a lot of emotion when I speak of Philippe, because he starred in my first film. He was a famous actor who said ‘yes’ to a young director with no real credits to his name. He even agreed to cut his salary in half. I asked him later, what made him stand by me in those days, and from then on. He said “I gave you my word,” and that’s the man he was. He was somebody…he had the politeness to make you feel everything was easy. He didn’t have to do what so many of those American stars do: thirty minutes of silence between takes. Philippe was making jokes, telling stories, then you said ‘action,’ and he was great. He wanted to make you believe that he knew nothing, that he was good by accident. Of course, this wasn’t true. (laughs) When he was very, very sick, he was doing a play, Love Letters. He could barely walk, but when he came out to take his bow, he was running out on to the stage. One of his co-stars said to him “Philippe, I thought you were so sick, but I can’t keep up with you when you run out on stage. What happened?” He said “Simple: here, darling, I am acting.” Then he spent his last days, on his deathbed, teaching another actor to take over his role when he was gone. That was Philippe. I absolutely adored him.

He and Isabelle Huppert played off each other beautifully. That was the first really adult role I remember seeing her in. Prior to that, she’d played Lolita-like nymphets.

Yes, exactly. And she was so funny, so sexy in that part. I think when Isabelle is funny…she is the best French actress of her generation. This year, she did two films that were really wonderful, very funny.


Was it a difficult shoot, being in rural Senegal?

No, not at all. Everyone got along well, no one was difficult. Stephane Audran was a bit shy in the beginning because she had a strange habit. She would never say her lines during rehearsal. That was the way she concentrated, and un-concentrated everyone else. So after ten rehearsals where she couldn’t remember a thing, we finally decided to shoot, and she remembered it all! (laughs) But she had to look completely lost in order to get there. It was a feast shooting that film.

Another film you did right before that was Death Watch, with Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider.

It’s going to be re-released in the States. I’ve had two offers to buy the film. That was a film that was, I think, very much before its time about the way television manipulates the fate of people.

Yeah, in many ways it was a more serious version of The Truman Show.

Yeah, I liked that film. I like Peter Weir very much. I think he’s a very unheralded filmmaker in many ways, because all his films are so different. I think Master & Commander is the best film ever made about a ship at sea.

And Gallipoli is one of the best films about war.

Yes, absolutely. Wonderful film.

Romy Schnedier and Harvey Keitel in Death Watch, 1980.

You worked with Romy Schneider toward the end of her life. Much of her appeal came from the fact that her beauty had such a vulnerability to it, and it sounds as though she was that way in life, as well.

She always said that Death Watch was one of the happiest shoots for her, but she was very unhappy in general. Once or twice, she had a problem with Harvey, because they weren’t working in the same way. Harvey is a stunning actor, and I’m glad he’s being taken seriously, but he was sometimes a bit difficult with her. He didn’t want to rehearse, forgetting that she wasn’t working in her own language. So they fought sometimes, and then I had to referee, if you will. (laughs)


When I started film school, Round Midnight was one of the first films they showed us pre-release. I gained a lifelong love of jazz from it, and especially of Dexter Gordon’s work. How was working with Dexter?

It was incredible. Sometimes it was difficult to bring him in front of the camera, because crossing the courtyard of the studio could last one hour. (laughs) But once he was there, he was so smart, so on top of it, and so knowledgeable about the camera. I never did more than three takes with him. He was amazing. One day he didn’t show up. The next day, I wanted to kill him, but he came up to me and said “Lady Bertrand, I made a huge mistake. I knew I had to come and work, but my mind was set on going to the Turkish baths. And strangely enough, I could not change my mind.” (laughs) And what can you say to that? You cannot scream and yell, and be angry.

That was his character in the movie, too. So charming.

Yes, he had the charm, the wit, the dedication, the intelligence. I said ‘You haven’t done many films, Dexter.’ He said “Well, I was filmed when I played with Louis Armstrong, but they felt that my skin was too light, so they put Max Factor number five on me, and I was looking like Cesar Romero.” (laughs) That’s such a wonderful statement. I remember when he was questioned by American television for the release of the film. They asked him “Do you want to do another film, Dexter?” He said “Yes, but I want a part less demanding, less difficult for me. Something lighter, something easier…Hamlet?”



I would have loved to see him play Hamlet.

Wouldn’t that have been great? He called me one night, and said told me that he had a broken bridge, and he was very upset. Then he said “I just received a letter from Marlon Brando about Round Midnight.” So he read me the letter, and Brando said that after watching Dexter in Round Midnight, it was the first time in thirty years he’d learned something about acting. He says “Lady Bertrand, after such a letter, who cares about a broken bridge?” (laughs) Years later, when I was doing In the Electric Mist, John Goodman told me he almost quit acting after he saw Dexter in that film. “I thought to myself, how can I possibly call myself an actor when I see this man turn in a performance that’s so honest, so real, so organic?” I told John I was happy he abandoned that foolish idea.

Legendary French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville.

You got your start under the wing of the great Jean-Pierre Melville. What was he like?

Yes, I was a second, or third assistant on Leon Morin, Priest, a very beautiful film. Some of his films made a great impression on me, like Bob le Flambeur and Les Enfant Terribles. I went to interview him and he became my sort of godfather in film. He went to my parents to ask their permission to let me work for him in film. So I became his assistant, and it was tough. On the set, he had the greatest charm, a great raconteur. He loved to have you under his control. He would give me an appointment, and he’d show up four hours late. Then he’d arrive in his big convertible Cadillac, with electric windows, and driving through Paris telling stories about the French underground, the resistance, showing you where famous gangsters had been killed. He’d take me to dinner, take me to films, and he’d keep me up all night, because Melville could not sleep. Then on the set, he was one of those people who had to have enemies. He had to have a few people to humiliate in front of everybody. The atmosphere was very tense. The first day, for example, he’d say “I’m saying ‘Hello and good-morning’ now for the only time during the shoot. I’ve calculated that if I’m saying ‘Hello and good-morning’ to everyone every day, I’m losing the equivalent of one day’s shooting.’ He could be really tough to the point that he created an atmosphere on the set where we’d all be shaking. I felt like I did in school when I’d go to math class. I was always afraid he’d ask me to do something I couldn’t do well, and then he’d just nail you, in front of everybody. At the end of the shoot, he said “Bertrand, you will be a lousy assistant director, and I’ll have to fire you. But I think you will be a very good press agent.” So he went immediately to the film’s producer and told him that he must hire me to do the publicity for the film. So I was fired and hired on the same day. And he was right—I was a lousy assistant. (laughs)

What advice would you have for a first-time director?

Be curious. Be open-minded. Be passionate. Know the films made before you. It is vital that you know that. You will not reinvent the wheel. Some people keep trying to reinvent the wheel, unsuccessfully. Also know the world, not just the street in front of you, because that will broaden your vision. Even if directors of a certain generation were not what we’d call “film buffs,” they recognized great work from others. John Ford was not a film buff, but he admired the films of F.W. Murnau.



And he’d lived life. Ford served in the Navy. William Wellman was a decorated flying ace in WW I.

Yes, exactly. But Wellman, too, when he was seeing a good film, he knew. But Ford was marked by German expressionism. He knew there was a way of lighting that was complicated, and he used that. And Wellman, when he was invited to see Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, (directed by Abraham Polonksy, one of the original Hollywood Ten, who was blacklisted through the ‘50s and most of the ‘60s), he said “I don’t want to see a film by that dirty Commie!” Then he went, and he found the film extraordinary. He said “This is a film I would have loved to have made.” Wellman found out that Universal wasn’t too excited about the film, so he called (MCA chief) Lew Wasserman, who’d been his agent years earlier, and told Wasserman’s secretary “Tell Mr. Wasserman that he’s an asshole! Tell him that he’s a piece of shit, if he can’t see that Willie Boy is one of the greatest films ever made, he has no taste, no intelligence, and go tell him fuck himself!” (laughs) I met Wellman once. He had the most piercing blue eyes I’d ever seen. Some of his films are stunning. Some of them are undone by bad moments of comedy, but one of his best is called Westward the Women, which is a masterpiece. There is no music during the whole film, very unusual for that period.

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GASPARD ULLIEL: The Hollywood Interview

(Gaspard Ulliel, above. Photo by Nora Schaefer.)

By Terry Keefe

While playing a French historical character with the nickname of “le Balafré,” or “the Scarred,” in the new film The Princess of Montpensier, actor Gaspard Ulliel also risked his own famous features, while shooting some of the film’s highly realistic fight scenes. Although Ulliel does, in fact, sport a small scar on his left cheek from an accident with a dog when he was a child, the marks carried by his young warrior character in the film, the Duc de Guise, are considerably more pronounced, which isn’t surprising when you see Ulliel as the Duc in the heated battle scenes of Princess. Directed by legendary filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (interviewed by Alex Simon for our site here), The Princess of Montpensier takes place during the French Wars of Religion of the 1500s, and the director opted not to use many stuntmen, so when Ulliel fights on foot, or on horseback, it is really the young actor performing those scenes.

During one highly memorable sword duel, which proceeds down a staircase and into a courtyard, Ulliel engages with fellow actor Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet (who plays the historical figure of the Prince of Montpensier) in a fight shot by Tavernier in raw, long takes, without cutting away from the moments in which the actors stumble, or miss a thrust. As a result of this fly-on-the-wall approach, the fights in Princess appear genuinely dangerous, and they potentially were, requiring Ulliel to train for two months prior to shooting with martial arts expert Alain Figlarz.

(Ulliel's Duc becomes "le Balafré" during an intense battle.)

After acting in television, and also attending the University of Saint-Denis, where he majored in cinema, Ulliel broke into feature film acting with a small part in 2001’s Brotherhood of the Wolf. In 2004, he then attained prominence both internationally, and in the United States, via his leading role opposite Audrey Tautou in the worldwide hit A Very Long Engagement, which earned him the French Cesar Award for Best Newcomer. He went on to play the young Hannibal Lecter in 2007’s Hannibal Rising and co-star with the likes of Jean Reno in Le Premiere Circle, and Isabelle Huppert in Barrage Contre Le Pacifique.

Based on a short 17^th century novel by Madame de la Fayette, The Princess of Montpensier centers on a young beauty named Marie de Mézières (played by Mélanie Thierry), who is poised to inherit one of the country’s greatest fortunes. Although she loves Ulliel’s Duc de Guise, Marie is married off to the Prince of Montpensier for financial and political reasons. As the Wars of Religion rage, Marie finds that her affections have become the prize of a much smaller battle, between the Duc de Guise, the Prince, and the Duc d’Anjou (played by Raphael Personnaz), who will one day ascend the throne as King Henry III. Acting as Marie’s confidante and tutor is an older warrior, the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), who abandoned the battlefield after killing a pregnant woman, and hopes to teach the young Marie the value of an open and inquisitive mind.

Tavernier manages to imbue Princess with an energy that is often missing in period productions, in which everyone from the performers to the costume designers often seem to be very aware that they’re making a film set in the distant past. By contrast, Princess feels as if the cameras were just sort of dropped into this earlier century and began capturing pieces of it.

(Unrequited: Melanie Thierry, and Ulliel, above.)

Last year, Ulliel also became the male face of Chanel, which had the side consequence of giving him the opportunity to work with another legendary filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, who directed Ulliel in the highly stylized, extended commercial for the Bleu de Chanel fragrance.

The Hollywood Interview met with Gaspard last month to discuss Tavernier, Scorsese, and a future career goal which may see him one day join them... in the ranks of the auteurs.

What is Bertrand Tavernier's directing style with actors? Does he give very specific blocking?

Gaspard Ulliel: Never. That’s a big thing. He tends to leave a lot of freedom to the actors. This is one of his priorities, I think, when working with the actors. One thing that really surprised me, in a good way, is that he always wanted to go straight to a take. He would never really rehearse or do a block-through for technical purposes. So then, of course, the actor is more fresh, if I can put it like this, on the first take, and, also, we would be free to move in any sort of way. We would never have really precise, definite marks on the floor, on the ground. And we would never really have to follow precise direction of movement and placement. So then, it’s great, because you don’t feel like you’re enclosed, or a prisoner of the frame. And this was a really interesting way of working, I think.

And then, a great thing I experienced on this film with Bertrand, was he was totally available to all the actors way ahead of the shooting, and he would insist on the fact that he wanted to meet with every actor, even those in small parts of the film, for one-to-one discussion. And this is quite rare. It never really happens with other directors. So we had many meetings, lunches, and discussions, and even readings before the shooting, to just talk about the characters and to create the characters.

The sword duels are memorable, in part, because it is clearly really you and the other actors performing those scenes. How much training went into that? It seems like it would be a bit crazy.

It was a bit crazy [laughs]. And a bit tiring. We worked for hours and hours. We’d work for 4-5 hours in a row and 3-4 times a week, and we kept doing this for a month and a half. I actually wish we had more time. The film was on standby for a while, because we had to wait for more money, with some budget issues, and then, all of a sudden, we had the money. So, they had to shoot it as quick as they could.

Bertrand told us from the very beginning that he wouldn’t use any stunt or body doubles, both for the fights, and for the horse riding. It was totally new for me, so I had to learn to train with the horses, too.

Were there any injuries during the shooting?

No, I wasn’t really injured or wounded, but in the duel in the courtyard, with the Prince, his knife went into my mouth (indicates the side of his mouth) and cut me a little. The blades were not sharp, so it was okay! [laughs]

(Lambert Wilson and Ulliel, above.)

Despite being a period film, there is a very modern feel to The Princess of Montpensier. Why do think that is?

When you see period films, it tends to often be with older actors. Here, you have all these younger actors. That gives a lot of energy and a modern feeling. At the same time, usually 'period film' means really precise filming with [dolly] tracks, and it’s stiff at some point. But here, he wanted to film this more like a documentary, in a way. He would be in the middle of the set with handheld shots and action, and this was another modern feeling to add to the film.

Then, I think another way the film can be a bit modern is in all the themes that are explored in this story. Many of those strong themes have great resonances with today's world. Like the condition of the woman, or the forced marriage, or the religious war. And also, love, and the passion... all those feelings never change. That's universal. That's why I think this film can be quite modern, in a way, and really work on young audiences.

(Gaspard Ulliel, above. Photography by Nora Schaefer.)

Let's talk about working with Martin Scorsese on the short film for Chanel last year.

It was amazing. Of course, it was a bit short, and at some point, it was a bit frustrating... because I could have kept doing this for a month [laughs]. I remember when the Chanel people phoned me and said, “We’re thinking of having Martin Scorsese direct the ad," and I couldn’t believe it. I was so thrilled and excited about it. I remember waking up in my hotel room in New York City every day to go work with one of the biggest and greatest filmmakers we have today. It was like a dream.

(Scorsese, and Ulliel, above.)

Then, when the launch of the fragrance really kicked in with all of the publicity, what was that experience like for you?

This is a bit odd. When I signed for this, and was shooting the ad and doing the photo shoot, I knew there would be billboards and posters in the street, but not as much as they did. I mean, in France, it was everywhere, and I was a bit frightened in the beginning. You walk in the street and you see yourself everywhere. (He indicates his closely-cropped hairstyle, which is a significant change from the longer locks he sported previously.) Maybe that’s why I cut my hair [laughs].

But in the end, you just get used to it and you can walk past those posters and you don’t really see them anymore. You know, it’s part of the game. You know when you sign, in the beginning, that you have to prepare for this.

I understand that you were training to be a filmmaker, when you started to break as an actor. Is filmmaking something you wish to pursue again? As an actor, you're also a filmmaker, but -

Well, not really, but in some cases... I think as an actor, that’s the best way to work with a director. As an actor, we can bring lots of ideas and create, in a way, some part of the film with the director, but on the other hand, you’re sort of a slave to the director, in a way, you’re just one part of his own story and his own world.

And, you know, I would love to be able to express myself through my own film, and my own cinema, and even my own script. I would love to write the script. This was something I was really into, obviously, when I was 19 or 20, because I went to film school, and at that time, I wanted to become a director. But at the same time, I kept working as an actor and I started to get more and more offers as an actor, and I just thought that it would be so silly not to give it a try as an actor, after receiving those great offers. That’s why I decided to stop film school.

Sometimes, I regret and miss those moments where I was discovering such amazing filmmakers from different countries. But also, at that time, I thought it would be really interesting to experience real shooting, and sets, and to watch different filmmakers at work, and that’s another way to learn about directing.

Today, I’m really fulfilled with my job, with acting... it’s fascinating and it absorbs me completely. I’m really happy with it. Directing is still in my mind and I still would love to work as a director. But the more and more I work, the more and more I can see how difficult it is to direct a film, and to drive the whole crew. I don’t think I feel confident enough to go for it maybe today. And also, as you build notoriety as an actor, you can feel more and more pressure about the idea of becoming a director, because, obviously, you know your film will be more anticipated, and maybe more criticized, and you have to be sure to have the right project.

The Princess of Montpensier premieres theatrically in the United States on April 15th, and will be available everywhere via Sundance Select’s Video-On-Demand program starting on April 22nd.

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Sidney Lumet 1924-2011

Director Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet was the first director I interviewed whose one-sheet posters hung on my wall as a kid. He was an idol, an icon, and an inspiration. I wasn't yet 30 when I met him at The Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills for our interview at the press junket for "Night Falls On Manhattan," one of his solid, authentic urban dramas that blended crime, politics and personal revelations that became his signature.

Lumet immediately put any butterflies I had at ease. Diminutive, but with the infectious energy of a teenager, his was a disarming presence. He paid me a compliment on my sportcoat, saying that I looked a bit like the young Mickey Rourke (which I still don't see, but what the hell), then went on to regale me for an hour with stories about his remarkable life in the theater, the early days of live television, and of course in film.

The other indelible memory I have of that day is this, and it remains a potent lesson to me about the fragile, complicated and often mercurial personalities artists possess: another journalist who was waiting in the "holding room" for his turn with the maestro, a man whom Lumet obviously knew as he greeted him warmly, had brought his teenage son. The boy looked at Lumet in awe. Lumet smiled, shook the lad's hand, and asked about his interests. The boy replied "I want to be a filmmaker, and you're my hero." Lumet's entire countenance changed on a dime. He immediately broke eye contact with the boy, turned and hurried away, as if the kid had just spit in his face. I'll never forget that moment.

Lumet's body of work is one that will carry on for the ages, and remains one of the cinema's most diverse. It is unlikely, given the vast changes in the movie business since Lumet's entry, that another contemporary filmmaker will ever assemble one to rival it.

Thanks for it all, Mr. Lumet. Tonight will be spent with a bearded Al Pacino, a raving Peter Finch, a haunted Rod Steiger, and a vulnerable Paul Newman, magnificent bastards all, reaching for that moment of redemption.

SIDNEY LUMET: THE MASTER SPEAKS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

Regarded by many as the finest motion picture director of his generation, Sidney Lumet's films have been nominated for over fifty Academy Awards. Born in Philadelphia in 1924 to parents who were veteran performers in the Yiddish theater, Lumet initially took to the stage as a child actor, making his debut on radio at age four and stage debut at the Yiddish Art Theater at five. He went on to appear in many Broadway plays, including "Dead End." He made his only film appearance at 15 in One Third of a Nation (1939). When WW II broke out, Lumet's career was put on hold as he did his U.S. Army service in India and Burma as a radar repairman from 1942-46.

Upon his return to the States, he organized an off-Broadway actors' group and became its director. During this time, he also directed in summer stock and taught acting at the High School of Professional Arts. In 1950, he joined CBS, where he soon won recognition as a gifted director of TV drama ("You are There," "Omnibus," "Best of Broadway," "Alcoa Theater," and "Goodyear Playhouse," among others). He was given his first chance to direct a motion picture with 12 Angry Men in 1957 when the film's producer and star, Henry Fonda, took a shine to the young director and his TV work. Thanks to his TV experience, Lumet was able to complete the tightly structured courtroom drama in 19 days on a budget of $343,000. With the help of cameraman Boris Kaufman, Lumet used the space restrictions of the cramped setting to advantage, generating uncommon tension from the claustrophobic confines of the jury room. The film and its director were nominated for Academy Awards. Lumet won the Director's Guild Award and the film was widely praised by critics. It would lay the groundwork for territory that Lumet would explore in many of his future films: humanity attempting to prevail amid cynicism and corruption in an urban, political setting with a righteous protagonist standing alone in this harsh world in which he is attacked from all sides, sometimes by those he loves and trusts the most.
Lumet received another nod from the DGA for his handling of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), on which he applied a masterful mix of static and dynamic camerawork, turning the play into a distinctly cinematic work with a classic performance from Katharine Hepburn in the lead.

Lumet's growing reputation was further enhanced by his intelligent handling of the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964), and his compassionate treatment of a complex psychological theme in The Pawnbroker (1965), the profoundly disturbing story of a Holocaust survivor's anguished existence in New York's Harlem amidst his burning memories of the concentration camps. After generating a powerful drama of the wretched life in a British military prison in The Hill (1965), the first of his four collaborations with star Sean Connery, which also included Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the little-seen masterpiece The Offense (1973), Lumet's next big commercial splash came with Serpico (1973), the riveting true-life police thriller starring Al Pacino about an honest cop trying to expose widespread corruption within the NYPD. Lumet followed this classic with the equally-lauded Dog Day Afternoon (1975), again with Pacino in the lead in a story ripped from current headlines about a young Brooklyn man who robs a bank to pay for his lover's sex change operation. This was followed by another classic of the 70's, Network (1976), his greatest commercial triumph. Although the film, which was written by Paddy Chayefsky, was denounced by broadcasters and many critics as preposterously false, it was a huge moneymaker earned several Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won four Oscars in the writing and acting categories. Lumet next shared an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Prince of the City (1981), another true story of police corruption in New York. His subsequent films in the 80's received mixed notices, with the notable exceptions of the riveting The Verdict (1982) and Running on Empty (1988). In 1995, Lumet wrote the best-selling book Making Movies which is now in its seventh printing.

Lumet's 40th film, being released this month, is Night Falls on Manhattan, which Lumet adapted for the screen from Robert Daley's novel Tainted Evidence. The film explores familiar Lumet territory of political corruption, tough cops, and the mean streets of New York in telling the tale of one Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) an Irish-Puerto Rican former cop and wet-behind the-ears assistant D.A. who is thrust into the limelight after being chosen to prosecute a high profile, headline making case. As he moves deeper into the criminal justice system, Casey's world is torn apart, as he experiences personal and professional betrayal after discovering a crime and cover-up among those closest to him. Richard Dreyfuss, Lena Olin, Ron Leibman, James Gandolfini and Ian Holm give fine support in the large, emsemble cast. The film is a riveting drama, and ranks among Lumet's best work to date.

Although now in his early 70's, Sidney Lumet looks at least ten years younger and carries himself with the countenance and boundless energy of a man in his mid-20's. Mr. Lumet sat down recently in a plush suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to reflect on his prolific and distinguished career, and to talk about Night Falls On Manhattan.

How did someone who seemed to have a bright future as an actor, suddenly fall in love with directing?
SIDNEY LUMET: You know one of the things in everybody's life, and people always seem to think I'm kidding when I say this, luck has a tremendous amount to do with it. It's stunning to me how big a part luck plays in your life. I'd been an actor, and I was making a decent living, not great, but decent, and I was teaching--I'd set up the drama course at the High School for the Performing Arts--and a friend of mine, Yul Brynner, was directing for television at that time, and a wonderful director by the way. And Yul said (imitating him)'Come on over! Nobody knows what they're doing. It's great fun! You'll make good living!' And so I went into CBS as Yul's a.d., his assistant director. And then when Yul left to do "The King and I" on Broadway, I took over the show, which was a melodrama called "Danger." It was a half hour show every Tuesday. So I really just fell into it. I did that for some months. Then I started doing more shows from there.

Henry Fonda was apparently instrumental in bringing you onto 12 Angry Men. How did the two of you hook up originally?
Again, luck. I had worked with Reggie Rose, who wrote the script, on "Danger." We had done some of Reggie's first scripts. He always liked what I did with his work. So when the movie came up--I had not done the original television show--Reggie wanted me to do it. Before I began directing, I and another group of actors had formed a workshop off-Broadway. And we'd be there doing exercises, vocal exercises, physical exercises, and work on scenes. And I had done some directing there, that's actually where I started directing. There wasn't an official director in the group, but somebody had to say 'You go over here,' 'You do this,' So I started doing it...and at the end of every year, we tried to find a new American play that we would mount in a workshop format...now, we're talking about luck again. One of the actors in the workshop, a guy named Joe Bernard, was also in "Mister Roberts" at the time on Broadway...when it came to the year end project, Fonda came down to see him. Two or three years later, Reggie brought (Fonda) 12 Angry Men and mentioned my name to direct, and Fonda said "Oh yeah, I remember him. I saw something he did down in the Village two or three years ago that was extraordinary! Yeah, I think he could do it." And that was it. Again, talk about luck!

How did you build and then maintain the tension in 12 Angry Men since you were working in such a confined space on such a tight schedule. Was it what you did with the actors, was it camerawork...
A combination of both. Technically it's an enormously complicated movie. You'd think that shooting in a tight space would be the easiest thing in the world, when in fact the easiest thing to shoot is a cattle round-up! Just put six cameras on it and all the footage will be so marvelous you won't know what to choose because the action is so terrific. Here, through the slow intensification of performance, and then also through a very subtle use of the camera: use of lenses, use of lighting...not trying to avoid the claustrophobia, but trying to take advantage of it. Make it more claustrophobic. Make the ceiling feel lower, make it seem as if the walls are closing in on them. We weren't kidding anybody. We were going to be in one room. Let's use it dramatically!

With Night Falls on Manhattan, I noticed that you return to some familiar themes in many of your films: the lone protagonist fighting and exposing corruption, and so on. Is there something specific that occurred in your life that interests you in these themes?
Nothing that I know of. It's an age-old interest. What I find interesting about Night Falls on Manhattan is that (Andy Garcia's character) doesn't pursue anything, it pursues him. And slowly the world that he's living in keeps closing in, and closing in with a complexity he never thought possible, and what he always thought was simple. And suddenly it becomes like peeling an onion, layer after layer, until there's no bottom to it. It just never stops. So that circumstances kind of overtake him, and it's a question of what he does in those circumstances. So in that sense it's different, but it's in the same area. For want of a better word, we'll call them 'The Justice Movies.' (laughs)

Is that what drew you to the book Tainted Evidence initially, those same themes?
The book is actually quite different from the screenplay. Both begin with the same incident--which really happened. It may not have happened exactly that way, but it certainly happened. That was the kickoff, that if this story was true, that a bunch of cops had gone up to knock off the biggest drug dealer in Harlem, and that he had took out four of them and escaped anyway, and the defense that was offered in the real trial was that (the cops and the dealer) were in business together, and that this was self-defense because he knew they were coming up there to execute him, and that if that is so, since that is so ass-over-tea kettle to begin with, such a reversal from what you normally think would happen, all of a sudden it's 'Wait a minute, where am I. None of this makes sense.' I thought, okay, now let's take the prosecutor, the prosecutor's office, all those people, and what happens afterwards. How do they cope?

So that part of the screenplay was all original?
Everything (in the film) from the trial on was original.

I know you've only written two of your other films prior to this, Prince of the City (with Jay Presson Allen) andQ & A. How do you find writing and directing as opposed to just directing?
I love the writing process. It's fairly new to me. And I don't consider myself a full-fledged writer yet. A full-fledged writer is really someone who can invent people, who can get that individual sound of people. So far, I have been, again, very lucky in the sense that, because of my interests, I wind up dealing with cops, so I know how they sound. I've spent so much time with them--thirty years. And the three pictures I've written, the first one in a sense was even easier. The protagonist in that, who was based on a guy named Bob Lucie, I had all his tapes, because he was wearing a wire all those years. So we just transcribed exactly what was said into a lot of the scenes. With Q & A I branched out a little bit more, with Night Falls branched out a little more and who knows, maybe one day I'll be a writer. We'll see. (laughs)

It's a great life.
It's wonderful way, isn't it? And I'm not an egotist, so when we're in rehearsal and the actor says 'Sidney, this line doesn't feel right,' or two actors may say 'Sidney, this scene isn't going anywhere,' we'll talk it out and I'll go home and re-write it and sometimes it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to do it through a writer! (laughs)

I read in your book that a lot of the dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon was improvised. Do you encourage improvisation from your actors?
No I don't. I'm not a believer in improvisation, although I like it as a rehearsal process, but not for shooting. I find most improvisations wind up being rather self-indulgent, and what takes seven minutes to say in an improv could actually be said in a minute or thirty seconds. And time is precious on the screen. But Dog Day presented a unique problem: in its style...the first obligation of that picture was to let the audience know that it really happened. And as a result, the style of that picture isn't even realistic, it's naturalistic. I wanted it to feel like a documentary, and as part of that, I told the actors 'Look, as long as you don't change the meaning of anything, or shift the scene to another direction, use your own words. ' And by the way I did this with the complete approval of the writer, Frank Pierson, who was there and wrote a wonderful screenplay. And we never changed the structure of anything...much of what we used were Frank's words. But he saw the advantage of that. And what we would then do, we wouldn't just leave it as an improvisation. I brought my sound man in and the boom operator, and we recorded the improvisations and that night a bunch of secretaries would sit down and type them up, then Frank and I would sit down...and by the time we began shooting, we had the shooting script with dialogue composed of the improvisations. Only two of the scenes in the film are actually improvised on camera: Pacino's scenes with Charlie Durning and Pacino's yelling 'Attica' at the cops outside the bank.

You seem to experiment with a great deal of styles in your films. How do you respond to critics who accuse you of not having a distinctive personal style?
They're not wrong in the sense that I think that my job is to serve the material. When I'm doing Murder On the Orient Express, I don't want that to look like or feel like Dog Day Afternoon. I shift styles by picture and by subject matter, and by subject matter I mean not only the genre the picture's in, but what the picture's about emotionally. And the only thing is, I do it with great subtlety. To me, a bad shot is a shot that you notice.

Who are some present day filmmakers whose work you admire?
Gee, there's a lot...I love Zemeckis' work. I think Spielberg has become a great director. And I'm not using the word 'great' like Variety uses the word 'great,' I mean of all-time. I think two of the greatest American movies every made are E.T. and Schindler's List. Those are two great movies in the classic sense of the word. E.T., even though it's very different kind of movie in that it's not 'serious,' is one of the most beautiful, perfectly-made movies I've ever seen. An extraordinary piece of work. Nobody knows who hasn't tried it, how hard it is to make a fantasy work. Film is a very literal medium...and when that group of bicycles took off, my heart just leapt, as did the whole audience the night I saw it. The whole place just screamed and cheered and applauded...the sense of emotional release that you had from that, the sense that they were going to win--that's great moviemaking!

Any other names that come to mind?
Well the bad thing about a question like this is that I run the risk of offending those that I leave out, either intentionally or not. There's so many...I love Jonathan Demme. I love Ron Howard's work. He's a wonderful director.

What do you think about the independent film movement?
Well...I'm not sure there is an independent film movement. I hope there is, but Miramax belongs to Disney and Harvey Weinstein is getting himself up to 30 and 40 million dollar budgets, a far cry from where he began. New Line belongs to Turner, so their Fine Line budgets are going up, up, up...The history of independents, by which we really mean in this country, is independent financing of movies--we don't mean 'independent movies.' John Sayles, for example, still makes independent movies. And he's another director I love. There have always been the John Sayles', the individuals who get it done. But the history of independent movies in this country seems to indicate that the independents eventually all get swallowed up by the majors: Dino di Laurentiis, Lorimar...and I think that'll happen more and more as the problems with distribution, I guess I should say the stranglehold on distribution, gets more complete.

Since so many independent-minded films did well at the Oscars this year, do you see those types of films coming back into vogue, like in the late 60's and 70's?
I don't think so. I think you're going to see a big backlash next year! (laughs) I think you're going to see the most expensive movie from every studio nominated next year. I'm probably wrong, but what can I say? I'm a cynical old man! (laughs)

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