The Rumpus.net » Anisse Gross

Reelings #5: TO THE WONDER

Anisse Gross — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:36:05 +0000

A few weeks ago, I was lying on a king-sized bed in a motel room off the highway in Denton, Texas. The Quality Inn. I was on the way to a wedding of two of my close friends. In the bathroom of my motel room was a cockroach whose head had been removed, its body left intact. I took a picture of myself to send to my boyfriend. Lying on the bed, I could hear bikers holding a party in the rooms across the hall. A guy on a moped delivered the bikers a few pizzas. These were less than small moments that would disappear forever, each holding its stake in the grotesque and the sublime.

I thought about weddings. What does it mean to wed yourself to someone or something? I thought about meeting someone and never wanting to leave them until you die. To feel so compelled that you want to weld yourself to them. I’ve always conflated the words wed and weld, but really what’s the difference? Whether it be a book or a person or a place or a thing, what is that quality that makes us abandon the rest of the options and choose this thing to be our resting place, the thing that owns a piece of our hearts?

Weeks later, after my friends had exchanged rings, and other smaller insects or a hotel maid had removed the roach, and the bikers had drifted off to another motel party, and the pizza delivery guy was counting and sorting his ones, I was in the dark watching Terrence Malick’s new film To The Wonder, thinking it was a thing I could wed myself to. It was a matinee in San Francisco, and I was one of only three people in the theater. I chose a seat far away from them, because I knew this was Malick, and Malick makes me cry.

The film opens with camcorder footage of two people’s love, and a woman’s voice begins narrating. “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night. A spark. You got me out of the darkness. You gathered me up from earth. You’ve brought me back to life.” The part-Biblical, part-half-as-good-Rumi narration continues, and its elevated spiritual reach combines with Malick’s hallmark swaying camera. That camera, commanded by the great Emmanuel Lubezki, creates a dull seasickness in some, and a swelling of emotion in others (me).

The story of To The Wonder is fairly bare-bones. With almost no dialogue, it’s a love story about a couple played by the painfully beautiful Olga Kurylenko and the painfully stoic Ben Affleck. She’s a single mother living in Paris with her daughter, and they move to America (Oklahoma) to be with Affleck. The stark contrast between the European scenes and the American ones pits the Old World against the New World as Malick has done in his other films.

The couple fall in and out of love over and over, like the rest of us. Affleck’s character is noncommittal, while Kurylenko twirls through the film, searching for her freedom. The real meat of the story is in the surprising character of Javier Bardem as a lost and conflicted priest in the Oklahoma town.

Profoundly joyless and searching, he wonders where God has gone. “Everywhere you are present. Still I can’t see you…I have no experience of you.” Bardem’s character continues seeking God, finally finding some solace and meaning in treating the downtrodden. But still he searches, much like Malick himself.

These characters aren’t characters; they’re meant to be archetypes. Stripped of almost all their dialogue, and left only to wander and wonder, they become stand-ins for us. There’s not much more to say about what “happens” in the film, because it’s about the spaces in between, about the rapturous filming of light and the moments we can’t capture through speech and action.

Between Malick’s last film (Tree of Life) and To The Wonder, one has to note the heavy-handed spiritual direction of his films. He’s ramping up his production, from one every twenty years, to one every two, and he’s getting older. By this point, Malick’s style of folding in multiple dancing-in-the-grain shots with sparkling light of the magic hour has become a joke among many critics and filmgoers. People poked fun when he rolled out the dinosaurs in Tree of Life. But what were they really laughing at?

I suppose they’re laughing at the purported cheesiness of his expression. Take the following bit of narration from To The Wonder: “What is this love that loves us? That comes from nowhere. From all around. The sky. You, cloud. You love me too.”

For some, it’s laughable; for others, it’s moving. It takes a certain kind of bravery to be so sincere as to verge on—then fall headfirst into—cheesiness, something critics never dare to do. From the comfortable point of watching art, it is easy to laugh, but who among us has not been moved by the ineffable? Has not seen a cloud and exchanged love with it?

In A. O. Scott’s review (which I enjoyed), he mocks Kurylenko’s incessant twirling: “…the twirling ladies look more commercial than cosmic, as if plucked from advertisements for perfume, high-thread-count sheets or other luxury goods.” He’s right. These supermodelesque actors do verge on the cliches of advertising. But he’s also wrong, because advertising imagery panders to and reflects our highest ideals: that elusive, spiritual, field-twirling joy. Malick’s women are not pandering to those ideals, but rather embodying them, twirling to a different tune, a music brought in on the wind by the gods. Who would mock a whirling dervish? Ultimately, Scott finds To The Wonder a “noble and sincere” effort but also a failure of sorts, writing, “…the fine intentions of To the Wonder pave a road to puzzlement, not awe.” But what is the difference between the two besides the semantic? Is not awe a state of bafflement?

Both atheists and believers alike acknowledge the coexistence of faith and doubt. Both groups understand that grace and magic flicker in and out. How do those of faith reconcile believing in a God who seemingly comes and goes? To whom do nonbelievers ascribe this magic all around, tucked into unexpected corners of life?

Malick seems to be interested in what is outside and underneath and around the framework of our lives. He’s not interested in the stories we tell as much as the moments that cause us to throw our hands up into the air. What large thing is hiding inside the tiny narrative of “born, fall in love, die”? All around us, the world is permeated with possibility and profound gestures of grace and surprise. How do we integrate that magnitude into the tiny story of our lives?

Is it even possible to make a film or novel of artwork that captures all of life? Ask almost any artist, and they’ll tell you they never told the story they wanted to tell. Do we ever fully tell our story, or are we always reaching? In Tree of Life, Malick was trying to do it all, and the failures and successes of that film reveal one thing: his admirable reach. Malick has been trying to tell this story his whole life, and he seems to be getting closer and closer.

I almost never read reviews before I write them, but I’ve heard that almost everyone panned To The Wonder, both critics and filmgoers alike, which made me feel crestfallen and alone. What was I seeing that they were not? Then I remembered that beauty strikes us in different ways at different times. Certain films I loathe I often rewatch in moments when my heart’s a bit more open, and I see them radically differently. Perhaps one has to be prone to a state of wonder when watching Malick’s films.

In the end, it’s the ineffable that seems to move us so. Maybe we’re so intrigued by death because we don’t know what it is. Why is it that we can fall in and out of love and back in again? We have moments of inexplicable synchronicity. Mystery. Miracles abound. And we can never understand them. We are rendered wondrous.

To the Wonder is an ode to that wonder. It’s a film for people who will never tire of watching blades of grass wave against the sun. It’s for those of us who doubt and still strive to have faith in something. It’s for those of us who might still believe in a truth. It’s for those of us who lie in beds in motel rooms on the sides of highways, wondering what it means to want to wed yourself, to weld yourself to something beautiful, forever.

Reelings #4: SPRING BREAKERS

Anisse Gross — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:01:20 +0000

I grew up in Hawaii, so I have no concept of going away on “spring break”, but Harmony Korine has clearly schooled me in what I seemed to not have missed in his raunchy, pulpy, neon-fueled reflection of young America, Spring Breakers.

The opening montage of this romp is filled with budding tatas, American-colored popsicles-as-dicks, and girls who don’t look old enough to drive doing bong rips. But what looks right out of MTV’s Spring Break quickly devolves into a nightmarish echo of capitalist culture.

It’s no surprise, and quite a delightful choice, that Disney’s darlings are culled to play demon teenage girls who cruise through the film in bikinis and ski masks, holding up people at first with squirt guns and moving quickly along to blasting people to death Natural Born Killers style. While the obvious subversion of casting Disney stars as soulless gun-toters could have fallen flat, it was repeatedly met with delight.

The trailer for the film prepared me for what I anticipated to be a whole truckload of misogyny. It’s clear that only in a male fantasy would college girls spend their time in class drawing hearts that say ‘I love penis’ inside of them, drink out of squirt guns, and do handstands in their underwear. But suprisingly, just when the audience is positioned in an exploitative stance as we watch the four teenage girls in bikinis shotgunning weed and stroking each other’s hair in a faux-lesbionic fashion, Korine turns the trope on his head, making the four youngsters base and nihilistic. These aren’t girls gone wild, they’re girls gone wrong. They seem to care about nothing (save for Selena Gomez who turns in the only emotional performance of the film as a born-again Christian roped in with the wrong crowd), and proceed to blindly rob, steal and kill anything in sight.

After holding up a chicken shack, wearing short shorts and powder blue hoodies, they have enough money to go to Florida for spring break, where they meet a gangster rapper named Alien, played with panache and eerie conviction by James Franco. Franco sips through his silver grill, and his corn rows shake around like a wild lawn sprinkler as he ushers the girls into the world of St. Petersburg, Florida.

He takes the girls round in his Camaro (license plate BALLR), and introduces them to his life of hustling, though to his surprise they seem to need no introduction. In a gripping scene two of the girls turn the gun on him, and make him fellate his own hardware. There’s also a very Korine-esque scene where Franco’s character Alien plays Britney Spears’ “Everytime” on a white grand piano situated on the deck of his pool, while the girls stand around holding machine guns, wearing pink ski masks and sweat pants that say DTF (down to fuck), even though the girls in this film have very little fucking on their minds. And that brings us a central problem with Spring Breakers: the protagonists of the film seem to have no real desire. Can you have characters without desire? The lineage of art seems to say no, though Korine seems to be asserting that desirelessness is our cultural inheritance.

When Alien says, “Big booties and money is what life’s all about”, for a second I had to reconsider what life is all about. Had I gotten it wrong this whole time? Was my belief that life is about truth and beauty just a dreamer’s fantasy? Have I become un-American?

If nothing else, Spring Breakers seems to be just another way of saying what we’ve known for a long time: consumerism is eating us alive. In fact, our real desires have been wholly replaced by manufactured ones. The girls in the film, when presented with buckets of cash, reply, “Seeing all this money makes my tits look bigger.” And the insidiousness of subliminal advertising plays a role via Alien’s repetition of the phrase “spring break” which he whispers over and over throughout the film, even when he’s not on screen, like a narrative mantra lulling us into a capitalist-induced coma.

It’s this base need to be a cog in the money-making machine that is the nexus of Spring Breakers message, if there is one. The girls tell each other affirmations in the form of, “just pretend like you’re in a video game” and “act like you’re in a movie or something” – could not those phrases be instructive for anyone dealing with modern life?

When one of the girls hesitates, the others get firm and say, “you have to be hard”. Welcome to the new economy ladies! There seems to be no time to develop ethics when struggling to get by financially. How do you get to Florida for spring break and eventually pay for your student loans? By dealing drugs and robbing people (duh!). It’s not a sad statement of where we’re at; it’s a damning one.

And aside from all that, the there’s the issue of race. The one time we see the girls in school, the topic at hand is the civil rights movement, but instead of paying attention to Emmett Till on the screen, they’re busy doodling testicles in their notebooks. While many students went south in support of equal rights for African Americans during the civil rights movement, the young stars of Spring Breakers return South to rob and then eventually kill a party full of black men. That’s quite a portrait of how little we’ve come, if we’ve come anywhere at all.

The film’s characters of color only exist on screen to remind us just how much white culture has stolen from them. The character of Alien, faux-rapper, middling gangster, is meant to be an apex of appropriation. The fact that Franco’s character learns everything he knows from fellow Black ganster Archie (played by Gucci Mane), and then has him killed is an obvious metaphor for white suburban consumption of hip hop culture. Additionally, to have two white girls in bikinis blow up an entire party of Archie’s crew, without suffering one scratch, seems gratuitous and sick, though that seems to be the film’s point. While Korine doesn’t seem to have the intellectual chops to fully deal with the issue of race, his film at least nods to the fact that he’s aware. Every artist has their limitations and Spring Breakers is more reflection of racial tension than analysis.

In the end Spring Breakers is much like having sex with a praying mantis—an experience that seduces at first then spits you out headless, and thus brainless. Which is not to say that the film is dumb, but rather that it’s mind-numbing. It’s a testament to the fact that we’re easily seduced by bright lights and hypnotic base lines. The film’s success can largely be attributed to the flashy neon cinematography courtesy of Benoît Debie and the trance-like editing of Douglas Crise. Throughout the film I was repeatedly reminded of the pulp-nod of Drive, so it came as no surprise to learn that the video-pumped soundtrack was created by Cliff Martinez (who scored Drive) and Skrillex.

Korine is nearing 40, (how long can you be referred to as an enfant terrible?) and I suspect Spring Breakers is more likely to appeal to aging film critics, middle-aged men, and women who never got a spring break (see:me) than the completely non-existent demographic of 18-year-old nihilist girls in neon bikinis. If that demographic actually existed, we’d all be doomed. Let’s be grateful, this once, for the pulp and fantasy, but not forget that the reflection comes right from the other end of the looking glass.

The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Joshua Mohr

Anisse Gross — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 14:00:26 +0000

I’m interviewing Josh Mohr but there’s a problem: the table’s wobbly. I decide to wedge my passport under the clubbed foot of the table, all the countries I’ve visited supporting the weight of our interview. I turn the recorder on and Mohr says, “It’s like we’re hobos huddled around a garbage can, the only source of warmth.” We’re outside a café on 24th street in the Mission District of San Francisco, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of Mohr’s writing. However, his latest book, Fight Song, is set in a completely foreign world to Mohr, the suburbs. Fight Song is a call to arms against complacency, a rally towards reclaiming one’s own individuality. Mohr, now with four books under his belt, seems comfortable in his own skin as an author and a man, and is by all accounts a literary heartthrob. Generous, thoughtful, and underslept (though you could never tell), he sat down to open up about his latest book, and about the writing life. With my passport under our table, and caffeine in our blood, we went places.

***

The Rumpus: So let’s start by talking about how Fight Song came about.

Joshua Mohr: I was thinking a lot about the Coen Brothers and how in their early films, like Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple, they were working with stark macabre territory. My first three books chronicled self-destructive sojourns of addicts and artists in the Mission District. I really wanted to challenge that milieu and to get out of my comfort zone, into a world that I really didn’t know anything about. So I decided that I wanted to write about the suburbs and that I wanted to write comedy. I was tired of flexing the same muscles I used in the first three books and wanted to set myself up to fail to a certain extent, to say, “Am I capable of writing a black comedy?” I think as artists we have to challenge what we think we’re good at if we’re going to keep evolving and progressing, and Fight Song was way out of my comfort zone for sure.

Rumpus: It’s funny you say that, because your writing feels so comfortable and self-assured. Like you’re comfortable with every move at the gym. Was it a challenge? Because I rarely laugh out loud, and I found myself bursting out—I was surprised I found it so actual “ha-ha” funny.

Mohr: The comedy always has to come from the characters themselves. To keep the appalling gym metaphor going is this idea that we are still kind of working the same muscle groups as storytellers, regardless of what the novel’s ecosystem is going to be. But you want to challenge yourself from an aesthetic standpoint, too. I’m going in trying to write a black comedy and if that doesn’t work, then I’m going to let the book evolve into what it wants to be. I’m a huge advocate of letting the characters dictate to the artist what the actual narrative will eventually be about, but with Fight Song, as I got deeper into it, they were bringing the jokes to me. It wasn’t like I was superimposing them onto them—I thought it was going to be that way, but they corroborated and confirmed otherwise.

Rumpus: I believe that a book will push something out if it’s not working. But still, was it hard to be funny?

Mohr: Well even my first three novels can be pretty squalid, but I still think there’s a lot of humor in those narratives. I’m always drawn to the grotesque or the asinine. I had worked a job right out of graduate school in which I was doing some temp work for a video game company south of Market Street (SoMa), and it just seemed like a world that was ripe to have a little bit of fun with. I think the trick with satire is to also find the humanity in it. You don’t just want to poke the animals in their cages, otherwise it devolves into a Stephen Colbert skit where he’s just telling everyone how stupid they are. You also want to find the big beating heart in those characters, and bring them to life at the same time that you’re having fun.

Rumpus: That’s true. The literary critic Northrop Frye once said that with satire, the irony has to be militant. The culture we live in now, we’re in this strange relationship with irony. So in terms of the writing into of irony, how do you manage it while still being sincere?

Mohr: Well the irony can create this awful distance between your audience and your subject matter. I like the adjective “militant”; that really works for me. You have to think about it in terms of, how am I going to bring these people to life cogently? How am I actually going to occupy them as though they’re sincere, sovereign beings? I’m going to have some fun with them along the way, but I’m really going to do the hard work and the diligent and fastidious stuff that can only come with revision of really trying to bring them to life And once they’re animated and walking around onstage, I think the gags will spring organically from them, rather than me working them around like grotesque soft puppets.

And to say one more thing about irony, is to talk about influences in terms of literary irony. I love Donald Barthelme, so when I would start to get stodgy in this story or hedge my bets, or say, “This is too dumb, I can’t push it this far,” I’d read some Barthelme stuff and he’d give me permission to be as stupid as I wanted to be. And when I use an adjective like “stupid,” it sounds like I’m not taking this seriously, but what I’m really saying is that if there’s going to be tons of low-hanging fruit strewn throughout the narrative, how do you know which low-hanging fruit is going to work and which are going to lie flaccid among the page?

Rumpus: It’s funny you should mention low-hanging fruit, because the etymology of satire comes from Latin for “a mixed dish of various kinds of fruit,” and your book is like an insane black rainbow of fruit. How do you stop a book like Fight Song from becoming a circus? How do you keep the boundaries of its ridiculousness within reign?

Mohr: During the first couple drafts, I was not trying to delineate between good acid trip and bad acid trip. I was just letting it be this sprawling hallucinogenic romp, and at one point there was a goat talking to the various characters, and that would fall under the rubric of bad acid trip. So in revision, I had to cut that stuff. If you’re going to give yourself creative license to follow every whim of you imagination during the rough nascent draft, then it just puts more emphasis on you as a storyteller to really be savage how you’re attacking it in the revision process, and Fight Song took me forever to revise just because of the good/bad acid stuff. When I sent the book to my agent, the first thing he said, was, “So…the goat…” And there was this terrible ellipsis after. At a certain point as an artist, we need other readers. I had to invite other people’s eyes that I really trust to get me the rest of the way there.

Rumpus: Do you wait until you’re done before you let anyone read?

Mohr: I wait until I’m done with quotation marks, and then I will send it to five or six trusted readers that I’ve had since graduate school, and they’ll tell me I’m nowhere near done, and then I’ll take it to the next iteration of “done,” then send it to my agent. My agent is one of those people who actually gives really thoughtful criticism. A lot of people don’t have that relationship with their agent, so I feel lucky. My wife is a novelist too, and she—and I mean this in the most loving way possible—is a really malicious reader. When I think this chapter is so great, I’ll give it to her and she’ll say, “This fucking sucks.”

Rumpus: At least you know you can trust her.

Mohr: Absolutely. It leads to lots of uncomfortable frittatas in the morning, but I think we’re working through that. Our marriage is stronger than ever.

Rumpus: We should talk about this line in the book, where Bob Coffen’s wife says to him, “‘Your gender is ridiculous.’” I don’t want to call this a “male book,” like “dude lit”; it’s poised to be a dude book, but it escapes that. What I mean to say is that this book has all the hallmarks of male torment, the particular torment of being a man.

Mohr: Also the emasculation of realizing that you’re probably never going to be the person that you were emulating when you were a teenager. You’re doughy, bald, and your cock is half-hard.

Rumpus: Did you think you were writing a book about what it means to not be the man you set out to be?

Mohr: I’m going to answer that from two different standpoints. Selfishly, writers are always writing about their own lives. I had written my first three books on drugs. This was going to be my first book that was going to be soup-to-nuts that I was sober for. The metaphor I came up with was Bob Coffen becoming sort of obsolete, because technology had usurped what he had been very good at. There was a very strong parallel for me being a sober artist. Am I obsolete if I don’t have opiates or whiskey? I didn’t want to hit that nail on the head, because we’ve heard that story a thousand times, where to varying degrees of success, people are just talking about getting sober. I wanted to find a way to tell that story, but skin it in an entirely different way.

The second way to answer that question is that the themes thrumming throughout most of the book are existential questions that transcend gender to a certain extent. It was through the revision process that the wife’s conflict becomes almost more important as we get later in the story. In the first few drafts of the book, the wife was just this mannequin that I was shoving around, and once I really started to zero in on the fact that she has her own vital trajectory, that was when the book really started to have the sizzle.

Rumpus: The other great thing you do is take clichés of suburban life and use them literally. For example, you take the term “treading water” and cast the wife literally as a champion water treader. When that happened in the book, I was like, This is ridiculous. I have to put this book down.

Mohr: You didn’t trust me at that point did you?

Rumpus: No, I didn’t. At first I couldn’t believe the audacity of it, and then it turned out to be the most elegantly-rendered metaphor, and the most beautiful, salient point of the book. Was it…was it…

Mohr: Was it an accident? Is that what you’re asking?

Rumpus: I just think turning tropes literal seems risky and insane.

Mohr: That’s been a hallmark of most of my books. In my first novel, Some Things That Meant The World To Me, I wanted to write about a broken home, but I didn’t know how to do that in a way that hadn’t been trampled. So I decided that I was going to literally break the house, and the rooms are drifting apart from another like separating continents. So with Fight Song, I had that as a precedent that I could get away with it, so it gave me more fortitude and brazenness to see how far I could push this water-treading metaphor. From the perspective of irony, I’m not making fun of that. If I did my job right as a novelist, I’m occupying Jane’s thought process, and this is her big thing. She’s honestly trying to break the world record for treading water, which is about seventy-five hours. So we see her training along the way and we know how much it means to her, and hopefully it starts to mean something to us as well.

Rumpus: I was pleasantly surprised. Because at first?

Mohr: You asked earlier, “How do you give yourself permission to be inane?” At a first glance, there’s no reason that the treading water bit should work any better or worse than that stupid talking goat. But you have to just get out of your imagination and get some evidence on the page. A lot of apprentice writers go wrong when they start editing in their heads. And they don’t give their imagination the jurisdiction to try it out.

Rumpus: It’s so hard to abandon the critical mind when creating.

Mohr: In Damascus, basically through draft twelve, there was a talking genie living in a whiskey bottle that Shambles had. Every chapter of Shambles, she’s rubbing her bottle and the genie was coming out. I mean, you should be laughing because that’s ridiculous. But I gave that idea every chance to succeed, so that when I finally excised it, I knew without any doubt that it sucked. Anybody out there who is reading this: never have a genie in a whiskey bottle in your book, because that is a terrible idea.

Rumpus: Did you have any models for Bob’s character? Characters like Frank Bascombe from Richard Ford’s Sportswriter, or any other suburban men?

Mohr: I think that research can be an incredibly helpful enterprise, and it can also be an incarcerating force. In terms of Bob Coffen, I was basing it on somebody I met at this video game company that I worked at. He lived in Danville, had a polo shirt tucked into his jeans, Jerry Seinfeld white sneakers, and his last name was actually Coffin, like the thing you die in. So I was trying to ingest this on the literal and metaphorical level, and it just seemed like something I had to write about. I took some weird road trips and took pictures. I went to Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Corte Madera. If I was going to build my perfect suburb, which details was I going to yank from real ones to build a Frankenstein monster of suburbs?

Rumpus: In terms of satire, there’s two ways of going about it. There’s the lighthearted, slightly pointed, and the ruthless, almost unfunny kind. Did you see your book as a critique of suburbia?

Mohr: I was not interested in writing a book that was looking down its nose at its characters. I was interested in it from the standpoint of it being a cautionary tale. Like a modernized fable. One of the influences I had was, I was wondering if I could tell the Wizard of Oz in a 21st century American suburb? Dorothy is Bob Coffen, and hopefully I did it in such a loose way that no one will identify it, but it’s nice to have those subtleties running through the narrative.

Rumpus: Do you use elements from your real life in your work?

Mohr: I find it almost impossible to sequester my work from what I’m experiencing on a daily basis. For example, when I was putting Termite Parade together, they were tearing up Valencia Street as they are wont to do every three hours, and there were all these crazy jackhammers going on, and suddenly that worked its way into the narrative, and it actually became this extended metaphor that ran throughout the bulk of the book and was able to have a nice, emotional core when the book was finished.

Rumpus: Now that you’ve written four books, do you feel more comfortable, or do you feel equally as lost and daunted by the prospect of writing?

Mohr: I love feeling lost. The best frame of reference we can maintain as an author is trying to be an apprentice forever. I’m not trying to get good at telling a story, because that implies that I’m trying to master something. What I want to do is present these weird systems of challenges to myself where I’m constantly stringing the high wire up higher. I couldn’t have written Damascus first, because it was a harder book to execute than my first two. Fight Song strung the high wire a little bit higher in terms of writing something I didn’t feel qualified to write about. Hopefully what I’m doing now is stringing the high wire at a more scary altitude, and ideally you continue that over your career.

Rumpus: Naiveté opens you to limitless ideas, like a talking goat for example.

Mohr: I know what I’m trying to do more, and that allows me to be more relaxed on the page. I can have more fun in the process, because I kind of know what I’m trying to do. For example, when I was putting Fight Song together, I was having trouble coming up with the ending. I was asked to babysit some friends’ kids, and I was reading a story and the story was “Remember the Night Rainbow,” and the end had an illustration of a pitch dark sky with a vibrant rainbow, and I thought to myself, I’m totally going to steal that. And I wanted to reappropriate that from a literary standpoint and hopefully make it mean something else. I don’t know if I would have given myself permission to do that when I was writing my first book. I was all like following my own heart then, blah blah blah. It was great to say, I love this image and I’m going to steal it.

Rumpus: So, endings. For me, I can’t start unless I know where it ends. Do you ever know where the book is going to end?

Mohr: Oh, I don’t write that way. I know the first image. I have to know the first chapter, and I never want to know anything else, because I love the trial-and-error process along the way. Usually it’s about halfway through a rough draft that I start to see some climactic action. I certainly don’t ever know what the closing image is going to be until I get to the climax. I always operate under the assumption that everything in a rough draft is placeholder anyway.

Rumpus: At the end of the book there’s this line, “There’s no such thing as the end of the rainbow.” How do you end a book and acknowledge that there is no real end of the rainbow, that a character’s journey never really ends, but that the end is just the resting place of the book?

Mohr: The resting place is a great way to think about it. There has to be a suggestion of their life to come, but there also has to be this lovely taste in the reader’s mouth. The last page of the book is the longest white space in the world, so you want to end with an image that is going to speak to them and is also going to leave room for them to ponder it after-the-fact. Lars von Trier says that at the ends of his films, he tries to leave open the avenues of interpretation. I love the idea of not steering your reader too much. The reader has to be able to crystallize her own interpretation of the proceedings.

Rumpus: Do you see yourself continuing in this vein? What are you working on right now?

Mohr: What I’m working on now is definitely not a satire. I want to write something that can do a similar thing to San Francisco that Let The Great World Spin did for Manhattan. I’ve concocted this framing device that will ricochet through a bunch of characters, and I want to try to tell the social history of San Francisco from the ’30s through, at least, the AIDS crisis. It’s going to take me a long time. This is the first book I’ve ever done research for. My first four books have all been about my narcissism, and it’s been fun to get out of my own head and go to the archives and research.

Rumpus: Research is such a thing that fiction writers often don’t utilize. You hardly hear fiction writers really talking about research.

Mohr: Well it’s a very unsexy thing to talk about.

Rumpus: Really? I think it’s so sexy.

Mohr: That’s because we’re nerds. I think the cool thing about getting out of your own zeitgeist is it really challenges what you think you know that is true about humanity. Can you put what you think about the world in a time machine and have it stand up in the 1930s with any verity?

Rumpus: Ben Marcus has that great quote along the lines that the world is just all the things you don’t know about, things you haven’t thought yet.

Mohr: Marcus is a great example of a person who is giving himself the license to be that apprentice forever. He’s always challenging what he thinks he knows, and then defying himself to prove himself wrong. Vanessa Veselka is also a great writer. She came to one of my classes and what she said to the students is, “How willing are you to fail? Are you really willing to actually set yourself up to have this not work?”

Rumpus: We are built culturally to succeed. Failure is not embraced, so it takes a whole rewiring towards failure as a necessary thing.

Mohr: I was very lucky in that I didn’t get any bad reviews for my first two books and Damascus was really well-received everywhere, except for The Washington Post. It was the first time that I had ever really gotten my ass handed to me in a public forum. We say to ourselves, Oh I’m so secure in myself as an artist, that shit won’t bother me at all. I’m made of Teflon. But it really hurt my feelings. I spent two or three days doing my diva thing around the apartment, lurching around sullenly. Then you have to get back to work. The headline of the review was, “Mohr is drunk on clichés,” and that was the nicest thing she said. It was not short. It was an eight-hundred-word skull-fucking. It was so mean and terrible.

Rumpus: What do you think about writers who don’t read reviews? I always think they’re lying, trying to sound cool. How could anyone resist?

Mohr: I guess it depends on how you’re wired. I’m always pro-information. I want to see what people are identifying as the strengths and weaknesses of a book I put together. I think about my career as being a continuum. It’s not just one book, it’s going towards this greater good of trying to learn as much about storytelling as I possibly can.

Rumpus: Do you ever want to write short stories?

Mohr: I can’t! I try all the time. I want to, but I can’t. All my ideas get pulled into the black hole.

Rumpus: Yeah, me too. My ideas just always want more room.

Mohr: It’s very rare that a writer can do both well. I just get so interested in context and the legacies of poor decision-making. A short story might render the moment you make that poor decision, but my mind always wants to know what happens down the road, and suddenly my short story is eighty-five pages long, and I’m like, Fuck it, I might as well seal the deal.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about teaching. Do you ever stand up there and feel like it’s dangerous? Are you terrified of giving people ideas of “how it’s done”?

Mohr: I always tell my students that if any instructor ever stands up in front of you and tells you that he or she knows the way to do it, run the other direction. Because they’re trying to sell you something; I’m not trying to sell them anything. I tell them about my experience on the page, and ask them about their experiences on the page. We can teach the primary colors in grad school—plot, point of view, etc.—but at the end of the day, you can’t teach imagination. Either they have a great conceit for a book or they don’t.

Rumpus: Even though I don’t think school is necessary to write, I think it was essential for me and has been really helpful. I don’t think I’d be the writer I am today without that education.

Mohr: It definitely compresses how long it takes you to get your head around those primary issues. Anything you learn in grad school in three years, you could learn on your own, but I think it would take you twelve years. You just have to write a lot and read a lot, and not just things you like. You need to read things you don’t like and pull them apart.

Rumpus: Do you think you could ever live a life just writing and not doing something else, like teaching?

Mohr: No. I need ways to get out of the house. If I sit around the house too much all of a sudden, I start to think my books are really important. I need to get out of the house and be a generous teacher, hear about what other people are struggling with on the page and try to help them rather than sitting at home Googling myself, which is a terrible thing to say.

Rumpus: Teaching really clarifies what you don’t know. It’s a learning profession.

Mohr: You also have to put together these verbose documents on things like characterization and setting, and it makes you constantly reevaluate what you think you know goes into telling a compelling story. Whenever I’ll say something in front of the class, I leave asking myself, Do I really believe that? It keeps you honest and it keeps you sharp. I think the biggest mistake you can make as a teacher is teaching the same stories over and over again, or fall into a rut and become a regurgitating robot. Your students can always sense if you’re going through the motions.

Rumpus: I think there’s a misconception that writers have that you’re supposed to be in control. Do you find that you ever solve your problems unconsciously in your sleep?

Mohr: I think of writing as on the page and off the page. I do most of my problem-solving in the shower, on a walk, working out, something where I’m not thinking. And cooking, I love to cook. Though I’m never usually trying to solve the problems for my characters. I’m usually trying to complicate them. Charles Baxter said that we want to write about people we like, then visit their lives with trouble. I think that axiom works well for putting long-form fiction together.

Rumpus: It’s amazing how the mind works, like when you drive a long distance and all you remember is getting in the car, and then arriving, and nothing in between.

Mohr: I have insomnia, too, and I typically write between midnight and five.

Rumpus: That’s dangerous.

Mohr: I’m okay. Insomnia gets a bad rap. If I had a day job it would be a big deal, but I don’t do anything, so it’s fine. The cool thing about insomnia is you get into a fugue state like this driving thing you’re talking about. I’ll look at the clock and it’s two in the morning, then I’ll look at the clock and it’s six in the morning. And I’ll have to reread everything and say, This scene works, this scene doesn’t work, but I have no recollection of putting it together.

Rumpus: That’s an extraordinary fertile place.

Mohr: I don’t know if there’s any proof to this or not, but I feel like when you’re in that zone, the gap between your subconscious and conscious mind dwindles.

Rumpus: So much of the time we divide that part.

Mohr: The nice thing about insomnia, too, is there’s no e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and I write with all the lights in my apartment off, so the only illumination in my entire world is the story. I love to have that. I usually have music on.

Rumpus: With words?

Mohr: Words. Always words. You hear writers complain about that, but at a certain point I’m not hearing it anyway.

Rumpus: Insomnia makes your brain weird, you know that right?

Mohr: I’m aware of the data.

Rumpus: Well it induced a hallucinatory state; that would account for the genie.

Mohr: Let’s blame all my bad ideas on insomnia.

Rumpus: Are there writers you feel like are influential to you?

Mohr: There are people that I go back to for different reasons. A local writer, Susan Steinberg, I go back to when I feel like my sentences are lazy. When I feel like I’m losing my recklessness on the page, I go back to E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, or Jesus’ Son, Cruddy. Amy Hempel’s first book, Reasons to Live, is a collection I go back to a lot, because I admire her ability to be emotionally naked on the page, and I feel that takes an immense amount of personal strength, and I really admire that in her work.

Rumpus: Jesus’ Son is great.

Mohr: Endings are an interesting thing in that book. They’re so unconventional, what you think you know about the ending, Denis Johnson is always like you don’t know anything about the ending. Tree of Smoke would be a great example, too. I’ve read most of him, and that’s my favorite ending of his. Getting there is pretty arduous, but the last thirty pages are profoundly beautiful.

Rumpus: That’s why I read a book always to the end, because you can never understand a book unless you finish it. You don’t know if it’s good halfway through.

Mohr: One of the lazy byproducts of the democratization of the Internet, is that if I want to be mean to myself, I’ll read reviews of my books on Goodreads, and some gas-huffer in Georgia says, “I only read twenty pages and this was the worst book I ever read.” They feel like their opinion is just as valid, but they didn’t even see what I was setting up. Also, it’s important to see why a book doesn’t work. What tactics were they using and how can you avoid those same pitfalls.

Rumpus: I’m excited Fight Song is coming out—are you excited or nervous?

Mohr: The six weeks before pub date are always fascinating because no one has said an ill word about the book yet. It’s just like this perfect being. My therapist says the best way to solve a problem is to get a bigger problem. Because we’re expecting a baby in June, it has given me this certain frame of reference with the book. Normally I’d be really worried about the book, but now I really don’t care that much.

Rumpus: Do you love seeing your books sandwiched between other writers?

Mohr: I’m always stoked when I go into a bookstore and I’m next to Toni Morrison. That’s good company.

DJANGO BLOWOUT

Anisse Gross — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:42:19 +0000

Today we’re running five essays on Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained. The intention of running so many was not to give Django a disproportionate amount of coverage, but to reflect the controversy and conversation the film has sparked: I’ve overheard 80-year-old men in Speedos talking about it at my swim club, and a thread on my own Facebook page got so heated that I almost quit social media entirely. The scope of these essays spans love, hate, and ambivalence, and I hope they give a kaleidoscopic view of a film whose controversy exhibits just how much more thinking and talking and writing needs to be done.

Take #1 -Larry Fahey can’t wait for Quentin Tarantino to grow up.

Take #2 – Melissa Chadburn provides a personal reflection on Django and folds in the views of friend Ty Hardaway, who loved the film.

Take #3 – Nicholas Rombes touches on Sontag, Cornel West, and George Fitzhugh in his multi-lensed review.

Take #4 – Ade Adeniji reviews Django, tying in the 1975 film Mandingo, Malcolm X, Spike Lee and more.

Take #5 – My review of Tarantino’s good intentions, and the responsibility of the artist.

No related posts…

Django Take #5: Paving the Road to Hell

Anisse Gross — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:24:20 +0000

The problem with Tarantino’s Django Unchained is that it’s a very good movie. Wildly entertaining, expertly made, and very fun to watch. I loved almost every second of the watching of it. The man-child can make a movie as seductive and entertaining as the next, is a whip-smart writer of dialogue, and creates some of the most memorable characters on screen. If you’re looking for your classic Tarantino fix, you won’t be disappointed with Django. However, after looking back at his oeuvre to date, it is starting to seem like he has a bunch of seductive, interesting ways to say a whole lot of nothing. So what is it that he’s doing that is captivating everyone, selling out box offices, and making him a name that your Grandma recognizes?

Sure I enjoyed the film, but I like Tarantino the way I like people who are bad for me. They’re seductive in their charms, but hollow when it comes down to the serious things. What about his irresistible aesthetic? Well you can wow me with style, but you can’t win me with it. Am I supposed to believe a person is beautiful because they wear nice clothes? And who is paying for those clothes anyway?

The brief summary of Django Unchained, which if you haven’t seen it you should, (particularly if you want to talk about it…)is this: Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave who is found by a German bounty hunter posing as dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz needs Django’s help in identifying several slave owners and in exchange for his help, Schultz agrees to help Django find and free his wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington) who is living on a slave plantation called Candyland, owned and operated by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Sadly and surprisingly, the plot is watery and straightforward, and instead what comes to light is a host of interesting questions about what the role of an artist is.

The film has created quite the stir, and much of the debate surrounding Django is the question of whether it’s appropriate for a white director to make a film about slavery in the manner Tarantino does. This territory of discussion treads some slippery lines, because it borders on artistic censorship. I’m a firm believer in the fact that no subject matter is taboo when it comes to art. It’s also true that slavery in the antebellum South is not only a story relegated to black history. It is white history as well.

But the most important question one can ask about a film like Django Unchained is this: of all the stories that Tarantino could tell, why does he insist on casually co-opting the story of another? And why does he choose to tell it in this way?

I think the why is pretty clear: Tarantino chose to make Django because slavery in America is a topic that we haven’t thoroughly dealt with, explaining the disproportionate marginalization and discrimination based on race in American culture today. So, I understand his why, but not so much his how. The central problem with the film is the idea that Django is a hero: Django’s quest isn’t really about freedom. Dr. King Schultz, German bounty hunter, seems more intent on freeing the slaves than the slave himself. In fact Django doesn’t seem to empathize with many of the slaves in the film – his goal is to get his wife back, which like a slave, is technically seen (and portrayed in the film) as property. Making a movie about slavery in the American South, where the most captivating person and morally conscious character is a German bounty hunter, is just the tip of the racial dilemma of Django.

You might have seen the film and argue that it’s a role-reversal story of a slave freeing himself and his wife from the grips of slavery in a bloody free-for all. But you might forget that the film’s narrative is largely aided by the agency of a white man who gets Django almost all the way towards his goal, and then lets him have the last shot. Django isn’t responsible for his freedom: white people and money are. And we should note not much has changed. If you think slavery’s legacy is behind us, you might want to take a stroll around the American prison system.

In fact, while most of the conversation around Django has been wondering what black people’s reactions are to it, I’m as equally interested in how white people are responding to the film. I caught myself laughing at a scene where Django blows away so many white people as if to defy plausibility. As a white person, what was I laughing at? Ha ha, my ancestors were such evil people? Were we laughing as a way to absolve our lingering guilt? Are the ketchup-packet deaths of a bunch of white slave owners supposed to make me feel better about the past? For me it was beyond uncomfortable to watch the white characters in the film to be shot in a silly, implausible way, sidled up next to the gruesome drawn-out deaths of the slaves in the film. Why don’t the slave owners in the film get tortured? Why do they get to die so easily?

What Tarantino seems to be doing in many of his films is proving that he’s on the “right” side of history, but that effort seems dubious in Django. All white people would like to think that in the days of slavery they would have been against it, if not in practice, then at least in their hearts. But history proves that some of them, clearly, would not have. And so what of Tarantino? When watching his films it’s hard to tell where he stands, as he seems to be perennially toeing the Mason-Dixon line. Are not the black actors in his films permanently held, both literally and metaphorically, by his purse strings? Are they not essentially in blackface? What white director would consistently force his black actors to degrade the other with the n-word? What white director would name his German hero Dr. King? What white director would allow the only black woman in the film to be essentially a speechless object of beauty?

The most difficult thing about watching Django, is to see the cues lined up like bowling pins that we are supposed to, and do, knock down with laughs, followed by scenes where Django is hung upside down and about to have his balls cut off so he can bleed to death. What is this roller coaster ride supposed to do besides thrilling and nauseating?

As we all know, Tarantino’s hallmark is gratuitous violence. And it’s hard to argue that Django shouldn’t be violent. Any film about the antebellum South, should show violence, for what else was it but that? But the issue is that Tarantino’s version feels too enjoyable. While the audience cheered and laughed when white people were murdered and then dutifully sucked air through their teeth in pain when black men were beaten to death, the problem is that violence isn’t that simple. I could not help as I looked around the packed cinema, wonder – what if instead of two thirteen-year-old white kids next to me, it had been Emmett Till watching? Would he be cheering on Django, or would a look of contortion and confusion cross his face as Django left many slaves behind without a word or nod of comradery?

There’s all types of violence, but to me there’s a marked difference between Uma Thurman stabbing out Daryl Hannah’s eye than watching a slave being ripped apart by dogs. I can say that watching Hitler burn to death trapped in a cinema was a high point of Inglorious Basterds, because it wasn’t meant to be a salve for the Holocaust. Is watching Jamie Foxx blow away every last white person in sight supposed to make us wash our hands of slavery and clap them in cheer?

The major difference between Inglorious Basterds and Django is that the former film intentionally did not aim to be historically accurate. The other, searing difference, is that while the Holocaust seems to be fairly “in the past” (if anything can ever really be in the past), American slavery’s effects have lingered and are ever-present today.

It also did not escape my notice that the only form of revenge available to the “freed” slave Django was violence itself, a narrative that the media at large has been happy to perpetrate. When violence is the only payback for violence, what do we have but another system of endless slavery in place? There’s a line in the movie when Django finds out that Dr. Schultz is a bounty hunter and says, “Kill white folks and they pay you for it? What’s not to like?” It’s a funny line until you unpack its implications. Not only do black people consistently get longer jail sentences than whites for the same crime, and are proportionally more likely to be framed for such crimes. Many people have commented on reveling in watching a black slave shoot a bunch of slaveowners, but the idea that black people just want to kill white people as a form of revenge is a pretty white notion. I’m pretty sure all black people wanted was to have never been enslaved in the first place. I may be white, but I was born in raised in Hawaii, where we had “Kill Haole Day” (Haole is the term for white people) every year. Did I think, crossing the playground with trepidation on that day every school year, that Hawaiian children really wanted to kill me? Of course not – I always knew they just wanted their land and people back.

Yesterday at the coffee shop, an 80-year-old white guy was standing behind me in line and he was shifting around, like you do when you want a refill, and said, quietly behind my ear, “I’d shoot everyone in here if they let me.” The reason Tarantino’s films are so easily digestible for most is the same reason that man felt comfortable uttering such a hostile phrase at an uncaffeinated woman at 7 in the morning. Has violence become so casual that we can’t even consider it seriously anymore as a culture? Or are Tarantino’s films supposed to be a balm to the seriousness, a three-hour reprieve from the realness of it all?

The conflict, for me, comes with how enjoyable his films are – how damn entertaining they can be (Django’s 2.75 flew by). He knows he’s a great stylist with an ability to put his finger right on the pulse of culture, seducing us with story and soundtracks, then forcing us to walk through emotionally booby-trapped terrain. His films are always cool, which is why we keep watching them, but hasn’t anyone figured out that being cool is often the diametric opposite of being sincere?

Growing up I never really understood the saying, “Good intentions pave the road to hell”, but after seeing Django Unchained, I think I finally get it. I truly believe that Tarantino set out to make a film about the horrors of American slavery, and I applaud his efforts for taking this risk. In a scene in which Dr. Schultz is listening to a white woman play Fur Elise on the harp, intercut with flashbacks of a black slave being torn apart to death by dogs, we see, for the first and only time in the film, a white man coming to terms with slavery. This, I think, is what at his heart Tarantino wants to communicate in Django. But he can’t put aside his childish, selfish, unexamined antics and gun-loving, to dig at that heart. Which brings up the endlessly fascinating question – what responsibility does and should (that dreaded should) an artist have?

Tarantino casts himself in the film as a hapless Aussie who meets Django later in the film. But who is Tarantino really? Is he more like Monsieur Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), slave owner, or is he more like Dr. Schultz, a man who truly does not align himself with the nexus of evil that is slavery? I think Tarantino is a little of both. How can he be the filmmaker he is without fetishizing, loving, and inappropriately appropriating black culture all at the same time? In effect, he’s like our nation’s cultural dealings with our racial past and present boiled down into one filmmaker.

The best thing I can say about Django Unchained is that it’s brought an onslaught of conversation. I belong to a swimming and boating club, and eavesdropping on a group of 80-year-old men in speedos talking about Tarantino and debating Django in the sauna, reveals if not his significance, then at least his cultural hold. This film has people investigating who can make art about what, and how far we have not come in terms of dealing with our country’s past. The film has people talking about race. For that I give Tarantino credit – to tackle something very complicated and fraught in his own way.

But to me he seems to be an artist who doesn’t yet fully understand his motivations and their ensuing ramifications in the culture at large. Which begs the question, does an artist have to know their motivations, or understand them? In the end, the fact that the film is so good and so bad reveals that Tarantino did what most artists never do – he took a big risk.

But at the end of the day, there’s still something unsettling about a film that’s so slick about slavery. Perhaps what made Inglorious Basterds easier to swallow was the fact that the story of the Holocaust has been told in a variety of elegant and painstaking films and books. Maybe the truth is that we haven’t enough stories and examinations of America’s dark past (and present), and to have Tarantino’s stand out and rake it in at the box office feels like we’re being cheated at getting real. Earlier, in this very review, I said that Tarantino has a bunch of interesting ways to say a whole lot of nothing. But maybe I missed the point. Perhaps he is setting us up to do the talking.Maybe the fault of Django Unchained isn’t his, it’s ours. We clearly haven’t done the work. We haven’t said enough, or made enough art. Danny Glover has been trying for decades to fund a film about Haitian revolutionary and former slave Toussaint Louverture, but encountered trouble because there weren’t enough white heroes.

There’s a good reason Kerry Washington, who says almost nothing during the film, plugs her ears in the final scene: she’s heard enough about what white people have to say about her plight. She wants to hear a different story, or rather, she’d probably like to tell a story all her own.

Reelings #3: THE IMPOSTER

Anisse Gross — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:00:34 +0000

I’m going to go ahead and spoil the entire plot of Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter, but only because the film does in its first opening minutes. Why? Because the plot, as balls-out-crazy as it is, is not even the most compelling aspect of this film.

The plot: In 1993, a 13-year old boy named Nicholas Barclay vanishes from his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, never to be seen again. That’s until “he” turns up four years later, discovered by the police, crouched in a phone booth in Spain, prompting them to take him to a foster home. The “boy” they found in the phone booth was actually a 23-year-old man, Frenchman Frédéric Bourdin to be exact, who had spent most of his life pursuing an odd path of crime, impersonating missing children, ostensibly because he wanted to find the love that had been missing from his own childhood.

Once in the foster home, Bourdin agrees to call his parents if the foster home will just give him 24 hours alone in the office. While in the office, he calls the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, asks if anyone matching the description of himself went missing about four years ago, and they fax him an image of Nicholas Barclay. Bourdin, in a moment of panic or inspiration, decides to assume the identity of the missing Barclay, despite the fact that he looks nothing like the missing boy. He dyes his hair blonde, gets tattoos that Barclay had, and hopes for the best. And so begins the insane tale that is the pivot point around which The Imposter spins. Barclay’s family from Texas reunites with him, and Bourdin, posing as Barclay, moves in with them in San Antonio and resumes, or pretends to resume a “normal” life with them.

I’m giving away the plot, because as they say, the devil’s in the details.

The devil in this case appears to be Frédéric Bourdin, master psychopath, whose career was lengthily profiled in David Gann’s New Yorker piece, a man whose acts like a chameleon (his nickname), oscillating between pandering to your emotional compass (he only wants to find a family and to be loved), and appearing utterly creepy and devoid of emotion (there is no clear telling what he’s really up to).

While the film doesn’t delve much into Bourdin’s childhood history (an investigation that might shed light into his particularly curious form of pathological deception), it does start to dig at the Barclay family. The mother of the missing boy, presides over the film like a ghost, showing almost no sign whatsoever of any emotion. There are other members of the family lurking around, but as the film progresses, something is clearly not right with the Barclays.

It’s apparent to any filmgoer that Bourdin looks nothing like the missing San Antonio boy. First off, he’s got a French accent that does not disappear once in the States. Secondly he’s got brown hair (not blond), brown eyes (not blue), and a significant five-o-clock shadow. So the more intriguing question becomes the investigation into the psychology of the Barclay family – why would a family take in a stranger who clearly is not their son? Do they really believe that it is him? Do they want to believe? Or, are they pretending to believe in order to hide something else?

The more nefarious suggestion arises, even from Bourdin himself, that the Barclay family knows very well that he is not Nicholas, but they are pretending to in order to cover up the more disturbing truth that they know what happened to their son.

There’s the personal truths (see: delusions) that the players of this tale cling to, but there’s also someone in the film who thankfully goes for the old-fashioned definition of truth. The film’s watery layers get a fresh look when San Antonio private eye, Charlie Parker, steps onto the scene with his rotund belly and suspenders. He’s not that into all the nuance of the situation; the man just wants to set the record straight. Parker starts off by outing Bourdin as a fraud, using a technique where he compares his ears with photographs of Barclay. Apparently ears are the best way to distinguish people from one another (who knew?) Then, believing that the Barclay family knows what happened to Nicholas, Parker takes up a shovel (literally) and begins hunting for Nicholas Barclay’s body, which he believes is buried somewhere in San Antonio. As he begins the murder investigation, his first suspect, Nicholas’ older brother, overdoses. There’s nothing like a San Antonio private eye scooping the FBI, but more importantly, he adds a layer of common sense to this unbelievable tale of deception.

The Imposter is as thrilling as any action film (I was reduced to many open-mouthed omg’s and wtf’s), employing proficient narrative pizazz and technical flourishes. Yet at times its over-the-top made-for-TV style often felt as though it was part of the grand tale of deceit it was portraying.

In the end, The Imposter managed to portray a complex story, but did little in the way of probing the question that seems to be at the heart of this story: What lengths will we go to in order to be loved? Murder? Lies? Impersonating missing children?

The film is also a solid affirmation of the Didion quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Without the story that he is a missing child, what then might Bourdin do? For a moment Bourdin, knowing well he was not Nicholas Barclay, had to believe the lie he concocted. In order to “be loved” he had to “be Barclay”, and in order for the Barclay family to believe their own tale (the truth of that one is much murkier), they too had to believe the story. If everyone goes in on the lie, where does the truth really reside?

We all go to desperate lengths to be loved, to believe what we want to. While most of us don’t impersonate missing children in order to find a home, who among us cannot relate to the desire for one? Additionally, we all tell ourselves small lies (most of us steer clear of ones that pique the interest of Interpol), in order to piece together a story we can live with. None of our stories have the brand of truth that detective Charlier Parker would vouch for, but as we all know reality, it turns out, is pretty f’n malleable. Who knows what crazy story we’ll believe next.

The Rumpus Interview with Andrew McCarthy

Anisse Gross — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:01:32 +0000

Andrew McCarthy, likely best known to you as a member of the iconic Brat Pack, with his roles in Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire, has forged a second career as a travel writer. Out with a new memoir, The Longest Way Home, about traveling as a way to settle down, McCarthy touches on issues of fatherhood and commitment. I met up with him at a café on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, where he ordered a boiled egg and it came with what he called “shredded bread.” I tried to explain to him that they were toast points and that it was a traditional French thing where you dipped the bread into the egg, to which he replied, “I don’t know anything about that. I’m from Jersey.”

With a refreshing mix of honesty and tenderness (he got choked up three times in an hour, talking about his children), McCarthy, who rarely does interviews, opened up about acting, travel, family, and fear.

***

The Rumpus: What prompted you to think you could be a travel writer? Did you always have a writing impulse?

Andrew McCarthy: No, I didn’t write ever. I didn’t read. When I went to school I wasn’t interested in any of that. Then someone gave me The Old Patagonian Express. I read that and it blew my mind, so I started reading more Paul Theroux; then I started traveling and then I started writing. I tried keeping a little journal and that was so pathetic. It was just stupid, so embarrassing for even me to read. Then I began writing down scenes of things that happened and I kept them in a notebook and I did that for years. There was no motivation—it just sort of validated traveling to me. When you travel you’re sort of drifting, and because I would travel for months, I became untethered, and I found that if I wrote a scene, it gave me something to do for an hour and grounded me. I did it for that sake and literally put them in a drawer when I came home.

Rumpus: Was there a learning curve? I mean I’d like to be a great jazz player, but I don’t hear amazing jazz and think, Hey I could do that.

McCarthy: Well if you read a lot of travel magazines you realize a lot of them are crap. So the bar wasn’t that high. But there’s some great travel writing, too. One of the reasons I thought I could do it is because no article captured anything of my own experience of traveling. When I read Paul Theroux, I could tell he’s having an experience. After an editor said that I could go ahead and try to write something, I told him I didn’t know how to write a travel story and he said, “Good.” No other editor would have taken a chance on me. There are a lot of people who have the attitude, “Oh this actor thinks he can write.” I get that all the time. I can smell it in a second, and you come upon it, and you just have to go around it.

Rumpus: Were you able to translate any of your acting knowledge into writing? Are there similarities between the two practices?

McCarthy: The similarities for me are that I’m not good enough to fake things. I couldn’t write about fashion. I genuinely believe travel changes people’s lives. Everything that I write, whatever my story is about, whether it’s about prosciutto in Parma, underneath it is the sensation that this is going to change your life. If I’ve been successful in any way, it’s because people pick up on that. It’s the same thing acting did for me. Acting saved my life. I felt alive in a way I never had before. I felt like I had an answer and a way out of whatever life I had; it gave me direction. They both fuel the same excitement. I knew I could write from that place. I didn’t know what a nut graph was, but I had a passion and an instinct for it.

Rumpus: It seems like there’s two types of travel writing: vacation and real travel.

McCarthy: There is a difference, but I’m a big anti-snob. I can’t stand when people say, “You’re not a traveler, you’re a tourist.” Go and fuck yourself. If you get out of the house, hats off to you. You know what I mean? How many people here have left the country? Not too many. So I mean anybody who gets out of the house, let alone leaves the country? I don’t care if you’re going to the greatest hits of Paris—Notre Dame, and you’re going to go to the Eiffel tower, and then home—fantastic.

Rumpus: Right, because they’re coming up against fear.

McCarthy: You have no idea what fear they’re dealing with. That’s what travel obliterates—it obliterates fear. That Mark Twain line is so brilliant, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…” My whole soapbox is that America is a wonderful nation but incredibly fearful; we make all our political decisions based on fear. If people went out into the world they’d realize that a guy with a towel around his head isn’t out to get you. Something like 30% of Americans have passports, and they usually use them to go to Canada and Mexico. So anyone who gets out the door has my undying affection.

Rumpus: Do you think being alone is integral to a certain kind of travel? Oddly, some of the most moving parts of this book take place when you’re traveling with family; what’s the distinction?

McCarthy: You often have the experience of each other in the place, as opposed to yourself in the place. By nature I’m a solitary traveler, but by nature I’m a solitary person. I prefer—am most comfortable, most at home—when I’m far away alone. I get that. I’m deeply comfortable there. There’s a great line by Madame de Stael that says travel is “one of the saddest pleasures in life.” There’s no greater feeling than when I have that childish realization that nobody in the world knows where I am. That’s thrilling to me, but it’s also childish. Then, on the other hand, when I’m alone and see something, I think, I wish my kids could see that. You can’t win. They’re just different. I’m glad that I traveled alone first. The only reason people don’t travel alone is because they’re afraid. They think they’ll be lonely, but loneliness is not going to kill you. It’s a different loneliness on the road than at home. Loneliness at home is much more painful. Loneliness on the road has a depth and an expanse where the loneliness at home is an experience of depravation. On the road, you’re tiny, which is an incredible thing.

Rumpus: I noticed in the book when you travel alone, you’re endlessly annoyed by other travelers. I was waiting for you to bond with someone and you didn’t.

McCarthy: Yeah, those fucking people. Well, it happens even here in New York. It has nothing to do with traveling. If I get over myself a little bit, I realize there’s a lot to learn from everybody. It’s more of a life problem that I have than a traveling one. Hopefully it makes for some kind of illuminating conflict in the book. Part of this book is seeing how a loner learns to communicate with other people. It’s not something I’m good at, whether at home or traveling. I just don’t really know how to be with people. I really don’t get it intuitively.

Rumpus: It seems interesting to me that as a loner you’ve had to lead a public life.

McCarthy: It’s very odd. It’s ridiculous, actually. It took me years to realize that I was a loner. It’s like anything: if that’s the position from which you look at the world, that’s the way you think everyone is. Though I think a lot of actors are actually introverts.

Rumpus: Writers are often introverts; maybe that’s part of why you feel comfortable writing, or why you’ve turned towards this path?

McCarthy: I have to say that finding writing was a huge relief. Even when you just say that, I find it relieving. Now it’s just a question of, do I have the abilities and the skills and the “can I think between thoughts enough” to communicate it. But, yeah it’s a relief.

Rumpus: To me my worst nightmare would be to have my glorious anonymity taken from me. Is that another reason you like traveling? To regain a sense of anonymity?

McCarthy: Yes, and when I’m recognized on the road, I’m much more gracious and open than I am here. It’s very interesting. I’m not sure why. I guess I’m more relaxed and therefore more emotionally generous. I became recognizable very early, when I was young, so it formed a lot of my responses to others. I mean, I certainly wasn’t a Kennedy where I was prepped for success—I just knew I couldn’t go to the mall. And suddenly I was getting laid a lot, when a year ago no one would look at me. I was twenty-three and it was awesome, though it was assaulting in a certain way. It would be better to find success in your thirties, when you have a sense of yourself. I was just writing an article about Ireland, and neither countries, nor people, get rich quick gracefully. When Ireland became wealthy it became an awful place, and now that it’s broke, they’ve gone back to themselves and it’s great again.

Rumpus: Traveling seems to magnify some kind of personal or interpersonal conflict one might have. By traveling those issues seem to come into focus.

McCarthy: There’s nowhere to hide. I think people have this wrong idea about traveling. I mean wherever you go, there you are. And if you’re not trying to buy stuff to distract you, then all you have is that thing. So you’re just left with that one thing in your head and it’s surrounding you. I think that’s a good thing— it helps you deal with whatever that issue is.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask you about change through travel. You said that you don’t change through “a-ha” moments.

McCarthy: Yeah, that’s what my editor said. She wanted to know what happened at the top of Kilimanjaro and I said, “It was fucking cold.” I never see the change in the instant. The biggest a-ha moment of my life was in Spain. I broke down and was sobbing, but I didn’t realize why until I got to the end. I’m not in my life or smart enough to realize when it’s happening to me. I have them, but the dawning takes a while. When I was successful so quickly so young, I didn’t trust it. I much prefer the brick-and-mortar path. With the writing, I knew that I wanted to write as many different publications I could, so that by the time I came out with a book, my critics couldn’t dismiss me so easily as an actor-turned-writer. I was sure I wanted to write, and so by the time I was outed, and someone wanted to exploit it for publicity, I already had won an award and had all these publications.

Rumpus: I can understand the fear of being pigeonholed.

McCarthy: There’s nothing I can do about that. It’s something I learned from acting. I was never in the kinds of movies that I wanted to be in. Only in hindsight did they become these iconic films of a generation. At the time they were not these particularly respected films. Brat Pack was a pejorative term. Now it’s become a term of affection, and the Brat Pack members have longevity that young actors now might now have in twenty years. But yes, it’s a double-edged sword. I get attention from having been in those movies, but I have to redirect the conversation so it’s not just some vanity project. Hopefully my book stands on its own.

Rumpus: Theroux talks about how travel has changed so much, as explored in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he revisits his original trip chronicled in his classic, The Great Railway Bazaar. Does the notion of change affect you as a traveler?

McCarthy: I walked the Camino de Santiago 20 years ago, and now the idea of walking it now being able to check in every thirty seconds would be awful. I mean, but things always change. It’s like the movie business. When I arrived, people were like, “You should have been here a couple years ago, it’s really changed. It’s a shame. You should have been here in the 70’s when the auteurs were here, just five years ago. You missed it.” And that was ’82. It’s the same thing. It’s also the first thing I heard when I went to Hawaii in 1986: “You should have been here ten years ago.” You read those great quotes of people saying “our times are so modern now” and you realize [they were] written in 1820. People have always been lamenting change. Yes it’s true, and yet what are you going to do? It’s inevitable that things change, but you still set out anyway.

Rumpus: What about the issue of mortality? So central to travel is the fear of death, yet it doesn’t appear a lot in your book.

McCarthy: I used to be terrified of death. I was terrified of the world. I was terrified of travel. That’s why I travel, because I was so afraid; I stopped being afraid of the world to a degree by traveling. That notion of “I could die here,” that’s what I discovered when I walked across Spain. I was terrified every day. I wanted to see if I could take care of myself, and I found out that I was taken care of somehow. It wasn’t a religious experience but it was a personal, transformative one. The greatest way to overcome fear is to get out of the house, and to get out of the house alone.

Rumpus: Sometimes when people come up against the fear of travel they just don’t do it. What motivated you to push into the fear?

McCarthy: Because fear was not going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do in life. Some famous explorer said, “Brave men never do anything, it’s cowards that discover the world.” It’s absolutely true. I traveled solely because I was afraid.

REELINGS #2: MEEK’S CUTOFF

Anisse Gross — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:16:07 +0000

Some of us know the Oregon Trail as a two-dimensional game of forest and lime green, where someone on your team dies of dysentery, but it’s okay because your parents will be picking you up sharply at three. Now that we’re adults most of us know that’s not the real Oregon Trail. If you want to simulate the authentic bleakness of life on the trail replete with anxiety, fatigue and the potential of facing death in an unmarked land due to dehydration, leave it to filmmaker Kelly Reichardt to be the one to introduce you.

The skillfully understated Reichardt joins up again with screenwriter Jon Raymond (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) to give us Meek’s Cutoff – a portrait of the Oregon Trail as both a place and an idea, back when the west was an uncharted strange land off in the distance, waiting to be found.

Meek’s opens with a group of settlers crossing a river. An early image: one of the women is chest-deep in the water holding up a bird cage with a yellow canary inside. The canary shines like a golden coin against the washed-out landscape as a symbol of hope, colonial dreams, and the persisting conflict between freedom and captivity. A wild creature inside a cage. This initial image portends almost all of what’s to come.

Based on the diaries of real women on the Oregon Trail, Meek’s takes place in 1845, and it follows three families of settlers who have separated from a larger group deciding to follow a guide named Stephen Meek, who becomes less and less credible as the movie progresses, stranding the travelers in a wilderness unknown. Along the way, water is running out, and they come upon a lone Cayuse Indian (Ron Rondeaux) who they capture; instead of killing him, they try to use him to help guide them to water and hopefully towards their destination. But the Indian only speaks Nez Perce, and is more than indifferent to their quest; he seems glad to let them perish.

The pressurized situation of being stranded and running out of water reveals the characters’ personalities as they’re pushed to their physical and psychological limits. They lose a wagon, and remember that canary from the opening scene? The beacon of hope? Well a swift shot of an empty bird cage swinging from the back of a wagon lets you know that there’s nothing to chirp about any more.

The settlers’ last hope seems to be the Cayuse Indian, and the only character who reaches out to him (its unclear if her motivations are purely altruistic, conniving, or a healthy blend of both) is a young wife named Emily Tetherow played with measure by Michelle Williams. Williams totally gets Reichardt’s vision, and portrays the character of Emily with such unsentimentality, you couldn’t shed a tear if you tried. If you don’t get out to the movies much, here’s a tip: just go see whatever Michelle Williams is in.

To add to the film’s inherent anxiety, Reichardt chose to shoot the film in the tight 4:3 Academy ratio, instead of wide-screen, directing the viewer into the moment at hand. This forces us to see the wide-open plain as a trap. Which is not to say the film isn’t visually beautiful; cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt manages to bring light to this barren land, and often times the portraits of the three women in their dailyness, gathering sticks, walking across the plain, feel like Andrew Wyeth paintings come to life.

Meek’s may have all the dressings of a western: guns, horses, wagons, but this isn’t what you expect from a Western. What kind of Western sheds no blood? What kind of Western focuses almost exclusively on female characters? What kind of Western seems almost wedded to tedium?

The term “revisionist western” applies to films that take the optimism and foolhardiness of a traditional western and subvert them with historical underpinnings. Reichardt goes the extra step of stripping the genre down to its knickers. “Going West” has often been glamorized as something filled with hope and drama, but what was it really like, physically and psychologically? What complicated interior dilemmas did that journey actually encompass?

This is also a feminist film that eschews male authority in general; the notion that men have it under control and can be in charge of all major decision-making is completely turned upside down during the course of the film’s events. The character with the most mettle turns out to be Emily. She’s the only one who shoots a gun. While everyone else falls apart or proves incompetent, she retains her reserve and cleverness throughout the film.

Now, we should get to the whole “boring” part (notice the italics and quotes). There’s was a flurry surrounding just how boring Meek’s Cutoff is when it came out. From Dan Kois’ “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables” to Mahnola Dargis and A.O. Scott’s “In Defense of the Slow and Boring”, the idea of a film’s ultimate purpose arises. I suppose it’s true that very little happens in Meek’s Cutoff, but that’s only if you need every second of every frame to be filled with noise, visual or otherwise. Not only does Reichardt have a preternatural ability to stretch every moment far past its breaking point, she also seems to hesitate using language, motion, plot, and anything else that might get in the way of open contemplation. When people describe Meek’s as boring – what they really seem to be saying is that it makes them have to personally bear so much silence. Meek’s is slow and unfilled because it’s attempting to question the actual experience of history instead of answering it. What was it like to set out in a world completely unknown? To follow nothing more than a promise? To embody the idea of blind faith?

In the end, it turns out that the cutoff in Meek’s Cutoff has less to do with the breaking point of the settlers and more to do with that of contemporary movie-going audiences. After exiting the theatre where I watched Meek’s, a man outside flagged me down seeking confirmation, “There wasn’t enough action, right? RIGHT!?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him the answer he wasn’t looking for, “Maybe there wasn’t supposed to be.”

But what he said points to a truth – Reichardt’s films are directly addressed at our abilities to watch films. Movies tend to shy away from monotony. They seem almost desperate to please you. Not this one. Instead of speeding things up, Reichardt amplifies the chore-like living of this quest. Her goal seems to be to inhabit the realness of life – the mundane, the uncomfortable, the daily. To ask us: Could a film open us up to our world before we were here?

Meek’s is a Western we’ve never seen before. It’s a mystery, a lyric documentary, and here the references to Malick seem apt. While they are distinctly different filmmakers, this movie is clearly reminiscent of Malick’s The New World in that it explores similar territory: the world before we knew it.

Because compared to the world of 1845, our world is so known. To watch the settlers labor towards a new destiny without any previous knowledge, compass, or map, every sight new and full of threat, opens us to the vast, complex mystery that is history. There’s something thrilling about watching Reichardt take the glamour and idealism of the classic western and bring it to its aching knees. We all know that the journey was rough and unpleasant, even though we don’t access that knowledge regularly. The local PDX coffee shop where people laze about with their latte was probably once a spot where settlers died of dehydration. And because we are so tuned out, and our lives are so comparatively easy now, those bleak and brave 1845 days have been revived in the most beautiful boredom, for us to endure.

After all, they endured it for us.

The Rumpus Interview with Francis Ford Coppola

Anisse Gross — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:01:07 +0000

Francis Ford Coppola hardly needs an introduction. A godfather himself of American film, Coppola is a director, producer, screenwriter, and the force behind legendary films such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and my personal favorite, The Conversation. He founded American Zoetrope, an independent film studio in San Francisco, Zoetrope: All-Story literary magazine, a booming winery, and even a hotel business. He has won more awards than he can hold. But when I sat down with him for what turned out to be a five-hour conversation that continued into a lovely dinner, what impressed me most was how humble and open he was. It was as if he would have answered any question I proposed, no matter how personal. I was less interested in asking questions about his films and working with Brando, though, than I was in discovering Coppola the artist.

***

Rumpus: Your newest film TWIXT is based on a dream. Can you describe the dream for us?

Coppola: Well I went out one night with these two sister lawyers and had Turkish raki. I had an alcohol-induced dream that was very vivid. I was in a frightening, mysterious forest and I saw a young girl walking with me. We began to speak and she asked me if I was frightened of her. We approached a sort of hotel with some odd people there, and when I entered they said that I was stepping on the “grave.” I tried not to step on it but they said it was all right, that the whole floor was the grave, filled with murdered children. Then I saw the children stepping out of the grave and playing in the moonlight as if it were sunshine. A man who was caring for them hurried them back into the grave and as I left, I ran into Edgar Allan Poe. I asked him to guide me and he bode that I follow him, and as I did I was awoken by the call to prayer coming out of my open window in Istanbul, where I was dreaming. It was great. I was getting a whole movie for free, but the end didn’t come to me in the dream. I had to figure that out myself. A movie is like answering a question.

Rumpus: Part of TWIXT appears in 3-D – what informed your choice to do that? I also saw that at Comic-Con, the 3-D glasses you handed out were embedded in Edgar Allan Poe masks, which is amazing.

Coppola: At the time of making TWIXT, there was much talk that the future of cinema was moving toward being in all 3-D. I felt that with glasses it was uncomfortable to watch a whole film in 3-D, and I preferred that only certain sections be in that format, which is what I did with TWIXT.

Rumpus: When you talk about writers who influence your work, you mention Poe and Hawthorne for this film. But what else influenced it?

Coppola: Well when I was writing this film, I reread a lot of Flaubert. I’m interested in what breaks your heart, like when there’s opposing loyalties. Take War and Peace. I always respond to novels with a heroine. If your work doesn’t have a heroine then it has to be about war. I only like novels that are about women. Natasha in War and Peace gets in such a pickle and that torn loyalty pulls at me. Torn loyalty is the theme that moves me the most. I always loved books that tear you apart. Loving two people is the world’s worst thing. That’s a killer. Better to have five women in your life than two. James Goldsmith made a great statement once: “Never marry your mistress because then you create a job vacancy.”

Rumpus: Is TWIXT being received differently here than abroad?

Coppola: It was received very positively by the French. But the French are the French – they love movies. They look at a movie differently. In America, even the critics – which is a pity – tend to genre-ize things. They have a hard time when genres get mixed. They want to categorize things. That’s why I love Wes Anderson’s films and the Coen Brothers, because you don’t know what you’re going to get, and very often you get something that you don’t expect and that’s just what a genre’s not supposed to do.

Rumpus: I wonder if that informs their decision to make films that play with genre?

Coppola: Like Burn After Reading. That movie is totally off the wall. Brad Pitt was just amazing in that film. When I go to the movies I like to come away and say, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” That’s my highest praise.

Rumpus: Do you think that’s a danger in teaching writing – formulaic scripts?

Coppola: Dramatic structure and theater plays are thousands of years old. It’s amazing how much dramatic structure is influenced by the Greeks. The novel’s only a few hundreds of years old, but in the novel there’s still so much room for invention. That’s why I was annoyed when they were saying the big thing for movies now is going to be 3-D. The cinema’s only a hundred years old, you don’t think that even in the writing of the film there’s so much left to accomplish?

Rumpus: How do you feel about adaptations?

Coppola: I don’t feel that books should become movies. I feel that movies should be written fresh and new. They should also never make remakes. With all the money and effort you should at least try to give something to the world that’s uniquely for cinema and not adapted from a book. Also, the short story does much better in translation to film than a novel. It’s already in the right shape and size. A movie is like writing a haiku. You have to be so pared down. Everything has to be so loaded and economic.

Rumpus: How do you deal with criticism?

Coppola: Reading reviews is like pulling on a sore tooth. Sofia [Coppola] doesn’t read reviews. She makes a personal style of film that doesn’t fit in all the time. As with everyone there’s people who love them and those who hate them. What filmmaker doesn’t have detractors or the five films people hate? In the end it’s totally irrelevant. We live in this strange world of this Internet – it’s a little bit like people in traffic honking their horn. The only thing about the Internet is that the decorum and the politeness really hasn’t been worked out yet. You can say anything you want and there’s no accountability. I’d like a little bit of politeness. To be a human being.

Rumpus: What’s your personal code of ethics?

Coppola: I have a couple rules in my life. The first is never to lie. I was impressed by a line, I think it’s Joseph Conrad: “Nothing is more repugnant than the stench of lie.” Lying always leads to a pyramid of lying, and after a while you don’t know where the lie was yourself. But if you have a rule never to lie, you can never get caught in a lie. If someone asks you if they’re beautiful and they’re ugly, you can always just say that it’s an inappropriate question to ask. I always taught my kids good character building things.

The second [rule] is when you take a piece of paper out to always put the date in the corner, because some day in the future that date might help you track something down. A lot of times you write something down, you don’t think there’s going to be any value to them. Like today I’d write 8.9.12 and here I would put SF or, even further, the penthouse of the building. Very often the scrap you write down turns out to be of value to you and if you have the date, at least you have the lead of where you were and when it was and it’s such an easy habit to get used to. Sometimes that scribbled thing turns out to be a great piece of what you’re working on.

Rumpus: Of all your work, what do you feel the most personal connection to?

Coppola: In my earlier career I liked The Rain People, because that was my first film where I got to do what I wanted to do. I was young; I wrote the story based on something that I had witnessed. Few people know that film. It’s about a young wife who loves her husband but doesn’t want to be a wife, and one day gets in her station wagon and leaves a note with his breakfast and takes off. In a way it preceded the women’s movement. It’s curious for a guy like me to do. Then I made The Conversation, which was an original as well. That’s what I wanted to be doing. The Godfather was an accident. I was broke and we needed the money. We had no way to keep American Zoetrope going. I had no idea it was going to be that successful. It was awful to work on, and then my career took off and I didn’t get to be what I wanted to be.

Rumpus: What did you want to be?

Coppola: I wanted to be a guy who made films like The Rain People and The Conversation. I didn’t want to be a big Hollywood movie director.

Rumpus: What was your reaction to suddenly having all this fame?

Coppola: Well, it was the first time I had any money. I was always a starving student and money was always a big problem. Suddenly I had all this money. I bought this building, and I bought a nice house. I didn’t want to ever do a second Godfather. I was so oppressed during The Godfather by the studio that when Mr. Big, who owned the whole conglomerate, said, “What do we have to do to get you to do it?” I had suggested that I would supervise it and pick a director to do the second Godfather. I don’t know why there should be a second Godfather. It’s a drama, it’s the end, it’s over. It’s not a serial. When I went back and told them I had chosen Marty Scorsese to do it they said absolutely not. Finally I told them I’d do it, but I didn’t want any of those guys to have anything to do with it. To see it, to hear the soundtrack, the casting, their ideas, nothing. So I made Godfather 2 because I’d always been thinking about trying to write something about a father and son at the same age, two stories juxtaposed. I had total control and it was a pleasure, I must say. I did that and won all these Oscars and had all this success for doing that.

Then when I wanted to do Apocalypse Now, no one would do it. I couldn’t believe it. I was so disgruntled that I had played by their rules and won, yet they still didn’t want to make it. So I just went on myself, and took all the money and property I had, went to the bank, and made Apocalypse Now myself. When it came out it was very dicey. People didn’t know what to make of it; it got bad reviews. My films have always gotten a lot of bad reviews. I was very scared that I was going to be wiped out because the Chase Manhattan Bank had all my stuff. I decided I would make a movie that would be very commercial. Every time I’ve tried to do something commercial it’s always failed. So I made One From The Heart.

And what happened was that Apocalypse Now, little by little, started to be a big success and thought of as a classic, a great movie. But by then I was already making One From The Heart and that was a big flop and I lost everything. So from age forty to age fifty I just had to pay the Chase Manhattan Bank all that money, and I just barely ended up holding onto everything. So ironically, the thing I did to solve the problem ended up causing a problem. All this takes a big emotional toll. It took ten years of making a movie every year to pay off the bank.

Rumpus: Was that depressing?

Coppola: Yeah. I wanted to be making other kinds of movies. When you do movies like that for hire, you’re a prostitute. If you’re a prostitute you’ve got to find something about the client to enjoy. Nice eyes, a sense of humor, nice hair. You have to do that with the movies. You have to find something to fall in love with because it’s a process you can’t do without loving it. Every year I had to go get a job to pay off the bank.

Rumpus: When you returned, you developed a new set of rules for your filmmaking process – that they be based on your own original screenplays, involve a personal component, and be self-financed. How did you arrive at this set of rules and what have been its challenges and rewards?

Coppola: I wanted a clean slate so I decided to embark on a series of “student films” for myself to begin anew. I thought, “How do you be like a student?” Easy, you have no money. If you have no money to pay for everything, that’s when things get interesting. The films I make now have to be inexpensive enough that I can finance them myself. This was how I made a new beginning for myself. There’s a scene in a Kurosawa movie where they get this guy, and they practically kill him, and he’s in a box. He just has this knife, and these leaves are blowing, and he throws the knife and tries to get the knife to go through a leaf, and that’s how he builds himself up. I had to do that: be broken in a box and have a second life. To do that I needed to be a student. I thought I should try to make movies with nothing. No money, just whatever I have. So I made Youth without Youth, then Tetro, which was very personal, then this wacky film TWIXT. I really wanted to make this last film to have fun, but even that got personal.

Rumpus: What was your life like growing up?

Coppola: I didn’t grow up with anyone. I lived in a different place every six months. I went to 24 schools before college.

Rumpus: How did that affect you? Your social skills?

Coppola: I didn’t do well in school. I have no social skills. I didn’t have any friends. First of all, I was always the new kid. Second of all, my name is Francis, which was a girl’s name. And also there was a famous series of movies called Francis the Talking Mule, the predecessor to Mr. Ed. I got picked on but I had one thing on my side: I could beat them up. I didn’t lose any fights. I didn’t go looking for them, either, but I could always get them in a headlock and win.

I wanted friends, though. For a couple years, I was paralyzed with polio. I always had this yearning to be part of a group. That’s why I think I gravitated towards theatre, because there’s a tradition of being part of a troupe. You do the play, rehearse together, have coffee together, work on the sets late at night, there’s a real sense of camaraderie that film doesn’t have. Film school was like “every man for himself.” It’s always been a mystery to me that in every film school in the world they want nothing to do with the drama department. I mean they’ll go out with the girls in the drama department, but there’s a different culture. They just don’t gel. Theatre people are considered weird by the film people.

Also, in those days, the young men in film were all about camera, films, and editing, and that’s the least important thing. Orson Welles said once that you could learn those aspects of film in a weekend. The hard parts of film are acting and writing. Most film students know nothing about acting. Acting for film classes starts boiling down very quickly to marks on the floor and acting for the camera. The big advantage I had is that I had been a theatre major, and that made me have to work with actors. I never wanted to be an actor, but I was interested in knowing how to help them.

Rumpus: That seems to me to be one of the most interesting things about being a director, working with actors.

Coppola: If you look at the statistics of all of the people who become movie directors, the success rate is the highest by far among actors becoming directors. It makes total sense, because acting is fundamentally one of the two main ingredients: acting and writing. You never hear of a movie that’s so wonderful because of the photography or the art direction being great. It’s usually the acting or writing; without those two things you don’t have anything.

Rumpus: I was thinking of Terrence Malick. Take The Tree of Life or The New World, for example. How much acting is in those?

Coppola: He’s in his own world, but like in The New World, that young girl inhabits that film. That’s acting. She radiated her essence. During Tree of Life I thought, this is another way of telling a story, so understated and subtle. In that family there was so much being said that was unsaid. He’s truly unique. My big thing is that movies are only 100 years old. The movies about to be made will blow us away. Malick’s movies are a new way of telling a story that I never thought of before. That whole thing in The Tree of Life where the son takes the underwear and buries it was so full of mystery.

Rumpus: His movies are so dreamlike that you’re allowed to participate in the creation of them as a viewer.

Coppola: That’s important because radio used to do that. It wasn’t all done for you. Today, in movies, everything’s done for you. The difference between radio and television is that [with] radio you could sit and imagine what was happening, and it was great because you were seeing it in your own mind. Terry’s films are like that.

Rumpus: So many aspiring filmmakers are daunted by how much money films cost to make. Does that ever deter your ambition?

Coppola: In terms of money, I have a magic box. I do. In that box is an infinite amount of money. So when I have a worthy project I just go in that box and I take out the money. The box doesn’t exist and therefore there’s nothing in it. But I believe there is. And ultimately that’s what happens. At the time, if I ever have a script doing what I wish that it could do, then I would figure out where to get the money.

Rumpus: What are you currently working on?

Coppola: I’m working on this longer, more personal, ambitious piece. I’m thinking this year of going abroad to work on it. For some reason I had a fun time in Beijing, so I think I’m going to go there, rent a house, and work on my script. I don’t know anybody there, and when you know people inevitably your feelings get hurt. That’s why I write in the morning, because early in the morning no one’s had time to call me up and hurt my feelings.

Rumpus: Do you feel like you’re pretty sensitive?

Coppola: I don’t think I’m thin-skinned or anything, but I do have an emotional life. It’s possible to hurt my feelings, and if my feelings get hurt then I don’t work very well. I brood over whatever slight that was.

Rumpus: How do you compose your screenplays?

Coppola: Sometimes when I write screenplays I first write them in prose so I can enter into the characters’ thoughts. I guess in the old days that was like a treatment. I write it as if it were a novel, then adapt into a screenplay. It’s how I find out about the piece and the themes.

Rumpus: After all you’ve accomplished what are your remaining ambitions?

Coppola: I don’t have any real ambitions besides making a great film, the one. Whether that will happen, I don’t know. Even if I don’t get to make it, working on it is its own reward.

Rumpus: Do you show anyone your work?

Coppola: I’m sure I’ll write a draft of this script and then be careful about getting an opinion. I remember showing The Godfather to all the film cognoscenti of San Francisco, and they all came out after the film and only one person said that it was something good: Bob Towne, the screenwriter. He wrote Chinatown. He was the only one who thought it was good. So all these people who buzz around the film business know nothing. No one does.

Rumpus: Is there anyone outside of the film world you trust to read your work?

Coppola: I have to say I really don’t have anyone. I wish I did. I’d give anything. But I also wish I had a movie studio to call home, like United Artists, which was such a great company which was destroyed. If I have time I’ll try to resurrect United Artists. There’s a lot of people in my life who I love and care about, but whose ideas about film and scripts are very conventional, and I don’t think they’d see things in front of them. I’ve got to think about someone who I could really show it to. That’s a big question.

Rumpus: Do you ever get critical of your work when still writing it?

Coppola: Oh, I’m very critical of it, but I have a rule. When you write six pages, you turn it over and don’t read it until you’ve written the whole thing. A young person, any person really, has a hormone injected into their blood stream that makes them hate what they’ve just written. It gets better a few months later when you read it. Do it, write it, and turn the pages over and feel good about it. Then the next day pick up from where you left off. A lot of times when you’re writing you can get lost in making revisions to things that later you’re just going to cut out later. If you decide halfway through the character isn’t a man but a woman, then just change it later. But don’t go back. Go forward because you have no idea where it’s going to go. Let it tell you what it’s going to be.

Rumpus: How do you compare yourself now with yourself as a young filmmaker?

Coppola: It’s dangerous to try to compete with myself as a young man. All those things I did then, I did then. I don’t want to run after that. I want to see things different. The best thing I can do is start over again.

Rumpus: I’m reminded of the opening to Shunryu Suzuki’s book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” How are you both an expert and an amateur?

Coppola: I am an amateur in that I do what I do out of love and I go blindly wanting above all to learn. I am an expert in that I have done this kind of creative work all my life and know that even though I am perhaps lost at the moment, ultimately I will find my way.

Rumpus: Do you think risk is involved with your artistic growth?

Coppola: Yes, without risk I don’t think there can be art.

Rumpus: What’s the best advice you can give another artist?

Coppola: Suspend your self-doubt, do only the work you love, and make it personal.

Rumpus: You’re at the age now where a lot of people sit back and rest on their laurels – what keeps you creating?

Coppola: Somehow I haven’t done (in cinema) what I always dreamed of doing, and am ever hopeful that now I’ll be in a position to accomplish that. I wish to write something big and as full of emotion as I feel I am. I am learning so much about writing and am hopeful that I am on the verge of accomplishing this goal. I wonder if when I get all this done, if I’ll be able to take the leap beyond melodrama and stand back and say to my incorrigible imagination, how can I take this to a level not like the movies I grew up with, but beyond that? I want to make a film that breaks your heart, but I’ve never done it.

Rumpus: Are you afraid of dying?

Coppola: I have no fear of death whatsoever. I used to do a little experiment for the fun of it in my elevator here, when I go down to the first floor. I can control the elevator so when I go in, I shut out the lights and I’m in total darkness. I think, when I get to the first floor that I’m going to be dead. As I go down, I think, I had such an interesting life, I got to be a movie director, have a wife and children, had so much fun with them, got to be in the wine business, go through everything, and as I’m lost in all these interesting thoughts, the door opens on the first floor and I’m not dead. I walk out.

Francis Ford Coppola’s TWIXT

Anisse Gross — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 00:14:35 +0000

Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film TWIXT opens in San Francisco this Friday, August 10th. Written, directed and produced by Coppola, this film represents his new code of personal filmmaking ethics: the film must be an original story; it must have a personal component, and it must be self-financed. Coppola says, “Beginning in reverse, the self-financing forces the budget to be limited and there’s no producer, distributor, or financier to weigh in with; the personal focus means in the end I might learn something about myself; and having to write an original story means that I won’t take the shortcut of starting with a book or otherwise adapting anything someone else worked out.”

TWIXT is about a writer (Val Kilmer) whose career is in decline. He arrives in a small town on his book tour and becomes wrapped up in a murder mystery involving a young girl. One night in a dream, he’s visited by a ghost named V (Elle Fanning). Unable to figure out the ghost’s connection to the murder, he still feels grateful that a story is being delivered to him and is eager to figure out his role in the story.

It turns out the plot of TWIXT came to Coppola in a dream while on a trip to Istanbul. He recalls, “I was in Istanbul in Turkey, trying to see if that might be a city I could make a film in. While out for dinner with a young lawyer who was advising me on work conditions there, her sister arrived and I had a great time involving the consumption of ‘raki,’ the traditional liquor. That night, under its influence, I had a particularly vivid dream — I was in a frightening forest and saw a young girl walking with me; we approached a hotel and when I entered they said I was stepping on the ‘grave’. The whole floor was the grave, filled with murdered children. They were stepping out of it and playing in the moonlight as if it were sunshine. In the dream I kept thinking: ‘This is a gift; I’m being given a scary story in this dream.’ In the dream I ran into Edgar Allen Poe and asked him to guide me. As I began following him I was awoken by the call to prayer coming out of my window, nearly knocking me out of bed and I thought, ‘Oh no, I’ve got to sleep, I’ve got to get the ending.’ Of course I never was able to get back to that dream, but at least I was able to dictate the fragment of it into a recorder. That was the germ of the story that became TWIXT.”

To add to the alluring dream-inpisred genesis of TWIXT, part of the film is in 3-d and at this year’s Comic Con, Coppola gave the crowd 3-d lenses embedded in Edgar Allen Poe Masks. If that isn’t boss, I’m not sure what is.

The full Rumpus interview with Coppola coming soon. TWIXT opens in San Francisco and runs August 10-16 at Sundance Kabuki Cinema. Tickets found here.

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