Margot Robbie in a New Full-Length, Red Band Trailer for 'I, Tonya'

"I made you a champion, knowing you'd hate me for it." Neon has launched a new red band trailer for the indie comedy I, Tonya, which was a huge hit at the Toronto Film Festival where it first premiered. From director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, Fright Night, Million Dollar Arm, The Finest Hours), the film tells a fictional, darkly comedic version of the story of figure skater Tonya Harding, who planned an attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. Margot Robbie stars as Harding, and she looks sensational, as usual from Robbie. Allison Janney also co-stars and it looks she also gives like another outstanding performance. The rest of the cast includes Sebastian Stan, Paul Walter Hauser, Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale, Mckenna Grace, plus Caitlin Carver as Nancy Kerrigan. Based on this awesome trailer, I have a feeling this might be one of my favorite films. Still excited to watch it as soon as I can. Enjoy.

Here's the full-length, red band trailer for Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya, direct from Neon's YouTube:

You can still watch the first teaser trailer for Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya here, to see even more footage.

Based on unbelievable but true events, I, Tonya is the darkly comedic tale of American figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) and one of the most sensational scandals in sports history. Though Harding was the first American woman to complete a triple axel in competition, her legacy has forever been defined by her association with an infamous, ill-conceived and worse-executed attack on fellow Olympic competitor Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver). I, Tonya is directed by talented Australian filmmaker Craig Gillespie, of the films Mr. Woodcock, Lars and the Real Girl, Fright Night, Million Dollar Arm, and The Finest Hours previously. The screenplay is written by Steven Rogers (of Hope Floats, Stepmom, Kate & Leopold, P.S. I Love You, Love the Coopers). This first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this fall. Neon will release Gillespie's I, Tonya in select theaters starting December 8th this year. Who's down to see this?

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Ruben Östlund and Terry Notary on the Stunning Climax of ‘The Square’

By Matt Hoffman

The Palme d’Or winner and his star discuss the motivations behind their film.

Ruben Östlund won the Palme d’Or for his latest film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The Square left me puzzled and somewhat frustrated following my screening last May (check our my review here), but one thing I’m fully on board with is the film’s climax. This scene, dominating the film’s promotional material, features a performance artist pushing the boundaries of high art. Featuring motion capture artist Terry Notary (whose work can be found in Avatar, the Planet of the Apes reboot series, and Kong: Skull Island among others) as a contorting monkey man. Notary saunters into a dinner of museum donors, bringing laughter before causing havoc. This sequence is just one of many that feature bizarre interpretations and boundaries of modern art. I sat down with Notary and Östlund for a chat regarding the film’s depiction of art and the sequence that will stick with viewers for weeks.

This film has quite a lot to say about the art world. In today’s cultural landscape, what does art mean to you?

Ruben Östlund: For me, what is art is something that makes me think about existence and society or myself in a new way. It raises a new question. That is definitely what art is to me. When an art piece or a movie or a play is suddenly making me look at life in a slightly different way, that is what art is for me. That is what artists are trying to do. We’re trying to raise questions about different kinds of things, trying to highlight things that are going on in contemporary times. When you look at the museums and the contemporary art museums, so many of them are just copying MOMA, like that has been the role model for all contemporary art museums. The white cube and you just put something into that white cube. Quite often it doesn’t provoke any new thoughts, and it doesn’t even have to be with the art pieces. That’s not the problem, it’s the way we exhibit the art pieces that is the problem. Which way should we put them in a context in which we actually see, “ah ha, this is what we are aiming for here.” I think the art world has a problem because it’s reproducing a certain kind of ritual over and over again. Often it’s quite silly. I guess that’s my take on the art world. It’s a little bit lost, and it’s very theoretical; almost corporate bullshit theoretical. We have to be able to criticize that because I’m part of it in some ways.

Can you talk about the origins of the art pieces in the film? I especially adored the piles of gravel that the janitors had to cautiously vacuum around, and of course The Square itself.

RO: The gravel – well I was talking to a friend and he said, “the only things you see in these museums are mirrors and piles of dirt.” I thought that was so true. That was the inspiration for that, his take on the art world. The Square is actually an art piece that I made with a friend of mine. I’m not sure that I want to talk about it as an art piece because then it becomes only theoretical. I look at it as they are talking about it in the film, as something that is as simple as a pedestrian crossing. It’s a humanistic traffic sign, something that should remind us of a certain kind of behavior, a humanistic behavior; that we take care of each other, that we show trust for one another, that we have a responsibility as human beings. This actually exists in four cities, two cities in Sweden and two cities in Norway. We have this permanent thing in a public space in the center of the city. The reason that the film takes place in an art museum is because I was invited with a friend of mine to have an exhibition about the idea of The Square.

Terry, is this the first time you’ve appeared as yourself, without motion capture digitization, in a film?

Terry Notary: Pretty much. It’s the first role like this.

RO: Definitely not the last, I’m 100% sure.

TN: It’s no different for me than doing performance capture. I think I’ve just become the guy that they think does that. So I just didn’t feel any different. I’m still me in a room with people as it is when I’m performing as any other character. I didn’t approach it any differently at all. I just think that people are recognizing this more because it’s me – you see my face. It’s was definitely an amazing experience doing this scene, because we knew we had to do something profound and we had to move the audience and we had to say something with no dialogue. The marks that Ruben wanted to hit were: win them over, scare the alpha male out of the room, and breed. It’s like the base things, become part of the pack, make a gang, and gang up on someone. Then turn around and become the alpha of the room and breed with the prettiest girl. That was basic.

RO: What was the word you used, breed? What does that mean?

TN: Make love. Have babies with. Anyways, we knew that we were going to keep it simple, but how we got there, we didn’t quite know. We kind of mapped something out and then we just let the moments happen and let them be fresh. When we found something that was working we kept it, and then we moved to the next thing. We would do it in big chunks, but we did so many takes.

RO: We worked three days on this single scene.

TN: By the end of it I was fully in it. Then I would go around and apologize to the people in the scene. “I’m so sorry, so sorry. Is your neck okay? Did I throw water on you?” Then I’d go back into it. So the rest of the actors kept it alive, they were always waiting for something new to happen. I had to surprise myself, I didn’t want to repeat any of the same actions.

Where did the idea for the scene come from?

RO: Many different things inspired that scene. One of them was a Russian performance artist called Oleg Kulik and he had a performance in a museum in Stockholm and he was playing a dog. I think there was a sign that said, ‘beware of dog”. When people didn’t respect that he actually bit them. It ended with him biting the chief curator’s daughter in the leg, so they had to call the police. That’s why the character’s name is Oleg. The voiceover is about trying to highlight that we are animals. If you show fear the animal will sense it and hunt you down. If we you remain perfectly still, you can hide in the herd and be safe knowing that someone else will be the prey. We have to remember that we human beings are animals. A lot of our behavior comes from our instincts and our needs. I wanted people to have to think about this at the same time as we think of ourselves as civilized creatures. The scene in itself came together when I was watching Terry’s performance on YouTube for Planet of the Apes. It was a little demo. His performance was so beautiful and powerful and fantastic. So it gave me the idea that the performance artist could imitate a monkey.

The Square is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It begins a nationwide expansion this Friday, which will continue throughout the fall.

The article Ruben Östlund and Terry Notary on the Stunning Climax of ‘The Square’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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Dreyer, and more, in Houghton

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).

DB here:

Professor Erin Smith, of Michigan Technological University, distinguished herself during her years at Madison as a grad student in both English and Film. She’s moved more fully into media studies and production, including documentary work. When she invited me to visit 41 North Film Festival this coming weekend, how could I refuse?

There’s a lot going on, most elaborately a screening of Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc with orchestral and choral accompaniment.

I’ve never attended a performance of Richard Einhorn’s score, so this should be quite something. (The Criterion DVD version of the film offers it as optional accompaniment.) In addition, there are several other films showing over the weekend. You can go here for the full schedule, which includes one of our recent favorites, Varda’s Faces/Places.

While Kristin and I are there, I’ll be doing a lecture on Dreyer and another talk based on Reinventing Hollywood.

My first book was a little guide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and my second book was a survey of Dreyer’s films. I’ve returned to him sporadically since then, and I’ve had occasion to rethink his role in film history–especially in light of my and others’ research on silent cinema. (For example, “The Dreyer Generation,” “Dreyer Re-Reconsidered,” “Nordisk and the Tableau Aesthetic,” and this blog entry on Criterion’s Master of the House release.)

Dreyer remains for me an impressive, enigmatic figure. He was sensitive to the changing styles of cinematic expression from the 1920s to the 1960s, and yet he went his own way. His early silents were au courant with trends in European filmmaking, especially kammerspiel. Yet Jeanne was one of the wildest movies of the era, a  hallucinatory blend of Expressionism, French Impressionism, and Soviet Montage. It still seems to me resolutely unique, which partly secures its timelessness.

After the no less weird Vampyr (1932), Dreyer’s films seemed old-fashioned in their pacing; even Danish critics called Day of Wrath (1943) sluggish. Yet as things played out his “archaic” style in the sound era looks more and more prophetic. He said he learned from Antonioni, but Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964; below) go far beyond the deliberate pacing of European films of his day and look forward to Straub/Huillet and Béla Tarr.

Was he the first director of “slow cinema”? I now see him as integrating principles of the “theatrical” cinema of the 1910s–a style he rejected in his youth–into the modern sound cinema, in effect showing the continued viability of the approach, while pushing it to extremes. Just like what he did with editing and shot design in Jeanne, come to think of it. For such a quiet guy, he was pretty bold.

Michigan Tech is located in gorgeous country (the UP, as we midwesterners call it). Kristin and I look forward to our road trip, accompanied by old Orson Welles radio shows. We thank Erin and her colleagues for inviting us!

A view of Houghton, MI, from the Portage waterway.

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Becoming A Monster: ‘Mindhunter’ and The Real Ed Kemper

By Jacob Oller

Some performances are just too close to reality.

David Fincher’s remarkable Mindhunter isn’t just a gripping psychological police procedural. It’s a lot of fun. And that’s scary. Especially when some of the funniest, most charming segments are conversations with Ed Kemper, played in the show by Cameron Britton.

Britton’s performance is striking, seductively normal, and all-too inviting. This is truly a dangerous psychopath, we think. But how close is this to someone that really walked among us and murdered all the co-eds he wanted before turning himself in?

In a back-and-forth editing comparison between Britton and interviews with the real Ed Kemper, Thomas Flight finds that the vocal tics and accent are spot-on while the writing captures the essence of Kemper’s icy amiability without stooping to direct quotational lifts. The effect is chilling.

The article Becoming A Monster: ‘Mindhunter’ and The Real Ed Kemper appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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On Fertile Ground: The Pregnant Women in Denis Villeneuve’s Cinema

By Sarah Foulkes

Exploring a consistent theme in the filmography of one of today’s best working filmmakers.

In the 7 years since Incendies was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010, Dennis Villeneuve has been making films at an impressively fast rate. Having recently released Blade Runner 2049, I’d like to take a look at a recurrent theme in Villeneuve’s films: the theme of fertility and motherhood. It’s not the first thing you think of when you think of Villeneuve, and yet this theme is present in every single film except Sicario and Polytechnique.

Spoilers for pretty much every Dennis Villeneuve movie below.

Villeneuve isn’t concerned so much with the physical reality of pregnancy, but rather its symbolism. For Villeneuve, having a child is an exercise in ultimate creativity. Its making life from the smallest of parts, or from the biggest trauma. And embedded in that creativity is the mystery that often ensues in his films. A lot of Villeneuve’s are structured as circular narratives, looping towards the answer and back to the question. Who is my mother? My father? How does that change who I am?  Indeed, in both Arrival and Incendies, the big reveal is who the father is. Yet, neither film derives its emotional intensity from the need to answer that question. You get the sense that his characters always felt helpless; like the cards were stacked against them. The answer doesn’t so much solve, as confirm the anguish. Yet, for Villeneuve, life is always worth it. Even if you are raped, or know that your child will die, it’s worth the pain. Just as an aside, I think it would be a mistake to assume any direct political stances, although others clearly have. It’s interesting then that one of his earlier films from  Maelstrom begins with the female lead having an abortion. A foreshadowing of the man she runs over and kills later on in the film, the abortion is an omen. It’s also our introduction to the character, a ballsy move as it can divide the audience from the get-go. But Villeneuve is more interested in the symbolic potential of birth, rather than abortion.

Brother and sister read their mother’s dying re(quest).

Birth is often a placeholder for the unknown other. After all, sci-fi is always about the other, even if that other is growing inside you. And in Arrival, by communicating with the other, Amy Adams’ character has visions of her child, of her future. And this unknown works the other way too. In Incendies, the two children are each given a letter by their mother Nawal, after she’s died. The letter instructs each to go find their father, and their brother respectively. The third act reveals that they are one in the same person. Just as communicating with the heptapods in Arrival condenses linear time, rape and incest condense the family tree.

In Enemy, Helen’s (Sarah Gadon) pregnancy is met more with fear, than veneration. The fantastique film is more about male anxiety than female agency. Helen is Adam’s wife. Her very pregnant belly is a reminder of how much his life will change once he becomes a father and settles down. Whether you believe that Adam and Anthony are twins separated at birth, or one is a psychic projection, the two women Helen and Mary are pawns in the men’s game. They are both alternatives, one from the other. The Virgin and the Whore. I mean, even the names are Biblical. What’s funny is that Dennis Villeneuve stated in an interview that he made the film because he wanted to make a film about female intimacy, and yet that intimacy is only viewed through the lens of the male doppelgangers.

Dr. Stelline

And finally, Blade Runner. Since Blade Runner 2049 has come out, I’ve been reading reviews left, right and center. Dazzled by Roger Deakins’ vision of the future, and impressed by the film’s development from the original film, I felt seduced by the film’s neat and calculated plot and aesthetic. However, I felt uneasy about the film’s politics. Are they regressive or reformist?  On the one hand, I understand that all the female characters, especially Luv and Joi, are literal products of the patriarchy. They are made by and for men. So in some ways, it would be inconsistent if they proved to be independently minded women. In many ways, Blade Runner is about the trafficking and control of women.  But on the other hand, the story is told entirely from the perspective of a white dude. The film could’ve easily made its argument about Niander Wallace’s imperialist desire to play God while also having nuanced and diverse characters. In a way, Blade Runner 2049 does a similar thing as Aronofsky’s mother!: ironically, by attempting to allegorize female fertility, it fails to accurately represent the female’s experience of fertility and motherhood. When can we go beyond the allegory? Moreover, K sacrifices himself for Dr. and Deckard. The whole film purports “the future is female” ideology, while in actuality renegading females to the sidelines. The final shot of the film, after all, is K, not Dr. He may be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but he’s still the hero of this narrative. So, one thing is for sure, the film certainly isn’t as progressive as many would’ve hoped.

So, Dennis Villeneuve has returned again and again to the theme of motherhood and pregnant women. Fertility is a common theme in sci-fi, especially dystopian sci-fi (Children of Men is the prime example of that). And when used well in other films, can easily imbue the film with a sense of emotional urgency. Arrival is a great example because Louise is a mother, but isn’t valued or defined for her motherhood. She is introduced to us first and foremost as a world-class linguist. And it’s not to say that “feminist” films can’t portray female characters as primarily mothers. In fact, in Sicario there’s not even a hint of Emily Blunt as a mother. But Villeneuve’s films that offer the most interesting characters are the ones that don’t portray characters as vessels for symbolism.

The article On Fertile Ground: The Pregnant Women in Denis Villeneuve’s Cinema appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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‘Cool Hand Luke’: A 50th Anniversary of Resilience and Defiance

By Emily Kubincanek

In a time of war and political turmoil, Cool Hand Luke found lasting defiance in Hollywood’s most charming man.

Paul Newman was no stranger to playing the outcast by 1967. With The Long, Hot Summer, The Hustler, and The Young Philadelphians under his belt, audiences were used to him being dealt the shorthand. His struggles never put a damper on his good looks until the torture he’d go through in perhaps his most famous role in Cool Hand Luke.

50 years after its release, Cool Hand Luke may be remembered for its famous quotes or that hilarious egg scene, but that isn’t why audiences continue to revisit it today. Newman’s performance as Luke, a petty criminal unsure of his place in the world, gives the film the depth a movie needs to have a legacy.

The script originated from real life convict, Donn Pearce. He wrote a novel with the same title about his life serving on a southern chain gang. The rights for the story were obtained by producer Gordon Caroll, but he believed Pearce’s lack of experience in Hollywood wouldn’t make for a good script. Frank Pierson was brought on to write the screenplay for the film that would outshine the novel it was based on.

Despite deviation from Pearce’s vision, Cool Hand Luke derives most of its power from the anti-establishment tone that is present in Pearce’s novel. It opens on Luke unscrewing the heads of parking meters while drunk. He laughs at the officer who orders his arrest, unphased by the consequences of what seems like a prank. He ends up at a chain gang with the likes of men who have committed far worse crimes like assault, yet immediately the guards deem him as a hard case. Luke takes everything dished out at him from the very beginning with a smirky grin.

His unamused calmness agitates not only the captain and other “bosses,” but the inmates as well. Upon his arrival, Luke even challenges the rules orchestrated by gang tough guy Dragline (George Kennedy). This results in a fight scene impossible to watch without grimacing. Lukes takes punch after punch as the guards look on, uninterested in saving him from a beating. A perfect example of Luke resilience throughout the film, his inability to bow out of the fight earns his respect from the other inmates.

Luke continues to defy authority throughout the film, but his actions are not without heart. In a sad scene with his dying mother, he admits he could never live a normal life. The girl he wanted to marry ran off and he apologizes to his mother for being a burden on her shoulders. Her death affects him deeply, pushing him to what the guards expected him to do all along–escape.

Cool Hand Luke uses the authoritative characters to look at cast an anti-establishment theme unlike most films of its kind. They are not directly representative to the authority figures the film may have been commenting on during the Vietnam War, but they evoke that image. The ruthlessness and unsympathetic nature of the Captain (Strother Martin) and his “bosses” Paul (Luke Askew), Godfrey (Morgan Woodward), and Blind Dick (Richard Davalos) could certainly be connected to the impressions of the military officials at the time. Their sadistic torture of Luke and the other inmates is very similar to depictions of Vietnam War officials, like in Full Metal Jacket (1987). When contrasted with Luke, these characters feel like an impossible evil force to beat.

The film represents feelings towards authority, whether it be the government or reigning Hollywood studios, at the time it was made, but in a way that isn’t overtly of its time. The story can resonate during any time because it’s not grounded in events directly connected with the 60s. The time period has very little to do with the story. Unlike Easy Rider, this film doesn’t contain the aura of the decade while still using the same sentiment. It makes for a more accessible and relatable story that 50 years later, audiences can identify with.

The article ‘Cool Hand Luke’: A 50th Anniversary of Resilience and Defiance appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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Austin Film Festival: A Conversation with Lindsay Doran

By Natalie Mokry

We dig into growing up in the business with super producer Lindsay Doran.

The producer of films such as Sense and Sensibility, Stranger Than Fiction, and Nanny McPhee, Lindsay Doran has brought a variety of delightful films to our screens for years. Growing up within the industry, she always aspired to be a filmmaker herself but knew it would be a challenge considering the lack of women working as executives, producers, and directors. Now an established, award-winning producer, with an illustrious career, Lindsay Doran still works with stories on a regular basis, and attends various events where she provides her insight on why movies have such a strong power to make us feel happy, sad, overjoyed, and a mixture of all of the above.

Over the years, Lindsay has attended the Austin Film Festival, giving talks on subjects such as the writer-producer relationship as well as the psychology of storytelling. During the week of the festival this year, I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with her, and talk a little more about her career, her work with Emma Thompson on films like Sense and Sensibility and Nanny McPhee, and the role of psychology in movie-making.

You grew up surrounded by the film industry, both your father and mother worked within it, but did you always see yourself becoming a producer or working in the film industry at all?

I always wanted to. I was very aware that at that time, everyone was a man. I have a picture of my father in his office from the 60s. Well, I don’t really know when it’s from, but it’s sort of the whole Paramount staff, and it’s all a bunch of guys. So even though I loved movies and I watched them all of the time, and I dreamed in a general way about making movies, I was very aware that the women were actresses and costume designers, and I wasn’t really interested in being either of those things. So yeah, if I had any dream it was to make movies in England. That was my main thing. I loved English movies and that was the goal. And I actually moved to England the minute I was done with college, literally within three days I was there. And I thought that somehow just being there would do the trick but it didn’t do the trick. It took me a long time to get back and actually start making movies there.

And now that you have had such an established career, and have produced wonderful films, what is that you find you enjoy most about being a producer?

What I enjoy most is the process of actually working on the story. It’s interesting how some producers can’t wait to get to the set. That’s just the part they love the most and they kind of rush the development stage because they can’t wait to get on set and do that part of the producing. I tend to spend a very long time developing screenplays. It’s not unusual for me to spend 3-4 years on a script. Sense and Sensibility took 4 years. Once and while they happen quickly, but most of the time they take years and I love that. And then I love the editing room, which is the same thing of looking at the story and figuring out where you can make cuts and creative things. So, even though it’s more the director’s space, it’s just a space I love to be part of, while the initial space is almost always just me and the writer.

So you would say you enjoy more of creating the story and piecing it together?

Yeah, and helping structure the screenplay. I mean that’s what I really love to do, and because I love working on the screenplay so much and have thought so much on what makes them work. That’s why I love coming to Austin to be around people who are interested in the same things.

As a producer what do you look for in a story? In a writer?

It mostly has to do with, and again if you asked different producers, they would probably have different answers to this question, because you know, some of them want to do true stories, and some want to do stories about social justice. For me, the writers that I respond to are the ones who are laugh out loud funny and can break my heart. And know how to write a romance. And who like to write lots and lots of story. You know, there are certain movies where story is sort of the last thing on anyone’s mind, and there are movies like that I actually like. Magarey Prime, which came out this year, there is no ostensible story in that movie, but it’s fascinating because they create a mood and a kind of mystery that’s not like anything else. That’s never something I would produce, as much as I liked it. I wouldn’t even know how to make a movie like that. I’m always adding more story. I need more. And I like working with filmmakers who say “you know what, I bet we could have even more go on.” So I like lots of narrative, lots of suspense and surprise. I always want to laugh out loud, and I always want to cry.

Going off of that, what has been your most challenging film to produce thus far, or perhaps what has been your most rewarding? And could you talk more about the difference in producing something like Stranger Than Fiction in comparison to Sense and Sensibility, which takes place in a whole different era?

Sense and Sensibility was difficult in the sense that, well first of all, it took me 10 years to find a writer for it. I think it was about 10 years. I loved that book and had read it way before I got into the movie business and kept thinking of what a great movie it would make. But I was trying to find somebody who could honor Jane Austen in that sense of being laugh out loud funny and being heartbreakingly romantic and know how to do it in period language. When I met Emma Thompson and saw some skits that she had written for British TV, even though she had never written a screenplay in her life, and had not even thought about it that much, I really thought she was the one who should do it. So it was challenging. It was very challenging for her, learning how to write a screenplay, and it was very challenging for me helping her to write that screenplay. But then she won the Oscar for it, so that was good.

The challenge of making a period piece is harder for an American producer than for an English producer, because a lot of English producers have been doing that for most of their career. What was hard for me and for Ang Lee, was to understand that there was such a commitment to make sure that all the details were right. So we had in mind that Alan Rickman would wear a mustache. That was just always this idea that we had seen him with a mustache in I guess Truly Madly Deeply, and he had looked so incredibly romantic, and so when we hired him we thought he would wear a mustache. But we were informed by the hair and makeup people that was out of the question because men didn’t wear mustaches in the 1800s. And the end. That was it. It’s like I’m the producer, and this is the director, we wanted it another way. Too bad. It was really shocking.

Or there was a scene when Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant are riding horses. We found that location in the winter. Then when we went back in the spring to shoot, it was covered in these beautiful yellow flowers sort of like mustards, and we said “oh wow, that’s great, we can have them riding in front of those beautiful yellow flowers.” And the production designer said no, that everyone knows those flowers weren’t introduced to England until 1879. And finally, even Hugh Grant came over and said you can’t put the camera there, everybody knows about those flowers. So it was very challenging for that reason. But in every other way it was great to have a Chinese director who was new to making an English period movie, and really new to making even an English language film. That made it really exciting.

So that’s a very different thing from Stranger Than Fiction which is modern day and shot in Chicago. Zach Helm had already written many plays and screenplays before that, so that was probably the quickest development of anything that I’ve worked on. But it began, unlike Sense and Sensibility which began with a book, Stranger Than Fiction began when Zach said that he wanted to write about a guy who has a narrator. So that’s all we had. Building from the most basic level of a building block into that whole story.

So, did Nanny McPhee resemble Stranger Than Fiction in that it started with more of an idea which developed into a full story?

Nanny McPhee was a series of books that Emma had read as an adult, and she told me the basic story over lunch one day. And I didn’t really even need to read the books after that, I had thought the idea was so strong, and thought that we could just go from there. In a sense we didn’t even really use much of the book, but rather the idea of that character and the idea of very naughty children, and the idea that she uses magic to teach them empathy so that they can experience what it means to be on the other side of their naughtiness, and then they get better and she gets prettier. All of that is what I love. We used almost nothing else. The books didn’t really have much of a story. She gets uglier and prettier, and uglier and prettier, in almost every chapter. So it’s just a series of naughty things that the children do and what she does. So building that story was completely from scratch. In the books both parents are alive, you get the sense that there are maybe 100 children. None of that story that exists in that first film or the second is really from the books.

I attended your Psychology of Storytelling panel at Austin Film Festival last year and found the talk very fascinating. You said that your interest in positive psychology began after you read the book “Flourish” by Martin Seligman.        

No, it was after I read his earlier book, “Learned Optimism.”

Oh yes, that’s right. I’m sorry. “Learned Optimism” was the book. “Flourish” is his more recent book. So then could you talk a little more about how that has shaped your lens as a producer now? I recall you saying it felt like a bit of an aha moment.

Well, that book and then the later book and then getting to know the people who were sort of leaders in that field, just made me realize, you know, I think a lot of us believe that depression is necessary for art. That the great writers are all depressed, and are all drinking, and are all suicidal, and that movies that make you feel terrible are automatically better movies, and I never really questioned any of that. They really made me question it. They made me say why is that the most depressing movies win all the awards when our field is trying to make people less depressed? Why are you guys trying to make people more depressed? And why do you think that depression is a good foundation for art when research says exactly the opposite. You’re actually more creative the more positive emotions you expose yourself to. That if you’re trying to get yourself out of a story problem, you’re much better off listening to “Despacito” than Leonard Cohen. I mean that’s fascinating to me. These are the kinds of things that I want to share with people because I didn’t know, and I certainly hadn’t thought about accomplishments and relationships in this sort of ballet that goes on between those in our stories and which are the things that audiences are responding most too.

Once I began doing the research and realizing that there are real preferences going on in terms of an audience and what they care about and how relationships become so much more important than accomplishments even though, and this is more from evolutionary psychology. But we are made to pay attention to our accomplishments and wiping out our opponent and winning, but in truth what we really care about are relationships and that those are equally important for our civilization to thrive, it’s just that they’re not important for fight or flight, just for the kind of community that’s required to keep civilization alive, but they’re not as dramatic. So I just found all of that to be so interesting.

And for example, when I work with a lot of writers, because I do a lot of story consulting now, so let’s say I’ll come in the middle of a project. And I will say to everybody, “what is the most important relationship in this movie?” And I will get 6 different answers. When people realize there are 6 answers, everyone realizes something is wrong. There has to be a sense of the centrality of that. It doesn’t matter if there are 2 people or the whole group in Hidden Figures or the whole group in Pitch Perfect, but you have to say in the end, this is about these people; this group, this friendship, this couple. The script will work a lot better if you can identify that. And weirdly that’s the note we got from the studio in Sense and Sensibility. They said, this is great, but we’re not feeling the relationship between the sisters strongly enough. And they were actually right. It made it so much better when we went back and made sure that was the central thing despite all the romance that was going on. So it was just an exposure to ideas that had a lot to do with storytelling even though for positive psychologists, that’s not their main focus, but it’s mine.

And you say it’s not necessarily that a story needs a happy ending, but rather a positive ending. Could you explain maybe the difference between these two a little bit? And how important do you think it is that audiences take away something positive from a film?

It’s two things. I don’t think that people should just watch positive movies. There are lots of movies that I like and admire that are tragic. I never want anyone to think that what I’m doing is saying that you shouldn’t make sad or tragic movies. I worked for Sydney Pollack for 8 years, and he specializes in love stories where the two people don’t get together. That’s what he does for a living. He rarely made a movie where they did. But they’re wonderful movies that will live forever. It’s a lovely way to make a movie. So I would never say that people shouldn’t do that. But I have become aware that we are making fewer and fewer cheerful movies. Those that make us happy from beginning to end. That used to be a standard thing in Hollywood. We were making On the Waterfront, but we were also making Singin’ in the Rain. There was a balance. So you could go to a movie for escape or you could go to a movie to think seriously about social issues. It was all there. Now, I feel as if that genre is disappearing. It’s there sometimes. It’s there in Momma Mia, it’s there in Talladega Nights.

Somehow this idea that movies should be darker has really been taking over, and what I have learned from the positive psychologists is that the mental and psychological health for people who are going to the movies, that kind of escapist humor that makes you laugh in a un-cynical way is really an important part of our mental health. I just want to make people aware that we need to be doing that too. There are lots of good movies that end sadly and end in a devastating failure. And I’m not saying that’s wrong at all. But I do think there needs to be more of an understanding of the importance of it. We are not aware of the importance of making movies that make people happy because that is the crucial building block of mental health, of emotional health, of our own emotional health. As I say, it turns out that writers will be much more creative going and watching a scene of Singin’ in the Rain or listening to Andy Grammar sing “It’s Good to Be Alive Right About Now” than if there were to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and listen to Leonard Cohen. It’s not that there is no place for Leonard Cohen. I love Leonard Cohen. It’s just that we have to realize we need the whole spectrum of emotion in our entertainment.

And as television gets darker and darker, I mean let’s face it, what do you watch on Sunday night that makes you feel good? I mean it’s all getting very very dark and cynical that I just want to make sure that movies are doing their part to balance that.

So thinking on this, throughout your career, what are some films that have inspired you most? Or have made you feel really strongly about something, or that you wanted to emulate, or any of the above?

 There are so many. I always come back to Seven Samurai, the Japanese film. I feel that it has everything. It has amazing drama, amazing action, there are parts that actually are funny. And it is very deep philosophically and very entertaining. So it gives you whatever you want from the movies on that night that you get. Great storytelling, great acting, great cinematography. So it’s the whole package in that way. I love that movie.

I also really really love Singin’ in the Rain. I love His Girl Friday. I also really love this silent film called Sunrise, which is a romance film that I think is one of the most emotional things I’ve ever seen. I also love Shoot the Piano Player, which is one of Truffaut’s films from the 60s and is one of my favorite films.

I’m sure if you asked me tomorrow, I would give an entirely different list. I love Sleepless in Seattle. I love Love Actually. I love romantic comedies in general. It’s one of my favorite genres and again, it’s a genre that disappearing. And I think that’s so sad. Something that’s been with us since the beginning of movie making is just not happening. What happened? People didn’t want to stop seeing love stories, and people didn’t want to stop laughing. So how did that happen? I think it’s really really sad.

Lastly, what advice would you give to upcoming filmmakers who aspire to be producers and screenwriters?

See a lot of movies. I’m kind of shocked at times from how few movies people have seen. So many people are watching television right now and that’s fine if you want to watch television, but if you want to make movies, you should see a lot of movies. And you should see silent movies, and movies from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and all the way through, because they’re not just old-fashioned black and white films you have nothing to learn from. There is some stunningly good storytelling from films in every decade, including silent films and it’s so important to have seen all of that. From a producing and screenwriting point of view, just see more movies. See them more than once. I draw on that stuff all the time. I solve problems with scripts I’m working on today with something I saw in a movie that was made in 1934, 1959, etc. They are full of solutions.

The article Austin Film Festival: A Conversation with Lindsay Doran appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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[The Daily] Lady Macbeth Leads BIFA Nominations

The nominations for the 2017 British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) are out, and William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth leads with fifteen. Mark Gatiss will host the BIFAs ceremony on December 10 in London. Links from the titles will take you to . . .

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The Good and the Bad of ‘Stranger Things 2’

By Liz Baessler

Really it’s mostly good.

Stranger Things 2 Spoilers Below

This is the definitive Film School Rejects review of Stranger Things 2. I watched the whole thing in three sittings over the course of 15 hours and, definitively, I was charmed to bits.

But why? What did this season of Stranger Things do right? (Even righter, I would venture to say, than the first season).

Some of it comes from familiarity. Second seasons are by no means destined to be good, but one thing they almost always have going for them is the return of beloved characters.

And Stranger Things has a few.

It doesn’t stop at characters, either. The show knows its appeal, and it maximizes its engagement with the audience through repetition of old favorites like Eggos and spiky clubs. But even better is the playfulness this familiarity allows. We’re at home in this world, now, and we love to notice changes and promised events — cue Dustin’s new teeth and the long-anticipated Snow Ball.

An even more enjoyable aspect of this playfulness is the introduction of unlikely alliances. When done right, they’re pure magic (think the Hound and Arya’s road trip in Got), and Dustin and Steve’s pair-up makes for some of the funniest and truest moments of the season.

Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery)

There are also some welcome additions. Widely hailed as The New Barb, Sean Astin’s Bob goes above and beyond the title. I would never speak ill of the dead, but Barb was a good friend who got a very tough break. Bob, on the other hand, is achingly charming. He’s a lover, a father, a hero, and a total nerd, and Astin plays all these elements in perfect balance.

Another revelation isn’t strictly new, but he might as well be. Last year Will Byers did a lot of lying around looking cold and wet, and not much else. Thank God he came back from the Upside Down because Noah Schnapp can act. On the whole, the Stranger Things kids are a cut above, but Schnapp delivers magnificently as both haunted and held hostage by powers he doesn’t understand. I’m excited to see more from him.

Will Byers (Noah Schnapp)

But of course Stranger Things 2 is far from perfect. Eleven’s episode-long adventure in Chicago didn’t strike me quite as badly as other reviewers (its presence has a nice experimental quality to it), but it does feel like an entirely different show with an inconsequential plot. It’s the introduction of extraneous characters with potential for more (apparently Dr. Brenner survived his face being eaten — a ready-made recognizable spin-off villain), and it smacks of commodification.

Other problems include the minimal characterization of Mike (whose main emotion of “mopey” is occasionally replaced by “mopingly angry”), and the somewhat shoehorned Justice for Barb subplot (almost definitely a direct response to the hashtag and a negative side effect of the show’s eagerness to engage with its own celebrity).

The show’s worst moments come when it stumbles over social issues. Last season it was mentioned several times that Will might be gay, but this season it’s never brought up once, despite the fact that every other character has a romantic interest. I covered this topic more extensively in a separate article.

And while homosexuality is done away with (apart from a single bizarrely blatant use of the word “faggot”), race is handled only a tiny bit more straightforwardly. Billy clearly doesn’t want Max hanging around with Lucas. But is it because he’s black, or just because he’s a good thing in Max’s life?

Damned if I know.  

Max Hargrove (Sadie Sink), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin)

Because Stranger Things 2 attempts to strike a bizarre balance between addressing racial conflict and never using language that addresses race.

The same thing happens in It, which I enjoyed well enough but can’t help but think of as Stranger Things 1 ½. Mike Hanlon, the film’s only black protagonist, is tormented by the town bully and told that he doesn’t belong. It certainly feels racially charged, but it’s never entirely clear since verbally he’s distinguished as “the homeschooled kid.”

The result in both cases is a truly despicable villain who’s somewhat vague in his motivations. It doesn’t add anything to the racial dialogue, and it makes for confusing characters. It’s a half-measure that does nobody any good.

What’s worse are Billy’s motivations that the show does seem to be hinting at. Between his negative reaction to the show’s single F-bomb and his unusual placement as the object of the sexual female gaze, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Billy turns out to be gay next season. But then, of course, he’d be the show’s sole queer character and its antagonist, which would be a rough way to go.

Steve made the transition from villain to a beloved asset, but I’m not confident the show could swing it twice.

Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery)

Stranger Things 2 has its problems, but what show doesn’t? All in all, it’s a wonderfully charming and spooky adventure with a lot of heart. It’s very good at timing its comedy and its angst. It knows its audience, and it’s not shy about giving it what it wants.

I for one look forward to our Shadow Monster overlords in season 3.

The article The Good and the Bad of ‘Stranger Things 2’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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