the everyday film-lovers' magazine — issue #16
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Women in Film What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps female executives and filmmakers from prospering?
Spike Jonze:
His life, his art, and his journey to winning an Academy Award
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Contributors
David Sims theatlantic.com/david-sims dsims@theatlantic.com @davidlsims Rebecca Fulleylove itsnicethat.com/authors/rebecca-fulleylove rf@itsnicethat.com @BeccyFulleylove Alessandro Furchino Capria alessandrofurchinocapria.com info@alessandrofurchino.com @alessandrofurchinocapria Maureen Dowd nytimes.com/dowd @maureendowd Art Streiber artstreiber.com @StreiberPhoto @aspictures
Nicole Holofcener variety.com/t/nicole-holofcener James Mottram independent.co.uk/author/james-mottram @jamesmottram Julia May smashingmagazine.com/author/julia-may @indigomay The Renaissance Kids therenaissancekids.wordpress.com alex.samblog@gmail.com @therenaissancekids Karen Stabiner karenstabiner.com @kstabiner A. O. Scott nytimes.com/by/a-o-scott @aoscott
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In This Issue
On the Radar
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Lily, student at the University of Aukland in New Zealand, talks her favorite films, areas of study, her biggest inspirations, and plans for the future in filmmaking.
Italian Ideas Factory
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Offering the opportunity to explore design, visual communication, photography, journalism, product design and much more, the type of projects students at Fabrica can expect to work on are diverse.
Upcoming Releases
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If you’re looking for an escape from the oppressive sameness of big-budget Hollywood in the next few months, here are some indie efforts to watch out for.
Women of Hollywood
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Female executives and filmmakers are ready to run studios and direct blockbuster pictures. What will it take to overcome the sexism that keeps them from doing it?
Spike Jonze
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The self-made filmmaker talks his latest release, his humble beginnings, his biggest inspirations, and his road to becoming an Academy Award winning screenwriter, director, and producer.
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Title Sequences
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Explore title sequences. Many may forget their importance, but in truth, there is a significant art to the design of film titles. They set the mood for the entire film, and should not be overlooked.
Editor’s Pick
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The student filmmakers from London who call themselves The Renaissance Kids talk about their latest project, their process, and their inspirations.
In Rome
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Discover the beauties of Rome from the Pantheon to the Colosseum through the filming locations of the 1952 film, Roman Holiday, with one of its stars, Gregory Peck.
Review
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La La Land, a musical about everyday life, explores what is more important: a once-in-a-lifetime love or the spotlight. Directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.
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On the Radar: Lily Lily is an enchanting student from Auckland, New Zealand who loves long coats, cats, and Alex Turner. The avid disposable film user also has a keen social and cultural awareness and an evident interest in the arts. What do you study?
Do you have a favorite film?
I am in my second year of university completing a conjoint degree at the University of Auckland. I am studying Fine Arts alongside a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Film and Television.
Museum Hours by Jem Cohen. I saw it last year at the Auckland Film Festival. It was a very slow-paced film based in Vienna and what interested me was the lack of a major narrative which allowed a complete focus on the observations made by one of the characters, which I found really poetic. Afterward you didn’t leave feeling overwhelmed with inspiration or possibility nor did you feel depressed or contemplative…you left feeling neutral, something I find quite rare in most cinematography.
Why did you choose to go to art school?
Both of my parents are artists and I was always surrounded by it. It was something that I was also good at so I decided to apply and here we are. I also wanted to pursue film, which is why I picked up the arts conjoint.
Do you have any artists that influence your work? What do you want to do after you finish your degree? Is there a career that you hope to pursue?
I'm not too sure since I have so many areas of interest. I really like working on films so I think I would continue working in that field.
One person that really got me into photography was the Dutch photographer Hellen Van Meene. Her area of interest is portraiture and she photographs girls in their adolescence, or I supposed you could say their “awkward stages.” She creates these beautiful and timeless portraits which I really like as I love portraiture.
Do you think that there is a particular area within the film industry that you would want to work in?
How would you describe your innate style?
I really love editing and sound design even though I haven’t had much experience with it. Other than that, I would love to continue with acting and directing.
I don’t think I can categorize my style but I am highly influenced by my environment, my friends, and everything around me. Those factors definitely shape my style.
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Indie Films to Watch in 2017 Words by David Sims
FE B 27
APR 7
Lovesong
Colossal
A hit from last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Lovesong is the fourth movie from the Korean American director So Yong Kim, whose three previous features In Between Days, Treeless Mountain, and For Ellen all showed significant promise (playing to fairly small audiences). Lovesong stars Riley Keough as a mother in her 20s and her fraught, romantically charged relationship with a good friend (Jena Malone) that plays out over several years. Kim’s films tend to subdued and pensive, but not without tenderness, and Lovesong looks like it will follow suit.
This Anne Hathaway-starring sci-fi monster satire premiered to very divided critical reception at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Directed by Nacho Vigalondo (who made the 2007 cult hit Timecrimes), Colossal follows a woman (Hathaway) who realizes she’s somehow connected to a giant, Godzilla-esque monster rampaging through Seoul. It’s really a sharp, dark comedy about abusive relationships, but whether Vigalondo lands the tricky allegory is a matter of debate.
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APR 14
Personal Shopper
A Quiet Passion
The newest effort from Olivier Assayas is a strange, haunted odyssey starring Kristen Stewart, who plays a young American woman in Paris going through a sort of personal crisis. Part horror movie, part muted workplace drama, Personal Shopper divided critics at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is likely to baffle viewers with its elliptical ghost-story plot. But Assayas is one of cinema’s most fascinating artists, and in Stewart, he may have found a new muse.
A long-gestating project for the English director Terence Davies (the Malick-esque master behind works like The House of Mirth, The Deep Blue Sea, and Sunset Song), A Quiet Passion is a biopic about the life of Emily Dickinson, played here by Cynthia Nixon. The movie received some rapturous reviews on the festival circuit last year, and the New Yorker critic Richard Brody said it would have been his favorite of 2016 had it gotten a U.S. theatrical release, calling it a “drop-dead masterwork.”
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The
Italian Ideas Factory Explore Fabrica through the eyes of its alumni, a place where design isn't just aesthetically pleasing but functional, and can be a solution for real world problems.
Words by Rebecca Fulleylove Photos by Alessandro Furchino Capria
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Since its inception 22 years ago, Fabrica has proved it’s the type of place that can take ordinary ideas and turn them into something unique. Summed up as a “communication research centre,” the phrase only taps at the surface of what the institution actually does. Fabrica was the vision of Luciano Benetton in 1994, the Italian billionaire businessman who is one of the co-founders of his eponymous fashion brand. The first directors were photographer Oliviero Toscani and director Godfrey Reggio, the idea behind Fabrica has remained the same since opening: to create ideas that are “a vehicle of social change.” A place where design isn’t just aesthetically pleasing but functional, and can be a solution for real world problems. Offering the opportunity to explore design, visual communication, photography, journalism, product design and much more, the type of projects students can expect to work on are diverse. The centre offers people under 25 from around the world a one-year scholarship, accommodation and a round-trip ticket to Italy to “enable a highly diverse group of researchers.” Year on year it produces a class of graduates arming each Fabricanti (what Fabrica calls its alumni) with a Communication and Applied Arts Foundation and a whole load of experience and creative and business opportunities to boot. Notable Fabricanti and collaborators include artist Jaime Hayon, designer Dean Brown, and furniture maker Martino Gamper, as well as a new roster of talent including designers Anna Kulachek and Broomberg & Chanarin. In June later this year, the first Fabrica reunion of its alumni since 1994 will take place and despite the high profile work it churns out, it’s still shrouded in mystery. So what separates it from the rest? Is it the students, the environment or just the continued expectation of greatness that is bestowed upon it? For CEO Carlo Tunioli, it’s the culture at Fabrica that sets it apart from other research centres. “What makes Fabrica really special is the interaction among young creative people speaking different languages and coming from completely different cultural backgrounds,” he explains. “Our researchers become ‘lateral thinkers’ and find fertile ground for the development of strong ideas – it provides exposure and real-world experience while still being conceptual and experimental.” Housed in a renovated 17th Century villa in the Italian countryside in Treviso, the Fabrica building epitomises the centre’s approach to problem solving. In the 90s, the
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dilapidated villa was transformed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando to create a space for creativity and curiosity. By using traditional techniques and materials from the original structure it’s now a seamless blend of the old with the new and an embodiment of the Fabrica ethos. At the heart of it is Fabrica’s vast library – a hive of information students gravitate towards when they first arrive. With over 5,000 books on graphic design, photography, industrial design, art and other topics relating to visual communication, the centre’s library is constructed around a concrete spiral illuminated by natural sunlight above. It’s a place many Fabricanti cite as one of their favourite places on the campus including Tunioli for its “moments of creative mindfulness.” Designer Anna Kulachek also remembers the cosmic powers of the building. “It reminded me of a whole galaxy with its magic quietness and number of amazing books,” she says. Anna was at Fabrica from 2012 until 2014 and her main project there was the Fabrica Handbook which she created with Samantha Ziino, to help new students adjust to Fabrica life. “Our main goal was to create a manual for newcomers with all the helpful information about the campus. We had to create the content and understand how exactly we were going to tell the story,” explains Anna. “Now every time I hold the book I relive all the experiences once again.” From printer etiquette to a snapshot of the food you can accept from the campus cafeteria Mensa, the book covers all bases. But it’s the less tangible things that will also stay with Anna: “Fabrica is a unique phenomenon. It doesn’t have a scheme for teaching everyone the same thing…Now it’s always there for me no matter where I go,” she says. “After my time there I feel more connected to
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ABOVE RIGHT
Fabrica's main courtyard Inside the library
this world, it united me with more people and now the world isn’t so disjointed for me anymore.” For photographer Jen Osborne, who’s known for her refreshingly honest style, finding a common ground with the people she was working with was key in her Fabrica experience. She stayed for just over a year back in 2008 and at the time it seemed like “the ultimate thing for a young photographer to do.” While Fabrica can be a rose-tinted experience for many, for Jen her time there was rocky – “I basically pulled my hair out trying to get projects approved!” – but to escape the pressures, Jen frequented the town of nearby Treviso. “There was a gelato shop in the centre. I would buy pretty much any flavour of the highest quality gelato for only 80 cents.” The real learning curve for Jen was getting over her fear of continually trying to “produce groundbreaking work” and she realised her colleagues were feeling exactly the same as her. “I was happy to learn we all have our highs and lows and it was important to discover that in a place like Fabrica that bestowed such high expectations on me.” Eating gelato and spending time away from the studio is part of the rich tapestry of Fabrica life. Mensa is the campus’ cafeteria situated a short walk, drive or bike away closer to Benetton’s headquarters. For illustrator, graphic artist and It’s Nice That favourite Andy Rementer it was a space that became another part of his education. “Mensa was truly the forum for open discussions and lively conversations, I looked forward to that time of the day for socialising, team building and of course the pasta,” says Andy. Known for his brightly coloured and surreal illustrations, Andy attended Fabrica for two years in 2005 and having ten years to reflect, he feels “the concept and prin-
ciples remain.” Andy threw himself into the Visual Communications department, “the face of Fabrica” at the time. “I would often resort to drawing when pitching ideas and the team responded to my style which encouraged me to pursue it more.” The real pull for him was living in another country – “I had never lived abroad, so it was quite a thrilling opportunity” – and as well as immersing himself into his work, Andy explored the campus with vigour. “There are so many beautiful and peaceful moments throughout the building – spending two years working in a Tadao Ando structure was incredible,” he says. “For quiet time, I’d go to the centre of the building. There’s a wide open piazza-like space surrounded by looming grey columns – it was a special place to go and collect your thoughts with an afternoon espresso from the machines.”
But with Fabrica, creative thinking is left to its students – there’s no curriculum, just guidance. The grey columns Andy refers to, mark the path for a courtyard that sits in between the auditorium’s curved wall and the other buildings. It’s a striking feature of the Fabrica building but these throughout the campus. Designer Dean Brown discovered this for himself when he attended Fabrica for a year in 2010. “There is this undiscovered staircase underneath the library that leads you to a locked door,” explains Dean who was senior consultant at Fabrica working on retail interiors for Benetton. “The space is extremely dark, pierced by two pyramid-shaped glass skylights that bring column like beams of light into the space. It’s probably the most secret place in the building.”
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“Fabrica puts trust in young and inexperienced creatives. There are few places like this around the world and this is an issue that’s as relevant as ever.” Dean Brown
Dean feels it “sums up how eccentric, unique and indulgent Fabrica is,” which only adds to the allure of this elusive institution. During his time there the designer created the centre’s first furniture collection that launched at the Milan Furniture Fair and it became clear that it was up to him to make the opportunities happen. Treviso is full of artisanal production and Dean took full advantage of that: “It was incredibly fulfilling to have ceramic, glass making, metal folding, wood turning and stone cutting on your doorstep,” he says. “A moment sharing a sketch with a craftsman can change everything.” Looking back on his time at Fabrica Dean says: “It’s very much an experience you shape as an individual so you must make the most of it… Fabrica puts trust in young and inexperienced creatives, offering them the time and support to find their own way. There are few places like this in the world and this is an issue that’s as relevant as ever.” Of course Fabrica isn’t the only institution with a hub of creativity bubbling away, offering young people an alternative educational experience. Both ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland and global business school INSEAD offers its students solutions to contemporary issues and tries to remain forward-looking. But with Fabrica, this thinking is left to its students – there’s no curriculum, just guidance. It’s a place to hone independent working but utilise Fabrica’s connections and consider the impact of their work in the wider world. This notion is almost Bauhaus-like, where a key attribute of the movement is an understanding of the relationship between art and design with society and technology. But while Bauhaus dismissed traditional fine art education, a year at Fabrica is in addition to your previous training or education. When we’re in a climate that recognises the importance of design, but still hasn’t quite worked out how to integrate it into the wider world, places like Fabrica are vital. RF
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ABOVE
Fabrica's main courtyard BELOW
Circular library OPPOSITE ABOVE
Main courtyard
OPPOSITE BELOW
Students at work
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The Women Beh
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hind the Camera
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WORDS PHOTOS
Maureen Dowd Art Streiber
Colin Trevorrow’s Hollywood fairy tale started at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The bespectacled, bearded director, then 35, came to Park City, Utah, with an endearingly quirky timetravel romantic comedy executive-produced by the endearingly quirky Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, and starring Mark. The $750,000 indie film, ‘‘Safety Not Guaranteed,’’ went on to make $4 million in theaters nationwide. The young director soon found a mentor in Brad Bird, who became famous at Pixar directing ‘‘The Incredibles’’ and ‘‘Ratatouille.’’ Trevorrow started hanging out with Bird on the set of his big-budget George Clooney movie, ‘‘Tomorrowland.’’ Bird called his pal Frank Marshall, a producer of ‘‘Jurassic World,’’ to give him a heads up. ‘There is this guy,’’ Bird said, ‘‘that reminds me of me.’’ Marshall was so impressed with Trevorrow that he took him to meet Steven Spielberg. That’s where Trevorrow hit the jackpot: He was tapped to direct and co-write the $150 million ‘‘Jurassic World.’’ The movie went on to make $1.6 billion, and Trevorrow was signed to direct the ninth ‘‘Star Wars.’’ That kind of leap — from indie to blockbuster — is almost exclusively reserved for young guys in baseball caps who remind older guys in baseball caps of themselves. Kathryn Bigelow, a unique figure in Hollywood, got a big budget for ‘‘K-19: The Widowmaker.’’ The director Patty Jenkins’s ‘‘Wonder Woman’’ will arrive in 2017. No other woman in Hollywood has directed a $100 million film. In August, Trevorrow drew ire by suggesting that the dearth of female directors making films involving ‘‘superheroes or spaceships or dinosaurs’’ was because not many women had the desire to direct studio blockbusters. He had already drawn a backlash for portraying Bryce Dallas Howard’s character as a cold career woman running away from dinosaurs in high heels. ‘‘Would I have been chosen to direct ‘Jurassic World’ if I was a female filmmak-
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er who had made one small film?’’ Trevorrow mused in an email to Slashfilm.com. ‘‘I have no idea.’’ Every woman who has ever had a film at Sundance has an idea, because they have watched male peers at the festival vault with ease across the chasm to Hollywood studios, agents, financing and big paychecks. ‘‘If they make a $150 million movie with women directing or starring, and it bombs, they take it a little harder,’’ says the director Adam McKay, who is Will Ferrell’s writing and producing partner. ‘‘You can trace that to the old-school guys in the boardrooms.’’ Leslye Headland is a 34-year-old writer and director who was in the same 2012 Sundance class as Trevorrow, with the movie version of her scorching Off Broadway play, ‘‘Bachelorette.’’ She bristles with ambition to do everything he is doing. Sitting in a red leather banquette at the Monkey Bar in New York, Headland told me she wants to be a Martin Scorsese, and ‘‘not just the female Martin Scorsese.’’ She wants to direct a James Bond movie, ‘‘even if I have to marry someone to get British citizenship.’’ She wants to make films in which women behave badly
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and are not held to a higher moral standard or seen as ‘‘less than.’’ She wants to look cool in magazine pictures so that ‘‘little girls will put female filmmakers on their Pinterest boards.’’ In her black-and-cream miniskirt and black Balenciaga hightops, Headland was a magnetic presence with a throaty voice and a booming laugh. She had a Nicki Minaj ring tone, ‘‘Truffle Butter,’’ and several movie tattoos: ‘‘redrum’’ from ‘‘The Shining’’ on her lower back; a line from ‘‘War Games’’ — ‘‘The only winning move is to not play’’ — on her left forearm; ‘‘How would Lubitsch do it?’’ in script on her right. Harvey Weinstein, for whom Headland worked as a receptionist and assistant, calls her ‘‘wildly talented.’’ Headland made this fall’s ‘‘Sleeping With Other People,’’ a raunchy rom-com starring Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, in 25 days for $5 million from a script she drafted in two weeks, chronicling her obsession with a ‘‘lame’’ ex-boyfriend. ‘‘Quentin Tarantino can make ‘Pulp Fiction’ for $8 million and you can slap him on any magazine,’’ Headland said. ‘‘He’s the poster boy. He was for me. I want to be that guy even though he looks like a foot. God bless him, and he can do whatever he wants to my feet. But with a female director, you’re just not celebrated the same way.’’ The problem is so glaring that in 2005, the actress Geena Davis, who would go on to start her own gender institute, commissioned Stacy Smith, a researcher at the University of Southern California, to study the issue and help push the studios beyond Dude World. From 2007 through 2014, according to Smith’s research, women made up only 30.2 percent of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films. But the most wildly lopsided numbers have to do with who is behind the lens, not in the acting stars. In both 2013 and 2014, women were only 1.9 percent of the directors for the 100 top-grossing films. Excluding their art-house divisions, the six major studios released only three movies last year with a female director. It’s hard to believe the number could drop to zero, but the statistics suggest female directors are slipping backward. Prof. Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University reports that in 2014, 95 percent of cinematographers, 89 percent of screenwriters, 82 percent of editors, 81 percent of executive producers and 77 percent of producers were men. ‘‘It’s kind of like the church,’’ notes the actress Anjelica Huston, whose father, John Huston, helped set the template for macho directors. ‘‘They don’t want us to be priests. They want us to be obedient nuns.’’ Hollywood’s toxic brew of fear and sexism has kept women even more confined than those in legendary male bastions like Silicon Valley, where 10.8 percent of executive officers are women; corporate America, where about 16 percent of executive officers at S.&P. 100 companies are women; and Congress, where 20 percent of the House and Senate are women. But a series of events over the past year finally put the issue in the spotlight and gave a cascade of wom-
en the courage to talk about it. First, there was the Sony Pictures hack, which revealed the crazy fact that Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams received less money than Jeremy Renner for ‘‘American Hustle,’’ even in the similarity of their roles. Below the level of the studio head Amy Pascal, it turned out that the top executives at Sony were nearly all white and male. After the hack, Manohla Dargis, cochief film critic for The New York Times, wrote a three-part series on the plight of female directors, calling the imbalance ‘‘immoral, maybe illegal.’’ And in May, the A.C.L.U. in Los Angeles and the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project in New York petitioned state and federal agencies to look into the matter, which spurred the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to open an investigation. There had long been a strange sort of omertà on talking about the gender disparity. Even though women watched things getting worse, said Helen Hunt, the actress and director, it was hard to speak up: ‘‘Women who say it’s not O.K. are wet blankets or sore losers.’’ When I began reporting this article several months ago and asked some male moguls in the entertainment industry for their perspectives, they shrugged the issue off as ‘‘bogus’’ or ‘‘a tempest in a teapot.’’
Although the female pioneers’ names have long been forgotten in modern Hollywood, female filmmakers started out with gusto. ‘‘Not that many women have succeeded in the movie business,’’ one top entertainment boss told me, while insisting on anonymity. ‘‘A lot of ’em haven’t tried hard enough. We’re tough about it. It’s a hundred-year-old business, founded by a bunch of old Jewish European men who did not hire anybody of color, no women agents or executives. We’re still slow at anything but white guys.’’ When I phoned another powerful Hollywood player to ask about the issue, he said dismissively, ‘‘Call some chicks.’’ So I did. I talked to more than 100 women and men at all levels of Hollywood. What I heard was an avalanche of previously pent-up fears, regrets, recriminations and recommendations. Beyond the bad numbers were a lot of raw emotions. Even though I grew up in the shadow of the Washington Monument, I knew long before Sheryl Sandberg that women could lean in. I learned it from film-noir vixens with guns in their purses, who never worried about being called bossy and never hesitated to pursue happiness — in all directions. At their best, movies can be instructions in how to live and how not to live, and can help us invent the verbal and visual vocabulary with which we engage the world. When my older brother took me to the American Film Institute to see old movies with Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Ida Lupino — the first actor to write, produce and direct her own films — my imagination was fired by smart, powerful women. Carole Lombard made me dream of being funny and glamorous.
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LEFT Lily Mariye, writer, director, actress,
Model Minority BELOW Dee Rees, writer, director, producer,
Pariah, Bessie
‘‘I’ve gotten into watching old movies on TCM,’’ Jennifer Lee, co-director of ‘‘Frozen,’’ told me. ‘‘And what kills me is the female characters are fantastic, complicated, messy, and they aren’t oversexualized, and I love them.’’ Actresses were second-class citizens then too, but at least they had juicy parts. The dictatorial and crass Hollywood moguls actually cared about art. They would take all the literary best sellers, throw starlets into them and make prestige movies. Although the pioneers’ names have been forgotten in modern Hollywood, female filmmakers started out with gusto. Alice Guy Blaché, who worked as a secretary to Léon Gaumont, a Frenchman who sold cameras and film, picked up a camera in 1896 and helped invent narrative filmmaking in France and Hollywood. ‘‘It is true that I passed for a phenomenon,’’ she wrote in her memoir, adding that she knew it was an ‘‘unfeminine’’ career but didn’t care. In 1910, she became the first woman to found and run her own film studio, along with her husband and a partner. Over her career, she would oversee nearly 750 films, including cross-dressing comedies, movies playing with the gender roles in marriage and action films featuring heroines. In 1914, Lois Weber, who was mentored by Guy Blaché, became the first American woman to direct a fulllength feature, ‘‘The Merchant of Venice,’’ in which she also starred as Portia. Infused with the conviction that film could change culture, she made movies about contraception, capital punishment and poverty. She ran a production company with her husband’s help, but he often deferred to her judgment. She had great taste and said her ideal picture entertainment was ‘‘a well-assorted shelf of books come to life.’’ Dorothy Arzner, a screenwriter and director who worked in Hollywood from 1922 to 1943, had her technicians rig a microphone to a fishing pole, essentially inventing the boom mike. She helped Katharine Hepburn get her start and still has the largest body of work by a woman director. ‘‘No one gave me trouble because I was a woman,’’ she said in 1974. ‘‘Men were more helpful than women.’’ The veteran director Allison Anders tells boom operators on her projects that their jobs were created by a woman.
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So given such remarkable trailblazers, how did women in Hollywood start reeling backward? The more I talked to people, the clearer it became that if the luminous Hollywood of my childhood was obliterated for good, it all started with ‘‘Jaws’’ in the summer of 1975, which would devour half a billion dollars at the box office. America fell in love with the blockbuster, and Hollywood got hooked
The moment you mention it's a female director in a foreign country, you can see the eyes roll. on the cohort of 15-year-old boys. It has never wavered in this obsession, even though girls and women buy half the movie tickets and watch more TV series, and even though teenage boys are increasingly fixated on gaming. In the ’80s, the paradigm that ‘‘Jaws’’ helped create shifted yet again. Studios began being swallowed by conglomerates, and as Norma Desmond predicted, the picture business became small. Box-office revenues would eventually go from 70-30 domestic/international to 30-70, which meant foreign markets were calling the
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shots. Dialogue and women who weren’t in leather cat suits became superfluous. Crunching data, foreign sales companies started providing the presale estimates for the value of a movie and its stars outside the United States, and producers would borrow money against those estimates. They often want the male players attached before the female ones because men tend to have more value in foreign sales. ‘‘The moment you mention it’s a female director to foreign companies, you can see the eyes roll,’’ said one woman leading a studio. ‘‘Buyers want action films, and they don’t see women as action directors.’’ Penny Marshall, the director and actress, told me in that hilarious nasal whine: ‘‘All they like is ‘Superman,’ ‘Batman,’ those kinds of things, because it sells foreign, because it doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. Even the comedies are sophomoric. They remake things that are lying there while the people who have done it already are still alive. I’ve read and seen horrible stuff. Sometimes the people who are in charge of things are a little dumb.’’ There is plenty of evidence — from ‘‘Mamma Mia’’ to ‘‘Bridesmaids’’ to ‘‘Frozen’’ to ‘‘Hunger Games’’ to ‘‘Maleficent’’ to ‘‘Fifty Shades of Grey’’ to the summer’s ‘‘Pitch Perfect 2’’ and ‘‘Trainwreck’’ — that movies directed by women can make a ton of profit. And women like the Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, the ABC powerhouse Shonda Rhimes and the Universal Pictures chairwoman Donna Langley are minting money. But Hollywood continues to treat those successes as anomalies. Leigh Janiak is a 35-year-old with a laid-back manner, but you sense immediately that she knows where she’s going. Janiak pragmatically plotted her rise while she was a producer’s assistant for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. She refused an offer to direct an episode of a network TV show on the condition that she
shadow a veteran director first. She was afraid it would stigmatize her. ‘‘Why would anyone give me $40 million to get a movie off the ground if just last week I was doing this little training program?’’ she asked, over lunch at Little Dom’s in Los Feliz. She knew that guys who made horror and science-fiction movies could make the jump to blockbusters more easily than women who wrote rom-coms could. With her writing partner, she did a $1 million horror movie, ‘‘Honeymoon,’’ a goosebumps-inducing something-badhappens-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods story (my favorite genre) starring the alluring redhead Rose Leslie, best known as Ygritte, the Wildling love interest of Kit Harington in ‘‘Game of Thrones.’’ That attracted the attention of the married producing team Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, who tapped Janiak, raised Catholic and a former Ph.D. candidate in modern Jewish studies at the University of Chicago, to co-write and direct a remake of the cult horror movie ‘‘The Craft,’’ about witchcraft at a Catholic prep school. She said she has no patience when she hears about female directors who melt into a puddle of tears after tangling with a grouchy cinematographer, saying: ‘‘I hear stories like that and think, If you are going to let people walk all over you, why do you even want to direct?’’ Fixing the gender problem in Hollywood is important for women like Janiak. But it’s also important for women and girls everywhere around the world. ‘‘We are influencing culture, which is why it’s so dangerous, I think, not to have more women making movies,’’ she said. ‘‘Why can’t I direct the next ‘Superman’?’’ MD
LEFT Shonda Rhimes, creator, Grey's Anatomy,
Scandal, founder, Shondaland ABOVE Kimberly Peirce, director, writer, Boys
Don't Cry, Carrie
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Spike Jonze Unmasked A look inside the mind of the Academy Award winning screenwriter, director, and producer, his personal take on storytelling, and his climb to the top of the film industry. Words by Nicole Holofcener Intro by James Mottram
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It’s hard to know quite what to expect from an encounter with Spike Jonze. The first time I met him, for his 1999 directorial debut Being John Malkovich, he was cripplingly shy – barely able to get out a word. But today, dressed in a jacket and tie, and sitting in the early evening gloom in a London hotel, he’s quite the host. “You’re so much smarter than I am,” he says when I articulate one question about his new film Her. Well, that’s one way to get your interviewer on side. As much as I’d like to buy into his flattery, it’s Jonze who is the clever one. Groundbreaking videos for Beastie Boys, Björk, Fatboy Slim and Arcade Fire; a founding member of the multi-million dollar Jackass TV show and movie franchise; an ad-hoc acting career in films like David O. Russell’s Three Kings and Martin Scorsese’s recent The Wolf of Wall Street (he’s the penny-stocks broker Jordan Belfort meets). And we haven’t even got to the films yet. Her is Jonze’s first solo venture, after his two wondrous collaborations with writer Charlie Kaufman, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and his more troubled take on Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where The Wild Things Are. Critics awards have been pouring in since December. He’s just won a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. And he’ll go to the Oscars in March with Her up for five awards, including Best Picture – one of the Academy’s saner decisions this season. Set in a stylized version of the not-too-distant future, where a very mainstream high-waisted pant and mustache revival appears in full bloom, Spike Jonze’s new film, Her, revolves around the deepening relationship between a recently separated writer named Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and his new artificially intelligent operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Theodore makes his living working for a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, penning heartfelt letters for other people that are digitally produced to approximate the warm, personal effect of receiving a real handwritten letter from someone who actually cares about you. In loose flashbacks, we see scenes from his life with his wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), who has since filed for divorce, and watch as he — unsuccessfully — tries to move forward without the answers he so desperately seeks as to why their marriage fell apart. It’s only the arrival of Samantha — who introduces herself, like most new software upgrades and installations, by asking him to tell her his preferences — that seems to awaken him, and Jonze sketches the quick evolution of their relationship almost like it’s a long-distance phone romance-cum-metaphysical-exercise — ex-
cept that Theo lives in the material world (of George Harrison, not Madonna), and Samantha, who ostensibly just exists as code, is both everywhere and nowhere. Despite the overarching conceit, though, Her is a film about technology only in the most literal sense. It’s actually a movie much more concerned with notions of space, intimacy, and love, filled with voices coming out of devices that feel real and close, and, conversely, people who are physically present but feel worlds away, the question of what really constitutes the real thing always looming like a storm cloud over every human interaction. Jonze says the kernel for “Her” first came to him 10 years ago. “The initial idea was a man falling for a voice,” he says. “But it didn’t become something until I started to think about it as a relationship movie.” After wrapping the lengthy production of “Where the Wild Things Are,” which took five years of Jonze’s life (and was a costly box office flop), he wasn’t ready to immediately jump into another movie. “For awhile, I just wanted to work in this other way where I would take an idea and just do it, without overthinking anything.” Though he had 50-plus pages of notes on “Her,” Jonze began making short films that were “incredibly freeing to just write a draft and shoot.” They included “Once We Were a Fairytale,” starring Kanye West as himself; and “Mourir aupres de toi” (“To Die by Your Side”), a stop-motion love story between characters on the covers of books made with handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan. From the beginning, Jonze knew he didn’t want to paint a dystopian picture of the future. “One of my first inspirations for what I wanted the future to be was Jamba Juice,” Jonze says. “Not the architecture, but just how clean and colorful it is.” The filmmaker also was fascinated by how styles come in cycles, and wanted the costumes to have a slightly 1920s feel. He was so involved he even modeled some of the clothes for Storm. “I went to a Salvation Army and gathered a random assortment of shapes and sizes and tried them all on Spike,” Storm recalls. Many
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times the costumer had to build outfits from scratch, as Jonze favored high-waisted pants and unique collars. To hear his collaborators tell it, Jonze’s shooting style is as unique as his films. “Twice now we’ve done retreats where the principle creatives get together and go over the script, and he lays it out beat by beat before we get our grubby interpretations on it,” Storm reveals. “It’s a total luxury.” Little is publicly known about the prolific but pressaverse Jonze. He was born Adam Spiegel; his father Arthur H. Spiegel III, ran a health-care consulting firm, and his mother, Sandy Granzow, is an author and artist. While he was famously married to filmmaker Sofia Coppola for four years until 2003, Jonze has never discussed the relationship publicly. Despite the fact people know little about Jonze’s private life — or maybe because of it — there is endless speculation on how personal “Her” is to him. “Everything I’ve done feels really personal,” Jonze says. “Even scripts that Charlie Kaufman wrote feel personal, which is why I was drawn to them. Even my music videos and ‘Jackass,’ I’m close to it because it’s all stuff I’m excited about.” Jonze worked off Charlie Kaufman’s inventively twisted scripts on his first two films, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002), and collaborated on the screenplay for his third, an re-imagining of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009), with Dave Eggers. Her is his first full-fledged effort as a writer-director, and in keeping with his other movies, it has an off-kilter, fable-like quality to it. But for a filmmaker with such a strong affinity for absurdist humor, not to mention for coming off as a cipher himself, he very easily wears his heart on his sleeve. On some very basic level, Jonze is a skater and a poet who has worked with Meryl Streep, and those kinds of incongruous triangulating tent-poles are what very often make up the architecture of his movies (e.g., three people, one of them a puppeteer, become embroiled in a love triangle after finding a secret portal into John Malkovich’s head; a writer writes a screenplay about a writer who is struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a movie; a boy who is sent to his room without dinner finds refuge on an island of monsters who crown him king). There’s an undeniable darkness that creeps and swirls beneath the colorful, breezy surfaces of Jonze’s movies—in Her, it hovers around the fine line between love-as-devotion and love-as-delusion. But there is also a sort of unsuspecting optimism—that maybe, for example, deluding yourself is important, or necessary, or the only way to go—and that, in the end, everyone will find a way to be okay or at least move on even if these kinds of quandaries of human experience never get answered or resolved. Jonze started out as a photographer, shooting in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s for skate magazines (as well as Interview). He is, of course, also a prolific director of music videos and commercials (he had his own retrospective in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years”), and an occasional actor (David O. Russell’s Three Kings, 1999; Martin Scorsese’s latest,
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The Wolf of Wall Street), as well as a creative consigliere for Vice, and a producer on the Jackass franchise and its attendant offshoots. Interestingly, Jonze, shares his nom de guerre with Spike Jones, the bandleader of the ‘40s and ‘50s, who was known, among other things, for his satirical takes on popular favorites; one of his posthumous releases was even titled Spike Jones Is Murdering the Classics (1971). The extent to which that Spike Jones was operating in some overly self-conscious meta-capacity is unclear, but it’s easy to imagine that he might have enjoyed this Spike Jonze’s movies. Nicole Holofcener recently spoke with the 44-year-old Jonze in Los Angeles. Tell me about the role of technology in Her and your interest in it.
For obvious reasons, every interviewer asks me about that, and, well, you’ve seen the movie—it definitely has a lot of ideas about technology and the way we live with it, and the way technology helps us connect or not connect. But I think what I was really trying to write about was the way we long to connect with each other. I really tried to make more of a relationship movie—or a love story and a relationship movie in the context of right now. Do you think the world is a better place or a worse place because of [technological] advances? Having seen your film, I also have very strong feelings myself. I would gather that you do, too.
I have a lot of contradictory feelings about it. It’s so complex, but I think maybe you saying that about me has more to do with your reaction to the film. I was left thinking, “I know how Spike feels.”
I think the exciting thing so far has been that there have been many reactions to the film that are all contradictory. And you like that?
Yeah definitely. I’m sure you, too, as a filmmaker, hope that everyone has their own personal and emotional relationship with what you make. Tell me about the scenes in Her with Rooney Mara. Were they scripted? How you show Theodore and Catherine characters falling in love with each other is very distinct and powerful, which is why I'm asking.
Well, Joaquin's character is going through a divorce, so there are a number of flashbacks to his relationship with his ex-wife, Catherine, who is played by Rooney. So I wrote about 20 scenes that sort of depicted very different and very specific small moments in a relationship. I wrote out what the scenes were about, what the characters were talking about. I didn't write specific dialogue, though. It kind of was inspired by the way Terrence Malick works, or at least the stories we've heard about how he works. So it was sort of about showing up on set and giving a
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Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly in Jonze's latest film, Her (2013) ABOVE
Jonze with Max Records as his character Max in Where the Wild Things Are (2009) LEFT
John Cusack as Craig Schwartz in Jonze's first film, Being John Malkovich (1999) RIGHT
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ABOVE
Joaquin Phoenix in Her (2013)
BELOW
Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Her (2013)
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scene—an intention of what a moment is about—and letting the actors go and find it. Were these two actors comfortable with that much freedom?
Yeah. Joaquin and Rooney were really good in that kind of situation. Because some actors might freeze.
We talked a lot about it in advance and they were really open to it. On those days, we would be in a location like their house, and we'd have nobody in there except Hoyte, who was operating the camera, and our boom operator, and myself sitting next to the camera. There was no wardrobe, no hair, no script supervisor—nobody else. So we just had this whole day where all the crew was out on the street around the corner, and we could go wherever we wanted and the camera could just wander wherever the actors went. In the middle of the scene, I'd say, "Let's go to the backyard now. Chase her out of the house." So it was this very loose thing. We knew that we didn't need to cover the scenes in a traditional way. We didn't have two pages of dialogue that we needed to work. We needed to just get these moments that were alive, whether it was a little, sweet moment where he's distracted while he's working and she wants his attention or a moment where it's a heavy fight or a moment where they're just sharing their work with each other. We would just make it up. Rooney has such limited screen time, but it really resonates. She's such a huge presence in the movie and in his inner world.
I think a lot of it just had to do with casting. Rooney has a presence that's really powerful. I definitely knew she was a good actor, but I don't think I knew how great of an actor she is. She's incredible to direct—she's able to go anywhere. She just has such precision and emotional honesty, which sometimes don't go hand-and-hand. Do you feel any connection between your movies and your music videos? Or is it all very compartmentalized in a way?
I feel like they’re probably the opposite of compartmentalized. Obviously, movies and music videos are different because they’re different lengths, and in a movie, you have more time to explore an idea. But I feel like they’re all the same really. Even if you’re going somewhere heavy or sad or intense, it’s playing in that sense of exploring an idea or exploring a feeling, and exploring some imaginative thing that excites you. I think the process is the same. I work with people I love who are really smart, who are talented, and who completely make me better, whether it’s the actors or Eric Zumbrunnen, our editor, or Hoyte [Van Hoytema], our cinematographer, or Lance Acord, who shot all my movies up until this one, or the Beastie Boys or Charlie Kaufman. It’s working with people that make me so much better. And I learn so much from having access to all of these ideas. You know, my job as a director is to encour-
age as many people to give their ideas as possible, and then to curate which ideas are actually right for what we’re trying to do. So in that way, I think it’s all the same. Was there a clear step between skateboarding and filmmaking?
Yeah, I mean, looking back, it seems like how you end up somewhere always seems like it totally makes sense. But at the time, it’s so completely random. I was taking skate photos and making skate videos, and Kim Gordon saw a skate video I did. Mark Gonzales, who is a skater, is a friend of mine, and we made this video called Blind—Video Days [1991]. It was with Mark, Jason Lee, Guy Mariano, Jordan Richter, and Rudy Johnson. And after a Sonic Youth show one night, Mark gave it to the band in the parking lot. Was that the first time you directed professionally?
The first time I’d ever held a film camera. I’d only shot video at that point. So Tamra basically just let me hang out with her for three weeks as she prepped this video, and I got sort of a crash course in how to make a music video from her. She was like, “This is location scouting, this is casting, this is a cinematographer…” We worked with this great cinematographer, Michael Spiller, who she had worked with on a bunch of stuff, and he let me use this 16-millimeter film camera. He showed me how to use it, and I shot Guy and Jason skating. At that point, when Tamra made videos, she would always rent an edit system, have it dropped off at her house, and edit herself. But she was working on a movie at the time, Guncrazy [1992], and she was busy prepping, so she said, “Hey, if you want to edit, then you can just come over every day and I’ll let you in and you can edit.” So I went over to her house every morning, edited all day, and then showed her what I’d done and she’d give me notes. With the whole thing from the beginning to the end, she gave me a master class in music videos. Before we go, I just want to mention how much I love Amy Adams in Her. I've never seen her do this kind of part, this kind of character. [Adams plays Theodore's friend from college and the only real, live human woman besides Catherine that he has extended contact with in the movie.]
She's amazing. It's funny because I could see you guys hitting it off so well. I could see her fitting into one of your movies so easily. I felt that even more after seeing your movie. I've met her, and I really like her, so maybe it will happen.
It'll happen. We're putting it in motion. I hope she reads this. Hi, Amy.
Hi, Amy—and thanks for doing Nicole's movie in the future. NH
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The Art of Film Title Design Words by Julia May
Have you ever thought of what makes you remember a certain movie or TV show? Of course, it’s the story being told, you’ll say. But what about movies such as Goldfinger, Seven and Snatch? What’s the first thing that comes to mind? We are pretty sure their opening title sequences stick out for most. Breakthrough ideas in titling, such as timing the typography to interact with metaphorical imagery or to create its own world, were largely innovations that came from outsiders to the Hollywood studio system. Figures such as Saul Bass, Pablo Ferro, Maurice Binder and Richard Williams arrived on the scene in the 1950s, at a time when the studios were starting to flounder in their fight with TV. At that time, independent filmmakers made commercial headway by doing things differently, spreading utterly fresh ideas about the possibilities of title sequences. This is the era in which the discipline of film title sequence design as we know it today was actually born.
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Experimentation on the fringes, where title sequences really thrive, have led to all kinds of innovation in what a title can be and how it can serve the story and the director’s intent. Perceptive directors like Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Blake Edwards and Stanley Donen embraced these innovators and gave them the reign to surprise audiences from the opening shots. The Bond films, the Pink Panther series, Barbarella: the sequences for such films became enticing popular amusements. By the mid-1960s the top title designers were celebrities in their own right, people who could be relied on to deal with the business of credits with playful panache.
A great draftsman and visual storyteller, Saul Bass ran the gamut of techniques for his title sequences: montage, live action, cut-out paper animation, typography in motion, to name a few. Whatever technique he used, Bass summarized the film as a metaphor that often shone with creativity. (In January 2010, David Peters, Kai Christmann and Dav Rauch, all of Design Films, gave two presentations on the work of Saul Bass at the 12th Future Film Festival in Bologna, Italy.) It could be argued that typography lost importance in this era of title design. The imagery behind the credits received a lot more attention. Still, the interplay of typography and
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images was by no means ignored. Popular trends of the 1950s were using three-dimensional lettering and embedding type in physical artifacts such as embroidery and signage. In contrast, Saul Bass often approached the lettering of a main title as he would a logo, making it function as the core element in a full marketing campaign. While the variety of solutions increased considerably, their anchor was always the relationship of onscreen typography to the movie itself. Every sphere of contemporary life — and especially the film business — has been affected by computers. For designers, creating film titles meant participating in the apprenticeship tradition — learning by doing, on the job; that continued unabated into the mid1990s. At that time, dynamic openers by Kyle Cooper and others showed what the next generation of design-educated, film-literate, tech-savvy creatives could do. That apprenticeship tradition has largely been overshadowed by the rise of popular technology, the Internet-enabled archiving of everything and the plethora of schools that propagate countless design dis-
ciplines. Most significantly, we see designers working like filmmakers and filmmakers working like designers. The potential of digital graphics and typography has attracted some of the most creative minds to motion design. Pixar and Disney have reserved crucial parts in the branding of their films for the title sequences. Using animated characters to introduce viewers to the story became a popular trend. Such talented graphic designers as Susan Bradley (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., WALL-E, Ratatouille), Jaimi Caliri (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events), Dave Nalle (Corpse Bride), Michael Riley (The Back-Up Plan, Kung Fu Panda) and Michael Curtis (Brother Bear) use all manner of tools to test different approaches to designing titles. One thing these individuals have in common is a drive to find a strong metaphor and tell an exciting story with their sequences. Throughout the history of cinema, film titles have evolved with the film industry, as well as with social trends and fashion movements. But the measure of a title design’s quality is the same now as it was in the silent era.
Whatever function they perform, titles remain an essential part of film. Granted, in recent years the business of film titling has been terribly strained by the control of producers over commissions and their persistence in demanding speculative work as the price of admission. Creatively speaking, though, as filmmaking consolidates into the most powerful international cultural phenomenon of the 21st century, ingenuity in titling is a certainty. As designers have always known, the opening moments can make a deeply satisfying contribution to any film. JM
TITLE DESIGNERS TOP ROW (LEFT – RIGHT) Cúbica; Saul
Bass; Mike Perry; Gareth Smith & Jenny Lee; Jessica Hische; Jill Bilcock, Tania Burkett & Catherine Martin BOTTOM ROW (LEFT – RIGHT) Iginio
Lardani; Jim Helton; Wayne Fitzgerald; Danny Yount; Jay Johnson; Christian Brinck
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Editor’s Pick: Grand Slam Words by The Renaissance Kids
Let me begin by saying that we’ve been yearning to collaborate with Hanna Jovin for a while now, but the urge became more apparent while we were shooting behind the scenes of her film The Con Artist’s Guide to Quick Getaways last October. Initially, we had planned to shoot something during the December break, but our blind ambition was no match for the unforgiving winter. Unable to juggle being in the throes of fourth semester while also creating content for the blog, we decided to tuck our plans away for another four months until we were completely relieved of our academic responsibilities. Fast forward to the start of the summer break and you’ll find Hanna, Alex and me sitting in a coffee shop near College and Bathurst plotting an elaborate plan for a seasonal look-book, which includes three separate looks, three locations and two days of shooting. That was the start. Grand Slam is ultimately the summation of our delayed idea, several meetings across the city, some location scouting and many extensively pared down notes. The video begins with an undefeated tennis duo, Maya Francetic and I, who come face to face with some worthy opponents, Alex and Stephanie Chunoo, and concludes with the four “breaking bread,” or rather sharing candy after a good doubles match. Thereafter, we’d like to believe that #squadgoals ensue—eat your heart out, Taytay. We are total fans of everything our director and editor of the video Hanna, third-year Ryerson film student, and her film school colleagues are creating. And we were incredibly fortunate to have Benjamin Wong, who commuted from Waterloo to help us bring our ideas to life, as our cinematographer. Neither of us would consider ourselves sportswomen, but tennis is definitely our racket. At least, it was for the purposes of this video, which was fabulously edited
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to make us appear as worthy rivals of Serena Williams. In actuality, picking the outfits for the video was our main concern, because they had to be the perfect combination of preppy, bougie and tough—we were going for Upper East Side meets Wimbledon meets [something tough] and I think we were pretty spot on in the end. The pièces de résistance were definitely the matching pleated skirts, which I, Alex, bought in bulk from American Apparel when they were clearing them out ($20 a piece reduced from $60 is clearly a steal, so I had to have one in every colour). This video was the perfect “told ya so” to my mother who lectured me for half an hour accusing me of spending money frivolously and “do I really need six of the same skirt?” They turned out to be pretty useful and perfect for the shoot. For shirts, we went with the classic polo to emphasize the tennis theme, keep to our beloved preppy roots and give a nod to Alistair and #PeopleLikeUsDontApologize mantra. We packed on the jewelry—chunky statement necklaces, pearl bracelets and earrings, watches and our signature “The RK” bead bracelets—to add a flair of opulence and absurdity to the look. Of course no one would ever seriously play tennis (actually, we might) with hoards of jewelry, but that was the point. If you’re not good at a sport, you might look good on the court. The shoes were definitely my favourite part since I don’t typically wear running shoes in my day-to-day life. After sporting Stephanie’s Nike Air Maxes, I totally understand the appeal of the athleisure phenomenon and enjoyed feeling equal parts comfortable and bad-ass. A large part of why the four of us look like we’re killin’ it on the court is thanks to our director, Hanna’s, sublime aptitude with foundation, pots of eyeliner and lots of brushes. It took our bitch faces from Rogers Cup to French Open status. TRC
Visit us online to learn more at therenaissancekids.wordpress.com
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TRAVEL SERIES
Explore Rome 28
Using Roman Holiday as a Guide Words by Karen Stabiner
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01
The Colosseum
In the days before computer-generated images, real men tore each other apart, and this is where they did it. The largest amphitheater in the world had just a few strategically placed tourists in it when a guide explained its 2,000-year
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history to Princess Ann and Joe. Times have changed: Occasionally the admissions lines grind to a halt because no more than 3,000 visitors can enter the Colosseum at any one time. But do not be dissuaded. I expected a quick stroll
and then the real-life equivalent of a jump cut to the next scene, but the more I walked, the more I wanted to walk, to try to grasp the graceful enormity of this incredibly violent place.
and inside serves an array of sandwiches and antipasti. Just off the opposite side of the square, at Tazza d’Oro, Via degli Orfani 84, you can get the signature granita di caffè con panna, sweet coffee frozen to a slush and topped with
whipped cream. Ann paid no attention to the hulking Pantheon. I think that’s why I embraced her tour; sitting at a sidewalk cafe, watching the world go by, is a great way to experience a city.
Piazza della Rotonda, the Pantheon
If you were a princess in 1953, you ordered Champagne for lunch. But the G. Rocca cafe by the Pantheon is no more. L’Antica Salumeria at Piazza della Rotonda 4 greets the hungry at the door with free samples of porchetta,
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03
The Spanish Steps
This is where Joe found Ann eating a chocolate gelato she bought from a cart at the base of the steps, in the Piazza di Spagna. She lied and said that she had run away from school, and he offered
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can purchase a selfie stick from any one of a dozen vendors, there was no gelato cart.
struction got underway in the 14th century and went on for five centuries, and members of the family still live here. Art lovers pack the Saturday tours — English language at noon. Or you can wander without a guide on that day only from 9 in the morning to 1:15 in
the afternoon. This is where the story ends. The princess realized that Joe was a journalist and the two recited the kind of coded but passionate dialogue that only they — and the film’s audience — understood.
Palazzo Colonna
“Roman Holiday” was shot in black and white to save money, so the most startling thing about the great hall in Palazzo Colonna is that it’s saturated with color, the walls covered in paintings. It is one of the oldest and biggest private palaces in Rome; con-
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to help her plan her day of fun and excitement. The sweeping 135-step stairway, built between 1723 and 1725, links the Piazza di Spagna with the Piazza Trinità dei Monti at the top. And while you
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05
The Arch of Septimus Severus and the Temple of Saturn
Princess Ann fled her country’s embassy after yet another night of reviewing the next day’s schedule and a bedtime snack of milk and crackers. She escaped in the back of a truck, and Joe Bradley found her halfasleep on a low wall in front of the arch. To the right, the
eight remaining pillars of the Temple of Saturn, built in 476 B.C. This location is at the northwest end of the Roman Forum, for those who come here to look at the ruins — which the princess and the journalist did not. But I had time and daylight on my side, so I lingered
to consider the vast scale of the Forum. Yes, I leaned against the very wall where Ms. Hepburn pretended to slumber; not quite as good as being discovered by Mr. Peck, but it would have to do. KS
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Tra La La Land Damien Chazelle’s paean to Los Angeles is hilarious, romantic and utterly charming, with captivating performances from its two stars.
Words by A. O. Scott
It starts with a traffic jam, a sweltering ribbon of frustration on a Los Angeles freeway. All of a sudden, a melody emerges from the squalling of horns and the cacophony of competing radio stations, the commuters leap from their cars, and a big, brazenly sincere movie-musical song-anddance number is underway. An early verse, sung by a chipper young woman in a yellow dress, is a kind of overture, hinting at the theme of the bittersweet fairy tale to follow. She recalls leaving her hometown boyfriend behind to pursue fame and fortune here in La La Land, a quaint old nickname for Los Angeles that is also the name of Damien Chazelle’s new movie. The ingénue in the yellow dress will vanish from the story, which is concerned with the entwined romantic and creative doings of an actress named Mia (who is behind
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the wheel of a Prius) and a jazz pianist named Sebastian (who is pushing a shiny crimson beater). The kicky opening sequence serves as an audition piece, a mini-“Chorus Line” acquainting us with the crowd from which these two gorgeous faces will emerge. Mia’s face belongs to Emma Stone, Sebastian’s to Ryan Gosling, so you know what I’m talking about. But even though they’re played by movie stars, Mia and Seb (as he’s sometimes called) have a long way to go. They are still swimming in a teeming pool of strivers and seekers. Every car from Glendale to Santa Monica holds an aspiring artist or performer of some kind or other. If they shared their rides, the commute might be easier and the smog less heavy, but of course part of the point is that each one makes the trip alone.
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That first song, one of a bouquet of compositions written for the movie by Justin Hurwitz, with lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, is called “Another Day of Sun,” and it is the movie’s way of auditioning for the audience, testing our tolerance for a bold blend of nostalgia and novelty. Can a generation raised on “Glee” and the “High School Musical” franchise and besotted by newfangled stage musicals like “Book of Mormon” and “Hamilton” find room in its heart for a movie that unabashedly evokes “The Young Girls of Rochefort” and “An American in Paris”? Why not? Mr. Chazelle, whose previous features (“Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” and “Whiplash”) were full of music and brash, youthful energy, is a natural showman and a canny craftsman. He wears his influences on his sleeve, but he wears them lightly. For all its echoes and allusions, “La La Land” is too lively and too earnest for mere pastiche. It doesn’t so much look back longingly at past masters like Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Donen and Jacques Demy (to name a few) as tap into their mojo, insisting on their modernity and its own classicism in the same gesture. Mia and Seb are throwbacks — if not quite to Ginger and Fred then surely to Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney or Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly — but they are also citizens of the present. They are better at acting than the other stuff, able to express emotion in nonmusical scenes with candor and conviction, but a little stiff-limbed and wobbly-voiced when the moment arrives for hoofing and chirping. In this, they’re pretty much the opposite of those earlier performers, who were vaudevillian troupers before they were thespians.
Seb’s fussy jazzman antiquarianism is, in any case, an entirely plausible millennial affectation. His vintage car has a cassette deck in the dashboard, and he lives in a shabby apartment amid stacks of vinyl records and old concert posters. His prized possession is a piano stool that supposedly once belonged to Hoagy Carmichael, and he’s upset when his unsentimental sister (the great, all-too-briefly seen Rosemarie DeWitt) sits on it.
La La Land succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity. In his approach to work, Seb is a proud purist, perpetually oppressed and affronted by the prospect of compromise. To pay the rent, he is obliged to take what he regards as demeaning gigs: tickling out Christmas carols and show tunes at a restaurant (the manager is J. K. Simmons, the fearsome Oscar-winner from “Whiplash”); doing ’80s pop hits with a knowingly cheesy cover band; touring with a combo fronted by an old friend who has made it big. That friend, Keith, is played by the real-life R&B star John Legend, whose affable participation presents an interesting challenge to Seb’s dogmatic traditionalism. It seems doubtful that Mr. Legend would have shown up to perform music that he thought was bad, and Keith’s unapologetic commercialism is less a strawman for Seb’s
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high-mindedness than a plausible counterargument. The difference between selling out and breaking through is not always clear, and “La La Land” is not so hypocritical as to pretend otherwise. This is especially true in Mia’s case. She works as a barista at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros.’ lot, dashing off to audition for small roles in dubious films and television shows. But, of course, the line between art and junk is also blurry, partly because to qualify for the junk you must be absolutely dedicated to your art. Which Mia is, in a way that magnifies Ms. Stone’s extraordinary discipline, poise and naturalness. The real tension in “La La Land” is between ambition and love, and perhaps the most up-to-date thing about it is the way it explores that ancient conflict. A cynical but not inaccurate way to put this would be to describe it as a careerist movie about careerism. But that would be to slight Mr. Chazelle’s real and uncomfortable insight, which is that the drive for professional success is, for young people at the present time, both more realistic and more romantic than the pursuit of boy-meets-girl happily-ever-after. Love is contingent. Art is commitment. As moviegoers, we might prefer not to choose, and in this case we don’t really have to. “La La Land” succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity. The artifice lies in the gorgeous colors, the suave camera movements and the elegant wide-screen compositions. In the songs and choreography too, of course, though it has to be said that,
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with one or two exceptions, these are more competent than dazzling. You’re more likely to remember what you saw than what you heard. The naturalness comes from the stars, and from the filmmaker’s disarming infatuation with the place apotheosized in song as the “City of Stars.” Taking his place in a long tradition of besotted Easterners, Mr. Chazelle (from New Jersey by way of Harvard) can’t stop looking up at the palm trees silhouetted against the evening sky. The four chapters that track the changing seasons are a sly joke about the weather, which is always perfect. The magic hour — that purple-and-orange twilight cherished by generations of cineastes — seems to last for weeks. The Griffith Observatory might as well be heaven itself. Like a capable bandleader or stage illusionist, Mr. Chazelle knows how to structure a set, to slacken the pace at times in order to build toward a big finish. He memorably pushed “Whiplash” to a complex and thrilling musical climax, and he outdoes himself in the last 20 minutes of “La La Land,” and outdoes just about every other director of his generation, wrapping intense and delicate emotions in sheer, intoxicating cinematic bliss. The final sequence — one last audition, followed by a swirl of rapturous, heart-tugging music and ballet — effectively cashes the check the rest of the movie has written. On first viewing, for the first 90 minutes or so, you may find your delight shadowed by skepticism. Where is this going? Can this guy pull it off? Are these kids going to make it? Should we care? By the end, those questions vanish under a spell of enchantment. AOS
Director’s Cut
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Director’s Cut
Director’s Cut is a quarterly independent publication focused on filmmaking and film appreciation for students and amateur filmmakers looking to make films on a budget without sacrificing quality. ISSUE SIXTEEN
www.directorscut.com
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