Not rated / 144 minutes / Released by Lions Gate Films

First things first: STEVIE, a documentary by Steve James, is a difficult film to watch. It chronicles in sharp, often telling detail the troubled Stevie, a man in his 20s from rural southern Illinois who has had, for pretty much all of his life, a combination of bad (or no) parenting, neglect and abuse. His psychic scars are as visible as the tattoos on his arms, and the pain he is in, as well as the pain he causes those around him, are made plain to the camera (if not always to himself).

Intertwined with Stevie’s story are the purposefully self-conscious musings of the filmmaker, Steve James. James had been Stevie’s Big Brother while he attended college in the area, when Stevie was a pre-teenager. Even then Stevie had seemed like an accident waiting to happen. James, by now a documentary (HOOP DREAMS) and fiction (PREFONTAINE) filmmaker, had felt a nagging sense that he had abandoned Stevie, and wondered whether the troubled child had become a troubled adult.

In a word, he did. By the mid-1990s, when James returned, camera in hand, Stevie was already a veteran of foster homes, a mental hospital, a failed marriage, arrests and jail time. The basic sweetness of his character is soured by his threats — often delivered with a grin — to hurt or even kill those who have done him wrong. Most of his anger is focused on his mother Bernice, who gave the illegitimate Stevie to her mother-in-law Verna Hagler to raise but remained close enough to administer occasional beatings and verbal abuse. Stevie’s half-sister Brenda was the favored child but she’s none too fond of her mother either. Pretty much every member of the family carries around resentments and betrayals that are often decades old: James films a birthday party for Stevie that is as revealing a picture of family tensions as to be found in the most penetrating fiction film.

By the time James re-enters Stevie’s life, it’s gone even further downhill. He’s been accused of sexually molesting an 8-year-old female cousin and faces serious jail time. Through a combination of his own stubbornness and a mistrust of virtually any kind of therapy, he rejects a plea deal that turns out to have been his best hope.

James wonders throughout the film if he is actually helping Stevie or, by the very fact of making his documentary, repeatedly betraying him. It’s an interesting way to bring this issue — a big one that many documentary makers ignore — into the open. But ultimately James’ pondering comes off as a way to assuage his middle-class guilt at observing, and not being part of, this trailer-park, Jerry Springer show existence.

STEVIE is also a challenge to those of us who believe in people’s ability to repair badly broken childhoods. Everyone in the film carries around their own childhood-inflicted torments, and they seem to only get nastier as they age. The film contains a touching scene where Stevie, now an adult, reconnects all too briefly with the stable, caring foster parents who gave him a short period of stability and love, but then had to give him up. Had Stevie had just a bit more of them and a bit less of his own family, his life could have easily taken a lighter path.

Of course, it might not have made as compelling a film if that had happened. Filmmaker Steve James seems aware of the uncomfortable role he has put himself into — chronicling what seems to be an inexorable downward slide. He wonders what he can do to help and says several times that he will “be there” for Stevie. If Stevie were a bit more self-aware or self-preserving, he might want to say “thanks but no thanks.”

Credits:
Director: Steve James

Cast:
Stephen Dale Fielding
Verna Hagler
Bernice Hagler
Brenda & Doug Hickam
Tonya Gregory

What would you do if a year’s salary just dropped out of the sky? How would it change your life, and what wouldn’t change? These are some of the questions posed by MANNA FROM HEAVEN, a comic fable with a great cast of character actors, including Shirley Jones, Frank Gorshin, Jill Eikenberry, Wendie Malick, Seymour Cassel and Harry Groener. The film itself is a family affair: it was produced by the five Burton sisters (Maria, Gabrielle, Jennifer, Charity and Ursula), written by their mother Gabrielle B. Burton and co-produced by their father Roger Burton. Sisters Maria and Gabrielle co-directed, and Ursula acts in the film. All seven Burtons have dedicated themselves to a grass-roots, city-by-city approach to marketing and promoting MANNA, which opens in New York and Los Angeles April 4. Gabrielle and Ursula spoke with Films in Review’s Adam Blair about the challenges and pleasures of creating a truly independent film.

FIR: I was curious about the overall idea for the film — is it an urban legend in Buffalo, or was it something that happened to someone you knew?

GABRIELLE BURTON: Our mother read an article in the paper about a truck that dumped a bunch of money on a working-class neighborhood in Florida, and of course the people gathered it up.

URSULA BURTON: It was just a little squib.

GB: The police went around and collected it back, so she wondered, what would happen if no one collected it — would it answer your dreams?

UB: It’s really a story about rediscovering hope, so we do say it’s a fable, it’s not an urban legend.

FIR: Gabrielle, you’re the co-director [with your sister Maria]. Were you on the set with her?

GB: Yes, we directed together. It’s like a lot of sibling teams now that direct together — we had worked on TEMPS, our second film, very collaboratively, because I had written that and she directed it. We’re very collaborative as a family. As directors you discuss what you want, and you have to verbalize what you want and why you’re choosing something. Discussing it with another person really makes a lot of the choices solid and thought through.

FIR: Sometimes siblings develop a shorthand, a shared frame of reference.

GB: Yes, it’s a lot faster. We communicate really quickly, and also there’s a sense of basic trust. At the same time we get along, which is why we work together, and we know that everybody wants the same thing at the end of the day — we all want a good product. Since we’re all producers, we’re all wearing that hat as well. There aren’t the arguments between producers and directors, or directors and actors.

UB: You just have the fight between yourself.

FIR: But sometimes directors have to be ‘disciplined’ by the producer — they might say ‘If you want this shot, well, we can’t afford that one.’

GB: Even within ourselves, we’d say if we take this five minutes to do one shot, we won’t be able to get that other shot, so what’s going to be more important? Having that sense of responsibility also made our priorities clearer.

FIR: What kind of budget were you working with?

UB: Under $4 million

GB: If you consider that MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING’s budget was $6 million, that under $4 million is considered so grass-roots.

FIR: It’s a real independent movie, not one of these faux independents.

UB: Even to the point where we had walkie-talkies that weren’t working very well, and the fire department brought us over some other walkie-talkies. That really grass-roots independent.

GB: We were able to keep the costs down that way, with a lot of the generosity of the people and businesses in Buffalo — they donated what they could. All of the food was free, people helped sew costumes, the locations, the mayor helped us and gave us an office — major expenses were cut out of the budget because of people’s generosity.

FIR: Ursula, what was it like being the producer as well as an actor? Did you find yourself divided while wearing other hats? Were you able to turn that off to enter your character?

UB: You have to turn it off to enter your character, because the moment before you’re rolling, you’re still casting someone or talking with some crew member or making sure the food will be there. But it’s really exciting, and it’s this wonderful balance between two roles. When you’re hired by someone else to be an actor, you’re so pampered — you don’t have to worry about losing the light or people griping — they come and get you when it’s time to shoot. It’s so glorious. But when you’re doing your own project — I care so deeply about the projects that are ours, and they’re really a part of me. That’s so exciting, especially when you’re an actor and you have so little control over so much of the product that you end up doing, and so little control over the parts you get. It’s a really wonderful balance.

GB: There’s a great picture of Ursula. She’s in the nun’s habit in the scene where she’s getting the ashes at the altar. They were lighting for that, and she’s her own stand-in too…

FIR: Another cost savings!

GB: So she was sitting for the lighting in this nun’s habit, and she’s producing at the same time — she had two cell phones in her ear and she was casting for the young cast.

FIR: You did get a great cast together — a lot of people who are familiar from television, but to a certain extent casting them against type. How did you bring together wonderful actors like Shirley Jones, Frank Gorshin and Cloris Leachman?

GB: We had a wish list, and many of the hurdles were getting through their agents for what we were offering to pay. Then it was figuring out their schedules, because it was a month in Buffalo, in the winter. That was a big issue — we were going to cast some other people and their schedules didn’t work. Now we can’t imagine other people in this cast.

UB: We were very interested in casting against type — I think with all of us having performance backgrounds, and knowing what that’s like to have many different colors that you want to show — that’s why you become an actor, to step into so many different lives. That’s very interesting, to let people do what they really can do.

GB: And knowing that these people have that range, and that they could do those parts. That Shirley Jones could play a con artist, for instance.

FIR: Or that Jill Eikenberry could be mousy, when you think of her as the very directed “L.A. Law” lawyer.

GB: Jill Eikenberry said specifically that it was so exciting to play a responsive character, someone who is never initiating anything, but who is always responding to everybody else’s needs.

FIR: Ursula, are you anything like your character? Kind of innocent and otherworldly?

GB: I can answer that. As far as the casting process, we had a list of people we were thinking of for that. All of a sudden, my mother said Ursula would be perfect. We were looking for someone who did have that quality, and had that kind of beatific strength of character. Someone people would follow, but who wouldn’t be Pollyanna and sappy. It’s hard to find an actor who can hit that chord. Knowing Ursula so well, that was what was nice about this — here’s someone who could do this part and play it well. It wasn’t initially set to be this way — it came about in the casting process.

FIR: I understand you’re taking a grass-roots approach to marketing the movie as well.

GB: What happened was that we made the movie, and we took it to film festivals and it was winning audience awards. We could tell from people’s reactions that it had an audience, it was something that had legs. Then when we were talking with distributors, a bunch of them proposed opening the film in New York and L.A. and seeing if it stuck. Another one said, how about eight cities at the same time, but not really putting in a lot of prints and advertising money. That was scary because you could see the writing on the wall. If you open a movie in New York and L.A. for a weekend, without advertising, without a huge $35 million studio budget, you’ll probably, like most independent films, close in a week or two, and that’s the end of the story. Then they sell off the video rights and own the film for seven years.
So knowing that there was an audience out there, but that a lot depended on the way you marketed to them, our family decided that we would take a year of our lives and try it. We partnered with this releasing company, RS Entertainment. They had proposed a marketing structure similar to what we had been proposing to the large distributors, who had said ‘It can’t be done. Americans won’t go to see a feel-good independent American film. They’ll go see a feel-good French or British film. But the Americans are supposed to be dark or edgy.’ That’s the marketing structure.

UB: The whole marketing structure is geared for that. If you’re a WAKING NED DEVINE, FULL MONTY or BILLY ELLIOT, they’re set for that, but we didn’t have Irish accents, so they don’t know how to do it.

FIR: Just Buffalo accents.

GB: Irish Buffalo accents. We thought that’s kind of rigid, to say you have to be one or the other, and it is time for Americans to tell these feel-good stories about small communities coming together. We took the year — starting in August 2002, we opened it in Missouri, then Kansas, then Washington D.C., where we screened it for Congress, which was really exciting. Then we opened it in Arlington, Va., Greenbelt, Md., Buffalo, Olean, N.Y., Columbus, Ohio, and then Juneau, Alaska.

FIR: You’re really on the whistle-stop tour.

GB: And now we’re opening in New York and L.A. Originally we had planned a real whistle-stop, where we were traveling in a van, the Manna Van, from town to town. We thought it would be in 26 to 50 cities and play one or two weeks in each city. But in the first stop, Branson, Mo., it played six weeks, and in Kansas City is played eight weeks, which was really unusual for an independent. In Kansas City it doubled its box office the third week. So all of a sudden it became a different kind of release — and right then was when GREEK WEDDING hit.

FIR: I was going to ask about GREEK WEDDING, which was a feel-good independent that hit the jackpot.

UB: That won the lottery, but nevertheless it does show that people will go to a feel-good movie. It proves that idea wrong, but still some people consider it an anomaly, the exception

FIR: That doesn’t prove the rule.

GB: At the same time there’s a very reactive attitude in the film business — they have the “Greek Wedding” TV series and they are probably making GREEK WEDDING II— so you might have more feel-good, fun, quirky comedies.
So then [the theater owners] AMC and Regal noticed the numbers, and said we’ll book you into our theaters for a week, and if you can hold competitively against the other 25 films out there, then we’ll keep booking it one week at a time. So that’s what we’ve been doing.

UB: Each city we’ve gotten more and more theaters, and just expanded wider and wider.

FIR: So what’s the plan for New York?

UB: About 15 theaters, and in L.A. we’ll be in about 21.

FIR: So the strategy of building it has worked.

GB: It’s always like Sisyphus. Every Friday starts at the lower level — it doesn’t matter if last weekend you showed big numbers, and this weekend BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE opened on three screens and you might have dropped just a couple of points in rank. It doesn’t matter, you’re gone. If MANNA doesn’t come in at the top level, you’re out.

UB: I’m getting nervous just thinking about it.

FIR: But it’s already been out for eight months.

UB: That’s what’s so interesting — it does work. We’re still running in Buffalo, we’re in our tenth week there. But in each market, the bar is raised. It is a challenge — we don’t have that $35 million promotion budget, we don’t have TV ads running, we don’t have whole pages in newspapers, we’re not on all the talk shows. It’s a question of letting enough people know we’re actually opening. We’re in the theaters handing out fliers. It’s a constant battle — please put our posters up, please run our trailers.

GB: And there are so many levels. When you’re a studio, they have so many checkers on all those levels. We’re only seven people. It will be a huge opening in N.Y. and L.A., so it won’t be one filmmaker per theater as it’s been in other places. There are even the logistics of driving the prints around. Ursula and I were trying to figure these things out — we’re trying to get the prints to places and they’re hours and hours away from each other. And we won’t have half the bookings until the Monday before the opening, so you can’t get any posters in there, and you can’t get any trailers running. No pressure.

FIR: You mentioned the theme of the movie being about hope and dreams. Is it more than just a feel-good movie?

UB: Our sister Jennifer wrote her dissertation on hope, and what she was talking about was that Pollyanna is very different from what she defines as hope. I think that’s in our movie as well. It’s not that everything is whitewashed or perfect. There is adversity, and you have to acknowledge this adversity. In our movie there’s homelessness, people are being beaten up and are hungry and cold. You need to acknowledge that, and then say, but, people can make things a little bit better.
Even individuals — even the con artists played by Frank Gorshin and Shirley Jones — in the end, he doesn’t stop being a con artist just because he’s going to do something selfless. But he does something for somebody else — that’s the point. People can improve themselves, but in a realistic way. So I think it is hopeful but not Pollyanna.

GB: Part of it is about a community coming together, and rediscovering hope as a community. And a lot of people have been saying, in these times particularly, that that’s a really wonderful message to have in a movie, because people are so cynical and skeptical and these times are so uncertain and troubling. This movie is about, in a very small, reasonable way, how this community comes back together and finds itself. And the city around it gets revitalized by this process, and it all becomes just a little bit better. We’ve been hearing from audiences that this is something they want to see now, because it’s hard nowadays to find hope.

A Sony Pictures Classics Release.
112 minutes / Rated R / In Spanish with English subtitles.

There’s a very old and very sexist joke that says the perfect marriage would be the pairing of a blind wife with a deaf husband. In Talk to Her, writer-director Pedro Almodóvar flirts with the idea that an equally perfect pairing would be between a lovesick, virginal man and a beautiful but, unfortunately, comatose woman.

I know, I know, this sounds like a sick joke, but it actually makes for a mysteriously lovely movie. How people communicate—and how they don’t, or can’t—has been a terrific theme for dramatists and filmmakers for at least the last 75 years; Almodóvar brings his own brand of gender-bending and his infatuation with females, and female beauty, to bear on this conflict. Amazingly, he accomplishes this with a fairly light touch—the angst of non-communication is filtered through the juicy, entertaining melodrama of a soap opera.

At the heart of Talk to Her are two couples: Marco (Darío Grandinetti) and Lydia (Rosario Flores), and Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Alicia (Leonor Watling). Marco is a hunky, sensitive journalist who becomes involved with female bullfighter Lydia; both are struggling to free themselves from the emotional chains of difficult previous relationships. Benigno is a male nurse caring for Alicia, the lovely former dance student and current coma victim (he did know her, briefly, while she was still vertical). Fate brings the men together when Lydia, gored in the bullring, also succumbs to a coma and is placed in the same clinic that houses Alicia.

Almodóvar fractures the narrative, overlaying and interweaving these stories while moving back and forth in time. He uses a variety of devices to make us aware that there are multiple stories being told in this one film, which opens with a strange modern dance performance choreographed by Pina Bausch. Marco and Benigno are in the audience: they happen to be sitting next to each other, but they don’t actually meet until several months later at the clinic. Clear? Well, it’s not really that important to the overall flow. It’s more important that the performance moves Marco to tears, even though it’s never exactly explained why.

Another story-within-the-stories is the highlight and encapsulation of the entire film: a silent movie that pays homage to the 1950s sci-fi flick The Incredible Shrinking Man. Almodóvar’s mini-masterpiece literalizes the sexual subtext of that and similar films (i.e. The Fly). When the woman towers over the man (literally and figuratively), how can he satisfy her sexually? Almodóvar has a unique answer that may leave some people uncomfortable, but is, in the context of this film, nothing short of miraculous.

Talk to Her isn’t perfect. It’s a bit slow (and stops dead for a song by Caetano Veloso that’s good for mood, bad for moving the story ahead). It could also use a bit more humor; Almodóvar obviously recognizes the coincidences that drive the stories forward as the contrivances they are, so it wouldn’t hurt to let the audience in on the joke more often (as he does with the silent movie).

Even when the pacing drags, the performances are superlative. Grandinetti’s Marco is an appealing mix of openness and mystery, sensitivity and frustration. Flores’ Lydia maintains her femininity even as she is strapped into her tight, gender-eliminating bullfighting outfit. Leonor Watling’s Alicia makes you understand how someone could fall deeply, madly in love with her in her few non-comatose scenes.

Finally, Javier Cámara’s Benigno is a truly remarkable performance. Cámara’s broad face and wide eyes make him seem harmless, even a bit clownish, and his matter-of-fact line deliveries when he’s saying the most outrageous things provide the verbal equivalent of a double take. Cámara balances innocence and creepiness, love and obsession, desperation and calm acceptance in a way that’s ultimately extremely touching.

Talk to Her is itself an appealing combination—both mood piece and melodrama. Almodóvar, known for outrageous, overheated plots and flamboyant female performances, seems to be branching out in interesting ways.

Cast:
Javier Cámara,
Darío Grandinetti,
Leonor Watling,
Rosario Flores,
Geraldine Chaplin.

Credits:
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Javier Cámara’s Benigno is at the heart of Pedro Almodovar’s strange yet satisfying film Talk to Her. His remarkable performance as a naïve, virginal nurse who cares for a coma victim, talking to her as if she can hear every word he says, helps make the outrageous plot almost believable and definitely moving. Cámara, a popular television and theater actor in Spain, spoke with Films in Review’s Adam Blair about the challenges of playing a character who “doesn’t do anything but feels everything.”

Spoiler alert: Several key plot points in the movie are discussed during the interview.

Q: Pedro Almodóvar says you are Benigno, in a very intense way.

Javier Cámara: Yeah, I am.

Q: Would you like to delineate what is you and what is not you in Benigno?

JC: I don’t know. It’s so bizarre for me. It’s amazing to work with Pedro, very intense and very passionate. From the beginning, Pedro seemed to know that I was going to be Benigno. There was no casting, there was no test. So at our meeting in his office, he basically put the script on the table and said ‘If you love this as much as I love this, and you are as drawn to this material as I am, this is yours.’
I said, what? You are Pedro Almodóvar, I’m a stupid actor, a TV actor/theater actor—I’m not a star. You don’t know me. For me this situation is fantastic, it’s my dream, but it’s not really true. Pedro told me, I don’t know why, but I think Benigno is for you, and Benigno is in you, inside you. And when I read the script, it was a big travel, a trip. An amazing story.
And the script changed during the film, because Pedro improved, and improvised, constantly. He has the story very clear in his head, but he improvised. I talked constantly with Darío [Grandinetti] who plays Marco. Pedro would say ‘This scene is about love;’ ‘In this scene you need to talk about marriage;’ ‘You love Alicia and you need to talk with your friend.’
I would say, but Pedro, the story is very changed, I don’t know. The movie is in your head? He would say, yeah yeah yeah yeah, I’m very clear with the film, but now play for me.

Q: You seem to be very opposite to Benigno—what did you bring from yourself that made you comprehend the character?

JC: Yes, I’m very different. Benigno has two lives, I think. When I talked with Pedro, I said for me Benigno is impossible—he’s very emotional and is very passionate, but Benigno doesn’t move. I found playing the character of Benigno very difficult. Because it’s like having to walk this very fine line—this character who felt all these things but couldn’t express them, couldn’t show them. I had to keep it at just the right level, and at the end of the film you find out he was full of all these feelings.
The passion is inside of Benigno. But during the big part of the beginning of the film, he touches Alicia constantly. I think Benigno is completely professional [when he’s caring for Alicia] as the nurse. He doesn’t feel possession, or something disgusting, or something erotic.

Q: He’s very innocent.

JC: He’s very innocent. But his feelings are true. As an actor playing this character, I had to portray someone who knows he’s living in a parallel universe. Although his touch is innocent, he does, at the same time, feel these other things. But he does know the rules of real life. He needs somebody near him—Marco, the man. He needs his friend, his father figure, for talking and opening his heart. When I talk about Benigno, I don’t know if I defend the role too much, because I love the role. I love the film, I’m not objective with the film.

Q: It’s an evocative title, “Talk to Her.” What’s your interpretation of the title?

JC: I think it’s very interesting. When people translate the title into other languages—for example, in Greek, ‘talk to her’ is a normal conversation. In Spain, it’s another meaning—it’s a [more formal] invitation to talk.
I talked with Alicia during the film, during the shoot, especially during the moment of the rape. The rape scene was an uncomfortable scene for me to film. I had been working with this actress who has had her eyes closed for all this time. This was the first time during the shoot that Pedro looked to the woman who plays Alicia [Leonor Watling] and said look at Benigno, talk to him.
And I saw Alicia—she looked at me with big, enormous love, and invited me to touch her body. Now I feel something—because during three months, this body is dead. The eyes are closed, and I touch the body—it’s not dead, it’s warm—and constantly during the shooting I touched her hand, because Leonor told me ‘I’m afraid because my eyes are closed, and I hear a lot of things and a lot of movements, and I need to touch somebody.’ I said don’t worry, I’m here, I’ll touch you. Because Pedro told me, you talk constantly with her, when you clean her body you talk with her. There was a lot of improvisation with the other nurse, talking and talking with Alicia—‘hello, good morning, oh my little ass, it’s clean here, or bad girl’. There was a lot of improvisation—while the director of photography is getting the lights ready and there are 40 people in the room, the other nurse and me are talking to her. It’s something peculiar—the work is constant in the room.

Q: It must have been very difficult for her to stay still and for you to keep her calm or relaxed into that state.

JC: I think the most difficult role is for her. It’s awful—her job was obviously the hardest one. Nobody really gives her as much credit as she deserves for having to spend three months completely motionless.

Q: The moment that sets up the rape is when Benigno sees the silent film, and he interprets it as a green light that he can go ahead and do this act. What’s your interpretation of that?

JC: When Benigno and Alicia talk on the street, she says I like cinema, I like dance, I like travel. Later when Benigno talks with Marco, he says that he loves film and sees all the films. Benigno takes the life of Alicia and invents a new life, but a new life without her. Benigno is like an angel—he’s so innocent. He experiences film like the dance—completely differently, from this more innocent standpoint.

Q: In the end he does sacrifice himself for her—it’s only because she gets pregnant and has the baby that she comes out of the coma. So in a way, he very innocently does sacrifice his life for her.

JC: Yes. When the movie premiered in Rome, I stayed in the city another week. I walked through the Vatican, and a biker screeched to a halt and called ‘Benigno!’ There was a huge line of people waiting to get into the Vatican and people were wondering what had happened. And it was a priest on a motorcycle. He talked with me about the film because he loved the film. I asked the priest what he thought about this rape, because he raped her for life. He said he loved the film, because it’s a metaphor—it’s a fairy tale. The music at the beginning of the film is not reality. It begins another story, and the music, the dance is a metaphor and all is a fairy tale. And the finale is another dance, it’s a metaphor, not a reality. And I said oh yes, in my next interview, I’ll say ‘It’s a metaphor.’

Q: You had read the entire script, so you had a sense of the whole film. Did it help you to know how it all starts and resolves in the other characters’ lives, or was it better not to think about that when you were thinking about your role?

JC: Luckily Benigno’s story was shot in order. For me it’s great—I saw the answers—day after day it was evolving. For me it was fantastic.
What I wanted was for people to be able to forgive Benigno. During the course of the film, people don’t forgive Benigno—people don’t understand this situation. When people in the film said the truth—Benigno is a rapist—but it’s pure love, it’s romantic. At the beginning of the film, I saw these feelings—I realized what Benigno felt, and he didn’t even want to acknowledge it himself. When I would ask Pedro ‘Pedro please, I don’t understand Benigno, it’s very difficult for me. Benigno doesn’t do anything, at the same time he feels everything. I’m a TV comedian! It’s impossible for me to stay here.’

Q: How did the part change you as a person, and how did it affect what you want to do next?

JC: It changed something, I don’t know what. Working with Pedro, I’m near to an artist. He’s a person who searches constantly but with a lot of passion and a lot of feelings and a whole history to make art, to make something unique—to make something artistic. Not in the ‘I am an artist’ way—like it’s natural. He needs to tell his stories. He needs to film, he needs to write. And this is the closest I’ve ever felt to an artist. Pedro is constantly working—he’s working with his feelings.
In the jail scene, the last week for me was very special. Pedro was crying with me in the jail—and in the moment when Marco is waiting and I look out the window and it’s raining—Pedro came to me and told me a story, about his sin in his life, and I feel this story is not autobiographical, but he feels the story deeply in his soul. It’s a connection with your most intimate part, your artist part. The art exists for me, and now in my life, I search for something inside me for making this.

Q: What was the story he told?

JC: Oh, it’s a secret.

Q: What’s your next role?

JC: In the next movie I’m a pornographer. Sorry, yes, it’s a little film in Spain—we’re a couple of poor Spaniards that have to make porn in order to survive. With this body!

There are big-budget Hollywood movies, and there are more personal, smaller films. You can’t get much more personal than Some Body, which explores the often messy relationships of a woman played by Stephanie Bennett—and is based, in part, on events and people in the actress/co-writer/producer’s life. It even features some of Bennett’s old flames playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Some Body is raw and honest about sex, love and loneliness. Let’s put it this way: This may be the only movie this year where there’s a comparative discussion of vagina size. Bennett and director/co-writer Henry Barrial talked about how Some Body went from an idea to a feature film (thanks in large part to the low-budget miracle of digital video) with Films in Review’s Adam Blair. Some Body, released by Lot 47 Films, opens April 26.

Q: What was the genesis of this film?

HENRY BARRIAL: Stephanie and I had been going to the same acting school/theater group, a Meisner-based training center called Playhouse West in Los Angeles. I knew Stephanie, we had some common friends, but I didn’t know her all that well. We were working on a scene from John Guare’s Landscape of the Body, where I’m playing a detective and she’s playing a mother accused of killing her child.

At that time we were starting on the advanced work—the idea of trying to find a parallel to the scene that you can understand and live out. I showed up at Stephanie’s place to rehearse, and interrogated Stephanie on aspects of her life that I thought were borderline, or something. It led to such a kind of cathartic, wonderful experience for both of us, and it was so real—there was something so raw about it—eventually it led to the idea of making a movie based on her life, where we could explore, in that kind of brutal manner, what was going on during that period in her life.

I do need to say that she was going through a particularly rough period in her life, and so was I. We thought maybe there were some universal elements here.

STEPHANIE BENNETT: We had the idea, and the original idea was to make a short film. We started to bring in other actors to do improvisations to help us write the script. Eventually that turned into an outline for the feature. We never had a full-on script. We developed the outline, and then we’d bring the actors in, and heavily discuss the dynamics of the scene, where we wanted it to go, where our story was going, where the scene should go. But obviously this is an exploration, so if it goes somewhere else then so be it—we’re shooting digital video (DV), we can shoot as much as we want. But always the idea was to create something as brutally honest and truthful as we possibly could.

We were talking about this before—it’s so not about being a woman, or a man—everybody, I think, goes through the experience of being alone and a little bit desperate. In the beginning I thought it was more about myself and the people that surrounded me. Once I started writing about it, I started noticing how everybody seemed to be searching for their somebody. They wanted their somebody, and in the meantime they’re drinking or drugging or sleeping around. I’ve seen it in different settings, so it hopefully has universality for everybody.

Q: Maybe the search has universality.

BENNETT: And the vices you deal with to be alone are different for everybody, but I think a lot of people have their own way of being alone. Maybe some people are more comfortable with it than others.

Q: How much contribution would you say the different actors had to the final shape of the piece?

BENNETT: Lots. These actors, when they were cast, they were asked—just like I was asked and was dedicated to do, was to talk about everything and be as honest with everything, and take it and not be embarrassed and ashamed—to talk about things we normally don’t talk about.

BARRIAL: When I would do the interviews with the actors, I would ask them not to tell me whether what they were saying was true or false. I didn’t care.

Q: So some of it might have been improv, and some of it might have been real life—you didn’t know.

BARRIAL: I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.

BENNETT: The whole thing became this kind of weird dirty game—nobody knew what was real and what wasn’t.

Q: There are some scenes where the characters are judging your character, and I wonder if there’s a bit of a double standard at work. Your character is going through a wild period and indulging in some vices, but the next-door-neighbor character admits that he’s a male slut—butthat gets treated as humorous.

BENNETT: We were saying this yesterday—if I had directed this movie and Henry had starred, it wouldn’t be interesting if a man was doing this kind of stuff. Nobody cares, everybody expects that. If a woman does it, people take it so much more seriously, and they’re so apt to look down on it.

BARRIAL: And what does she really do that’s so bad? We’ve had some responses where people just get angry. It’s almost like people would rather see somebody get shot in the film than somebody admitting or saying some of these things.

BENNETT: In the long run it’s a compliment to us as the filmmakers—people see this as such a reality, they feel like they’re watching a documentary, it’s so voyeuristic, that they take it so seriously. And they also may be faced with something in themselves that they don’t want to admit they’ve ever gone through.

Q: Well then, here’s the $64 question—how much of what appears in the movie is you, or reflects you at that time period?

BENNETT: The basic outline was certain situations that had happened to me. But once we started developing the story and went into the editing room, we edited for over a year, and if something didn’t work, we could go back out and shoot something that would help a little bit. So we could shoot and edit, shoot and edit—in the end we did things for dramatic effect, switched things around a little bit, and obviously some characters got a little bit out of control. A lot of it is based on real life, but a lot of it is not.

BARRIAL: One of the things we did was cast a couple of people who were really involved with Stephanie—whose work we knew, and who were terrific actors. I wanted to try and get those men in the movie, to play themselves and re-explore the situation, because we were doing a lot of improvising, and there could be a specificity to the improvising. Improvising can bite you in the ass, but if you could get people who really had an emotional stake in what was going on, then you could catch that specificity that you wouldn’t normally be able to catch. I felt that was an important element.

Q: How long did the shooting process take? And the editing?

BARRIAL: It’s tough to say—we both work full time, so we’d edit after work. Basically we shot for two weeks, and 65-70% of what’s in the film was captured during those two 2 weeks. Then we had to wait for [director of photography/editor/composer] Geoff Pepos to move down from Montana with his editing equipment and get set up in his bedroom. Then once that started going, we had 100 hours of footage to look through, which took a few weeks.

BENNETT: We had the best intentions of being done in a few months, and then of course it ended up being about a year. But the great thing about digital video is, once the year was over and Next Wave Films came on board and gave us finishing funds, we could work with Next Wave to say, how are we going to make this the most marketable movie that we can? So we were even able to change it up to Sundance 2001. And even after we projected digitally at Sundance, we were able to massage a tiny bit the things we didn’t like at Sundance.

BARRIAL: Because we hadn’t seen it on the big screen until Sundance 2001.

Q: What did you get from the Sundance audiences, or the people there?

BARRIAL: It was nerve-wracking, obviously. But with each screening, we seemed to find the audience that would be interested in this kind of film. So I thought each screening got progressively better.

BENNETT: Another thing that I discovered about the movie was that there were a lot of people who really related to it in a big way and loved it, and then there were a lot of people who dismissed it—the digital video problem, the production values, no stars, and also the story—people saying “I don’t know anybody like this, it’s just the filmmakers masturbating all over themselves,” this kind of thing. This holds true still—people either really love it or really hate it, there’s no in between. Which I prefer. Either way, it’s causing very strong emotion. People have very strong emotions and opinions about it, it’s something that sticks with them for a couple of days, they think about it afterwards.

Q: The film has a very ambiguous ending. I thought it was saying that your character was still in the process of change, and that she might not get back together with Anthony, the original boyfriend.

BENNETT: A lot of people don’t like that, that there’s not a big lesson learned, or that you don’t see the big change happen. We had about five different endings. When we ultimately decided on this ending, I liked it the best, because it’s exactly what you just said. Because big life change doesn’t happen overnight. We’re doing a slice of life movie, so why are we going to do a slice of life movie and then come out with this big Hollywood ending, to tell you she’s made this big change? It would be so fake and phony. This is a woman who wants to change, but it doesn’t necessarily come that easy, it’s something that very very slowly happens as you keep living.

BARRIAL: And here was the advantage of basing an idea on somebody’s life. We said, what’s going on with you now? And Stephanie said, I’m in the process of change. So that’s where we kind of left it.

Q: Do you feel that the independent film market, or side of the movie business, is more receptive to this type of movie, or is it moving towards the more traditional types of stories and films?

BENNETT: Big stars are doing independent films, and winning Oscars for them.

BARRIAL: It is the arena where different films get out into theaters, and people get an opportunity to see them. I feel like, though, there’s still a snobbishness to the independent film world—snobbishness is too harsh a word. There’s a mind-set—if you’re going to make an independent film, make it dark, or violent, or campy.

BENNETT: When we were sitting in the editing room, I did all kinds of homework on what kind of festival we thought we would be right for. I almost didn’t submit this to Sundance—I thought we wouldn’t have a chance in hell. I thought we would need a star, some kind of beautiful setting, a million-dollar budget, production values. We almost didn’t submit it—we didn’t know anybody. It was kind of a miracle that it was accepted.

There are these big-budget movies with big stars that are becoming ‘independent,’ so to speak, because Hollywood is making such shit, and because big stars can win Oscars this way. At the same time, it’s hard to say, because we were the ones who were given the chance. We were the dark horse that was let into the club, for that year.

Q: Maybe we need a new phrase, beyond independent. Maybe independent has outlived its usefulness. You mentioned the low budget—what kind of budget were you working with in this film?

BARRIAL: We didn’t have any money—this movie wouldn’t have been made without DV. We shot this before The Celebration [the Dogma 95 film] came out—we were editing at the time.

BENNETT: Which helped us to see that it’s all about the story, with the best acting we can get, then who gives a shit what it looks like.

BARRIAL: Right—it’s all about content. But to go back to budget—it cost us around $3,000 to film.

BENNETT: We didn’t pay anybody, we didn’t pay for any locations.

BARRIAL: We owned our equipment—the price of the film was the DV tapes—you can buy them for $7-10 apiece. And since we were shooting in this style, with no lighting, people would just show up. What was great about DV is actors show up and say ‘ho-hum, it’s just DV.’ And that’s great, because they calm down.

BENNETT: There’s no pressure.

BARRIAL: They don’t think anything’s going to happen with this. That allows the actors—I’ve acted before and know how nerve-wracking it can be. And I felt like that attitude, the atmosphere, the banal atmosphere—we could sit around. I told them, it doesn’t cost us anything to shoot for an hour—you can mess up, you can talk, we’ll discuss—so there was an easing of tension.

BENNETT: To get the film ready for Sundance, and make a film print—obviously now the budget is much larger. But to actually shoot it was less than $5,000.

BARRIAL: The philosophy of the school we had attended was, and is, that you explore but you don’t know where you’re going to wind up. That’s how we went at this film—we didn’t know where we were going to end up. We would find out where we were going to wind up in the editing room. The editing room became part of the writing process—almost to compensate for the lack of writing that we had. And with DV, again, you’re editing in somebody’s bedroom—we’re not paying anybody to edit, we’re editing it ourselves.

BENNETT: Of course the editor became a third partner.

BARRIAL: I thought that was an advantage—Geoff, the editor, calls it a garage movie. We got together and did this thing.

BENNETT: But it was a labor of love—lots of blood, sweat and tears.

BARRIAL: Lots of creative arguments.

BENNETT: Lots of passion going on.

Q: So it was developed very organically, but with actors who are all trained in that organic method . . .

BARRIAL: One of the things we studied at this school was the Group Theater. Clifford Odets would write roles specifically for certain actors. That’s kind of what we did. We put this person in and we know what the relationship is, and sure enough when we shot it, although things went different ways, the essence didn’t change.

Q: What’s next for you professionally?

BENNETT: I’m pursuing other acting jobs, he’s pursuing other directing jobs. But at the same time we’re writing another script together.

Q: In the same style as Some Body?

BENNETT: We’d like to keep in that same type of vein.

BARRIAL: Maybe build on what we’ve learned and continue to explore. And also, possibly, although continuing to work in the digital world, bump it up to digi-beta, or shooting high-definition—depending on what finances allow. But we also want to continue to explore in an organic manner. It’s another relationship story, about whether modern marriages can survive our cynicism.

Q: Are either of you married?

BENNETT: He just got married. I have a boyfriend—obviously with this new script we’re drawing on very personal experiences too. I’m suddenly finding myself faced with this kind of decision. I’ve always been so scared of marriage, because I’m the product of divorce. The film will deal with, how does modern marriage work, and is it a smart thing to do?

BARRIAL: People seem more cynical nowadays about it—sometimes people find out you’re married and say, oh. It’s like a death sentence.

BENNETT: [laughing] Oh, I’m so sorry, I hope it works out.

BARRIAL: But the truth of it is I was horrible at being single, and I hated being single, and I’m not good at it. I’m glad that I found somebody that I plan on spending the rest of my life with. I don’t know how people do it—I had a really hard time being single—that was part of why we both related to wanting to make this film.

80 minutes

If Some Body were the documentary that it often resembles, a better title might be “The Mating Habits of Straight People.” I can almost hear the voice-over narration, 1950s-era Disney-nature-film style: “Having left the protection of a long-term relationship, the female human embarks on a series of exploratory encounters with other potential mates. But look out! There’s danger ahead!”

That’s basically the story, but Some Body, despite its resemblance to a documentary, is actually a fiction film about twentysomething Samantha (Stephanie Bennett) and her search for love, sex, companionship and some sense of herself. Based on some elements of actress/co-writer/producer Bennett’s own life—and even featuring some of her past likes and loves in corresponding fictional roles—Some Body aims for an in-your-face realism about relationships.

Unfortunately, despite a few flashes of hilariously frank talk about sex and a grittily realistic view of the many ways love can turn sour, Some Body finds mostly banal cliches rather than the universal truths it’s so obviously seeking. Bennett and co-writer/director Barrial used improvisational techniques with the actors and shot Some Body on digital video, which gives the film a welcome low-budget feeling of spontaneity but also sinks the dialogue and situations deep into the mundane.

Granted, the dialogue that “real people” spout when they’re in the process of breaking up, making out and creepily stalking others is usually less than Noel Coward brilliant. And I will certainly admit I’m from the school of thought that says, as Alfred Hitchcock put it so well, that movies should not be a slice of life but a slice of cake.

Still, I don’t think it’s just the plainness and clumsiness of Some Body that made it such rough going. Other filmmakers have turned those vices into virtues. And I’m not always a fan of cleverness and gloss for its own sake. I got almost as impatient watching a glossy Hollywood version of the mating game on cable (Someone Like You, with Ashley Judd, Greg Kinnear and Hugh Jackman) a week before I saw Some Body. Someone was more “entertaining” than Some Body—the leads were cuter in the Hollywood movie, they worked in a more glamorous setting (a TV talk show vs. an elementary school), the dialogue was snappier and the movie certainly looked better (downtown New York vs. semi-downscale Los Angeles, major-studio cinematography vs. low-light DV).

What both movies shared, despite their different kinds of “sophistication,” was a rather maddening oversimplification of their female leads’ motivations and journeys. Ashley Judd’s character in Someone is dumped by Greg Kinnear and becomes obsessed with the idea that men are “bulls” who are always looking for a “new cow” to screw, while disdaining the “old cow” that they have already serviced. I won’t say much more except to note that both Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd look great in their underwear.

In Some Body, Samantha’s character does the dumping at the start, and then finds to her chagrin that her long-term boyfriend Anthony (Jeramy Guillory) has moved on to a new, more sexually satisfying relationship more quickly than she has. Samantha has a quick affair with the boy next door (literally) at her new apartment and also has a one-night-stand that incipient stalker Tony T (Tom Vitorino) would like to turn into something more permanent. Samantha’s relationship with Bobby (Sean Michael Allen) begins with them falling into bed after she drinks too much (she’s dressed as a devil at a costume party), but surprisingly they start what seems to be a relationship with some promise.

Still, for all the straight-to-the-camera confessions and the frankness about sexuality of Some Body, I still felt like I didn’t know much more about Samantha (much less any of the other characters) at the film’s end than the beginning. It’s not that I want the filmmakers to spell out every motivation in capital letters, and I’m fine with the ambiguity of the ending. But I think the filmmakers themselves are so close to the characters that they haven’t decided how they feel about them—or if they have, they’re not telling us. Even a documentary isn’t just raw footage; it needs a point of view, and Some Body’s seems to be simply: relationships are tough, especially for women, and love and sex are confusing for everybody. It’s not enough

Credits:
Directed by Henry Barrial
Written by Stephanie Bennett and Henry Barrial

Cast:
With Stephanie Bennett, Jeramy Guillory, Billy Ray Gallion, Laura Katz, Tom Vitorino, Sean Michael Allen

Released by Fine Line Features
Rated R / 89 minutes

I’m tempted to say that Todd Solondz’ STORYTELLING is critic-proof. Not in the way HARRY POTTER was destined/designed to rake in the golden galleons no matter what the nation’s critics thought of the actual film, but in a cleverer and even more sinister way.

STORYTELLING’s premise is that the act of telling a story, and of interpreting it, is in and of itself either impossible or ridiculous. So even though the stories told (there are two unrelated sections, “Fiction” and “Nonfiction”) are repellent, containing “characters” without a single redeeming trait-and few recognizably human traits-one feels like a fool for criticizing them, or the film itself. Eventually, one even feels like a fool reacting to them, though that didn’t stop the disgust from welling up while I watched the film.

Throughout STORYTELLING, Solondz (who also directed the bleakly funny WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE and HAPPINESS, which I didn’t see but which sounds similarly sick), picks apart the processes and conventions of creating stories-both the ones writers and filmmakers use, and those people use in their everyday lives.

In “Fiction,” the first and shorter of the two sections, Vi (Selma Blair), a graduate student taking a creative writing course, is involved with fellow student Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), who has cerebral palsy. After Marcus’ short story-apparently a sentimental, fictionalized account of their relationship-is ripped apart during one seminar, Marcus breaks up with Vi for not supporting him during the critique session. She then embarks on a particularly ill-advised one-night stand with the course’s professor, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), a charismatic black author with a penchant for rough, degrading sex with his students. Vi attempts to get back at the professor by writing a story about the experience, but it, too, gets a thumbs-down from the students-for being racist, misogynistic, confusing, etc.

It sounds like a predictable, banal graduate-student short story, and that’s how Solondz directs it as well. At first glance it feels a bit like satire-the way that people say exactly the opposite of what they’re thinking, and the squirming embarrassment in the writing seminar scenes, have the ring of just slightly stretched truth. But other scenes play more like theater of the absurd. Vi’s pickup of the professor in a local bar is so underwritten-for a writer he’s not exactly eloquent-that it’s like an outline of this archetypal event rather than a specific scene between two people.

Solondz also uses filmmaking’s conventions to play with our expectations. When Vi and the professor do have sex, he superimposes a big red rectangle over the middle third of the screen. We are cued to understand that it’s an “X-rated” scene-but it’s also the central fact of this “story,” and we are not allowed to see what “happens” with our own eyes (and make our own judgments). Does Vi deserve to be brutalized? Does she enjoy it? Is she sickened by it? Exactly how stupid/shallow is she?

These would all be legitimate questions in a conventional story/film, but again Solondz pulls the rug out. The students in the graduate writing seminar-the audience-misunderstand Vi’s story, applying their own prejudices and rejecting the real human pain underneath it. And we realize that we’re simply watching a story too. One reason Solondz makes the story so basic is so that we can see how each small detail colors our reactions. For example, when Vi goes to Scott’s apartment, she sees nude, S&M snapshots of his other seminar student conquests before she has sex with him. (She whispers to herself “Don’t be racist. Don’t be racist.”) So she’s aware of how badly this could go. How would we feel about her if she didn’t know ahead of time exactly what a sicko the professor was?

I’m going into this level of detail because it seems to be the point of the film. Scott basically announces the theme near the end of “Fiction”: “Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction.”

Well, if fiction is poisoned, how about “Nonfiction”? The second segment concerns itself with a would-be documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti, sweaty and desperate) who decides to focus on a suburban teen as the subject for his project. He picks Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber), a walking catalog of hot-button teen “issues”: drug user/abuser, ambitionless, fascinated with guns, passively homosexual, full of empty dreams of becoming a TV “personality” like Conan O’Brien but with no clue how to achieve even that hollow victory.

Scooby’s parents are caricatures, with good actors John Goodman and Julie Hagerty used for their most obvious traits (his physical size and blustering voice, her oversized eyes and questioning whine). Jonathan Osser as Scooby’s younger brother-supposedly the “good” child in the family-is in actuality the creepiest creation of Solondz’ weird imagination. Veteran actress Lupe Ontiveros, as the Livingston’s overworked maid, comes the closest to creating a coherent human character-until Solondz decrees that she take revenge on the selfish, materialistic family that has fired her.

Throughout “Nonfiction,” Solondz gives us a number of surrogate audiences for the unfolding events. I would call those events tragic but, as in “Fiction,” I have a sneaking suspicion that everybody deserves what they get-but there I go making actual judgments about characters who are hardly even one-dimensional.

In any case, Giamatti and his editor (Franka Potente) view the footage in various stages of completion. And near the end, Giamatti screens a rough cut of the documentary for an invited audience of downtown hipster types. They laugh hysterically at the suburban stupidity and crass materialism of the Livingstons-though it’s not terribly funny stuff.

Again, Solondz plays with our own reactions. If we laughed too, we would be as heartlessly “sophisticated” as the audience in the movie. If we don’t laugh, we can look down on the ironic hipsters as well. Both interpretations are equally valid.

Of course, Solondz is hardly the first filmmaker to play with an audience’s expectations, or to implicate their voyeurism in darker emotions. Kubrick’s CLOCKWORK ORANGE certainly comes to mind, as does much of Hitchcock’s best work. One of my favorite moments in PSYCHO is after the infamous shower scene. Norman Bates has put Marion Crane’s body into her car and pushed it to the edge of the swamp, to bury the evidence of “Mother’s” crime. The car sinks, burbling and guggling. Then it stops, its back half still conspicuously out of the water, and in a few chilling reaction shots Anthony Perkins-who has been nervously chewing candy-stops too. The audience holds its breath. Hitchcock has maneuvered us to want the car to sink, and it finally does after a few more agonizing seconds. This short sequence never fails to get either a laugh or a sigh of relief from the audience. We want evidence of the crime to be buried-not only because Perkins has created a sympathetic monster but because we want the story to go on.

STORYTELLING is undeniably a powerful piece of filmmaking. It’s also disturbing, and unpleasant. Is it worth it? Is Solondz just playing intellectual games? Does he hate his audience? Does he hate himself? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I guess it’s to his credit that I’m even asking them.

Written and directed by Todd Solondz
With Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom (“Fiction”); Paul Giamatti, John Goodman, Julie Hagerty, Mark Webber, Jonathan Osser and Lupe Ontiveros
(“Nonfiction”)

Ghost story. Political allegory. Coming-of-age film. [Anti-] war movie. Spanish-style soap opera. According to director and co-screenwriter Guillermo del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone is all of these. Films in Review’s Adam Blair caught up with the filmmaker to learn how he mixes and matches art film elements with Hollywood know-how.

Q: In the visual structure of the film, there’s a predominance of certain colors. What are your reasons for making this type of visual impression?

DEL TORO: The reason is that the entire movie is a memory; the movie is also supposed to be where ghosts are like insects in amber, or like old photographs. So taking that, we decided the entire color palette was going to be limited to sepia, amber, earth colors and very muted forms of green. This color palette renders the entire frame sort of like an amber image, and helps give the sense of encapsulating the characters, like amber would encapsulate an insect. At the same time, it would make the movie more quiet, and visually the blood, when it appears, would be far more striking and violent.

What I wanted very much was for the movie to have a very affecting use of blood and violence. Not violence as amusement at any point. Because if it’s a an anti-war movie, I could not allow any death, including that of the bad guy, to be pleasurable for the audience. So I tried to make it really shocking and really brutal and not a pleasurable experience-even when you may find a reason [to kill]. If you make a war movie where someone enjoys a killing, it’s not an anti-war movie; it’s something else.

Q: There’s a lot of duality in the film. Can you talk about how you developed that structure?

DEL TORO: The whole movie, I felt, needed to be constructed on a rhyme. The movie was about a big war but contained inside a small war. If one was a mirror image of the other, the best way to refer to the rest of the movie was by having an opening that was exactly like, or similar to, the ending-but different. And every time one thing repeated itself, it actually enhanced the one before.

The same character, for example, recites poetry twice. [Cásares, the older man in love with the widow played by Marisa Paredes]. The first time he’s just doing it as a courtship exercise, and the second time he’s on the verge of tears, and really reciting for dear life. Two kids fall in the water. Two characters whose names begin with “J” are bullies, one of him amends his ways, the other one doesn’t. Every time you achieve a rhythm of rhyme, through repetition.

I felt that this movie needed that visually-even to the point where I repeat exact camera moves in totally different circumstances. There are visual quotes for different moments that are exactly like each other. The bomb falls twice: the first time it’s an act of war; the second time it’s the hand of God telling the guy “you’re a coward.” Everything is done in pairs to give that sense of rhythm-as if you were understanding a little more of the world you are entering by repetition.

Q: This story is based on a novel?

DEL TORO: No, it’s totally original. The movie is a story that I’ve been writing for 16 years. It was originally my screenplay writing thesis, and I graduated with it. But then I kept writing and writing and writing. Eventually I found a screenplay by two Spanish guys that contained elements-like the bomb-that I was totally taken with, and I decided I was going to fuse it with my own. Curiously enough, it was my screenplay that happened in the [Spanish] Civil War. Their screenplay occurred in a war with no exact geography.

Q: Could you talk about the political aspects of the film, particularly given what’s been happening today?

DEL TORO: It’s completely a terrible accident in a way, and in another way it liberates me from having to articulate how I feel about it. I think that evidently the movie has characters that have to resort to violence, but they do not embrace it as a way of life. It has the kids coming together as one-once every single adult has let them down. Every single adult is disappointing, as they are often in childhood. They promise you things they don’t deliver; they theorize about things they don’t act upon; and all of them seem incomplete characters. One lacks a leg, one lacks a heart, and the other one’s impotent-he is ultimately a revolutionary man that is incapable of firing a shot. A revolution, now and then, requires a shot.

This revolutionary character, Cásares, is incapable of taking action. He just likes poetry, and likes talking about hope and freedom and all that. And then all of a sudden everybody and everything starts dying around him. It’s a completely impotent character beyond the sexual aspects of it-he’s politically impotent, philosophically impotent.

The thing with politics is very simple-if you don’t care about politics, politics are going to end up taking care of you. If people try to negate the war enough, and for enough time, long enough, ultimately it catches up with them, in the worst, most intimate way. And that’s what happens in the movie.

I think what happens then is the kids-who are an incomplete group, afraid, injured, poorly organized-have to take each other as a group and act upon what they know is inevitable. But to me the importance of the movie, or the significance of that gesture, is that it’s not a violence that anyone in the group enjoys. It’s not as if the kids are stabbing this man and squealing with joy, or as if, at the end of the movie, they go into the desert with the shotgun. They do what they need to do and return the shotgun to the adults. What you have at the end is an almost metaphorical image of kids facing a desert, and they’re no longer kids, they’re fragile adults, in the sense that they mature through the rite of passage.

Q: What type of technology did you use to achieve the special effects-such as the ghost seeming to have water around him all the time.

DEL TORO: For the digital effects, most of the stuff is off-the-shelf programs. We did not write code for this or anything, but we use them in a more offbeat way than a Hollywood production would. The normal procedure for the ghost would be to hang the poor kid on wires, shoot him against green screen, probably put an aura of glow around him, make him transparent all the time, and make the whole presence of the ghost digital. The ghost then becomes an abstraction, it becomes something that doesn’t coexist with the character in the same frame. I wanted to avoid that, so I approached the ghost as a kid in makeup, physically there in the frame, then enhanced later by digital effects.

Q: So the blood coming out . . .

DEL TORO: Is digital, and it’s composed in, and we have a two-dimensional effect on the distortion around him. We have 3-D animated particles around his forehead for the blood and diffusion, and then we have a series of 3-D objects floating around that are like debris in the water. So ultimately when we composite these elements together, the presence of the ghost becomes both physical and beautifully ethereal, because we’re using elements that are floating in the air, but he’s really there in the frame. And there’s a sense of not being a Hollywood ghost that just glows and is not really there.

Q: You got some remarkable performances, especially from the child actors. Is that another reason you wanted to have the actor playing the ghost on the set?

DEL TORO: Yes, but actually the kids seemed to respond to that kind of stuff in a normal way, because they see the whole process, they see the makeup, and there are about 80 technicians around. It’s like shooting lovemaking-you don’t get aroused.

The two main kids and I went into about three months of theater exercises, theater games. We went into everything from finding a breathing exercise that would work to have them hyperventilate at the moment; all the way to teaching them the basics of what I understand in my experience to work, from methods such as Sanford Meisner’s method, or things I find practical in life.

The one thing I did with the kids is I treated them like adult actors. I think the best way to deal with kids in life is never to condescend. You talk to them equal to equal, and they, more often than not, surprise you in how sophisticated they are mentally.

Q: As you developed the story, did it always have the supernatural ghost story elements?

DEL TORO: Yes, always. What I wanted very much was to talk about ghosts as things you lose, or don’t get, or that get destroyed in front of your face, and haunt you for the rest of your life. I wanted to do that very much with a war. Have a guy that loses something that can never recover it, or a guy that hates his childhood and would love to have another childhood but can’t-and that haunts him. These elements were born at the same time, in and of the same impulse. I think the beauty of understanding evil or good is if we understand it in the small ways that it happens and the big ways that it happens, and one reflects the other.

One of my favorite directors is Sam Fuller. He had a way of making B movies that were great allegories for something else. I think it would be a failure of the movie if it were an allegory that weren’t entertaining enough. I try to keep them simple and entertaining enough, but if you want to dig a little deeper there’s a lot more. But the first duty of the movie is to flow, as simply and effortlessly as possible.

Q: What was the budget of The Devil’s Backbone?

DEL TORO: Total cost of the movie is between $5 and $6 million.

Q: And the potential profit?

DEL TORO: I have no idea. The reality is that, as far as our production company, we were already in the black by the time we finished the movie, because we were pre-selling. As far as box-office success, that actually benefits the distributor/exhibitor more than the production company.

Q: There’s been a resurgence in Mexican cinema-you’re one of the leaders of that.

DEL TORO: The way I view myself is as a Mexican filmmaker. But I feel myself as a Mexican filmmaker with the right to have adventures all over the world. I think that the point of view I bring, whatever country I go to, is different than a guy who was born in Spain and lives in Spain. I think the most beautiful thing that has happened to Mexican cinema in the last few years is that we’ve reached our own market, and found audiences and profits in it.

What is terrible is that in the last few years, we find less and less movies from the indigenous cinemas of other countries. It’s a shame if we lose world cinema to Hollywood product in one single way. If we view movies as a world buffet, as a banquet-of course burgers are great, but shouldn’t you sample all the other platters? And it’s so great that there are other platters that I just hope people treasure that and support those movies-whether in their own countries or when they travel abroad.

106 minutes / in Spanish with English subtitles
From Sony Pictures Classics / Rated R

It’s remarkable how flexible the horror/ghost story genre has proven at giving filmmakers the ability to comment on politics, society and human nature. Depression-era audiences alleviated their real fears of an out-of-control economy by screaming at Karloff’s Frankenstein monster and Lugosi’s Dracula; atomic-age worries were effectively externalized by giant ants, Martian invaders and pod people. Today’s audiences take their creepies with a side of irony, as TV shows like the clever BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER deal with everything from sexuality, drug abuse, censorship and AIDS via metaphor, indirection and humor.

With THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, director Guillermo del Toro avails himself of the ghost story’s conventions to create a film with a surprising relevance to the current political situation. Although it’s set in 1930s Spain, during the Spanish Civil War that pitted Franco’s fascists (backed by Hitler) against Republicans and leftists of many stripes, the film is a microcosm of that particular conflict, set in an isolated school/orphanage far from the actual fighting. The film’s destructive villain could easily pass for one of today’s terrorists-he certainly isn’t picky about who he kills, including women and children.

Actually, THE DEVIL’s BACKBONE mixes and matches a number of genres. It’s told mainly through the eyes of Carlos (Fernando Tielve), a boy left at a school run by Carmen, the widow of a Communist (a beautifully no-nonsense performance by Marisa Paredes), and her admirer Cásares (the elegant Federico Luppi). Other key characters are Jaime (Iñigo Garces), an older bully who at first confronts but later confides in Carlos, and handsome, destructive Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), working as a handyman at the orphanage he grew up in and now hates with a passion.

So we get a child’s-eye-view of growing up, a bit of Spanish-style soap opera, as well as a war story (there’s an unexploded bomb in the school’s courtyard, like a fat, off-kilter memorial to a war that’s still going on) and a ghost story. Santi, a boy who was killed the night the bomb fell from the sky, is a restless spirit who pulls a poltergeist on Carlos and others.

The special effects-along with the camerawork, lighting and music-are all extremely well done. Del Toro limits his color palette to the tans, browns and greens of the desert setting, making the blood that eventually appears even more shocking. Santi, whose body rests in an underwater cavern, seems to bring his watery environment with him. Like most of the ghostly effects, it’s unsettling and spooky without being “boo!” scary. The overall restraint-in the performances and the visual effects-is also a lot more effective than other recent horror outings, like the high-pitched and numbingly hysterical Nicole Kidman film THE OTHERS..

For all these positives, though, THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE is ultimately underwhelming, especially in its emotional impact. I wanted to like this movie more than I did. Perhaps the care del Toro takes-and even the poetry (visual and verbal) he uses-are too much for the simple, violent story he’s telling. It probably doesn’t help that the Spanish Civil War, while it provoked high passions around the world at the time, no longer carries the direct emotional associations (at least for an Anglo audience) that World War II or the U.S. Civil War do.

THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE is certainly the work of a talented filmmaker (del Toro co-wrote the screenplay as well as directed). It does include a handful of remarkable performances (including Noriega’s frustrated killer Jacinto). If it’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts, many of the parts shine brightly.

Credits:
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz

Cast:
Eduardo Noriega,
Marisa Paredes,
Federico Luppi,
Iñigo Garces,
Fernando Tielve,
Irene Visedo,
Berta Ojea

Rated-R / 99 minutes / Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures

In our overly ironic age, it’s refreshing to see a movie that not only isn’t ashamed of its melodramatic elements, but actually revels in them. Melodrama is easy-too easy-to spoof, to scorn, to relegate to the soaps, but you have to admit that it’s also a very effective means of propelling a plot, as well as establishing who to root for and who to hiss.

THE DEEP END is a lot more than simply a melodrama, of course, but it uses the contrivances of melodrama (death, blackmail, outrageous coincidence and that old favorite, a damsel in distress) to let some deeper issues bubble up from below the surface. It’s also a showcase for one of my new favorite actresses, Tilda Swinton, to show what she can do, and that turns out to be plenty.

Swinton’s character, Margaret Hall, is one of those capable women that everyone depends on and no one really knows. In this case she’s a Navy wife with three children and a father-in-law, living in a nice house on the California (non-gambling) side of beautiful Lake Tahoe. Of course, all is not well below the placid surface (sorry, I’ll turn off the water metaphors soon). Oldest son Beau (Jonathan Tucker), still in high school, has gotten involved with sleazy-but-sexy Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), owner of a gay nightclub called, you guessed it, The Deep End. Writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel cleverly play down the obvious, every-mom’s-nightmare aspect (“My beautiful son is gay!”) by overwhelming it with the story’s melodrama: not only is he gay, but his lover is an extortionist with a villainous pencil-thin mustache.

After Margaret visits Reese’s nightclub to warn him away from her son (he says he will, for $5,000), Reese shows up at the house that night for what he hopes will be a booty call with Beau, which rather rapidly turns ugly and violent. Margaret hears the noise but doesn’t see Reese-or rather, what’s left of him-until the next morning. His mid-section has come into unfortunate contact with the sharp end of an anchor. Margaret does what any loving, protective mother would do: she dumps the body in a secluded cove and says nothing to anyone, including her potentially homicidal son.

Described this way, the plot (and there’s a lot more of it, including Goran Visnjic as a moodily handsome blackmailer) sounds not only melodramatic but farcical, but on screen it plays beautifully, mainly due to tight direction and Swinton’s performance. Her dogged concentration, controlled voice and minimalist gestures show us the toll these unfortunate events are taking on Margaret.

What’s most remarkable about Swinton’s acting feat is how much she shows us while hiding from everyone around her. There’s truly no one she can confide in, and the direction emphasizes her character’s solitude from the very first shot, where she’s almost invisible in the blazing sunlight outside Reese’s literally shady nightclub.

Her husband is conveniently at sea and unreachable, but you get the feeling he wouldn’t be much help even if he were home. There’s a small, telling scene between Swinton and her Navy veteran father-in-law, played with the right touch of comic self-importance by Peter Donat. Swinton tries to ask him for money, but she can’t break through her own protective shell of super-competence to admit she needs tens of thousands of dollars-not the $80 he generously offers.

In fact, the only real connections Margaret makes are with Visnjic’s increasingly sympathetic blackmailer and eventually-almost too late-with her son. When the plot’s twists and turns finally bring Swinton and Visnjic into close physical proximity, I felt like shouting “go ahead and kiss him!” to the screen.

With her son, the melodrama of the plot turns into a metaphor for coming out of the closet. This is a time in both a parent’s and a child’s life when life does feel like a melodrama. Margaret’s inability to confront her son over Darby’s death is just an extension of her inability to talk to him about his homosexuality, and her own complicity in the cover-up externalizes her own guilt.

McGehee and Siegel have created an intricately designed trap for Swinton’s character, and she provides them with a miracle of a performance. She creates a credible character-even when the character is doing rather incredible things. One of the most interesting things the actress and filmmakers do is make Margaret increasingly sexy and attractive as her problems get worse. When she dresses up for a trip to Reno, across the lake in big, bad Nevada, the red suit she wears is like a wake-up call after the deep, dark blues and greens of the lake, sky and trees.

If there’s a problem with THE DEEP END, it’s that no one else on screen is as deeply imagined, or as convincingly acted, as Swinton’s Margaret. But as with many another melodrama, a star performance and a plot twist or three may be just enough.

Credits:
Written, Produced and Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel

Based on “The Blank Wall” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Cast:
Tilda Swinton,
Goran Visnjic,
Jonathan Tucker,
Raymond Barry,
Josh Lucas,
Peter Donat