The Immigrant

Started by wilder, October 25, 2013, 01:15:16 PM

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wilder

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COOK: Which no one can do.

GRAY: Bogus idea. I can show you my truth and hopefully it'll mean something to you. I don't think this applies to the Dardennes, by the way, they're able to keep it cinematic, it's a real strategy. But just shooting something in front of you with a handheld camera means you're under the illusion that you have some kind of objectivity.

COOK: It's naïve.

GRAY: Very naïve. It's one of the great sins of art cinema, the notion they have the truth. What it says is that something that has a formality to it or formalism to it or tells a story in a traditional way, is somehow beneath them. If it's beneath them, it means there's a lot that's beneath them and they're not embracing everything and everybody.

COOK: We talked about the mythmaking that goes on at Cannes.

GRAY: People really liked me asking me about the reaction to my movie at Cannes, and I don't know, the only people I talk to are those who interview me and each has their own story. It's all bullshit. Every opinion on everything from anyone is valid. Of course. But what I think is appalling is the idea, and I'm sure you do this Adam, so you'll be totally offended about what I say, the idea of Twittering right after a movie is finished is so awful. The film should sit with you and then if it's worthy, demand some kind of explanation, discussion, or if it doesn't, it's not worth it, to you. Here's the thing, I'll tell you why Twitter freaks me out. I know that when I first saw The Conformist, which is now one of my favorite films—

COOK: —Your tweet about The Conformist would've been...

GRAY: "Beautiful looking, cold as heck" [laughs]. I would've been wrong. I have to let it linger. When I first saw Vertigo I said "what the fuck is this movie, Jimmy Stewart's driving around in a car for an hour, this is boring" and then I had to see it again the next day. And again and again and I couldn't stop. I was obsessed. I only came to understand Vertigo completely many viewings in, and one of the things that became so beautiful about Vertigo was how much it validated Kim Novak's Madeleine. I've talked about this.

COOK: In Jordan Mintzer's book, you said it was the moment she looked into the camera.

GRAY: I misspoke in the book. The best moment in the history of cinema is when she comes out of the bathroom in Vertigo and fulfills his fetish.  It's so genius cause it validates his notion of her perfection but it's her tragedy more than his. The whole thing is completely beautiful because both characters have their moment. How could I tweet this? Maybe I could...three years after I saw it. This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be critics. I think critics are more important now than they were before the internet. I don't know about aeronautical engineering, I don't go online and comment on the design of the batteries in the Dreamliner. So, why is it people think they can write in about movies? The whole point of the critic is to establish an excellent level of discourse and there's top quality writing on movies in the blogosphere. That's more important than ever. That's why Twitter is so scary.

COOK: Your film had a divisive reaction as usual.

GRAY: I don't mind that. If you please everyone you're doing something wrong. It means you're not under their skin, you're not provocative. Although there must have been a great film that everybody loved. Godard would say it's by accident. When a great movie's a success, it's an accident. It's hard to think of one. My friend said "what about The Godfather" and I said to him "google Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, The Godfather." Kauffmann said it was incompetent and that Brando is a moron, that the great performance of Jean Gabin in The Sicilian Clan blows away Brando. All this stuff.

COOK: 2001: A Space Odyssey sent everyone running.

GRAY: 2001 was beyond divisive. The story John Boorman told me was that Kubrick had called John and asked him if he had seen 2001 and John said "Yes, it's a masterpiece" and Kubrick said "would you please give me a quote for the poster cause I don't have enough critics' good words to put on." 2001! It might be the greatest movie ever made that was an absolute failure in the eyes of the director. That doesn't mean I know what Kubrick thought of the film, but he was clearly going for some sort Homeric epic hero story. The movie's called A Space ODYSSEY, he's got the main character named Bowman, he fights a Cyclops, a one-eyed computer, he's going for the mythic hero to the point where there's even a rebirth at the end with the Starchild, it's a total attempt at this mythic, Campbellian sweep, but you don't know anything about Keir Dullea, so the movie doesn't operate at all on that level, it operates brilliantly as a kind of Myth of the Gods movie. It doesn't work at all as a Campbellian model. The movie's fantastic, still, because what he did was he was able to capture the genius of the computer's dilemma and the genius of this idea of the monolith, which I think came from minimalist 60s art, maybe something by like Donald Judd.

COOK: If all goes as planned, is the science fiction film you've talked about your next project?

GRAY: I would hope so. But there's the reality of paying bills. I'm shooting a pilot next month. There's this idea that if you make movies you're a rich guy and that's not the case, especially when you only make movies every five years and do only what it is you care about doing. At some point that's going to have to end because that's reality. I've been very fortunate, but it won't go on forever. I'm writing the film now and it depends on actors, how fast I can get them to do the thing.

COOK: Can we look forward to it being another collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix?

GRAY: You already know too much about it. The ambition of the film is very Campbellian, very mythic and to do it in the way that is entirely based in scientific fact. It takes place in the future but it wouldn't be ridiculous production design and it would feel like Apollo 11 footage, it would feel like space travel today.

COOK: Still fitting within the subjective style you've moved towards or not?

GRAY: That's ahead of where I am now. I'm trying to make sure the dramatic conception is entirely whole, which is always the way that you have to start. I do always of course think about sequences, you have to, and music—which is extremely challenging with science fiction because if you go with electronic it's incredibly hackneyed and you certainly can't use most classical music because it seems like you're emulating Kubrick, so right off the bat that's a tremendous challenge. The other challenge is to relay a non-dystopian vision of the future because: A) Dystopian futures are boring dramatically, and, B) incredibly hackneyed, the future sucks everyone looks like shit, whatever. First of all, that's not true, in the history of the human race, the trajectory is pretty good, uneven but it's progress. The average person doesn't die of bubonic plague at 12 anymore, the average person for the first time next year will be middle class...The United Nations say that next year the average person will live in a middle class fashion. I don't know exactly what that means according to the UN, but it does mean shelter, food, clothing, the essentials. The progress of man is pretty steady, with hiccups—Hitler, for instance—but it's forward moving. So this idea that everyone a hundred years from now will live in a shit hole is puerile thinking. How do you radiate a certain level of optimism with a certain level of pessimism because at the same time of progress there is global warming and McDonald's as opposed to the cow that was milked outside? It's always a balance, presenting a vision of the future in space and balance optimism with pessimism. I didn't succeed with my first two pictures, they were altogether pessimistic.

COOK: I don't think so, The Yards—

GRAY: Yeah, maybe not in that one but—

COOK: Little Odessa is about doom.

GRAY: It's a movie made by a 23-year-old suffering from terrible depression. I was going through a very difficult time and my mother had died a few years before that and my father gone through terrible legal troubles and I was a devastated person and that was the film I made. It was certainly close emotionally to where I was. I'm trying to move past that now. I'd love to. I clearly have no talent with humor because I thought so much of Two Lovers was funny and so much of this movie was funny, and people say there are no jokes.

COOK: Two Lovers definitely has its moments. Phoenix rapping in the car, for instance.

GRAY: ...and when he says there was a terrorist alert in the subway and his Dad says [emulates Moni Moshonov] "Terrorism?". [laughs] Or the thing where Isabella Rossellini says [emulates Rossellini] "look, he's trying to open the box with plastic spoon." I'm laughing but the movie screens and there's not a peep. This movie, I think Joaquin Pheonix's burlesque show is ridiculous: "Miss Egypt...All the mysteries of the universe!" and he does this thing with his crotch.

COOK: I like how he's a clumsy showman.

GRAY: He's inept. I thought that stuff was good. Renner's show is totally cheesy. Movie screens and not a peep.

COOK: It's because of prevailing tone.

GRAY: Obviously, so I'm a failure at creating a kind of tone that enables laughter, which is important.

COOK: What about making a comedy?

GRAY: I just explained to you I think it would be a disaster—

COOK: —but if the prevailing tone was comedic.

GRAY: I would love to do one. It's a very difficult idea because unless you are doing satire, the perfect example being Dr. Strangelove, where there isn't a specific main character and the whole idea is to be better than the character—wait let me take that back: the genius of Strangelove isn't that Kubrick is better than the characters it's he's saying we're all idiots, which is not the same thing as saying they're all idiots.

COOK: Everyone's on the same level.

GRAY: Everyone is a fucking idiot. Despite our best efforts, the world will blow up. Unless you're doing satire like that, comedy partially has to have a happy ending, in classical terms, whereas a tragedy or drama ends the opposite way. If I could come up with an idea for a comedy, I would do it in a second. I may do one someday, Playtime is genius. That one's up there for me too. Playtime, Vertigo, Godfather, 2001.

COOK: Notorious edges out Vertigo for me.

GRAY: I love Notorious.

COOK: It's the film where it's the most painful when the love interests are apart.

GRAY: Yeah I cannot defend Vertigo over Notorious, I love it. The sense of mood and character. The same reason Vertigo is so great. There's incredible compassion for Cary Grant's struggle, but also Ingrid Bergman's struggle is so ridiculously clear.

COOK: With Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here stunt, was it easy working together again. You were upset initially, weren't you?

GRAY: Yeah, I had no problem with that. After the initial release of Two Lovers, I never gave it a second thought. I was just pissed at the time.

COOK: Did you see the film?

GRAY: No, I saw a three hour-long version to give comments on.

COOK: But I imagine it's difficult for you to see that film with any sort of objectivity?

GRAY: I can't look at it. I know Joaquin so well and the machinery around making it.

COOK: Your relationship has evolved a lot over the four films.

GRAY: I'm so close with him. He drives me crazy and I drive him crazy. He's an extremely intelligent person. So intelligent. Emotionally, not book smart.

COOK: Which is just, if not more, important.

GRAY: It's everything. He's extremely focused and disciplined, and he really thinks about what he's doing. It may not have been always the case.

COOK: Not on The Yards.

GRAY: He didn't have his method done pat, his craft. Now, he's got it down.

COOK: All of your films have been in opposition to American cinema of the moment—Tarantino is a direct contemporary and in some ways his cinema is antithetical to yours, and of course he's become a giant. Did you feel a part of the "American independent cinema" culture when Little Odessa was released? How do you feel about how you've fit in or not fit in to this culture? Do you feel outside of it?

GRAY: I didn't use to feel outside of it. I used to feel like I was part of it and that whatever I was doing would contribute to American cinema culture, but particularly over the course of the last two pictures I have felt outside of it.

COOK: —at odds?

GRAY: At odds. Maybe because I see how difficult the distribution is of them and I am also stunned by how successful a lot of these other kinds of pictures are and I've been shocked by the audience—what they seem to respond to.

COOK: Is that the audiences changing or just a systematic symptom?

GRAY: I don't think people have changed since the beginning, the demographic has changed. I shouldn't say people haven't changed. I'll tell you who has changed, where this whole American cinema where we are today, where it all has changed. In the mid 1960s, up to maybe '78, '79, you had a radicalized audience in colleges in the United States, so when Kubrick made 2001 or when Arthur Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, the people that went to that movie were the disenfranchised and disaffected, disillusioned college students, and that's over. When you go to colleges today, they're waiting 16 hours for the new fucking iPhone. In a way, Slavoj Zizek was right when he talked about now capitalism has pushed to an ideology-less society, the only ideology is the product. The most disappointing people, I think, are college students. Think about this: it's ridiculous to point fingers and I'm sure every college student will be enraged at how I've insulted them, but that's not the point of what I'm saying at all. George W. Bush started a war under completely false pretenses and everybody knows it. Where were the college students protesting? The only reason there was protesting in the 60s, and I want to emphasize it doesn't mean people in the 60s and 70s were better, it was because the draft existed and it would've' forced them to fight a totally illicit war. If there were a draft to fight in Iraq, you would've seen holy hell break loose.

COOK: The genius of the system is its evasiveness.

GRAY: Totally genius, cause now there's no draft so you have poor brown and black people fighting the war so college students don't have to give a shit, they can be completely divorced from politics. How does this affect movies? Well, it makes you realize the movies no longer have to convey to us a reality we recognize. Why? Because college students no longer face an imminent life or death situation. They aren't forced to confront mortality. So they don't need Five Easy Pieces. They need Avatar: "Cool ride, man." That's really where American pictures have changed, because that audience is gone.

COOK: It used to be a pillar.

GRAY: —and it's gone. Now, they focus on 9-14 year-olds and hopefully that will be the gift that stops giving cause if it keeps on you're going to see more and more of what we get, which is superheroes. Some people bring up that more movies are made now, and that's true and what is also true is that there's a thriving independent movement, but there is not the craft goes along with that movement.

COOK: It's less sophisticated.

GRAY: It's all consumed with "how the date went". You get the sense from watching these movies that nothing bad ever happened to anybody. That can't be true. It's weird, they feel bourgeois. Maybe this is the sign of a more healthy society. Childhood is a relatively recent conception, courtship is older, it's Eleanor of Aquitaine, but childhood is Victorian England. Before that, you had 7 and 8 year olds helping load the cannons in the Battle of Trafalgar. I think this means were going toward a more healthy society because people are not so worried about death when they're 18 years old, but the by product of a better society is that you have worse movies.

COOK: Are there any films and filmmakers that you feel a kinship with or that you recognize as having similar goals as you and your work?

GRAY: I don't get to see too many movies because I have three kids, but who do I have a kinship with? Well, I have friends who make movies, whom I love very much. I love Paul Anderson and I love Wes Anderson, David Fincher, J.J. Abrams, and Matt Reeves is my closest friend. For better or worse, and in their case for the better because their careers are all better than mine, they're not doing what it is I'm doing. I really like these people.

COOK: What about Clint Eastwood? You've cited Unforgiven as a favorite.

GRAY: Yes, I love it.

COOK: What about what he's doing now?

GRAY: Hereafter was periodically fantastic. I've come to love Matt Damon. I saw Behind the Candelabra and I don't understand he's not the one with all the great reviews. Anyways, I guess I don't feel a kinship with anybody. I feel very lonely in many respects. It's not a good feeling. I just read Bill Friedkin's memoir, which I enjoyed very much and it sounds like in the 70s he had his friends, he had Francis Coppola, and a whole bunch of other directors that were making movies. I have friends who make movies but...

COOK: Not that synthesis of friendship and philosophical alignment.

GRAY: No...

COOK: It's interesting. Fincher and Soderbergh are very specifically digital filmmakers now. Pioneers even, along with Michael Mann, of digital form. It seems inevitable that you'll work with digital at some point. Is it coming soon?

GRAY: I think the more you focus on that, the shittier the movie is. It's a superficial care. What are the characters doing, saying, meaning? What is the mood you want to create? The technical aspect of it, the language is the same.

COOK: Is that true? Doesn't digital elicit different connotations and feelings? They have distinct properties and effects. Like a close up in digital is different than one in film. It just feels different. Ultimately, there are two different approaches to digital: trying to come as close to film as possible or to mine these distinct properties.

GRAY: Yes, that's true, but I can't think about that. It's not like painting, where I could go to the store and ask for cadmium red light or cadmium red medium. Which one, I can choose. Very soon, that choice is taken from me, whether I shoot in film or digital. Here's the tragedy of digital: if I said to you tomorrow that there was no film, everyone used digital. Best digital image you can get. And I came around said hey I got something guys, it's not electronic and you have to run it through these chemicals and it's plastic but when you shine light through it it's got better resolution, better contrast ratio, it sees the way the eye sees with grains emulating the dots as opposed to pixels. It's called film. Everyone would be like "holy shit what's this fucking film thing," and maybe you'd have Chris Nolan saying "sorry I only shoot digital." [laughs] Everyone would move to film. I don't think digital is there yet. Maybe the next generation ARRI will. I did camera tests for The Immigrant on Alexa, Red, Fuji and Kodak, and did them all blind and filmed them out and it wasn't close. It was Kodak by a mile. It beat Fuji by two miles, over the Red and the Alexa by a mile and a half, so until I see what it is I can do with a product that's better than film I'm going to try and use film as long as I can. When the powers that be say to me time's up, I'll deal with it. It's not a zero sum game though, film isn't just staying the same, it's getting better too. The film stocks are so good now that a chimpanzee could do it.  You don't have to do anything, you put a little light there and you run film through the camera and you have exposure, it's incredible, you put the film in the back of your trunk at 100 degrees in Death Valley for 15 hours and then develop it, it looks exactly the same. We tried to bake the film on the movie, we put it in the oven to see if it would degrade the film stock, make it look like old film stock, old color, old two-strip and you would bake it for 9 hours at 140 degrees and go develop it and it looks exactly the same, you call the Kodak guy and say the film stock looks perfect and he says "yeah, isn't that amazing what we can do."

COOK: Is the recurring Pietà imagery in your films something conscious? I think I've noticed it in each of your films.

[Note: the following answer includes details from the ending of the film]

GRAY: Really? In the new one, I know, the ending is totally Pietà, it's almost written in the script. You've got me wondering. [James pulls out a copy of the script from his office] It was more overt in the script, the ending of it, which I made a little less obvious:

Quote[reading from the script] "The rain begins to seep through the roof and taps Bruno on the head. She takes the water that dribbled on her hand to his head and uses it to push back his hair and clean his face, he looks up at her but seems to stare a thousand yards past her, his head sinks forward, she strokes his head as if he were an infant, yet he falls asleep, a noise awakens him."

It's not too far from where it is, but I remember very specifically doing that.

COOK: In We Own the Night, there's the shot where Phoenix comes home to Eva Mendes and collapses to her feet—

GRAY: —which he didn't want to do, by the way! He said "it's phony, I would never do that," I said, "yeah but sometimes you make sacrifices for poetry."

COOK: I love that shot, the way that at first it's composed to emphasize Phoenix and his struggle but then as the camera moves forward and zooms, it recomposes to emphasize Mendes and her emotional struggle, to the point where he's no longer in the frame—it's like with Vertigo, the shot's actually about her tragedy.

GRAY: I should see that movie again. I haven't seen it since I finished it; I remember what you're talking about but not necessarily the context of it.

COOK: So much of your films are bound up with ideas of love, different kinds of love...What does love mean to you, in cinema? How does one show love? Commitment?

GRAY: What makes it so hard is that love is the most beautiful and encompassing emotion that a human being is able to express. I've just started this book which is called The Tree of Knowledge, it's extremely interesting, about consciousness—the subtitle of it is "The Biological Roots of Human Understanding". It's for the sci-fi thing. One of the things you realize is that the idea of consciousness itself...there is not a dividing line between human beings and anything else that does not have consciousness. It's an outgrowth of evolution and evolutionary processes, so just as a leaf is integral to the tree, our consciousness is integral to us. Love is essential to our consciousness. I guess you could say the way you show love in a movie is to make clear the ongoing struggle to connect, what it means to be a human being in the world—because love a fantasy, but it's also real. Just because it is a fantasy, as Jacques Lacan would tell us, it doesn't mean it's not real to you.

COOK: ...Reminds me of Two Lovers.

GRAY: Well that's the whole idea behind the movie... "In vain your image comes to meet me for I am the only one who finds it." This is a poem from Louis Aragon, it's from the lectures on psychoanalysis by Lacan from 1965. It's very beautiful; maybe it helps answer the question.

[quoting the poem from his computer]:

Quote"In vain your image comes to meet me and does not answer me for I am the one who only shows it.

Turning towards me you can find on the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors that can reflect but cannot see

Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited by your absence makes them blind" ■

Incredible. "I am that wretch comparable with mirrors that can reflect but cannot see". Is this guy like the fucking greatest genius ever? The point is, how do you show love, I don't think that can ever be an ambition. I think if you show, as much as you can, an honest depiction of our struggle and what it means to be a human being, then love is going to be part of the equation.

COOK: Because you reflect it.

GRAY: How can you not? It's about how you react to and with people—and it's such a primary need to love and be loved, that it will be integral to every reaction every character has if you position them correctly in the scene. So, the other thing I would say is important is in order for us to come to terms with the bittersweet arrangement of biology, which is that our death is imminent, we have to delude ourselves somehow, and I think death as a presence has to imply other things; by the nature of its finality it has to imply the opposite: life and beauty, and love. So, inextricably bound together with mortality is the other side. The opposite of death is to love, to be loved, that is a richness, the richness of the human experience is the opposite of death, not just living...

This doesn't answer the question at all. I suppose that if you were to strip away everything, it certainly holds true for 2001, and holds true for a whole bunch of other movies I love like Walkabout and so many others, what does it mean to be a human being? What is the nature of consciousness? Love is the most important aspect to our consciousness, that, and the knowledge of our death because it leads to our bloodlust, it leads to neuroses and that's not a comfortable or pleasant part of our selves, so love is the best thing we've got to give to the world, to present to the world. The other side of our consciousness is considerably uglier. So, in a sense, the way to show love in a work of art is to try to explain most clearly that essential struggle to connect because implied is the need for love, and how do you show that? Well, that's how the actors relate to each other, how the characters relate to each other, and how the story forces characters into a position where that becomes self evident...

Difficult question, because part of its difficulty is putting into words what is never a verbal exercise. It's not a concrete thing—on the other hand, it is and it is no question that when you make a film love is a very present idea. The more you can make love evident in every frame—and by love, love is often meant to mean a saccharine presentation of affection, that's not what I mean—the more we make evident the struggle to connect, the need to express emotionally to somebody else without judgment, the more clear we can make this, the better the work will be. Cassavetes, he's a hero, to everybody, why? Love. He has it in abundance. In every frame he was able to impart it. I think that's what distinguishes real art.

COOK: It comes back to sincerity.

GRAY: It does, doesn't it?

Just Withnail

Gray does the best interviews, so generous.

And this is hilarious:

GRAY: Obviously, so I'm a failure at creating a kind of tone that enables laughter, which is important.

COOK: What about making a comedy?

GRAY: I just explained to you I think it would be a disaster—


Please do make one!

Ghostboy

Saw this for the 3rd time over the weekend. It keeps getting better and better.


wilder

Appreciated the following bit from the above KCRW interview. Thought the definition of melodrama Gray provides here was worth posting...

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Gray: When you see opera, part of the thing that strikes me as so beautiful is that there's a total sincerity to good opera. There's no pretense about reality—

Mitchell: —there's also no cynicism...

Gray: No cynicism at all, exactly. No ironic distance. It's almost like the postmodern movement has left opera behind completely, or opera's left postmodernism behind, depending on your approach to the work.

Mitchell: Because that's why I said melodrama, because there is that sort of touch with pure emotion that's a part of melodrama.

Gray: Absolutely — I think melodrama gets a bad name because it's conflated with melodramatic, and they don't really mean the same thing. Melodrama is: something has the courage of its convictions, it's not programmed for a facile or exploitive emotional response. You know, "melodramatic" is somebody's yelling and screaming over-the-top over the death of their guppy in the fish tank. Opera's emotions, when done well, by the way —bad opera exists and exists in spades, unfortunately— but when good opera is great, what it does is it never attempts to distance, make fun of, or gin up an emotion that it hasn't earned.



wilder


wilder


Alexandro

I saw this film a few weeks ago and fuck yeah, everyone here who's with it are right. Cotillard, goddess. Everything she does is awesome. She sells this thing through and through. How does she do it? Her's is the less colorful character in the film! Of course Joaquin Phoenix is up there too. I want to see it again just to appreciate his work a little more. A complex, contradictory creation. I just don't understand how this film, and pretty much every other Gray film are systematically dumped by the studios...wtf? Cotillard's oscar nomination should be for this one.

Something Spanish


wilder

Right now the blu-ray is up for pre-order for $15