2007 AFF—Michael Hawley's Preview

The Arab Film Festival ("AFF") is one of the essential reasons why film-going in the Bay Area is so rich. But please don't call it the Bay Area Arab Film Festival or even the San Francisco Arab Film Festival—it's simply THE Arab Film Festival, the largest of its kind in the nation. This year's edition (the festival's 11th) features an impressive selection of 44 narrative and documentary features, a like number of shorts, and will take place from October 18-28 in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose. Then in a festival first, the whole show will travel south to Los Angeles for a five-day run starting October 31.

Another first for this year's festival is the creation of an annual, juried cash-prize award which will be presented in Feature, Documentary and Short film categories. The prize is called the Noor Award (named after the Arab word for light, not the queen of Jordan) and will be presented at a special Awards Night Reception & Ceremony at the Castro Theater on Thursday, October 25th. Following the ceremony, the festival will screen its Centerpiece Film, director Hala Khalil's Egyptian comedy Kas Wa Lazk (Cut and Paste).

I've attended the festival for most of its first decade and watched it grow from a handful of weekend screenings to its present grand expanse (a development which seems directly related to our increased awareness of the Arab world in general). Every year I come away from the festival feeling like I've seen the best cinema the region and its diaspora has to offer. And sometimes I see films that, when I look back at year's end, rank among my favorites of the year (Yousry Nasrallah's The City in 2001 comes immediately to mind). The only year I specifically remember not attending was in 2005, when I blew what was probably the only chance I'll ever have to see Nasrallah's five-hour epic, Gate of the Sun.

For this year, artistic director Sonia El Feki has put together a program that is half comprised of her favorites from recent festivals in Carthage and Cairo, and half from submissions made directly to the festival itself. I've had an opportunity to preview a half-dozen selections, and can attest that another fine assemblage of movies awaits this year's festival go-ers.


Things get off to a great start with the opening night screening of Nouri Bouzid's making-of-a-suicide-bomber film, titled appropriately enough, Making Of. This is the first Bouzid film I've seen since his notable 1986 debut, Man of Ashes, but a quick on-line check reveals that he has written or co-written most of the Tunisian films I've seen in the past 20 years, including Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces, A Summer in La Goulette, and Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palace and The Season of Men. His new film is a compelling, if perhaps occasionally overwrought tale of how a hotheaded, charismatic young breakdancer named Bahta is manipulated by fundamentalists into committing the ultimate in self-sacrifice.

The film's title, as it turns out, has a double meaning. Well into the movie we find ourselves being taken outside the narrative, in the first of several scenes where lead actor Lotfi Abdelli bitterly argues with director Bouzid about the direction the film's story is taking. My initial reaction to this film-within-a-film device was a wary one. But as an outsider to the culture being depicted, I soon came to appreciate the added context these fiery actor/director exchanges provided. Abdelli's incredible performance, by the way, is what makes Making Of a must-see (he's won several Best Actor prizes at various festivals, including Tribeca). If you can't attend opening night, the film will be screened two more times during the run of the festival.


I can also strongly recommend two interesting documentaries I previewed, Leila Khaled: Hijacker and I Love HipHop in Morocco. The former is a thoughtful profile of the strikingly beautiful Palestinian woman who would become notoriously known as the world’s first female hijacker. In 1969, 25-year-old Khaled commandeered a Rome-Athens TWA flight in order to force the world's attention upon the plight of Palestinians. A year later, after the first of six plastic surgeries undertaken to disguise her appearance, she would unsuccessfully attempt to hijack an Amsterdam-New York El Al flight. (For what it's worth, no one was killed or injured in either of these incidents). Khaled was a teen idol to the film's director Lina Makboul, who was raised in Sweden by Palestinian parents. As an adult, she found herself less certain about Khaled's goals and methodology, and sought to find out whether Khaled herself remained unrepentant.

After a brief history of the Palestinian cause, the film's first half focuses in detail on the two hijackings, and includes present day interviews with the flight crews and passengers. In the second half we travel to Jordan and meet Khaled, where she lives a fairly ordinary life as a housewife and member of the Palestinian National Council. It's a bit strange reconciling the chain-smoking older woman we see vacuuming the house in her pajamas, with the popular image of Khaled as "terrorist." We learn that she has few regrets about her past, and on the issue of terrorism, she declares, "Who decides and defines what terrorism is? As far as I'm concerned, occupation is terrorism." Of all the questions she's asked in the film, however, I was most fascinated by her ambivalent response to the query of whether she believes in God. "Sort of," she replies. "We must say so, I guess." Those are pretty brave words to speak in a culture that places belief in God above all else.


Reconciling one's religion with one's lifestyle is a dilemma faced by nearly all the subjects of Joshua Asen and Jennifer Needleman's fascinating I Love Hip Hop in Morocco. Asen received a Fulbright grant to study the effects of hip hop on Moroccan youth culture, and the resulting film effectively captures a movement in the making. The film's narrative arc is found in the anticipation of Morocco's first hip hop music festival. We're given a nuts-and-bolts look at what goes into making the festival happen—from the securing of artists, venues and technicians—to the all-important procurement of sponsorships. Interestingly, half the money for the festival ends up coming from the U.S. Cultural Attaché (a use of my tax dollars which I heartily approve) and the other half from Coca-Cola (because “Sprite is for freshness and liberty.”)

The balance of the film features intimate portraits of the artists who will perform in the festival. We meet DJ Key (Morocco's #1 turntableist), top-rated Meknes-based crew H-Kayne, Fnaïre (who combine vocal harmonics, beatboxing and traditional Arab rhythms), English-rapping Brownfingaz, and Fati, the film's (and perhaps the entire country's) lone female MC. As one might expect, the film's exhilarating highlight is the festival itself, wherein 36,000 fist-pumping Moroccan youths appear to be having the time of their lives.


Two narrative features in the festival share a similar story structure—that is—one in which we follow the exploits of a young man over the course of one night in a capital city. Michel Kammoun's Falafel is perhaps the more solid of the two, and has been rightly compared to Martin Scorsese's After Hours. The film's good-natured protagonist Tou, sets off for a night of partying with friends in Beirut. Before long, however, an incident involving a thug, a gun and a scratched car sends him recklessly wandering through the night seeking revenge. He experiences several vaguely, and not-so-vaguely threatening encounters during his nocturnal odyssey, which together serve as a metaphor for the psychological aftermath of the city's 15-year civil war. I had a bit of trouble accepting the rashness of Tou's dangerous pursuit of justice, based on the personality we've become acquainted with in the film's first section. But Kammoun's astute ending, literally and figuratively, manages to bring it all home for us quite nicely.


There's hardly anything "nice" about Jilani Saadi's nihilistic, Tunis-set Ors El Dhib (Tender is the Wolf). Our nighttime protagonist on this outing is Stoufa, an immature, unemployed 30-ish layabout who loiters on street corners with his like-minded buddies, drinking and smoking dope. When neighborhood prostitute Saloua ticks them off with her sharp tongue, they all gang-rape her except for Stoufa. He ends up taking the blame, however, and is beaten into unconsciousness. He'll spend the rest of the night confronting his friends and trying to extract revenge on Saloua and her protectors.

I admired this film for the consistency of its dark tone, but thought the director made several missteps. He tries to conjure up empathy for Stoufa's friends, an absurd impossibility after the brutal gang-rape scene, and then presents us with an equally absurd romantic encounter between Stoufa and Saloua. Even worse is his repeated use of a ticking digital clock, a la TV's 24. Saadi does comes up with some nice visual flourishes, such as a recurring God's-eye-view of the action done with black and white digital video. There's also a lyrical tracking shot that follows Stoufa's trip to the hospital, his naked and unconscious body riding atop a garbage cart. Actor Mohamed Hassine Graya has a commanding screen presence as Stoufa, and the other actors turn in generally fine performances as well. All of which makes Tender is the Wolf worth a look, especially if you take an interest in the grimier side of humanity.

Set in the 1930's and 1940's, Selma Baccar's Koshkhash (Flower of Oblivion) is a Tunisian pot-boiler about one woman's descent into drug addiction and insanity. When we first meet Zakia she's being dragged into the nut house, in a scene that's so over-the-top the only thing missing is a guy who thinks he's Napoleon. Once she's in her cell and comfortably straight-jacketed, we learn in a series of flashbacks what it was that put her there. Married into a well-to-do family complete with a gay husband and horrible mother-in-law, Zakia miraculously manages to give birth to a baby girl. To soothe her postpartum pains, she's given an infusion of poppies which over the years grows into a monster-sized addiction (she even marries her daughter off to a guy who owns acres of poppy fields). The movie cuts back and forth between this tale of ruination and her stint in the asylum, where a budding romance with a fellow patient might help her regain her marbles.

Although this a film I would probably classify as a guilty pleasure, there were some things about it that genuinely impressed me. First, it provides a fascinating look at the social mores and rituals of upper class Tunisian society at a certain period of time, with top notch sets and costumes. The other aspect that caught my attention was a rather sympathetic portrayal of Zakia's gay husband. He's not depicted as a villain, but simply as a man who's trapped in a life not of his choosing. And when his mother banishes the male servant with whom he's been happily sharing a bed, it's touching to watch the look of empathetic sadness on Zakia's face for this man she's long considered her rival. It's a point of quiet elegance in a film that's largely painted with broad strokes.


Because nothing beats seeing a movie with an audience on a big screen, I've saved a number of films to watch during the festival proper. I'm most looking forward to VHS Kahloucha, which I understand is a hilarious documentary about an amateur Tunisian filmmaker helming no-budget big-scale epics. As a fan of Arab films, I'm also anxious to see Arab Cinema: The State of Things, a documentary which includes interviews with some of my favorite filmmakers such as Moufida Tlatli and Yousry Nasrallah. I'm very curious about What a Wonderful World, a neo-film noir set in Casablanca, and A Perfect Day, a Lebanese film that explores the lives of youth in contemporary Beirut. And finally on a lighter note, I'm anticipating this year's breakout hit film from Egypt, Awqat Faragh (Leisure Time), the aforementioned Centerpiece Film, Cut and Paste, and a nostalgic look at a young boy's love for cinema in 1950's Tangiers, A Muslim Childhood.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 MVFF30—Frako Loden on Three Docs

Filmbud Frako Loden offers up some off-the-hip commentary on three documentaries she caught at this year's Mill Valley Film Festival.

Chicago 10—An energetic and engaging but superficial account of the police brutality on demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the subsequent conspiracy trial. As an historical account the film is useless—it doesn't even mention who the Democratic nominee was (Hubert Humphrey) and makes a glancing reference to the assassination of Martin Luther King but not Bobby Kennedy's. I still don't understand the title—who are the two additional defendants? The film's decided emphasis is on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the most ostentatious and media-savvy of the defendants and the figures most likely to inspire the youth of today. Since there are no images from the trial, the film employs motion-capture computer animation and famous voices (Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo) to repeat words from the trial transcripts, with an emphasis on the funny and most dramatic lines. Interspersed with the trial is a recounting of the days leading to the final police assaults using vivid archival footage. Rage Against the Machine stands in for MC5 doing "Kick Out the Jams." For me, the overall effect of the film was to say that the leaders of that antiwar generation were cool and sexy—a great ensemble cast for a future live-action film—and that they had a more challenging political climate to fight against, given Mayor Richard Daley's determination to subdue the demonstrators, charges of Communism still alive in the late '60s, and a war where troops were being killed at many times the number dying currently in Iraq.


Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm is a documentary detailing the history of massage tools (i.e., the vibrator), the 1970s movement to encourage women's masturbation (Betty Dodson), and the 2004 arrest of a Texas woman for selling vibrators to undercover cops. I don't know if it's still true, but in 2004 Texas it was illegal to own more than six vibrators because that implied you were selling them, and it's against the law to sell devices that stimulate the genitals (although there's no problem with the advertising and sale of Viagra). The history of vibrators for the treatment of "hysteria" is fascinating, and accounts of a woman's first orgasm are a tearful delight. Reno the performance artist's comments on this or that were hilarious. It was frustrating to hear about a slide show featuring all the different shapes and sizes of vulvae and not being able to see it ourselves (the film instead uses floral imagery and time-lapse photography of blooms opening and closing)—directors Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori's explanation that they wanted to keep the film "mainstream" since its subject matter was already such a problem was understandable but still frustrating.


So far my favorite documentary at Mill Valley is Soldiers of Conscience, featuring the stories of a number of soldiers who, already in the military, decided they couldn't take lives and either deserted or refused movement. This is an impeccably argued film about an individual's considered decision, after much reflection, not to follow orders to kill. We were sad not to see Lt. Ehren Watada (whose court-martial has been postponed to the end of this month) among them, but apparently his refusal came after the shooting of this film. It opens with some astonishing statistic, I forget the details, about a vast majority of soldiers never firing their weapon once. And that most people, faced with the kill-or-be-killed scenario, simply refuse to kill. It argues that the highest assertion of one's freedom is to listen to one's conscience, and that conscience is wired to have empathy for one's fellow.

Cross-published on Twitch.

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT—The Wired Interview With Ridley Scott

Switching replicants in the middle of a dystopian dream can get you wet and sometimes scolded, as director Ridley Scott discovered with recent commentary surrounding the release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. One gets the sense that audiences feel entitled to their initial experiences of a film and they don't take too well to said experiences being tampered with, either through a director who's poised to deliver his vision as he initially intended it, or through state-of-the-art technology that can visually perfect it.

Whether or not you feel that Ridley Scott is pulling a fast one by now claiming that Deckard was always intended to be a replicant, and whether or not that makes you feel differently about the film's narrative thrust, or whether or not that admission adds heft to a project that was already heavily-loaded with gravitas, you can decide for yourself when the five (that's right, count 'em, five)-disc DVD release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut hits the shelves in December. Until then, Ted Greenwald's interview with Ridley Scott for Wired (Issue 15:10) offers keen insight into the director's current stance with some sweet reminisces from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Zack Snyder, Raymond Kelly, J. Craig Venter, Thom Mayne, Ray Kurzweil, Mamoru Oshii, and Moby about what Blade Runner meant to them when they first saw it.


One of my favorite bits, albeit a throwaway without much explanation, is Scott's admission that he consciously chose to go Asian with his futuristic scenario rather than Hispanic. Several Chicano theorists have criticized Scott for what they feel is an inaccurate depiction of the future San Angeles.

Twitch, of course, has been all over this, since Todd Brown's initial announcement back in May, Aardvark's follow-up in July, and Todd's most recent update in August when it was announced the film would screen in Venice. Fred Kaplan at The New York Times covered the Final Cut's late September appearance at The New York Film Festival.

Photo of Ridley Scott courtesy of Robert Maxell and Wired Magazine. Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF: CARTONEROS—The Evening Class Interview With Ernesto Livon-Grosman

Many years ago in my mid-20s I studied with a Hopi medicine woman whose first lesson to me was that—if I did not handle my own garbage—I could do nothing for the Earth. That stern primer in recycling has stayed with me all these years.

When I reviewed the Idaho International Film Festival line-up, the first film that stood out to me was Ernesto Livon-Grosman's 60-minute documentary Cartoneros, which—as the IIFF program capsule synopsizes—"follows the paper recycling process in Buenos Aires from the trash pickers who collect paper informally through middlemen in warehouses, to executives in large corporate mills. Five years ago, a severe financial crisis left Argentina reeling, putting millions out of work and into financial distress—today, in fact, more than 30 percent of the country lives below the poverty line. One particular trend borne of the economic is the increasing number of cartoneros, the poor residents of Buenos Aires and vicinity who make their living by collecting and selling recyclable paper and other materials.

"Between 25,000 and 30,000 people comb through the city's 4,500 daily tons of garbage every night, picking out paper, cardboard, metal, and glass in an effort to support themselves and their families. The scope and variety of cartoneros' enterprises so intrigued Livon-Grosman that he wound up making a documentary about it, in the process discovering the complexity of recycling and its social, political and cultural implications. The film is both a record of an economic and social crisis and an invitation to audiences to rethink the value of trash."

Ernesto Livon-Grosman was born and raised in Buenos Aires. In his early twenties, he moved to Patagonia, where he developed an interest in the history and the politics of that region. He later published Geografias imaginarias, a study about travel writers who created a mythical iconography of the Patagonian landscape, one in which the region is viewed as an uninhabited space despite the indigenous groups that have been living in the area for centuries. During the last military dictatorship, Livon-Grosman emigrated to Costa Rica. He went back to Argentina in 1983 after the return of the democratic government. He now lives in the Boston area where he teaches literature and film at Boston College.


His documentary Cartoneros begins with a quoted poem by Baudelaire:

Here we have a man who has to gather
the day’s refuse in the capital city.
Everything that the big city threw away,
everything it lost,
everything it despised,
everything it crushed underfoot,
he catalogs and collects.

The documentary then proceeds to ask a series of pointed questions that I felt were hardhitting for being so timely:

What do you do with your garbage?

What turns a person into a scavenger? Unemployment? Hunger? A desire to work independently? An interest in ecology?

What bothers you most about garbage? The smell? How hard it is to get rid of? The idea of wasting something that could be useful?

I contacted Ernesto Livon-Grosman through the film's distributor and he graciously consented to an interview.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Nancy Babine's write-up on Cartoneros for New England Film informatively provides the backstory on the making of your documentary so I won't pursue that so much; but, I did want to follow through on a few points that were of interest to me. A couple of years back I had the welcome opportunity to speak with Fernando Solanas about his documentary The Dignity of the Nobodies when it screened at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival. Cartoneros could easily serve as compañero to Dignity of the Nobodies, especially with its focus on the urban center of Buenos Aires. Being someone who teaches about documentaries, who were your influences in shaping Cartoneros?


Ernesto Livon-Grosman: I did have influences, although the filmmakers that I like very much, people who triggered my first interest for documentary making and documentaries in general, are not necessarily visible in Cartoneros. One of them, is Fernando Birri, who was one of the founders of the New Latin American Cinema or the Third Cinema, in which Solanas was certainly a key member. Birri is the first who comes to my mind but not necessarily by any means the only one. Other directors I watched time and again, even though I wouldn't dare or even try in imitating but who are very close to my heart are people like Chris Marker and—to some extent though for different reasons—Jean Rouch. The impact of their work could be seen in the fact that Cartoneros has a clear ethnographic take.

Guillén: You utilized some structural devices that caught my attention, namely your use of split screen. What prompted you towards the split screening?

Livon-Grosman: The idea behind the split-screening was to give a picture of the process and the process was made out of many different parts. I wanted that process to be reflected in the formal structure of the film, in the attempt to put together several elements. What I did together with the editor and co-producer of the film, Angélica Allende Brisk—who was the key person in that process—was to look for a harmonic relation between content and form.

Guillén: Cristina Banegas narrates your film. Is it correct that her narrative voice is somewhat fictionalized?


Livon-Grosman: The narration was a main concern for me: how to find the option for the narrator's voice. I was very aware that one of the major issues at stake within the documentary genre is the narrator. Bill Nichols—one of the most influential critics in the field—described the voiceover as the "voice of God" and a sort of excess of authority on the part of filmmakers. Being aware of that, I was trying to get around that issue. I wanted to have a voice that would be reflective and more intimate and not necessarily telling the audience how things are. I decided to use a female voice because in the documentary tradition, there's a tendency to use a strong, deep male voice that explains it all. As an audience, you are being told exactly how things are. In Cartoneros the narrator is a fictional character that goes back to Argentina after many years of being abroad to rediscover the city where she was born. It's, if you wish, an alter-ego.

Guillén: I appreciate that idea of feminine instruction. That's probably also why La Colo came off so well in the film; she was so articulate and dignified. She worked against what Solanas would call "a culture of despair."

Livon-Grosman: There are many women doing the jobs and it would only be fair that they be properly represented. From the very beginning it was always a job that didn't have a traditional gendered division of labor. That was one factor. But there was also a serendipitous element because it was my good luck to find people like La Colo. The film always hoped to show the different stages of the recycling project as well as the dignity of the people doing this job.

Guillén: I likewise appreciate your play between the personal and the public and how—by beginning your film with a quote by Baudelaire—you incorporate a wide time margin to recognize that this reality of the cartoneros has been going on for some time in many places, long before its current inflection in Argentina.


Livon-Grosman: Thank you for noticing and making the connection. The reference to Baudelaire actually comes from a quoted poem, but it's also been used by Walter Benjamin to describe the flâneur, the person who walks through the city as a key witness and interpreter—in Benjamin's idea—of the modern city. That, perhaps, is a less obvious reference but I thought that the quote could be read without all those references and was clear in itself and if a viewer knew the references and wanted to think about it those terms, that would be possible. I liked that idea that it could be simple and complex at the same time. In that sense the flâneur is also a twofolded character that carries the fusion of the public and the private.

Guillén: Are you familiar with the Chicano aesthetic of rasquachismo written about by Tómas Ybarra-Fausto?

Livon-Grosman: No.

Guillén: Rasquachismo is a sensibility that infuses Chicano art, Haitian art, and refers to the principle of creating the most from the least, often registered as the recycling of detritus from impoverished areas to create beauty and art. Amalia Mesa-Bains has probably captured its poetry the best when she writes: "In rasquachismo, the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least ... one has a stance that is both defiant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials... The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo." I felt Cartoneros was right in line with this sensibility of rasquachismo and the tradition of salvaging and gleaning, especially in your profiles of artists Antonio Berni and Alejandro Marmo. Could you talk a little bit more about them or other sculptors who are working with recycled materials?


Livon-Grosman: Today there are several artists in Buenos Aires with similar aesthetics. But there is an important tradition that goes far back. Berni was a turning point in Argentine art history. He became an influential figure among the people who adapted and cannibalized French surrealism into Latin American art, which actually happened in many different areas, with serious attempts to distinguish themselves from the European or the French. Berni was a perfect example of that and a very successful one.

The other thing that was very touching for me—and is mentioned in the film—is that Berni was very much attached to that place where he started to collect the debris that he was including in his work—to the shanty town, or villa, known as Bajo Flores and located in a part of the city where one of the co-ops of cartoneros is now located. The co-op is located there because the shanty towns were there and the shanty towns were there because that was the location of the city dump; one of the oldest and largest ones. For me there is a sense of continuity with the past. It was important to stress that there was also a continuity between Berni's and Marmo's work.

Guillén: There's almost a sense of an architecture of archaeology, layers and strata.

Livon-Grosman: I agree with you. That's why I mentioned Rouch and the word "ethnographic" at the beginning of our conversation because that was, no doubt, the model I was working with. Ethnographic films have been in some cases deeply criticized for the way they portray the objects of their studies. I'm fascinated by that particular area of visual anthropology.

Guillén: Cartoneros has had a great festival run. I'm curious why you haven't played in San Francisco and why I had to go all the way to Boise, Idaho to see the film?

Livon-Grosman: What happened was at the beginning I didn't have a distributor. Now I do, and the distributor DER [Documentary Educational Resources] has taken over in a very efficient way. They are present in festivals all over the country and they have a strong tradition of working with ethnographic and anthropologic material. Once they took over, they started to send it out to festivals that I did not know about. At the beginning—because of lack of experience on my part—I didn't plan the exhibition of the film in a strategic way. Hopefully, San Francisco will be one of the future exhibition venues.

Guillén: I hope so because actually here in San Francisco there is a pronounced recycling community with a whole subculture of cartoneros who actually travel through neighborhoods going through the recycling bins left out on the sidewalks. Your film has prompted me to investigate what San Francisco's official policy is towards this whole subculture; if they even have one. I've never heard or read anything. So I believe there's relevance for your documentary here in San Francisco, though truthfully it's relevant in many parts of the United States. I think your documentary demonstrates that these cartoneros who we render invisible are everywhere.

Livon-Grosman: Thank you for your comments and for making a connection between the film and today's San Francisco. One of the reasons the film might be interesting for American audiences is because environmental as well as globalization issues—which in this case are connected to each other—are present in most of the developed world. It's a clear concern for everyone. In poorer countries, the issues are still visible but with different repercussions. People who have picked the film to show it in film festivals have been matching the film's themes with environmental or Latin American issues, and rightly so.

Guillén: Absolutely. And also here in the Bay Area there are ongoing art programs connected with Bay Area landfill where artists are encouraged to work with recyclable materials to create art. Specifically, I know that Sunset Scavenger—our city's garbage collection service—sponsors or coordinates SCRAP, the Scrounger's Center for Reusable Art Parts, where donations are accepted from businesses and individuals of items that can be used creatively and which are stored in a large warehouse. This also ties in to one of the themes of your documentary.

Livon-Grosman: That sounds really interesting and an unusual approach. It seems like the people there are very aware of the issue and they have devised creative alternatives for what could be perceived as just a problem.

Guillén: Exactly. Cartoneros premiered in Buenos Aires at the 2007 Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (SHA). How was it received? Has it had any beneficial effect or impact on the local culture?

Livon-Grosman: The film was well-received. It had a particularly good reception with people who were working with recycling, working with co-ops, or trying to organize them. It's been shown to activists and that's a great thing for the film. Also, it's most likely going to be shown in a conference for cartoneros that will take place in Colombia this coming March. I think they're trying to put together some films about informal recycling and Cartoneros will be one of them.

Guillén: I'm glad to hear that. Another theme that surfaced in the documentary that proved interesting to me is of the privatization of garbage. I've actually witnessed this in action between two of my neighbors; one who became upset with the people who go through the recycling bins and complained that they had no right to do that, that their garbage belonged to them and the city and that the city was supposed to be doing that, and another neighbor who countered that, no, this was giving these people an opportunity to fend for themselves. Can you speak to the issue of the privatization of garbage?


Livon-Grosman: In Argentina, as in so many places, the problem is trying to find a solution that will save the cartoneros' "jobs" but will change the conditions in which they work so that they will have the salary that they deserve and their share of the profit, which is very large at the end of the process when it gets to the paper mills. But it's hard to do that. It's hard enough to institutionalize by default what's going on now—the present working conditions in which informal recycling takes place in Buenos Aires—as opposed to developing a formal structure. The problem is that, in general, the more sophisticated recycling programs all over the world tend to have some kind of governmental support. It's hard to persuade Latin American politicians that they should be putting money into recycling when they think they will have a better political impact putting money into something else, for example housing or public transportation. It's a degree of awareness, I think, on the part of a large segment of the population that we need to change for politicians to be more receptive to the idea that there is political capital there and it will be seen as a positive decision for them to seriously invest in recycling.

Guillén: Cartoneros has been such an articulate first film from you, Ernesto, what can we expect from you in the future? Are you working on another film?

Livon-Grosman: I have started to work on the script for a new project, this time about Patagonia, which is an area I've written about and where I've lived for several years in the early '80s. I hope to travel and film in Patagonia soon, hopefully next year.

Guillén: Thank you so much for taking time from your busy teaching schedule, Ernesto.

Livon-Grosman: I really appreciate very much your interest in the film and thank you again for taking the time to ask such great questions.

Guillén: Igualmente.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 ARAB FILM FESTIVAL—Lineup

Todd Brown at Twitch may have beat me to the punch announcing Washington D.C.'s Arabian Sights Film Festival, but the 11th Annual Arab Film Festival ("AFF") beats them to the punch by starting up at least a week earlier, October 18-28, 2007 in the San Francisco Bay Area. How do you say "Neener neener neener" in Arabic?

Along with screenings in San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley, AFF extends to Los Angeles this year. One of the most successful and anticipated San Francisco Bay Area film festivals, AFF is the largest exhibitor of exclusively Arab cinema in the United States, featuring national and West Coast premieres and engaging discussions with visiting filmmakers, family screenings, and educational outreach. More than 80 films, representing 13 countries, make up this year's line-up, including the first Lebanese vampire movie, a stylized neo-noir film set in Casablanca, an Iraqi love story, Egypt's latest break-out indie hit and a Jordanian documentary about finding peace through skateboarding. In addition, AFF offers the latest documentaries from Palestine and Iraq and explores stories of urban youth culture in Beirut, Casablanca, Tunis and Cairo. Anticipate some preview picks from Michael Hawley in the near future.

In her third year with the festival, Artistic Director Sonia El Feki has shaped the AFF line-up from films she personally selected from this year's Carthage Film Festival and Cairo Film Festival. A good 50% of the program is the result of her sojourn to these Mideast festivals, cherry picking the best, with the remaining 50% coming from submissions.

Opening night is the West Coast premiere of Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid's Making Of—winner of the Golden Tanit Award at the Carthage Film Festival—with lead actor Lotfi Abdelli accompanying the film. The Centerpiece presentation—in tandem with the First Annual Noor Awards Ceremony—will be the U.S. premiere of Egyptian director Hala Khalil's romantic comedy Cut and Paste.

Other highlights include Tunisian director Najib Belkadhi's documentary profile of Mouncef Kahloucha filmed during the making of Kahloucha's Tarzan of the Arabs. A huge hit among Tunisian expatriate communities in Europe, AFF will screen VHS Kahloucha and sponsor a panel discussion on "Birth of Arab Cinematic Kitsch?" Other panel discussions include "Mission Impossible? Producing A Film in the Arab World" and "Women, Resistance and Political Participation."

Check the AFF website for titles, times and venues.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 MVFF30: THE DARJEELING LIMITED—The Evening Class Interview With Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman & Roman Coppola

I dedicate this entry to Owen Wilson, wishing him grace and strength with the healing he has left to do.

Screened as a Special Presentation at this year's Mill Valley Film Festival just as it opened in local theaters, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited premiered in early September at the Venice Film Festival to mixed reviews and was recently the opening night feature at the New York Film Festival, where it likewise weathered a critical reception fraught with staged ambivalencies. It's hard for me to appropriately gauge that reception because, believe it or not, this is my first Wes Anderson film. No, I have not seen Bottle Rocket. No, I have not seen Rushmore. No, I have not seen The Royal Tenenbaums. No, I have not seen The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. What part of no do you not understand? And quite frankly, I might not have seen The Darjeeling Limited had it not been for Brian Darr's clever Hell on Frisco Bay entry where he simulated a boxing match between Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson when the Castro Theatre programmed both directors' films side by side. No, I did not catch any of that programming; but, YES, I read Brian's entry and, yes, I was amused and, yes, I caught The Darjeeling Limited. Phew! As a film writer I feel like I am constantly playing catch-up to everyone else or—in the immortal words of Alice—"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get."

Notwithstanding, with only one Wes Anderson film under my belt, I agreed to meet with him and Darjeeling Limited co-writers Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola earlier this afternoon at the Ritz.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I'm in a curious position with regard to your work because, admittedly, The Darjeeling Limited is the only one of your films I've seen and, therefore, I can only accept the film on its own terms. But judging from some of the film's critics (some of them who come off as downright bitches), you're reiterating thematic scenarios you've used in your previous films. My gut reaction to that is—as with any artist—you are burnishing themes, not necessarily repeating them. What's your take on this criticism that you're repeating yourself?

Wes Anderson: Well, it might not be good to respond to what critics say. It's probably not a good idea to defend yourself or feel like you've [had] your feelings hurt by critics, because they respond with their honest reactions and that's their job. My approach to my work is there are things I know that I repeat; different things that have to do with my point of view and what I am most interested in. I'm interested in a lot of different things with each film. In this movie, the main principle subject matter is India; but, I don't mind if my movies follow a certain train of thought over the course of them and if at the end of it they can sit on a shelf together and can be connected to each other. I don't mind that. I'm okay with that.

Guillén: It's somewhat of a facetious criticism anyways. If you look at any auteur, you're bound to find striking resemblances between their films and/or a consistent effort throughout the body of their work, themes they're preoccupied with, themes they've developed, and progressed through, and perhaps even cited back to self-referentially.

Anderson: Yes. Right.

Guillén: Following through on the criticism you've received, I was amused by Steely Dan's open letter to you of, I believe, last year. Did you ever respond to that letter officially?

Anderson: No. I didn't really know what to say. I didn't know how to be exactly funny about it in the right way. I just thought, "We'll let this be their project." I mean … now I have responded to it! [Laughs.]

Guillén: And it's an honest response at that. I'm just curious that they were trying to give you such advice.

Anderson: Yes. I appreciated their advice.

Guillén: That's fair.

Anderson: And they wrote some lyrics. I think they had a song called "Bottle Rocket 2", which they proposed I should do. I thought it was pretty good. And they wrote a song about this movie, about their idea of this movie, possibly about what it shouldn't be. I don't remember exactly.

Guillén: At least it was a clever critique. In contrast to some others. Some of these critics, I feel like—if Van Gogh were alive—they'd say, "Paint another Starry Night!" And then if he did, they'd be the first to bite off his other ear.

Anderson: I can't say that Steely Dan made me feel like a million bucks actually; but, I think it was kind of funny.

Guillén: It was at least funny. So how did it come about that the three of you wrote this script together?

Jason Schwartzman: Wes?

Anderson: Roman?

Roman Coppola: We were invited by Wes. We all happened to be in Paris around the same time. Jason and I were working on Marie Antoinette and Wes was staying with Jason and ended up living in Paris at that time. There was something on Wes's mind, the notion of making a film in India with three brothers and there was something bubbling up. He started talking to Jason about it informally, just started with something in the air, and then—since I was there—I was invited to talk about this and the first act of beginning the project was Wes's choice to include Jason and myself. We have all these histories. Jason and I have known each other forever and Wes and I have known each other for many years and Jason and Wes have their own separate relationship and friendship, so right off the bat there was something that resembled three brothers and history and that was the beginning of the project.

Guillén: How did you coordinate the development of the script?

Schwartzman: We wrote it while we traveled together. We went to India together. We had the idea that we wanted to make the movie as personal as we possibly could. Whether that's a good idea or a bad idea, I don't even know if it matters, but that was our philosophy about the movie. Anytime we could answer the question "What happens next?" with "this happened to me" or "this happened to him" and come up with something that had details from our own experience, well, we thought that's the kind of movie we wanted to make. That was the kind of story we wanted to tell.

Guillén: So how much of the brothers' experiences were actually your own?

Anderson: Well, in a way it sort of all [is]. I mean, we didn't buy a cobra. But there's some correlation between moreorless everything in there and something in our own experience and a significant amount of it that was direct.

Coppola: And then some of it was us kind of play acting, testing out the roles and assuming the characters to improvise and come up with ideas. We were a little bit more bold to go to some temple in the middle of the night or go jump in a rickshaw and drive aimlessly because that's what these guys would have done. In a way we tried to experience things in that way to help us.

Schwartzman: We always said say yes to everything, be open.

Guillén: Jason, did you write the scene where you have the tryst on the train?

Schwartzman: The characters are all fictional. [Laughs.] I didn't write specifically for my character.

Anderson: But that came from somebody that we knew.

Schwartzman: Yeah, it comes from something that's very real. It's an honest story from someone I know very well that we put into the film. I'd say the three brothers really are equal shards of the three of us dispersed amongst them and each character, each brother in the script, in the movie, he is made up of the three of us.

Guillén: That being said then, Chris Norris's Film Comment article….

Schwartzman: You say "that being said", did I just walk right into something? Did I just bite hook, line and sinker? [Laughs.]

Guillén: No, no, no, that's just the way I talk. Relax. I'm not out to get you. [Laughs.] In Chris Norris's Film Comment article [September/October, 2007; Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 30-34], he described the three Whitman brothers as "three greedy tourists grabbing at epiphany." Did the three of you have such epiphanies as you were filming The Darjeeling Limited? It's a movie about a spiritual quest in India. As you were making the film in India, with the knowledge of the many people who have made a pilgrimage to India for spiritual enlightenment, did you three experience anything or walk away with any kind of acquired insight?

Anderson: I would say it was a very emotional experience making the movie. I don't know that I would go so far as to say we had spiritual epiphanies, but I can't remember having a work experience or travel experience that I felt was more life-changing than this one, just in terms of how it affects your point of view and just the feeling coming out of it.

Schwartzman: And the distance. I've never been so far away from my home for so long with people that I feel were such a small, tight little bundle. It was life-changing for me and life-changing for all of us together as a group, as friends. I know I feel closer to Wes and Roman and to the actors as well, much closer than I've ever felt to them ever, and I feel that (hopefully) will last.

Coppola: For my part, I think we were all in this quest or search but—what it really was—was the movie. We were trying to figure out what this movie was going to be. We were trying to accomplish this thing. I don't know if there's any tidy answer but the movie is the result of this experience and that's the answer.

Anderson: The thing we found.

Guillén: How long did it take to film this movie?

Anderson: Well, we went to India together to write and that was maybe for six weeks or something like that? Five weeks?

Coppola: Four or five weeks.

Schwartman: Four weeks. Five if you include traveling.

Anderson: And then when we went to make the movie, we were there for four months.

Coppola: Four and a half months.

Anderson: Four and a half, five months. So I'm not the guy to ask. They seem to remember the numbers better than I do.

Guillén: Did you film in the places where you were traveling?

Anderson: Yeah, we found a lot of locations when we were writing.

Schwartzman: We'd be walking around India and—if we had a scene that would take place in a temple—we'd see a temple and we'd take our scripts out and we'd do the scenes, act them out, see how it felt in those environments and often times those would be the ones we'd go shoot at.

Anderson: Also, while we were writing, we met a lot of people that ended up in the movie.

Guillén: Being that this is the first movie of your's that I've seen, it's like dropping a pebble into a pond and watching the concentric rings ripple out. From this moment of entry into your work, I'm now excited to explore your previous films and looking forward to what you will create next.

Anderson: I like that. That sounds good.

Guillén: Barbet Schroeder's appearance in The Darjeeling Limited intrigued me. Can you talk about how that came about?

Anderson: Yes. I'd gotten to know him over the last few years. Part of the time he lives in Paris and I live in Paris part of the time also so I'd met him [there]; I think first through Milena Canonero, who's our costume designer who worked on Darjeeling, who worked on Life Aquatic, who worked on Marie Antoinette, and who we've all known [for a long time]. So I got to know [Barbet] in Paris. He's very smart. He's interested in things. He has tremendous curiosity. He always knows much more about what's new than I ever would and I also like the way he's worked. He's worked all over the world. He's had his own personal projects that he's done, that he's made in South America, now he's working in Japan, and he's worked in America, he's worked in France.

Coppola: Also, he's made some pictures that were intimately [crafted], like La Collectionneuse and whatnot, that were productions on such an intimate scale. That was something we were attracted to.

Anderson: Inspired by. In fact, La Collectionneuse—do you know that movie?—it's an Eric Rohmer film but it's produced by Barbet. It's a great one and was a visual inspiration for us.

Guillén: So was there the character of the mechanic first and Schroeder slipped into that role or was the character written for him?

Anderson: We had a mechanic and we thought, "If Barbet would do it, that would be great!"

Coppola: And it was a Porsche and I think that was a connection that connected Barbet through his name.

Anderson: He looks like he could play … you could definitely cast him as a Nazi. We wanted a mechanic who looked like a Nazi but then turns out to be a good guy.

Guillén: Can you speak about the film's production design?

Anderson: With The Darjeeling Limited our goal was to discover the way the movie was going to look by going there and saying, "What surprises us that we see?" [India's] a place where there's just no shortage of ideas, if you're interested. There's just so much to see and so much to learn. That was really where the whole look of the movie [came from]. It's my point of view, organized maybe, somewhat, but it's all from India. What we made, we made with people we met there who brought their own talents and ideas on how things ought to be done. Often, we'd have somebody—like a guy who paints walls, for instance—and we'd say, "We'd like something like this" and then he would set to work and we would come back and he would have done something completely different and that's what's in the movie. That was our rule: whatever we get back, that's what we want.

Schwartzman: Wes said early on if we wrote the script and it called for a red car but when we go to shoot it that day we have a blue truck, we just shoot the blue truck.

Anderson: From our point of view, whatever is contributed is probably going to be quite interesting and it's a way to learn about the place, by just accepting what comes back.

Guillén: Visually, the film is fascinating. The colors are so vibrant. The production design especially exceled in the "train of thought" montage. That sequence astounded me. Where did that idea come from? How did you construct it? What were you going for?

Anderson: The idea of it was simple. Roman had this idea that Anjelica Huston's character would say, "Maybe we can express ourselves more fully if we do it without words." And then Anjelica was very good in this silent moment but then we wanted to find a way to visually express whatever it is they were saying to each other and we didn't want to explain it. That was our answer to that. We searched for a while to figure out how to physically express it. In the end, we took a train car, gutted it, and we built these sets all in the train car and then we set out into the desert on the train and we shot it live with this construction. A very odd thing.

Coppola: Just to go a little deeper. What I recall is that we were in that moment of let's communicate without speaking and then you hear the bell ringing. At first it was kind of literal. You'd see this person here and this person there, just have a visit, and then that was the first step that led to that thought of somehow….

Anderson: …linking them on a train. We also thought it might be nice because it's a train movie and because there are a lot of metaphors that would come easily.

Coppola: But what's interesting to me is that it was not a conscious thing like "Oh, this is what we're going to do for this reason"; but, it was one little thing that leads to another and leads to another and, before you know it, that's what you have and you didn't think of it; it's just the way it should be.

Guillén: Within that montage, what jumped out for me was the image of Peter's pregnant wife coming to meet him. That profoundly moved me. It was an "aha!" moment where I grasped what was actually happening, that these were thoughts moving through their minds as they were in a state of silence, and that some of those thoughts were desires/fears, and this was Peter's. It told me so much about him. So returning to the construction, you gutted the train car, you dressed the set, and then you just moved the camera along a trolly? Nothing was moving but the camera, right?

Anderson: And the train.

Guillén: The train was actually moving?

Anderson: Yes, the train was actually moving. Because out the window you can see the desert going by.

Schwartzman: The whole movie's shot on a moving train.

Guillén: Let's talk a bit about Hotel Chevalier.

Anderson: It was originally separate.

Schwartzman: It was always a short film that had a beginning and an end and wasn't attached [to The Darjeeling Limited]. It was a companion piece to the feature film. The idea was that it was a prologue, homework really for an audience, and if you see it you will learn a little bit about my character, his backstory….

Coppola: Don't say homework.

Schwartzman: Huh?

Coppola: Homework, that doesn't sound good.

Anderson: The connotation.

Schwartzman: Oh. That makes some people feel weird?

Guillén: I'm not going to watch that short now. [Laughs.]

Coppola: Have you seen the short?

Guillén: No, I haven't.

Schwartzman: They didn't show it with the movie? You saw the movie in the theater?

Guillén: Yeah, I saw it in the theater and they specifically indicated I would have to go find it online.

Anderson: Go to iTunes. You have to get it from iTunes.

Guillén: Oh, okay. But then that means I have to sign up for an account with them.

Anderson: You don't have an iTunes account?

Guillén: No, I'm kind of a Luddite. But I go to movies!! Is that too old-fashioned? [Laughter.]

Schwartzman: Basically, Hotel Chevalier is just a little bit extra information about my character that, hopefully, will help make some things [clear] and fill in some blanks if you want the blanks filled in when you see the film. It was great from an acting point of view because you shoot this thing in chronological order that has happened to my character before The Darjeeling Limited's begun and so usually, at least for me, when you go to work on a film, you think about, "What has my character gone through? Where's he coming from? What are his experiences?" And it's wonderful not to have to imagine an experience but to have really been able to have shot it and to have experienced it and to have lived it and then to just be able to watch a DVD of it. Without sounding funny about it, it's true. You can see it and it really gets inside your body so that—when I'm on the train—I can feel that fucked-up feeling of having been in that room with that person.

Guillén: It's an interesting exhibition strategy to connect the movie theater experience with home computer viewing. Since they initially started as separate projects, at what point did the two become conjoined for purposes of exhibition?

Anderson: While we were writing the movie, I started thinking, "Jason is playing the same character; they should be linked." We thought, "Well, it's a short story and a novel and they're two separate things but they'll refer to each other." It was only after they were done that I said, "Okay, now how are we going to present these?" I had to puzzle that out. At a certain point I thought we would add the short in with the prints of the movie in the theater; but, first I wanted to make it available for free to anybody who's interested to see it and have it not be in the movie and have the movie just play by itself. It will be on the DVD and different people will see it in different ways.

At the end of the movie you hear Jason saying, "I wrote the ending of this short story. I don't know how it starts, but, do you want to hear it?" He reads this scene between him and the girl.

Guillén: The wonderfully mean scene.

Anderson: Yes, the mean scene; well, that's the end of the short. So, if you've seen the short, there's links. At another point in the story, he takes something out of his suitcase and it's a bottle of perfume. He later smashes it. Well, in the short she puts something into his suitcase. You don't know what it is but you see her slip something into his suitcase. It's a bottle of perfume. So there are links between the two.

Guillén: Speaking of that scene where he smashes the perfume bottle, I understand that was configured in the dark?

Anderson: Yeah, we rehearsed it in the dark because we lost the power.

Guillén: How could you see what was going on?

Anderson: It was just the compartment so we could sort of see a little bit. We just didn't have any power. But it gave us a calm, peaceful environment to work in. Everything was sort of stopped because there was no electricity; the power had gone out, which would happen from time to time. So we had a quiet, thoughtful rehearsal in the dark and I have to say that I really liked it. It was a great way to practice the scene. With some of your senses … what would you say?

Coppola: Altered?

Anderson: Incapacitated? Yeah, altered.

Guillén: Speak about the film's score, much of which is taken from Merchant Ivory films and from the films of Satyajit Ray. Was his music a conscious influence while you were writing and shooting the film?

Anderson: I think so, yeah. We had a CD of all those cues, of lots of music from Satyajit Ray's films, Merchant Ivory films, and we played it all the time. The three of us would go to the set together, we would go on location scouting together, we were traveling a lot together and we always played this music during that so it was really not just the soundtrack to the movie, for us it was a soundtrack for the making of the movie. It definitely was in our minds often.

Guillén: The film is richly textured with citationality. For example, I'm old enough to remember when The Beatles went to India so I can see those references going on in the movie. I mean, I'm assuming they were there, right? You were playing with that?

Anderson: Yeah, but I think without even realizing it. Jason looks like a Beatle, with that moustache especially. And then the four of them walking and Jason's barefooted and it looks like Abbey Road. It was not so much planned. We went to Rishikesh at Jason's urging where The Beatles had gone and it was definitely something that was in the mix for us.

Guillén: And also Renoir's The River?

Anderson: Most definitely. That's the movie that made me want to go there. We watched it together a couple of times, but once in Dehli at the end of our long trip together when we were writing, the last thing we did in India was watch the river together.

Guillén: Going back to The Beatles reference, I think Jason looks a little bit like Ringo.

Coppola: This is a good chance to plug something.

Schwartzman: I play Ringo Starr in a movie.

Guillén: You do?!

Schwartzman: It's funny because I'm in the preview for this movie Walk Hard. I'm in the movie but I'm only in it for one scene but—because I'm in the preview—I've been getting a lot of questions: "So did you research the part of Ringo Starr? How long did that take you to do?" I'm only in it for a cameo.

Anderson: What do you say?

Schwartzman: I don't know because—in the style of Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan—in those movies you say a lot of different things during the course of a day and you don't know what's actually going to end up in it.

Anderson: Are you doing a Ringo voice?

Schwartzman: Well, yeah, I'm doing a Ringo voice; but, my whole take on Ringo was that I'm not going to say anything. So I was very quiet and everyone else is improvising and I just kind of sat there. I do a face.

Anderson: Can you do it?

Schwartzman: [Blushing] I can't do it right now.

Anderson: Can you do your Ringo voice for a second?

Schwartzman: [Doing a few words in a Ringo accent, making all of us laugh.] I have some moments where I slide in sideways and talk about drug taking and then slide out. It's kind of like Yellow Submarine. It's a caricature of a Beatle. I was doing more a Yellow Submarine than a Ringo Starr. But my only problem is that I love Ringo Starr so much. He is my favorite drummer of all time and I'm a little nervous that he'll be offended by it because it's definitely a broad depiction of him. It would bum me out if he saw it and was upset.

Guillén: I doubt he would be offended by that.

Anderson: Probably not. I mean, he's Ringo. Does Ringo get offended? I don't know. I doubt it.

Guillén: Ensemble-wise, though I haven't seen your other films, I've read enough about them to know you use the same ensemble of actors. For future projects, is this how you work? When you get an idea, you call up everybody you've worked with and say, "I think I have a new one for us?"

Anderson: Often, my first instinct is to go to the people who I've liked working with who are my friends. I like working with my friends. I like the beginning of the movie to be a reunion. I feel like that can find its way onto the screen. That's usually my first instinct.

Coppola: Anjelica tells an amusing story where she'll get a figurine of a nun in the mail and knows that something's bubbling.

Schwartzman: That's true?

Anderson: Uh, yeah.

Guillén: You sent her a nun?

Anderson: I sent her a nun, yes. And then I think I sent her another nun, having forgotten the first nun I sent her.

Schwartzman: A nun-a-nun?! [Laughs.]

Guillén: Did you send it anunymously? [Laughs.]

Coppola: Nunsense!

Schwartzman: Let's have nun of that. [We all groan collectively.]

Anderson: Oh boy.

Guillén: So when Anjelica got this nun, did she know you wanted to cast her as a nun or is this some kind of code for you're wanting to cast her in a movie?

Anderson: As a nun.

Guillén: So people know you're suggesting something?

Anderson: Yeah, yeah, she started to think something's up.

Guillén: Well after two nuns in the mail, wouldn't you? Anjelica was remarkable in The Darjeeling Limited. She has a way of taking you limpidly into the depths beneath a comic veneer. Her eyes are so wet. They register so much life experience.

Anderson: Yes, yes, yes.

Guillén: So to wrap up here, I'll give you one more chance to refute your detractors. Another criticism levied against this film—if not all your films—that came up frequently while I was researching reviews was the heedless privilege of your characters and the obvious wealth that they have to be traveling around India, throwing away luggage, and what have you. Clearly, you have an artistic sensibility that is unique and creative and which leaps over the hurdle of your films having to be necessarily politicized.

Anderson: I like the idea of that. What I would say is definitely these characters … my theory is Owen's character has money. He's got a business. We don't know what he does; but, he's got this assistant for Francis Whitman Industries. I think he's got some business and he's made some money from his business; but, I don't know that he's that focused on it right now. Adrien's character, I don't know. We have a theory that we won't share what they do. We have information that we wrote that's not in the movie because we decided we shouldn't put it in there. But he probably doesn't have so much money. Jason's character probably got an advance that he's burning through rapidly. He's probably blown most of it. In the short you'll see how he's spent all his money. The father was probably reasonably well-to-do; but, there's a degree to which some aspects of it—like people might say the way they're dressed or something—well, I don't think that's the way rich people particularly dress. They're modeled on something else.

Guillén: Well Adrien didn't even have pants half the time. He was running around in boxers. They couldn't really do that in India, could they? Could he run around in boxers like that?

Anderson: Yeah.

Guillén: Really?!

Anderson: A woman couldn't. A woman might be ill-advised to do so. But a man can do anything.

Schwartzman: That's exaggerated.

Anderson: You want to say anything on that? You had a couple of things on that. Your mother has some thoughts on it.

Schwartzman: My mom said something that's interesting….

Anderson: Because she was responding to the same thing.

Schwartzman: She said she thought it was really funny when people go like, "and they walked around in their suits with this $6,000 belt and this $3,000 loafer" and she said something that I think is really interesting. She said, "They just say it's that much money; but, these guys exaggerate and they're crazy and just because they say it's a $3,000 shoe doesn't mean it's necessarily a $3,000 shoe."

Coppola: My take on it is that they're heavily in debt.

Anderson: Yeah, but you've got to be rich to be in debt that much!!

Cross-published on Twitch.

LIONS FOR LAMBS—A Question for Robert Redford

I'm heartened to know that Robert Redford is as disgruntled with press junkets as I am. That's as much of an indirect confirmation as I need. Rather than subject his new film Lions For Lambs to the tailored and predictable questions that would inevitably haunt the hotel suites that usually host such press junkets, Redford has opted to screen the film for university audiences and to engage their questions. He genuinely wants to know if his critique of student apathy is accurate or not. Thus, he accompanied the film to a screening at the Shattuck Theatre in Berkeley, California—once the hotbed of the activist Youth Movement in the '60s—to explore if young people still have some bite left.

Lions For Lambs braids three accomplished performances by Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, with fine supporting turns by Andrew Garfield and Michael Peña, who accompanied Redford to last night's stage. Redford plays an idealistic political science professor; Streep a compromised journalist; and Cruise a senator and presidential hopeful whose eyes gleam with the dream of military victory. Sound familiar? It should. But where Redford ratchets up the familiarity is in how he articulates the ideas that inform the film's action and his stern caution that "if you don't stand for something, you might fall for anything."

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Michael Guillén: Robert, Lions for Lambs is very much a movie constructed from clearly articulated ideas that seek engagement with the film's audience. Often with films, light and focus is placed on answers; but, here, questions take center stage. It's well-documented that the Iraq War—in contrast to wars before it—has seen an unprecedented preponderance of coverage, first through (as the film suggests) how the media sold the war to the American public, then through a rush of documentaries from the field, and now with an increasing appearance of fictionalized features. Just as too much information can distract from grasping the issues at hand, I fear entertainment can become commensurate noise, further distracting audiences from the very topics the films seek to address. My question to you is: What was it in this script that you felt served the topic and would leap over the hazard of entertainment as noise?

Robert Redford: I never wanted to make a film about the Iraq War because I felt even a year ago that that was going to be treated heavily, either in documentaries or films. I just knew there was going to be a lot of films about the Iraq War. I was not interested in making a film about the Iraq War. What captivated my interest in this was that it was a tryptich of three stories that would try to find some way to connect and would connect on a much deeper level than you might think. That's not easy to pull off; but, it was challenging and interesting to me and I thought, well, if I was going to want to make a film about where we are today—I mean, there are other films I made in the past that were about where we were at various times—it would be … since globalization has occurred and borders have dissolved and lines have dissolved, things are overlapping into each other, the idea that education and politics and the media are overlapping each other with versatile stories, with the catalyst being the soldiers Michael Peña and Derek Luke play in a dire situation that is a result of decisions made by higher-ups who are not qualified and are interested in winning only. To me, that covers a broader territory. That's what got my interest. It was not about the war. It wasn't even about the issues. It was about those three categories being caught up in this situation and about everybody's self-interest. Because it is a very self-interested piece; everybody has their self-interest. I think we all do because we're trying to survive. That's what interested me.

Cross-published on Twitch.