Goode Is a Great Bad Guy

Find The Lookout on Video

Goode Is a Great Bad Guy

(from brinkzine.com 3/29/07)

• 
•  Mathew Goode

Matthew Goode walks into the room and I don’t recognize him.  I had just seen director-writer Scott Frank’s excitingly inventive noir, “The Lookout,” and this debonair stranger who sits down across from me bears no resemblance to the tattooed, vicious ex-con who manipulates brain-damaged hero Chris Pratt (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) into helping his low-life gang rob a bank in Noel, Kansas.  That guy gave me the creeps, but the man I talk to is full of wit and charm, and flashes the dimpled grin of Hugh Grant.  And Goode, who grew up in Devon, England and attended Birmingham University and Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, speaks like an upper-crust English bloke, for heaven’s sake.
 Apparently I’m not the first to be started by the difference between the amiable actor and the reptilian villain. First-time director Frank (whose screenplays include “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty,” “Malice,” and “Minority Report”) says, “When the casting director first suggested Matthew Goode to play Gary Kasparo, I honestly had to ask who he was.  She said, ‘He was in ‘Match Play’...’  I said, “Oh, is he the one who kills…?” She said, “No, he’s the rich guy who befriends him.”  I said, ‘The tall Rupert Everett guy?  That’s who you think should play a thug from Kansas City?’  And she said, “He’s closer to the part than the guy you’re thinking of casting.  You should meet him.”  So Matthew showed up with his head shaved and wearing a ripped T-shirt.  He started bouncing all over the room and I literally couldn’t keep up with him with my eyes.  And he using a flawless American accent and was amazing.  He wasn’t at all what I expected.”  Ironically, Goode’s performance is so convincing that one hopes he now won’t be typecast as nasty American heavies.

Q: After playing “gentlemen” or gentle men in previous films, like “Match Point,” “Chasing Liberty,” and “Copying Beethoven,” were you thrilled to play Gary Kasparo?
Matthew Goode: In the past I’ve been required to play pretty much myself or someone with money. And unless you do that in period costume, some people say you’re not acting.  So I’d been looking for something to get my teeth into.  Not just so I could say, “Fuck you, I can do other stuff,” but to prove something to myself.  I read scripts I might do in the bath and I finished this one, which was a good sign.  Scott had written a terrific character-drive script, and I hadn’t played someone like Gary Kasparo before.  I thought it would be fun to play a bad guy who isn’t a two-dimensional character. I liked that he is charismatic and manipulates Chris Pratt by telling him the truth.  In fact, he’s the one person who is doing that—it’s an interesting conceit.  So I wanted to play the part enough to go through the whole audition process.  I knew I had better be good because ostensibly I’d be taking the job away from an American actor.
 Q: It sounds like you dislike auditions.
 MG: I fucking hate auditions.  But I understand the need for them and that they’re beneficial because we actors need that pressure to do well.  I don’t know about others, but I get into a character by getting into a dreamy haze.  However, I need to relax to do that.  So if I go into my final audition and there’s suddenly eight producers standing there, how do you expect me to feel comfortable?  And besides, doing something by yourself in a hotel room is totally different from doing it on a set with other actors, because eighty percent of your performance is based on what they’re doing.  You’re not acting opposite a tennis ball stuck on a broom handle.
Scott made me audition for two and a half months, which is a long time.    I thought I’d gotten the part early on, but he kept bringing me back.  He put me through the ringer, which is fair enough, but there’s only so much you can do.  My guess is that what he was after was for me to relax, but you’d have to ask him while it took so long.
[Frank, in New York to publicize the March 30 opening of his film, is asked that question, and recalls, “I brought him back to read with Joe to make sure they had good chemistry.  And Matthew was completely different from how he’d been the first time.  I wondered what happened.  So I continued to read other actors.  And I was so close to giving the part to someone else.  But I kept thinking of his first audition.  I knew what I saw.  So I flew him back in and he read with Joe again, and I made him read and read and read.  And he was beyond phenomenal.  I sent the tape to the producers and it was clear to them that he was right for the part.  It turned out that for the other interview he was jet-lagged and was going through something with his girlfriend and was completely distracted.  I did torture him but, hey, I gave him the part.”]
Q: In playing your first scoundrel, did you have any screen villains in mind, like, perhaps, Robert De Niro in “Cape Fear?”
MG: Not intentionally, no.  I’ve seen so many films, so subconsciously some character might have made an impression.  But I didn’t watch that movie again or gangster movies and think I’d give Gary a bit of Jimmy Cagney, where he’d lower his head and raise his eyes—though that is an interesting technique he invented.  I tried not to think about it too much.  I just tried to be true to the script and do what Scott wanted me to do. I felt in safe in his hands, even though he was a first-time director, which was important because I shot my scenes almost backwards. The first day I filmed, the third day of the shoot, I filmed my character’s final scene, so it was really make or break time for me.  I’m theater-trained—Stanislavsky, Brecht, Shakespeare--and it was quite daunting not having a character arc.
Q: So on your own, did you have to work on developing your character? 
MG: I didn’t sit down in an office and work on my character.  But I thought about it the entire time.  I worried about the accent and all the little choices I was going to make.  It’s not method but as I said there’s a dreamlike thing I go through as I try to be someone else.
Q: Gary Kasparo is cold-hearted, but you allow glimpses of humanity to show.  Did you see him as being battered and damaged by life, as are all the other characters in the film?
MG: There was no exposition about his past in the script, so you don’t know why he turned out as he is and what he wants to achieve by robbing the bank.  So I came up with a very interesting back story that made him a bit sympathetic.  As an actor it’s good to come with secrets about your characters to draw upon, without telling anyone else.  But I’ve told a few people about what I came up with for Gary, so I’ll tell you. I believe he’s an intelligent guy who came from a middle-class family.  His mother died early in his life.  His father was in the navy but was dishonorably discharged and turned to drink, and there was some abuse that went on with his son.  He had to travel around to try to find a job and ended up a laborer on a farm.  And Gary would live on the farm with his abusive, alcoholic father and be bored by his new life.  So eventually he started drinking, too, and committed some crime and got arrested.  He had a fucking-hard life and was seeking the money because he felt he deserved something.
Q: How does his somewhat sweet girlfriend Luvlee, played by Isla Fisher, fit in?
MG: I didn’t worry too much about their relationship because I liked the ambiguity of it all.  I think viewers will assume he knew her before the scene where he supposedly picks her up while in the bar with Chris Pratt.  I would think he met her when she danced in a strip club.  He fucked her once and kept her around.  She is intrigued by him because he’s charismatic and dark; and she feels protected by him and kind of special.  So she goes along with his plan to seduce Chris Pratt so he’ll help rob the bank where he works as a night janitor.
Q: Were you allowed to improvise?
MG: When I read Woody Allen’s script for “Match Play”—here’s where I get in trouble  --I wasn’t exactly blown away by what was written for my character. There wasn’t anything to it, and he said that himself, so I was lucky that he let me improvise.  And afterward he said, “Thank you, good job, blah blah blah.”  With Scott, there’s no reason to improvise because it’s all there in the script: the dialogue, the relationships…and it’s a very linear narrative where you know what’s going to happen yet the suspense is maintained.  And there’s humor in there despite it being about a guy who has had a traumatic brain injury—which is not funny.  Scott had met a lot of people who had suffered similar head injuries and discovered that they had senses of humor, so the offbeat humor was there for Joe to play, even in scenes with me. 
Scott and I didn’t analyze a lot about what my character would do, I just did it. We didn’t over-rehearse but talked each scene over and then went and shot it. I had freedom but no need to really improvise.  The exception was the scenes in the farmhouse basement where the gang hangs out.  We didn’t know how we were going to do them although we’d gone over them in the hotel room.  So we go down there and I’m fucking freaking out because I’d gone over it so many times but really had no idea what I was going to do.  But we got through it.
Q: In the film’s production notes, you say you had a lot of leeway to play Gary and there were a lot of different ways you could have played him.  What way would have been wrong?
MG:  Joe, Jeff Daniels, who plays Chris’s blind friend, and I all could have played our parts over the top and made them two-dimensional.  That would have been wrong.  It was great acting with Joe and Jeff, who is an effortless actor that I love to death, because they could have gone overboard and gotten Oscar consideration, but chose not to.  I’ve heard people have been hard on Joe for not doing more.  But I like this economy. I didn’t force myself to hold back so that Gary wouldn’t be too extreme; that’s just the way I thought he should be played when reading the script.  He is a very consistent character throughout the film—there’s no great big change in who he is, so I never had him lose control. The one thing I might have done differently was to go the other way and give him more stillness—which might have made him even more menacing.
Q: Did you have a hard time with your American accent, particularly after a few days off?
MG: On this film I was up in Winnipeg for the entire shoot, but I wasn’t working the whole time.  I’d have seven days off sometimes.  So I went to a lot of bars.  But also I’d go over my lines every day, in the bath of course, doing my homework. When you do an accent you worry that’s what you’re going to focus on and you’ll lose dramatic impact.  It would have been nice to have a dialect coach, although I can’t imagine having asked Scott for one.  But there would have been less worry on my part--“Oh, God, am I saying it right?” It helped that before shooting I spent a couple of months in New York, which wasn’t to get the accent I did, but to be around American culture and pick up rhythms.
Q: Do you live in New York now?
MG: I split time between England and Manhattan, where my girlfriend lives.  She’s English, but she’s not an actress.  She’s my rock.  She tells me went to shut up.
Q: Are you recognized on the street yet?
MG: More here than in England, where I’m totally unknown—maybe because I wear a hat.  I’m fine with that.  I like going to a pub and not being recognized.
Q: What projects are coming up?
MG: I am going to do the film version of “Brideshead Revisited” for Miramax, so I’m watching the miniseries again.  I’m stepping into the ominous shoes of Jeremy Irons, which is very intimidating.  Actually it’s always intimidating to get any acting job, and I’m always fairly surprised when I do.  Michael Gambon is in that, too.  One reason I decided to act was I saw him play “Volpone” at the National Theatre.  So I’m going to act with some really great people and it’s thrilling.  I don’t have other things planned.  If I get to do a film and a piece of theater every year for the rest of my life, and go to pubs and play golf, that would be fine.  I don’t understand the need to make five films a year.  I don’t want to overdo it.  Maybe in a couple of years I’ll get another script like “The Lookout.” 

TFF: Dara Bratt, "In Vivid Detail"

Find on Video

TFF: Dara Bratt, "In Vivid Detail"

(from brinkzine.com 5/3/07)

• 
•  
•  Piper Perabo and John Ventimiglia
• Dara Bratt

Well, the Tribeca Film Festival Awards were just announced and I discovered that after ten days of carefully choosing the sure-fire films to screen, I saw a grand total of zero prize-winning features. Forty-five also-rans. I did manage to see the entertaining short called Super Powers that won Best Narrative Short, although I thought several films featured along with it in Tribeca’s “Express Stops Only” program were equally good, including my favorite, Dara Bratt’s “In Vivid Detail,” a nominee in the Student Visionary Competition that stars Piper Perabo and John Ventimiglia. Short films always get short shrift at festivals, but try to check out both these shorts and six other crowd-pleasers when “Express Stops Only” plays at the AMC on 34^th Street, between 8^th and 9^th (by an express stop!) on Saturday May 5, at 5 p.m. and Sunday May 6 (the last day of the festival) at 2:15 p.m.  I got lucky and was able to interview the talented Dara Bratt soon after an earlier screening.
Danny Peary: What's your background? Did you start making films in Canada or at NYU?
Dara Bratt: I grew up in Montreal. After graduating from Communication Studies and Philosophy, I moved to Toronto for 4 years and ran around as an Assistant Director, working on American films that were in production. I worked on films ranging from the blockbuster “K-19 The Widowmaker,” to the gender-bending “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” A few producers I met told me that if I could get into NYU, I'd have to go. It was the only MFA school I applied to, and after a grueling interview, I was accepted on scholarship.    
 DP:  Were you first shorts comedies, too?
DB: Does this mean that you think “In Vivid Detail”is a comedy?  That's great. I made a short film, "Full," which was more experimental and quite lyrical. Minimal dialogue, lots of detail, a little on the dark side.. I really liked it, but it was not a festival piece. When I wrote a script called "The Sitting," which is a comedy that takes place at a Jewish funeral, my friends at school turned to me and said, "Wow, I didn't know you could be funny."  I also directed a short documentary on the gentrification of the historical Lower East Side, told through the eyes of the vendors from Guss' Pickles. It's called "Hello, Pickles?" I love that film!   (I think I secretly choose to make films that involve food.)

DP: How did you come up with the unusual premise for your film?  Were you attracted to such a subject because you are a romantic at heart?

DB: A close friend who is completing her PHD in Education at Harvard told me about this strange complex disorder she had just learned about. The center of research for prosopagnosia is at Harvard. We were looking up info online and learned about a farmer who could tell his cows apart but not by their faces. It is bizarre. I wanted to tell a story about this complex neurological disorder and figured the best context would be within a simple love story that questions how we measure beauty. Yes, I'm a romantic and love lyrical, romantic stories, although never one this mainstream.  This script certainly isn't the one I'm most drawn to write, but it just seemed to work for this story. Also, the film questions our judgments about people and our need to categorize people. He's not blind, but he can't see perfectly, so where does he belong?  The idea for the ending came right away. I asked, "Could mapping her face on a graph be the link to putting the puzzle together?"                    
DP:  Did you ever think of doing the film as straight drama?
DB: Well, unlike you, I think it is a drama and is certainly a fairly "straight" story.                                         

DP: How did you get your two professional stars, Piper Perabo and John Ventimiglia of “The Sopranos” to agree to be in a student film?  How did your male friends react when they found out you had the star of “Coyote Ugly” in your movie?

DB: After my third year of my MFA degree, I went back to Toronto for the summer, mainly to spend time with my boyfriend who is from there. I decided to AD for the summer on "Cheaper By the Dozen 2" to earn a little extra money. He turned to me and said, "You know you're working with the lead from “Coyote Ugly,” right?" I had never seen the film. I had heard of but hadn’t seen "Lost and Delirious" either, so I rented both films. On set, halfway through the film, a friend of mine passed Piper the script without my knowing. I was nervous to follow up, fearing she hated it.  But lo and behold, she agreed to do it and kept her word. Piper's a star- an amazing actress who is wonderful to work with. After she committed, my producer, Sharon Barnes, and I started to look around for the right lead man back in New York.  John Ventimiglia had just wrapped up “The Sopranos” and was very interested. I was so worried that it would fall through because of their tight schedules and auditions, that I did backup auditions every weekend until one week before the shoot. Just in case.
When it was clear they’d be in the movie, it was the talk around school.

DP. How did you feel directing two seasoned actors?

DB: I was very excited to work with accomplished actors. During rehearsals and into the first few days of shooting, I am sure I was being tested and I could feel myself earning their trust. Boy did they ask a lot of questions during rehearsals! I knew I had to be confident and find the balance between listening to their ideas and staying true to my vision. Just because they are good at what they do doesn't mean they don't need direction. They see their roles. I need to see the big picture.                                                                          
DP:  Talk about the pre-production for your film.                                                                                  
DB: There were months of rewrites and running around the city looking for the best locations, including trips to chocolate shops. (I love chocolate.)  I initially wanted to shoot in Old Montreal but decided on DUMBO--a visually interesting and desolate neighborhood in Brooklyn.                                                                                                                                                    DP:  Why is Leslie attracted to Justin? DB: Leslie is drawn to him because he's not like most men she's known. He isn't drooling over her beauty -- he's aloof, hard working, and reclusive. He's also observant and precise and notices details. And she likes that their first date is so weird--he takes her to a chocolate shop run by identical twins. She interprets his face blindness as a unique sense of humor.                                                                                                          
DP: If he can't tell she is sexy and beautiful, why is he attracted to her initially?  And why does he start falling for her?
DB: She's daring--showing up to work in red high heels--just a little out of place for the office. She's got long wavy hair and a dimple--traits prosopagnosiacs would notice. And she appreciates his social awkwardness.
DP: Do you agree that your short wouldn't work at all if it didn't have the "right" ending?  So was your ending your chief worry and challenge? 
DB: The ending is definitely critical and I think it elevates the script to being a smarter romantic comedy. At every screening, I am still concerned about whether everyone will "get it."  I get so nervous during screenings that I usually close my eyes. But I always watch the last scene - I'm most proud of that one.                            
DP: How meaningful is it  to show your film at Tribeca?                                                                 
DB: I was so nervous about being accepted to Tribeca. The film is shot in N.Y., has N.Y. actors and was the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a N.Y. foundation, for its incorporation of science. So it was exceptionally important to me to premiere at Tribeca. The night before I got the call, I was having doubts about whether I was tough enough to last in this dreamer's world. A professor of mine said, "Don't take the rejection seriously. Don't take the praise seriously. Only take the work seriously." I got accepted the next day.         
DP: What has been the reception you have had from strangers?
DB: The best part about the screenings is after it's over. As I already mentioned, I close my eyes for most of the screening but I do listen to whether the audience laughs or not. It's amazing when strangers come to me afterward and compliment the film. I love it because it's not from friends so there's no need be nice or flattering. The most honest feedback is often from people you don't know and the reception at Tribeca has been great. New Yorkers always tell you what they really think so when the words are positive, it's definitely a feel good situation.
DP: How can people see your film after Tribeca?
DB: I really hope that Tribeca is a launching pad and that the film will travel to more festivals. Being Canadian, I am striving for the Toronto Film Festival. Check the website invividDetail.com for updates.                              

DP:  Do you plan future shorts or features?

DB: I have directed and produced a feature documentary, which I¢m also currently submitting to festivals. It's about the most loved and hated man in Canada, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who revolutionized the Canadian abortion law. The film is a deconstruction on the man behind the cause.I have just finished a feature narrative screenplay Mirabella's Secret," which I am submitting to Sloan. I hope to begin preproduction in the next year or so. But for now, I'm just going to enjoy this festival adventure. And then get some sleep. Lots of it.

Kate Christensen Says "Bomb It"

Find on Video

Kate Christensen Says "Bomb It"

(from brinkzine. com 5/5/07)

• 
• 
• Kate Christensen

I met Kate Christensen last week at the Tribeca Film Festival when I was talking to the flamboyant star Velvet of the outrageous surrealist French comedy “Avida.”  Suddenly a young woman next to her started telling me I must see that film.  It turned out that Christensen was championing a film she had nothing to do with despite the fact that the press screening of her own film, “Bomb It” would be at exactly the same time as the press conference for her friend’s film. That’s when I decided I had to see the enlightening film Christensen produced about graffiti around the world—an ambitious, kinetic, slice of social history.  I reluctantly turned down an invitation by the two women to go out drinking, but later I got to ask Christensen about her impressive documentary, which screens for the last time Sunday May 6 at the AMC Village VII on Third Avenue at 11^th Street..
Danny Peary:  What is your background?
Kate Christensen: I'm from Baltimore, the home of John Waters and Barry Levinson.  I grew up in love with film.  I would study the movements of Greta Garbo's eyebrows and Fred Astaire's feet.  I remember watching “Pink Flamingos” when I worked in a movie theater.  I was in high school at the time and it was a transforming experience.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing and I wanted to keep watching.  I studied history in college and planned to be a law professor, but somehow I ended up in LA messing around with movies.
DP:  As a producer, what exactly did you do on this film?
KC: What does a producer do?  That's the $64,000 question.  My background is as an editor, so a lot of what I did involved post production... I helped to structure parts of the story; found cool music; hired an editor; looked for composers; and recruited and supervised many of the loggers, translators (we shot in seven languages), assistant editors, associate editors, and researchers we needed to complete the project.  I also landed some interviews, set up shoots, found archival footage etc. etc.
DP:   I assume the director came up with the idea for a film on graffiti?  Is that true?  And did he always plan on traveling the globe to put together the film?
KC: The idea for the film came from one of the (graff) writers, Sharp. The director, Jon Reiss, was interviewing Sharp for another project. Sharp found his questions compelling and suggested he make the first global graffiti documentary.  Jon kept asking questions for the next two years.
DP:   Did anyone behind the camera have graffiti experience?  Have any of you done it since?
KC: Our titles were done by a writer, who also contributed photography. Some of the animations were done by a writer, who also brought other writers on board the project for interviews.  Have the rest of us started tagging?  We're probably better filmmakers than taggers.  It might be pretty embarrassing.
DP:   Can you define what is and what isn't graffiti?  For instance, why is there no mention in the film about the type of graffiti written on bathroom walls. Is that graffiti?
KC: Graffiti is a mark made without permission on a public surface. Writing on your own bathroom walls is not graffiti.  Writing on someone else's bathroom walls is graffiti.
DP:  The first line of the film is "Art is a weapon." So does that imply “bombing”—a term some of the graffiti practitioners use in the film--is an art form?
KC: The most controversial term in your question, is not "bombing," but "artist."  A lot of the people we interviewed for this film don't consider themselves artists at all.  They call themselves writers. In the graffiti world there is a real distinction between writers and artists. "Bombing" is associated with an illegal act and is more commonly applied to writers.
DP: Today, most of the graffiti in New York and Los Angeles is gang-related.  How are their origins different?
KC: New York started on the trains.  LA graffiti started with the shoe shine boys and the placas.
DP: Talk about Cornbread, the first graffiti artist, dating back to the sixties in Philadelphia. Who are your favorite graffiti characters in the film?  Are the females different from the men?
KC: Cornbread got his name from reform school.  He hated white bread, so he kept asking for cornbread.  Wouldn't stop.  After awhile, Cornbread became his name.  He wrote it all over the walls.  He was famous. When he got out, he wrote it all over Philadelphia.  He became more famous.  And then the crackdown started.
I loved Mickey, the kindergarten teacher by day, graffiti writer by night, Fuckin’ Revs who wrote his diary in the subway, Zezao, who went down to paint the sewers of Sao Paulo... Because of the possibility of jail time, graffiti is not something that people do casually.  Both men and women are risking their lives to do this.  That makes them interesting.
DP: You include people who dislike graffiti, including a woman from T.A.G. (Totally Against Graffiti).  Did you feel compelled to show the other side?  Do you agree with anything said by the people who think graffiti artists are criminals?  When is it vandalism?
KC: Graffiti doesn't happen in a vacuum.  It happens in a world of crime and punishment.  It happens in a world of laws and power.  You can't understand it without showing "the other side".  Legally, putting your mark on a public surface without permission is a criminal act. There's nothing theoretical about it.
DP: When is it vandalism? 
KC: It's vandalism when the person who does it is on an anarchic mission of destruction.  It's not vandalism when the writer or artist thinks they're making the space better.
DP: Did you accompany any graffiti artists on nightly, guerilla excursions? Is it as if they are preparing for war?  Were you (or whoever went with them) scared of being arrested or of rats, muggers, etc.?
KC: Tracy Wares, our Producer and DP, and Jon Reiss, our Producer/Director did that.  As for the fear factor, from what I've heard, rats and muggers were not much of a concern.  The police were.  The gangs were.  And the sewers of Sao Paulo could be pretty lethal.
DP: Do graffiti artists despise those who make money using graffiti-like art on commercial posters and in ads?
KC: Graffiti is in a lot of ways a “fuck you” to the establishment.   For that reason, a lot of people that practice it, resent people who use graffiti to advance themselves in society.  But there is a huge market, and a lot of great writers and artists are attracted to that.
DP:  What have you learned about graffiti? Do you personally prefer political graffiti or other types?
KC: Graffiti is highly visible, but most people have no idea what the tags mean.  Graffiti is a secret language being written all around us.  A war is going on that most people don't even know about.  Graffiti is about power.  I don't have a favorite kind of graffiti.
DP: Talk about showing the film at Tribeca.
KC: There's a line in the film from Claw: "Graffiti is an indemnible [she meant “endemic”] part of New York City.  You can't even think of New York without it.  It is as New York as the Empire State Building."  New York was the perfect place to screen the film, and, of course, Tribeca is an incredible festival.  The day of the premiere, I ate two lunches.  It wasn't until I had finished my second lunch that I remembered I had just eaten a half an hour before.  Premiering a film is a pretty nerve-wracking experience.  You're on the auction block.
DP:  What are your plans with the film?  Are you searching for a distributor?
KC: We're talking to a few people.  Everyone should please sign up at our website to be on our mailing list: www.bombit-themovie.com
DP: What are your plans?
KC: My next project is “Die for You” It’s a story of family murder and suicide in Tokyo.
I will direct and produce this documentary with the Japanese filmmaker, Yumiko Aoyagi.

Two Filmmakers Tackle Tale of Two Bitter Brothers

Find When the Tide Turns on Video

Two Filmmakers Tackle Tale of Two Bitter Brothers

(from brinkzine.com 5/12/07)

• Kelly Chapman and Campbell Maynes
• 

“When the Tide Turns” got a lot of people’s attention when New York magazine selected it as one of the five best shorts screened at the recent Tribeca Film Festival.  Of the 14-½ minute, two-character Australian film, Bilge Ebiri wrote: “Starting off in one register, with brothers Benno and Gill happily heading out on a liberating getaway weekend to the beach, Campbell Maynes gripping little film quickly switches to another, as a freak incident results in a rapidly escalating standoff between man and nature—and then between the two men themselves.  Tight, tense, and by the end, surprisingly tender.”  With that rave review in mind, I ran into the short’s director Maynes and producer Kelly Chapman at the festival’s Filmmakers Lounge and conducted this brief interview.

Danny Peary: Where are you from in Australia?
Campbell Maynes: I am from Brisbane but currently live in Los Angeles.
Kelly Chapman: I am from Brisbane, too, but still live there.
DP: What had you done before this film?
KC:  I started out producing music videos years in Melbourne.  I used to want to be an actor when I was a “baby,” and left Melbourne for New York so that I could be discovered.  Instead I fell in love and had a child and went to university, and my life went sideways for a while.  I picked up producing shorts again a couple of years ago, and documentaries. (I’m working in interactive online narrative as well as the moment.)  I’ve tried directing and writing, which I quite like, but I’m a producer. 
CM:  This was my first opportunity to direct.  Prior to this, I did a business degree at university and worked at investment banking for several years, and decided to work at something I was more passionate about.  So I pursued filmmaking.  I took several courses and spent a few years producing television commercials.  Last year I got the chance to make a pitch on this script and Kelly liked what I had to say. 
DP: Who originated the idea for When the Tide Turns?
KC: The idea came from the scriptwriter, David A. Fellows.  I contacted one of the state funding bodies to tell them that I wanted to produce another short film. They sent me five scripts to choose from and it was the one I picked.  I worked a little with David and then got in touch with Campbell, who was definitely the right person to direct it.  And then we developed the film together.
DP: Why did you choose this film rather than the others?
KC:  It’s not something I can put into words, but I believed it, it rang true to me.  It’s even a blokey film, but I have sisters and believe there are things in it that aren’t specific to males.
DP: But would you have thought of hiring a female director?
KC: Not for this film.
DP: How did you know of Campbell?
KC: From a friend of a friend, actually.  Brisbane has a quite small film scene so everyone has heard of each other.  I knew that he wanted to direct films and I had a sense that this one would work for us together. 
DP: Campbell, why did you think you were the right pick for this movie?
CM: For two reasons.  One is that I had an older brother and I know about the deep bond brothers share as well as the conflict that exists at any age.  My brother and I are competitive people and sometimes that can be serious.  I connected with the dynamics between Benno and Gill; and I connected to them individually on a personal level.  Gill is in the finance industry and I’ve been there; and Benno is a bit of an outcast, and odd-jobs guy, and strangely enough I’ve done a bit of that over the years.  So I related to the two characters.  And second, shooting on the beach and in the water excited me a lot.
DP: Where did you film this?
CK: In northern New South Wales, most of it in the water.
DP: On the DVD, beneath the title, is the line, “blood is thicker than water.”  I assume that’s the theme of the movie.
CM: It really is.  It has a double meaning because the story is about brothers and much of the film is set in water.   At the beginning of the film, Benno and Gill are estranged but are going away on a surfing trip for the weekend with the hope that they can work out their differences and things can be good again.  Once they get to the beach, though, old resentments and issues start to come between them, and things deteriorate from then on.
KC:  They’ve been estranged for quite some time, probably since their early twenties.
DP: Did something happen then that is, literally, “resurfacing?”
CM: The way they each decided to live their lives, day to day and on an ideological level, is quite contrasting and over the years they’ve really grown apart to the point there is quite a chasm between them.  At those times they’ve had brief meetings, the same issues have come up.  It all comes to a head in the short.
DP: Did you know the two actors before making the short?
KC:  I did. Damien Meehan, who plays Benno, actually built a set on a previous short of mine.  And the wife of David Cassidy, who plays Gill, acted in a short I produced. 
Damien Meehan is a newcomer to acting. He works full time as a carpenter while exploring further acting opportunities. Damien Cassidy is classically trained and works in the theatre regularly. He has had small film roles including one in the Australian feature film “Kokoda.” He supplements any income he makes from his craft as a cinema projectionist. We did an extensive casting session for this film.  We’d auditioned a lot of people the actors in pairs to see how they played together.  Although Damien Meehan hadn’t had much acting experience, he’s perfect for the role and we were surprised at how well he and Damien Cassidy fit as brothers.
DP: Do you think the two Damiens will be friends after the film?
KC: They’re as different as Benno and Gill are.  I wouldn't say they won't be friends, but they are very different types of guys and I doubt their paths will often cross, unless perhaps in another movie.
DP: Do you want to make features?
KC: Cameron, David, and I are actually developing “When the Tide Turns” into a feature.
CM:  That’s one of our priorities at the moment.  We have an initial treatment written and are hoping to develop a script from it.  I also have a couple of other projects in the early stages that I’m developing as well.  The goal is to make a feature film.
DP: What was your reaction to be accepted by the Tribeca Film Festival?
KC: To me it was a real dream playing at Tribeca.  I’ve lived in New York and it was great coming back to the festival not as a volunteer!  That excited me.  It was a surprise to us that this little film that we knocked together in the ocean in three days had such legs. 
CM:  It was a festival we dreamed of getting into.  The budget for our film was only $3,000 and we had a lot of great people who helped out for nothing, and there were businesses that supported us.  It was a fairly surreal experience getting the phone call telling us that we’d been accepted.  And coming to New York has its own excitement.
DP: Where can people see your film?
CM: We have entered several more festivals in the U.S. and Australia. We're screening at the St. Kilda Film Festival in Melbourne in June.  We’ve also been accepted for the London Film Festival in October.  If people are interested in updates they can contact us via www.whenthetideturns.com

Brian Steidle Versus the Devil of Darfur

Find The Devil Came on Horseback on video

Brian Steidle Versus the Devil of Darfur

(from brinkzine.com 5/21/07)

• Brian Steidle
• 
• 
• 

I  interviewed Brian Steidle at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, where the exceptional, shocking documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback" played to enthusiastic audiences.  [Brink.com is reprinting that interview to coincide with the film's New York theatrical premiere at the IFC Center.]

Former United States Marine Brian Steidle, who lived around the world as the son of a naval officer, was just twenty-seven when he began work in Sudan in 2004.  The driven but unassuming Steidle was a military contractor with the Joint Military Commission, whose job it was to monitor the cease-fire in the twenty-year civil war between the Arab-dominated government in the north and the rebel SPLA, drawn from the black African tribes of the south.  When he saw leaked photographs from Darfur, in western Sudan, of atrocities committed against peaceful Africans by the government-backed militia, the Janjaweed (“the devil on a horse”), Steidle chose to go to that region as an unarmed observer and US representative for the African Union. 
He was unprepared for what he saw.  There he witnessed the brutal, systematic slaughter of African men, women, and children that the government denied was taking place.  Steidle was frustrated that he could do nothing in Darfur to stop the genocide, but he took more than a thousand photographs of the carnage, figuring that if he showed them in America there would be such outrage that the war would end immediately.  So he quit the African Union, managed to sneak out of the country with the incriminating photos, and returned to the States. 
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who has written passionately about the genocide that has claimed more than 400,000 lives in Darfur, and caused 3 million more to flee their homes, published the photos and there indeed was temporary public outrage.  But the Bush administration offered little but lip service.  Refusing to let the story die down, Steidle took it upon himself to get the word out about what is happening in Darfur, to a few people at a time.  He has made it his personal crusade, giving talks around the country, publishing a memoir (with his sister Gretchen Steidle Wallace, the founder of Global Grassroots) titled “The Devil Came on Horseback,” and agreeing to be the subject of a documentary of the same name, directed by Annie Sunberg and Ricki Stern (the team that made the acclaimed “The Trials of Darryl Hunt”).   Filming began when Brian went to the refugee camps in Chad to search for survivors of the violence he photographed and their relatives, and continued as he toured America.  I was able to interview the driven but unassuming Steidle at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, where the exceptional, shocking documentary played to enthusiastic audiences.

Danny Peary: When did you meet Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern and agree to make “The Devil Came on Horseback?”
Brian Steidle: We met in the spring of 2005 when I was in Washington speaking about Darfur.  They had become friends with my sister Gretchen and she had told them about me and the thousand photographs I had of what was going on there. 
DP: Was their any resistance on your part to a documentary?
BS: No, there was no resistance at all.  Before we actually agreed to make the movie we already were doing it.  It just started happening and then we got our agreements down.  It was something we all wanted to do.
DP: You wanted to do a film about Darfur, but they wanted to do a film about you, so did you actually have different reasons for doing the movie?
BS: I think the overall goal for everybody was to tell the story of Darfur and to reach the American people.  They show the story from my perspective, through me, because they thought a film purely about Darfur might not resonate with people, who might think of it as just another African tragedy.  In this way they hope people will say, “Here’s a guy who could be our next-door neighbor trying to tell a story—let’s help him out.”
DP: Annie and Ricki told me that you were a very willing participant but weren’t prepared for all the nuts and bolts work a documentary requires.
BS: I’d gripe, “How many times do I have to do this voiceover?  I’ve said this 900 times!”
DP: Was your mother a liberal or did I make that up?
BS: You made that up.  I wouldn’t label her a liberal or conservative.  She leans a bit to the right on some issues, but leans to the left on others.  My father leans toward the right.
DP: I assumed that since your sister leans to the left, she got that from your mother rather than a father in the military.
BS: Gretchen has leaned to the left since she was a little kid.  When we were in the Philippines, she was about ten, eleven, or twelve and got bored and had a different experience from  me there.  She was able to spend time with some Philippine families in the villages and it opened her eyes a bit more than mine, and since then she always has been trying to figure out how to help people.  She’s basically been the humanitarian of the family. 
DP: When you got home from Darfur with your photos, were you surprised that the people who came to hear you speak at rallies were mostly from the left?
BS:  They do tend to be from the left, and that’s because the left tends to be more aware of humanitarian issues.  It hits them a bit differently.  But I’ve found that this issue hits people across the board.  I’ve had huge support and interest from both sides.  I’ve spoken at the Naval Academy and received tremendous support, and I’m scheduled to speak at West Point on Monday, and expect support there as well. The Christian Right has been huge.  In fact my strongest supporter was Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who as people may know, is involved with some liberal issues but is, very Christian right.  And Senator John Corzine, now the democratic governor of New Jersey, was a huge supporter.  So I’ve had support from both sides of the aisle. 
DP: At the end of “Three Days of the Condor,” Robert Redford arrives at the New York Times and it’s a given that  people will know his story and everything will be all right.  When you went to the Times and Nicholas Kristof printed your pictures, did you feel that everyone would react and the genocide in Darfur would stop?
BS: That was my perception. 
DP: In the movie you say how you believed that when everyone was made aware of what was happening in Darfur, they’d react.  But they didn’t.
BS: It still frustrates me.  I’ve been back two years now and am still talking about this issue, I’m still going around.  We have made some progress, but it’s amazing how slow that progress has been.  I really thought that when the word was out, there would be boom, a huge reaction, and the UN would go in and solve this issue.  At least now we have some powerful tools, the book and the documentary, so hopefully more people will become aware and be motivated to do something. 
DP: You were motivated once you first saw the pictures of the school girls who had been chained and burned alive. Was seeing the photos of the murdered girls your first great shock in regard to what was taking place in Darfur?
BS: Yes, but I wasn’t there yet.  Those photos were leaked back to us at the mission where we were stationed.  And I thought, “Wow, this is incredible.”  It was peaceful where I was after the cease-fire was signed, and there I was sitting behind a computer doing Senior Operations stuff.  I said I had to go and try to do something.
DP: Where were you when Colin Powell stated for the record that genocide was taking place in Darfur?
BS:  That was the middle of 2004 and I had just put in the request to go to Darfur.  That was when the African Union was just starting out and we thought it would be effective, and so we felt we could go in there and do some good to stop the genocide.  We went there, but the genocide continued and all we could do was photograph it.
DP: How do you react now watching the scene in which you are in a helicopter following the Janjaweed as they drive off in a jeep after destroying a village and probably committing rape and murder?  In the movie, you said you wished you had a gun instead of a camera.
BS: That is the one time that I still wish I had a gun.  I think I was able to make more of a difference by taking the pictures and coming back and talking about them.  But if I had been on the ground with a gun, I clearly would have been overwhelmed and killed them.  That situation was amazing to me.  They went back to this area the size of about ten football fields filled with loot and they were just dividing it up.  They were just sitting there and staring at us, knowing we weren’t doing anything, that we couldn’t do anything. 
DP: A scene that really gets to me is the broken-hearted, angry Darfurian teacher who talks about how there nothing is left in her country.  To illustrate her point, she shows how the Janjaweed even destroyed all her bowls so she can’t carry water.
BS: The Janjaweed stack the bowls up and shoot a bullet through them.  The people in Darfur are not very emotional, so it’s hard to get them to be emotional.  So I think the filmmakers did a great job of pulling things together so they could throw those emotions out there.
DP: Among the other things you’d remember is when you figured out the strategy for the Janjaweed and could predict which villages they’d next attack, but you told a superior who ignored you.  Was that among the reasons you had to get out of there?
BS: Absolutely.  That was definitely one of the biggest reasons.  We knew where they were coming from; we knew that they blamed certain villages for stealing their camels so it was obvious they’d go to those villages.  After they attacked one village, there was even a letter they gave us in which they said they’d attack this village and this village and this village and they’d burn the villages, steal whatever they wanted, and kill everybody they could.  They laid it out for us like Here It Is. And we went to this commander with the African Union and he said he wasn’t interested, that we were there only to monitor.  He was a Nigerian colonel.  Before him, we had another Nigerian commander who was phenomenal.  We would escort humanitarian convoys and do a lot of extra work we weren’t supposed to be doing.   We actually had been told not to do it but he allowed us to do it.
Then the new commander came in and took over, and he was horrific.  He had a totally different perspective. We got cut off from the humanitarian convoys. He wouldn’t allow us to meet with humanitarian organizations.  What we’d do is find out where everyone was and notify them for security reasons.  We’d say they were headed to attack for a village, so don’t go there or pull your people out. Under this new commander, we weren’t permitted to share this information. But we did it anyway.  He cut that off.  He’d say no humanitarian people in the compound. Through pressure from all the monitors and from international pressure and a lot of pressure from the U.S. embassy, we got him out of there in three months. He got of booted from his command.
DP: Because of your military background, for you to do things you weren’t supposed to do, you must have done a lot of soul-searching.
BS: The majority of people who serve in the military want to do good.  They join the military and want to help somebody, they want to protect their families, and they want excitement in addition.  Since I’ve returned to America I’ve been approached by many military personnel at the academy and active-duty personnel and they’ve said, “How can I do this work?  I really want to do this work.  This is why I joined the military.”
DP: In the movie, you had a negative reaction when someone called you a whistle-blower.
BS: I think that term tends to be used in a negative sense, as when someone informs on another person.  And I don’t look at what I did as something negative. 
DP: At one point in the movie, I was thinking you hadn’t cried or expressed guilt that you are unable to prevent what is going on.  At that exact moment, when you are riding in a van in Chad, you start crying and say you feel personal guilt. 
BS: I remember that moment.  Ricki and Annie weren’t there, but I was talking to their cameraman and broke down.  There were other times I broke down but the camera wasn’t on me.  I still feel like that sometimes: frustrated and guilty.  However, now I think I’ve gotten past that and try to take all that frustration and energy and put it into something to try to make a difference.  I wrote the book, I made the movie, and I go around the country talking about Darfur.
DP: In the film, at a talk you give in Washington, several Sudanese people attack you for lying.  They are obvious plants.
BS: At the majority of events in Washington there tended to be plants from the Sudanese embassy and Sudanese press corps, which is associated with the embassy.  They said they were journalists but they represented the Sudanese government.  We weren’t surprised when that happened.
DP: But how did you feel when that happens?  There you are presenting all your evidence, yet they are denying it.
BS: I get that all the time.  So my attitude is: Here it is.  I’m going to tell you what I saw, I’m going to show you what I saw, and you can make your own decisions.
DP: You keep your composure and you don’t call them plants.
BS: There’s no reason to confront them on that.  Let them talk if they want, but I have the evidence.  If they want to come on the stage and look at it, we’ll discuss it. 
DP: Has somebody organized against the film at this point?
BS: There’s no real organization, it’s a small-time thing.
DP: We all want the image of Arabs to be positive but the Arabs in your movie are the villains, so has there been negative feedback?
BS: What I try to bring up at screenings is that we’re not critical of all Arabs.  In the Sudan there is a large number of Arabs who don’t have water or haven’t had an education and who are equally affected by this war.  That’s a point we have to bring up.  It’s hard to show those people because we can’t go into those communities because of the fighting.  So during Q&As, we try to bring up that it’s not all Arabs but a select group that has been corrupted by the government. 
DP:  One thing I learned about in the film is the involvement of China, which gets large quantities of oil from the Sudanese government.
BS:  Most people don’t know about that.  Steven Spielberg didn’t know about it, so when he was confronted by Mia Farrow, he said that he had to write a letter about this.  He knew about Darfur but he didn’t know about the Chinese connection. China could stop this war tomorrow.
DP: Could the United States stop it tomorrow?
BS: No.  We’ve got to do a lot more.  Since we don’t do any trade with Sudan, unlike China, and don’t have any ongoing political involvement with Sudan, we have to convince other players to convince the Sudanese government to stop the killing.  We would have to convince China to convince Sudan.  We could pass legislation that divested all mutual funds, and stop all individuals from doing business with the companies that are complicit with genocide.  But that will take time.  We could enforce a no-fly zone and impose additional sanctions.  The U.S. already has sanctions on Sudan, but the rest of the world doesn’t.  So it’s something we can do a lot more about, though we can’t stop it. 
DP: When you hear Bush say “Darfur” in a speech, what is your reaction?
BS: I think it’s a good thing.  It means somebody, whether it’s him or not, thought it was important enough to put in a speech.  That at least he’s aware of what’s going on is a positive thing.  But it’s not enough.  There needs to be definitive action.  It becomes frustrating when you hear about it, hear about it, hear about it, and then even call it genocide, but then there’s nothing done.  It should be “Let’s talk about it,” and it should be in every one of his speeches.  It should be a priority, a topic of discussion in the upcoming elections. 
It should be out there.  We were at an event in New Hampshire with Senator Edwards and his wife Elizabeth and there was a special screening.  And we talked to Barack Obama’s people.  Gretchen and one of the producers will be going to an event next week, also trying to get Darfur into the political debate and let everyone know it’s an important issue.  People do want to know about it.  You realize that from the success of “Hotel Rawanda.”  And it had dead bodies in it. Do people want to know about the genocide?  If you say no, then you’re wrong.
DP: Do you see progress in getting the word out so we can be hopeful?
BS: Yes, it’s definitely something we can be hopeful about.  I think we’ve been pretty good at giving people the tools to help them move forward and make a difference.  The more people who see the movie or read the book, the more people who will be motivated to action.  The key is to get everyone to see it. 
DP: Are there other witnesses like you who are talking about genocide in Darfur?
BS: No.  There are a lot of people talking about it and doing things about it, but there aren’t witnesses.
DP: So I’m sure that makes you more obligated to continue what you’re doing for as long as it takes.  You’re pretty much stuck.
BS: Yeah, I know.

Humanitarian Rides "The Third Wave" in Sri Lanka

Find on Video

Humanitarian Rides "The Third Wave" in Sri Lanka

(from brinkzine.com 5/25/07)

• 
• 
• 
• 

There’s a classic country music song, written by Becky Hobbs and sung famously by Alabama, called “Angels Among Us.”  That song came to mind when I was watching Alison Thompson be a modern-day Florence Nightingale while nursing surviving Sri Lanka tsunami victims in her stirring, extraordinary documentary, “The Third Wave.” Both on screen and off, the Australian-born Thompson, who now calls New York home, modestly downplays her own contributions in helping the destroyed village of Peraliya come back to life, preferring to pay tribute to her three brave cohorts, Italian boyfriend Oscar Gubernati, Australian Donny Paterson, and American Bruce French, and to volunteerism in general. A first-responder for nine months at Ground Zero, Thompson says her eye-opening document of volunteers making a difference is a clarion call to mobilize everyone to lend a helping hand somewhere in the world.  I read about her remarkable life and her diary of her time in Sri Lanka online.  I met her at the Tribeca Film Festival, where she and her film received thunderous ovations from awed audiences.

Danny Peary: Talk about your youth in Australia, growing up a preacher’s daughter in the bush outside Sydney.
Alison Thompson: I have great memories of growing up in Gray’s Point on the edge of the Sydney Royal National Park, camping, swimming, kayaking, fishing, boating, bushwalking, surfing, playing cricket and soccer. I went to public schools and dreamed of playing professional cricket and having four kids. My father was a preacher man and my mother a nurse, and I traveled with them to many Third World countries. I lived in jungles and even visited the Royal Palace in Tonga.
DP: What affect, if any, did your father being a preacher have on your becoming a humanitarian? 
AT: I think my father being an international preacher helped give me a love and understanding of travel to Third Worlds.  And my mother taught me unconditional love.
DP: Do you think that growing up on an island is what gave you a restless spirit, so much that you have traveled to every continent and filmed in thirty countries?
AT:  Yes. I think Australia, despite air travel and modern technology, is still isolated from the rest of the globe and you grow up with a feeling that you just want to get out there and explore the world.  As most of the world is so far way, when you leave you just keep on going!  I no longer feel restless to keep traveling but purely inspired. There is an incredible world out there, and each country is unique.  Still, after exploration, I came to the conclusion that the best of the best is right here back at home.
DP: When were you a medic and mathematics teacher?
AT:  In Australia I taught mathematics for five years at Cronulla High School.  Also, I worked as a Nurse’s Aid at my mum’s Chesalon nursing hospital in Jannali over a period of eight years.  That experience and various courses I took helped me when I worked as a medic on September 11^th and for nine months after that at a Ground Zero first-aid station.
DP: When and why did you decide to become a filmmaker?
AT: I was investment banking on Wall Street at the time!  I never had a thought in my life that I would become a filmmaker!  It just happened. I had a real passion for photography and also filmed all my Third World trips to Africa, Burma, Iran, etc., and people started asking me for my footage and wanted to buy it!  I left the security of a paycheck and went to study at NYU film school and learned everything I thought I needed to know to make a film. Three weeks out of film school, I made my first film.
DP: Talk about the making of “High Times Potluck.”  Was this the type of film you expected to spend your career making or did you already want to make message films?
AT: Fresh out of film school, I raised a million dollars from Wall Street and asked Victor Collichio, who wrote Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” to write a comedy. He wrote  “Potluck,” so I went for it!  We shot it in twenty days, using over forty locations and fifty actors. We had a great cast and had a real blast making it all over the streets of New York.  It was a fun comedy, but it wasn’t very deep.
My “Potluck” Investor was killed in the Sept 11^th attacks, and after working at Ground Zero as a first responder, my life was changed forever. Firstly as a volunteer but also as a filmmaker, I now wanted to make films with real messages to the world, that would make people think about issues they had known nothing about.
DP: What did you do as a volunteer for nine months at Ground Zero? 
AT: On the morning of September 11^th, I rollerbladed with my first-aid kit downtown, four miles to Ground Zero. When I arrived the South Tower had just collapsed and there were injured people everywhere with bits and pieces of bodies lining the streets.  I reached onto a debris pile to grab someone’s arm to help free him, but it was just an arm and I squeaked and threw it away.
I met an EMS guy who helped me work CPR on a man, and we started helping people who were bleeding. I heard a rumble from above and the North Tower exploded above us, so I rollerbladed as fast as I could and dived under a car. It went black for half an hour and I prayed my guts out. After that I set up a triage station with EMS worker Michael Voudoris at Firehouse 10, across the road from Ground Zero, and stayed, living in the streets, collecting bodies, and washing out firemen’s eyes. I didn’t have any shoes with me, so we took them off a dead body that passed by on a stretcher.  The shoes were size 13 so we sliced them in half and I wore them with my toes hanging out the ends.
A $3,000 cashmere coat from a retail store called Century 21 kept me warm at night.
We collected sixty-eight green garbage bags full of people and ate KFC on piles of iron and burnt debris. The police took over a nearby Burger King and cooked burgers. One day on the pile we ate filet mignon and potatoes from a fancy uptown restaurant. A destroyed Amish store supplied us with food and water for days. Everyone pitched in to help in an amazing display of humanity.
There were many times when we heard SOS tappings from people who were trapped deep underground but we couldn’t get to them. One day I found someone’s heart lying out on a piece of steel.
For the next five days it felt like the rest of the world was gone and we were the only survivors. Three were no phones or electricity and we lived as a MASH unit next to the morgue.
On the fifth day, Fema shut us down and we were too exhausted to argue. I found my rollerblades exactly where I had left them five days earlier and I rollerbladed back uptown in shock. I fell asleep on a Saturday night and woke up on Monday night.
I lived Sept 11^th over and over as a volunteer for the next nine months and marched with the soldiers of Ground Zero on its closing day, May 31, 2002.
I never found my friend but I had tried really hard.
DP: How is your health?  Did you realize the air was unsafe?
AT: While working at Ground Zero I met an air pollution tester and every day he assured me that the air was safe. I never really believed him but unlike others I haven’t had a sick day since.
DP: Had you been to Sri Lanka before the tsunami?
AT:  I had never been to Sri Lanka before but I knew it was a very poor country and I had heard many surfers tell stories that if you ever got sick there you have to come straight home because you will die in a local hospital.
DP: Having been at Ground Zero, did you actually believe that you’d spend only two weeks in Sri Lanka?
AT: When I set off for Sri Lanka I really believed that I was going only for two weeks. I had a return ticket for that time and had only a few hundred dollars in my pocket. I had rent to pay and was up to direct an episode of “Law and Order” in N.Y. the next month.
DP: You had to expect complete misery and destruction when you arrived in Sri Lanka, so how much worse was it than you expected?
AT:  On Sept 11^th, after the second tower had fallen, there was no hope to save anyone. So when I arrived in Sri Lanka it was actually better than I had expected. I felt like I was once again standing at the gates of hell, but this time there were survivors and I felt like I had been a second chance to help people. As the months moved on it became harder and more challenging than I could ever have imagined in a wild mushroom trip!
DP: Talk about the formation of the “Fantastic Four,” and how well you complemented one another.
AT: I had told Oscar, my Italian boyfriend, that I had decided to go to Sri Lanka to volunteer and I asked him if he wanted to come with me. I said, “I was going anyway.”
He came and we met Donny, an Aussie ex-army engineer, at the Sri Lanka airport at the baggage carousel and asked him to join us. Bruce came later that night.  He lived in Telluride and was a private chef for the band Pearl Jam. He was a friend of a friend whom we hadn’t met yet. He was the last to join our team. We rented a van, filled it with medical supplies, food and water and started driving along the tsunami coast helping people, until we arrived in Peraliya and stayed there.
We were so different from each other but somehow it worked. We all had different skills to bring to the table. Donny became “Operations” and built toilets and houses. Oscar produced the village by raising money from the road and re-directed aid traffic. (Italians are really good at acquiring things.) Bruce ran logistics.  And I ran the field hospital and later the Tsunami alert center.
DP: Among your hobbies are carpentry and cooking, so did you expect to do more than nursing once you and your friends began trying to bring life back to Peraliya?   Other hobbies include kickboxing and fencing, so did you feel safer and more confident than might other volunteers in a strange and sometimes hostile environment?
AT: I was just expecting to do anything to help. All I really needed was to use my commonsense in everything I did whether it was collecting bodies, eating clean food, or hugging someone.  There was stifling heat and sweat ran down my legs daily. I think my being fit prepared me for the marathon ahead but we were running on pure adrenaline.
We didn’t have much time to think about the next day but simply getting through that day and the days melted into each other. I felt very confident with my past experience in many third world countries. I thought I knew what to expect and I was very wrong.
DP: What was a typical day for you like?
AT: The typical days varied over the months. In the beginning we would wake up at first light 5 a.m., eat a papaya or something that Bruce would muster up, and drive straight out to the village three miles down the road. The villagers would stand there waiting for us and run over to the van to greet us.
In the early days every moment counted, as we were getting the villagers food, water, and temporary shelter and treating people who were sick or hurt. Over three thousand people in this village depended on us, not to mention the thousands we would encounter along the way to and from the village. Donny and Bruce had really hard physical work-- they would spent hours repairing roofs, cleaning out temples and homes, and preparing shelters with big rolls of plastic. They also had to deal with the problem that there wasn’t a single toilet for miles.
I would treat wounds with the help of some paramedics and nurses I had collected on the way. The hospital was so busy; people would walk to us from over 20 kilometers away to get treated. In the following weeks we were treating over a thousand patients a day.
I would arrive at the field hospital, feed my starving cats and dogs, and then start treating people--and not move sometimes for thirteen hours. There was nowhere to ‘pee’ and my bladder would hurt, once it ran down my legs all over the floor but there was no time to stop.  People just kept on coming and infection was setting in.  There were so many people wanting help and when the stress became too much I would walk into a broken house and just start crying. Sometimes I didn’t even know why I was crying, I think I was just so tired.
It was so hot and during the first week I had picked up a virus and had a 102-temperature along with the 104-degree heat. It was really very hard for everyone, but there was no time to think of yourself because these people had just lost their eight kids and spouses and everything they owned and were much worse off.  The adrenaline set in and we concentrated at the tasks at hand.
In the later months when we had many more volunteers, we would get up and have a more civilized breakfast at the beach in the main town as it was being rebuilt, and we would start work around 8 a.m. There was always just so much to do and we were in a race against time to get everyone into some sort of shelter before the monsoons arrived.
A typical day would also be spent listening to hours of horrifying stories told through translators who spoke broken English. You didn’t have to understand the words to feel their pain.
DP: When new volunteers arrived, would you tell them what you wanted them to do?
AT: When volunteers arrived at Peraliya we would say, “There are no rules, politics or bureaucracy, so just get your head down and work, do whatever you want to do.”  We left them to their own commonsense, and it worked out very well.
DP: Was the diary you were writing for yourself, or were you emailing people around the world, including in America and Australia?
AT:  I knew I had to get help and when the internet shop was back in order I started sending emails out to friends and family or anyone that would read them.  The situation on the ground was so desperate and I begged for help. I knew what people were seeing on TV or in newspapers wasn’t the truth because my mother was telling me things that were being reported back home that weren’t accurate.  I started my diaries to get help and to report what was really going on in the ground. A few weeks later a journalist came through and created a Web site for us so volunteers elsewhere could read what we wrote and respond and come and help.  I received hundreds of emails from people sitting at home watching TV wanting to come and help.   I had no time to type back so my response was simply “Come!  Get on a plane and drive to our village. See you soon!”
DP: In your diary, you write to all prospective volunteers, “Don’t listen to the big organizations when they say they have plenty of help or only medical skills are required.”  As time passed, did you witness any money or supplies coming in from the Red Cross, Unicef, the Bush-Clinton fund, Doctors Without Borders, Care or any charity that many of us donated to?   What was (and is) the problem?
AT: Some of the aid money got there but most of it didn’t and the world did give so generously! Everyone meant well but it was just that most of the large organizations were struck in bureaucracy within their own organizations or in logistics at the airport. A lot of the tsunami money was saved or redirected to use for other projects in other countries. I know The American Red Cross donated 50 million of left-over tsunami money to the U.N World Food Program (the WFP is a good organization).
The volunteers had no one to answer too so we would just build a toilet. A larger organization would have to write six letters that went through twenty-three people to get approval. We wrote to three of the top Aid organizations for four months or help us with no response. They seemed to be fighting over who was in charge and plastering their signs all over the coast to show sponsors back home they were “on the job!” I saw their aid signs but I didn’t see what they were doing. We did see large NGO’s staying in $500- a-night hotels and driving around in big fancy brand new jeeps. I think the key problem was that the larger organizations need to regroup into smaller sub-groups that can make bigger decisions on the ground and move about and respond much more quickly. We lived meagerly and wanted every cent that was sent to us to go straight to the people. We couldn’t have lived with ourselves if it didn’t.
Clinton’s envoy came through and choose our camp to host a meeting of all the NGOs in the area as it was the only camp rebuilding. It was a positive meeting but as usual nothing became of it. Celebrities would also come through and take pictures with children and promise money and aid and they never came back. Quite a few famous Australian cricketers came through but we never heard from them again. I am not into playing the blame game of who did what. All I know in the 2 years I was there the money wasn’t reaching the people and still isn’t.
Most of the organizations were stuck, but there were also smaller ones that worked well. I have researched the money problem for fourteen months but it would take me hours and hours to explain all the fraud and the billions that were lost passing through millions of hands. A lot of the donated tsunami money is still sitting in bank accounts around the world.
All I know is that after a disaster everyone is needed! No skills required!  It doesn’t take much to pick up rubble or hug someone. Some volunteers who came to us were rejected from large organizations as they didn’t have Masters degrees, etc. I am sorry this is Bullshit and wrong. It is about getting on the ground and getting dirty. It isn’t just medical; you have five hundred traumatized children sitting around with nothing to do-- they need actors, singers, teachers, everyone.
DP: Is that why you realized you could never leave?
AT: We realized we couldn’t leave in the first days and weeks as there was no-one there helping in our area. It was the biggest disaster of all time and thousands of miles of the coastline were gone. The people also relied on us and trusted us and we couldn’t choose to not show up to feed them. Even when we came back to Sri Lanka after a three-week break, we saw that no work had been done from when we had left.
Three is still so much work to be done.
DP: In the film it seems that almost all the people trusted you at the beginning—is that true and if so, why?  Was it always the kids who trusted you most? 
AT: The Sri Lankan village people trusted us, as we were the only ones there helping them. It started out as a medical camp where we were treating their wounds, feeding them daily, and providing water. We treated them with respect and love and asked them what they needed for their village. We worked together and included them in most decisions. The children were the most honest of everyone and when the adults started to turn on us, the kids knew the truth. They could see us working our guts out and just trying to help. The children behaved like adults and the adults like naughty children.
I learned a lot from the honesty of the children and when the adults were lying to us about how much aid they had received, the children would always give us honest answers.
When I became frustrated at the jealous village women screaming at each other over aid, I would lock the hospital up and walk down the railway tracks to cry. The children would run after me trying to kiss me and begged me to stay. They would say “you help us …we love you …those women bad!!” When you are surrounded by thirty children all trying to kiss you at once, it is one of the most beautiful moving moments you can ever experience. So I would open the hospital back up again and go back to work.
We all stayed for the children.
DP: What was it like seeing the drawings the kids did of you?
AT: Seeing the pictures the children drew of me was a sweet moment. I was happy they had stopped drawing the tsunami. They drew me exactly the way I dressed including my hairstyle except they drew me with black hair instead of blond. At first I thought they just got it wrong but one little girl said it was because I was one of them. 
DP: Repeatedly you say in your diary, and it’s evident in the film, that you “were trying to make sense of it all.”  And when you saw heartbreaking things, you’d try to put a positive spin on it in your mind by talking about “the bigger picture.” Any comments now that you look back on it?
AT: With everything there is always a bigger picture and an outsider can see that. That is why we could sympathize with someone’s pain but also see further in time to healing. When a woman in pain would beat at my chest or curse my name, I could understand that it wasn’t me she was really mad at--it was from the loss of her five or six children, her husband, her home. It took me a while not to take it personally, but by the end I could see through this to the bigger picture.
There were times when you couldn’t put a positive spin on things. After consoling maybe seven hundred women there was still that one woman who was inconsolable and telling her that her dead child was at peace in a beautiful place just didn’t work. I would break down with the thought that the child was just dead and stuck in a tree somewhere. I would cry a river as the woman’s tears stained my clothes.
DP: After 9/11, there was so much heartbreak seeing people searching for the missing.  You experienced that to even a larger degree in Sri Lanka—was that one of the most difficult things to deal with?
AT: The Tsunami dead was multiplied by hundreds of thousands compared to Sept 11^th but I found it hard to see or hear a difference in the pain. One was a murderous massacre and one an act of nature. They were both bad and the grieving of one dead and hundreds of thousands was still equally really sad.
Only half of the bodies at Ground Zero were found, mostly in little pieces. The other fifteen hundred just vaporized. It was the same with the tsunami.  Many bodies were found right away, but five months later we were still collecting bodies and people were still bringing me body parts. I really wanted to find all the bodies; I knew that I would want to be found.
The heartbreak in Sri Lanka seemed louder compared to a more refined New York crowd but it didn’t mean the pain was less. My friend Phil Marber, who runs Cantor Fitzgerald, lost over 600 members of his company, all of whom he knew personally. How do you deal with that kind of loss?   I remember being in the pit at Ground Zero one year later with the grieving families and hearing 24,000 people sobbing and crying all at once. It was one of the most saddest experiences I can ever remember.
DP: Was there ever a discussion with Oscar over whether you’d bring a camera to Sri Lanka or leave it behind?  Did you always expect to make a film?
AT: I took a video camera with me to Sri Lanka, as I do everywhere I go, including on holidays.  I thought I would shoot some footage of the destruction and hopefully make a little piece after I returned home to help raise some money for the victims. I never expected we would be there for fourteen months and come back with 250 hours of footage.
We just passed the camera around to volunteers, kids, ambulance drivers or whomever and then at the end of the second month we met a local camera guy who said he would shoot for us and he just followed us around as we ran the refugee camp.
DP: Would there have been a film without him?  As a director, did you give him actual direction?  What did the people think about the filmmaking, particularly those who didn’t trust you?
AT: Sunil was a Canadian Sri Lankan whom I had met in early March when he wandered through the village with his camera. We talked about him joining us to shoot the refugee camp for a while and he agreed. He came to the camp every day for a few hours and then more as the months moved on.
Sunil was a beginner cameraman so every now and again I would pull him aside to tell him not to zoom or to make sure the light was behind him or something basic. I checked the tapes every few days but was generally too tired to do it and after a few weeks I trusted his work enough to leave him alone. It was too busy a time to think about that.
His footage turned out to be very natural and honest with light in all directions and a simple touch, just like the refugee camp itself. The filming got better as the refugee camp got better.
He knew the local language and had a great quiet way of moving about so you didn’t even know he was there. Sunil became part of the story as the villagers complained to him and tried to push him into a translator position. We would have had a very much different film if he hadn’t been there to capture the villagers’ side of the story.
Generally, the village people ignored the camera or just spoke into it to ask him questions and ask for favors, etc. I don’t really think they understood the concept of a film. They didn’t really seem to mind the camera but as they started to turn on us, they turned nasty towards Sunil and some were threatening to crush his camera.
DP: At night you reflected for the camera sometimes and seemed at peace—was it like that most nights?  Was having a camera there helpful to you because you knew a document would eventually be produced for the world to see?
AT: At night we would talk into the camera about what we had experienced that day. I think the camera helped us from going insane. It was sort of like therapy, where we would talk about the day and get all our feelings out and then the next day we would move on. Sometimes we would cry or laugh or just let off steam in a joke, but most of the time we were just too tired to talk into the camera so we missed many nights.
I knew I had to keep shooting and something would come together later. The shooting at night was really personal and I thought we would have a laugh or cry in re-watching it years from now. I knew the footage could be made into something but it wasn’t until much later in the year that I realized that the volunteers were the story.
DP: Explain the meaning of your film’s title, and at what point did you decide “The Third Wave” would be the title?
AT: The First tsunami wave destroyed everything, The Second wave killed around a quarter of a million people.  The Third wave title refers to all the aid and volunteers that flooded into the country to help. The title just came to me one day shortly after I came home and it made sense.
DP: The film takes on a new dimension when the people realize that time has passed yet they still have nothing.  While watching the film and seeing the once thankful people start to turn against you and forget all you had done for them—the persecutors—I thought of “Lord of the Flies,” when the bad side of human nature surfaces.  You mention this in your diary.
AT: After a while it became apparent that we were in some sort of “Lord of the Flies” movie. We had seen mankind at its very best and now we were seeing it at its very worst. I remember talking into the camera and meaning to say “Lord of the Flies” and when I got home I saw it on tape and I had said it wrong: “I feel like I am in a “The Lord of the Rings” movie.  It just didn’t sound right!
DP: In your diary there are several instances when people turn against you—beating and poisoning your dog, laughing at you and leaving you on the ground when you tumbled from your bike in pain after almost being hit by a firecracker—but you chose not to include mention of this.  Were you trying to balance what you showed?
AT: There were many things we experienced over fourteen or fifteen months that couldn’t be included in an 88-minute film. There was just too much footage and too many stories to choose from.
Some villagers treated me unfairly out of jealousy for aid and I struggled hard in the editing room as a director, rather than as a character in the film, to keep to the film’s objective--and yet also show our shortcomings. There were so many ways to tell this story with the footage I had, and I chose to make an uplifting film about volunteers and how they can make a difference in this world and to make it clear that everyone is needed. I wanted to give future volunteers a road map so that after they observe and learn, they can volunteer themselves somewhere in the world in the near future.
I choose not to make a negative film about how we were better than them or kick them when they are still down. That’s another film. I think the film shows just enough of the injustices we experienced during our stay.
When some of the villagers beat up my dog or committed other crimes against me, or directed hate or jealousy towards me, I learned to rise above it and put it into the concept of good and evil. I was going to beat evil by the act of unconditional love. I was even kinder to them and it so confused them they that they gave up.  Many months later, people dropped to their knees and apologized at the cruel things they had done to me. Everything balances out in the end.
DP: Comment on this line from your diary: “There is no time for vanity or emotion.”  At the Tribeca Film Festival, when I first met you, you were modest about your personal accomplishments in Sri Lanka, so was it hard for you as director to figure out what to include of yourself in the movie, particularly when you were personally doing something special?
AT: There is no time for vanity or emotion.
When you are working in a refugee camp you look like shit and are dirty and really sweaty all the time. There are no blow dryers, makeup, pedicures, hot water or even toilets. There is no time to show your own emotion as you are so concentrated on saving lives that yours doesn’t matter for a while, because you know you will be okay. You try to be strong as the people in front of you who have been through a lot worse.
In editing the movie, those words also rang true but I tried not to think of myself as “in the film.” I thought purely in the logic of four characters and creating a story. I tried to give the four characters equal time but we just didn’t have the footage on all of us and certain characters naturally took the lead. I tried many times to take many of my shots out but my editor was strong and stated that they were important to the storyline. I usually hate being in front of a camera but was really too busy most of the time to notice it.  It’s not like you are in makeup with soft lights--you are exposed in sweating flesh and desperate, ugly moments.
DP: You also didn’t include your caring for Oscar after his bus accident—which you wrote was the hardest of all.
AT: In late August, Oscar was involved in a very bad motorbike/bus accident and was confined to a couch for a few months. For me looking after him, while running the refugee camp and tsunami center alone, was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.  This is not in The Third Wave, which covers only the first five months of our journey in Sri Lanka, up until we all left for the first time. We do have the next eight months on tape, but it is a more personal journey of Oscar and myself. One day I may have the energy to re-visit it in a film but for now I need to change my thoughts.
DP: Comment on something else you wrote in your diary: “I am alone but I won’t let the snake get me! I have the ultimate higher power looking after me.” When such a disaster happens, particularly a natural disaster that killed 250,000, including kids, did you ever for an instant lose faith? 
AT: “I am alone but I won’t let the snake get me.” In the refugee camp I saw things as either good or bad.  Moving forward was good and something that was hurting the cause was bad.  I called it the fight between good and evil. We would plant new coconut trees (good) but over night drunk men would pull them out and destroy them ( bad).
In every turn we were faced with what I called “the snake,” which represented the snake in the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. The snake tempted Eve to eat the apple and to go over to the dark side.
Many volunteers, including atheists, also commented on feeling the presence of the snake and its impact on this island. I took it a little deeper and felt a personal battle between good and evil and I was determined to win no matter what the snake threw at me. There were times when the snake seemed like it was winning but after I was able to take myself onto a higher level of thinking of loving my enemies unconditionally, the snake could not reach me.
One day, a year later, I found a dead snake on the track and I smiled at how pathetic it looked.
I know it sounds very deep and mystical but in these island paradises you begin to think about life very deeply.  I think I made the comment about the snake when everyone had left or was sick and I was the only one left in the village. I felt more vulnerable than I had ever been in my life but so powerful in spirit and faith that nothing could touch me.
I never lost my faith, and the disaster just made it stronger. I witnessed hope for humanity.
DP: What were your feelings when Katrina happened and you were there?
AT: When Katrina hit New Orleans I wanted to go there to help so badly but we couldn’t just abandon this disaster.  There was too much work still to be done and we needed to follow through on this work. I posted an entry on the Web site urging people to go there and gave them a loose road map of how they could do it.
Many Aid workers pulled out of Sri Lanka to go back to help Katrina victims, which made our work even harder.
DP: You became the body collector—did this cause you nightmares?  And if it didn’t, did you wonder why it didn’t?
AT: There were still so many bodies left out there that hadn’t been found and we would go out every other day to collect them. Soon I became known as “the body collector,” and people started bringing me legs and heads in little plastic bags. I guess I just got used to it. Sometimes I would pretend that I was picking up meat but at other times I would imagine the family when they found out that their loved ones had been found.
I never had any nightmares about the bodies I saw, I think the carnage of Sept 11^th helped me with that, but I have developed a strange fascination with the decay of the human body.  I like to look at dead bodies now, they make me feel calm. I think I will stop now before they come and lock me away.
DP: Would other volunteers there have totally different stories than you?  And would their films have been similar or different?
AT: Everyone’s experience over there was different. People were challenged in very different ways. For me it was mental, for others physical.
The volunteers who came for a few weeks faced a whole different reality than the ones who stayed for long periods of time. The long-term volunteers experienced a much harsher reality.
DP: Talk about the amazing soccer game that Oscar and you arranged.
AT: To make a long story short, Oscar decided to arrange a 90 minutes soccer game of peace between the Tamil Tiger rebels in the North and the local Galle district in the south. The game was to be played in Jaffna, a major battleground to the north of Sri Lanka.  They had both been engaged in a Civil war for over thirty years but Sept 11^th taught us not to give into Terrorism so we went ahead. We negotiated with the Sri Lankan Army General and were then taken out into a field full of men with machine guns to meet with the leaders of the Tamil Tiger rebels themselves. Three hours later a soccer match was agreed upon and it was a mighty day.
The week before the match the Sri Lankan foreign minister was assassinated and a state of emergency was declared, and days before the game a policeman was killed in the area, and the day before the match a grenade was thrown into a public office.
We walked into that stadium not knowing if a massacre was about to take place.
The game was a success and both teams celebrated in the same shirts together singing, laughing and sharing a beer.  For one day the war was quiet and Sri Lanka became one.
It was an amazing day and we joked that “it was a good thing that they won!”
DP: How much could you laugh each day there?  Are there memories that make you laugh?  What memory still breaks your heart the most?
AT: When you are in a really bad situation, things can only get better so it was easy to laugh at ourselves and the situations we found ourselves in.  One funny moment I remember was when Oscar was consoling someone who had lost loved ones. He would say “I know how you feel” and many other cliché comments. He was very sincere when he said it, but months later someone dropped off a disaster manual of “What Not to Do in a Disaster Zone” and it said: “Don’t say you know how they feel when talking about a dead loved one because you don’t!” We laughed so hard when we went down the list and saw that we had broken all the rules.
The memory that breaks my heart the most was when a woman I had helped so much for six months denied that I had ever helped her to the chief of the village just so she could get more aid. The betrayal stabbed “E Tu” at me and I felt physical pain in my heart. That is the moment you see me break down and cry in the film.  It broke me.
DP: Talk about your early detection system, which I’m sure is a source of pride.
AT:  I am really proud of CTEC, the Community Tsunami Early-warning Center we have created.  It is still the only one there protecting the whole country. It has a main base open 24 hours a day with eight employed officers who work five-hour shifts monitoring the world’s data on computers for earthquake activity and many different nature elements. It is linked to the Met Department and all the other tsunami centers around the world.  It is also connected to the surrounding villages with speaker systems and to over two hundred community points around the island.  There are ten volunteers in each village to get the message out if there is any danger to the people of the village.
You can have the fanciest tsunami system in the world but you still need to get the message out to the people in the far away villages and CTEC bridges that gap.  We receive calls from all over the country, sometimes more than two hundred calls a day.
DP: When did you realize it was time to leave Sri Lanka? 
AT: I realized it was time to leave the first time I hit a mental and physical wall. Infection in the village was almost healed and we had everyone safely in temporary shelters or new homes before the monsoons hit. I knew it was a time to go and rest but I knew I’d be back because there was still so much work to be done.
I don’t think I have ever really left Sri Lanka but I removed my physical self from the village so the villagers could go back to their normal lives.
I left them with the early warning disaster center to watch out for them, even if it just gives them peace of mind to sleep at night.
I made this film to hopefully bring money and attention back to this region, to the people of the tsunami that were left behind.
DP: Did you feel any guilt when you left that everyone that you’d helped wasn’t appreciative of what you’d done? 
AT: When I left Sri Lanka I learned that you help people because they need help. Never let your ego be hurt if the very people you helped turn around and scorn you. Just help because they need it and you will never be disappointed.
DP: Did your time in Sri Lanka change you or bring out what you already knew was the best in you? 
AT: I can say it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.  I found it brought out the very best in me, as I was able to use all my life-learned skills. I did see it bring out the worst in some others.  When you are taken out of your air-conditioned environment, who knows how you will react--but that is the beauty of it. Everyone is changed and most people meet themselves for the first time in their lives.
DP: Knowing what you know now, how would you have done it differently?
AT: I probably wouldn’t do anything too much differently because it worked.  I would liked to have taken my own translator with me, but that would have been too expensive.
DP: What was it like returning home?  And how bad was it finding you were being evicted? 
AT: When we arrived home to New York, the headlines were obsessed with Brad Pitt and there was no tsunami news around.  I was happy to have a hot bath and a bagel and I just wanted to sleep for a few weeks.
After rebuilding five hundred homes it was hard to come home to an eviction notice. My landlord said, “Next time just look after yourself!  My wife is nagging me to go shopping!”
We joked, “We were now tsunami victims!” and wanted to call up our Aid friends to build us shelter. It was a brutal welcome home to NY and we survived on eating bananas for a few weeks. After this experience material things didn’t matter to us anymore. We were happy to be alive. We had six days to get out of our apartment and my friend Phil Marber helped us pay our rent and it all worked out. It always does.
DP:  How did Morgan Spurlock become involved with your film?  What were his contributions as executive producer?
AT:  When we finally got home we had over 250 hours of footage but we were too broke to survive, let alone make a film. We cut together a 20-minute teaser and sent it to a friend who showed it to “Super Size Me” filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. He immediately responded that “the world has to see this story” and he came aboard as Exec Producer and raised us the finishing funds to comfortably finish the film. He even agreed for profits to go back to Sri Lanka. Morgan is a very fine and humble man.  He said, “This is a very important film, I just made a film about hamburgers.”
DP: How did you go about editing 250 hours of film into 88 minutes?  What did you need to leave out to keep your story focused?
AT: Cutting 250 hours of story into 88 minutes was really hard and we made hard decisions to cut out so much of the story!  But we were thinking that in Sri Lanka it takes 88 minutes just to line up for petrol.
I slowly logged every tape and then sorted it into bins of time, characters, events, etc., and then chipped away at it placing it on long Final Cut Pro timelines. For those familiar with Final Cut Pro, I had to “Control B” a lot of footage, which means leaving it in but hidden with the option to delete it later.
I wanted to cut the footage as if I were making a narrative film with three acts, characters, and an interesting pace.  So I focused on the four main volunteers, treated them as characters, and kept advancing their stories. Any side stories were deleted, and then I made the decision to tell only the first five months of the journey, as that concentrated on the volunteers and illustrated the message of the film, which is “everyone is needed.”
It was hard to let go of so much good footage but I had to separate myself from the volunteer I had been in the footage and become an objective storyteller.
DP: What reactions did you want from people who see the movie?  Were these the same reactions you wanted when you began filming?
AT: I would like people who see “The Third Wave” to think about the possibility of being volunteers themselves. This doesn’t mean they have to go overseas. In the film we have tried to provide a basic roadmap for them to follow, bumps and all.
DP: How was the Tribeca Film Festival experience?
AT: The Tribeca Film Festival was amazing.  It’s a big festival and we were honored to be part of it. We had five sold-out shows with three standing ovations at the end of each screening. We were blown away by the positive response and letters people wrote to us.  It never entered my mind that something like that could happen.  I think we got the volunteer message out and brought attention back to a forgotten disaster that still needs much work to be done.We had been in the editing room for a long fourteen months and had finished the film only three days before the festival started. I loved showing it at Tribeca because of my experiences on Sept 11^th. New York audiences are intelligent but also can be hard and cynical, so if they can enjoy it then I think anyone can.
DP: When is your film playing in your native Australia? 
AT: The Third Wave film is screening at the Sydney Film festival on June 9^th at the Greater Union Theatre. All my family will be there to see it.  I haven’t been home in three years so I’m thrilled.
DP: Do you have a Web site, where people interested in you and how they can see “The Third Wave” can go?  And since, as you say, Peraliya—from where you still receive mail every day asking for aid--and other villages in Sri Lanka still desperately need assistance, do you have a Web site for people who wish to help?
AT: Anyone interested in the film or future volunteering can go to thethirdwavemovie.com Web site and write to us. They can also go to the original refugee camp Web site and read a more detailed diary of my adventures in Sri Lanka. It is located at peraliya.com
DP:  You’ve been living the experience for so long, first in Sri Lanka, and now with the film, so when do you think you’ll be able to move on to something else?  When do you think you won’t be exhausted?
AT: I will always remain involved with Sri Lanka.  In fact, I have committed to a ten-year program running the new tsunami center. I am also heading to Darfur, Sudan, at the end of this year with a bodyguard and a camera to try and make sense of the terrible genocide occurring every day over there.
I will continue to make films with important messages to the world and continue my love for narrative features.  I have been offered to direct many large productions from Kung Fu movies to animated films, so I think I will try and do it all. I just have to sleep for a few weeks and then I think I will be as good as new.
DP: Are you proud?
AT: I feel very humbled to have had this experience and it also has given me a deep confidence that I can do anything in this world.  I just have to have faith and take that first step.