Emma, Andrew, and Marc on The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Playing in Theaters

Emma, Andrew, and Marc on The Amazing Spider-Man 2

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 5/9/14)

By Danny Peary

Andrew Garfield as Spiderman with Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy.

The Amazing Spiderman 2, in 2-D and 3-D, will definitely be the top attraction this weekend at the cinemas in both Southampton and East Hampton.  It’s pretty hard not to be lured into the sticky web of this sequel that is doing tremendous box office throughout the country. So I think it’s a good time to take a brief break from posting my interviews from the recent TriBeCa Film Festival and give a nod to a film that I admit I haven’t seen yet.  However, for the Australian magazine FilmInk I visited the set in New York last summer on the day they were shooting the early graduation scene and got to have some quick back-and-forths with Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man/Peter Parker), Emma Stone (Gwen), and director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer). There were other international journalists present but what follows are my questions only and the responses.
Emma Stone
Danny Peary: Emma, in Gwen’s speech, she tells the graduating students how precious time has been and will be. Is that a theme of the movie?
Emma Stone: Yes, time and timing are probably the most definitive themes of this second movie. Gwen’s speech, makes a lot of sense because her father died in the past year. So a lot has happened and a lot has changed for her. This past year she’s had a lot of realizations and is trying to impart that in her speech.  She’s grown up in a very major way. I love Gwen and her story. It’s very cool.
DP: You’re back working with Andrew and Marc. Is it easier this time because you have a communication that really works and it’s not necessary to talk everything through?
ES: Yeah, I think we all feel really comfortable together. It’s really nice getting to work with the same people again, because making movies is like being in a traveling circus and you have a new work family every three months. So it’s really nice to come back to work with people that I know and trust.
DP: Were you a fan of the superhero comics?
ES: I didn’t grow up reading comics, I kind of just learned about the comic book superheroes through movies. I grew up with Michael Keaton in the Tim Burton Batman movies.  They were my favorite, and then I saw the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy when I was a little bit older. I was struck by its passion.  Spider-Man  has such a legacy and that’s something that most movies can’t really replicate.  As actors, you don’t travel around the world with most movies and have every person who speaks to you know who you character is and know the other characters and storylines.  With other movies you’re just hoping that people like it. With this, you’re just hoping we’re all doing it justice!
Andrew Garfield
Danny Peary: Has it been easy to slip back into playing Peter Parker and Spider-Man?
Andrew Garfield:  I never slip in. I always have to crowbar myself into whatever I’m doing. Maybe that’s a personal problem I should take a closer look at. It’s a different chapter, so it’s a different person. There’s been major growth within Peter, there’ve been major changes. There’s been lots of experience, so every day I feel like I’m starting from scratch.
DP: Of course, Peter Parker will always have a major issue regarding who he is.
AG: Really, in Peter, in the story there is the sense of identity crisis. It’s exciting to play, but also what it means is that you need to have a certain amount of trust.  Peter doesn’t know who he is at this point. He’s losing himself as Spider-Man, he’s losing himself as Peter.  Peter’s relationship to Spider-Man is so complicated. On the one hand, it’s like two people: Spider-Man’s the older brother and Peter is the younger brother in the shadows. But as the older brother is getting all the approval, the praise, adoration, and has all this amazing skill he has been given this great gift, Peter can’t be part of any of that. He’s not allowed that in his daily life. He also has to be alone because of the power that he has.
DP: He tries to push Gwen away to protect her but what would his life be like without Gwen if she really stayed away?  He’s destined to be alone, but it’s easier to be alone if there’s no one tempting you to be together.
AG: If he’s without Gwen? I don’t know how to answer that. Of course we don’t know what could be until we’ve experienced it.
DP: I think he’d be miserable because he’d be missing a part of himself. But even with her, can he be happy ever?
AG: That’s a great question, and that’s a question that we explore in this film. That’s always been explored with this character. I think it would feel very weird to him to be happy. I don’t think he’d feel very comfortable with it for too long.  If a problem didn’t come along he’d create one.
DP: In Gwen’s speech, she talks about time being precious. Did Marc Webb tell you that theme was important to the film?
AG: Yeah, but I think it’s self-explanatory. Her “time is luck” line is important for Gwen to say.  Because of what happened to her father, I think it’s a beautiful sentiment.
DP: The other thing Gwen says is that everyone thinks they’re immortal.  I know at that age, kids think they are immortal and invincible, but I don’t think Peter or Spider-Man does. So he’s the exception.
AG: Yeah, I guess…I think he feels pretty secure that he can get himself out of most situations, but does have a great awareness of people being vulnerable from the first film because of his experience with his parents, his uncle, and Captain Stacy. People around him have died.

Marc Webb, director
Danny Peary: You’re from Madison, Wisconsin and I went to college there and felt the Madison vibe in 500 Days of Summer.  Does this film have that vibe too, particularly the relationships?
Marc Webb: I don’t know that that’s from Madison, I’ll tell you though, I think sometimes there’s a little bit of a separation between what we think about in New York and Los Angeles vs. what happens and what people value in the rest of the country. I think there’s a little bit of a gap there. I think one of the things I really value, having grown up in the Midwest, is an understanding and an appreciation for what that part of the country appreciates and loves. And it’s not that we’re all sort of the same, we’re all human and we all like these big mythological films. I don’t know, there’s something about the down-home nature of Wisconsin that I think I appreciate. You’d have to ask my mom.
Q: I mentioned the relationship, particularly the sweet but complicated love story of Gwen and Peter. I’d think there is danger of losing that in the action.
MW: Action the first time around for me was a new thing. I’d done a little bit of action in music videos, but I’d done very little. This time around we had a lot more time to set those action set pieces up. There is a lot more fun, a lot more humor, a lot more really volatile, intense action beats. So we spent a lot of time thinking about, preparing, and orchestrating those. But there’s also the great love story.  What I think separates Spider-Man from many of the other comic book movies is that central relationship. I hope people will relate to Peter Parker in the simple domestic dramas he has to endure and go through. That’s still fundamental Spider-Man, I think that will still exist, those small little moments that make him who is.
DP: Does he still search for himself?  Is that part of what Peter Parker does?
MW: There’s always the internal quest. I think it’s harder to think about as an actor and a director when you’re doing a big tent-pole movie, where there’s always the external conflict—stop the bad guy! But what I think people relate to the most–and are more difficult to express because you need nuances–are the internal conflicts that people have.  With Peter, it’s about it means to be Spider-Man, and what the nature of sacrifice is, and how he has to sacrifice in order to live what is his destiny. That is very much at work in the second movie.
DP: Along with Peter’s sense of responsibility.
MW: Yes. I think the writing and the performance are really very sophisticated in handling that material. You know, he’s still a kid, and he’s got that punk rock attitude, which you can even see today when he’s near the podium and getting his diploma. That’s a very important part of Spider-Man.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead Is "Alex of Venice" at TFF

Playing at Tribeca Film Festival

Mary Elizabeth Winstead Is Alex of Venice at TFF

(from Sag Harbor Online 4/24/14)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead Photo: DP

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Chris Messina

You can catch the final screening of Alex of Venice at the Tribeca Film Festival this Saturday at 6:30 at the SVA theater on 23rd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.  The impressive directorial debut of actor Chris Messina, a native of Newport, is a character piece about a workaholic environmental attorney in L.A., Alex who lives in Venice, California.  When Alex’s husband George (Messina) suddenly leaves her, she is forced to pay more attention to their shy son Dakota (Skylar Gaertner) and her aging actor father Roger (Don Johnson). Still neglecting her son, she enlists the help of her irresponsible, free-spirited sister Lily (Katie Nehra) around the house while she deals with the biggest case of her career and has an affair with the man she is fighting in court, Frank (Derek Luke)  Alex is played by one of my favorite actresses, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who made a splash as an alcoholic teacher in #Smashed. On Saturday I spoke to Winstead about the film and her character.

Danny Peary: I thought you deserved a lot of awards for your performance in Smashed. That might have been the best performance of 2012.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead: Wow, thank you.

DP: Your characters in Smashed and Alex of Venice have no self-awareness. Did you recognize that similarity?

MEW: It’s funny, but I don’t think I actually compared them in that way.  But it’s true. They’re both in denial about their own lives and not really looking at themselves.

DP: They can’t fix themselves, or make no attempt to do it.

MEW: That’s right.  Certainly Alex through most of the movie is just in complete denial about who she is and all the problems she has.

DP: In the press notes, Chris Messina says this is a slice-of-life drama.  That means characters don’t have to change.  But the movie is about change. Everyone changes for the better.

MEW: It’s one of the major themes of the movie.

DP: When does Alex have her pivotal moment of change?.

MEW: There are several little moments.  Her relationship with Frank (Derek Luke) is a huge change for her, because she married when she was young.  But her internal change doesn’t happen until the end of the movie, when she kind of comes in and talks to her son, Dakota (Skylar Gaertner).  That to me is the moment when she says, “I’ve been so much in denial of my life.” During the early midlife crisis that she is going through, she becomes focused on everything other what she should really be focusing on. Ultimately, she should focus on her relationship with her son and her estranged husband George (Chris Messina), whatever that relationship is going to turn into.

DP: That’s interesting that you say that, because how they are now is not set in stone.

MEW: Even if they don’t get back together, they recognize that they have a son and must look after him together.  Ultimately her relationship with Dakota is going to be the most important thing to her. After George leaves, she has to be a parent alone and at first she’s flailing about and hitting the wall and not being attentive to him.

DP: Well, you know the last line of the movie.

MEW (smiling): “I should have listened.” Yeah. That is a great encompassing line for who she’s been.

DP: About a third of the way through the movie I was liking your performance, but I was asking myself, “Do I like her character?” When you read the script for the first time, did you like Alex?

MEW: I really liked her in the script and as I played her, But there were a few moments when I was thinking, “I hope people stick with her through some of this stuff, because she’s really high-strung and nervous for a good majority of the movie.” She’s not connected, not really present, and making bad choices as well.

DP: Really bad choices.

MEW: There were a couple of really bad choices she makes but I’m not sure Chris and I realized they could potentially turn the audience against her until the movie was over.

DP: Actors are usually protective of their characters, so were you seeing good stuff in her?

MEW: Absolutely. She’s so relatable, in terms of people that I know and love. I have a really big family, so there’s all sorts of types of people in my family. So there are Alexes in my family. Especially when you’re a mother and you’re very busy and  just trying to keep your life together, you don’t want to look at or think about or address things that aren’t going well.  Because there’s too much going on. I think that’s easy to relate to, particularly for women today who are trying to balance so many things in their lives. Alex, in some cases, would rather things just go on in their own broken ways because it’s easier than addressing the real problems.

DP: Something she must do to move forward in her life is to realize that she’s no longer in love with her husband, and vice versa.

MEW: Oh, absolutely. That’s a hard thing to learn. I think Alex and George haven’t really been in love in a long time, even if she never admitted that to herself.

DP: In the scene when George breaks up with Alex as she sits on the porch in front of him, you had tears in your eyes. Was that a powerful scene to shoot?

MEW: It was incredible. We did it so many ways.   I didn’t really start out intending to be as emotional as it was. It was one of my audition scenes, and it was less emotional in the audition.  At first she is so in denial as he breaks up with her that it wasn’t really hitting her. Doing the scene with Chris, and having him acting with me and directing me at the same time, was very interesting because he started going completely off-script and had George say things to Alex that were heartbreaking.  What he said was really sad and mean, but it was really truthful. That immediately set off the waterworks, There were emotional takes, where I was sobbing at the end of it, but we knew Alex couldn’t have that moment so early in the movie. So I think we found something that is poignant, but not devastating because she is not realizing the weight of what is really happening to her. She has denial.

DP: Reading the script, did you think Alex would end up with Frank, the most self-aware character in the film?

MEW: In the scene with the Ouija board, Alex tells Lily that since George has left, she wonders if she will ever have sex again. I think it’s a nice moment because Alex shows her insecurity, which she never really revealed up to that point because she’s really trying to keep it all together. She shows that she is insecure about who she is and where she’s going and will end up. Frank is an exciting person who comes to her life.  He is the most self-aware character in the film.  I don’t think Alex is thinking about messing up her work life, I think she’s just allowing herself to feel something she hasn’t felt in a long time.  With Frank, she tries to be kind to herself.  She wants to give herself a little bit of freedom to explore something new romantically. That’s how I feel, but I think there’s several different interpretations.  When I watch the scenes between Alex and Frank, I realize that’s my favorite stuff in the movie. Doing those scenes with Derek Luke just felt so different from the scenes I did with anybody else.

DP: You have many two-character scenes in this movie. Alex is with George, Roger, Dakota, Frank, and her sister Lily (Katie Nehra).

MEW: Yeah, it was like ten different mini-movies for me.

DP: With different styles of acting.

MEW: Yeah, absolutely. Which was so much fun to do.  I got to show so many sides of Alex through these different relationships.  I love the scene with Lily and Alex and the Ouija board because the mood we created felt so real to me, like when I’m with my real sisters and we have wine after our parents have gone to sleep. My sisters don’t talk about double penetration necessarily, but the feeling and mood in that scene was spot on. It was fake wine but we felt drunk and giddy.

DP: I thought it was brilliant to cast Don Johnson as Alex’s dad Roger, an aging actor who is the early stages of Alzheimer’s but is trying out for a part in The Cherry Orchard.

MEW: Chris was asking us, “What do you think about Don Johnson for the dad, and we said, “That’s brilliant.” I think he really rose to the occasion and gave a really heart-breaking performance. You never know what to expect from someone who’s an icon, and he was just really great to work with. There’s nothing PC about Roger, and I love that.  We have a similar sense of humor, let’s put it that way. It was one of my favorite days on the set.  He was so giving to everyone and really taught me a lot.

DP: I wasn’t surprised by how good and natural you are in this film because I’d seen Smashed. But I was surprised by how good you were in that film.  Do you have different fans from your early horror movies, Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and the types of films your making lately, Smashed and now Alex of Venice? Or do fans not realize you’re the same person in all of those films?

MEW: I really don’t know, to be honest. I did several horror movies, so they started to connect the dots. I think one of the reasons why I get to be so anonymous is that no one knows that I’ve been in more than one movie. They always think it’s somebody new. It’s kind of nice.

DP: I saw most of your early movies without realizing they all starred the same actress, you. It wasn’t until The Thing that I knew who you were.  Was that a pivotal movie for you, in terms of audience?

MEW: I’ll always really love that role.  It was not a movie that did well necessarily, but I was attracted to the idea of playing a smart action heroine at the time. I still am.  I loved the character, and the project, and the director [Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.] and it’s still something that I look back on fondly.

DP: You had the scream queen designation, and all the sudden you’re playing your roles in a low-keyed manner, like a female Steve McQueen almost.  You hold back and give caring, nonshowy performances. Were you always capable of that, or did you all the sudden become a really good actress?

MEW: I was always suited to play these roles but when you start out you get boxed into a certain type of role.  People thought, “Oh, that’s what she is suited for.” They thought I was meant to be an action heroine or a horror scream queen, but I always approached those roles in the same way I approached Alex in Venice and Smashed.  So even when I look back on those films, I’m proud of the work that I did in them. But maybe I just didn’t have the freedom to explore as broad a range of emotions as I do in the films I’ve done of late. As I’ve gotten older and gone further in my career I make the effort to just bring myself into the part as much as I can and know that’s a good thing. I think when I was young I thought that wasn’t really acting. I thought I had to create this mysterious person who’s totally different from me and that was the only way I was going to be a real actor.  As I got older I realized that what people want to see is the actress and they want to see her personality and her heart and their soul.  That’s actually what makes people relate to my characters. I’m just really thankful that people like Chris Messina watch me closely and appreciate all those weird things I do in front of the camera.  Because when I watch my performance I see all these faces I was making without realizing it!

Japan's Greatest Monster Breathes Once Again

Godzilla: The Japanese Original Is Playing in Theaters

Japan's Greatest Monster Breathes Once Again

(from Sag Harbor Online 4/16/14)

By Danny Peary

You can already see the trailer on television for the latest epic version of Godzilla that opens theatrically on May 16.  More interesting is that from April 18 to 24 the Film Forum on Houston Street in New York City will be showingGodzilla: The Japanese Original, a sixtieth anniversary restoration, including new subtitles, of Japan’s most successful monster movie, Ishiro Honda’s Gojira.

The new American, 3-D blockbuster, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen and Bryan Cranston, is the second remake of Terry Morse’s familiar 1956 American film, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, starring a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr as a US reporter in Japan. Burr’s Steve Martin serves as our eyes as a 400-foot-tall prehistoric beast is awakened by atomic testing in nearby Bikini Atoll.  He marches through Tokyo, spewing his atomic breath, crushing buildings, and killing thousands of people.  When all weapons prove ineffective, a scientist (Daisuke Senzawa) must decide whether to use a terrible weapon he invented, the Oxygen Destroyer.

Honda was credited as codirector because all the non-Burr footage came from his two-year-old Japanese version. To make room for Burr in his 80-minute version and to excise a strong anti-nuclear subtext, Morse deleted 40 minutes from the Japanese version including the opening credits; a Japanese newsman; Tokyo commuters wisecracking about surviving yet another disaster; a volatile session in the Japanese parliament; and more scenes with Takashi Shimura, best known for his starring roles in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru and not the Seven Samurai.

Because of Burr’s wooden performance, the sloppy dubbing of the Japanese actors with silly English dialogue, and an optimistic ending, Morse’s film was best suited for juvenile sci-fi movie fans.  It wasn’t until 1982 that Gojira 2 played in America and we could see that Honda intended his film to be a solemn, sobering adult movie that was a scathing indictment of the Bomb and how America brought WWII to an end.

This is some of what I wrote back then:

“It may be surprising to some that in Japan Gojira is regarded with the same awe and pride as Americans feel toward King Kong (1933). (King Kong was the major influence on Eiji Tsuburaya, Toho Studios’ special effects master.)  Not only did the first Japanese monster film cost thirty times that of the average Japanese film of the day and break all attendance records during its much ballyhooed November 1954 premiere engagement (a Gojiraradio play had heightened anticipation), but it also received much serious critical attention in its native country.  As Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie point out in The Japanese Film, even those who criticized “the picture’s exploitation of the atom-bomb scare, praised it for an ‘intellectual content usually lacking in foreign pictures of the same genre.’” It won many awards, including the Japanese Film Technique Award for Tsuburaya.

“What makes both versions interesting is that, unlike all those giant creatures of American science fiction films of the fifties, Godzilla was no simply a bad consequence of foolhardy nuclear testing.  The merciless monster which kills and destroys with machine-like precision is meant to be the embodiment of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  This horror film gave Americans one of their first opportunities to see Japanese rage and disgust over what America did to them in August 1945.  Morse’s version makes deletions to cover up references to damage done by the A-Bomb.  But, ironically, he makes changes that further identify Godzilla with the A-Bomb.  Significantly, in his version characters die from radiation poisoning.

Oddly, Morse has Burr (in cleverly edited sequences) tell us Tokyo is evacuated before Godzilla’s attack on the city, implying that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were prepared for the attack.  Knowing this wasn’t the case, Honda didn’t evacuate Tokyo in his film, and inadvertently stuck Morse with footage that makes no sense in the U.S. version–after Godzilla leaves, Tokyo hospitals are full of people who were supposed to have been out of town. The Honda version ends gloomily, the Morse version optimistically: “the whole world could wake up and live again.”  That the scientist uses his Oxygen Destroyer on moral grounds in both versions is philosophically confusing because it backs up America’s claim that it used the A-Bomb to end the war quickly and stop the killing immediately.  But only Honda’s version makes a plea for peace and no more nuclear-bomb testing. Too bad nobody outside of Japan was listening.”

Showtimes for this landmark of the kaiju eiga (the ever-popular Japanese monster movie) will be daily at 1:15, 3:15, 5:15, 7:30, & 9:45.

Truffaut's "Small Change" Has a Big Heart

Playing in Theater

Truffaut's Small Change Has a Big Heart

(from Sag Harbor Online 4/13/14)

By Danny Peary

The much-touted “Tout Truffaut” festival at the Film Forum in New York City ends this Thursday.  Every Francois Truffaut film is a “must-see” film, but I’d like to call attention to one little gem in particular that often gets overlooked.  If Tuesday the 15^th turns out to be a taxing day, make it a point to make the trek to Houston Street to see Small Change, a title that refers to kids and not what you have left in your pocket after dealing with the IRS.  No, it’s not a history-of-film-changer, like Truffaut’s highly autobiographical, The 400 Blows, which helped usher in the French New Wave, or as powerful as his deeply personal The Wild Child. However, it is, I believe, a minor masterpiece by the cinema’s most tender and humanistic director on a subject close to his heart.  This is how I wrote about Small Change/L’Argent de Poche in 1986, which was the film’s tenth anniversary:

“Francois Truffaut’s glowing tribute to children, who must use all their immense, amazing resources to compensate for living in a sometimes brutal, adult-made, adult-controlled world.  Leisurely plotted film is set in Thiers [a hillside town in central France] near the end of the school year, and most scenes take place at the school, where the children (ranging in age from about four to twelve) are more relaxed than the students inThe 400 Blows, and the teachers are much more enlightened that those in the 1959 film—they care about their students, find the skillful clowning and idiosyncrasies endearing, and want to teach the kids about both school subjects and life, rather than disciplining them all the time. The kids’ lives are tough enough as it is. [The young Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) certainly would have benefited from having these teachers.]

Other scenes take place around the village and in a housing development where families and teachers live—this allows us to see how the kids relate to their parents. (Unlike in The 400 Blows, the kids seem to have gotten the upper hand, and the parents are full of love.)  And significant scenes take place in the cinema, where the entire community gathers and there is no distinction between child and adult.  The two children who share center stage are those who have the most difficult home lives.  Patrick (Geory Desmouceaux) lives alone with a handicapped father—what he finds missing in his life is clear when he develops a crush on his best friend’s mother.  Julien (Philippe Goldman) is a victim of child abuse—a subject that in 1976 was not getting much attention in film or on television.

While this film is known for its humor (which the kids deliver naturally), the child-abuse theme was of extreme importance to Truffaut; he even has a teacher (Jean-Franois Stévenin)—he will remind some of Truffaut—lecture his class on the subject.  Otherwise this is a simple film about innocent themes (a boy’s first kiss, boys sneaking into movies, boys spying on a nude woman)—but don’t let that fool you! There are unforgettable scenes and faces, and so much is revealed about children’s special, often-troubled world.  Also with: Virginie Thévenéx, Sylvie Grezel, [and his daughters] Laura Truffaut [and] Eva Truffaut.”

Screening times for Small Change on Tuesday April 15 at the Film Forum are: 1:00, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45, and 9:50.

Archive: Talya Lavie on Her Short, "The Substitute"

Tribeca Film Festival

Tayla Lavie on Her Short, The Substitute

From Timesquare.com November 18, 2006

Danny Peary chats with Israeli director Talya Lavie, whose short film "The Substitute" made a big splash at this year's Tribeca Film Festival

For film critics, one of the pleasures of attending film festivals is to be able to watch shorts and discover those talented directors who might be making great features in the near future. The short that really impressed me at the recent Tribeca Film Festival in New York City was the 19-minute “The Substitute,” made by young Israeli filmmaker Talya Lavie.

It was made with polish and wit and has an unusual storyline—a female soldier who does endless, mindless clerical work wants desperately to leave a remote outpost but is ordered to stick around and look after her suicidal substitute. My enthusiasm for the film was justified when it won major awards at recent festivals in Tokyo, Barcelona, Palm Springs, and Melbourne. So I interviewed her by email...

Q: Before we talk about your prize-winning “The Substitute,” I’d like to go back a little. Prior to doing graduate studies as the prestigious Sam Spiegel Film & TV School in Jerusalem, you went to the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in the same city to study animation. Did you want that to be your field or did you want to go on to make narrative films?

Talya Lavie: I wanted to be a “filmmaker,” and at a certain point I decided that I didn't want to restrict myself to animation--especially since my animation skills are very limited stylistically. However, it’s still one of my favorite realms, so I’d really like to work in animation or at least integrate it into my work.

Q: On your showcase CD, along with “Sliding Flora” (2003) and “The Substitute,” you include a brief but amusing and visually dazzling animated short called “The Waitress” [watch video]. Was it a school project? And did you show it locally or enter it into competition?

TL: It was made as part of my studies at Bezalel Academy and was never shown in a competition or other framework (but it, like “Sliding Flora” and “The Substitute,” can be viewed online at www.talyalavie.com).

Q: Talk about the animation and design. I like how you make it seem there is a cameraman filming at the restaurant, and employing various angles and altering distances; and how in your final shot there are three planes—foreground (where a car moves past), middle, and background (the café), like Disney would have in his classic cartoons.

TL: This animated film was created almost entirely by hand. I drew each layer of the animation separately, and then transferred the drawings to a basic computer program that merges the individual layers. The characters were drawn and colored via computer, and the backgrounds are collages composed of acrylic paintings and newspaper clippings. That's a 1932 Fiat that drives by---straight from a book I found on the history of automobiles.

Q: “Sliding Flora” was shown at about thirty festivals, won seven international prizes, and had a screening at MoMA. Where did you get the idea for a film about a klutzy waitress who must deliver her trays down a slide?

TL: "Sliding Flora" was filmed at a statue called “The Monster" that was created by the French artist and sculptress Niki de Saint Phalle. Ever since she fashioned it in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1970s, it's been a very popular park for children. At one time I was living in the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood of Jerusalem, and every day on my way to the bus I'd pass the statue and think how neat it would be to make a film there. I should mention that at the same time I was working as a waitress (not a particularly talented one). The two factors converged, and the idea for "Sliding Flora" was born.

While I was working as a waitress, I always thought about how waiting tables was actually a metaphor for something else, for an emotional state where you work to please people of nondescript identity. At some point you appear before them as if before an audience, in a role you've created for yourself, and you act as if you really care about them. The waitress in the film must meet daunting acrobatic challenges that are intended to be nightmare-like. But her thinking is so influenced by her desire to excel in her performance and be admired and valued by those around her that she doesn't even see the absurdity of the situation.

Jerusalemites react quite enthusiastically to the film. The "Monster" is an indelible part of their childhood memories, and they can't believe that they're seeing it as a coffee shop in a movie.

Q: I think it’s totally original and comical, and your lead actress, Shiri Ashkenazi, is a find.

TL: First, my thanks. Shiri Ashkenazi is indeed an outstanding actress. I met her during the auditions for an actress to play Flora, and we became very good friends. Subsequently, the role of the dejected woman soldier, Libby, in "The Substitute" was written with Shiri in mind.

Q: Again I am impressed by Shiri in “The Substitute,” and you also got a strong, “real” performance by Dana Ivgy as Zohara. Tell me about her and how you got her in your movie.

TL: Dana is a well-known, highly-respected actress in Israel. I had tried for the longest time to reach her, but somehow never succeeded. And then I sent the script to an acting student who I thought could play the role of the medic. He turned out to be Dana’s boyfriend! She read the script and called me to say that she really loved it and wanted to play Zohara, and that was the first connection between the two of us. Later the production was delayed because of various issues, and Dana became extremely busy. So again I found myself with no lead actress with just a short time before filming was set to start. Out of total despair, I decided to stalk Dana everywhere…until I found myself in her house. She made some phone calls and turned things upside down in her schedule in order to make herself available for the period of the filming.

Q: Were you comfortable directing a star?

TL: The fact that Dana’s such an experienced actress was perhaps a bit threatening at the beginning, but that passed very swiftly. It was wonderful to work with her and the rest of the cast. They were all extremely talented, modest, and prepared to work their hearts out.

Q: You say you connected with Shiri and she inspired you to make “The Substitute.” When we talked informally about the film, you described Libby as “a problem.” Can you explain what you meant by that?

TL: I knew that I wanted to do a film about my army service and I had a general idea about the locale of the film and the characters, but I still lacked a storyline. I knew I wanted Shiri to play one of the parts, and I kept imagining her as being “somebody’s problem.” We created her character primarily from body language and facial expressions, and chose to leave her personality unresolved, yet quite comprehensible to her own self. In essence, the role of the protagonist, Zohara, and other characters were built around her.

Q: Your film is about women in the Israeli army, far away from any fighting. Talk about how your own two years in the army relates to your film.

TL: Most of the military films I've seen placed men at the focal point. For a long time I had wanted to make my own army film. A film that would take place in an atmosphere charged with intensive combat and battle missions, but would place the most lackluster, least heroic characters at the forefront of the story. We tried, via small hints, to give the impression that important, fateful events were taking place behind these characters, but they were occupied with no less dramatic matters.

The story is fictional and scripted, but the one thing that is completely autobiographical is the life of the army clerk. Zohara’s role was identical to the one I played during my military service. Beyond that, I drew inspiration for creating the characters and the atmosphere from my own army stint. The movie was filmed at the exact base where I served, and since the story is quite extreme, we were careful to pay attention to the authenticity of small details—the set, the uniforms, the language.

Q: I laughed at the beginning when Zohara instructs Libby that she can vary what she will be doing as an army clerk—either opening all the mail at once or one at a time. A numbing routine.

TL: That segment just accentuates the appalling waste of time the work really is. And that a monkey could do it just as well, or, best case, maybe a computer. It was important to me that this text be spoken seriously, not cynically. That’s because the absurdity is even greater when we the viewers see it and the characters don’t because they’re so used to thinking that this is what they're good at. Also—this may sound strange and contradictory—I sincerely believe that you must not belittle any work that you do, even if it’s stupid.

Q: You told me that the movie depicts “humiliations” that you felt at that outpost. Talk about the line said by the young medic to Zohara when he’s trying to seduce her: “In the desert, every thorn is a flower.” Is that a compliment or a humiliating line?

TL: This is a line that’s usually part of a men’s joke. It’s never been casually used by a man trying to make it with a woman. The fact that he utters this sentence in a complimentary tone confuses Zohara about how to respond and what to make of it. She pegs the medic as a problematic type, yet a specific one with his own, not necessarily “bad” personality.

Q: Talk about your Israeli film title, “Lonely Soldier,” in relation to the characters, including Libby, who says she feels she doesn’t exist, and Zohara, who seems to have had no friends before Libby. The other women do nothing of consequence and seem to be living like prisoners. I think you’re saying that female soldiers in remote posts feel that way because of loneliness, isolation, and doing unnecessary tasks.

TL: My first night at that base felt like my first night in prison. Eventually matters improved, but even after a year-and-a-half of serving there and things looking different, I was still engulfed by that “prison” feeling etched in my brain. Through the character of Libby, the new soldier, I wanted to convey that feeling in the girls’ barracks, which even architecturally resemble most of the prisons I’ve seen in movies.

As for the title, in Hebrew it’s “Lonely Soldier,” which in army terminology refers to a soldier with no family in Israel—or at all. It’s a very common and cold term, but I’ve always felt that it’s a poignant juxtaposition of words. I adopted this for the title of the film because despite their being no information in the script about the girls’ families or backgrounds, there’s a pervading feeling that they are quite alone.

When translating the film to English (which, by the way, was quite complicated), we decided that the literal translation “Lonely Soldier” didn’t express the same sentiment as the Hebrew (where, as we said, it’s an army term). Somehow in English it had the sound of a Vietnamese war movie. So we decided to title the English-language version “The Substitute.” This name we also deliberated over a great deal. We were afraid it had the connotations of a substitute teacher, but a friend who’s a native English speaker convinced us that this definitely was not the case. If you disagree, take it up with him….

Q: At one point the women, who have little recreation, watch a political puppet show. You had puppet imagery at the end of “The Waitress,” so can I assume you have an interest in puppets?

TL: The truth is that I wrote a short skit for a puppet theater and I really wanted to put it in a film somehow. What the puppets give "The Substitute," beyond fulfilling my desire, is a way to reveal feelings that the characters themselves can't express. The puppets can weep aloud, shout, cry out to God. I love the segment where the officer shouts that she's lonely: In the play that’s just the beginning of a stupid joke, but from the expression on Libby's face, you can see that this is her genuine feeling.

Q: Do you think Libby has attempted suicide before arriving there? When she and Zohara bond does Zohara think she will be happy and never commit suicide again?

TL: While the army did not trigger Libby’s deep depression, it certainly exacerbated it. When I was writing the script, I used to monitor internet forums for soldiers suffering from depression (and it turns out that there are quite a few). I think that an acute depression leading to suicide begins at a much earlier stage, but army service frequently brings it to the fore.

From the beginning, Zohara never believes that Libby wants to commit suicide. She, personally, is so self-centered that she assumes everyone else harbors selfish priorities. She is sure that Libby is feigning suicide in order to get released from the base, which is exactly what Zohara would have done.

Q: Do you like Zohara or Libby, and do you relate to them?

TL: I’m very attached to both characters. I think that they’re quite similar, yet they represent two contrasting options for relating to life. Each of them lives in her own world, without much awareness of her surroundings. I identify with them both, despite their differences, and I think that I succeeded in expressing myself through them.

Q: Will Israeli women relate to your film more than anyone else? Do you think there are universal themes?

TL: It’s hard to answer that. While I was writing the script, I imagined an audience made up of people I know who are somehow connected to me. And they’re Israelis, of course, mostly IDF veterans (it’s important to note that the army is a very individual, different experience for each soldier). Naturally I had no intention of focusing only upon the very limited audience of Israeli women soldiers. So not everything in this movie necessarily relates to army service, and the military is in some ways an excuse to talk about other structures in life.

Also, I never considered that the film would be screened in many places outside Israel, nor could I know whether its themes would be understood internationally.

I still contend that it speaks differently to an Israeli audience who understand the army culture from up close and can catch details and codes that are transmitted to those in the know. However, of course I’m delighted that the film is being shown in places across the world I’d never imagined, with positive reviews.

Q: With your camera placement, you made some interesting choices. What were you thinking in regards to a style?

TL: The decisions about the filming style were shaped by loads of restrictions. The film was extremely low-budget, with serious time constraints. We couldn’t afford the luxury of having complex camera movements or complicated shots of any type. But I actually like these kinds of limitations---they arouse great creativity. We attempted to keep to a limited spectrum of colors in the film and dim lighting, to set the proper atmosphere. In essence I think that this is the type of film whose simple filming style doesn’t attract attention, leaving the stage to the actors’ work.

Q: Do you think your film is political?

TL: I think that it’s indirectly political. Through a story that doesn’t touch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in any way, we get a glimpse of the place where decisions affecting human life are made by people too young, sometimes unable to comprehend the extent of the responsibility on their shoulders. This, as well as cases of different sorts, can lead to tragic consequences.

Q: Before your film played at the Tribeca Film Festival, it already had won the Audience Award in Berlin. Since Tribeca, it has won several awards including being chosen Best Short Film at Barcelona and the Melbourne International Film Festival. At Palm Springs, you were named Best Emerging Film Student. You have had amazing success at festivals, so tell me your overall impression of them.

TL: They are all great experiences. I especially enjoy the vibes and the special energy of big cities like New York. Besides that, a lot of people talked to me about the film and were interested in my work, and I usually have some interesting meetings. I never know if showing my film at an event will lead to anything in the future, but I don't think that is the main reason to go to festivals. At Tribeca, for instance, I had conversations with interesting people, getting to know different points of view, and saw films that I couldn't see anywhere else. It was very fulfilling and a lot of fun and I hope to be invited back.

Carbone, Jones, and Varnson Can't Hide Their Smiling Faces

Hide Your Smiling Faces is Playing in Theaters

Carbone, Jones, and Varnson Can't Hide Their Smiling Faces

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 3/26/14)

 

(L-R) Daniel Patrick Carbone, Ryan Jones, and Nathan Varnson  Photo: DP

Hide Your Smiling Faces fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor.  After Daniel Patrick Carbone’s debut feature played last year at the Tribeca Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival, it received the National Society of Film Critics award for “Best Film Still Waiting for Distribution.”  Tribeca Film bought the distribution rights in January. On Tuesday it became available on VOD and this weekend it will have its U.S. theatrical debut in New York City at the Cinema Village on 12^th Street and University.  I recommend it. This deeply personal film is replete with not-always-connected moments and scenes, not unlike how we recall memories of our childhoods, and in the film’s press kit, Carbone correctly states it has a natural structure “like that of a dream, fragmented but always fluid.” Equally telling is a descriptive line in the notes–”An atmospheric exploration of life and death in rural America, as seen through the distorted lens of youth.” That line stood alone next to a “Synopsis” that doesn’t attempt to synopsize the events in the film, but instead gets into the minds of two brothers facing “seemingly insurmountable moral peaks.”  My synopsis: Tommy (Ryan Jones), 9, and Eric (Nathan Varnson), 14, are spending a lazy summer in rural, upstate New York, playing with friends their own ages, hanging out with each other, riding bikes, wrestling, and exploring the woods. Tommy’s friend Ian angers his father by taking his handgun to show the other kids.  Yelled at, he runs off into the woods.  His dead body is soon discovered, underneath a bridge.  Did he jump or fall?  Everyone in the area is affected, including the two brothers, who have never experienced a human death before. They discover there are no easy answers. Well, I got easy answers when I interviewed Carbone, Jones (11 then 12 today), and Varnson (16 then 17 today) at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival about this poetic, haunting, challenging movie.

Danny Peary: Where are each of you from?
Daniel Patrick Carbone: I’m based in New York, but I grew up in northwest New Jersey, the tip near Pennsylvania, right across the water.
Nathan Varnson: I’m from Atlanta.
Ryan Jones: I’m from Connecticut.
DP: Dan, how did you find Ryan and Nathan for your film?
DPC: We didn’t have a casting agent or anything, just a big, tri-state open call.  That’s how I found Ryan.  He’d done some TV and some short films, but this is his first feature. I found Nate through a friend of a friend.  I guess he was modeling and she sent us some headshots and said this guy really wants to act, so we brought him in for an audition. He came in very raw, without any kind of training per se, which is kind of what attracted us to him.
DP: Did you two audition together?
NV: No, never, we met the day we shot.
DP: This is one of the few instances outside of Leave It to Beaver, where the older brother is friendly toward the younger brother and contentedly hangs out with him when their friends aren’t around. Ryan, considering you hadn’t met before you started shooting, were you always thinking that the audience has to believe you were brothers?
RJ: I didn’t think that while making the movie but I knew it needed to happen.
DP: Dan, explain the title of your movie. Or should I ask them first?
DPC: Yes, I want to know what they think.
RJ: I definitely fully understand the title now, because while watching the film I realized that in the scene when Tommy and Eric are laughing in the living room, they’re laughing not because they think anything’s funny but because the situation is so awkward. Ian’s death is too heavy for them to understand, so they just start laughing–that’s what people do. All Tommy and Eric can do is laugh because they don’t have anybody to tell them what to do.
NV: Everybody feels that they have to have some emotion when there’s a death.  Especially kids.  Most people become sad, but as Dan said a lot, there’s no proper response to death. It’s just how you take it. That laughing scene basically reflects that. Eric and Tommy weren’t supposed to laugh. It was not in the script.  But Ryan and I were looking around and our eyes locked and we just started laughing.
DPC: The first thing I’ll say is I just love the degree of interpretations of the title, I think that’s what makes a good title.
DP: It’s like Eyes Wide Shut.
DPC: Exactly, yeah. For me it’s important that the title’s in the second person.  It’s a command or an order, which I think speaks to the difference between kids and adults. As kids, you’re told that you’re expected to act a certain way and you’re reprimanded for acting out of the norm, even when there is no norm. Who’s to say that their laughter is inconsiderate or rude?  Or anything?  But let me now say that the title did not come from that scene when they laughed spontaneously.  The script had that title.  A lot of people think that the title came out of their reaction, but it was just kind of happy accident and spoke so much to just being a kid and finding things so heavy that you don’t know what to do.
DP: Do you think this movie is about anything specific or is just about two boys during a summer and their progression toward adulthood?
RJ: I think it’s definitely about death during childhood and how to handle it. And how sometimes it’s traumatic but you have to overcome it–and, as I said, how some do that by laughing, for example.
NV: I feel like there are a lot of moral themes you can take from the movie, I don’t think there’s a specific one that you can point out and say, “That’s what this movie is about, this is what you gotta take from it.”
DP: Dan, did you want to say something specific in your movie?
DPC: Not necessarily. There’s a number of themes that flow under the surface, but first and foremost it was always for me about creating a world and an atmosphere and giving people a realistic and, in my opinion, an honest portrayal of what it’s like to be young and confused.
DP: Did you relate to Tommy or Eric more?
DPC: Definitely a combination of the two.  I have a brother who is five years older than me, so in some scenes Tommy and Eric are me and my brother.  Some scenes it’s me and me because some things happened to me in real life at Nate’s age and some at Tommy’s age. The film is kind of a dramatization of all that.  If I had to pick one boy, I’d say more of the scenes probably came from my memory of being Ryan’s age. At that age you’re starting to kind of understand it. The older Eric’s more violent and is seemingly confused but I think it’s because he knows how hard these things are and is holding on to a younger part of himself.  He’s about to be an adult and I think there’s a little bit of anger coming from that.  He wants to stay a kid for a longer time.
DP: Nathan, would you have been friends with your character?
NV: I’ll say yes, but I don’t think we would have been great friends. Eric just doesn’t really know how to handle things. I know most kids don’t know how to handle things, and I’m not saying I’d know how to handle everything that happens to him, but I know some of his responses to what happened, like breaking a window and pulling a gun on his friend, are not what I’d do.
DP: Well, it’s too much to handle for a kid. What about you, Ryan, would you be friends with Tommy?
RJ: I think so. I don’t know if we’d be great friends, but I think he’s a good kid at heart.  He just doesn’t really have a lot of good role models in his life.
DP: He has bad role models.
RJ: Yeah, his older brother, Eric, and his parents. I think his dad tries to mentor him a little bit.
DP: But he’s not very good at it.
DPC: I think, Ryan, you had a lot of fun getting into that character.  Tommy’s kind of a slightly badder side of you. He’s picking up dead cats, rolling around in the dirt, and getting dirty.
DP: There’s a lot of death around the kids, not just Ian but dead animals and insects. That’s one of the things that one remembers from childhood. I grew up in South Carolina and I still remember finding a dead dog while walking through the woods at Tommy’s age.  It was frozen and hard.  Never forgot it.
DPC: There’s a bird scene early on–initially death is kind of something mysterious and almost funny. Their understanding of death evolves over such a short period of time.
DP: Nathan and Ryan, this is a story about two brothers who experience the sudden death of a young boy. Had either of you experienced anything like that in real life?
NV: Luckily I’ve not experienced anything on that scale.
RJ: When I was in 8^th grade, two friends of mine were playing on the ice in Georgia, and they fell through and drowned.
DP: Did it affect everybody who knew them the way it affects everybody in this movie?
RJ: Yeah, for sure. I grew up in a fairly big town and when I saw everyone there was upset, it just hit me. They were popular boys.
DP: And there was no explanation.
RJ: Right. They were just two innocent kids playing on the ice.
DP: So, Dan, since death is a touchy subject that can be very confusing to a youngster, did you have to have a serious discussion with Ryan about it?
DPC: It is a touchy subject so we talked a little bit about when I was his age and experienced death. Ryan was really impressive and amazing to direct because he had the mental capacity of someone triple his age.  For some of the other kids on set I would have to almost play out scenes to really get their minds to imagine the situation, but Ryan could just process something and say, “I’ve got it, I’m ready to go.”  I’d say, “Are you sure?  I don’t think you could so fast.”  And he would nail it.  He could be in other people’s shoes and still make it very personal to him.
DP: As a director, I’m sure you realized that you had a responsibility to keep the kids from getting messed up psychologically because of the topic.
DPC: Whenever possible, I tried to have them base their performances on something they’d gone through. It was always about building their performances from personal things. It is a hard thing for anyone to do but these two were so professional and were willing to give themselves over.
DP: In the press notes, it says that the death of Ryan’s friend Ian is “unsettling the brothers and their friends in a way that they can’t fully understand.” They never do fully understand, and that’s what makes the movie interesting but a hard movie.
DPC: Sure, for the audience and for the actors. It’s difficult to withhold explanations. There’s almost a tendency to hold the audience’s hand, to make sure they’re still with you and not leave, and I definitely wanted the audience to be an active participant and try to figure things out along with us.
DP: There’s really no adult figure in the movie that helps them comprehend what happened. Ryan, did you ever say, “I wish there was somebody who could talk to these kids?”
RJ: Yeah, a lot. The adults don’t really play a big role in this movie at all. It’s all from the kids’ perspective.  Tommy’s older brother can talk to him, like on the bridge when they’re just sitting there, throwing rocks.  But Eric’s trying to understand it himself by talking it out, so I don’t think either of them can really understand what’s going on.  When I first saw the film, I really liked that there’s an open-ended question.
NV: I feel the same way. Before we started shooting, we talked about the role of the parents and adults in the film. I think I said something like, “The boy’s mother and father are not really parents, they’re just there.” They don’t help, they don’t have any input on anything. So it’s kind of left for the brothers to help each other out.
DPC: I like that interpretation, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them bad parents or absent from the scene. It’s just part of the film that everyone’s dealing with this death in their own way. Maybe they’re doing a bad job in helping their boys understand what happened, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad parents or that they’re not present. As you get older, it doesn’t get much easier to deal with these kinds of things, and the adults are as lost as the kids in a way.
DP: Ryan, if I were to say to you that there’s only one moment in the movie where there’s a real connection between a kid and an adult, what scene would that be?
RJ: In Ian’s house, when Ian’s father touches Tommy on the arm. That’s the only scene.
DP: Did you realize how pivotal that moment is in the movie?
RJ: Yeah, yeah. When we were shooting that scene, there was a lot of talk about what Ian’s father is feeling and what my character is feeling.   What Tommy is feeling and what Ian’s father is feeling are almost the exact opposites. Tommy wants to run away because he’s being touched by someone he doesn’t like and it’s creepy to him, but the father wants him to stay because he reminds him of Ian.
DP: He gives a grieving father a little comfort.
DPC: Absolutely. It’s definitely the only time that two people are on the same page emotionally. Maybe we could say that also about the scene when the brothers are talking on the bridge, but, as Ryan said, the confused boys are almost talking to themselves as much as to each other.
DP: Yes or no, do you think it is Ian’s dad who ties up the boys’ dog in the road?
NV: Yes.
RJ: Yes.
DPC: It’s definitely the more common answer. I think there are enough clues in the film.
DP: I looked at this like a memory piece that, paradoxically, is set not in the past but today. I saw it as my youth, walking in the woods and all that. Dan, could you have set this in your past instead?
DPC: I hope so. It could have been any time.  It seems like people or all ages are responding the way you did.  The most complimentary thing I’ve been hearing is from women of different ages who say they feel they can share the experience. It’s definitely a male-centered film, and it’s about that age and the emotions felt by boys of that age, but it almost transcends your sex and your age and when and where you grew up.  The time period is slightly ambiguous. The technology I put in the film is intentionally outdated but, maybe, it could be from now.
DP: Why does Tommy go back and get Ian’s father’s gun?
RJ: He doesn’t really want it for attention, he mostly wants it to make Ian’s dad upset, I think. Because he saw how upset he was when Ian took the gun. But I don’t think he realizes that Ian’s dad is already upset. I think Tommy’s blaming him for Ian’s death and takes his gun because he didn’t know what else to do. Part of taking the gun is for protection and part is just to make Ian’s dad upset.
DP: As you two read the script for the first time, were you thinking as I was–especially after Tommy gets the gun–that something horrific is going to happen?
NV: Well, Dan only sent us the parts of the script that we were in. So I had no idea what Tommy was doing when he wasn’t with Eric. The first time I saw the other scenes was at the premiere of the movie.
DCP: The idea was to try to make the set as close to reality as possible. So from scene to scene, Tommy and Eric didn’t know where their brother had just come from or was going. Ryan and Eric’s experience of reading the script was not like somebody else’s.
DP: Why did you do it that way?
DPC: I thought it was important for all the actors but especially the young actors.  Because if they knew where something was going, they’d tend to hint at things and play that up, and act only how a character can act, not a real person would act. I knew the end of the movie already and what came between, but these two guys didn’t, and I think it helped their acting.  All they could focus on was the here and now, not on the next scene or where things were going.
DP: After working together, it’s obvious to me that the three of you really like each other.
RJ: I never had any issues with these guys. Dan taught me so much. His instructions helped me grow as an actor, and playing off Nate helped me grow up a lot more, too.
NV: I consider myself good friends with both these guys. Behind the scenes was a lot more fun than being in front of the camera.

Raymond de Felitta Shows Us How to "Rob the Mob"

Playing in Theaters

Raymond de Felitta Shows Us How to Rob the Mob

(from Sag Harbor Express Online, 3/19/14)

By Danny Peary
Rob the Mob fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor.  This Friday it opens in New York at the Angelika, an indication that it’s not the predictable mob comedy one might expect from the title.  The true tall tale told by director Raymond de Felitta and screenwriter Jonathan Fernandez includes humor of the absurdist variety, but as in de Felitta’s smartly-cast, superbly-acted mass-audience-would-love-them-if-they-bothered-to-see-them little films Two Family House and City Island (which won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival), it blends the wit with off-kilter romance/love, quirky plot twists, tricky family relationships, and serious themes. And at the center is a big heart.

A quickie synopsis: “Rob the Mob is the true-life story of a crazy-in-love Queens couple who robbed a series of mafia social clubs [in the early 1990s] and got away with it…for a while…until they stumble upon a score bigger than they ever planned and become targets of both the mob and the FBI.” Michael Pitt (Funny Games, TV’s Boardwalk Empire) and Nina Arianda (Midnight in Paris; Tony-winner for Venus in Fur) are sensational as the doomed Tommy Uva and his clever girlfriend Rosie, heading a terrific cast that includes Andy Garcia (City Island), as soulful mob don Big Al, a serious Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond) as a reporter on the mob beat, Cathy Moriarty (Raging Bull), and Michael Rispoli (star of Two-Family House).  I spoke last week to De Felitta about his stars and new movie.
Raymond de Felitta Photo: DP
Danny Peary: When I saw the title Rob the Mob, I assumed it was going to be a full-fledged comedy, which it isn’t. Did you keep the humorous title because you wanted the film to maintain a light-hearted tone even when things become darker?
Raymond de Felitta (left): Some people said it wasn’t serious enough a title for the movie, but I always loved it because it’s cheeky and I feel the movie in general is cheeky. When I watch it with audiences I see there are good laughs through the first half and absolutely none in the second half, when it turns into a different movie. To me, that’s cheeky. If I did my job right, you don’t really see what’s coming and that’s part of the movie’s fun. I got a little pressure here and there to change it, but ultimately it’s Rob the Mob. It is what it is.
DP: In New York, it’s going to open at the Angelika, a site for art films. Is that surprising to you?
RDF: I guess the bigger question is: what are “art films?”  I don’t know any more. I think Rob the Mob is an art film under the guise of a genre film, which reflects my own preference in movies.  If you don’t care about film and you just want entertainment, you’ll like the title and love the idea of the movie, that somebody with an Uzi robs mob social clubs. And if you are a serious filmgoer, you might hear that it is not just a mob movie but has little more going for it.
DP: You’ve called it an “anti-mob movie.”
RDF: Yeah, because “mob movies” are over with, in a sense. Rob the Mob was not going to be The Godfather or Goodfellas or Casino.  There’s no more room, it’s done. So you’re either going to make a really bad mob movie, or find a new wrinkle.  This movie is not really about the mob.  The more we developed the script and the closer we got to doing it, I began to feel that this movie will live or die with the romance of these two people Tommy and Rosie. If you understand that it’s about their love for each other, I think the movie will have heart and be special and won’t slide off into a genre and be this kind of movie or that kind of movie. It had to have a center and their romance is the center.  I love when things are disguised as other things, and that’s why I wanted to do this movie. It’s a mob movie, but it’s really not, it’s about these two people in love. I guess you could fit it into a genre with Gun Crazy, They Live By Night, and Thieves Like Us.  There is some of those films in mine, but mine is more kinetic. It was a bit of a magic trick. I don’t know if I pulled it off, but I liked doing it.  Whatever people think this movie is, it’s not quite that; it a different animal.
DP: So where does the mob fit in?
RDF: While it’s not primarily about the mob, I love that the mobsters are the victims in the movie. They’re kind of the worn out, tattered remains of their former selves. I thought that was a fun, interesting angle, because to me it humanizes them rather than makes them larger than life.  It brings them way down to the actual size they are. They’re the guys at this stupid club on the corner. That’s where they hang out, and they don’t do much there other than sitting around. It’s not at all glamorous.  They can’t even figure out how to deal with Tommy and Rosie, the amateurs who are robbing them.  That’s the truth, they did not know how to deal with this couple who was making fools of them and threatening the organization.  Those are the things that I liked in the script.  I felt it turned our view of the mob upside down.
DP: In the production notes, you say that Rob the Mob’s coming from a true story made it more interesting for you. If it were a fictional story, would you have been interested in doing it?
RDF: You know, it’s hard to say.   Because it weren’t true, if it was made up, it might be too silly to believe.  This story is so unbelievable and so strange and has so many odd things about it, that it being true is what makes it interesting; as fiction it would be far-fetched. Somebody really did pull off those robberies on the mob!  Tommy and Rosie were really rubbed out.  The facts of the case make it interesting. I compare this story in terms of its truth to Dog Day Afternoon. Similarly, if I write a movie about a married man with a secret gay lover and he needs money for a sex change, and he has a Vietnam vet friend who robs a bank, you’d be like, “Where’s this coming from? Did you hear this story somewhere or did you make it up?” In fact that story happened, too.  Also similar about the two stories is that neither had any real notoriety. The Dog Day Afternoon story also came and went in just a few weeks and never was a big, nation-wide story.  I think dramatizing these stories is a little more poignant because you’ve discovered such a large theme and such a big and bold story in something relatively obscure. I’d never heard of Tommy and Rosie Uva.
DP: I vaguely remember something about a list of Mafia names that proved there was an organized crime organization.
RDF: That’s why I focused so much on the list. I wanted to show that there was something bigger that happened than what Tommy and Rosie ever knew about, that they even understood. We couldn’t fit it into the movie, but the different mob families all started arguing about who actually made the hit on Tommy and Rosie.  One of them was caught on tape taking credit for it and he wound up being sent to prison for the rest of his life. I couldn’t dramatize any of that because it happened after they were dead, and the movie has to end when Tommy and Rosie are shot. I didn’t really want there to be a long coda. But yeah, there were things about them that were a bigger story.  Jonathan Fernandez, the writer, and I talked about the size of a movie that’s just a caper film. And Jon pointed out that what The King’s Speech was really telling us is that if this guy didn’t fix his speech impediment, England would have lost the war. It’s not that cynical, but the gist of our story is that a little act led to something heroic. We started looking at Tommy and Rosie as two little people who actually took down a big chunk of the mob. They didn’t mean to, they didn’t know they were having that effect, but Tommy’s crusade against the guys who beat up his dad when he was as a little boy actually leads to big things. He got somewhere in his life, he did finally accomplish something, and I find that very moving. If you can twist the story that way, then I think you’ve got a great character arc.
DP: There seems to be a parallel story.  Big Al tells the FBI that he doesn’t want to be humiliated in front of his grandson and as a boy Tommy experienced his own father being beaten up and humiliated in front of him.
RDF: I don’t know if other people get it but the fact is that Tommy and Big Al had so much in common.
DP: I think Big Al would have liked Tommy, actually. He would have understood Tommy’s anger toward the mob from what happened to his father.
RDF: I think you’re right. They’re both haunted by deaths in their pasts, they’re both haunted by things they can’t change or avenge.  And ultimately Tommy’s actions have a huge impact on Big Al, although they’ve never met.  When we were editing a scene with Big Al in post-production, we’d cut to Tommy and Rosie just to reiterate that their stories are impacting on each other. I think it’s so interesting in life to look back and realize the people who’ve impacted you whom you’ve never met. You’ve somehow had this parallel existence, and one person’s actions have paid off positively or negatively in someone else’s life.
DP: Tommy has charm according to Rosie, but Big Al’s the person who really has the charm in the film.  And he’s probably the one really smart person in the movie. Do you think a reason Tommy and Rosie are so vulnerable is because they’re not smart enough?
RDF: I think they’re idiot savants.  They don’t really know what they’ve gotten themselves into. They think they’ve got a handle on it, but no. She’s reasonably more polished than he’s ever going to be, but yeah, they’re not smart enough.  Andy Garcia plays Big Al as a guy who was actually too smart to be a mob boss. He really shouldn’t have wound up where he is. He should have been a businessman.
DP: He loves to cook so he could have run a legit Italian restaurant.
RDF: That part Andy and I developed together. We were looking to create a Don that hadn’t been done. He’s not Powerman; he’s tired, he’s a grandfather, he doesn’t really understand how he got where he is.  I felt the way he’s portrayed by Andy is a big part of our turning the whole mob concept on its head.  What if it’s not about a powerful Don and about “respect” and all that crap, which we’ve seen so many times? What if it’s about a guy who wants to play chess with his grandson?  Big Al’s fatal flaw is ultimately his humanity–he doesn’t order a hit on Tommy and Rosie at the very beginning before things escalate.  That’s what you’re supposed to do as a mafia don.
DP: The Uvas were really married, but in the movie they’re not married.
RDF: Yeah, we took that liberty because I wanted us to see Tommy ask Rosie to marry him.  I just felt it was such a beautiful place for them to finally get to. The fact is they really were murdered on Christmas Eve, so I wanted them to have that moment before it happens.  That’s the sentimental Italian in me.
SPOILER ALERT
DP: There’s a Bonnie and Clyde reference in regard to their being shot in their car, but you are very protective of them and we don’t see them get torn up by the hail of bullets.  What happens to them could be shown with as much brutality as what happens to Bonnie and Clyde in Arthur Penn’s movie, but you don’t, won’t, let that happen.
RDF: Well, you’re not going to beat Arthur Penn’s ending.  But I also don’t need to see their death.  I only need to know that they get gunned down and what the ending is going to be.  I was inspired in some ways by the ending of The Wrestler, where he goes leaping off the ropes into the ring, after he’s told he can’t wrestle anymore.  You don’t need to see anything after that.
DP: I love that it’s elegiac, even sweet and super romantic, oddly enough.
RDF: I thought the same thing. To me, that was very important – how do we feel about Tommy and Rosie at the end?  Do we end with a huge downer and see blood everywhere ? That was something we developed as we were doing it, we figured out a way to give them some dignity and let their romance live on.
END SPOILER ALERT
DP: In the production notes Nina Arianda says that the romance between Tommy and Rosie is kind of a combination of Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, and Sid and Nancy. Actresses usually don’t bring up Sid and Nancy in conversation, but there’s a madness in the romance that really appealed to her in that film and in Rob the Mob.
RDF: Michael Pitt and I talked about how great love, passionate love, is actually a destructive force. It doesn’t have any boundaries, it does whatever it needs to do, it has its own fierce energy.  That’s how we saw the romance of Tommy and Rosie.  It’s a force that can’t be stopped. They create their own catastrophe. The way I always read the real story of Tommy and Rosie is that she was trying to show the world what she saw in him. She wanted the rest of the world to see it. It was so much bigger than what anyone else had ever thought of this guy who seems pretty much like a druggy ex-con. He had this side to him that she believed in, and that was his humanity and poignancy. The whole act of what they do–coming up with his bizarre scheme and pulling it off–is his work of art and his gift to the world. She was so proud of him for it. That’s what I loved about their real story.  It was about two people who in their sociopathic way thought they were doing something light and beautiful for each other.
DP: In Gun Crazy and Bonnie and Clyde the robberies themselves are sexual acts to communicate the love the two lead characters feel for each other.  Are you trying to show the same thing when they kiss in the car before he commits the crimes and when they celebrate in their apartment afterward, throwing the money into the air?
RDF: I do think what we show after the robbery is like an orgasmic release for them. But they also have a practical consideration. They are trying to put together enough money so they can settle down and finally be normal.  There’s the whole concept–One of these days I’m going to be like everyone else– that a lot of us carry around, mistakenly. If only I could organize the world to fit my needs, then I’ll finally be part of the normal world.
Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda
DP: Do Tommy and Rosie have a death wish and is their being ill-fated part of the romance?
RDF:  I guess so, but I look at it as Rosie being so in love with Tommy that she’ll do whatever he needs to complete his journey. She’s not necessarily the doomed one. She’s just so profoundly in love with Tommy and so believes in his misunderstood genius that’s lost in the world, that she’ll do whatever.  That of course leads to their doom.
DP: And she sacrifices her career at the collection agency for him.  Granted, it’s a weird career, but you see what talent she has to do it. And he has no talent to do it. She could take over the agency some day.
RDF: She absolutely could be working in a hair salon or be a teller in a bank. Rosie is every one of those great girls from Queens who maybe had some drug issues in high school, but got over it and now have jobs. Tommy isn’t capable of working a real job. He is a dark, sad, sociopathic young man.
DP: Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda are perfectly cast. I think you might look at the film now and say, nobody else in the whole world but these two actors could play these parts. I’m sure you recognized they have the potential to be superstars down the road, but at this particular time, you could still afford them. You were very lucky. Is that how you see it?
RDF: Absolutely. It’s funny how these things come about, the weird journey of filmmaking. The very first actor we sent the script to was Michael Pitt. The script was not exactly the script we ended up shooting, but it was a pass at it and you could understand what the basics were. And Michael “got it.”  I thought, “If this guy gets it, he’ll become a collaborator through the whole process.” I wanted to have a relationship with the actor playing Tommy.  I wanted it to be like Scorsese and De Niro, and we’d do this film together, and create Tommy. I thought that if we got that character right, the movie would have heart and soul. If we didn’t, we’d have simply a guy playing a young thug.  So Michael and I became very close while working on the development of the story and his character.
DP: With dark hair, Michael Pitt looks a little like Elvis in your movie, a good-acting Elvis.
RDF: A very young Elvis, yeah.  It took us a long time to get the financing because everyone was trying to get us to get a bigger name than Michael to play Tommy.  They also wanted a big name actress to play Rosie.  But none of them wanted to do it– Mila Kunis, Scarlett Johansson. You make a list of name actresses, you send it out, you don’t really know if they ever read it. After quite some time, my producer said, “Look, if we make the movie for less money, we can probably get this done and not have to try to rope in a name actress as if we were searching for Scarlett O’Hara.  It’s ridiculous.” So on Michael’s recommendation we went after Nina. She had this tremendous Broadway life that happened to her very quickly, so when they brought her name up, I asked, “Is she going to want to do it, or is she waiting for a starring role in a bigger movie?”  She read the script and really loved it, and met with me and Michael.  Like you say, I can’t imagine anyone else playing those parts now.  A wonderful thing about filmmaking is that once it’s done, it’s real.  Those two amazing actors are in my movie.  But it’s funny that along the way there are always so many bizarre iterations.