Back at New Directors/New Films in 2019, I was struck by Philippe Lesage’s deeply moving, boldly structured coming-of-age tale Genesis, ultimately naming it one of my top 10 films of its respective year. Half-a-decade later the Quebecois filmmaker has finally returned with a worthy follow-up, expanding on his knack for expertly conceived characters with a wider ensemble. Who by Fire is a lush, intimate, psychologically riveting drama following two families on a secluded getaway in a remote cabin as they contend with career and romantic jealousies. 

I spoke with Lesage while he was in town for the film’s 62nd New York Film Festival premiere last fall, and now sharing the conversation ahead of Friday’s opening at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center and next week’s opening at LA’s Laemmle Theatres. We spoke about expanding his scope, his approach to cinematography, what television will never have compared to cinema, his music-centered sequences, and his forthcoming spiritual sequel to Genesis.

The Film Stage: After Berlinale, did you make any changes to the film? I noticed the runtime was slightly shorter.

Philippe Lesage: There’s five minutes less than that version.

Ah, just decided to trim a little?

Yes, I did the exercise just for the sake of it. And then I was very resistant. It was just about the distribution in France. But I mean, come on: it doesn’t make a lot of difference, two hours and 25 minutes or 41 minutes. But while playing with it, I started to remove scenes after I saw it so many times and I saw it also with an audience in Berlin. And also moments where I felt, “Oh, it’s a little bit long here. It’s a little bit lingering too much.” I really love the new version actually; I think it’s better. I don’t know if you noticed the difference.

I actually only saw the new version.

Okay. Yeah, I simplified a bit the dreams, but I prefer it because, in the last dream, you don’t know if it’s Aliocha or Jeff that’s dreaming. I really like that. Noah [Parker, who plays Jeff] saw it last night, that new one, and he preferred this version, and then also my cinematographer who saw it in Paris. So I think I made a good choice. It’s interesting to play with the film, but I feel like a painter who goes into the gallery when the painting is already there. He’s changing a bit, the colors.

Just starting more at the beginning, your previous two films focus mostly on adolescence. Obviously here you have that too, but  I would say two of the primary characters are adults. What made you want to explore adult characters a bit more?

It’s not like I’m trying to do films about teenagers or stuff. It’s more like the first two films were very autobiographical. That’s the reason why I did the films, and it was revisiting my youth––so there’s that––and then for this one, I thought it was interesting to switch the kind of point of view. Because in the first films, the adults were almost absent. In Genesis, they’re almost like in Charlie Brown. [Laughs] They are out-of-frame. Of course there are teachers at the school, but then I thought it was interesting to really put myself in the shoes of the young people around the table there and perceive the adults through their eyes, even though I’m also telling their stories. That’s the point of view of the film, I think.

Of course, I’m being a bit critical with adults and with masculinity, more questioning––maybe symbolically––patriarchy in general, but really the films never come with an idea. It’s not an idea. It’s characters. It’s a story I want to tell. You can find things in Genesis and this film, also, that are echoing. I also tend to treat subjects… I go where it hurts. I don’t spare myself. I don’t spare others. And I disagree that these are all despicable characters; I think they’re humans with their flaws. I’m interested in showing their flaws. It’s much more interesting for me in films, and even in comedy, to have characters with flaws. That’s what makes a character like Albert also very funny. So yes: it was just a kind of transition towards this perception of still-young people but on the adults.

I really love the cinematography in your films. There’s a controlled warmth to it that really invites one in, where it feels as a viewer you are also hanging out in the cabin with them. Because of that, you’re more taken into the characters, so when perhaps darker flaws are exposed, you’re invested. How do you come up with the color palette you are going to use and these beautiful crosssfades? 

For me, film is really about atmosphere and mood. It’s what I recall when I think about the films that I loved when I was young. Even though the story can be violent or difficult, there’s some aspect to it that you want to live in the film. So I think there’s a little bit of that, that I tried to create: that atmosphere, that house, the woods around, the color, the choice of lenses. We worked with Panavision from the ’70s. There was probably big classics shot with exactly the same camera lens we used for the film. So there was a notion of getting a texture.

I cannot afford to shoot on film because we had a decent budget for this one, obviously my biggest budget so far, but the way I direct the films, I cannot afford film because I’m doing 20 takes on average for each shot––so it’s impossible. Then there’s work in trying to find a texture, anyway, so it doesn’t look like digital. So with Balthazar Lab, the cinematographer on this one––who is different from my previous films, Nicolas Canniccioni––the recipe came very early in the process. And of course the texture is not only about the lenses you’re using or the light you’re using; it’s really also about finding the right locations.

We shot the house in this very old cabin from the 1800s, or the beginning of the century, where it was a fishing club for very rich people that were coming to Quebec in airplanes and then fishing around the region or hunting bears and stuff like that. So that house was completely intact. It was preserved––owners now are actually fantastic––and I had the luxury to go back there and to spend a couple holidays, because they’re very nice and we became friends. [Laughs]

It’s true, though: it’s not about being realistic in it. I’m being very naturalistic in terms of the acting. I really want people to speak in the films like they speak in real life; it’s really the tone that I’m looking for. I want to remove the theater out of [it]. It has to be, for me, very cinematic and like if you’re witnessing these real people having an argument or living something. That’s really the tone that I’m looking for and I’m obsessed with the tone of the film. There’s something a bit impressionistic, I think, in all my films, that I’m trying to create this kind of universe where it’s actually warm in a way and, maybe, yes, it does compensate with the fact that I’m sometimes dealing with very harsh subjects––like, of course, in Genesis and also a bit in this one, even though nobody gets killed. It’s kind of letting the light also be in there. I also believe there’s light in all the characters. Even though sometimes it’s a bit difficult to see in some of the characters, I admit.

Another way your characters exude joy is in the music sequences you have in almost all of your films. I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but how do those come about with the songs you are selecting and how much direction do you give for dance sequences? I’m thinking of the B-52s scene.

It’s a mix of freedom and creating this… that scene is very important because it’s after the wine-gate scene, so there’s a lot of tension around the table, but it’s also very comical; it’s the comedy of life. When you take a step back, there’s many things that are horribly comical. The dancing scene is a moment of relief, and of course all my films are built around music. It’s the starting point of it for me because I start choosing music very early in the process––not “Rock Lobster,” though––and then the music is like guiding me to do my own direction in the writing.

Then one of my greatest joys in life is when you are sitting in the editing suite three years after you wrote the script and then you are putting the music on and you see that it’s working. And sometimes you need to mourn because the song is too expensive and you need to find another solution. But sometimes the plan B is more interesting. I’m very resilient about the little deceptions you can encounter, because every time I had to change an actor at the last minute, I lost somebody, we lost a location––it was always for the best. I pray to the gods of cinema.

It worked out.

Yeah, exactly. I want that to continue.

Noah Parker, Philippe Lesage, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré at Berlinale 2024.

There’s so much about the long conversations that I loved, but there’s one quote, where a character says, “TV is the reason for the moral and intellectual decline of of our age.” I don’t think your movies would play as well on TV since they are so cinematic. I’m curious if you share the belief of your character.

I was a film teacher once, so I put that element that Albert used to be a teacher. Maybe Albert is just slightly a bit older than Blake, but more or less they’re the same age. My other colleagues, they were talking more about the industry, which I found too disgusting to think about, talking about the industry when you are in film school, because if you’re not experimenting there without compromise at film school, then you will never be… I mean, what’s going to happen to you? It’s not a place to make compromises. I was telling my students the importance of getting very personal stories and digging in their own [life], finding that interesting topic that moves them. Scratching where it hurts, in some ways.

It was 2008, 2009 when I was a teacher and TV was a bit shit. And I’m not a huge fan of TV, but I can see that it’s stealing so much now from cinema. But there’s one thing that TV doesn’t steal from cinema and that’s what makes cinema still a relevant art form: it’s not stealing the flaws of films, the “unnecessary” scenes. For instance, you wouldn’t have a five-minute scene of dancing to “Rock Lobster.” Because they would say, “Okay, we got it.” So I like to take risks, and I don’t really care if my films are not perfect because I’m not looking for [it], even though if I think that I did the best that I could do. I like my films, but I don’t have the pretension that they are perfect. And I don’t think I’ve done my masterpiece yet, to be honest. [Laughs]

But that imperfection is also exploring, and it’s taking a risk. Like the end of Genesis, for instance: half of the comments on Letterboxd say they don’t fucking understand anything about the ending, but I think this is the best thing in the film. 

Yeah, I love it. 

So I don’t really care. Filmmakers who are taking the risk, playing with the structure, they’re the ones who are making cinema still relevant. Because otherwise we are being screwed up by TV. TV is a compressor. You can have amazing acting in TV now. You can have good directing when you have money. But it doesn’t really… it’s still a kind of consumption thing. And it’s made to get you hooked on things. While cinema has the possibility to bore you, but then you get a little fantastic reward after the wait. [Laughs] Then you go home and you feel like you’re richer. I’m not a big consumer of TV shows––life is too short––but I don’t really get anything that stays with me for a long time. 

Yes, everything is so resolved.

Yeah, even the best; even if the acting is good. I recently discovered Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer, which I never saw and it was a shock. Then I think about that film all the time, and there’s a spirit there of that film that stays in me and it’s beautiful and it’s beauty. Where are the contemplative moments in TV? So yes: I’m more like Blake in that sense. I believe we need to be fighting the good fight and no compromise. I hope I will not do “Rock Lobster,” the comic series. 

[Laughs] Well, I agree with all of that. You were last here for New Directors/New Films with Genesis, so what was the process and your reaction like when you knew it would be at the New York Film Festival? I know it’s been a long journey since Berlinale.

Well, it’s great. I’ve been wanting to come here for a long time. The thing is––I don’t know if I’m allowed to say––but they wanted [Who by Fire] for a long, long, long time here. They were the first to discover the film. I got an invitation from New York Festival before the film was in Berlin. So they wanted the film for almost two years. They saw many, many films and they still wanted it, which is fantastic. I really like Dennis [Lim] and Florence [Almozini]. I know the film is there because obviously I have no power in the industry and I’m more or less unknown, so it’s not because they need to put my film there because they want to please some entity. [Laughs] So it’s very nice and the film is having a great life. I’m traveling the world right now; I’m going to go on a tour of the world and it’s great. 

What I find also funny is: I’m also going to new festivals. But there’s also festivals that usually love my films and they didn’t invite me this time. But then I’m invited to somewhere else and ––

You make new friends. 

Yes, a new place. It’s also funny because there’s people who are like, “I really love Genesis,” and then they don’t really like this one. Or the opposite. Or they said, “I really loved The Demons and then everything you’ve been doing after that, it’s, you know…” 

It’s a lot of opinions. 

Some people are talking about my old documentaries. “Oh. Is this your best film? The one you did in 2009?”

I was going to ask for your other documentaries. How can you access them? Because I watched The Demons this weekend. 

You can find The Demons, no?

Yes, I watched it this weekend. It was streaming on Prime Video. 

Had you seen it before?

No, I hadn’t.

Did you like it?

Yes, I liked it. It’s interesting to see it as a stepping stone to Genesis, because they are twins a little bit.

It’s a bold film, especially nowadays, dealing with the sexuality of children. It’s a bold subject.

And the documentaries are not as available, right?

Depends. You would need to ask the director for a link. They are difficult to find.

What did you learn the most from the documentaries that you carried through to narrative filmmaking?

It changed my whole perception of what it is to make cinema. I think I had a concept that it was very fiction––very, in a way, American kind of storytelling––and then I tried changing my approach in terms of acting and looking for surprises and accidents on a film set, and not being attached to a preconceived idea of how you are going to make a scene, how you are going to shoot. But in the moment, you’re there and you think, “Oh my God, this is great.” And because the more you prepare, the more you can leave a space for what is unexpected. And I’m looking for the unexpected. So the documentaries, you need patience.

My breakthrough documentary in Quebec––the film didn’t really travel outside of Quebec, sadly enough––was shot in the hospital and it was a spectacle of life and a comedy of life as well, both tragic and funny and human. So there was not a moment where I was not doing something truthful. Because when you go to see the doctor, you don’t care about the guy who is filming. They agreed or not, then once I’m there they were completely like the best actors on earth because they were forgetting I was there. I’m looking for that moment where the actors are forgetting that they are even playing in the film. There’s a very beautiful quote from a Taoist code that says, “The best swimmer is the one that forgets that he’s in the water.” This is great because this is how I see work. Because when you can forget that you’re even doing a film, it’s like, wow. 

It’s like magic. 

Those moments happen. That’s all coming from my documentary background.

To wrap up, you mentioned, for your next project, hoping to have a follow-up to Genesis with some of the same characters. Is that still happening?

Yes, I’m applying for financing now. It’s going to be with Théodore Pellerin and a French-Quebec actor Niels Schneider. He’s a famous actor in France, but he’s from Montreal originally. Of course you don’t need to have seen Genesis to see this. It’s really like…

A spiritual sequel.

Yes, it’s just a name. But basically it’s Guillaume [Pellerin’s character] ten years after. He’s a grown-up and he’s full of passion for a lot of things, but the world doesn’t send him back the echo of his passions so he is struggling, and it’s tough. Like it could be when you’re back in your 20s. I hated my 20s. They informed me, but it was difficult––especially when you carry a flame and you really know what you want to do––and I was really struggling. I wanted to make films and I was uncompromising. I really want to write in a free way as well. It will be the first time I will put my parents in a film. I think they are a little too old because they will be playing 20 years younger, but they’ll have a part. [Laughs]

Who by Fire opens on March 14 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center, on March 21 at LA’s Laemmle Theaters, and will expand.

Initially considered the heir to Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont shocked audiences in 2014 with the heel-turn of his Twin Peaks-inspired miniseries P’tit Quinquin, which (were it not television) would certainly earn the label of An Extremely Goofy Movie. His switch to incorporating laughs into the philosophical brew has produced works like the frenetic Joan of Arc musical Jeannette and bone-dry, Léa Seydoux-starring satire France. His latest, The Empire, sees him playing in the sandbox of the American space opera, affording room for both stunning effects work and some truly vulgar humor.

We were lucky enough to catch up with Dumont over Zoom on the occasion of The Empire’s American release, with interpretation provided by Nicholas Elliott.

The Film Stage: I’d say, more than past films of yours, The Empire heavily incorporates things like complex visual effects and production design. Was this film far more of a collaborative process than previous works?

Bruno Dumont: Yes, indeed it was. The entire special-effects part of the film was a new type of work for me, and I must say it took a little long; it was a little difficult for us to find our way together. The translation of what I wanted through the effects––and particularly in terms of how the spaceships were constructed––it took me a long time to get the people I was working with to where they’re used to going. 

Regarding the design: I feel like there are medieval elements incorporated, such as the cathedrals, people riding horses, and whatnot. Did you see the film as almost encompassing a history of France– the past, present, and future?

Yes, I think that the film, in that aspect, refers to both a universal mythology, but is also directly inspired by local French architecture, which has a medieval tone to it. So the film goes very deeply into the history of human representation and it also connects with a local environment, that north of France in which I am used to filming. In that sense it’s truly a synthesis of these two aspects.

For example: in the north of France there are still a lot of vestiges of World War II, the war with the Germans. So for instance: there are a lot of bunkers, and we use these bunkers to build the spaceships, or the structures of the spaceships. And that was really interesting work to anchor this in the reality of the history of wars while building what remains a science fiction film.

You mentioned northern France, a location very familiar to you. Did the genre of The Empire, science fiction, allow you to work on not just a more epic canvas but also to shoot rural French landscapes depicted in many of your films in a new way? I noticed there were many overhead shots of these landscapes that you don’t necessarily see in your past films. So was that something exciting about the film: being able to shoot the familiar in a new fashion?

Absolutely. You know, I’ve filmed the north of France enough on ground level to want to find a different way to film it. So filming these spaceships was a way to approach themes and characters, also, in a different way––to transform these northerners whom I know into heroic people, celestial knights, which was really interesting for me. It was a question of finding a new dimension for these people and landscapes that I know so well––to transport them elsewhere.

The film deals in the concept of good and evil. Is there relevance in that to how contemporary politicians use that rhetoric, like Marine Le Pen referring to “the evil elites,” or things of that matter? Or were you not thinking of contemporary events at all when conceiving the film? 

The subject of the film is the confrontation between good and evil. From a perspective, if I dare say, that is naturalist on the one hand, where it’s hard to know what exactly good is, what exactly evil is, and then another perspective that’s more intellectual and oriented toward fantasy, where it becomes very clear what is good and what is evil. And so the film is really about confronting these two perspectives. It’s also confronting characters who, on the one hand, are completely imaginary and are very clear representations of good or evil and really come out of the history of cinema––such as, for instance, Murnau’s Faust, who’s evil incarnate, and then characters like Freddy from my own Life of Jesus, where it’s a lot less clear, a lot less visible. What interested me here was the confrontation between these two worlds.

Bruno Dumont at Berlinale 2024

This film is certainly referencing American cinema’s favorite genre of the past few decades, the space opera. But in bringing in the two detective characters from Petit Quinquin, were you also directly poking fun at the idea of intellectual property? Or rather: sequels, franchises, and cinematic universes that have come to dominate American cinema as of late?

Well, first of all, I’m not looking to make fun of American cinema. American cinema really interests me because it’s very present in global culture, so I’m not mocking anything. For instance: the spaceships in the film are not ridiculous. I’m not doing what Mel Brooks did when he poked fun at Star Wars. On the contrary: I think this is a major genre, the space opera, that the Americans are currently masters of. But we have to remember that the sword-and-sandal film was born at the beginning of the 20th century in France and Italy. So that’s genre film at its birth, and genre film belongs to the world. What’s interesting is that American cinema is taking a European tradition. After all, what is Star Wars? Star Wars is basically the Roman Empire. It’s taking a historic genre and making it go galactic. That’s what American cinema is doing. 

You know, it’s always been one story––it’s always been the same story––so in that sense I find the Americans making sequels is absolutely understandable and very interesting. What interests me in cinema is the fact that we have an American cinema, a French cinema, an Italian cinema, a South American cinema. It’s the exchanges between these different cinemas that interest me. That’s the spirit in which I work. I’m not at all caustic in my work. Now, it is true that I like comedies and Americans tend to make these kinds of films in a serious manner where I am working in a more comical vein, which probably is related to European cinema. What interests me is mixing genres, mixing colors, mixing countries. It’s in that maelstrom that we see human nature. You know, man is not simply European or simply American; man is both. We have to mix things or otherwise what we get is a pure race, and a pure race is never interesting.

I saw you say in another interview that star Fabrice Luchini, who you’ve worked with before, initially had some hesitancy about the character, or rather the right way to play it. How much of the job of the director is really working around actors’ insecurities or rather steering them just in the right direction?

You know, when I work with non-professionals, we build the character from that person’s nature. So that’s not so hard. It relativizes and limits the work, but I believe it gives the non-professional’s performance strength and ease. The work is a little bit harder with professional actors because a professional actor is looking to compose or construct the performance. The professional actor is looking for a model to make a composition or construction in the performance. Fabrice Luchini is not someone whose nature is film when he performs; he’s not going to give you his nature. He’s someone who is very nervous, generally, and so his nature forces him to look for a character that he’s going to compose or construct. It was the same thing with him when we worked together for the first time on Slack Bay, it took him time to find the character. But this is work that I find fascinating.

In the case of The Empire, it’s when Luchini found his costume. I’d mentioned Murnau’s Faust to you, and there’s something of Luchini’s hair in The Empire that resembles Faust. It’s when he found his costume that he was able to start composing his character and to understand him. The costume that Fabrice Luchini wears in The Empire is a copy of a costume worn by the great French theatre actor of the 1930s and 1940s, Louis Jouvet, that he wore in the role of Don Juan. So a theatre costume, and Fabrice Luchini loves Louis Jouvet. The mere fact that he wore a copy of something that Louis Jouvet wore structured his work. It gave him the momentum and the confidence to reassure him and take off and play this part. 

It was the same thing when I worked with Juliette Binoche. That’s part of the work with a professional actor: you’re constructing something, and often it takes a little longer than it does with a non-professional. But the professional actors are richer because you have incredible possibilities of colors, but you first have to find them. 

The Empire opens in theaters on March 7.

“Focus the text” commands a translation app pop-up at the mid-point of Matías Piñeiro’s new experimental essay film You Burn Me. It’s a mantra that the Argentinian filmmaker has taken to heart. Using Sea Foam, a chapter from Cesare Pavese’s book Dialogues with Leucò, as a creative catalyst, Piñeiro envisions audiovisual dialogues between characters (Sappho and Britomartis), between actresses (María Villar and Gabriela Saidón), between filmmaker and text. As pertinent pages and mnemonic games unfold, repeat, and recontextualize, the spectatorial thrill of Godard’s Goodbye to Language comes to mind. This a formally bold, playful, reinvigorating work––a love letter to language both verbal and visual.

After a warmly received North American premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival, You Burn Me opens in the U.S. in limited theatrical release this week from Cinema Guild. I first saw the film last June, when it had a U.K. premiere at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Returning to You Burn Me now, I notice details that previously escaped me, and I find myself bringing different focuses, reflections, and points of interest to my spectatorship. Watching You Burn Me is a highly active, participatory viewing experience that profoundly reflects the film’s central concerns, its text, its process, and its form. Sitting down with Piñeiro over Zoom, we expand that text further.

The Film Stage: I want to start by exploring how You Burn Me differs from your past work. You had made many films exploring Shakespeare. Recently, your Sycorax co-director Lois Patiño went on to make Ariel, and you went off in a different direction. What prompted you to depart from Shakespeare towards these new horizons?

Matías Piñeiro: I was initially involved in Ariel, and I was thinking that it would perhaps be my last Shakespeare film. Due to circumstances of scheduling and life and so on, I had to step out from the project. All of a sudden the Shakespeare cycle––a project of ten-to-twelve years––had ended. It was not that I declared “now I finish the cycle.” I had to step out, and then the cycle was over. It was an interesting thing for me.

In the meantime, this other text appeared––the Cesare Pavese text. At first I sort of resisted it because I wasn’t able to fully finish the book; it’s very dense. But then, on a second try, I found this text, the one between Sappho and Britomart: Sea Foam. 

There’s something in there that I hope is exposed in the film, this thing of Pavese––a man of literature who kills himself––projecting himself onto the figure of Sappho. He not only wrote the Sappho lines, which have to do with these ideas of death and desire, but also the lines of Britomart, the [figure that] is accepting life, accepting conflict––coping. For me it was interesting that, in that text, you would have both energies, not just one. That’s why it was important in the film not to fall upon the admiration that you can have for a figure such as Pavese, to instead try to go beyond the romantic myth of the troubled artist.

I do think that the Shakespeare cycle needed to end, in a way. I usually make films because I react to literary texts, such that I somehow feel that they should be put up there. Usually those texts offer a resistance. I wouldn’t say that it was obvious that I would make films about Shakespeare’s comedies. But it was interesting to spotlight those works more than they had been, putting the focus on the comedies that were supposed to be minor, working around that. With Pavese, the text is so dense that it offered me a challenge of what to do with it. Where is the enjoyment of this text? Where is the enjoyment in this resistance? What is it that can be shared?

Why an essay film, rather than something more theatrical?

In 2020, I practiced this more essayistic form with Mariano Llinás, a filmmaker friend from Argentina. We were asked to conduct a video correspondence during the pandemic. Something in that experience opened a gate, which I continued through in You Burn Me. 

I’m not only adapting the text, but also the idea of footnotes. The book is full of footnotes, and those footnotes make the text bloom––they expand the text. I said, “Why not include this information if it’s what is making me have a stronger connection with the text? So what could a footnote be in cinematic terms?” It made me go there very intensely, working with these ideas month after month. It’s not that you fully consciously decide. You suddenly get interested in something, and that something has a question that you aren’t able to resolve. So you insist. And that’s how you work.

Matías Piñeiro

What do you feel this process of deconstructing and reconstructing a text can do for us as artists, as audiences, as human beings?

Maybe understanding that knowledge is pleasure, in a sort of Rossellinian way. Cinema, for me, is a medium to share materials and to multiply them––to invert them, to give variations. We go back to texts and see them differently. I realized, in the beginning, that I hadn’t read the Shakespeare plays. I read them in high school and that’s it. One or two, and I hope that there were no abbreviations of the text. Even with a name like Shakespeare that is so big, you take it for granted and then you lose the detail. So what I like to know is: have you read this little one? Have you read King John, for instance? I know there’s something interesting in this paragraph here, you know.

I like the idea of detail. I hope that we can pay attention to small details, small segments. We provide a lot of stimuli, and I hope that people will connect through different parts of that stimuli. It’s about sharing––enjoying information and seeing things for the first time. Sometimes what happens after screenings is that people want to go out and read the text. It’s a nice thing for me that it expands from the cinema also.

What led you to “You Burn Me” (“Tú me abrasas”) as the key, titular phrase of this film?

Initially, I didn’t intend to title the film that. I knew that I wanted it to be a poem by Sappho. If I had to think fast, maybe the film could have been called Sea Foam––the name of the text that it adapts in full. It was the first time that I was adapting material in full. With Shakespeare, I was just riffing here and there. But then I thought that the title was too much Pavese––what the movie needed to do was to confront Pavese. By making the title a poem by Sappho, I would be shifting the balance.

The movie has this idea of memorizing, of learning by heart. There are a couple of sequences where we play around with this idea of the memory game, to learn Sappho’s poems by heart. The movie also does other things with the text: little adaptations and jokes, or they become dialogues. I thought that making You Burn Me the title would be another way of memorizing it.

I wanted to do three of these memory games. One with a three-word poem, which ended up being You Burn Me. Then one with eight words. And then I wanted one with a lot, like 30. It would be very kaleidoscopic, but I thought that it was a little excessive, so I changed it. But the other two remained.

You have a finished film that almost functions like a thesis––you’re presenting the findings of your research. I’m curious as to whether you feel that your film has a finality to it, or if you feel it’s open-ended, that it expands beyond the film that we see?

I think it’s open-ended. And that’s not just theory; it’s practice. Two weeks ago I premiered a short film that is a preface to You Burn Me. I finished the movie in February of 2024. At first I was going to make a trailer, but then it went off-track and became much more than a trailer; it became an independent thing. Pavese’s book has a lot of prefaces; they’re a key element in the text. And I said, “This is a preface, actually.” It’s an idea that I couldn’t include––the movie actually rejected it––so we had to leave it out. I felt that it would also give context to how the film is before it starts. Maybe audiences are familiar with my Shakespeare films. So now there’s a preface: six new minutes that give a sense of what the movie will be.

When I was shooting I really wanted to keep myself in that state. I didn’t know how the movie was going to be. I started with the idea of the memory game. I knew that I wanted to do something with Pavese’s text. I didn’t know how to shoot it. I filmed around San Sebastián and New York and put shots together to see if this memory game worked. It did, and I continued it. From October 2021 ’til January 2024, I shot almost every month. It’s not that there was a thesis. I was working on a form. I was working on patterns, working and reworking. I was finding the movie while I was making it. I wasn’t pressured to end it, but there’s a moment where you feel that you found a balance. It’s a hybrid between fiction and essay, but it’s not that I had a “point” to make––more that I wanted to move around certain ideas. 

I didn’t want to make Pavese a totem. He’s a wonderful writer; I wish that he wouldn’t have killed himself. But I didn’t want to romanticize his suicide as so many movies do. Myths and the construction of myths are very male-centric, and there’s a lot of mythology in the text. So it was how to work with that and somehow point out how those myths are representing a certain society. All the time, there was the problem of how to bring that text into images and sounds––how to open it up, how to put it in circulation. What is the movement of this text? What are the images that would allow this text to move around? That was my research.

Do you think with the same logic when manipulating images and text? Do they come simultaneously to you, or do you find that mentally editing and manipulating fragments of text versus image takes a different kind of mental acuity?

It required a different way of working for me compared to my previous films. Did I take the scroll to London? I have it here.

[Piñeiro produces a paper scroll, 25 meters long, to which shots from the film have been affixed along a drawn chronological timeline.]

You showed photos of it during the masterclass at the ICA.

Yeah. With this object I was able to find the position of the relationship between images and sound. I wrote the whole text, and then I started associating it with the images that I had. Then I started creating the detours of what the footnotes could be and what images could be related. And then what I was missing, I still had to shoot.

In this process of shooting, writing, shooting, editing, writing, etc., you’re constantly combining. That was something that I also did a little bit in Isabella, my previous film. I printed the shots of the movie, like this, and I would say: “Okay, which one comes first? Okay, this one has to come first.” But then I’d grab another one and say: “Should this go after or before this new compound?” And so on. It was by combining and seeing the results that I found the form. And I needed it as objects. I needed to touch physically, I needed to cut, to print, to manipulate, to carry it in my backpack.

I needed to take time, also. This slowed me down. Same thing with the 16mm. Digital is too fast and it wouldn’t have allowed me to find detours. You fail and you reconstruct. That’s why I’m always shooting: there are wrong paths. You need to rewrite; you need to reshoot. I shot around six hours in 16mm, and the movie is 1 hour and 10 minutes now. There’s a lot that I left out because it didn’t fully work.

You mentioned gender, and it’s an interesting aspect of this film. In your previous films, you centered women prominently onscreen. Here they’re focused through voiceover and the characters in the text. What has that shift done for you and the film?

I think that has to do with Pavese’s text. It’s the only chapter where it’s two women talking in the whole book of Dialogues with Leucò, which I think says something. Pavese seemed to have a problematic relationship with women, and it showed in his work. It’s not so innocent that myth was a way to convey certain ideas of his. So there was a need to review that, and to expand––because Pavese is a complex figure. We should not reduce him. We should expand.

The collaboration that I have with María Villar and Gabi Saidón, the actresses and musicians of the film, is very strong. A movie is an opportunity to meet and to create encounters––to create a life together. In my previous films there was a crew with ten-to-thirteen people. This one was mostly shot between three people. It’s very different––up-close, intimate. That intimacy has to do with friendship. The film was a good excuse to meet and to see what the meetings would provoke. The meeting is not only with humans, but also with books or with a city. It’s the intersection of all these elements. As a man I also needed to have this energy, this relationship with different women. It was important to listen because I was going to have a lot of biases. There were discussions around how the poster should be, for example, with the producer Melanie Schapiro. They helped me to understand how it’s better to think certain things. It’s like a cinema family, in that sense. I’m not the employer, and it’s not an industrial bond.

This is a highly formally inventive film. What excites you formally in cinema beyond your own work at the moment? 

One that’s a big reference for me is Hong Sangsoo because he’s constantly breaking patterns. People think that he’s always doing the same movie, but he’s constantly changing. Of course, not in a psychotic way. It’s not that now he’ll do the complete opposite. There’s a sort of working program, thinking and rethinking. It’s interesting to see how he stops doing the zooms. He’s doing things that he hasn’t done before. That extreme close-up of Isabelle Huppert in A Traveler’s Needs. Then in By the Stream, he comes back more to plot again, like in the films that he did in the 2000s. He’s constantly trying to escape, a bit like the Cheshire Cat. And there’s something about how he merges production with the formal ideas of his films. I’m very interested in how he’s becoming so small. At the same time, the films become so blurry––not only because the image is sometimes blurry, but because the relationship within the shots is very ambiguous. He keeps on pushing certain boundaries in this world of fiction. 

Mariano Llinás made this huge movie, La flor, and then now he’s making these more essayistic, smaller films––one every year, when he used to do one every ten years. I’m really interested in that sort of transformation.

And I’m interested in films by new filmmakers, such as Paula Tomás Marques, a friend of mine who just premiered her first film in Berlinale. I like films by Nicolás Pérez, for instance. Roberto Minervini. Eloisa Solaas––also from Argentina––she did a documentary called Las facultades that is very good. There’s a constellation of films everywhere. I’m, of course, forgetting a lot of great films, but I must say that Hong is making us used to having this meeting with him once or twice a year––which I’m always very excited by, because I think that he’s always running away from what you expect him to be. There’s something very provocative in that.

As a final question: where are you heading next with your cinema? The libraries of the world are vast.

I’m already working on something. I’m working with a Francesco Petrarca text called Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul. It’s cool. I started shooting last August, and I’m shooting more later this year.

It’s always literature. I don’t know why. Or theatre. I think that the thing that I’m seeing as a continuity is that the Petrarca is also a text made up of dialogues––similar to the Pavese. It has this more essayistic side. I’m always going to be making things that are a little bit hybrid, but with this one I want to experiment with form whilst also embracing fiction. I think that fiction can be a way of experimenting. I don’t think I’m going to be shooting text in a book in this one. It’s a fiction film that will have very explorative and curious ways of being.

You Burn Me opens on Friday, March 7 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, accompanied by a special series curated by Piñeiro, and will have its Los Angeles premiere on March 15 at American Cinematheque as part of a series featuring films by the director. 

After decades of celebrated performances in Italian cinema and television, Paola Cortellesi made her directorial debut with There’s Still Tomorrow, a 1940s-set post-war drama that she also co-wrote and leads. Following the matriarch of a working-class family navigating a toxic marriage and a daughter whom she doesn’t want to follow in the same footsteps, as well as romantic fantasies of a better life, the black-and-white crowdpleaser was a massive box-office sensation in Italy, where it is among the country’s 10 highest-grossing films of all-time.

Ahead of the film’s U.S. opening beginning this Friday from Greenwich Entertainment, I spoke with Cortellesi about capturing the specific tone of the film, being inspired by classic Neorealist dramas and comedies, the central mother-daughter story, and why the film has resonated specifically in her county and abroad.

The Film Stage: The film starts with a slap. How important was it to establish the peril of Delia’s daily life right from the start?

Paola Cortellesi: Scene one is like the overture of the opera. It’s the summary of all the things that are going to happen in the film. So it’s about violence, which is clear. It’s violent, but it’s also a little weird, maybe fun, because she goes on like nothing happens; it doesn’t matter. She’s like a lady Cinderella. There’s a song in contrast. It’s a famous song of the time: “I opened a window. And let’s breathe the fresh air of the spring.” And there’s a dog peeing on the basement. So it’s terrible, but it’s also, in a way, fun. And that’s the sense of, well: we will be talking about all of this.

You’ve mentioned being inspired by Italian Neorealism and Italian comedies. Are there any specific films you looked back on when preparing, and how did they help the process?

Well, as Italian viewers we all grew up with neorealism and the Italian comedies of the ’50s and ’60s. So, because we watched it on TV, we all know that. And they were––yes, of course––an inspiration for me. And it comes, also, from my grandmother’s story. It’s a mélange of things, taking from their stories, and I imagine that story through how the cinema told me, and the cinema was the ’40s cinema. I loved specifically a kind of neorealism that we call “pink neorealism,” that it’s about real things, real people speaking in a real language, but also with a romantic side, so it’s sweeter. And I like many of those movies. It’s Campo de’ fiore [The Peddler and the Lady], I could tell you many titles, many with Anna Magnani also. She was also involved in pink neorealism and she was great. She was everywhere.

And so that kind of cinema really inspired me. Then I chose black-and-white because my grandma’s memories came from that time and I imagined that in black-and-white––they were talking to me. So that’s the reason why I chose that kind of style. And then it changes in the first eight-and-a-half minutes. It’s exactly like neorealism; also the square screen and the music up to that time. It’s a fake start, but starting from the opening title, everything changes: the music and the screen and language, the character of the people, and the way of speaking they had.

How did the cinematography collaboration with Davide Leone work? It’s black-and-white but there’s a very specific desaturated look.

We shot with regular cameras, so the real shoot was in color, but I have it on the monitor in black-and-white. Of course, it’s not exactly what you see on the screen. We made so many changes and worked on it. We worked on set with the set designer and costume designer to make some differences between the colors of the costume and wallpaper, for example, because it could be all gray. So we wanted to find a contrast on set, and that was the work.

I loved your use of anachronistic music. Did you decide these early on and was it a way to say these issues still exist in the modern day?

Well, those choices were written and some scenes came from the music. I was listening to some music and the scene came out. I didn’t want to ape neorealism; I didn’t need to do that. I just wanted to do my film with my language. And of course, the subject is about domestic violence, but I wanted to set a film in that time to talk to the present day because we have an issue with domestic violence and femicide and we are counting a femicide, on average, every 72 hours. So we have a problem and my purpose was just to talk about it and where it comes from. Not from the ’30s, because it’s an age-old question. Italy’s changed, but that kind of mentality is here; it’s with us. So, coming back to the music, it’s also about a language. It’s not just about a past time, but it speaks to our present day. So I chose specific songs while writing.

The film really becomes a beautiful mother-daughter story. What was it like writing that aspect of the film? Did you draw from any of your own experiences?

Yes, but not a specific experience. Of course, I am lucky compared to the characters in the film. It’s dedicated to my daughter. She’s 12 now, and when I was writing the film she was eight-and-a-half. As I was starting the script, we were reading a book together before sleeping about women’s rights and history for girls, so it’s great for little young girls. She couldn’t believe that it wasn’t possible that women had no rights. And she kept telling me, “But is it real or is it fake? It’s a story or it’s real?” It was real. So I felt relieved, in a way, because she’s living in a better world and she has rights that my grandmothers didn’t have. I wanted her to be aware of where the rights come from and the fact that rights are not eternal, and this is dedicated not, of course, only to my daughter, but to all the girls and guys that have to focus on these kinds of problems.

While you were writing it, did you envision it as a crowdpleaser, in a sense, or did that come to fruition when you finally saw with an audience?

Well, this is my first [film]. I’m 51 now, so I’m not a little girl, and I’ve been working in this industry for almost 30 years, but I couldn’t imagine [the response] so I just wrote about a subject that I cared about. I knew in writing that maybe I would have touched an open wound because we have an open wound on this subject. And that was my purpose, but I couldn’t imagine what happened.

As the film opens in the United States, is there anything particular to Italian culture that may help expand the experience? And what has it been like touring the film around the world?

I don’t know. My experience until now, so far, I’ve been visiting so many places to release the film. In Europe, in Argentina, and I’m coming from Japan. I’m going to China. In every place––and this is not good news––they felt involved in a way, in their own way. For instance: one of the first releases abroad was in Sweden. And as Italians, we consider Sweden, northern Europe, the most emancipated and most advanced societies. So I couldn’t imagine that they could feel touched by this subject. But they were, because they have almost the same problem. So I’m learning in every place––I’m learning that this subject touches people.

Of course, in Italy we have direct memories from our families because we have great-grandmothers who told us about the time. I’m the last generation, maybe, who had a great-grandmother who was living as a young woman at that time. But we have direct experience and also that type of life, on the courtyard where everyone is screaming and sharing bad and good things with all the others––I think this is a typical way of living. Not now––it’s completely different––but in some areas it’s still the same way. So maybe this is specifically very, very Italian style, but its subject––until now, so far––I think that it’s universal. It is universal. And this is not good news. 

I remember when the film opened in Italy and beat Barbie at the box office, people were discussing connections between the two, about women having more autonomy and fighting for their own rights. I’m curious if you saw Barbie and if you saw any kinship?

Well, Barbie of course, worldwide, has been a great success––also here in Italy. But this was bigger, just in Italy, just because it’s Italian. But it’s something that happens to an Italian movie once in a lifetime. Just once. And this kind of thing happened to me with my first movie. So now I have a problem with how to go on. [Laughs] But yes: I think that in Italy, yes, they felt closer. The same problem, the same issues. Not just the same because it’s about female emancipation, but it’s also about violence. And it’s more specific because, as I told you, we have a problem and people are counting everywhere. And sometimes eating dinner and listening to the news and every 72 hours comes the news that another woman was killed by her ex-boyfriend or ex-husband. It’s the same story every time. Italians are full-up tired of this; it’s very deeply set in our feelings, in our soul. So that’s why I think, in Italy, the film [had more attendance] than Barbie.

With the film being such a surprising success, how does that inform your next project? What are you working on next?

Well, I don’t have a real new project. I’m working on it, and I spent the last year-and-a-half going around the world. And this is a beautiful thing, but I didn’t have time to start a new project. But I’m starting now and, of course, it’s different––even though I’ve been facing the subject in many ways as an actress, as a comedian, as a playwright. So I’ve been facing this and this subject in many ways, so this movie, it’s the end of this. It’s not the end in my life because I keep fighting for for it in every way I can. But the next one, of course, will be a different thing.

There’s Still Tomorrow opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, March 7.

It’s mid-July and I’m sitting in my living room, wondering what Ben Burtt, the sound designer behind some of the most beloved cultural artefacts of the 20th century, will think of the decor. Burtt was born in Jamestown, New York, in 1948. Like many of his contemporaries, his early days in the industry came at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, but it was on Star Wars (1977) that Burtt made his name; with a tactile approach to foley work that led to the creation of many of the film’s most enduring sounds, including the hum of the lightsaber and Chewbacca’s roar.

In most cases, that would be enough to cement a legacy, but Burtt was only getting started. Around the same time, he challenged his colleagues to use a recording of a shrieking man in as many movies as they could—an in-joke that later became known as the Wilhelm Scream. Then, in the early ’80s, he began a collaboration with Steven Spielberg that resulted in the Indiana Jones films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and three Academy Awards. J.J. Abrams would eventually call. So would Pixar. When we hear Wall-E talking now, that’s kind of Burtt talking. When Darth Vader breathes, that’s kind of him too.

Eventually, my laptop flickers and Burtt’s face emerges from the pixels—calling from the Locarno Film Festival, where he’s just received a lifetime achievement award. I start by thanking him for all his contributions to cinema—a genuine sentiment that briefly catches the modest veteran off-guard. In conversation, Burtt has a calm and delightful way of speaking, with a sense of humility that feels characteristic of his generation of below-the-line, Hollywood craftspeople—not to mention a handy skill for anyone frequently asked to recount a story they’ve told a gazillion times. For a lively half hour (edited here for clarity) we spoke about his early days in the industry, the things he still likes to hear and not hear at the movies, and the quest to record Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch.

The Film Stage: I wanted to start by asking about one of your earliest films. I bought a DVD of Death Race 2000 when I was 14 and probably watched it 20 times. To later understand how influential it was, both for Roger Corman and you, was fascinating to me. How did you get involved in that? You must have been, what, 25 at the time?

Ben Burtt: I was just finishing my graduate work in University of Southern California film school and I wanted experience and needed a source of income. Another student and I found that we could get immediate employment as sound editors on very low-budget films being made in the backwaters of Hollywood. Richard Anderson, my friend, was cutting some sound at that time for New World Pictures, which was Roger Corman’s company, and they were doing Death Race, and they needed sound for those futuristic cars. They knew that I loved sound effects as a student, so they asked me to make up a library of exotic, crazy car sounds. The first things I made were for the trailer, which was being cut by Joe Dante, who became a famous director but at that time was a frantic, frazzled young man cutting film on a Moviola. I spent two weeks arranging sounds from airplanes and jet planes and other strange motors that I had in my collection. It was the first film I ever put sound into in Hollywood.

Did you stay in touch with Corman?

I actually didn’t meet Corman at that time. I knew who he was, of course, and like most students I’d grown up watching his low-budget exploitation movies. It was a few years later that I actually had a very nice meeting with him. It was after I’d done Star Wars, and I was traveling to New York and we ended up sitting next to each other on a flight. Of course I knew who he was and, strangely enough, he knew who I was. He congratulated me on the success I was having. Then I told him I’d worked on Death Race and he said, “Oh, yes, I guess that’s right. We loved those sounds.” It felt like a special endorsement having a compliment from Roger, because I admired his work. We all love the underdog filmmaker, the ones who can have a lot of limitations and still pull off something that was entertaining and had dramatic value.

Do people ever ask you to do the Wall-E voice?

Wall-E is really my voice effected electronically, so I can’t do it live. But the irony is that mothers will come up with their five-year-olds, usually a little girl, and the mom will say, “Do Wall-E for Ben,” and the little kid will go, “Wall-eeeee,” just perfectly. Why did they hire me? I don’t know. Humans are great impersonators––once we’ve heard something we can mimic a lot.

I wondered, after so long in your career, are there still moments when you’ll hear something in a film and think, “Wow, that’s cool,” or “that’s interesting,” or “that’s clever”?

Not that often anymore, but there are films that really stand out to me as having very interesting material. I still study as if I’m a film student. You learn to enjoy films on two levels: to be entertained or affected emotionally while at the same time running another input channel where you’re aware of the process––especially if it’s someone you know. I, of course, admire the work of Richard King, who did Master and Commander, the Peter Weir film, which I think is one of the most extraordinary sound jobs of all time. Because the ambience of the ship, the historical recreation of it, there’s so much detail. You can tell, with a film like that, that the filmmaker planned ahead of time and had the budget for the sound people to do their job, to take time to research all the types of sounds they might need to create a sailing ship.

A lot of those things are faked, of course, but I know that King went out into the desert with sails at the back of his truck to get the flapping and a little creaking. I greatly admire that. Of course, he did Oppenheimer more recently, which I thought was a very stark attempt to be hyper-realistic. None of the sound in that film glorified anything; it just seemed like they were giving you the facts. The films I’m known for, you’re magnifying everything, you’re exaggerating things, you are extending reality into surreal environments.

What about working on a project like Lincoln, say? Do you have a very different approach or does that come down to conversations you’ll have with the director?

Of course I’d worked with Spielberg on Indiana Jones and E.T., so I had a relationship with him, but I was very excited to have the opportunity to work on both Lincoln and Munich. I generally don’t get to do a film that’s quiet, where you get to have subtleties in the soundtrack, so it was kind of a new genre for me. Lincoln in particular: there are no battle scenes or monsters, certainly no robots. So I thought, “Wouldn’t it be challenging and fun to try to record things that Lincoln may have actually heard in his life?”

There are a number of good examples. Firstly his pocket watch. In the original script there were a couple of scenes that involved Lincoln and his watch alone together, using it as a kind of focal point for his meditation and thinking. The scene was greatly reduced in the final cut, but when I first read that I said, “We’ve got to record the real watch,” so I set out on a quest to find one. The Smithsonian in Washington had one locked up in a safe, and they were frightened to actually take it out and touch it, to wind it up, in case they broke it.

They eventually said “no,” but I found a second watch that came down through Lincoln’s family––from his son, Robert, which was in the Kentucky Historical Society. When I called the curator he was fortunately a Star Wars fan, and so he understood who I was and what I was asking for. So for the first time in 160 years, that watch was activated and we recorded it in their archive. We also had a clock in the movie that Lincoln had in his office at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, which is still in the White House today. We got permission to go in there and very carefully, without touching it, record it ticking.

Wow.

And across the street from the White House, the bells of St. John’s Presbyterian Church, which are still the same. They even pointed out a wooden seat in the congregation where he sat, so we actually did some foley there, getting up and moving, which was creaking he might have heard. We went a little extreme on it. We found the buggy that was his and we did the doors on it and the leather suspension squeaking as it moved. Obviously we weren’t advertising the fact that these were authentic to the audience, but it gave us a sense of purpose creatively.

I really find that stuff kind of beautiful. Like on Titanic, Cameron having all the plates in the dining hall stamped with the White Star logo, even though we never see it.

Yeah, what does it matter? But it mattered to us. I think it matters to the creators. It injects something into the movie that’s hard to define.

Ben Burtt on the set of Return of the Jedi

And on the other end of things, do you have any kind of pet peeves in terms of sound? For someone so hyper-sensitive to it, it must be like nails on a chalkboard sometimes.

[Laughs] You mean a really specific example? I’d hate to criticize peoples’ work.

No, of course. I don’t mean to call anyone out.

I would say what bothers me the most, in the general listening of films that I encounter, is the lack of sensitivity to the use of sound effects and music. That relationship. I love film music––we know the power the music has––but having music all the way through can devalue the music because the audience gets tired, because you’re using the same channel to reach them emotionally. Better films have areas of no music. I think that early filmmakers, the first that worked in synchronized movies, discovered that you needed to have a sensitivity to dynamic range. You had loud parts, soft parts, parts that were thin and simple, parts that were thick and full of sound. To me, the populist Hollywood films of today have lost that sensitivity. To make something seem louder in a movie, you have to precede it with something quiet, to have that contrast. Silence can be your friend. There’s been a few films that have done silence in recent times. The Zone of Interest.

That’s funny: I was actually going to ask you about it. It must have been interesting for you, when a film comes out like that and the sound is such a huge part of the conversation.

The idea of a film in which you’re using sound to stimulate the audience’s imagination, to let them complete the imagery, that’s a great idea. I had a tape recorder from a very early age, which was an unusual tool in the 1950s, and I would record movies off television and then listen to them back, no picture––just listening, over and over again, for entertainment. I was amazed at how the sound could stimulate imagery in my imagination, allowing me to generate a story in picture. That’s the great thing about sound: we have these experiences in our lives where we heard sounds and we connect them with our experience. It’s a real magic trick when you can capitalize on that relationship by having offscreen sound, or sound unseen, cause you’re adding visual dimensions to the movie. It’s a great approach, and every so often the subject matter of a film allows that sort of thing to happen.

I’m legally obliged to ask about the Wilhelm Scream.

[Laughs] Everyone’s obliged.

I remember reading about it a long time ago, so I tried to find the article. The first mention I could find was 2006, which I guess was around the time when people outside the industry started to know about it. There was the James Blake song…

Yes!

I’m just curious how it’s been, to see the life that it’s had, especially the last twenty years or so.

Yeah, 20 years! Well, to be honest, on some level I’m kind of embarrassed because it was a joke––an old sound effect which I heard in many movies as a child. It stuck in my mind because I thought it was amusing that it was used over and over again for different characters in westerns and science fiction movies in the 1950s and ’60s. So I eventually extracted a copy of it and put it in my student film. Then, in the time when I was working under Roger Corman––the Death Race era––I put it in a few kung fu movies. Someone would get kicked and they’d fly through the air and we’d put a Wilhelm in and get a big laugh.

It was a private joke between me and Richard Anderson, a student friend. Later we did Raiders of the Lost Ark together and shared an Oscar [for Last Crusade]. So for 25 years or so, Richard and I would put it in every film we worked on, as a kind of competition. I would sneak it into Indiana Jones and he would put it in Reservoir Dogs or something, and he would call me up and say, “Did you hear it, did you hear it?” It just went on like that anonymously. One of our friends, I won’t mention by name, knew that we were doing this and put the story on the Internet, and once that happened people were listening for it.

Ah, so it was a leaked thing?

It was leaked information. I don’t remember the exact chain of events but I had made a little documentary about it for in-house use at Lucasfilm, just to show among our editors and people. You make little behind-the-scenes things just to show at crew parties or something. I was testing out an invention George Lucas had called the Edit Droid, an early picture-editing system, and I needed something to cut, so I made a little documentary about the Wilhelm and that got a real laugh inside Lucasfilm. After that, the information got leaked out and there was no stopping it. A copy got into Peter Jackson’s hands and into Lord of the Rings. It got into commercials and all the Pixar movies. It was like a fire you couldn’t put out.

The other thing that you’re most often asked about is the lightsaber hum. I do really like the story, just the fact that one of the most iconic sounds in cinema comes from a projector. There’s something kind of poetic about that.

Yeah! I realize that: there’s something wonderfully ironic about it. That sound, just about anyone you meet knows it. It was probably the first sound I actually made for Star Wars because I had an immediate inspiration. I was a projectionist, so I knew that motor had a wonderful, sort of musical hum, so I recorded that right away. Shortly after, I recorded a buzz from the back of a TV set, where if you put a microphone really close to it it would induce an ugly buzz. You take the buzz and the hum, you mix them in a different ratio––a bit more buzz for Vader, a bit more hum for Ben Kenobi, about a quarter tone off from each other––just to distinguish them in the first fight. So yeah: when I made those I didn’t think I’d be talking about them 47 years later.

And here we are.

My goodness.

Through the story of the religious leader Papá Liborio, Nino Martínez Sosa’s 2021 film Liborio deftly contends with the cultural, spiritual, and political forces of a colonized Dominican Republic. After establishing a Black, self-sufficient community in the rural hills of the San Juan province of the Dominican Republic, Liborio and his followers endured pressures and pushback from the government and occupying U.S Marine forces. The dramatic changes that took place in the D.R. during the early twentieth century revolve around the struggle for independence and power. 

Ahead of the film’s screening from February 24-28 at NYC’s Mishkin Gallery, I spoke to Sosa about what it was like to research and shoot this film in the remote mountain villages where Liborism is still practiced today, the effect of colonialism throughout the Caribbean, and how cinema can be a tool for inspiring empathy and change. 

The Film Stage: Let’s start with how you got into filmmaking. What attracted you to this medium? 

Nino Martínez Sosa: I have always been drawn to all forms of art expression. From a very young age I began to approach music through the guitar, I wrote poetry, and I ventured into the school theater group. So I saw in cinema the way to bring all this together and develop them. I believe it is a very comprehensive medium where one can explore the essence of what makes us human and, through this, attempt to foster change in society––a change that, even if minimal, I believe should be one of the functions of art. 

What movies did you watch growing up, and who are some key influences, in film or any of the other forms you’re drawn towards? 

As a child I grew up watching Hollywood films from the ’70s and ’80s. I vividly remember movies like Star Wars, E.T., The Goonies, and Indiana Jones. But in my teenage years, when my passion for cinema became clearer, I began to seek out different kinds of films––films that, unfortunately, I hadn’t had the chance to enjoy up until that point. I was lucky enough to work at a video-rental store, which gave me access to hundreds of titles. That’s where I discovered the films of Buñuel, Pasolini, Bergman, Glauber Rocha, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the French New Wave, silent cinema, and Italian neorealism. You could say whenever I didn’t fully understand a film, I felt particularly drawn to it. I would watch it again and sometimes, the more I watched it, the less I understood. 

That quality some films have––the way they continue to take shape in the viewer’s mind––fascinated me. It was like an oracle that needed to be interpreted in order to extract meaning. From that moment on I realized I wanted to approach filmmaking in a similar way––not by spoon-feeding everything to the audience, but by allowing them to be an active part of the process. 

Nino Martinez Sosa

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, did you hear of Liborio? When did you first learn about the man and story? 

Liborio’s story has not been well-addressed by our historiography. I was unaware of the true dimension of Liborio and had only heard of him in a very superficial way. Perhaps the first person I heard mention him was my third grandmother, María, who had worked in my maternal grandparents’ home since my mother was born and helped raise me. She was from San Juan de la Maguana, and within the rigid and conservative standards upheld in my grandparents’ home, she kept a small altar of popular religiosity in her room. 

In my house there was little talk about any form of Dominican popular religiosity. The prevailing Catholicism was accepted as the unquestionable dogma, and everything else was dismissed under the stigma of “witchcraft,” which immediately disqualified it. My father, who was very proud of his Black heritage, wasn’t very Catholic and had all kinds of ritual drums in our living room, and every now and then he would be invited to a palo gathering. He would load the drums into the trunk of his car and disappear for an entire day. But they never let me go with him. 

There was also a merengue by Luis Díaz about Liborio, which may have been the first direct mention I heard of him and the myth that he never died. But my real interest in Liborio arose when I began to realize that he was a figure who embodied the three heritages that shape Dominican cultural identity. Liborio’s story also unfolds against the backdrop of the great transformation that took place in the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the 20th century, when commercial capitalism fully took hold––first through U.S. influence and later through its invasion. It was during this time that large estates were established, most of the land was registered and sold, and peasants transitioned from being landowners to working for landlords who lived in the cities. The fact that all of this converged in a single figure fascinated me. The more I learned, the more convinced I became that I had to do something about it. 

You spent eight years researching and making this film. Can you tell me about what the research process was like? What were some challenges and surprises? 

I first arrived in Maguana Arriba, Liborio’s village, during the patron saint festivities on St. John’s Day, and I was welcomed with open arms by the entire community; I quickly made some friends. I always went with a camera and mentioned that I wanted to bring Liborio’s life to the screen. At the same time I began searching for everything that had been written about him––articles, books, recordings. Since I spend most of my time outside the Dominican Republic, I took advantage of every return trip to go back to La Maguana, reestablish those friendships, and interview the elders whom I risked never seeing again. I stayed to live with them for a while––bathing in the river, eating their food, and using their latrine. Later, I traveled through the heart of the mountain range, visiting the hard-to-reach places where Liborio had moved during his escape.

The big challenge was giving shape to all those accumulated experiences while also honoring the belief that remains alive in the valley. My greatest surprise was the level of acceptance I received from the people I approached––their eagerness to have their story told. At first I thought I would encounter a hermetic cult that I wouldn’t be able to access easily, but the experience was the complete opposite. It’s an inclusive practice where everything fits because they are clear that the experience of transcendence is the same, no matter what name you give it. 

I like this notion that transcendence is the same regardless of the means used to arrive there. I’m wondering if, during your research, you went through (or were in search of) a “transcendent” experience. 

It’s complicated to define why I started searching for Liborio and where the interest in getting close to those people comes from. On one hand, there’s the lack of knowledge about [him as a] figure and their way of understanding reality. The desire to learn more about an unknown past with mythological undertones. The desire for reconnection with my Black past, with my father as the representative of that Blackness. 

The disconnection between the countryside and the city is huge, and I come from a mixed family where my father was from the countryside and my mother was from the city. Maybe that’s why I have this huge interest that persists in having true and meaningful experiences with people from the countryside. So Liborio was a gateway for me to get closer to the rural world and popular religiosity. 

You shot on location and with some people that actively live and believe in Liborism. What was this experience like? 

Filming in the mountains with a crew of almost 40 people was a highly complex production challenge. Sometimes, to reach the set, we had to walk several kilometers through the mountains, and on top of that, the weather was often bad. It rained every afternoon, which heavily impacted the shooting. We had several accidents––mostly due to insect bites, people falling off the horses transporting them, or slipping in the mud while walking. Fortunately, none of them were serious or of major concern; they just became anecdotes. I had trained physically for a triathlon, knowing that the shoot would demand a lot of physical effort, but not everyone on the team was in the same condition. The crew jokingly called the film “Liborio Fitness.” What we all knew for sure was that we couldn’t have filmed the movie any other way; being able to access beautiful, magical places that had never been filmed before was a luxury we couldn’t waste.   

Working with the local people was also something wonderful. I already knew many of them and had maintained a close relationship, but for many others it was the first time I had met them. And yet we found open doors and a constant willingness to cooperate. That also boosted the crew’s morale; seeing the townspeople so involved made all of us want to give our best. The circle was completed when we brought the finished film to Maguana and screened it in a plaza packed with people. 

Why did you choose to present this story as historical fiction versus a documentary?  

Because, at that time, my approach to the subject had more to do with a mystical text than with a historical essay. And for this, the form of that hybrid fiction that the film ultimately became suited me much better. Now I’m finishing editing a documentary on the same topic, which I’m making using all the material I generated during the years of research as a foundation. So that dual approach of poetry vs. essay was also present in my mind. I chose one over the other, but I didn’t discard the documentary. 

Liborio is subtle in its handling of specifics and details, but effective in capturing the feeling of power, lore, and spirit around the man and the movement. This is achieved in part by your approach to telling the story through the lens of seven different characters and their relationship with Liborio, creating (as you’ve said) “a cubist portrait of the myth, the character, the belief.” After making this film as a writer, director, and editor, how has it informed or changed your approach to storytelling? What do you think makes a good story or good storytelling?

There are many conclusions I’ve reached throughout this process, and I think I can summarize them as follows: cinema has to move you. It must touch the core that makes us feel alive. It shouldn’t just entertain, but also provide sensations that generate emotions which then develop into feelings. Cinema should serve as a doorway to the transcendent; it should help us approach the mystery. Through perception, it should take us to places we can’t reach in any other way. It’s not about understanding but about experiencing the ineffable, and––from that experience––proposing a cosmic perspective on the issues that make us grow as individuals. Cinema must be a generator of empathy. It should show the “other” so that we can discover ourselves in them. It should teach truth––that common denominator that defines us as human beings––and from there create a bond that unites us and helps us build community and tear down walls. Cinema must seek identity, the lost primordial paradise. 

As a representative of the diaspora, I ask myself where I come from to know my present and try to foresee where I’m going. I discover my identity through the denial of what I am not and the affirmation of what I am. I learned to look in the mirror and integrate that fragmented identity shaped by the violence that defines the Caribbean. Cinema must serve to recover memory. It should rescue fragile manifestations that haven’t been sufficiently highlighted. It should help showcase orality that has served as a refuge for an ancestral way of understanding life. 

Something that stood out to me was how the film depicts certain contradictions. For example: the U.S. forces coming to install “peace and order” and instead inflicting destruction and violence, or government officials feeling threatened by Liborio and his community because they live outside the realm of “conventional” society. For me, all of this expresses how enacting a deeply human desire to live freely on the land––to be self-determined and have agency in one’s life––is seen as a threat to political powers and agendas. What do you take away from this story? What does Liborism mean to you?  

The role of the United States in Caribbean politics has always been very ambiguous. As the heir to colonial empires, the U.S. imposed a way of understanding life inherited from European modernity. This imposition was meant to control, as neo-colonies, all the countries within its sphere of influence. In our country it began with the appropriation of customs and the introduction of economic control mechanisms, and it ended with the loss of sovereignty through a military invasion in 1916. This didn’t just happen in the Dominican Republic; Haiti was invaded a year earlier, and Cuba and Puerto Rico a decade before had also come under control. 

An agro-industrial model of large estates was imposed, promoting the monoculture of sugarcane; the plantation policy that the Spanish had brought centuries earlier was being reenacted. Liborio opposed this. Not from a political standpoint, but by creating a social movement that used religion as a form of resistance to reclaim an ancestral heritage that history had denied. A way of life based on community, demanding that the land should belong to those who worked it.  

For me, Liborio becomes an example to follow: an exceptional man, a great leader, someone who never hid his peasant identity, a man who united, who accepted, who tore down walls, and whose life marked a horizon of hope for all of us who approach his figure. The journey of the film, my personal journey, is about understanding that those people I once felt were “other” are actually myself––that Liborio’s assassination is part of “my” history, that those landless and hungry individuals who still keep the flame of Liborismo alive today are part of who I am. Integrating that past with my present is the very reason for all of this. That’s why, today, I can affirm that Liborio is still alive. 

Liborio screens from February 24-28 at NYC’s Mishkin Gallery.

Two decades ago, stop-motion animator Adam Elliot burst onto the scene with his wonderful short Harvie Krumpet. Following a man cursed with lifelong bad luck, it earned him an Oscar and introduced the world at large to Elliot’s wicked sense of humor, massive heart, and singular animation style. A little ugly, a little beautiful, wholly of itself, Elliot’s stop-motion work set itself apart from the worlds of Henry Selick and Nick Park. His clay creations––misshapen, lovingly rendered people––live lives that are equally comedic and tragic. His work always veers into the existential, mirroring his own life experiences. 

Calling his work “Clayography,” Elliot likes to think of it as animation for adults. With death, disease, and calamity, the films run the gamut of human existence. While he doesn’t soften the realities of things like obesity or addiction or death itself, there’s a warmth, a hilarity to the disaster that allows for it to be taken in by all ages. In addition to the handmade, textured style he employs (nothing is made from anything but raw materials), it’s this quality that sets him well apart from animated contemporaries. Where Pixar infantilizes deep concepts like death or race or equality––rightfully so; their audiences are, in fact, children––Elliot’s work forces the audience to engage head-on. 

Twenty years after that career-altering Oscar win, Elliot is back on the awards stage with the tremendous Memoir of a Snail. His second feature finds the director exploring many proclivities: death, addiction, and otherness, this time tracking the life of a would-be stop-motion filmmaker, Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook). We meet Grace at the end of a life––not her own, but her best (re: only) friend Pinky, an eccentric, elderly woman. As she lets her beloved snail Sylvia go, she sits in Pinky’s backyard and recounts her life story. Grace and her brother Gilbert enjoyed a poverty-stricken but loving life with their widowed, alcoholic father, a former Parisian street-performer, until his untimely passing. Separated by the state and placed into different foster homes, Grace’s life tumbles into a series of misfortunes. With only her pet snails to keep her company, Grace finds comfort in overeating and hoarding, her spiral rendered by Elliot with loving empathy.

As depressing as all of this sounds, Elliot’s trademark oddball humor provides a balm to engaging with these dark, innately human struggles. His “blobby,” clay creations are some of the most human characters you’ll ever see onscreen. 

Ahead of the Oscars, I sat down with Adam Elliot for a deep dive into portraying disability and disfigurement in an empathetic way, coping with mental illness, persisting in a “dead-medium,” and so much more. 

The Film Stage: I adore the fact that your work often circles back to this Kierkegaard quote: “Life can only be understood backwards, but you must live it forwards.” You used it in your short Uncle years ago, and then you used it again here in Memoir of a Snail. Was there a lightbulb moment where you were like, “Oh, this quote applies so perfectly to the life of a snail”?

Adam Elliot: It’s actually one of my favorite quotes, and yes: I’ve reused it because I love it so much. And when I used it in my student film––I love quotes, I collect quotes, I’m always quoting quotes, and I came across that when I was in my mid-20s and it was such a profound revelation. But in some ways it’s quite a trite quote, isn’t it?  It’s quite a simplistic quote, but I still think it is profound in its simplicity, and it’s something I certainly try to adhere to with my own life. I’m a worrier; I worry. I am on the OCD spectrum. I obsess about everything and I waste so much energy and time worrying about the past. So I’m always trying to remind myself: forget yesterday. It’s about today, tomorrow. And so with this film, I did always want to put in a couple of quotes that I like, and this one kept coming back to me because it did seem to be just right for the film.

It did seem to have a real importance to Grace as a way of her breaking free of her addictions and dealing with trauma and loss, and that she needs to purge and move forward to become a whole person again. So yes: of course I wished I’d written that quote. It’s not my quote, and I always tell people it’s not my quote––it’s Søren Kierkegaard’s quote. I think I might’ve heard it when I was in high school, but then it really struck me when I was in my mid-20s. But yeah: I worried, actually, it was too simplistic for this film. I think as I’m getting older and more philosophical and existentialist, I thought, “Oh, no––it’s not profound enough.” But it turns out young people particularly are quoting it on Letterboxd and in social media. To them it’s a revelation; I think, to older audiences, well: we’ve all heard it before. [Laughs]

Your work often deals in disability or disfigurement or disease. In Harvie Krumpet, he’s living with Tourettes and addiction. Here, Grace has a cleft palate. She deals with obesity and hoarding. Animation has historically shown these sorts of things in a mocking light. But what I love about your work is that there’s such an obvious empathy for them. It’s never leering. What does it mean to you to present a sort of representation for folks who may be living with these various conditions?

Oh, sure. Great question. Look: it’s very important because these characters are my family and friends and I’m respectful of them, and there’s a lot of sincerity that goes into the writing, and I want the representations of them to be as accurate as possible. So for example: my last film, Mary and Max, was about my real pen pal in New York, and I really wanted to make sure I got his version of what it’s like to have Asperger’s as accurately as possible. So he was my guide. I spoke to psychologists and experts in Neurodivergence and the Spectrum. And again: with this film, it’s based on my real friend who was born with a cleft palate, so Grace’s childhood mimics the experiences she had. And so yeah: I’m fascinated by the human mind. I’m fascinated by mental illness. I’m fascinated by the things that we wish we didn’t have.

And I think what I’m trying to say with all my films––and it’s only in retrospect that you really start to psychoanalyze yourself––that I think I’m trying to say is that we all have flaws. We all have things we wished we didn’t have. And a lot of them aren’t flaws. They’re actually things that should be celebrated about ourselves. And it’s about embracing your flaws, but also other people’s. I mean, I certainly have my fair share of things I wished I didn’t have. It’s quite a long list, but now that I’m in my 50s I’ve learned to accept a lot of them. There’s a few. I wish I had hair. [Laughs]

To that point, something I often think about is how collecting is such a human trait. I mean, behind me you see a ton of movies, and those are only two shelves of many all over my apartment. I know that this was sort of based on discoveries you had made about your father’s hoarding after he had passed and you were going through the garage. And I’m wondering: what do you think causes the jump from collecting into full-on hoarding? Where do you think that impulse comes from?

Psychologically––well, according to psychologists––it’s when shame kicks in. For the hoarder, it’s when it becomes a problem and it becomes a dysfunction. So extreme hoarders rarely invite people around to their homes––they’re shameful of what is inside––and more often than not, extreme hoarders have suffered a high degree of trauma at some point in their lives. And often it’s the loss of a child or a sibling or a twin, and that the hoarding becomes a coping mechanism to deal with that. Not in every case, but more often than not severe hoarders have had something really traumatic happen to them, and it’s a lot to do with loss and that they can’t bear any more loss in their lives. So they collect all this stuff and that becomes sort of a comfort zone around them––a buffer and a shield.

And I know, for my father, he battled depression throughout his life. He never felt comfortable in his own skin. And I see now, in retrospect, that all this stuff he had was some way for him to go and sit in amongst it all and feel protected, almost like a womb. It became this sort of comfort zone. And I wish, in retrospect, I’d actually seen that. But it’s only through analysis and research that I’ve come to realize that. So yeah: I mean, there’s nothing wrong with collecting. I celebrate collecting. But it’s when that becomes dysfunctional and something you wish you didn’t have in your life. 

We’ve been going heavy here for quite a bit, so I want to pivot to something lighter. Your characters have an unbelievable amount of personality. The people in your films look so absurd, but they also feel like people that you would pass on the street. Specifically, the one that I keep coming back to––one I think is a fan favorite for this movie––is Pinky. I feel like I’ve met so many older, fearless women in a bar who have stories to tell and they never get that opportunity. Was there a “Pinky” in your life?

Yeah, I know a couple actually. I’ve always been fascinated by older men, older women who’ve let go of a fear of embarrassment. They’re free spirits and they’re somebody that we aspire to think, “Oh, if only I could have that carefree attitude.” And a lot of people get that when they get older. A lot of people don’t, but Pinky’s based on three people. So there’s a bit of my mother in there, but also a woman I met at an animation festival many years ago at a bar. She was telling me her life story. She was very colorful, visually. She told me that she was one of the founders of the Burning Man Festival here in America. And she told me once she played ping pong with Fidel Castro. I thought, “You’re kidding.” I didn’t believe her at first, but it was true! And so I collect these anecdotes.

And also there’s a woman in my apartment building back in Melbourne whose family started the Ghirardelli Chocolate Empire in San Francisco. She fell in love with an Australian, moved to Australia, the family lost a fortune or something; I don’t know. She didn’t end up with much money, but she’s led a colorful life as well. She swears, she hits people with a walking stick, and I just love that flamboyance and eccentricity. And actually my next film I’ve just started writing––because Pinky’s been such a successful character––I really now want to tell the story of an older person. Not just for comedic value, but this character will have dimension and tragic parts of their life as well.

The people that bring your characters to life, the great casts that you have, especially in this movie––Jackie Weaver as Pinky and Sarah Snook as Grace––they’re giving such full-bodied, lived-in performances. My typical beat as a film journalist is action cinema. There’s been a lot of talk over the years about how there isn’t a Stunt Oscar. I think the same argument could be made for a Voice Acting Oscar. What are some of the challenges that come with having to direct a performance knowing it’s going to be V.O.? 

Yeah, look: it is very challenging. And the wonderful thing that just happened this week was back in Australia, Sarah and Jackie both won Best Actor and Supporting Actress in their categories at our version of the Oscars, the AACTAs. And that’s the first time that’s ever happened. I’m sure there were some disgruntled nominees who were up against them, but I’m glad that happened because it proves that it is about the performance, not about costume and makeup and what you see, but what you hear is what’s important as well. And we spent hundreds of hours with all my actors individually trying to get the most authentic, believable performance that had truth to it. And I use that word “verisimilitude” a lot because that’s what I’m after, is that moment in the film where you feel it is absolute truth. And so what we did with Sarah: we brought in one of the snails, Sylvia, and put it down next to her and used that as a device for her to talk to the snail.

And that’s how we got that beautiful intimacy and quietness, self-reflection and introspection. That’s how it’s such a convincing performance, even though it’s blobs of clay. And I think that’s what confounds people a lot, too, is they walk out of the cinema feeling like they’ve seen a live-action film, but they know that they’ve just been tricked. It was all a suspension of disbelief. And I love that; I love the beauty of animation. You can really manipulate your audience and heighten an emotion. And that’s my aim with every film, to make them laugh, make them cry, humor, pathos, comedy, tragedy, light, dark. It’s that duality. I love storytelling where you can push a multitude of buttons on the person and exhaust them by the end, which is what I want. I want them to be an emotional wreck by the end of the film. 

This is kind of a personal question for me and, by extension, my partner too. We saw you at the Museum of the Moving Image when you did your screenings there, and you talked a bit about how you were told years and years ago, earlier in your career, that you’re pursuing a dead medium. That’s an existential thing I have in my head all the time as a writer. Everything’s pivoting to video, then it’s pivoting to AI. No one’s reading anymore. And then my partner works in television, and those jobs are drying up. When you’re told something like that, that you’re walking towards a dead end, where does the patience and strength come from to persist? 

I trust my instincts, but also I think a bit of healthy naivety helps too, because I go back to this thing my screenwriting lecturer taught me. She told us in the first week of film school 29 years ago, she said, “I don’t care what you animate, computer, clay, plastering, whatever. You can animate your own excrement for all I care as long as you tell a good story.” She said, “The audience will always forgive bad animating, bad editing, bad sound, but they’ll never forgive a bad story.” That was quite a profound revelation to me as a young person, and so I’ve always stuck to that. It’s like: as long as the story’s strong, it doesn’t matter. My budget is so low and pathetic, it doesn’t matter. We can’t afford walking or as much talking as we’d like in the film.

The audience will forgive all of that. And as long as the stories feel as polished as possible, as long as it’s universal, as long as it’s connecting, then you’ll be okay. Even with my drawings: I love drawing and I love using drawing as an experiment, so I’ll draw something that I love and I’ll show it to someone as a test and they won’t respond. I’ll say, “Okay, why aren’t they responding to that drawing?” Because it’s not resonating to them. So I’ll redraw it and do it in a way that’s more empathetic or engaging. So it’s just hoping and trusting that, as human beings, we do need storytellers. We need storytelling in our lives. I love that quote: “Storytelling is equipment for living.” I think we tell stories every day to each other. It’s a way that we cope, but also the way we give the confidence, courage, and conviction to keep going.

I mean, when we started this film, AI was not a thing. Now we’ve finished the film and AI is threatening all our lives, and already, as you say, jobs are drying up. I’ve got friends who are illustrators who are losing work to AI. So it is worrying, but I keep going back to the fact that the arts community is really reacting strongly against AI, which is great. I was lucky enough to have dinner with Guillermo del Toro a few weeks ago, and he’s so anti-AI and he’s forming groups to lobby against it. So I think there’s a strong reaction against it. And I think, unfortunately, there aren’t as many regulations at the moment, but actors, of course, had the actor strike a few years ago. They’ve got contracts now which are very rigid and explicit in that their identities can’t be stolen or reused. So yeah: the battle has begun, but I think stop-motion is okay for the moment. But similarly, writing and poets and everybody, it’s like: why does AI have to attack the arts first? Why can’t AI attack politics or something else? Used-car salesmen? [Laughs]

I keep coming back to the hope that the desire for handmade products, whatever they may be, wins out. I think that what’s so special about your work is that you can see the brush strokes, the fingerprints, you can see the work that went into it. It gives your film so much more personality than if it was just smoothed-over by a computer.

It’s the same reason that knitting is as popular as ever. Basket-weaving, bread-making, bookstores are booming. People are buying DVDs again. We are releasing the film on Blu-ray. I never thought that would happen, but there is certainly a greater appreciation, as you say, for things that are made by human beings.

Something that’s as human as anything is our relationship to death. Death is almost an invisible friend across your work, the thing that your characters are confronting. I find that fascinating because, on the surface, your films are so light and funny, but then when you get into them, they’re these heavy, lovely objects. Your earlier work could be seen as a little more bleak. This film, though, has a happy ending. How has your relationship with death changed as you’ve grown older?

I certainly have an obsession with death. I’m always thinking of my own death. I know Woody Allen had a constant obsession with death. Not that I’m comparing myself to Woody Allen [Laughs] but look: I certainly, I love collecting [stories about] eccentric deaths, funny deaths. I think there’s a fear of death, rightly so, but I’m agnostic––or an atheist, actually. I think death should not be feared and death should be talked about, and it’s often taboo. Like in superhero films: there’s a lot of death but it’s never talked about. It’s never explored what happens next. So my next film’s actually going to be about death even more. And what happens as you get older? What are your thoughts on death? And it is going to be a lot more existential. I love that other quote: “Without the dark, the light has no meaning.”

So you really need, again, that duality of comedy and tragedy. Particularly with comedy, there’s that belief that laughter is a release of tension. And if you have a very dark scene followed by a scene with a lot of levity, then the humor works better. I think because there’s that release of tension and death can be amusing; death can be enjoyable and funny. I love people’s final words, and often they’re not profound or kind or generous. They’re actually random and stupid and meaningless. So I love that irony particularly. I love irony. I love absurdity. I love all forms of comedy, really. I do set out to primarily make comedies, but they end up becoming very dark. And getting back to your question: I certainly now prefer happier endings for my films because I’m preferring happy endings when I watch films. When I was younger and full of angst, I watched all of David Lynch and all that. I despised happy endings, despised a Disney ending.

Whereas now it’s like, you know what? I think the audience life’s difficult enough; give them a happy ending. But then again, I don’t want it to be a Disney ending with every loose end tied up. I want there to be ambiguities, things that aren’t quite resolved, because that’s life. Life’s never fully resolved before you die; there’s always things that are messy and not tied up in a neat bow. So I try to reflect that in the films too. For example: I get a lot of emails from young gay men. What happened to Ben? Where’s Ben? Forget Ben. He’ll be fine; he’ll find a way. Why does everything have to be resolved?

We were talking about persistence earlier. You won your first Oscar two decades ago and you’ve just been nominated again. How surreal is that to be nominated again after all this time? What have you learned as a filmmaker in those 20 years or so?

I think I’ve learned that the Oscars are just a big TV show. There’s so much hype. The first time I went with Harvie, and look: we won, which was wonderful, but I remember walking into the Kodak Theater and realizing it was all smoke and mirrors. And yes, it can change your career and people suddenly think that you have this Midas Touch and you know what you’re doing and you’re full of confidence. But I felt like a fraud for a long time. I felt like I didn’t deserve it or wasn’t worthy, but now it’s like: you know what? I did deserve it. I worked really hard, and it’s a cross between a beauty pageant and a lottery.

We’re not going to win in three weeks. We know that Wild Robot’s going to smother everybody and good on them; good on them. They made a great film and they’ve spent millions of dollars lobbying. We have no money to lobby, really. So it’s never fair. I meet all these filmmakers who are nominated or have lost and oh, they take it all so seriously. And it’s like: you know what? It’s just to see the fact that you’re nominated as a wonderful thing that’s happened, and use that nomination to help get your next project up because that’s what it’s all about. That’s what I’m focused on at the moment: the next film. How can I use this Oscar nomination to get money for my next film? Because I’m a producer as well. So I have to think about finance. My producer and I often call the Oscar the “Golden Crowbar” because it opens doors and it certainly helps. But if your aim and ambition is to win an Oscar, then you’re never going to win one.

Memoir of a Snail is now in theaters, available digitally, and comes to Blu-ray on March 25.

Essentially a lost film, legendary director Charles Burnett’s 1999 feature The Annihilation of Fish mostly lived on the festival circuit (and in bootlegs) for a quarter-century until a recent miraculous restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation. Despite featuring recognizable leads in James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave, one bad review from an influential critic (who seemed strangely wary of the film’s tonal risk-taking) was enough to sink its commercial prospects for potential distributors. 

A mental-illness romantic comedy of sorts, the film has a strangeness that may be potentially alienating to some, but it seems inexplicable, years later, that a work which so movingly wears its heart on its sleeve would be denied the audience it deserved. Burnett, a straight shooter, joined us over Zoom to discuss the film’s new path as well as the state of cinema and, frankly, American society today. 

The Film Stage: To the best of your memory, what happened with the film following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999? Do you remember speaking to potential distributors who were skittish? It was just the one bad review from Variety that presumably sank it, right?

Charles Burnett: That was the first we heard of it after the screening in Toronto. We got a good reception there. Later on, we got the negative review. And everything sort of fell apart then. But we screened the film on the 11th, 9/11, near San Diego. And two theaters were packed and we asked the audience––because we didn’t think they were going to show up because of the thing that happened in New York––”Why were they there?” And they said, “Well, we had to be with somebody.” They felt the need to be with humanity, to be with people. And so we got good reviews from them. And then, of course, the review came out and it just killed everything. And so that was the beginning and the end of the whole distribution––things just fell apart. 

Did you feel there was something in particular that the Variety review, or ones by other critics, didn’t really understand about the film?

I think there was one particular critic, Todd McCarthy, who wrote this really, really awful review. And so that was the only one that I know of that was just completely negative––like, over-the-top negative. In fact, we had a nice response from the audience [in Toronto], so that was quite a surprise. It may have something to do with Pierre Rissient, who was a good friend of Todd McCarthy’s. Pierre and I had fights throughout our relationship, and I had cast a person Pierre didn’t particularly like in The Glass Shield. So we argued constantly about that. And so, I don’t know. 

This film came at the end of the ’90s stretch of your career, which was a really fascinating one––it seemed like there were really sharp contrasts between the films in certain ways. You did the aforementioned The Glass Shield, which is somewhat of a genre film; Nightjohn, a period drama for the Disney Channel; The Final Insult is practically an experimental film; and The Annihilation of Fish is a comedy. At the time, were you conscious of wanting to do different things with every project, or did you see them all as strongly connected?

You wanted to do different things. You had opportunities to do one film after another––not one film after another, but different films. So you take the chance. You never know how they’re going to turn out. That’s what happened: just trying to keep working.

The Final Insult in particular is incredible. I like to tell people that’s one of the great hidden gems on the Criterion Channel. It’s especially different than those other films you were making in the ’90s, so were you feeling the need to experiment then, cinematically speaking?

Oh, no, it wasn’t that at all. What happened was: there was this festival in Germany, Documentary X, and they had these new cameras, these new Sony cameras, and they gave a bunch of filmmakers a use of these cameras and just said to go out and do something with it. I was interested in the homeless people [of Los Angeles]. And so there were a bunch of homeless people in my neighborhood, so I went out and shot them, tried to do a story about them. That’s how that came about. It wasn’t really planned, but it was a chance to experiment with this new Sony camera, and so I put together something with the people that I met on the streets of Los Angeles and it resulted in The Final Insult. It wasn’t really a traditional release; it was just meant to demonstrate the ease of the camera. 

With The Annihilation of Fish and Nightjohn you were, for the first time, directing other people’s scripts. Was that initially something you had some hesitation towards or was the connection with the material strong enough that there was no worry?

I think it was strong enough. Nightjohn was a Disney project, which was quite different from the other projects because it was more realistic and didn’t try to soft-peddle [slavery] or anything like that. They were really trying to get at the essence of slavery.

The Annihilation of Fish saw writer Anthony C. Winkler, who’s no longer with us, adapting his own novel for the screen. Was he very collaborative, since it was an adaptation of his own work, or did he give you a lot of free reign when it came time to make the actual film?

No, he was very free about it. In fact, he was exceptionally so. And he sort of leaped into me and [producer] Paul Heller’s hands to come up with a good version of his novel.

This film deals with mental illness, and it seems like that’s an issue that America in particular seems to struggle with. The Reagan administration gutting most services for the mentally ill in the early ’80s created somewhat of a crisis. Do you think there’s a fundamental issue of people just wanting to ignore mental illness? Or, with the film, were you not considering a grander social statement about that? Or were you just honing in on the characters?

We thought more about the characters, how people need companionship, you know, and both suffer from a lack of companionship and are looking at these illusions as something real. And we wanted to give them a sense that, from their perspective, there’s probably some element of truth in it––because we had these little moments where you see Fish battling his demons, and you get a hint that these things may be real when he throws them out of the window. You see that the effect of hitting a tree that this thing has a body. And so it must have some sort of relevance or realness about it. 

Was there any worry on your end about properly representing the subject matter? Or was just Winkler’s material and your connection to it strong enough that there was never any worry?

There’s always worry. It’s sort of a humanist perspective. We had to make sure it didn’t look like we were making fun of it and not respecting people with issues of mental illness. So yeah: we were always concerned about that.

It can definitely be said that you’re one of the great LA filmmakers. There’s a line in the film where Lynn Redgrave’s character remarks that Hollywood is pretty boring if you’re not a movie star. With the film, were you being very conscious about depicting Los Angeles in a certain way or rather showing unseen parts of it?

Not really. We thought people could look at it and say, “Well, this is a specific element in LA.” Because right now you see homelessness that is just absurd. It’s everywhere. The kids, mothers, families, fathers––it’s just awful. When I grew up in Los Angeles it was rare that you saw this kind of magnitude of homelessness. I mean, like, to see a homeless person, bum, on the railroad tracks near Grand Central Station was sort of a rarity. It was, you know, thought of like it was an independent person who had this sort of romantic idea about homelessness or the bum, or what they call it––a hobo or whatever it was. But they weren’t looked at the same way. And they didn’t see the kind of devastation that it took on ordinary people as an escape, you know, to have an alternative way of living.

I think [Los Angeles] has changed completely now. In fact, these characters, Fish and Poinsettia, aren’t like homeless people; they have other issues that come from being overpressured and being one check away from being solvent. It’s a whole different ballgame now. It’s not the same kind of group you find in shelters downtown and on the streets of Los Angeles. I mean, you find it in Beverly Hills and the Brentwood area, people that you would never see in these areas before looking in garbage cans. That’s different. That’s a different group of people.

I mean, you sound very passionate when talking about the subject of the current homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Have you thought about making a film about it? I guess it’s tough getting stuff made now.

I would like to. It’s different from doing a The Grapes of Wrath or something like that, which is a whole different ball game altogether. It was people moving from the Depression, the Dust Bowl, into some area where there was help––the federal-work program and things like that. But now it’s just: where do you go? 

You’ve been active in documentaries as of late, but do you find yourself missing fiction filmmaking?

Yeah, I do. I think there’s something more you can say than in terms of documentaries. I could be wrong, but I just feel I can contribute more and turn it into talking about the plight of people in fiction.

The Annihilation of Fish opens in limited release on Friday, February 14. Learn more here.

Universal Language could easily have overdosed on twee. Set in an alternate-universe Winnipeg where almost everyone is ethnically Iranian and speaks Farsi, it pays homage to films like Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. Director Matthew Rankin himself plays a character sharing his name, who travels home from Montreal to Winnipeg following news of his mother’s sickness. His story intersects with two subplots: children Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) find a 500-riel note buried under ice and look for an axe so they can chop it out while Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati) leads a guided tour of Winnipeg parking lots and highways.

Although Universal Language is very witty, with TV-commercial parodies and absurdist touches, fundamentally it’s a deeply sad film. This is reflected in its look: during the dead of winter, Massoud leads tourists around Winnipeg’s beige and grey districts. Matthew’s told to enjoy the relaxing view of a highway outside a Tim Horton’s. Rankin has fun imagining Canada blended with Iran, but that imagination is also used to flesh out his character’s sadder tendencies. With a sense of humor closer to Aki Kaurismaki and Roy Andersson than Panahi, it dreams up a liminal space that could only exist in fiction.

Ahead of the film’s U.S. release beginning this Friday, I spoke with Rankin and actor / co-writer Ila Firouzabadi last month during their trip to New York.

The Film Stage: I was wondering how both of you were introduced to Iranian film.

Matthew Rankin: I was introduced by a friend of mine; her family was Iranian. When I was a teenager she took me to see Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? That was the first Iranian film I’d ever seen and it thrilled my soul. So that’s where it began for me.

Ila Firouzabadi: I was born and raised in Iran, so I watched Iranian movies. Taste of Cherry was the one that made the biggest impression. I lived there ’til I was 24; then I came to France, followed by Montreal.

There are a lot of Canadian in-jokes in Universal Language, like the bureaucrat who says Alberta is the capital of Winnipeg. I’m sure there are things I didn’t pick up on at all, not being Canadian. As you’ve traveled around the world with it, how have people connected to that aspect?

Rankin: No one has had trouble with it. A joy of watching a movie is being in a world that’s precisely defined. I saw a lot of movies set in Brooklyn when I was growing up, but I never visited it. Without having any encounters with it, I learned a lot by watching movies. There’s always a joke about New Jersey in movies set in New York. Growing up in Winnipeg, that sort of went over my head, but I understood what it was: New Jersey is an object of condescension for New Yorkers. When I watched them in New York, the Jersey jokes got a huge laugh. They didn’t entirely register for me, but the New Yorkers ate it up. I understood why they exist then.

That’s true of every movie. As a Western viewer, you might not have access to every detail of a Kiarostami film, but you can still be in its world. This movie is very much a hybrid film: it’s interweaving codes of Iranian and Canadian cinema and turning them into a third space, which is something else. The references don’t always go together. That’s the pleasure of the movie––it’s not trying to represent the real world, but creating a new one.

Twentieth Century actually seemed much less accessible to me.

Rankin: I think that also comes down to how much interest someone might have in watching a movie on a Canadian subject. And that might be nobody!

Universal Language team at 62nd New York Film Festival. Photo by Mettie Ostrowski.

When I meet Canadians, they’re rarely enthusiastic about Canadian film. There’s a tendency, especially among Canadians who live in New York, to say “Telefilm Canada is wasting money on films no one will see,” and not value their uniqueness.

Rankin: Are you asking me to jump on that bandwagon?

Again, have you noticed that touring with the film?

Rankin: Particularly since the pandemic, we’re now in an age where public institutions are coming to a close. Individualism has become pathological. There’s a real consumerist notion that’s taken over. Why should I pay for your chemotherapy? I don’t have cancer––that’s your problem! Why should I pay for your national art or experimental animation? I don’t want it! Institutions have collapsed; it’s becoming every man for himself. They’re doing their best to hold down to the fort, but they’re pleasing nobody by becoming risk-averse and trying to please everybody.

It makes the situation worse. They’re between a rock and a hard place. The world is not intended for filmmaking. With or without public money, it’s always a struggle. Ila and I have made films with various sources of money, and we’ll continue to do so. It’s a tricky time, particularly in English-speaking Canada.

Have you faced criticisms that the film is appropriating or exoticizing Iranian culture?

Rankin: No. It was made by a community, including Iranians. There are some people who believe that everything should be made in solitude and the world would work better if we were all sealed into plastic containers. There are transgressions––films by western directors who’ve told the stories of Iranians over the voices of actual Iranians. They’re insulting or just lacking in nuance. But that isn’t the movie we were making at all. The story comes from my own life, but I’m not telling it by myself. It originated with my grandmother finding a two-dollar bill under the ice in Winnipeg during the Great Depression and how that resonated with Kanoon-style films for children.

The idea of making it in Farsi was very exciting. We don’t always ask why we make films in English. I’ve always seen value to resisting the dominance of the English language. The film is Winnipeg surrealism combined with the poetry of Iranian neo-realists. It’s not trying to assign meaning to Iran, or even to Canada; it’s about finding a third space we can encounter. I think there’s real value to that. There’s also a value to solitude. We live in Quebec, which is its world capital, but cinema is profoundly a collaborative medium.

Firouzabadi: In this case, Matthew was very open to the ideas of all the actors and crew members who worked on the film. Of course, he was directing it, but he listened to other people’s ideas. Even if they didn’t exactly match the dialogue, we were completely open to that if they changed it to suit their tone or accent. Being this open can be very rare. We didn’t make something that began with a closed structure; we made it with an open mind and heart.

Rankin: I think you see that in the movie itself. I understand why people would approach a movie like this with skepticism. Honestly, there isn’t really another movie like this. We don’t think of it as an Iranian movie at all, but it is in Farsi. It’s inspired by Iranian cinema. Overwhelmingly, people who’ve seen it understand what it is. We showed it in Tehran just the other week. Their proximity to Canadian in-jokes is even less than yours, but they really felt it. Similarly, Canadians who have little proximity to Iranian life feel it just as much. It’s about building closeness between spaces where we might imagine great distance.

While writing the script, did you have an explanation in your head for how this hybrid city came to be? Did you think it was best just to present it as something that exists and doesn’t need to be explained?

Rankin: If you watch it closely, you’ll see it takes place in the recent past, around 2022 or 2023. It’s a hybrid filled with little elements of Winnipeg history and aspects of my own life. It’s about my parents. It’s prismatic, looking for the Winnipeg within Tehran and vice versa. The idea is not to explain a parallel history; we think of it more as a parallel geography.

How much location scouting did you do to find color-coded buildings for the Beige Zone or the Gray Zone?

Rankin: I did all of it with the director of photography and production designer. We drove around Winnipeg a lot. I knew and loved many. We thought a lot about beige, as though it were a tuning fork.

Firouzabadi: The first time I came to Winnipeg I said to Matthew, “This looks very similar to Tehran, with all the old buildings.” They are beige and brutalist. I saw a similarity between the look of the two cities. He had the same feeling when he first went to Tehran twenty years ago.

The film seems steeped in depression. The way you film Winnipeg, the city becomes a part of that. How much artifice is there to it? For instance, did you repaint any buildings?

Rankin: No, they’re all like that. People read it in different ways. There’s a coldness and emptiness to some of the movie, but it’s also fairly warm and gentle. I love brutalism. To me it’s very beautiful, but not everybody sees it that way. It lends itself to deadpan humor. It connects different points of the compass. There’s great solitude, but deep community. There’s distance but also proximity in the way we shot it.

There’s an artifice to your early films, both Twentieth Century and some shorts, but Universal Language is slower and gives the viewer more space. The earlier films are more dense. Did you think about the two features’ differences?

Rankin: Every time we make a film it’s a reaction against the one I just made. Part of my personal ambition with this movie was to make something more minimalist, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s slower paced and doesn’t cut as much, but it has a lot of events and detail. It’s more Jacques Tati than Abel Gance. It’s quieter and gentler than Twentieth Century, but it’s abstract and that brings a certain density.

Firouzabadi: Some parts are very dreamy, like the section at the skating rink. That cuts down the density. Even when we were shooting it in cold weather, we felt that. There are so many things going on. That’s the beauty of it.

There seems to be an impulse to mythologize Winnipeg––obviously in Guy Maddin’s films, but also some of yours and other directors. No one mythologizes Toronto. Where do you think that comes from?

Rankin: It comes from Winnipeg history. There’s a strain which has always been very punk rock and resisted the North American mainstream. I’d trace that to Louis Riel, the metis leader. He was the only indigenous leader who founded a Canadian province, fighting against the government. I’d trace that to the 1919 general strike, where workers took on aristocrats. Yes, I’d trace it to Guy Maddin, the Winnipeg Film Group, Propagandhi, and the Royal Art Lodge. There’s an impulse to resist the mainstream and build something original and defiant.

But it’s coexisted with the opposite impulse: Winnipeg is the greatest producer of Christmas movies for the Hallmark Channel. There’s an impulse which desperately wants to integrate with the mainstream. Those people don’t see any value in Winnipeg as an idea; they just see methods of economic growth, which is the obsession of most North American cities. You don’t find the impulse of resistance in Toronto, which wants to join the North American mainstream.

Was it always your idea to act in the film and play an alter ego based on yourself?

Rankin: I played around with the idea of casting an actor to play myself. Ila and Pirouz were really insistent that the film would lose its meaning if I did that. It plays with cinematic language and the fact that it’s always a cheat––it’s always a city playing a city and a person playing a person, even if they’re playing themselves. For instance, Ila plays a bus driver. She even has a name tag that says “Ila.” Of course, a cinematic image has an artificial relationship to reality. It’s a two-dimensional image of us. That’s something which preoccupied a lot of Iranian filmmakers who influenced us.

Is your next film planned?

Firouzabadi: We started a movie about Esperanto, a docu-fiction. Esperanto speakers hold a world congress every year. Two years ago they held it in Montreal, so we shot it. We haven’t finished it yet, but we will do soon.

Universal Language 2!

Rankin: There are connections. It may be a trilogy eventually.

Universal Language opens on Friday, February 14.

At the beginning of my review of The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, I wrote: “It is hard to overstate how important Bill Morrison’s work is to the language and history of cinema.” That was nearly four years ago, and those words remain as true as they ever were, if not moreso. Morrison, whose work we’ve championed before on The Film Stage, received his first Academy Award nomination just last month for his essential short film Incident. We sat with him for a good thirty minutes and spoke about the nomination, the film, the inception of the project, the structure of it as a whole, and “how we grasp memory over time as a series of images.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the complete interview below.

The Film Stage: How has it been?

Bill Morrison: Wow, it’s been crazy. It’s a really crazy time. And as you know, I make pretty esoteric films, and once every six or seven years somebody asks me a few questions about it, but this has been an onslaught unlike I’ve ever experienced before.

How did you find out about the Oscar nomination?

Oh, you know––they tell you when they’re going to announce.

Were you watching? 

I was watching. I got up early. It’s 5:30 L.A. time and I was in Chicago with my mom. And we were holding hands, and when they said the name of my film we squeezed hands. My sister Ellen was there. It happens pretty quick, so it took everybody a second to register. It’s a rather morbid and serious story, so there wasn’t a lot of jumping up and down. But for my part, I was quite relieved because there was a lot riding on it at this point.

Every year, and especially with the L.A. fires and everything going on, there’s a discussion of “what is the point of the Oscars?” Incident is a great example of exactly why: it provides this platform in which so many more people will seek your movie out.

I mean, look: we can’t get the news from the news sources anymore, so it’s going to be incumbent on the artists and journalists to try and get a story out.

We talked about Dawson City: Frozen Time, which came out in 2016, right? And it didn’t make the Oscar shortlist?

No, I think I was a little naive about what it would take. It did qualify, of course. It played theatrically, but I didn’t mount a campaign. The distributor didn’t mount a campaign. It certainly was loved by a few prominent critics. I’m not sure it would have captured the imagination of the entire documentary branch. It didn’t have a strong social issue, which seems to be…

In vogue right now.

Yeah. Interestingly, the Academy really rewards craft up and down the line. And when you get to documentary, it seems to be more issue-driven.

You’re playing with form in such an interesting way, even with Incident. It’s so great it got nominated, but even, I just rewatched it––it’s thirty minutes for those reading and available on the New Yorker. It’s been watched by many, hopefully will be watched by many more. Just for those reading, what is it capturing?

It’s a film comprised entirely of source material from police surveillance and private closed-circuit TV. So it’s all surveillance-camera footage. There’s no talking heads or narrator or music. And with that, we’re able to show that there was a police murder and a dishonest alibi. It was claimed to be a murder in defense, but the officer in question lies about the fact: he says that this guy pulled a gun on him and that he killed him in self-defense, and the footage clearly shows that not to be the case, and that even the officer knows it’s not the case. The film really is about the unspooling of this narrative that comes from sort of a sputtering lie and then it coalesces into an official police narrative of what happened, and the judgment reflects that. So it’s sort of a fascinating look into what is really publicly available footage.

I’d say the police, the city of Chicago, tried their best to spin it in a certain way and say, “There’s nothing to look at here, and let’s put it back in this huge trove of available oversight images and not look at it.” And it’s really the work of my collaborator and the film’s producer, Jamie Kalven, who said, “Well, maybe there’s more to see here.” And he’s done that in previous cases, and in this case succeeded in unearthing the mother lode of footage. I don’t think any police force anywhere has made public the amount of footage of a police killing that was available to us here. And from that I crafted this film.

Officer Dillan Halley is the one who shot “Snoop” Augustus and he misstates what happens immediately after and he catches himself doing it, stops, but never corrects it. Then in that four-minute rush you see the reaction of his partner, the female officer (PPO Megan Fleming), everyone around him, the public realizing very quickly what’s happened. That is a rush. You are going full Mike Figgis, Timecode, four screens. It’s challenging. As you are putting it together, you are getting a lot of angles. What were the conversations about how much information you are giving to the audience and what you are showing?

First of all, the conversations are all conversations I have with myself, right? 

Yeah, you’re alone. You’re just talking to yourself. [Laughs]

I’m alone. I’m always alone. The real challenge was when I had to come up with a closed caption, where I’m not speaking. You can’t have two captions at once that occupy the same space. That certainly was challenging. I do press how much a viewer can take in. And many people have said to me, “I need to see this again” or “I’ve needed to see this again just to understand what’s happening.” But there is a way that we’re playing with this chaos, as you mentioned––especially those minutes where we go from two and then to four frames, the viewer is kind of plunged into this overstimulation and I think that that mimics, in some ways, the panic that the officer is feeling and that the community is feeling. You get this real rush of everything’s happening. Because after the shooting there’s sort of a calm before the storm, and then the storm builds very quickly, and it’s too much for the officer and he has to run away. And then we get another dip of silence while it’s sort of this meditation of them in the car while he’s weeping and freaking out.

We’re getting the incident in different ways, but that four or five minutes I referenced before right around that 10-minute mark––the cops’ immediate reaction and the acceleration of this mostly false narrative that they fully believe! Sociologically, it is just fascinating to watch because it becomes this thing he says: a police officer has been shot or shot at. That’s just not true. The victim never got the gun out of his holster, even if he was reaching for the gun. It’s fairly clear he was shot at before he even reached for that gun ––

To me it is.

There’s that key moment. Another officer quite astutely––and it really speaks to the whole “Blue Shield” of it all––he immediately takes that gun out of the holster as evidence but also not to have that gun be in the holster. Then they’re in the car with the other officer fleeing from the scene, as it were, so [Halley] can be safe. Because, like you said, the public is realizing what’s happened very quickly, and just the conversation they keep repeating what they see as the truth, and then that officer driving them––who kind of wasn’t necessarily there for what happened––is kind of reinforcing something she doesn’t actually know happened.

She’s just sure that they didn’t do anything wrong.

This is very much what we wrestle with as a public. To watch it play out, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

Right.

George Floyd, Michael Brown, so many tragedies of course. You referenced Laquan McDonald had happened a few years before this incident. That officer was on trial when this incident had happened. It’s all connected––we know this––but in the car, going away from the scene, you’re capturing this kind of… we are inventing our truth right now in this car. It is malicious, I suppose, but from their context there is no malice.

It’s a systemic problem, right? These officers are just doing what they think they’re supposed to do, which is to create this narrative as they’ve been trained to do. I’ve read people say, “I can see this kind of YouTube footage anywhere.” You don’t see that kind of fallibility inside the police car anywhere else. That’s a real different peek into the other side. You see hard cops, sure, but you don’t see this crushing realization that their lives have just changed, and that they’ve taken a life and that they’re kind of creating this narrative, repeating it, and on some level knowing that it’s not true––but that this, nonetheless, is the narrative that they’re going to push, and that there’s an agreement there, there’s a pact being formed. 

You touched upon it, but just after Officer Quincy Jones, who is the same officer who stopped Snoop––the 12-year vet––I think things would have unfolded quite differently if he had just been left to ask him questions. Maybe there would have been a citation or a warning or something like that. And it was really the other officers, the younger officers, coming up with guns drawn, sort of acting like they just bagged a big game that created the situation. But yeah: you’re right. There’s a key moment, and it’s the only time where I zoom in on the same image––and as an inset––where Jones removes the gun from the holster and takes it as possession.

It’s also from a different angle, the last shot of the film, when we slow down before we roll credits; you see the silhouette of that happen. That’s crucial. Obviously the gun was not drawn, and there’s a very quick exchange that happens between the officer who shot Augustus––Dillan Halley––and his partner, Megan Fleming, and it’s just after they reported to the sergeant. Now they’re off on the sidewalk, taking each other’s temperature. He says very quickly, “Was it a gun?” And she says, “Yes.” And he says, “Did you get the gun?” She says, “Yes.” And then he’s free to invent whatever he wants. He says, “Why did he have to point a gun right at us?” But he first needed to ascertain A) that there even was a gun, and B) that it was no longer [in his possession]. That whole exchange is super-condensed, like one second to rattle off that information.

When it comes to body cameras: Officer Fleming doesn’t turn on her body cam and she was cited for that after the fact. But then obviously other people do, as is kind of required nowadays. Do they help? We’re speaking as citizens, not as experts…

The number-one client of Axon, the manufacturer of the body-worn camera, is police departments, right? I think they’re fulfilling a need of some sort of problem for public oversight, but their usefulness is to prove innocence, or at least [with] the very presence of a camera there’s an assumption that this is being taken care of, this is being seen. Not taken into the fact that whoever owns the footage can sort of call it what it is and say, “Well, we’ve already dealt with that” and it’s going back into this huge file of uncountable numbers of surveillance cameras that are recorded every day.

There’s this obsolescence that’s created by just the sheer volume of footage that’s now available. So if the police say, “Oh, we looked at that and that was a split-second decision and we have to show deference to the officer. Nothing to see here.” The police did a good job of spinning, right? They isolated that frame that you mentioned, where it seems to be that Snoop is reaching for a gun. I think he’s already been shot at that point and this is a reaction. But they took that frame and blasted it over the evening news 24 hours later. That quelled the protests and the public opinion quickly swayed to this was a menacing figure. Quite opposite. 

To your point, referencing Quincy Jones––who is the more veteran cop––the tragedy is, of course, the guy had a permit for the gun. He’s showing them the permit. It’s that classic thing of de-escalation being largely ignored. We live in this time now where there is so much fear on either side. But when one side has, by design, infallibility more or less…

I mean, how crazy is it that their cameras actually captured that FOID [Firearm Owners Identification] card? If you saw that on television you’d be like, “Well, that’s crazy that you can actually read his card in one of those frames.”

Bill Morrison

I want to bring it back to the filmmaking, because obviously this movie was nominated for an Oscar and aside from its social importance, it is just a well-made movie. I’ve heard you’ve mention it’s a little different from the archival kind of art form that you do, but in another way it’s not; it’s very similar, in fact. There is a sad timelessness, not unlike a Dawson City to this document, where you could, sadly show this in 10 years, and it would feel very much like this is our country. 

Absolutely, and I’ve dug back to racial episodes in the Dawson City collection that, in some ways, appear more progressive than the society we live in now.

For the filmmaking part of it, I find it so well-paced; it’s almost like a thesis paper, in complimentary terms. You’re showing us the incident and then you show us again, again, and again. How do you get there? How do you find the pace for something like this?

There was only that one angle  that showed the whole thing unfurling like that.

And those amazing birds––you can’t write that!

[The birds] clearly were startled by the gunshots, right? Those seagulls, but that is some kind of weird poetry there. The only thing that’s providing audio are the body-worn cameras, and they haven’t been triggered yet. So it necessarily began in silence because we didn’t have audio for that. But it also provided an interesting implication for the ending, right? Because at the end, they need to turn off the body-worn cameras so the poor schlub who’s charged with writing up the report can actually get the story of what happened and how he’s supposed to write it, not on camera. Meanwhile we’ve already seen what happened. We see him, like us at the beginning, trying to figure out, “Okay, what happened? Who’s at fault? Did the police shoot him? Did he shoot the police?”

And gradually, as twenty minutes go by, we’ve learned what actually happened and what their story is, and now he’s dropped into this situation where he’s trying to get them to tell him what happened. They’re all on camera and are claiming they don’t know. And it isn’t until the commanding officer says, “Can you all officers turn off their body-worn cameras” that presumably he’s going to learn. And so during that silence, we understand, we’re sort of returned to this silence that we came out of, but now we’re sort of complicit in a certain way, and that we know what happened, and we’re helpless to help the situation.

What got you into documentaries? What was the spark plug for you deciding to go down this pathway of archival and narratives from the past?

It started with an aesthetic concern. I came out of painting, but I studied with the great animator Robert Breer and so I was looking at film as a series of material images that could be understood as material images, and sort of the implications of what that meant in terms of memory and how we grasp memory over time as a series of images. So as an aesthetic concern I was constructing animated films and then shooting photographic, cinematographic films and somehow disturbing them so that you had this idea that every frame was different. Then I became interested in how that happened organically over time, and when it was part of the actual history or historicity of the film. And that became interesting to me, going back 30 years to The Film of Her, and then going back 10 years to Dawson City––these stories of films lost in an archive became both the subject matter and the stuff of which the film was made.

That was exciting to me, and also the idea of reclaiming films lost in sort of obsolescence, finding old images that nobody had seen before was an exciting idea––that you could go back into the archive and, in a way, create new images, in that, if people weren’t seeing them, they sort of didn’t exist or they weren’t in the currency. So instead of showing regular stock images that people are used to seeing, I was making an effort to try to present in these old films, films that no one had ever seen. It also begged the question, “What else have we not seen? And what has been lost, this deep history underground?” And I think that there is some correlation here with Incident in that there’s this plethora of imagery that we’re creating all day that’s creating its own obsolescence of any curation. Somebody needs to say, “Wait, what’s in that file?” 

Also, when you think about a movie like Red Rooms, obviously a fictionalization of a real thing, and Assayas did it with Demonlover over 20 years ago. Incident is more disturbing in the sense of just this surveillance aesthetic that is now a part of our life. In a totally different technological way, but also in a very similar, practical way: all of this footage will be on hard drives that will break, not unlike all the celluloid under the pool in Dawson City. All of this will be lost.

By design. I don’t know if you read the postscript in the New Yorker article, but in December ‘23 there was a new deal between the Fraternal Order of Police and the city of Chicago, and in their collective bargaining agreement they slipped in that if two officers were to discuss an incident––as Fleming and Halley do––it’s inadmissible evidence now, and it is grounds to delete the file. So under current law, if any of this had gone down in 2024 as opposed to 2018, this film would be absolutely impossible to make, because all that footage would have been deemed deletable.

It’s incredible. I always see films as time machines to whenever they were made. Even if it’s a period film, they way the film was made or viewed or received is often a reflection of the time in which it was made. Your films take that idea to the ultimate level because they actually are time machines––these discovered things with this painterly, artistic quality that you bring to them. Then there’s the sadder, more revealing part of Incident, which is: as much as films are time machines, they are often sadly timeless. Because you have these very human things that happen. And it can be 2018, 2024, 1918, and it’s just fear, rash judgment, rationalization. Everybody’s the hero of their own story.

If you go back to why we had the urge to create cinema, it was somehow a way of capturing consciousness. First, you could show a sneeze, or that four hooves were off the ground.

My favorite thing is Muybridge and the bet. I always love the idea of cinema starting because of gambling. “I’m gonna invent something to win this bet to prove that all four legs are off the ground at the same time.”

Right. Also, that’s a thing that you can’t catch with your naked eye, like the spasm of the sneeze. There’s this desire to try to see between the frames, if you will. With the addition of audio, this kind of idea that each film could be some sort of representation of a story or of a dream or of consciousness. I think that’s the consistent thing. Now we’re talking about a bunch of different media and platforms, but the urge is to somehow capture an experience and pass it on.

When Jamie and I started, we’re a generation apart from each other but we’re old family friends, and as our careers started to overlap more we would meet and talk about what we were up to, and as he got into police-surveillance issues, I just met him on the street once in Chicago randomly. I said it would be interesting to explore the idea of a modern-day Rashomon, where a single event is captured by different people using different types of cameras and they represent a different truth or they can be expanded to show before and after in a context that belies what’s represented by camera A. We called this unwritten narrative our “Rashomon project.” And it was after all this footage got released to Jamie––first it was in piecemeal and then this mother lode came several years later––he shared it with me and I wrote to him and said, “I think we’ve got our Rashomon project here.”

Incident is now available to stream at the New Yorker.

Widely considered one of the most important and prolific film critics in America, Jonathan Rosenbaum began his career in the 1970s writing film criticism for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and the Village Voice before becoming chief critic of the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. At the Reader, he published over 5,000 reviews and columns; now, Jonathan runs his own website where he publishes old and new capsules. He is known, among other things, for being a champion of independent and international auteurs and for writing about them in a highly accessible yet personal, erudite style. Jean-Luc Godard once likened him to André Bazin and James Agee. 

He has written multiple books on film. The latest, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader, was published by Hat & Beard Press in June of last year, and can be considered the definitive culmination of Jonathan’s writing (to date!). An autobiographical and chronological journey, the book spans six decades of Jonathan’s writing about film, literature, and music (specifically jazz). Albeit chronological, the book ping-pongs between dozens of different subjects, ranging from Peanuts comics, William Faulkner’s Light in August, Jacques Tati, Spielberg’s A.I: Artificial Intelligence, Ahmad Jamal, Jean-Luc Godard, Phillip Roth, Mad, and roughly everything in-between, interactively connecting these separate threads and mediums into a personal manifesto of Art.

In celebration of the book, Metrograph hosted Rosenbaum for a double bill of two of his favorite films, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and Giants and Toys, with post-screening conversations with filmmaker (and friend of Jonathan’s, through critic Manny Farber) Michael Almereyda.

I interviewed Rosenbaum at the Upper West Side apartment where he was staying, the day after David Lynch died and the day before his book signing. He had just finished downloading a torrent from the website Karagarga. He drank cranberry juice. 

The Film Stage: Tell me about what compelled you to get this compilation together, which is an autobiography of sorts.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: I didn’t plan it as an autobiography; I wanted to organize my writing chronologically. And then I wanted to contextualize the pieces in the introductions, and then it turned into an autobiography. Also, ever since I wrote Moving Places, I tend to be autobiographical in my criticism. Because it’s really, largely, a form of political honesty. I mean, basically, it’s saying where my ideas kind of come from.

What do you mean by “political honesty”? I mean, I’ve always found there to be a political bent to your writing, so to speak. Even the title In Dreams Begin Responsibilities seems, to me, to be hinting at a leftist message. I know it’s taken from a W.B. Yeats play, but…

Well, it’s actually a little different. In 1914 Yeats had a book called Responsibilities. And on the title page he has two epigraphs, one of which says, “In Dreams Begin Responsibility.” And then it says under that “––Old Play.” So he’s quoting an old play. I don’t know what old play he was referring to or where he got that from, but that’s what the source is.

And why did you choose that as the title?

It’s just something that’s always appealed to me, and I’ve titled individual articles that. And I think it has something to do with the notion of freedom and the freedom of dreams, but at the same time doing something well––I guess you could say “socially aware”––with something that’s very personal.

In other words, I think an awful lot of my work is about––and I mention this somewhere in the book––this thing that appeals to me, partly about jazz: that it’s something that you, whether you’re playing it or listening to it, is something that is both an individual experience and a collective experience. And I think about movies similarly, in that even if you see something in a theater, you’re watching it with other people, but even if you see something at home on your laptop, it becomes social the minute you start discussing it. So I think that there’s a kind of way in which to combine things that are very personal with things that are very collective. 

But I’m curious about the “responsibilities” part. I mean making a work of art, whether it be jazz or a piece of fiction or a film. You hold artists to a certain responsibility, in a sense?

Well, I think when you actually have a dream, there’s something that’s kind of amoral about it because you’re the only audience. But at the same time, when you want to make something out of the dream, that’s when you sort of enter society and you have responsibilities.

Right. I think even the cover reflects that idea.

Yeah. I actually designed the front and back cover myself, and I want it to be open-ended––which is the dream and which is the responsibility. 

Right. 

So in other words: I want it to be interactive. Not just me sort of determining what those words mean, but people using them, which connects with something that I probably repeat more than once in the book, which is a statement that Godard said to me in an interview once: “I’d like to be remembered as an airplane rather than as an airport.”

That word “interactive”––I think you were the one to properly describe Playtime as kind of, like, the first interactive film. So you extend that ethos to your own writing.

Well, I like to think that what I write is socially useful, but in a way that people can take my writing to other places. It doesn’t have to be my place, in other words.

Speaking about your place, I wanted to ask about a post on Twitter that went viral a couple months ago, where you posted your personal DVD collection on Craigslist.

That’s right. 

Selling for $20,000. 

That’s right. And I found a buyer the same day I posted it.

Oh, wow. I’m curious––first and foremost––why did you decide to sell?

Well, it’s a complicated story. I had been in a long conversation with the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago––they were interested in buying my DVDs for a posthumous collection. The idea was that they would pay me the money now, but they would collect the DVDs after I died. 

They had to do a kind of inventory first before they could do anything else and it took a while before they did that, and finally they commissioned a projectionist to actually go through and catalog it. But then after they did it, they found that they couldn’t get the money for it.

And so then I decided, “Okay. Well, I should still sell it.” And the guy I sold it to is a very successful pediatrician who’s a film buff in Chicago, and he has his own screening room. But on the last day of this month, we’re gonna start a film club where I pick the films, and then he orders pizza, and then we have discussions afterwards.

And now I’m considering selling all my books, which would double how much money I have. It would mean I could go to Paris on business class. 

Oh, so you had never met this man before?

No. But we’ve, you know, we’ve had at least a meal together. We’ve had some conversations.

And does he have all the DVDs already in his house?

Yeah. He actually has them all shelved and everything. And, you know, there was a certain sense of loss to be shared, but at the same time it means less now because so much of the stuff you can get on the Internet for free. And so I’ve been loading up my hard drive ever since with several favorite things. I feel a certain lightness, you know, about having let go of it. Unfortunately, I have all these empty shelves now. I have to figure out what to do with those!

It’s interesting because, you know, there’s this kind of resurgence––or I feel there is––among younger film and music circles with physical media, so it’s interesting that you are letting it go. When you were giving it off to this pediatrician, were you hesitant to let go of any DVD in particular? Did you keep any?

Well, are there some that I even went and bought again since. The first film that’s gonna be shown in the film club is a film called The Story of Three Loves, which is an MGM episodic film from 1953. So I didn’t actually have the copy I had, so then I went and bought another one. And there are a few films like that that I have a particular love for and went and bought again. 

The Story of Three Loves

Back to the book: you mix literary, jazz, and film criticism. I’m curious what compelled you to collect these different branches of your writing. 

Well, I always felt bad that I hadn’t been able to reprint some of my book reviews because they’re important to me. Like the one I did for Gravity’s Rainbow, for example. So I thought about that and then I thought, “Well, there’s some jazz criticism I have”––which is less important to me, but at the same time I’ve been doing it––and then I thought, “Well, yeah, why not put them all together?” I didn’t know what I was gonna wind up with. I didn’t even originally think that I was gonna necessarily do it in chronological order. Gradually I became aware that, my entire life, I’ve been writing about jazz and literature and film. And I didn’t realize how much I’ve been comparing the art forms from the very beginning and how they’re all actually connected and important. So that was a kind of discovery I made while putting together the book. 

It begins with a review of Dr. Strangelove that you wrote when you were at Bard College. I’m curious about those years at Bard in the early sixties. 

I started college at NYU, actually.

Oh, okay.

1961. And then after 3 semesters, I was really missing, you know, being in a community. And I had a friend from a boarding school, a woman who was at Bard, who I went to visit, and she convinced me it was a great place, and so I transferred. And then immediately––even though I wasn’t a film critic then––I took over the Friday night film society. And, you know, sort of ran all of that. So I was still involved. But I was still learning. It was a great period for, you know, the new wave and all of that stuff, but I was still using the film society partly as a way of educating myself in some ways.

Right. Was there a vibrant film environment at Bard during the time? 

Well, there was no film department. I showed Sunrise twice because the first time everybody was laughing and jeering and everything, and I got very upset because that was my favorite film then. And so I decided to program it again and try to see if I could prepare the audience for it differently. And it, you know, it wasn’t a total success the second time either, but it was a little bit better. 

And what compelled you to start writing film criticism? Because I know that you actually were a fiction writer first. 

That’s right. What happened was really strange. I went to graduate school partly for, well, draft-dodging, but also thinking then that I was going to be an academic. And then when I really got fed up with graduate school––and once I reached the age and realized that, for whatever reason, I wasn’t gonna get drafted––I could quit. I did. I did everything except the dissertation. And the reason why I didn’t do the dissertation was because I couldn’t find a professor who would do something on film and literature, and I couldn’t find a faculty member who would referee. So anyway: I quit, and a guy who I knew who was a friend of friends––actually a friend of my friend named John Bragan––he basically hired me to edit a collection of film criticism, which I did.

But then John became a Scientologist. And he disappeared with all of the stills from the book to work on L. Ron Hubbard’s ships. 

Wow.

And so he became impossible to even contact. So anyway: in the course of putting together the book I met a lot of people for the first time, including Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber––at least on the phone. You know? So it’s kind of, like, I got involved. And I even wrote a piece for the book––one that’s never been published because it’s not very good, actually. But it was a piece about Sunrise, in fact.

And, you see, at that point I was then writing my third novel––none of my novels would be published––and at the same time I was in Paris and I found that I could be a Paris correspondent for Film Comment and I could write for Sight and Sound. So I was getting published as a film critic and not as a fiction writer. So that’s how I became a film critic. 

And whatever happened to those unpublished novels? 

Well, I still have copies of them. I could’ve put them on my website, but I don’t. There’s one chapter from the third novel that I put on my website. 

So you knew you were a writer long before you knew you were a film critic? 

That’s right. 

And I guess that’s representative of this book itself, because it’s not limited to film criticism. 

Right. And you see, I think there’s a kind of a French idea which I talk about: film is literature by other means. For example: the French magazine I wrote for the most, Traffic, is very much a literary magazine, because, I mean, it didn’t even have any stills except the tiny one on the cover. But in essence and style it felt like a literary magazine. And because I think it’s in France, it’s a literary culture. 

And I’m curious about, you know, literary criticism and film criticism. Do you go about writing them in the same way? 

Well, I don’t know. I don’t. It’s not quite the same because they’re different mediums, but I haven’t really analyzed it. I mean, I think each book review I’ve written and each film review, it’s almost like I feel like, ideally, I’m starting out from scratch. It’s not like I have a method that I use with everything and I applied it, or if I do I’m not aware of it. You know? It’s just trying to sort of deal with the challenges of a particular work. 

Someone else who also saw film as literature by other means is the Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. You deserve credit for being one of the earliest champions of his work and familiarizing American audiences to him. 

Oh, yeah. Most American audiences didn’t know who he was. One thing is that a friend of mine––who is a very good writer named Gilbert Adair––wrote two scripts with Ruiz, and what kind of amazed me was Ruiz’s originality; he didn’t care whether his films were good or not, or whether they were successful or not.

And I feel like it goes hand-in-hand with improvisation, which you talk a lot about in the book. The magic of a work of art is when, you know, someone has to come up with something they don’t even know. 

Are you familiar with Karagarga?

Yeah.

I am actually downloading one of my favorites [of Ruiz’s], The Blind Owl. I love what Luc Moullet said about that film. It was something like, “I’ve seen it 5 times and each time, I understand it less.” And the thing is, [Ruiz] and I were friends, but I think, you know, we drifted apart and I think the two reasons we drifted apart was, one, he was kind of fed up with the fact that I  kind of have a disability with language.

Even though I lived in Paris, I never became fluent in speaking French. And I think he was so good with languages. I think he was a little impatient. But I think the second reason we drifted apart was that he got more involved in big-budget movies, and that seemed, to me, going against the grain of his earlier work. I mean, when I did an interview with him he called it a capitulation in some ways.

The Blind Owl

Something I’ve noticed when reading the interviews you’ve done about this book is that you’ve had difficulty getting published by some presses because of its multi-media interest. 

Yes. University of California and Columbia University Press. In both cases the editors liked it and the publicist rejected it. And the amazing thing––and what just took me completely by unawares––was that I had no idea that publicists were more powerful than editors. They don’t deserve to get government grants if they do, because they handled it really badly at California. They let me go on for four months thinking that they were gonna be doing the book, and then I got a letter saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re not gonna do it. We talked to the publicists and they will have too much difficulty with it.”

That’s terrible. 

Yeah. So I didn’t even answer the letter; I was so angry. You know?

What is your relationship to publicists in general, and how do you view them––not just with this book, but over your career as a whole? 

Oh, I don’t know. There are good publicists and bad publicists. I’ve been friends with some publicists. And others who I consider my enemy.

Right.

It’s something that I speculate a lot about in my recent writing, which is that: if you think about it, the intake that people have of language every day––whether it’s things that they read or things that they hear, the language that everybody encounters every day––98% of it is advertising. And because of that, 98% of the language they take in on a given day is lies and insincere lies. 

It’s really about the market. That’s really what it is. In other words: the same thing with the idea of the Oscars. The whole idea of the Oscars is to resell things that have already been sold a second time. Again, it’s all about advertising.

What I’m talking about––a term that I use more and more often now because it applies to more and more things––is capitalist censorship. That’s why the University of California Press and Columbia University Press didn’t publish my book: it’s capitalist censorship. 

And it’s concerning that we even see it in the academic presses.

The interesting thing about it––what’s so politically conservative about it––is that the economic model goes back to Reagan, which is that you take an existing market and you exhaust it. Nobody tolerates the idea of you creating a new market. 

Do you think that extends itself to cinema as well? Like, this inability to imagine new ways of telling stories? 

Well, yeah. And I mean, in terms of what’s made, one of the things that’s horrible about what’s happened to Hollywood is that the people who run the film industry are not film buffs; they don’t care. They’re just thinking about making money. And they have contempt for the audience. So in other words: they don’t even like the people they’re servicing. And, you know, they basically decided when I was growing up that films were for everybody. But they decided that everybody is a 10-year-old boy. 

Would you describe yourself as a leftist?

Yes, and a universalist too. But at the same time, if I were asked, is there any national cinema that is better than all the others, I would pick the American.

I’ve heard that a lot of your writing’s done under the influence of marijuana. Is that true? 

Yeah.

Do you still?

I stopped smoking everything. But I used to smoke liquid delta. A large part of Moving Places was written when I was stoned. If you are self-critical as a writer it just opens you up and liberates you a little bit. 

Something you like to talk about is how you think critics don’t need to diagnose whether a certain movie is “good’ or “bad.” 

The idea of the very notion of a film being good or bad implies good or bad independently of people watching it. So in other words: it’s a ridiculous concept because it’s ridiculous to assume that any film that’s good is good for everybody in the world, and vice-versa. I’m quoting myself here, but I think what a film critic should do is ask “good for what, good for whom?”

But I do think that there is something to say about how a critic does have a sense of authority. Right?

Well, I don’t know. Sometimes I proselytize for certain things and, you know, hope that the people who will like it will go see it. But I like the idea of interactivity; I like the idea of people. I don’t like the idea of somebody imitating me. See, one problem I had with Manny Farber when I replaced him as a teacher, he had a writer’s workshop and I found that everybody in the course was imitating him and he’s the worst person in the world to try to imitate. One Manny Farber is enough. Even though I want to influence people, I don’t like the idea of trying to breed people to imitate me; I like the idea of people going off in their own directions.

What is the role of a critic, then?

Critics should never have the first word or the last word. They should come in-between.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader is now available.

With only two features under his belt, British musician Daniel Blumberg has already cemented his name in film history. After debuting scoring abilities on 2020’s The World to Come, the composer extraordinaire is back four years later with a monumental sophomore effort––one that reflects the work of a vetted master.

Blumberg’s 32-track, 82-minute score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, varied, odyssey-inducing epic that subtly clues you into the film’s expression, the soul of its architect lead, and the dawning sense of hard-earned revelation that runs through the sweeping immigrant story.

With a Golden Globe nomination for the score already, multiple awards from critics circles, and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar nomination on the horizon, Blumberg sat down to talk with us about composing the score, the various and experimental approaches he took to recording, and the beauty of working with an assured, hyper-involved director like Corbet.  

Daniel Blumberg: I was up ‘til 5 working, so I’m a bit, like… tired.

The Film Stage: What are you working on? 

Another film that I started on straight after The Brutalist, right after the sound mix.

What’s the film?

It’s Mona [Fastvold]’s next film [Ann Lee]. Brady’s partner. They wrote it together. She just got it together and it just happened to be back to back. 

Is Corbet making that one with her? Or did they just write it together? 

They normally do second unit for each other. And they kind of support each other through it all. They’re an amazing team.

I mean, The Brutalist is proof enough. Let’s get into it. You were big in the indie-rock scene a long time ago, and for more than a decade now you’ve been creating more experimental music with various artists, focusing on live sound, etc. How did you get into composing film scores?

The stuff you talked about is when I was, like, a child. Like, Brady was in Thunderbirds many years ago, but it’s very distant. I’ve been working with mainly improvised music since I was 22. I’ve always drawn pictures, and when I discovered improvised music it was like a relationship to drawing. And I think with film it was more like, I stumbled into Kieslowski when I was 17––just randomly got a DVD of A Short Film About Killing, and that got me into cinema. And then I watched all of Kieslowski’s films. Then someone recommended me another director; then I was watching all of Bresson’s films. It was always very much driven by discovering directors. I wouldn’t even really listen to or particularly notice the score or the performances of the constructs of the films. It was quite like a magical medium for me––unlike music, which I’d been making since I was 15. It was mysterious.

When I met Brady, he was making his first film, The Childhood of a Leader. And we immediately connected, became very good friends. Similar taste in many things. He introduced me to film scores because he invited me to the sessions when they recorded the brass for his first film. And then I met Peter Walsh, who was co-producing [the score], and saw how he was working. And we started working together. We made three records together. Now, this is the second film we’ve made together. Mona asked me to do her first film [The World to Come]. That was my introduction; that was the first time I’d worked on a feature. It was just really interesting, because I was working primarily with improvising musicians where it’s so open. You don’t know if someone’s gonna play a percussive note for half a second or if they’re playing the saxophone they might circular breathe for an hour.

But film is time-based in the sense that the scene is three minutes, 40 seconds, and 23 milliseconds. That was really interesting to me––like, how to retain the qualities of the music that I was excited about. And maybe someone like Mona had listened to my records, so how to kind of make that work fluidly with the responsibilities of scoring where you’re part of a wider team and you’re all trying, hopefully, to work together to execute what the director’s vision is. How I fell in love with film was through directors, so immediately it was all about how to do what I do in service to the director and their vision and still make it feel like [the film] is one person’s work.

Speaking of directors: I saw that you scored a short film directed by Peter Strickland, which is about GUO, your project with saxophonist Seymour Wright, if I understand correctly. I’m curious how you ended up working with Strickland. I know he’s hyper-focused on the sound of his films. Specifically sound design, but I imagine that extends to music as well, and the importance of those fusing together for a film.

That project was interesting because I had this duo with Wright, who also played alto sax on The Brutalist, and we were working in a more improvised way. But we would bring, like, an image before we played or a piece of text. It was a really nice way to start playing. We’d just meet and bring something. And then, when we started recording and making records, we wanted to kind of do the same: we’d ingested these images and text into the music, and we thought it’d be nice to give it to a writer or an artist to make an ekphrasis.

It’s quite an old-school thing where a write would, like, respond to a painting. Brady and I actually really connected on that. One of the first books he bought me was a László Krasznahorkai, who wrote a lot of Béla Tarr’s films. He had an ekphrasis book. I can’t remember what kind of paintings they are; I think they’re like prostitutes. But yeah: he has this beautiful book of, like, a single sentence that Krasznahorkai wrote in response to these images.

Anyway, the first record we had David Toop––who’s a really beautiful writer; he writes about music in an amazing way––he responded to our music. Peter’s film actually came from that process. We asked Peter to respond to the record that we’d made, and he came up with this film. He heard the lockers and, yeah, it went from there. But it was from the music that the film was generated. But yeah: he’s great. He’s really massive. When I met Peter I was a fan of cinema and he was a fan of music––I have a great DVD collection and he has a great record collection.

What does the music-writing process look like for a score that’s this gargantuan? 

Well, we started from the script––Brady and I talking about it really early on. The first instinct was this kind of prepared piano sound where you interfere with the strings of a piano. I was literally putting screws into the strings, wedging them inside. You prepare the strings with different objects and then, when you hit the keys, the hammer hits the string and it makes this kind of percussive sound. I thought of that just in terms of construction. It’s funny, because it’s like hammers and screws, but it actually sounds light. So it was like a mixture of that and thinking about John [Tilbury]’s playing, and also the potential of the piano in terms of, like, it’s a vast acoustic instrument.

The idea that it has bass, like with architecture. I was wondering, and one of the things we talked about was what spaces they’d be shooting in. Obviously a lot of it’s shot on a film set, which doesn’t particularly sound exciting, but it was very thorough. When he got the film together and he went to Budapest to start pre-production, I went there to live with him through the shoot. So we were really sharing space.

So you were composing just off-set while they were filming? 

Yeah. I mean, it was a combination. The first day of the shoot was the jazz scene, where Adrien and Isaac’s characters go to a jazz club and shoot up and come back in the room. So I had to get a jazz band together for that, because we did live music on that. And then––what would they be playing? I had a theme that we had done quite early. I really tried not to get too involved with obsessing over it until it was in pre-production. But I had done a piece of music that kind of became the construction theme. And there was this idea that that jazz music that they heard, he would retain that throughout his life, that he would never forget it basically. And it forms the construction music at the end of the film. That band was specific musicians: two guys from Marseille, Antonin [Gerbal] on drums, and Joel Grip on double bass. They played music that kind of evoked the ’40s but then also would be able to deconstruct it when they came out high.

It’s all acoustic, the score, until you get to the ’80s. Those players have very specific improvising practices in their own right, and I knew they could both play the jazz and the more open music that we wanted for when they emerge from the toilet and Brady is using this in-camera effect from the VistaVision that stretches the light. I showed the band the camera tests as an example of how they could kind of stretch it out. But it was great doing that at the start, because it was, like, immediately a collaboration between departments. I was hiding microphones and the cinematographer was operating to the music they were making and the actors were responding to it. And it was really nice to start that process, and that kind of continued through the shoot.

How much of the film’s score was composed by the time the film was done shooting? 

I like working before the pictures are made because the ceiling starts coming down; even just seeing images. I like to have the opportunity to rely more on my conversations with Brady. The thing is: I don’t want to illustrate stuff. You want to find this balance where it’s really part of it, really integrated. One of the things for me was that Brady wanted to shoot certain scenes to music. Obviously I was talking about the jazz scene, but that was live. But then the overture––like, when he’s arriving on the boat at the start of the film––he wanted to shoot that to the music. So I made a demo.

I mean, that was literally Brady and I sitting next to my keyboard and him sort of saying, “Yeah, and then László goes up the stairs, and he’s going up and up and then the Statue of Liberty.” And we were really sketching it out, and then I bounce it. I mean, that was played really loud on set, again, so the cinematographer could move to the beat or against the beat. And then Adrien and the extras, it was like a whole choreography that was shot to the music. And then later, the sound mix came in with sirens. This sort of rough sound immediately inspired the brass. When I started recording acoustically, one of the things I’d do at the end of each brass section is like, “Hey, can you make siren sounds?” 

What was the back-and-forth like between you and Brady in the scoring? Is he typically involved on an intricate, note-to-note level, or are you composing full pieces and getting back to him with those, then sharpening them, etc.? 

As involved as possible. I mean, it’s his piece of work. One of the great things about being on set is: if I see scenes where he’s communicating with the actors, I get a real sense of what his intentions are for the temperature of that scene. And those things, when I’m with the musicians recording the music, those are the moments where my instincts are almost trained to his. So it’s like I know I can be there with the musician, because I don’t have anyone in my sessions. The people I work with are artists mainly. It’s definitely a lot about communicating, and they’re all quite uncompromising, and it’s a lot of trust.

Someone like Sofia Agnel––she’s an incredible artist in her own right. She’s been making work for much longer than us. [John] Tilbury is in his late 80s. It’s a combination of kind of asking people because you want them in the process, not just their instruments. They’re not just classical players. I want them to feel free in themselves but also to have the right amount of context so that it hits the seam or hits what Brady wants. It’s a lot about communication and setting up those sessions in a way. I have a beautiful remote recording set-up; it’s very small.

Do you record everything live? As in: is each track a live, individual track? Or are you recording sounds and stacking them onto different tracks across sessions?

Peter Walsh, who mixed it, is just, like, amazing at making quite complicated sounds work together. And you can hear that in his records with Scott [Walker.] But it’s a real mix because with The Brutalist, the nature of the film––this kind of [makes metronome sounds], the precision in some of the cues, I mean it was the first time I was using a metronome. And so some of the cues are very specific. Sofia Agnel––I recorded her in Paris––there was one cue where I really wanted her to play with Axel Dörner, who’s in Berlin, and they’re all very busy. But they’d played together before so it was almost like live. So there was an element of that, and then there were some cues where it’s about retaining the live quality of it. Like the jazz, the bebop, you know that was, like, a take.

The heroin cue where they’re kind of making love for three days––that was a really improvised session. We recorded that in Joel Grip’s painting studio in Berlin. And I had the mics set up on two trumpets, Axel Dörner and his partner Carina. And then Joel was playing double bass and I was playing piano, and it was like a live take that, as we were playing it, I was like, “Oh, Brady’s gonna like this.” I got back from the Eurostar and went straight to his hotel room in London because he was over for pre-production. I played it for him and he was so excited. 

Brady Corbet’s music video for Daniel Blumberg’s single CHEERUP

Are you classically trained? Like, are you writing out compositions ahead of time and then iterating on it? Or is the kind of composing you’re doing more along the lines of directing various music sessions?

I can’t read music and I’m not classically trained at all. My friend Tom Wheatley, who played double bass on the film, he knows how to write music, so he translated a demo recording I did into score for a group of brass, like a trio, that play together often in Berlin. And they have quite a specific way of intonating between each other, and also their breath. With brass, when it’s a group that plays often together, they breathe in the right places and they needed sheet music. And that was more for, like, building the warm brass, like in the bus. Those cues are written out and it was much more, like, “This is what you need to play.” 

For that cue in the painting studio, I brought Erzsébet’s theme. In the film I wanted that to kind of disintegrate from the moment they meet, and it’s so romantic and beautiful and then fit to disintegrate by the time they’re fucking on heroin. But it needed to be that theme, so I brought it in its most simple form––I played it for them on the piano––and then we improvised around that and that was the limit for that improvisation. 

When did you land on that 3-4-note refrain that is the theme?

That just came from, well, me and Brady went through the script during pre-production and I just started playing piano. And Brady’s really good to work with because he knows when he likes something. There was this day where I was working on that theme and whether it could go to different places, and he heard me messing around on the keyboard, kind of starting and stopping, because I don’t know music theory, so it’s a lot about playing and trying. And he heard that process and immediately was like, “That’s László. It needs to sound like he’s working it out.” I had my dictaphone on, and for the temp he was using a lot of that dictaphone recording where I’m like starting, stopping, changing this setting on the keyboard, you can hear me dropping things.

That was one of the hardest things to work on because there are imperfections, these beautiful imperfections. I did it with John Tilbury, and that’s why I mic’d him; I mic’d his piano. I recorded him in the garden. He has, like, a Steinway in a shed basically, his studio. And I had a mic on the strings, in the room, and on him. So you can hear the piano still screeching and you can hear him scribbling on the stave. In the intermission, you can really hear that working-it-out process. I was trying to work out where that melody could go, which I brought to Erzsébet’s theme. The idea is that you hear it for the first half and then it develops into Erzsébet’s theme in the second half.

Like, I recorded John Tilbury trying to work out Erzsébet’s theme in real time, you know, and it was really nice. You can hear the birds walking around on the roof. That’s something where I can really listen to it. He’s trying to work out a klezmer integration because he had this idea of introducing klezmer into the theme. And just, for me to listen to that––it’s a collaborative piece, you know? I think of being with John and his wife Janice during that period, and it was very amazing to be able to work with an artist like that. You know, he’s made a body of work. Brady and I are young, just starting to make stuff. 

Had you ever done something that was this diverse across instrumentation and style? And did you know the range would be immense going into it?

I knew the script was huge. Brady got a lot of shit when he was making it. By the end, they were trying to make him make it shorter. He was just, “No.” He doesn’t let anyone come in. He made it exactly how he wanted to. I just found it so funny that people thought it could be shorter, because the script was always so long. I was always aware that this was a really important piece of work. The script reads so beautifully. Like, it’s a really beautiful text that he and Mona wrote. My thing was like: I wanted to get to the end of the process and really feel like I’d done everything I could. It was really hardcore for me and for Brady. Just timewise. And for Pete, the mixing was insane; it was like mixing two films. So it was absolutely crazy.

But it was always, I think, about trying to get these elements that would speak to the scale of it. But also, the score can really help a film when it can be, like, the glue. Especially on a film like this, where there are lots of elements to it and characters and new places. The score can really help tie stuff together. So, it’s like choosing instruments or musicians that could really… yeah, like the brass: it can be really harsh but also really warm. It was, like, how to use as little elements as possible to do as many things as possible in a cohesive way. But then the ’80s cue is kind of the most extreme jump in terms of aesthetics. 

That was inspired, because in the script Brady wanted to shoot on video––early, digital kind of video for the ’80s when it goes to the Biennale. And it was like, “Oh, that would be interesting for it to suddenly cut from these very acoustic instruments to a digital sound.” And yeah: that was definitely the most fun cue. I’ve had a Moog for years and I’ve always used it, but not for finishing stuff––it was more like a notepad or something––and that was fun. I worked with Vince Clarke on that. He, like, defined the sound of the ’80s with Depeche Mode and Yazoo. I worked with him and brought it back to London to work with Brady. The last day with the music was just me and Brady with two bottles of wine around my Moog just finishing that song. I’m like, “Please can you do a film that’s just synth one day.” [Laughs] It’s so fun.

The Brutalist is now in theaters and expands wide on January 24.