Three Pacifist Women Warriors

We Women Warriors is Playing in Theaters

Three Pacifist Women Warriors

(from brinkzine.com 8/11/12)

'The beauty of exceptional documentaries that are set outside the United States is that we can catch a glimpse of people's lives that are entirely different from our own. An extreme example can be found in Nicole Karsin's eye-opening We Women Warriors, which opened Friday at the IFC in New York City and will have its Los Angeles premiere on August 24. The gallant human rights activist and print journalist turned filmmaker put herself in harm's way to tell the story of three Colombian women whose lives we can barely comprehend. Flor Ilva Trochez (on right, in march photo), Doris Puchana (on left), and Ludis Rodriguez (in center) are three courageous native women who have long been, as the films notes state, "caught in the crossfire of Colombia's warfare and who use nonviolent resistance to defend their people's survival." (Ludis, whose husband was murdered, even spent a year in jail on trumped up charges during the three years of filming.) They have assumed leadership roles in their respective tribes (the Nasa, the Awa, the Kankuamo), which, like many of the 102 indigenous tribes, face extinction because of the never-ending internal conflict between government forces, paramilitary groups, and insurgents. The conflict is spurred by the drug trade. Below is an interview I did this week with the personable Karsin about her exceptional debut documentary:
Danny Peary: Tell me your background.
Nicole Karsin: I was born and raised in Los Angeles but went to college in New York. I went to Sarah Lawrence and then grad school at Columbia. Prior to getting my masters in journalism at Columbia, I had lived in southern Mexico and done human rights work. I went to Chiapas in 1995, a year after the Zapatista uprising, through a non-governmental organization, Global Exchange, to support the human rights movement and be an observer in the Zapatista communities that were being threatened by the Mexican army. Through that work I became involved with and became an adviser to various artisan cooperatives in the Mayan women's communities. That inspired me to go to journalism school because I saw how poorly that whole conflict was being covered. I saw that being on the ground was oh so different from what was being reported. So when I went to journalism school I knew I wanted to cover conflicts in Latin America.
DP: What's your ethnicity?
NK: I'm half Ukranian Jewish, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Sicilian.
DP: So how did you initially become interested in Latino human rights issues?
NK: Los Angeles has a large Latino culture. Because of my looks--Sicilian is what comes out most I believe--people in Los Angeles just assumed I spoke Spanish, but I didn't till years later. But I always cared about women's rights and human rights. When I was coming of age, civil wars in Central America were taking place and Los Angeles received a huge influx of people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. I watched the Iran-Contra scandal unfold but I was just a little too young to fully understand it. I knew there were injustices occurring but I didnt fully understand the dynamics, the how and why. When I was at Sarah Lawrence, I had a bit of an existential crisis my sophomore year and wanted to be out in the world and to see what was happening. So I took a semester off and went to Nicaragua because I had this curiosity to learn what was really going on there. I was nineteen and that's when I started to learn to speak Spanish. This was 1992. My first week in Managua was the five hundredth anniversary of the Spanish conquest. I was fortunate to be there at such a historic moment and I'm sure that affected me. When I went there were no college programs, no credits to be received. I was a volunteer through a program run by Father Miguel d'Escoto, who also went to Colombia Journalism School and was a Maryknoll missionary involved with the Sandinista government. He had an organization that helped support people in Nicaragua. I lived in the home of a very poor family in what was then called Barrio Carlos Marx. It was very post-Revolutionary--Violeta Chamorro had been in power for two years--and it was a real eye-opener.
DP: You were a journalist but you ended up telling this story in your documentary.
NK: It was a natural progression. I was doing print, radio, and photography and felt digital filmmaking is a combination of those. I bought a camera in 2004 and took it with me when I did interviews. I never had any formal training, I just had some colleagues give me pointers here and there. Film was more visceral and while it's true that Colombia is so complex it's also beautiful. The people are beautiful, the culture is beautiful and film was a more impactful way of conveying a story.
DP: From the beginning, were you thinking you'd do a story about these three women?
NK: No. At the beginning I wanted to do a film about how the indigenous people are caught in the crossfire, and how mostly their stance is nonviolent. But when I set out on my first pre-production, investigative trips to Colombia to find my stories and characters, it was immediately the women I was drawn to--I'm sure it was because I'm a woman.
DP: Did you meet Flor, Doris, and Ludis separately where they live?
NK: Yes.
DP: An emotional moment for me was seeing the three women together late in the film. Was that emotional for you?
NK: It was emotional. Logistically, it was a difficult shoot. There was a march that moved from Cauca to Bogata. Because the three women are leaders they have commitments and there are a lot of situations that are unfolding all the time. It didn't work out that they could start the march together. Landmines had exploded and people were killed in Doris's region and she had to leave early, and Flor was having a crisis in her region and had to come late. So I had those three women together for only 24 hours.
DP: Did they know each other before then?
NK: No.

(L-R) Doris, Ludis, and Flor

DP: Did you think that it would be great if you got them together?
NK: Kind of. I had applied for a grant with ITVF. When you didn't receive funding, they would give you a feedback session if you requested one. I had a feedback session, and one of their head people asked me, "Do your three stories intersect?" In all honesty, I hadnt even thought of it. Then I thought it would be something they could do of their own accord if they had the resources. I definitely invited them on the march. I thought about putting in a card saying that I had invited them, because I wanted to be totally transparent, but that would have thrown me into the narrative when I really didn't want to be there. That was something I grappled with most in terms of the narrative.
DP: Did they bond naturally and not need to tell each other what they'd experienced because they knew they all experienced the same awful things?
NK: No, actually they had experienced similar things but not the same things. They could understand each other, and each other's suffering and pain, but they had experienced different manifestations of the conflict.
DP: One of the women expresses one of your film's major themes: When you suffer, you feel the suffering of others.
NK: That was Doris, who mother was killed in a car accident when she was young. Yeah, they can feel the others suffering for sure.
DP: Were they proud of being women who are leaders or do they just take it for granted?
NK: Definitely they dont take it for granted. It's hard work and it's still taboo in the native community. There aren't many women leaders. Flor was elected and during the elections the indigenous radio stations would make jokes about there being a female candidate. These women are obviously very self-assured and have conviction of what they want to do, but it's still not easy.
DP: Everybody in America knows something about what's going on in Colombia, but what don't we know because, as you say, our journalism hasn't been good enough at telling the story?
NK: There's a lot. There's a very complicated, convoluted conflict, which is why newspaper editors shy away from it. The most important things for U.S. citizens to know is that our tax dollars are supporting military and paramilitary forces that are responsible for widespread and systematic human rights violations; and the amount of military aid that we give to Colombia far exceeds any social aid. Inadvertently, our tax dollars are responsible for the severity of the human rights crisis in Colombia, and we can change that.
DP: In your movie, Doris says that the people would be happy with the United States if it were giving money to the right causes. Is most of our money supposedly going to fight the drug trade?
NK: Until 2002, U.S. aid to Colombia was only under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, but that year it expanded to include an anti-insurgent mission. That changed things. Unfortunately, it hasn't mattered what administration we've had.
DP: And what about the effect on Colombia of Free Trade?
DK: The Free Trade Agreement was finally passed but multinational corporations have been for a very long time and have historically paid off whatever armed fighters are in the region at that time. The way it usually plays out is that the paramilitary organizations are supported by Coca Cola or all the different multinational corporations so that they can either clear out the Compatinos, which is by massacres and displacements, or protect their interests in other ways. It usually has to do with the land.
DP: Your film takes place in rural areas, where the livelihood of the poor indigenous people is tied to growing coca. Is it an issue that the people would like the government to support their growing other crops?
 Nicole Karsin films in Cauca

NK: Yes. They can only support themselves now by growing coca. There are no alternatives. There is no infrastructure whatsoever. The centerpiece of Plan Colombia, which began in 2000 under Bill Clinton, is fumigations with herbicides and thats been in effect for twelve years and hasnt much affected the cocaine trade. But it kills the environment and harms your health. I got very sick while reporting in those regions. Plan Colombia was 80% military aid, which included the fumigations, and 20% social aid. The social aid was kind of a joke. They'd give the Compatinos cows in the hope they'd stop growing coca, but the cows would die from the fumigation. There was no thought put into it and no real desire to help the people. It was all very superficial.
DP: Most of your filming was done between 2006 and 2009 so people might say, that's three years ago, a long time ago.
NK: I was back there a year ago to do pickups and nothing had changed. In fact the story that enfolds in Flor's region with the police barracks and the military occupation actually just flared up. In early July there was major combat between the army and the FARC and entire communities were displaced. And the Nasa people you see in the film have in their self-autonomous process made resolution stating that they want their territories free of armed combatants. That includes all sides--the paramilitary, the guerilla, and the state forces. So in the past few weeks they went around trying to remove army posts and find FARC fighters and destroy their weapons and flogthem in public assemblies.
DP: Flogging?
NK: They have constitutional rights to self-governance, and that is why they have the right to punish the FARC fighters who are part of the Nasa tribe. It's part of the culture.
DP: The Colombia media is portrayed in your film as presenting the company line. In terms of the indigenous people, are they more sympathetic today?
NK: The mainstream media, not so much. Two weeks ago the Nasa people went to an army post that was put up on a sacred, ceremonial site. Flor told me that they told the soldiers to leave their land. They were very cordial in negotiations with the army and as a sign of good will removed all their encampments. Colombian news was there but never showed this nonviolent actions. The army still refused to leave and the indigenous people were fed up and started removing them physically. There were a few shots fired by the army and it got tense. That part was covered by national TV! I saw the national TV reports that said that removing the army posts could be against Colombian law. There was no mention of what the Constitution protects or of international humanitarian law. After this news coverage that further stigmatized the indigenous people, Flor went to the city where her daughter is going to college and the owner of her apartment told her daughter to move out in two days. That was the backlash of how the news was covered.
DP: We see Flor's tribe dismantle barracks in your film while soldiers look on. Were they part of the tribe?
NK: Maybe a couple here and there, but generally not.
DP: Did you know beforehand about the dismantling of the barracks by the people in Flor's town and decide to go film it?
NK: I had planned on going there to join a human rights verification mission as part of my pre-production, searching for characters and finding my angle to tell the story. I got there two or three days after the 11-year-old boy had been killed, so it just happened to coincide. The human rights mission was in the region for only two days and when it left I decided to stay on. I stayed for three weeks and filmed the process.

Nicole Karsin, photo by DP

DP: There's a scene where you're filming Flor relaxing on a hillside. A government soldier comes upon you. A scary moment?
NK: A scary moment. Definitely. It wasn't on camera but strangely enough it was diffused because one of the policemen in the group was staying in the same house we were in so he knew we were really journalists. I wonder what would have happened had he not been staying in that house with us.
DP: Nothing happens but you include that scene--perhaps to show how quickly and randomly there can be danger.
NK: Also I was trying to show that despite the Nasa's small victory in removing the barracks their land was still militarized and they were still in danger.
DP: You did know about the march in advance in order to invite your three subjects to participate.
NK: Yes.
DP: You say that Ludis traveled for the march for indigenous rights. What are these rights specifically?
NK: In 1991 there was a new Colombian constitution, and the groups in Flor's region in particular were very involved. They achieved that the Constitution recognize Colombia as a plural ethnic society, which is huge in the Americas, and basically granted the indigenous people autonomy. On paper it's probably the best indigenous rights in the Americas; but it's an issue is how it is in practice. Indigenous people in Flor's region were practicing self-governance when they made the resolution saying they wanted the region to be free of armed fighters. That's where autonomy and the rule of state law clash.
DP: Does autonomy by the people deal specifically with the control of land?
NK: It's more. It's self-governance, which includes land issues. It also is about having respect for their form of punishment, which includes flogging. That's their culture. The land and self-governance are probably the two biggest ways to define indigenous rights. But now the big issue is--and it's not just in Flor's region, though that,s the best example of it--having the right to not be part of the armed conflict. It's their right under Colombian law, international humanitarian law, and other international conventions. The way the Colombian armed forces have installed their barracks and posts throughout indigenous town and surrounding areas puts the indigenous peoples at risk; it makes them possible collateral damage. That's what they are protesting.
DP: In one segment you have what amounts to be a montage of widows. It's powerful.
NK (emotional): Yeah. I love all them. I tried to call Ludis this morning but she wasn't available but I spoke to her friend Suzana, who is one of the other widows in the film. In a way I wanted it to be like a choir. This is what happens when there is systematic violence. Getting them to share their stories and speak out like that wasn't easy. I had been filming for a very long time and had known them, but it was still very difficult for them to open up and share or speak about on camera. Or just speak about it, period.
DP: It is stated several times by women that the kids are still traumatized years after their fathers' deaths. But three years have past and these kids are three years older and approaching being young men. Are the women worrying about these kids eventually becoming targets too? It seems that men are in jeopardy in this environment. Is that a concern?
NK: There are a lot of civilians who are killed randomly because of the conflict. But hopefully if they don't join one of those groups then they won't have to be part of the violence. Ludis has made some hard decisions to withhold information from her sons so they wont try to avenge their father's death at a later date. Ludis spends a year in prison on trumped up charges.
DP: There doesn't seem to be any good options there for young men.
NK: No. One extreme example was Alvaro Uribe, who was president for two terms (2002-2010). He was the governor of Antioquia when his father was killed by the FARC and as a result his administration was very bloody. He was someone who was constantly seeking revenge and that brought about even more bloodshed.
DP: The widows in Ludis's group weave. Talk about the weaving metaphor regarding the bonding of these women and all tribes.
NK: It's also female solidarity. But in Ludis's case it's also about survival. They weave to feed their kids. It's also a native tradition--women have been weaving for five centuries so it's a way of maintaining the culture.
DP: Do they make any real money?
NK: There are intermediaries who exploit the women by selling what they weave and keeping most of the profits.
DP: What three things would you like to happen in Colombia?
NK: I would like the Colombian government to respect the indigenous peoples rights and remove the army from their territories as they have requested. I would like the insurgent forces to leave as well. I would like U.S. policy to drastically improve in regards to respecting human rights. And I hope that the women's groups in Colombia --those in the film and other ones--gain the support they need and the training of the skills they need to start businesses to be autonomous and provide for themselves and their families.
DP: What about the drug trade?
NK: I think drugs should be decriminalized because there's so much violence. The government, politicians, and members of the armed forces are all involved in the drug trade. It's a pretext for groups to keep pumping the herbicide and the military-industrial complex to keep selling arms.
DP: Talk about your film in terms of universality. This situatio can be happening in a lot of places.
NK: I think so. Peoples all over the world are caught between armed fighters. The situation in Colombia has gone on for so long. The fact that these women still have hope and still stand for nonviolence and still are working to improve the world is a positive message that I believe can inspire many people.

Reunion in "Union Square"

Playing in Theaters

Reunion in "Union Square"

(from brinkzine.com 7/12/12)

Nancy Savoca photo by DP

After she burst onto the scene with two of my personal favorite films of the last twenty-five years, True Love (1989) and Dogfight (1991), I called Nancy Savoca "one of America's most exciting and original directors." She went on to direct the much praised Household Saints and seminal three-part HBO abortion-rights film, If These Walls Could Talk, but Savoca hasn't made enough films for someone so talented. That's why it's an exciting occasion that she has a new indie film that will be released this Friday, at the Angelika in New York City. Although made on a shoestring budget, Union Square has played at prestigious film festivals and received good word-of mouth, including from star Mira Sorvino, who says her character Lucy is the juiciest part of her career. Savoca herself believes some viewers will be too impatient to get past Lucy's early histrionics, but there's no doubt that many people will relate to this film about two estranged sisters--the highstrung Lucy, who is having a meltdown when her married lover won't see her, and the uptight Jenny (dark-haired Tammy Blanchard), who hasn't told her fiance Bill (Mike Doyle) about her turbulent upbringing in the Bronx, her crazy mother (Patti LuPone), and Lucy's eccentricities--who suddenly find themselves thrust together over the Thanksgiving holidays in Manhattan. I recently interviewed the personable Savoca about her much-anticipated movie and her beguiling characters.
Danny Peary: When someone asks you to describe Union Square in one line, what do you say?
Nancy Savoca: When I did True Love, John Sayles advised me that when I did interviews I should make sure to have that one line ready. For True Love I had it, but every time I did an interview I changed it, so I didn't have it at all. We don't really have a tag line for Union Square but in our press notes it says, "the reluctant reunion of two sisters." I think "reluctant reunion" is a good description.
DP: And if people as you why you made Union Square?
NS: It's the same. Every day I have a different reason.
DP: Rachel Getting Married was made several years ago but still is popular, Your Sister's Sister is now in theaters, and Caroline and Jackie just played at the Tribeca Film Festival--that one is also about troubled, secretive sisters who were raised by bad parents and who push each other away but are drawn to each other.
NS (laughing): My movie is part of "the sisters-wave."
DP: Do you have sisters?
NS: I have two sisters but I get along really well with them. They were already teenagers when I was born and they were both married by the time I was seven. So this movie wasn't based on my relationship with them but on a combination of other things. But siblings are interesting to do.
DP: As someone says in the movie, blood is thicker than water.
NS: You stayed till the end to catch that. Not everyone stays that long!
DP: I feel badly if people are walking out of your movie.
NS: I'm only guessing that not everybody sticks to the very end. It's a hard movie.
DP: In my 1993 book Alternate Oscars, in my essay about Lili Taylor deserving a Best Actress Oscar for Dogfight, I wrote that you "proved yourself to be one of America's few directors who makes films about characters, male and female, for whom she has a true affection." In Union Square, Lucy and Jenny aren't 100% likable, but I imagine you have a lot of affection for them.
NS: I always like my characters and want to spend time with them. I end up living with these people, and I guess there's a reason I myself want to take a look at them. Since I was a kid I've lived in a world that is very ambiguous. Morality was ambiguous and people's behavior was ambiguous. I couldn't help but see that there are all kinds of possibilities in the same person. So I get frustrated if people are painted in just one way, simplistically. It's always a challenge to see beyond the first impression. What else is going on? I had a lot of fun with Mary Tobler, my cowriter on this, digging deeper into the characters as the film moves along. In the opening scene, Lucy is on the cellphone in Filene's Basement on Union Square and having a meltdown. I saw a version of that actually happen. I thought it would be interesting to begin with that. Here's a kook on the street, but what if we don't walk away from her but find out what's really going on?
DP: That's like a writing exercise in film school. You see a character who is having a meltdown and is not at all endearing and then you write something that explains how she got to that point and/or what happens later. And you may see the character in a different light.
NS: In a way this film was an exercise. It was about trying to go beyond our parameters. We started out with our coproducer Neda Armian saying, "Use my apartment to shoot something." We didn't have money or time to do location changes, even with a small crew. We said, "We have only one space to shoot in. What can happen with two characters in a room that won't bore people to tears?" We had the one indoor location and we decided to venture outside a little bit to get some air, but we even did that in the neighborhood, around Union Square. We tried to make it in ten days but went two days over budget.
DP: Did you consider having a low budget a good thing because it challenged you or a bad thing?
NS: It was a very bad thing. It's like someone saying, "Oh, I love being poor." No one wants to go out with a low budget because you know what's going to come. 

DP: But wasn't the guerilla filmmaking aspect exciting?
NS: That was the good thing. The first impression is horror,but then you get kind of excited because for the first time in a while you aren't running around and chasing money, which is a huge early part of every movie. So it was exciting just to say, "We're really going to make this movie." We didn't even have to get well-known actors, although we thought that would be nice. As a matter of fact, we had a conversation about getting theater actors. But my main choices were always Mira Sorvino and Tammy Blanchard.
DP: Having only one indoor location, how could you prevent your film from being "theater" rather and a movie?
NS: It was hard. But I played with the idea of doing a homage to reality TV, which I think is very funny. The beginning of the movie feels like a reality television show. My DP and the other camera operator have worked on reality television. I told them, "Listen, our actors are going to come in and tear up the place and we're going to follow them."
DP: Did you have a few weeks of rehearsal?
NS: No, I wish we did. We had only one week, and that was with everyone, not just the scenes with Mira and Tammy. I would have liked more time alone with them because they were coming from different places. Mike Doyle, who plays Tammy's fiance Bill, said that was the most rehearsal time he ever had. He was thrilled! It was so intense. That week of rehearsal was just getting everyone on the same track. Once we were on set, everyone just took off as if they were horses at the gate.
DP: Once you started shooting, how similar were the various takes you did of scenes?
NS: Depending on the scenes, sometimes they were wildly different. The first day of shooting was Mira in the street. On day two, Mira charges into Jenny's apartment, a surprise visit. That was the first day of shooting them together, Mira and Tammy were trying all kinds of things. Tammy was the receptor and everything Mira did differently would make her react differently. What I loved was that Mira is like the Jenny character, and Tammy is more like Lucy. Tammy is a Jersey girl from Bayonne who is incredibly intuitive and Mira is a supersmart, Cantonese-speaking, East-Asian Studies major from Harvard. They couldn't be more different. Mira, like Jenny, would eat the curry tofu Jenny and Bill make in a flash whereas Tammy would want a burger.
DP: Why did you cast it that way then?
NS: I could see their potential for what they could do with the characters. Sometimes you don't have to be exactly what you're performing and being removed is beneficial as long as there is an understanding of the character.
DP: In the press notes, it is pointed out that Lucy and Jenny are very different, which is true, but as the film progresses we see there are moments when they are the same. I'd think you were going for that.
NS: We didn't articulate everything as we made the film, but certainly that happens in the story and script, and it truly happened on the set. That was very cool. Because we didn't have money or time, I worried about getting the performances that I needed. There was a story but if the performances didn't work and there was no nuance, the story wasn't going to hold up. I was very worried, but then my assistant director showed me a schedule for the shoot and I noticed that the scene numbers were going in chronological order, which rarely happens. We filmed almost all of it chronologically, which was huge. Because we did it chronologically, the change you see in the characters was happening with the actors in their performances. I'm not sure we would have seen the change if we hadn't shot in order. They were always able to understand what happened in the previous scene. On typical shoots, you might film the previous scene the following week and the actors have to pretend they know what took place.
DP: Did you do all of Mira Sorvino's outdoor scenes around Union Square at the same time?
NS: Yes, on day one. At Filene's and the Farmer's Market, it was her alone having a near breakdown. The scene when the sisters go shopping was days later.
DP: In the press notes, Mira Sorvino says she was afraid that Lucy's mood swings and histrionics at the beginning of the film might turn off the audience.
NS: I didn't have the same concern. Every time we'd come up with a new idea for Lucy, we'd say, "That would be really awful of her, let's run with it. What could make it worse? Okay, let's write that." When I think of independent films, I don't think they're about cheap filmmaking--I'm tired of hearing that definition--but about challenges. People who go to independent films want to actively participate in some way, more than with a big studio film that is supposed to satisfy all their needs and expectations. So the hope is that this movie challenges and engages them in a conversation. In this particular case the conversation might be about how there is the surface image of things and how you find out a little bit more and then a little bit more. You learn a little about Lucy at the beginning--and now do you want to hang on and learn a little more? To be honest, some people don't. Some people will watch the first twenty minutes of this movie and say, "I'm leaving." Lucy wears on you.
DP: And if you saw Lucy coming down an escalator and screaming into the phone, you are unlikely to invite her over for dinner.
NS (laughing): But what happens when that person is your sibling? That's the problem Jenny has. Lucy is her sister. But you're right. If we don't have a connection to someone like Lucy we will avoid this drama because we don't need it and aren't invested in it. From an audience's point of view, this movie is about hanging in there to see what else there is and where that drama comes from. The question becomes: who will want to do that? Who will think hanging around is worth it because the information that comes along may relate to them in some way? Like with any of these characters--who are we? People always take things too literally when they see a film like this. They'll ask me, "Which sister are you?" I'm not either sister. I appreciate both their sides, I understand both their sides. For me, in the end it's less about judging whether what they do is right or wrong--although some people do judge--than about empathizing. Not sympathizing. Is Lucy or anyone else a likable character? I don't care. But I hope you empathize with them. In Hollywood they say we have to sympathize with characters but I don't agree with that. Then you make them bigger and better and heroic and then I personally can't relate to them anymore because I feel they're better than I am.
DP: But would you tell Mira Sorvino and Tammy Blanchard that you didn't really care if people like Lucy and Jenny?
NS: No, no. They were taking care of their characters in the way I was taking care of the movie. I'd always say to them, "Just focus on being honest. If you're honest with that character, you're respecting her. Whether your character is doing something that is right or wrong, you need to justify it." That's what we do when we make mistakes in life, we justify them.
DP: Is it rationalize or justify?
NS: It could be rationalize or it could be justify on an emotional level, like when Lucy yells, "You left me to take care of mom by myself, that's why I'm crazy!" That's an emotional justification.
DP: So you're unconcerned that Lucy and Jenny are not completely likable. Do you agree that nobody is going to fall in love with them?
NS: I don't know if you'll fall in love with them, but you might identify with them. People have come up to me after screenings and said, "My sister did that to me, too, and blah, blah, blah." I'm open to whatever the reaction is. This is a very interactive movie!
DP: I'm not sure if your intentions were different when you made Dogfight, but I do think people fall in love with Lili Taylor.
NS: Shouldn't Lili Taylor be considered one of our greatest actresses? She has a nonverbal quality and does things that have nothing to do with what's on paper. Her performance in Dogfight is unbelievable. But I have mixed feelings about her character. I had issues with her because she's way too innocent and she holds on to that too much. She's only twenty and she can so embrace the world but then at the end when she goes to hug the returning vet, she doesn't push him away but she doesn't quite know what to do with him.
DP: I think the hug is exactly what he needs.
NS: I agree, although the studio didn't. But I think the hug reveals that she's not together at all. Here's this guy who's coming back to fall apart in her arms and if you look at her face you see that she's not together either.
DP: Well, I think that there's a lot of things that she can't say at that moment but she knows the important thing is to just give him her body to hold and make him feel he's come home.
NS: I love that people come away with different points of view!
DP: You spoke about viewers learning more about the characters in Union Square as the movie goes along. Did you learn about the characters you had written?
NS: Absolutely. We prepare and do everything we can but in the end you hope there will be surprises. One of the fun parts of directing is when accidents happen. You hope they don't go how you planned it in a good way.

Tammy Blanchard (L) and Mira Sorvino

DP: Do you like when at some point your actors get to know their characters more than you do?
NS: I hope for that. It should happen. They're going to get possessed. The movie itself possesses me. I need for that to happen to them for me to do what I need to do. I hand over my characters.
DP: Did that happen on this film?
NS: Oh, my god, yes. It was uncomfortable. Tammy could barely talk because she was having such a hard time during those twelve days of shooting. She was wiped out and almost in tears every night.
DP: I would have thought that Mira Sorvino was playing the emotionally-draining sister, so why did Tammy Blanchard react that way?
NS: Because she was receiving so much. It was like she was being struck by a laser.
DP: Was she feeling her character's guilt?
NS: I'm sure there was guilt, but the real reason was that Tammy is a party girl and she said, "Being this uptight kills me." It was hard for her to keep her emotions under wraps because she's not like that at all. She's very emotional, but she was playing someone who is very emotional but keeps a lid on it.
DP: What do you think the relationship between Lucy and Jenny was like when they were teenagers? Was their always friction?
NS: They were probably always beating each other up. It feels like there was friction. There are moments in the Thanksgiving dinner scene where you see there is a connection between them due to their shared experience. Whether you get along with your sibling or not, that shared experience has an impact on you.
DP: They are the only ones in the world raised by that mother. Do you think they used to hug each other?
NS: Lucy goes around hugging people. I think she always wanted to hug Jenny, but I believe that when Jenny was about thirteen she started pushing Lucy away when she tried to hug her. I think she started to build a wall.
DP: Later on we see a home movie that Lucy took of her mother, played by Patti LuPone, before she died and Lucy seems almost stable. But when we first see Lucy not long after she's having a breakdown.
NS: That's her release. She had to keep it together taking care of a mother who was unstable. Lucy stayed connected to her mother and was her caregiver, but Jenny saw the drama and bailed as soon as she could. It always amazes me that there can be siblings who grew up at the same time with the same parents and in the same house and they have a completely different stories about what it was like. And I think we have that here.
DP: In regard to Lucy, did you ever use the term bi-polar?
NS: Yes, often. That was one of the things that was interesting to me when we were writing the script. Usually I do research and then write the script, but on this we wrote the script and then I did research, including watching a beautiful documentary by Stephen Frye about being bi polar [The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive]. And I interviewed psychologists about its symptoms, and I was glad that our script seemed to already have a lot of what they said.
DP: Bi-polar usually manifests itself with extreme mood swings, so maybe Lucy, who seems to lead two lives, is schizophrenic?
NS: I love psychology and minored in it in college, and I love labels, but I think we're unsure about all of them. Today it's called bi-polar but a few years ago it was manic depressive and a few years before that it might have been hysteria. We keep changing the labels because how we analyze it keeps evolving. Having grown up with a lot of people who were eccentric, who don't fit the norm, I don't know what to call it anymore. I do like that bi-polar label because it set me off to do research, but I don't stand by any of those labels.
DP: I think there's a greatness in Lucy. She has a great kid, she took care of her mom.
NS: She's very loyal. She's very loyal to her sister.
DP: Where does her hurt come from?
NS: I think in part from how she was raised. It's so individual to her personality. Jenny hides her hurt, Lucy wears it on her sleeve.
DP: It seems that their mother, who has dementia, gave all the credit not to the daughter who took care of her, Lucy, but to the one who wasn't there, Jenny.
NS: That happens. The prodigal child, the missing child, the one who is away is the one who captures the imagination of the parent.
DP: We get only a glimpse of their mother, in the video, and she didn't seem particularly troubled.
NS: She was suicidal. I didn't want reveal too much information about the mother because I think movies that explain everything simplify things too much. I think why people are how they are is mysterious. Suicidal thoughts run in the family so why is it that Lucy got them and Jenny didn't? That's something I don't pretend to understand. When I look at the mother, I don't know how she got to be the way that she was.
DP: And that's fine with you?
NS: It's fine because I feel that way in my life. I don't understand how people end up with their personalities or flaws or destructive qualities. And maybe we can empathize.
DP: Why does Lucy wait until now to visit Jenny?
NS: It was only a few weeks. Everything happened at Halloween and now it's Thanksgiving, which is only a few weeks later. Jenny doesn't know that her mother died. There was a phone call that she may or may not have received. For me, it's Lucy coming out from under the debris of everything that's happened. Look at her: She's all dolled up and ready to take on life again in a way that's totally absurd.
DP: It seems to me that Jenny secretly wants this disruption to her life that Lucy brings.
NS: It's like a bank robber who wants to be caught and goes around telling everybody what he did. There's a lot of pressure on her hiding her past and she's going to do things to trip herself up. She invites chaos to come into her life so she can come clean. She does open that door and let Lucy in. She could have pretended to not be home. Then we'd have no movie.
Blanchard and Sorvino

DP: There is no reason to send Lucy away. Lucy had never done anything terrible to her.
NS: But Lucy tells Bill all this stuff that makes it clear that Jenny hasn't been honest with him. Lucy is very intuitive and knows she's opening up a door that Jenny wanted closed.
DP: When you wrote the script, did you laugh when you not only had Lucy manipulate Jenny into letting her stay the night but also invite her equally loud friend, played by Daphne Rubin-Vega, over to her sister's apartment?
NS: Oh, yeah. Mary said, "You know what? She's got to start inviting people over."
DP: What does Lucy get from Jenny?
NS: That's the sibling relationship. Jenny is the only person who can understand what she has been through. Her relationship with Jenny helps her figure out what happened that brought her to this point.
DP: How beneficial is it to Jenny that Lucy does come back into her life?
NS: It's like Lucy detonating a bomb and there goes the life Jenny built. You can look at it as beneficial or the opposite.
DP: Well, what comes out is that Jenny's husband Bill is a good guy. To him, it doesn't matter what is revealed about Jenny's past.
NS: Well, I have mixed feelings about that. I think we see that he didn't push to find out more about Jenny. I know that this happens in relationships and if someone is reluctant to talk about something, you don't push them. Jenny and Bill agreed that not talking too much about where she came from is okay.
DP: There seems to be something strange about his family, too.
NS: It's interesting that you say that. All I know is that they seem to be very much in touch with each other and are very connected as a tribe, while Lucy and Jenny's tribe is splintered.
DP: For us male viewers, Bill is us watching these sisters.
NS: These two crazy chicks.
DP: It shows his character in that he's not turned off by them.
NS: Which I really appreciate. Maybe he came from a big family with sisters and realizes that if sisters are emotional with each other it is healthier than if they aren't. He doesn't run away from it, he kind of rolls with it. If he'd reacted differently it would have complicated things; in this way, the conflict is only between the sisters.
Tammy Blanchard and Mike Doyle

DP: Why did you give Bill his profession, working with organic foods?
NS: That was because Mary had worked on some web sites that did that. But I really love it because it goes with the whole idea of Jenny [changing her life]. It's great when you have a turkey made out of red pepper and hummus--that was a recipe I found online. I googled it. I sometimes laugh about it, but I'll eat organic food. The L.A. Weekly once had this great headline that was something like: YOU-- NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU EXERCISE, NO MATTER HOW MUCH ORGANIC FOOD YOU EAT, NO MATTER HOW WELL YOU TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH--ARE GOING TO DIE. So it can be fear-based. The movie isn't about Bill, but I think he's very controlled. He likes things that are very safe and healthy; it's all good and measured, all the things that life is not. That's where the organic food thing comes in--it's hopeful! If you eat all organic, will you live longer? I love it when Mike Doyle's character and Michael Rispoli's character talk about raw food over dinner. That's my favorite conversation. I adore Michael; only he could have played Nick.
DP: Nick turns up out of nowhere.
NS (laughing): I know!
DP: Before then we think the only male Lucy is interested in is the married Jay. What if there were no Jay? Would the film be different?
NS: I think Jay is just a part of where Lucy is at the moment, part of her meltdown and how life isn't how it was. Growing up, Lucy was probably a popular girl in her neighborhood. She was not able to mature because she stayed there and took care of her mother. Now she's no longer in the caregiver role and she's gone out to have relationships, which is a problem because she already has one. So there's something very adolescent about her now.
DP: Well, she's self-destructive.
NS: Yes...
DP: And the hope is that she can replace her mother and replace Jay and develop positive relationships with the people who are there for her.
NS: I hope that, too. As with the endings of True Love and Dogfight, you can hope that things go well with the characters. For me, all these characters are at the brink of something else. They've finished something and now there's something else because for me everything is always in movement.
DP: I believe your films deal with conflict in different ways than other films. There's not simply the good against the bad. What do you see as conflict that you want to put into your movies.
NS: That's interesting. I see conflict everywhere even in a good situation.
DP: This movie is a situation.
NS: Right. In situations, I think everything is in constant motion and doesn't stay still long enough to be good or bad. It just keeps moving on to something else. Moment by moment, there are new conflicts. In that it is mimicking life. You can't say this to a studio, which is why I can't pitch a film to save my life. I was watching Minnie and Moskovitz again, and that's New York in the seventies when garbage literally flew in your face when you walked down the street. And John Cassavetes was very interested in watching these humans behave with each other. Human behavior interests me and my films begin with behavior. Who do we want to watch behave next? It is satisfying to work with all this complicated stuff that touches us in different ways and to put it up on the screen so we can all look at it.
DP: Talk about your soundtrack, which I like.
NS: We have fun music. Lisa Lisa is Lucy's ringtone, very '80s retro disco. We have the Italian version of Edie Gorme's "Blame It on the Bosa Nova." Like Connie Francis would sing the "Greatest Jewish Hits," Edie Gorme and others would do different versions of songs and I grew up with that because of my family of immigrants. Edie also has a Spanish version. I think the song fits. It's so random why people are who they are, so you may as well blame it on the bosa nova.
DP: You end with one of the great songs ever, Warren Zevon's "Keep Me in Your Heart for a While," sung by Madeleine Peyroux.
NS: It's a beautiful song and Madeleine Peyroux is amazing. I was a big fan of hers and thought her voice was what we needed to hear at the end. We sent her an email and asked her to sing the end song. At the time we didn't know what song it would be so I gave her a CD of songs that I thought might work and she picked it. Before we had a song, we were showing the film and it was very upsetting to people. We had them on a roller coaster and we needed to get them off it with the right song. I was so grateful when Madeline said yes and recorded it. It helps to sit through the song at the end. I got chastised for the ending to True Love because there is no resolution. I was told it wasn't fair for me to do that to an audience. The man who told me this said that afterward he and wife spent an entire weekend talking about it. And I said, "If you spent an entire weekend talking about it, it's not a terrible thing." As I said, it's interactive: where my story ends is where you can begin your own story. You can use the movie as a tool; I use certain movies as tools and they are very helpful psychologically.
DP: With True Love, we watch the whole movie wanting and expecting the engaged Italian couple from the Bronx, played by Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard, to come together because we like their characters.
NS: But look at the end of The Graduate.
DP: I don't think anyone will have a problem with where Union Square ends. But were you tempted to keep writing past the what is now the end?
NS: Directors are seen as generals leading the army and I probably am like that on some level but as a storyteller I feel my job is to keep my ear to the ground to understand what my movie needs. On Union Square, we shot a scene in the park with the two sisters on a bench, and even as we shot it I told Mira and Tammy that I didn't know if it was going to work. The movie itself wouldn't allow me to use it. I couldn't do it. The muse dictates and it's got to be what it wants to be.
DP: Was this a happy shoot?
NS: Yes, as troubled as things were, it was exhilarating, kind of guerilla and rambunctious. It was wild.
DP: Did you feel twenty again and starting out?
NS: Yes! Very much so.
DP: And did you say, "I can't believe we did this!"?
NS (laughing): Every day!
DP: And did you say that you could never do it again?
NS: I have three kids and every time I went into labor I'd say I couldn't do it again. It's like that! I'd like to say that I couldn't do it again, but I can't.
DP: Do you have films in your head that will require bigger budgets?
NS: Yes. I have bigger palette stuff. But Union Square wouldn't have worked bigger. It is what it needed to be.
DP: Isn't it strange that a movie that's set in November is coming out in the summer?
NS: That's what I say! I'm worried! It's Thanksgiving in New York and people are wearing coats. I asked if it's a good idea. But it's the way the business works--you take theaters when you can get them. They made me feel better by saying Frozen River and Winter's Bone came out in the summer. I think it's weird, but I hope the audience can forgive us. Maybe there is no one season for family conflicts.

The Girl Who Finally Said No

Trishna Is Playing in Theaters

The Girl Who Finally Said No

(from brinkzine.com 7/10/12)

Freida Pinto photo by DP

Michael Winterbottom's sumptuous Trishna, in which he transports Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles from 19th Century England to modern-day India, was one of my favorite films at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. The scenery is gorgeous, the lovely Freida Pinto delivers a daring, assured, and exquisite performance in the title role, director Winterbottom breaks rules and takes interesting liberties with the novel, and the jolting ending is sure to be controversial. The result is that there should be lot of discussion on your way home. The film opens this Friday and I highly recommend it. The story of the ill-fated heroine will stay with you, as it does me. I took part in the following roundtables with Pinto and Winterbottom during the festival. I note my questions.
Roundtable with Freida Pinto
Q: When you go back to India, as you did on Trishna, does it shock you how little or how much has changed?
FP: It doesn't shock me because I grew up in an environment in Bombay where not everyone had the same opportunities that I had. I feel that Trishna is a perfect way to bring Tess of the D'Urbervilles from 19th Century England to 21st Century India, because you see so much urbanization and the onset of these educational systems because children want to be educated. Things are changing and it is happening at a fast pace, although it will take time until it trickles down to rural communities. It was actually shocking to see the changes that are already happening in rural areas. I would expect them to not happen because they're so far away from city life, but it has changed so much. You know, 21st Century India is so different from what it was in rural England even when Hardy wrote about it. It's happening much faster than it happened back then.
Q: You grew up in Bombay and in a very different class than Trishna. She is far removed from your own experience, so how did you connect to her?
FP: It was really difficult because of what you say. I never grew up in a situation where I had to be submissive, not just to men but females in my life. I had the independence and liberty to always make my own choices. I didn't know what the other world would feel like. So I started my research a month prior to the film starting. I went down to Rajasthan and spent time with a few families. Some of the families we actually used in the film. I met a lot of girls, all kinds of girls. There were girls like Chanchal, the really talkative one at the start of the film. They were kind of traditional but a little more outspoken than Trishna. And then there were girls like Trishna. I remember meeting a 16-year-old girl who was married and staying with his family. I asked her, "Have you finished school? Do you want to be educated?" She was like, "Yeah, I'd like to but now I've got to cook." She was not openly resentful of it. She had almost accepted that this was going to be her life from then on. Those are the kind of influences I brought to my character. Because that's when it struck me that there is a reality that exists outside of my own.
Q: Under what circumstances did you see this movie for the first time and what went through your mind afterward?
FP: Michael wanted me to see the film before I watched it with the audience at the Toronto Film Festival. Unfortunately, they burned a copy of the movie but the quality wasnt really good. I didnt want to ruin the experience so I stopped watching it. And I remember telling him, "Everything was too dark and I couldn't see anything." And he's like, "What? That was the feel of the film and you didnt like it?" And I was like, "I didn't mean that. But let's watch it at the premiere." When I actually watched it I looked at the way it was pieced together. Obviously, when you're shooting a semi-improvisational film you really don't know which direction the director is going to take it using the footage. It was really up to him on the editing table to decide what direction he wanted to go in, because we gave him all kinds of things to choose from. And what actually went through my mind after the screening was how everything he had said completely made sense. This was especially true when I wanted to have more of a say in what was happening with Trishna's situation, and he said, "Don't talk. Just be quiet and absorb what's happening around you. And we'll see how it goes." That now made the most sense because Trishna's passiveness as she absorbs pain, and her internalizing of it of it justifies Trishna's final act for me.
Riz Ahmed and Freida Pinto

Q: How would you describe Michael Winterbottom's directing style?
FP: He's very quiet but he's to the point. What I found amazing about his style of working was how unconventional it is. There are no Actions or Cuts. The camera didn't stop rolling as soon as the scene was over. It would go on to capture even mistakes because sometimes a mistake makes for a beautiful take. He was always encouraging his actors to improv on set, which is a leap of faith. A director has to really believe that they'll be able to do it and carry out his story. He was trusting and very welcoming to suggestions and very democratic on set. I can still hear him.
Danny Peary: Does Trishna ever say NO to a man in the film?
FP: Toward the end actually she says to Jay that she doesn't feel like dancing for him any more. And he kind of persuades her to do it anyway.
DP: Her passivity is really interesting.
FP: I needed Michael's help with that because it was really, really hard for me to keep quiet in a lot of situations. It was improv and Michael helped me quite a bit by saying this is probably where Trishna would say something or wouldn't say anything. That's the difference between letting the actor just play out the character and letting her own thoughts and own upbringing interfere with her character, especially when she's that passive. It was almost to the point that it gets disturbing
Q: Is the submission of a daughter to a father still true in India in every class?
FP: Not in every class. Definitely not in my family. Actually, down south in Kerala there is a matriarchal system. So, it's completely the opposite of what we would see otherwise. I think it really depends on the family, the extent of education in the family, and how much of the world they've seen. You'll find this kind of submissive situation in Trishna's lower-class society and also in the Rajput society, which is the rich and the royal family of Rajasthan. One of the girls I met was going off to get married. An arranged marriage. She used to ride a bike and have a completely urban lifestyle, and I was interviewing her and she said, "Oh yeah, this is going to be my last month at the hotel. I'm not going to be working here after that." I'm like, "Oh, a new job?" "Oh, no. I'm going to get married so I'm going to enjoy this bike riding for the last few months." I asked, "What do your parents have to say about it?" "Oh, my father wants me to get married." So, it doesnt really hold the same for all.
DP: Because you're a female from India playing a female from India, would you contribute anything to Englishman Michael Winterbottom's knowledge of the subject?
FP: Yeah. You know, I'm very happy that he went there before all of us. Even eight years before when he was shooting Code 46 and that's when he found Osian. He loves Thomas Hardy and his books anyway. I thought this would be the perfect place to shoot Trishna because he found the similar Tess. And he was very welcoming to suggestions that came from Riz Ahmed and me, especially from me because I am from India about my character, her passiveness and how she would probably possibly respond. Most importantly, how she would be with her father? There's a difference in how she would interact with her father and her mother. You know, she's never that open with her father. She never really has an open conversation with him. Not so much with her mother either. You know, the only person that she loves talking to are her siblings. That's the only level that she can actually relate to. Yeah, so Michael was very open to suggestions. And he already knew how he wanted Trishna to play out. So, it did help that I wasn't there telling him, "Oh no, she wouldnt wear that because thats completely not believable." He would just let me do it because he knew that I would not mess up.
SPOILER ALERTDP: Heres a question that you dont want to answer. Would Trishna kill herself even if she didnt kill Jay first?
FP: I thought about this so much and it's a really good question. I was very conflicted about whether she actually had to kill him. I was thinking that maybe she should just go back to her family and find another job on the farm. Maybe she should just do that. But then it struck me, this girl just had an abortion. You know how it is in villages. Everyone knows what everyone's doing. The word spreads like fire. She lives in a social situation where she's already looked down upon for what she's done in the past. She's brought shame upon the family. So, going back and living there is as painful as being looked down upon as someone dirty. It would be almost as difficult for her to do that as it is to stay with him. There is emotional torture, which rips her apart. But neither with him nor with her family can she really live again. I felt like she has so much strength in her, which she has used to kind of plow through all the situations she's been through. Maybe she can go that one extra mile and just live with this pain. But you never know actually with human beings, when they just flip and they just dont want to do it anymore. I would want her to be a survivor in this situation. But unfortunately--also because we were going according to the book--she does end her life. In the book she gets hanged, so it's a different thing. But her death is inevitable. I also feel like it's the death of her pain and suffering when she physically leaves the world. It's sad that she is always one inch closer to what she wants but she never gets it--whether it's the fact that she wants to complete her education or to be in love with this man or help a family.
DP: Or dance.
FP: Or dance. And that's the most important thing because the only time she comes alive is when she's dancing, even when she was in Osian with her family. So I almost feel like some kind of a death is almost inevitable for this character. Trishna is an unfortunate character. However, if I were playing her as Freida, I would do it so differently. I would go back to Bombay and find a career as a dancer or I would kill him right at the start of the film! I dont know. It's a tricky situation. I was rooting for her, I really was.
Q: She has the responsibility of earning the money for her family;her siblings depend on her, as do her father and mother. So when she kills herself, she essentially cuts them off of any financial aid.
FP: That is true. That's horrible. When she says goodbye to her siblings she pretty much knows that it's going to be very difficult for them to even complete their education. She's prompting them to just keep going, keep going, something that she couldn't do. And I felt that would be so damaging for a family because she was bringing in the income. But I was like, "Okay, this girl has gone through so much." Maybe this is the answer too. Maybe it is. I'm not promoting it, but maybe it is for her.
END SPOILER ALERT
Q: Tell me one thing you learned from Trishna?
FP: Just to say no when the time is right. Don't wait for time to fly by. Saying no,
even in situations in the film industry,

Freida Pinto as Trishna

maybe with publicity, here you're asked to do certain things that you don't think are right for you or you can't relate to. Instead of beating around the bush, I think the best thing to say is: "I'm just not going to do it."
Q: How did your parents feel about you getting into acting?
FP: They were fine with it. They would be surprised if I did anything else because they knew I was dramatic enough when I was a kid. They had no idea what I was going to do when I grew up. I knew that acting was a passion but I never knew that a profession could be made out of it. I did not have a godfather in the industry or someone to guide me. I had none of it. So, I kept saying, Oh, I'm going to join the army, and then it was something else and then something else and then a wedding planner. So, they knew these dramatics would stop somewhere when I finally found my calling.
Q: I'm wondering if you think that beauty is something that helps you in your career or has it also been something where people have looked at you and said that she's really beautiful and we're going to use her only as a beautiful girl.
FP: It's funny because when my second film happened, none of the beauty questions even came up. I played a Palestinian-Italian journalist in Miral. So, I was just playing her as a 17-year-old girl and that question never really arose even though she is so beautiful.. In the Woody Allen film, yes, in playing a next door neighbor who is a seductress, that did come into the picture. But I feel it really depends on me, how I want to pitch myself when I go into meetings and how I want to play a character. I hate saying this, but sometimes they look for this "exotic" girl in the film. Then they'll send a script for an "exotic girl, " and I'd have two lines, which you can take
out without affecting the film at all. It's for me to say that the part is not for me.
Q: What's coming up next for you?
FP: I have two independent films that I'm working on at the moment. They're not really financed. I feel so passionate about doing independent projects and promoting them at Tribeca and other festivals that welcome independent films. I've been prepping for one of them since December. I really do hope it takes off. I wont say much because I know they want to make an official announcement before I open my big, fat mouth. It's contemporary, almost based on true life.
Q: What kind of prepping?
FP: Oh, physical prepping. It's not an action film even though I do physical prepping. But another film of expression, which is not necessarily just acting through dialogue but acting through body movements.
DP: Through dance?
FP: Yes.
DP: Like Trishna.
Roundtable with Michael WinterbottomQ: Did you see Roman Polanski's Tess?
Michael Winterbottom: Yes, I saw it when it came out and fell in love with Nastassja Kinski from that. Partly because of that, I later worked with her on The Claim. It was a western and the writer suggested borrowing a story [The Mayor of Casterbridge] from Hardy. She's lovely.
Q: Why did you choose to move the Hardy story to India.
MW: Because it's partly about a society in transition and change. In Britain, it feels like it's stagnating, which is a different sort of problem. In India, people's lives are changing a lot. A lot of people are improving their lives and trying to make changes in a world that is different from the one their parents grew up in. For all the people who make it, there are others who don't. There's the danger of falling through the gap between one world and the other. It's interesting because it generates a lot of stories that are simple but have big things at stake. Obviously the rural village community where Trishna comes from doesn't provide her with a lot of opportunities to express oneself as an individual. You're protected and safe as long as you don't venture outside; but as soon as it becomes modern and urban, all that protection disappears and you have to get what you want by yourself. There are still opportunities but the protection disappears.
Q: Did you like shooting there?
MW: I'd shot in India twice before and had difficult experiences. I'd actually shot in Rajasthan before and though we didn't have actors who the people knew, when we took the camera out we'd get three hundred people in the street following us. This time that didn't happen and I'm not sure why. It was quite challenging technically but most of the problems we anticipated didn't happen. It was easier in the hotels but even in Jaipur we were able to shoot this time. Maybe the economic changes have affected people and they have gotten more used to everything.

Riz Ahmed and Freida Pinto

Q: At which point did Anurag Kashyap come into the picture and when did you decide to have Anurag, Kalki, and Amit act in the film?
MW: Trishna likes to watch films and dance and the dance element was in from the very first draft of the adaptation; obviously cinema is part of Indian culture. Anurag himself I met at the beginning of the process of making the film, at the beginning of pre-production and he introduced me to Amit and Kalki. I always wanted the film to be in that world and had hoped to get real people to play themselves in a way but I didn't know Amit would be up for acting. He's actually quite up for that! And he's really good. Amit's quite shy but it was great because I'd never really worked with a songwriter writing songs for film. So it was really fun and sweet that we were able to have him in the film. And the dancers we met were great and they had parts in the film.
Danny Peary: You changed the accident at the beginning of the film from being her fault in Hardy's book to being her father's fault. I think it wasn't a minor change but affected everything that happens later. Did you feel that, too?
MW: Yes and no. When you read Tess, you don't really feel the accident is her fault. Of course she feels obligated to make up for that but I think she'd feel obliged anyway because she is the oldest daughter and she is who she is and has the possibility to help the family. It was more an expression of the character than what formed the character.
DP: I'm actually asking about the difference in the fathers. Because the accident is his fault in your movie, he feels obligated to her and does things like help her have an abortion without saying anything. He always gives her the evil eye, but she knows his weaknesses.
MW: Right. He is weak in that sense, but then again, in Tess, the father is weak, too. Maybe it balances out. One of the reasons I made the change was it was practical. In reality, in India we couldn't have her drive the truck. Women don't do that, it just doesn't happen. The family in Tess is much more marginal and he is much more feckless as a father and is a drunk. I talked to lots of drivers and this was a guy who actually, like a lot of people in India, is trying to make things better. His economic stage is going up before the accident. He has a decent house, his kids are going to school, he is paying off the jeep in monthly installments. It's like India as a whole is becoming better off. Until the accident. And she becomes the breadwinner and he feels shame because of where he is from.
Michael Winterbottom, photo by DP

Q: Something else that you changed is that you combined the two main male characters into Jay.
MW: It's tricky. I love Tess, but it's frustrating that Hardy makes such a clear distinction between Alec, her sensual lover, and Angel, her spiritual lover, because most people are both. I thought that in the movie it wouldn't be as interesting to have two black-and-white characters than one character who is wrestling with both aspects of why he is in love with her. Jay is someone who wants to be in love with Trishna and makes love to her because he thinks he loves her yet he has an armor of weakness. If you think about it, if he genuinely loves her he wouldn't make love to her. He's the owner of a hotel and rich and can make love to her without consequences, but for her as a woman and an employee, he should be able to imagine that he can't make love to her and have it all be fine for her. As soon as her fellow worker Chanchal is aware she has gone off with Jay, Trishan's position changes. Jay wants to be good but he's weak and spoiled.
DP: Basically everyone hates Jay by the end of the movie...
MW:..Good...
DP: ...and also at the beginning of the movie. But is he also a victim of the culture?
MW: He's a victim of his father in a sense. His father is infuriatingly strong and confident and has made his fortune. Jay, like Alec in the book, is a bit of a victim of that upbringing. He doesn't need to work or have a career, so he doesn't know what to do with his life. But it's really hard to have sympathy for a spoiled rich kid. You see that he is likable in lots of ways and could be a good person, but in the end he doesn't have the strength of character to carry that through. For me, he's the least clear character in the film. When Trishna tells him that she aborted their baby, that throws him. They don't communicate much. He falls in love with her but doesn't really know her, other than that she has a lack of imagination. Although in Bombay, they love each other in the moment, they come from two very different worlds.
He has an idea of her that her story of the abortion disrupts a little bit. But in the end that's not why things go wrong. When he returns from Britain, he has already decided to go back to Rajisthan and he sees this as being a good son who takes over his father's business. But he doesn't think what that means to Trishna. There, it's impossible for an incredibly rich person and incredibly poor person to be together. He basically forces her to go back to being his mistress and a worker who pretends not to be his lover. Although neither wants to acknowledge it at first, as soon as he turns her into his employee who is having sex with him on the side, as opposed to being his partner, he destroys their relationship.
DP: When you say Jay is not a clear character, did you intend him to be vague?
MW: I like that it's open to interpretation. I like the idea that you watch something and have to make your own mind up about what happens. It's not where this moment must be the moment when characters realize something or laugh or cry or whatever. I don't want one conversation to be where their relationship is destroyed but just one part of the process. I don't mind that people have different views. I like not having things scripted precisely; I like improvising and seeing what people do and then deciding what works.
Q: In that conversation when she says she had an abortion, he gets angry but just before that she accepted that he'd been cheating on her.
MW: Exactly. There's a double standard. He believes she's pure and simple because she has a different background than his.
DP: Did Feida understand Trishna right away or did she develop her?
MW: She did develop it through performing rather than a long time before, because in a way what's in the script is the story rather than the characters. The actors knew roughly what they needed to communicate, and Freida spent a lot of time talking with the real people in the film--the hotel workers, the dancers, and especially the young people in the family because she had to play scenes with them and know how to behave as a daughter in that family. She'd watch how the other sons and daughters and nephews in the house behaved. If you got actors from India to play those roles they'd have preconceptions about people behaved in that house but life is always much more varied and all the children behave differently and not a standard way.
DP: From talking to Freida, it seemed like she really thought about her motivation.
MW: I didn't have to worry about that! I let the actors do that!

Hitting for Dollars

See Ballplayer: Pelotero in Theaters

Hitting for Dollars

(from brinkzine.com 7/7/12)

You may have seen in the papers that the Mets recently signed a 16-year-old shortstop named German Ahmed Rosario from the Dominican Republic for a $1.7M signing bonus. So many teens are signed on the island at that age--Dominicans comprise an astounding 10% of MLB players--that you may have just taken it in stride, but if you were at all curious about the background of Rosario and other Dominican youths who strive for large bonuses from major league teams to escape poverty, then I recommend a new documentary called Ballplayer: Pelotero. Directed by Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin, and Jonathan Paley, executive produced by Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine (once the manager of the Mets), and narrated by John Leguizamo, it follows the troubled signings of two teenage star prospects--Miguel Angel Sano (smiling, with glove) and Jean Carlos Batista (fielding and hitting tire)--a couple of years back, and its gritty, up-close,

 behind-the-scenes approach reveals a world we havent seen before.

This film will also serve as a welcome complement to the excellent 2008 indie narrative Sugar, about a prized Dominican Republic pitcher who has trouble adjusting to minor league ball in Iowa after he receives his bonus. Ballplayer: Pelotero was an official selection of the Hamptons International Film Festival, Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Miami International Film Festival, Cleveland Film Festival, and Portland International Film Festival. It opens this Friday in New York and L.A. courtesy of Strand Releasing. You can see it here at the Maysles Cinema (www.mayslesinstitute.org) and the Quad Cinema. There will be a Q&A with co-directors Finkel and Martin after the 7:30pm screening on the 14th at the Maysles Cinema at 343 Malcolm X Blvd / Lenox Ave (Between 127th and 128th Streets) Contact: email: cinema@mayslesinstitute.org phone: (212)582-6050. 

The following the DIRECTORS STATEMENT from Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jonathan Paley:The central question behind Pelotero was a simple one: Why are Dominicans so good at baseball? The tiny island nation is consistently overrepresented in the Major Leagues, and as America's pastime continues to globalize, every year brings a fresh crop of young Dominican Peloteros to the top levels of the game. We had a romantic image of these players humble beginnings etched in our minds; poor kids chasing rolled up socks through dusty streets as motorbikes whizzed by. However, that vision of street ball felt disconnected to another romantic idea of Dominican baseball; Big Papi, Sammy Sosa, or Robinson Cano slowly trotting around the bases under the bright lights and cheering fans of a big league ballpark. How does one lead to the other? And what is the story in between the two?
 

Jean Carolos Batista

When an opportunity arose to secure some grant money in college to produce a documentary, we decided to travel to the Dominican Republic and do our best to connect the dots. That research trip allowed us to survey the country, build relationships and get a feel for what was really going on. More importantly though,we left the island infected with the spirit, passion, and zealousness of Dominican baseball.
When we came back a year later, this time for the long haul, we discovered that our simple question had a very complex answer -- one that had more to do with the hallways of Major League offices than with any dusty street. Where we had expected to find the Wild West of Baseball that we had read so much about, we instead discovered a highly nuanced system struggling with its own identity.
The Dominican system is one of stark contradictions. It's institutionalized yet independent. A free market, yet frequently manipulated. It is a system where integrity and corruption are interchangeable tactics in the pursuit of the country's top players. Indeed, the forces that make Dominican players so successful are the same forces that make the Dominican system so dangerous for MLB. Most importantly, for all these reasons, or perhaps in spite of them, the Dominican system is extremely effective.

Pelotero sheds light on some of the most pressing issues regarding the export of Dominican baseball players to the US: age and identity fraud, exploitation, and the opaque role Major League Baseball plays in determining the fates of young players and their families. However, at heart, the film is a story about two gifted young men with a shared dream, doing their best to navigate a mercenary world with the hopes, fears and burdens of their entire families riding on their success or failure.

Daryl and Zoe on Lola

Lola Versus is Playing in Theaters

Daryl and Zoe on Lola

(from brinkzine.com 6/14/12)

Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein

Mainstream critics have praised the first-rate cast in Daryl Wein's Lola Versus, which opened nationally last week, but I'm disappointed that several have accused the film of being trite and conventional. I'd love for those critics to try to list those films that it copies because they'd be hard-pressed. A lot of care went into making this perceptive comedy about a twenty-nine year-old, Lola (the always unconventional Greta Gerwig), whose life unravels after long-time boyfriend Luke (Joel Kinnaman) dumps her before their wedding, original--and it was done so subtly (almost line for line and scene for scene) that lazy critics didn't bother to notice. True, Wein and his life partner and cowriter Zoe Lister-Jones' second feature, following the acclaimed $15,000 indie Breaking Upwards, didn't venture into jaw-breaking extremes--for the simple reason they wanted to base it in reality--but the dialogue, characters, locations, cinematography, relationships, and even the way Gerwig and Lister-Jones (who matches the indie star as Lola's acerbic best friend Alice) move within the frame are not common to contemporary movies. Last week, I posted a four-journalist roundtable I was in with Gerwig (http://brinkzine.com/content/10999/.html). As promised, here are roundtables I participated in with Wein and Lister-Jones (a personal favorite whom I interviewed for Stuck Between Stations last year) on the same day. There's a profile of the couple in today's New York Times--it's mostly about them (and is worth checking out), this is mostly about their new movie. I note my questions.
Roundtable with Daryl Wein
Danny Peary: Why isnt there a third word in the title?
Daryl Wein: Zoe and I were lying at bed at two in the morning trying to come up with the perfect title. One of us said, Lola Versus... and we tried to think what the other word should be and we realized in that pregnant pause that it might be more interesting to leave the title open-ended because Lola's up against so much in the film. We thought that was a little more unconventional to let the audience fill in the blanks. Also we were exploring what it is like for Lola to be a PHd student studying the verses of silence in poetry, so in another incantation we actually spelled it with an es, and it was The Lola Verses. Then we decided that would be too confusing, and that people could just think of that subconsciously. So that was the inspiration for the title. Also: Lola being Lolitaesque, in that there is a young naivete to her, was part of the reason we gave her that name.
Q: Lola's about to turn thirty and people set themselves up with weird challenges because of this number.
DW: There's all this societal pressure that comes with these age milestones. At thirty, everyone expects you to have your life figured out. You want to at least be close to settling down with a steady job and a family. The anticipation of what you're supposed to do is in conflict with how you're socially conditioned to think and believe. When the rug is pulled out from under Lola, that's what makes, proverbially, the shit hit the fan even harder.
DP: But she learns there is no need for urgency.
DW: Absolutely. It's not about this desperate need to find that perfect person right away and have that plan so well mapped out. You can take the time to figure out who you are and what you want and get to a comfortable happy place before you're bringing others into your mess.
Q: Zoe just kills as Lola's best friend Alice.
DW: Zoe is hilarious. She's a brilliant comedian. She has sharp comic timing and also a vulnerable, dramatic side, too, which had a good showcase in our last film, Breaking Upwards. She's good at playing both. Zoe makes what could have been a really schticky sitcom thing into something grounded, authentic, and truly funny.
DP: Does Zoe write all her own lines?
DW: No, we write everything together. We have a healthy combination.
DP: Is it easy for you to write her?
DW: It is because I know her so well. We've actually been dating for eight years and I'm well-versed in the female experience.
DP: Because you've known each other so long I thought you might have a pattern where she writes the females and you write the males.
DW: It's funny, but we don't. It's pretty traditional in that whoever is feeling more excited or passionate about characters or part of a story jumps in with the writing and later offers up their notes or rewrites to the other person. It's gender equal. We don't write in the same room. We write separately and then show it to the other. If we sat in the same room and tried to craft sentences, we'd drive each other crazy. It would be like a painter trying to paint with someone next to them.
Q: Since you've been dating Zoe for eight years, was there any awkwardness when writing the breakup scenes?
DP: That was your whole first movie...
DW: Yeah, luckily we got that out of our system with Breaking Upwards. That was a very therapeutic process to go through. This one was less autobiographical so it was easier for us to write it and not be so worried that we might be offending the other person in our interpretation of what our real relationship is like. This one was more born out of our being friends with so many smart, funny, interesting women in the New York dating world--and Zoe's experience of being a single woman when we were in an open relationship.

Zoe  Lister-Jones and Greta Gerwig

They were having all these weird encounters with men and weren't able to find something that worked. That inspired us. It's rare to see funny, authentic single women post-breakup that aren't Sex and the City or Bridget Jones's Diary or any movie starring Julia Roberts or Katherine Heigl. It's rare when the woman make mistakes and isn't always charming and constantly the victim. Sometimes Lola crosses boundaries and alienates people.
Q: Lola isnt forgiven just because she's cute.
DW: Right. Often she's not cute. She's messy and raw--that spoke to us more than her being an always pretty and charismatic leading lady. You rarely see women in movies being unapologetic in a raw, genuine way. Sometimes people criticize women characters for speaking so candidly. They're not used to seeing women talking about their vaginas. We're used to men talking about their penises and pee-pee and poo-poo humor, and we only started seeing women do it in Bridesmaids, but there it was in a broad context. We tried to ground our humor in a reality we can identify with. We were trying to challenge the expectations of what a female protagonist tends to be, not only by casting Greta Gerwig but also in the way we wrote Lola's trajectory. She is ping-ponging back and forth in a way that doesnt take her from A to B, where at B she meets the next guy and they fall in love and have everything wrapped up with a bow at the end.
DP: What is harder or more fun for you two to write: characters who are breaking up or characters who are getting together?
DW: I think were always drawn to characters and alternative forms of relationships that we don't typically see. So it doesn't necessarily have to be them getting together or breaking up as long as it feels fresh and hasn't been written about to death. At the time of Breaking Upwards, we were seeing what it was like to be in an open relationship and having the nitty-gritty rules of being together but seeing other people. So we were trying to craft a couple who is together but is strategizing a breakup--they're not just breaking up but are actively creating rules. In many breakup films you see both sides but in Lola Versus we are seeing it solely from the female perspective.
DP: If you had made this film Luke Versus would you have been more sympathetic toward Luke? He seems to get out of the marriage because hes overwhelmed but otherwise he seems like an okay guy.
DW: When we were writing this we didn't want to portray him as the asshole villain, which he could have been. We wanted to show that it was more complicated than that. He goes through complex emotions surrounding the breakup. We dont show the breakup scene, but you can imagine what he says. In the conversations he has with Lola subsequently, we realize there were all kinds of factors that played into why they aren't together. They've been together for eight years, there was all this pressure around getting married, and maybe they weren't still exciting each other.
SPOILER ALERT
DP: I think what I'm asking is: If the film had been Luke Versus and we saw things from his perspective and got to know him fully, would we think that Lola should get back with him?
DW: In my opinion, and it's open to interpretation, I dont think they were ever truly right for each other. We imagine them to be the kind of couple that gets together in college --they fell for each other when they were too young--and thinks they are the ones for each other, and they stay together for a long time out of fear of leaving each other or because they're in denial about what's really missing between them. I think that ultimately Luke isn't fulfilling her, and visa versa. They are both looking for different things. Obviously, we're mostly focusing on Lola's pathology in this. If it was Luke Versus, I think we would have understood his pathology even more, post-breakup. And I think you'd see that he doesn't want to be with Lola anymore. He has been craving being with other women and having new experiences.
DP: At their age, everyone who wants to break up and let the other person down easy lies, "It's not you, it's me," although it is them. Then they add, "I need to be alone so I can go off and find myself." It's a cliche that is usually also a lie but in Lola's case it is a cliche that is true. She does need to be alone to find herself.
DW: Well, you're always rooting for the guy to get back with the girl and the girl to get back with the guy. You rarely see a movie where the woman ends up alone with herself by choice. There is an expectation that there will be a happy ending where she'll run off with the guy. But for us it was more important to root for Lola to figure out herself. It takes Lola months to figure things out and that she can say no to Luke. When the other person holds the power and broke up with you and they're happy and you can't stop thinking about them and wanting to get them back, you're in a vulnerable position. Lola goes through so many trials and tribulations but has to hit rock bottom to realize that's not the direction she should be going in.
END SPOILER ALERT
Q: Why didnt you have the breakup scene?
DW: We wrote it and shot it and then realized we'd seen breakup scenes so often and it was more interesting to tell the story without it. You get what's happening and it's more fun to catch up to what went awry. We knew that because of the film's marketing and trailer, people would already know they break up. It's more interesting having them on the happy track to getting married and buying the flowers and then boom there's a 180-degree flip. The rug is pulled out--that's how it happens sometimes. It was more important for us to get into the story of this woman spiraling after the breakup then it was to focus on why they were breaking up. The story for us starts post-romance.
Q: Talk about Lola's parents and casting Debra Winger and Bill Pullman.
DW: Lola's parents are supposed to be these New York hippie intellectuals who led an unconventional life in the seventies. Lola might have lived a more out-of-control life when she was a kid, and she rebelled by having an in-control planned-out life. When I was casting I was looking for actors who could fit perfectly into this world, and I cast great actors with amazingly long careers. You dont really see Debra Winger in comedies like this of late--the last movie we saw her in was Rachel Getting Married and she played a really dramatic role. It is interesting seeing her in a lighter, poignant, motherly role. She's smart, cool, and unconventional and that made her perfect for Lola's mom. Bill Pullman is such a sweet, kooky father. He has an offbeat quality and I'm always attracted to that, like Hamish Linklater playing Henry and Ebon Moss-Bachrach playing the one-night-stand guy, Nick "the Dick." There's something more unexpected about them than actors who tend to be polished.
DP: Did An Unmarried Woman flash through your mind while making your movie?
DW: We watched Paul Mazursky's film after we started writing our movie. It was an inspiration because it has such an interesting tone and the ending is so ambiguous and open-ended, with Jill Clayburg walking through SoHo carrying a large painting. That was a film that we referenced a lot while developing the project because we couldn't think of any other post-breakup story that follows a single woman in an honest way. Still to this day I cant think of any film with that trajectory. We were inspired by Jill Clayburg's performance, which was so powerful and compelling. Like Lola, her character is unapologetic, raw, vulnerable, and messy.
Q: Talk about the New York you shoot in this film.
DW: We moved around the city, trying to show different pockets. We used twice as many locations as are usually used in independent film. We shot in Vinegar Hill, Dumbo, the High Line, the East Village, Tribeca, even Times Square, so we were jumping around everywhere. There were homages to classic locations of New York, but there were also fresh, interesting places like Russ & Daughters smoked fish shop--it has been around for a hundred years but we were the first crew to shoot there.
Q: You seemed to take a lot of care with the cinematography.

Daryl Wein.  Photo by DP

DW: I think that almost all romantic relationship movies are shot very broadly. I haven't seen attention paid to the way they have been shot since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And that was shot by the incredible Ellen Kuras eight years ago! I wanted the way we shot this film to be more interesting than what you typically see and that's why I hired the amazing Swedish DP, Jacob Ihre, to give us more of a European art house aesthetic. He shot this great Norwegian film, Reprise, and I knew that the way he mixed styles would match the trajectory of what Lola goes through as a single woman in an interesting way, rather than just shooting everything conventionally. That's why we mixed hand-held with blocked off and tracking shots. We used all kinds of techniques to achieve the overall look. We also shot on film, which is rare, and worked really hard to get the budget to work for film. You see so many filmmakers shooting video because they can't afford film--or they dont care about the aesthetic. But I believe there is heart and soul in film.
Roundtable with Zoe Lister-Jones
Danny Peary: When I interviewed you before, I pointed out that you like doing scenes walking down streets. That's apparent again in this movie when many scenes have Lola and Alice walking outdoors in New York. You're the best at it!
Zoe Lister Jones (laughing): Walking and talking is fun! Wearing high heels on cobblestone streets in New York City makes walking and talking more difficult, but it adds to the challenge!
DP: We talked about the pacing, how you have to walk slowly but make it seem natural.
ZL-J: That's totally true so you can hit your marks at the correct time during the dialogue. It's all pretty technical. But it's fun in New York especially because there's so much to look at while you're talking. So many New Yorkers do walk and talk, including on their cell phones. New Yorkers are always talking. There's almost no silence.
DP: And Lola almost gets killed talking on her phone while crossing the street.
Q: In the Times Square scene you don't do any walking.
ZL-J: I know. There was just a skeletal crew on that. Daryl and two others followed Greta and Hamish and got to capture the madness of Times Square on film.
DP: I assumed that you wrote all your own zingers but Daryl says he writes some of them, too.
ZL-J: Yeah! We really switch off a lot. He writes dialogue for men and women and I write it for the men, too. It's not a gender-based process. Whenever I write a scene I'll pass it to him and he'll make notes or do some rewrites, and it's the same when he writes a scene, so at the end it's kind of an intricate melding of both of our voices. People ask us if he wrote something or I wrote something and neither of us can remember who wrote it.
Q: When you write about a female character do you think that you're going to play her?
ZL-J: No. Our last film Breaking Upwards was loosely based on the open relationship that Daryl and I were in, so we played versions of ourselves. But at first we didn't want to do that. We wanted Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel to be in it. And then 500 Days of Summer came out with them in it and we were like, "That's sooo weird." I think we're always trying to get recognizable actors because that allows our film to be viewed by a larger audience. Because we're just starting out, that's always our goal. When Lola Versus began we thought it was going to be a micro-budget indie like Breaking Upwards and I'd play Lola. But the script got such a great response that it was made by Fox Searchlight, which was so exciting. When Fox Searchlight came on board and it was going to be a legitimate production, Greta Gerwig seemed like an exciting fit for Lola and I stepped into the character of Alice. We don't really write for actors in particular. We just write characters who are interesting and funny to us and then have a casting process.
DP: Did Greta Gerwig audition?
ZL-J: No, she didn't read lines. We sent her the script and had a meeting with her and we hung out one night at the premier of her film No Strings Attached. We had a lot of fun. Then we had her read opposite other actors when we were casting around her. That was the first time we got to see her really put the part on its feet.
Q: You had a lot of funny lines directed at Greta but you couldn't knock her off her game.
ZL-J: Yeah, she's really present in a scene, and really works off what is given to her moment to moment. She listens. It's exciting working opposite her because she never plans anything, so [laughing] from take to take it can change pretty dramatically. That's great in the editing room because there are a lot of options for which way scenes can go.
DP: Do you change from take to take, too?
ZL-J: I do. I think I always have a bit of a director's head as well. Especially when I write a scene, I have a pretty good idea what I want it to look like. I don't change things dramatically, but I change little things. Especially for comedy, there are things you can change to help the comic effect and give it variety. But I don't think I go from zero to one hundred from take to take. Greta can change more dramatically--she gives herself a lot of room to play.
DP: Was it a fun or challenging dynamic working with someone like that?
ZL-J: It was always fun. Because I'm also one of the filmmakers, while acting opposite of Greta I was also crafting it and seeing how things were fitting into the story. So it was always interesting to see her take on things. She has a very specific rhythm as an actress and a unique energy that she brought to her character and helped bring Lola to life in unexpected ways.
Gerwig and Lister-Jones

Q: Talk about the theme of silence in your movie.
ZL-J: We wanted to deal with noise, particularly in a woman's head. I can only speak as a woman and don't know what the noise is in a man's head. A woman's head can get, figuratively, noisy. There's so much about self-image and relationships and a lot of self-analysis and a lot of self-loathing. And we wanted to capture that through Lola's fantasies and her dissertation--because her journey is to ultimately find a sense of peace. She is her own worst enemy in that journey. It's hard for her to apply the silence that she's studying in her thesis to her life--it takes time before she can make some of those connections and find a little bit of silence.
DP: Alice says to Lola that she has no friends but for her and Henry. I think that's significant in the movie. I asked Greta if Lola is a good friend, and she said, yes but not for that year.
ZL-J (laughing): I think she was a good friend. But what happens when you're in a long-term relationship is that your friendships really shift. When you're not in a relationship, your friends are your main priority, and when you're in a relationship your priority becomes your partner. That is a difficult transition and there can be jealousy and competition until you adjust to what your new role is in that person's life. So Lola has been with Luke for eight years. Alice is her best friend but Lola is ultimately a homebody who has found a routine with her long-term boyfriend so it's not about going out and partying and going to the bars where the cute guys are. That's more Alice's M.O. I think Lola has had been a good friend while with Luke but I think Alice is selfishly excited when Lola's single again so she can get her wing-woman back.
Q: In their case, opposites attract.
JL-J: Well, I think that's kind of true in friendships. Obviously there are shared interests among all those in Lola's social circle. They're fashionable, into music, intelligent, and have a sense of humor. But I do think that people are drawn to people who have different energies than their own a lot of the time. I think that's what makes the social dynamic interesting. In the film, everyone has a different rhythm but (laughing) "they make beautiful music together."
DP: Lola blames herself for her downward spiral and alienating Alice and Henry, but I told her that I also blame Luke, Alice, and Henry for letting her down. What do you think?
JL-J: Yeah, but I don't think it's black and white. I think throughout the film we were trying to not have all of those conflicts have a very clear villain or victim. Even in Lola's relationship with Luke, we never wanted to make him a villain. We wanted his trajectory to also be thoughtful and sensitive. He did something he had to do that hurt Lola but he isn't a total asshole. I think Lola is victimized but she also alienates herself from the people still around her during this year. When people are going through moments of crisis, especially breakups at that age, they can be pretty self-absorbed. So, yeah, there are definitely shades of gray in who's to blame.
SPOILER ALERTDP: Should Alice have gotten together with Henry?
JL-L: I don't want the audience to know that happens, but I will say I personally believe that she is allowed to. From the beginning--what makes it so complex--is that we hint that Alice has always been thinking about Henry. Lola has always been pushing Henry on Alice and telling her to date him; and Alice says that he does look cute and Henry says Alice looks pretty. Then when Lola drops the bomb that she made out with Henry, it's quite devastating to Alice because she had a glimmer of hope of getting together with him. So I think Lola and Alice are stepping on each other's toes. I think when you have to confront a close friend with difficult information, you don't always make the best choices. Sometimes you wait a little bit too long.
END SPOILER ALERTQ: There's a naval term for what happens with Lola and Henry after her breakup: "port of convenience."
ZL-J: Interesting! That's a good title for a movie.
DP: Lola and Luke have the same first initials, like Ross and Rachel on Friends and Luke and Laura on General Hospital. Were they the perfect match at one time and just grew apart?
ZL-J: Yeah. They met and college and grew up and are very different people from who they once were. They stayed together because they were on the same track and it's hard for either to jump off the train. They fell in love at a particular moment in their life but after eight years Luke starts to panic about the idea that they have grown into different people. They just haven't taken the time apart to realize who they are because of their codependence. In the back story we imagined that Luke was a total hunk and Lola felt that she scored big time. When you're in college, getting the dreamboat is so exciting! The thrill of that probably didn't wear off that much.
Q: Until thirty came. People don't realize that there's a long life after thirty.
ZL-J: I know. We were in a park and there were all these high school students who were acting so old--at every age, we feel we're so old, that we know everything and have done everything. Approaching thirty seems like a huge transition but in retrospect it is almost nothing.

Zoe Lister-Jones, photo by DP

Q: There's a funny scene in the movie in which Alice appears in an awful heavy experimental play with her boyfriend. Did you guys actually see a play like that?
ZL-J (laughing): Never like that. We took it to an extreme for comic relief. The most experimental theater Daryl and I saw was when we studied acting at Tisch at NYU. We'd see some black-box insanity. We liked that Alice is an actress because that lends a whole other level of desperation to her character. She can't be fulfilled in her love life or in her career! Everyone who lives in New York especially has seen plays their friends are in that are unwatchable and they have to lie to them afterward. So it's a funny New York moment when Alice comes out of the theater after being in a terrible play and Lola and Henry tell her it was amazing.
Q: What inspired you to write about Lola?
ZL-J: In the year Daryl and I were in an open relationship, my experiences as a single woman were very different from his as a single man. The dating scene for a single woman in her twenties was pretty bleak. All my single girlfriends were experiencing the same comically tragic lifestyle. We'd get together and laugh about it but also share our war stories about the variety of lame dudes we encountered and the guys we liked who would treat us like shit. So we felt it was a ripe story that we could mine a lot of humor and raw emotion from. We hadn't seen an authentic portrait of a single woman on the screen. There are the glamorized versions, like Sex and the City and Bridget Jones's Diary, but there was nothing that felt young or that we could relate to and that shifted between comedy and drama. Lola Versus is sort a call back to Paul Mazursky and Woody Allen in the seventies.
DP: Lola says at one point that to love yourself you have to love other people first. Is that true?
ZL-J: I think so. Often people say that you first have to learn to love yourself but sometimes I think it's the opposite in that self-judgment sometimes follows how judgmental you are of other people. Really appreciating the people who love you is sometimes the one of the hardest things to do--it's really hard to accept love in this day and age--but it creates an environment where you can ultimately love yourself.
Q: Are you interested in only writing scripts from your own ideas?
ZL-J: No, we're interested in working from other material. We like to write our own scripts but it would be exciting to veer from that path and do something really different.
Q: What's your next project?
ZL-J: We wrote another script for Fox Searchlight called Motherfucker.
DP: That title will go over well.
ZL-J (laughing): It will never get through. It's about a young couple and the girl introduces her boyfriend to her parents and he falls in love with her mother. It's an intergenerational romance!