Get Munked

While you are waiting for that turkey to digest, here's something to amuse your family with. To promote Alvin and the Chipmunks, Universal has created a viral website where you can create chipmunk avatars by selecting hair color, clothing and setting, and then recording a greeting which is transformed into the familiar, high-pitched signature voice of one of the chipmunk crew. You can download the finished product and email it to all of your friends who are sorely lacking something to laugh about.

To "Munk Youself," visit the website at http://www.munkyourself.com/ and choose your chipmunk's outfit and even the background (options include recording studio, mansion, stage, street and...bedroom?!). Then, you can further customize your chipmunk's voice by hooking up a microphone to your computer, calling or texting in a message, or choose from a list of pre-recorded messages. No helium filled balloons required.

The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund

Gucci and Tribeca Film Institute (my former employer - holla) announced on Monday that they have established the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund that will "provide finishing funds to documentaries that promote social change and illuminate issues in need of comprehensive coverage currently missing from mainstream media." Open to all U.S. and international documentary filmmakers, the fund will award anywhere between $5,000 to $30,000 per film, up to three films whose awarded funds will total at $80,000 in 2008. Submissions for the inaugural Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund begins on February 5, 2008 and must be postmarked by April 11, 2008. In celebration of the fund's launch, Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal, founders of TFI, will be hosting a dinner on December 18.

Having worked alongside the talented and passionate folks at TFI and the festival for a couple of years, I can personally attest to the organization's commitment to up-and-coming filmmakers, as seen in the Tribeca All Access, a meetings program that grant new and established filmmakers with unprecedented access to industry professionals during the annual Tribeca Film Festival. Gucci, of course, has been making an interesting foray into the world of cinema, as evidenced by David Lynch's Gucci ad for the spring collection.

For more information about the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, visit their website here.

Images: Courtesy of Gucci and Tribeca Film Institute.

Harvey Weinstein on Film and Fashion

Speaking at this week's WWD/CEO Summit, Harvey Weinstein reflected on the synergy between film and fashion, especially in light of the announcement of his involvement in the revival of Halston earlier this year. According to WWD's coverage, Weinstein, whom you also know as a producer of BravoTV's Project Runway, stated, "fashion, like movies, is a powerful medium to convey creative ideas, and that they are inextricably linked — a notion that has been present in the movies for decades." Here's an excerpt from the article:

"As we were researching Halston, there's a great scene at the end of 'Tootsie,'" he said. "Dustin Hoffman has now revealed to Jessica Lange that he's not a girl, he's a quite avid guy. And Jessica has kind of admitted that she's got feelings for him. And they walk off together after having a big fight, hand in hand. And she said, 'You know, one of the good things about you not being that girl anymore is that I get to borrow the dress.' And Dustin says to Jessica, 'I can't lend it to you, it's a Halston.' And that's the last line of 'Tootsie.' In the Weinstein Co. movies going forward, you will be seeing more of that."

Iiiiiintereting - is he talking about infusing more general fashion references into his movies, or is he referring to a new direction of the Weinstein films as a branded entertainment for Halston? I would love to see Rose McGowan kick some ass in a Halston dress (I don't care if that movie didn't exactly fill Mr. Weinstein's wallet - I loved Grindhouse).

Image: Courtesy of The New York Times Magazine.

New Latino Filmmakers to Watch

New York City is great in that being a melting pot of so many different immigrant and minority communities, the city often gives rise to new and exciting cultural movements that eventually have an impact upon America’s mainstream consciousness.

I am embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t even been aware of the existence of the NY International Latino Film Festival until late last year (the festival is now in its eighth year). Because smaller, regional, and often less prestigious film festivals often beget mixed results-- many of which are not always a pleasure to watch-- I wondered what caliber of work to expect from this particular venue. Moreover, despite the fact that I was a Spanish major in college, I unfortunately hadn’t been tapped into the Latino film scene for quite some time-- even less so that of the indie movement that has been burgeoning amongst the Latino film community in New York for the last few years. My only clue as to what the festival might hold was a little gem-- written, produced, and directed by my friend Tony Valles and his brother Jaime-- called, Casi Casi, which had had its New York premiere at the NYILFF back in the summer of 2006.

A light-hearted, teen-caper comedy, Casi Casi is neither representative of nor does it go against any of the current trends in Puerto Rican cinema, namely because up until this point, there really hadn’t been a significant body Puerto Rican cinema of which to speak. Until the Valles brothers’ project came along, the Puerto Rican film industry had been mostly limited to producing just a handful of politically-driven and moralistic films each year. Meanwhile, Tony and Jaime, both children of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, grew up watching such American teen cult classics as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club. Determined to make up for the glaring absence of the teen comedy genre in Puerto Rican cinema, Tony and Jaime set out in 2005 to make their own movie, which would speak to Puerto Rican youth. And indeed, this little indie hit about the misadventures of a group of middle-class, Puerto Rican teens trying to escape the wrath of their formidable principal has proven to appeal to audiences across all age groups. The film was an official selection of numerous Latino film festivals throughout the United States in 2006, including the San Diego Latino Film Festival, where Casi Casi won the Audience Award. In October of 2007, the movie aired on the HBO Latino channel and was subsequently kept on HBO’s regular roster of rotating On-Demand films for a number of weeks.

I first viewed Casi Casi on DVD in the privacy of my own home. While the film isn’t necessarily the most complex stylistically or compositionally (its set-design and mis en scene are pretty bare bones) it nonetheless boasts a smartly-written script, fairly polished and fluid editing, and features a cast of winning, young, first-time actors whose exuberance emanates through every frame. The directors also cast an affectionate gaze upon the lovely city of San Juan, where both Tony and Jaime grew up. Impressive is the fact that Casi Casi was the directors’ first foray into filmmaking ever. (The Valles brothers come from a theatrical and operatic background.) In fact, neither Tony nor Jaime had ever even operated any of the equipment they used to film and edit their project until a scant few weeks before production began (talk about DIY!). Thus, their achievement has been all the more extraordinary given the film’s relatively widespread mainstream success-- a boon to all native Puerto Rican filmmakers for whom exposure is highly coveted yet has often been elusive.

This year, I was able to attend a few programs at the NYILFF and found myself continually surprised by the level of passion, originality of vision, and production values of so many of the films there. No small feat, considering that the majority of works I caught were shorts. Indeed, based solely upon the caliber of talent on display at this year's festival, there can be no mistake that Latino filmmakers working in the U.S. are currently on the rise. Even more compelling still is the overwhelming sense of community that seems to pervade the scene, an esprit de corps that explains why so many of the directors at every screening seemed to know one another. It soon became apparent that many in attendance at the festival had at one point or another worked on another director's crew, or at the very least had worked with several of the same actors. One very much got the feeling that the NY-based Latino film community is not only a network of business associates, but is in fact a space in which artists who share a common language and diaspora are able to share in a specific cultural dialogue that perpetuates artistic growth.

The first film I saw was second-time director Nestor Miranda’s feature comedy, The Startup. A bit of a mad-cap, screwball affair, The Startup is at its core a story about the coming of age-- via one of the worst thought-out sociological experiments ever. In an attempt to finally strike out on their own, three bumbling friends from Queens set up house in a ramshackle brownstone in Harlem, only to realize too late that their limited financial resources won’t be nearly enough to cover the bills. Ben (played by Rafael Sardina), the most responsible and only one of the trio who is actually employed, leaves on a business trip and returns a week later to find that things in the house have changed. A lot. In order to generate a source of income, Ben’s friends Will (Ramon Rodriguez) and Rick (Steven Leon) have turned their house into an international youth hostel-- for which they have no license, staff, experience, nor any apparent sense of responsibility. Despite his initial misgivings, Ben quietly agrees to let his friends continue renting out beds when he sees how profitable the ill-conceived venture might be. But what neither he nor his friends are prepared for is just how involved running a legitimate business (even one without a license) can be. Things only become more complicated when a young boy named Reymond (played by the irrepressible Reymond Witmann) is abandoned at the hostel by his negligent mother.

The Startup doesn’t claim to be any more than what it intends to be-- that is, indulgently silly and playful entertainment. Considering how the recently christened “mumblecore” movement-- which is partially yet ostensibly characterized by its predominantly white, middle-class casts-- has so inundated the indie film scene with angst-ridden, overly-serious, sometimes overly pretentious films about twenty-somethings trying to “find their way,” it’s refreshing to see a film about the quarter-life experience told from a different perspective (one that is more spontaneously comical at that). The Startup has no aspirations of social weight other than by virtue of the fact that it is performed entirely by an all-minority cast and was made entirely outside of the Hollywood system. This is not to say that the film is without its flaws: with three main characters-- each with his own individual storyline to develop-- and all the zany antics of new characters who are constantly being introduced, Miranda at times lets the structure of the film slip, lapsing into moments that are neither crucial to the plot, nor are they always that funny. Nevertheless, the film’s immensely likable cast prove to be the film’s greatest assets, without whom our suspension of belief would be impossible. (The Startup’s real breakout stars are Rodriguez and Aro Sanchez, both of whom turn out energetic and endearing performances.)

The second film worth mentioning is “Hero the Great,” a short that might be considered The Startup’s sister film if only because its writer/director, Juan Caceres, served on the producing team for the latter project. In “Hero,” our attention is focused solely upon the daily travails of a young boy living with his maternal grandmother in what looks to be the Lower East Side. The milieu and concept behind the film may be somewhat reminiscent of the 2002 feature flick, Raising Victor Vargas; but the tone, look, and sensibility of Caceres’ work are most assuredly and delightfully original. Whereas Raising Victor Vargas revolves around a teenager blossoming into adulthood, “Hero the Great” is very much about that stage in between adolescence and childhood, when children are only beginning to become aware of themselves as self-realized individuals, yet are still very much children in that they retain their sense of innocence and play. Furthermore, Caceres’ visual style is decidedly rich, drawing from such influences as disparate as Francois Truffaut, Michel Gondry, and Spike Lee. The director does an extraordinary job directing his actors: Dennis Torres, who is mature beyond his years in the title role, and once again Reymond Witmann, this time re-incarnated as Hero’s rather puckish, cheeky side-kick, Biscuit. Together, this modern-day Quijote and Panza run, skip, skate, and skulk through Caceres’ verité-styled digital lens and emerge onto the screen as beautifully idiosyncratic, entertaining, and poignantly drawn characters. The film is not so much plot-driven as it is a uniquely rendered portrait of an old soul filtered through the eyes of youth.

Finally, while the majority of other shorts at the festival were all competently made, only one other film truly captured my attention with its brutally visceral visual style and a message as thought-provoking as it is emotionally affecting. Shot on location in black and white 35mm and using non-professional actors, “Primera Comunión” ("First Communion") focuses upon the desperation of a young boy, Eleuterio, and his suffering as the result of society’s capacity for negligence, cruelty, and religious hypocrisy. At the film’s outset, we are immediately plunged into the final moments of Eleuterio’s young life, a frenetically cut montage of images showing the boy lying on the ground, struggling to breathe, interspersed with memories of his family members, both alive and dead. The rest of the film is one long, neo-realistically shot flashback sequence, detailing Eleuterio’s day to day efforts to steal and beg in order to survive. In a mere fifteen minutes, we are able to grasp the totality of Eleuterio’s simple life, comprised mostly of a series of encounters with fellow denizens in his rural Mexican village, as well as the tragic pointlessness of his imminent demise when the film posits the question: who is really to blame for the boy’s hapless fate? Those who would wield a knife against him in order to better their own situation? Or those bystanders (specifically members of the Catholic church) who would deign to lift a finger in order to save him? The director chooses to magnify the film’s dramatic impact by having his principal characters played by children, lending to the final scenes in which Eleuterio is both assaulted and ignored by his peers a categorically chilling effect. Written and directed by Daniel Eduvijes Carrera, a graduate of Columbia's filmmaking program, “Primera Comunión” is one of those rare cinematic debuts which heralds to the world the arrival of an exciting new talent.

New Women in Film: Dee Rees

Earlier this year, Scarlett Cinema profiled Dee Rees and her short film Pariah after it screened at the 7th annual First Look Film Festival in Denver, Colorado at the end of April. It's a stunning entry into the film world that gives voice to both the gay and lesbian and black community, and has a masterful style lending it to a higher order than the usual student film.

Since winning the Audience Choice Award at First Look, Rees' film has screened at numerous festivals, including the 13th Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was the winner of the Future Filmmaker Award at the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Film.

Last month on October 10th, Rees was announced the winner of the inaugural Iris Prize, given out to new filmmakers valuing £25,000. The Iris Prize is a festival organization in Wales, UK established with the underrepresented genre of gay and lesbian film in mind.

"The purpose of Iris is to create an annual international prize to recognise, celebrate and promote gay and lesbian moving image content, which will also promote tolerance, acceptance and further understanding of the credibility and business of gay and lesbian filmmaking."

Thus far, I've been unable to locate streaming video of the 28 minute film, but you can watch the preview of Pariah at the First Look Film Festival's website, here.

An Interview with Sean Patrick McCarthy

Over the course of the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know up-and-coming writer/director, Sean Patrick McCarthy. After attending Brown University as an undergrad, Sean traveled and worked abroad as a dancer and choreographer for a few years, then finally returned to the United States to settle in New York and attend Columbia University’s prestigious graduate program in filmmaking. Since earning his Master of Fine Arts degree, Sean has become an increasingly prominent presence on the film festival circuit, already having been honored at the Telluride Film Festival as a ‘Filmmaker of Tomorrow’ and winning the Graduate Film Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2000 for his short, "Prom Queen." In 2006, McCarthy won the Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award at the IFP Market for his feature-length script, Pansy; the next year he garnered attention at the Market for his script, Muhammad and Mary, taking away the Panasonic Digital Filmmaking Grant. Last month, Sean and I met up in the West Village for his very first interview.

[Karen Wang] It wasn’t until a recent conversation I had with you that I first learned you were a dancer. How did you come to transition from the world of dance into filmmaking?

[Sean Patrick McCarthy] A lot of pot. (laughing) No, actually when I was doing dance, I was doing a lot of choreography. When I was dancing it was about people looking at me and trying to find an expression, or a vocabulary that would communicate—sort of like how Martha Graham came up with a whole movement vocabulary; but, when I was dancing, my choreography was much more about moving the dancers within the frame of the stage and telling stories.

Did you work in dance professionally?

I was in a couple of dance companies. I was in Berlin and London. I received formal training at London Contemporary, doing a choreography program. A lot of what I was developing there were narratives, more like dance-theater. And I became frustrated with the frame of the stage. I realized I was always drawing all these sets… it’s really all about moving the actors through these sets, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to create these narratives within such restricted parameters. So after I got injured—I hurt my back—I moved to New York and took a film class at SVA and started making experimental films. They were more sort of dance films. (laughing) My first film was called, "Alas, a Silent Scream."

Oh, my God. Wow. You have to talk about that one.

(still laughing) I had written the title in shaving cream on my bathroom wall in the shower, and I’ll never forget the opening sequence on Super 8 black and white: watching the title… drip… away. And the piece was a narrative, but it was a dance film, a sort of ballet. I played a disabled man who couldn’t stop eating junk food and became sick. Oh, and I was nude.

Alas…

… a silent scream! (laughing) Whatever. It was totally ridiculous, and when I showed it to my film class they all I thought I was a freak. It was very graphic in terms of my body parts. I was kind of working through Mapplethorpe. So, then I realized I wanted to develop stories, and I went to Columbia, because they had such a strong writing program.

What was your experience at Columbia like?

I loved it. I grew so much when I was there. I was working through my father’s death at the time and I was in psychoanalysis three times a week, doing really intensive work in terms of trying to understand psychology and people in general. That was the thing that I took away the most. There was this acting teacher there, Lenore Dekoven, and her approach is very much about getting to the bones of the psychology and sort of finding the person based on the actions that they take and their history. That was really perfect for me, because at the time I was really trying to understand myself.

There’s always this debate over whether or not film school is a good idea; or should people just learn their craft out in the field? Do you have any opinion on the subject?

What I got out of film school is that it’s just like a conservatory. It gives you the opportunity to focus intensively on your work, and it’s what you make of it. I mean there are people who go to film school, show up for class, and don’t have material. And then there are other people who have made a completely life-changing decision to go to film school and take that risk. It’s a huge investment.

Which is one of the reasons why there are some people who actually warn against film school; they argue that financially, the investment just isn’t worth it.

All of my friends from Columbia with whom I’m still in touch would definitely do it again. They loved it. You could be Quentin Tarantino, and your whole understanding of film language could be learned and developed by working in a video store (although video stores no longer really exist). But, he’s an exceptional case.

Looking at the field, both Hollywood and the world of independent film, is there anyone’s work in particular that you admire, respect, or that inspires you?

I love Ira Sachs. I’m still processing his new film, Married Life, but his first two films were exactly the kind of films that I like. Most of the films that I’m excited by are either European or Asian. Not many American films. Although I loved Me and You and Everyone We Know. I thought it was unique and had a fresh perspective.

Had you always felt an attraction to film as an expressive medium? And when did you realize that film was something you wanted to devote your life to?

I don’t have a devotion to film. I’m committed to people and storytelling as an opportunity for change. I finally feel like I’m getting to a point in my writing and filmmaking where I can envision change. Up until this point I had been writing how things are or were; and now I’m beginning to articulate the way that I would hope things could be. I’m working on a script (Muhammad and Mary) that has a happy ending for the first time. It’s bittersweet. It’s a love story. And the woman is old. She’s 81, and she falls in love with a man with a terminal illness; but they cherish every day, and they get to the point where they accept the card that they’ve been dealt. They find a way to make it work for them by shifting their perspectives so that they’re not just being defined by their age or their illness. They’re finding a way to find hope in a situation that would otherwise be very bleak. And that for me makes me feel like [filmmaking] is really what I want to be doing.

How would you qualify the work you produced prior to this?

Definitely more tragic, but I feel like tragedies can be really inspiring, too. Like the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu: it’s a very particular kind of filmmaking—very drip-down, very verite, and definitely just telling it like it is (or the way it was in Romania 20 years ago). Even though it’s so dark, at the end I feel liberated, because I feel like I’ve seen something that’s truthful. And because I’m able to look at that and understand that, it means that it’s possible for us to move beyond it.

What was your experience as a filmmaker like after you graduated from Columbia?

I had a fairy tale story that did not have a happy ending. After my short film, "Prom Queen," screened at a festival with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, this producer came up to me. I don’t want to mention any names, but he’s a well-known producer who had made a series of indie hits. It was sort of around that time when the crossover was beginning to happen, where indie films were getting mainstream recognition. Anyway, I’ll never forget it: he came up to me after seeing my film and said, “You have a unique voice. You’re very talented. I want to develop a relationship with you and produce your first feature.” This was 2 months out of film school! And I thought, “Oh, my God! This is fantastic!” In any case, we did develop a relationship over the course of a year and a half. He read a script that I was working on and submitted it to the IFP. It didn’t get in. Eventually, it all fell apart because of money. He wasn’t willing to produce it for less than $5 million, because he wanted to do bigger and bigger movies. And I wasn’t established as a director. I didn’t have the tools to present the project nearly enough to raise the $5 million, and he wasn’t willing to present the project to people, because he basically felt that it wasn’t ready. In hindsight, I think he was probably right. It’s difficult in this industry, because it feels like you’re constantly dating: you meet people and you have a great connection; but then getting to the point where you’re going to have a commitment is hard.

Have you seen your own body of work maturing? How does your creative process work? Has it changed over the years?

I’m still using the same tools I learned in my screenwriting class at Columbia with Janet Roach. She was very clear in her methodology. It’s taken me ten years to really feel like I’ve internalized that method and made it my own when I’m developing a script. It doesn’t mean that the product is always going to be stellar, but at this point I’ve written 14 scripts, and through that, each script has had something I’ve been able to incorporate into my later work. Like sketching. Also, I’ll never forget two quotes that Janet Roach said. The first was a quote she wrote on the board the first day of class: “Hollywood is a blood-sport.” The other is—and I’ve seen her talk about acting the same way—she said that in writing, you sort of need to slit your wrists and bleed onto the keyboard. That really resonated for me. The hard part is how do you bleed onto the keyboard and still be funny! And not be self-indulgent. You have to sort of indulge yourself and trust your instinct and go where you need to go as a writer, but at a certain point, it’s not about you.

Well, clearly it’s paid off because for the past 2 years in a row, your scripts have gotten into the IFP Market and won major prizes. Thinking back on those experiences at IFP, how did one year compare with the next? Were they very different?

Oh, definitely. The first year out, I still felt like I was very green, very young. I was still sort of ambivalent about talking to people about [Pansy]. The project was very provocative. It was about a very lonely, gay teenager at a Catholic school, and he has nobody. He’s very isolated. And then he meets this older guy online who becomes his confidante, which then leads things to spiral out of control

This was based on a true story?

Yes. It was sort of a sensational media story. I saw it on 20/20 with Barbara Walters, and that’s what sparked my interest. The script deals with issues of depression and how gay kids are so isolated, they’re vulnerable to people online who can take advantage of them. That’s a very controversial issue, because there are radicals in the gay community who would say that there’s this whole tradition of man-boy relationships. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but I understand what they are saying, that there are many people in the gay community who have had very positive experiences, because as youths, they were able to find someone who could give them love and acceptance. The problem is that when you already feel intense self-loathing because you’ve been brought up in a culture that tells you you’re evil, and then there’s the shame of having this secret with an older person, and then there’s the power dynamic with this older person… it just becomes this total powder keg.

Do you think it was the subject material and how close you were to it that made you more guarded at IFP the first year?

I think so. I wasn’t really in sales mode. I just did not want to present it as something that was a commodity. I kind of kept my guard up because most people were disinclined to want to explore the topic. I haven’t gotten the money to make the project, but I think that when I do, people will be interested. It’s very human and deals with things that—if you can get beyond some of the hot button topics that it presents—then you’re left with the compelling issue of how society is dealing with these kids who are killing people. And kids who are highly sexualized at a very young age. A Catholic church that is teaching people to hate themselves. I mean, not always. There are some individuals within the Church that speak out for love and not judgment; but I just wish there were more of them. I mean it’s all about judgment! I think we need to take back Jesus! Because Jesus was a liberal and a radical! And He was all about love! And if he was here today, then he would want to see Pansy! (laughing)

Jesus would endorse Pansy! We have a quote!

Well, he would have understood that this kid just needed love, and there was nobody! Everybody was so freaked out because this kid was so out of control, and there was no one except for this 41-year-old man, whom everyone wrote off as a pedophile. Whether what he did was right or wrong, he was the only one who was making this kid feel like a worthy human being and worthy of love. And that’s so sad! I mean they failed this kid miserably. Everybody in the community: the courts, mental health professionals, schools, his parents—everyone! I only wish that when I was presenting this at the Market, I had been able to talk about it like we’re talking now. I was still very close to it. The project was my baby; and I just didn’t feel like I could step back from it because I was still kind of nursing it almost. Whereas now I could be much more upfront, direct, and say this is why people are going to want to see this movie. This movie has something to say that’s topical, that needs to be heard. I think I was more able to do that with Muhammad and Mary. People were much more receptive this time, because I was being very direct and telling them boldly what I had envisioned.

The thing that strikes me about your work is if you look at both Pansy and Muhammad and Mary, they’re about characters who exist or live on the fringes of society. Is that a common theme in your work?

Oh, definitely. Across the board.

What is it exactly about that sort of situation or positing of characters on the fringes that attracts you? What do you feel you gain from writing about these types of characters and stories?

I think dramatically, it’s just a satisfying premise. I think we all want acceptance; and it just creates a better structure if you write about somebody who’s on the outside. Their need is very immediate. Personally, I’ve always identified with people who were on the outside. The outsider for me was always this symbol of hope and possibility, the ability to transcend. It’s also because when I was growing up, my family was extremely racist. I remember when I was a little boy, I was fascinated with the sitcom, Good Times. My father forbade me to watch it, because he didn’t want images of African Americans entering his house—which of course made me want them even more! Here we were in this suburban, upper-crust house-- miserable; but those characters on the show loved each other. So that’s what I took away from it. I think that these days, for younger people, race is complicated but it’s a little more blurred in terms of where divisions of culture lie.

On one level, it may seem that younger generations are better informed or perhaps better equipped to process racist caricatures; but on another level, when you take a closer look, you realize how illusory this impression really is. For example, many would cite the show Grey’s Anatomy for having a multicultural cast and for promoting minority representation. But, no one ever talks about how they’re an exceptional case, and how holding them up as an example of progressiveness only masks what little progress we’ve actually made.

No, we really haven’t. In fact, one of the things that shocked me was when I met with the production company Big Pita, Little Pita at IFP. It was started by Alicia Keys and her manager, and they have a first look deal with Disney. They basically said that Muhammad and Mary sounded really interesting, but that it wouldn’t be a Disney project because they wouldn’t make a movie about a couple that was mixed. In fact, they were also developing a family drama series for television, but told me point blank that the people at Disney wouldn’t do the series because it had a biracial couple. Which is shocking! That we live in a country where decisions are made because people are racist and they don’t want to see a family. I mean come on.

Do you feel now, having participated in IFP two years in a row, that there is a growing sense of latitude in terms of more provocative topics and traditionally underrepresented types of characters and stories becoming more acceptable, or at the very least easier to produce?

Definitely. Although, I think it’s really a question of having strong material. It’s not enough just to write a story about someone who’s in an underrepresented group. It’s got to be a good story. People will watch a good story. I don’t think people are afraid to see something new. I would argue that’s what would make these underrepresented stories have larger market potential. I’ve read scripts that were not going to a deeper level, and they ended up becoming regurgitated stuff that we’ve seen before. I don’t know. My new script is about a transsexual cleaning lady based on this cleaning lady that I had as a kid. I have a friend who’s a transsexual actress, and I think it’ll be a wonderful part for her. I hope that people will watch it. I don’t know. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll be freaked out. I have to find a way so that they identify with her, that they care about her. I mean look at Boys Don’t Cry. I feel very hopeful.

Do you feel that filmmakers like yourself, who challenge audiences by presenting unorthodox characters and stories, need to pitch or spin their projects differently? What do you say to producers and industry execs who counter with, “Oh, no one’s going to want to see that”?

I think if you can be clear, then people will buy it. It’s all about just finding the truth in the story that will resonate with audiences. It’s really about presenting the characters within a context or structure that will engage audiences. Really, I don’t have the answer. All you can do is just present your passion, and most importantly, you just have to keep working. That’s the thing: you have to keep working.

Note: Thank you to Short End Magazine for linking this interview to their main page. You can read more in the magazine here, and see Scarlett Cinema's exclusive page here.

An Interview with Barry Jenkins

Last month Barry Jenkins and I chatted via mobile phone, Chicago to San Francisco, for Jenkins' first ever interview. He began his work in film at the prestigious Florida State University film production program, and from there headed west for bigger things. One of his first stops was Telluride, Colorado where he and I met at the 2002 Student Symposium; later he was off to Los Angeles for a short tenure at Harpo Studios, and is now in San Francisco shooting his first feature film, Medicine for Melancholy.



[Pamela Kerpius] You were first at the Telluride Film Festival in 2002 as a member of the Student Symposium…

[Barry Jenkins] That’s right!

…You’ve returned every year as a production intern or volunteer. How has that film culture in Colorado influenced your filmmaking?

Ah, you know, this kind of sucks. It’s going to be a bad answer for you. But every year I go back to Telluride it’s less about film. This year I saw maybe, four films out of the thirty that were there. I pretty much go back now for the production crew that comes out to work every year. But I can’t deny the impact that the Symposium had on me, it’s where I met Lynne Ramsay; I had no idea who she was before that, and she’s a huge influence on my filmmaking now.

The more I go to Telluride the more I realize how I need to make films, which is pretty much on my own with my friends, outside the system. I realize more and more that Telluride isn’t the place for me as a filmmaker; at Telluride a film screens there and it already has merit, and I think you have to be within a sort of a box—not necessarily a safe box—but a certain box of prestige to make it at a festival like Telluride. I’m more interested in films that take more chances. I actually enjoyed the films at the San Francisco International Film Festival more as a filmmaker over the last two years. They pushed and challenged the things we’re used to seeing when we go to see cinema.

What did you see?

This year I saw Agua by a filmmaker named Veronica Chen from Argentina and it was amazing! So beautiful, and simple. It’s a story about a swimmer and a young swimmer who he’s coaching, and the kid is really good but he doesn’t have his heart in it; it’s kind of an underdog sports tale—but, the way she shoots it, the way she shoots the actual swimming it brings another language to the story. It’s the kind of movie I haven’t seen in Telluride for years.

Barry, you also keep a blog and you write a fair amount of film criticism and reviews on your own. How has the criticism industry shaped how you think about filmmaking? And who are your favorite critics?

You know the answer to that question, J. Hoberman! He’s the mother-fuckin’ man.

What’s his nickname again?

“J. Hobe.”

Yeah, I love J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and I like A.O. Scott, generally speaking. He’s a major writer. With A.O. it’s weird, he’s an amazing writer, but I don’t know that he’s an amazing film critic. He writes so well, sometimes I wish I had the quality of his criticism…

That is, opposed to someone like Rosenbaum and Hoberman who have some pretty dense thoughts about pop culture and film?

Exactly, exactly. Those guys are film first, writing second, whereas I feel like with A.O. Scott it’s the complete opposite, and his background is as a literary critic. But yes, I love film criticism. When I was in film school that was also one of the things that influenced me probably as much as watching films. I had a subscription to Sight and Sound and I felt that was the best criticism I could find. At Florida State it was a film school that’s really production based, you learn by doing, so there wasn’t much theory. One of the ways I would try to supply theory would be to read film criticism, and that’s when I found critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum, and all those guys who write at Sight and Sound.

Nowadays, I find the best criticism on blogs. That’s where I do most of my film reading now.

Which do you read?

There’s this one I go to, and it’s sort of a portal that stems out to all the others, called girish. It’s run by a professor of mathematics at a school on the east coast, in his spare time he writes about film, and somehow he got pretty popular. You can go there and always be up-to-date on what’s going on with film criticism on the Internet.

In 2005, how did working with Darnell Martin [as Assistant to Director] on the Oprah-produced TV movie, Their Eyes Were Watching God, influence you? How did she as a female and an African American influence your approach to filmmaking?

Darnell is a realist, she’s a pragmatist. She’s very straightforward, she doesn’t bull-shit. She hired me because she liked me as a filmmaker. I remember one of the first things she said to me was, “When you write characters people are less likely to identify with an African American character if he is complex.” In the two years that I spent in Hollywood, I can’t deny that there was some merit to what she said. I learned a lot from Darnell, she’s great.

You’re current (and first) feature film is loosely based on Ray Bradbury’s novel A Medicine for Melancholy. He says (as posted on your film’s website), “Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.” Where will we be following your characters, Barry?

Well, the film itself, it takes place in one day; there are two characters and they wake up together and they don’t remember how they met, and it’s those circumstances that put them together for the day. Really there isn’t too much that happens. The journey isn’t that far, but I guess to put it at its simplest, what ends up happening is that in the course of spending time with a stranger, they don’t come to realize this stranger is a thing that’s been missing from their lives; there’s some sort of melancholy within them that they haven’t recognized yet; the incident, the experience of going through this incident, makes them more attuned to that melancholy. Hopefully after the film ends, they’ll want to change, find what it is they need.



The film takes place in San Francisco…

In San Francisco.

…that’s a prominent feature of the film. Is the city a character of its own, or it is simply a matter of using the resources around you?

It’s definitely a character. I actually had the idea for this film a year or so after watching Claire Denis’s Friday Night. It’s a film about two people who meet amidst a traffic strike and end up spending the night together. When I saw it I thought, “Well, yeah, that was good, but it’s not really true of my generation,” because I felt like, of my generation, if there was a film covering a one night stand it’d be about the day after, not about the incident itself. So that was the idea, that it would be cool to make that film. We could do it really cheap…

(interrupting)

It’s almost like Knocked Up but over a shorter duration of time?

I haven’t seen Knocked Up, but from what I hear, yeah. Maybe.

…But in the process of living here—it’s, it’s such a weird place for a major city. It has such a small population of African Americans, and that was interesting to me. The more I started to think about what two people in that situation could learn from it, the more I started to put in my kind of weirdness of being here, that is, being a black male in San Francisco. It started to make that story worthwhile, if I can add that layer to it.

Race is a primary topic of your film, obviously too. Is that something your characters address outright, or is it something unspoken because the characters are black?

No, it’s addressed outright. It’s totally addressed outright. And it came about, it stems from a broken heart; I had a girlfriend here and it didn’t work out. We broke up and it was my first functional interracial relationship. A lot of the conversation in the script we had, the two of us did, me and my Caucasian girlfriend. It was funny, because at one point we got into a really serious discussion, and I asked her the question, I said, “Did you ever talk about [race] with your exes?” I asked why not, and she said “Why would we?” And I said well, I talk about race with black people all the time. It made me think about how different people treat race across ethnicities, and then I thought about how in this city, maybe black people don’t talk about race as much? I don’t know, you’re tripping me up here!

Well, my next question is about the places you’ve been—L.A., San Francisco, some time in Telluride, Colorado, Tallahassee, and inner-city Miami where you were born and raised. Thinking of the places you’ve been to in the past, and the ideas you have about being a black male artist in primarily white cities; how is space conceptualized in your film, how do memories from these places in your past manifest themselves in a totally different space like San Francisco, where you’re guiding these characters?

I don’t think they do at all. San Francisco is beautiful, and it doesn’t look like any other place I’ve ever been. It’s one of those things, it’s a beautiful, amazing city; it’s unique and doesn’t remind me of any other place I’ve ever been, but all the small deficiencies I’ve seen, and in all the other cities I’ve been to, as a black male, they’re all kind of magnified here. It’s one of those things, I can’t comprehend it—every little social issue that I’ve ever taken note of is magnified here in San Francisco, and I think that’s why it’s the right place to for the script. I can’t imagine making it anywhere else, it wouldn’t make sense in L.A., it wouldn’t make sense in Chicago, or New York; but in San Francisco the gentrification is more different than it is anywhere else. It’s a city, that’s not necessarily coming apart at the seams, but it’s changing so rapidly that no one can get a grip on it. When you put characters in a setting like that, it has no choice but to become a character.

Who designed the Medicine for Melancholy t-shirt? I love it.

Justin Barber, my buddy. He designed the t-shirt, and this is going to cut down on the “coolness factor” of me a little bit, but the movie’s only called Medicine for Melancholy because I was watching a Rohmer film, Chloe in the Afternoon, and in it there’s a scene where one of the characters is reading a book; the name of the title of that book is “A Medicine for Melancholy.” I had already written the script, but I couldn’t find a title, and I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect!” So that is why the film is called Medicine for Melancholy.

And Justin, who did our t-shirt, did a whole bunch of digging and found that quote from Ray Bradbury. It was very appropriate. It was kind of a synergy that’s just happenstance there, but it works.

I think that makes it more cool.

Alright, alright. Well, there you go!

Will there be any of The Sea and Cake in the film? This is your favorite band, right?

That is my favorite band. That’s one of those things that’s proving to be difficult about making the film—everything about making a film is difficult—but I think when you make a student film people are inclined to help you, they think it’s cool (Barry used a track from The Sea and Cake in his 2003 thesis film My Josephine.) Whereas when you’re making an independent film it’s a bit harder to get people to loan you resources. On our movie, we just don’t have the money to pay for music or locations like a big film does. But I would love to have The Sea and Cake.

That’s about all, but one more question, and I ask this as a friendly baker who’s known for her cookies: If Medicine for Melancholy were a cookie, what kind would it be?

Ah, you know what? There’s this place called Specialty's right down the street here from where I work—I think it’s only in San Francisco, I don’t know—but they have these cookies, these oatmeal chocolate-chip wheat germ cookies, and sometimes you can wait and they’ll take one out of the oven right to you. I physically remember writing the script and sometimes getting on my bike and riding down to Specialty's to get a cookie, it used to help me get through a block. The film would definitely be an Oatmeal Wheat Germ Chocolate-Chip cookie.

And what kind of cookie would Barry be?

Me? Aw, I’m chocolate-chip! I’m simple. Chocolate-chip. Real simple.



Note: Thank you to Short End Magazine for linking this interview to their main page. You can read more in the magazine here, and see Scarlett Cinema's exclusive page here.

New Film Week, November 5th-9th!

Hello, Scarlett Cineastes!

This week we'll be running a special theme for the site, "New Film!" New releases are one thing, but we're going right to the source: interviews, news and reviews on up-and-coming filmmakers, small films from the festival circuit and more.

Tomorrow, Monday 11/05, I'll be kicking things off with an exclusive first-time interview with screenwriter and filmmaker, Barry Jenkins. Originally from south Florida, Jenkins headed north to Tallahassee for film school, then west to L.A. and now to San Francisco where he began shooting his first feature film last week. Medicine for Melancholy looks at race, love and life in the altering landscape of San Francisco.


You can support the making of his films at the film's website, right here. Rest assured that any amount you contribute will be appreciated and put to good use. You can purchase a Medicine for Melancholy t-shirt, or make a direct monetary contribution. Support the arts!

Come back tomorrow for the full interview with Barry Jenkins, when he'll give us the scoop on movies, film fests, his thoughts on film criticism, and even his favorite kind of cookie.


Finally, congratulations to the 2007 ING New York City Marathon finishers! Especially Amanda Gee who completed her first 26.2 in just over four hours. Way to go!