No live music was played, but the Saturday afternoon premiere of Dave Grohl’s Sound City documentary — about the fabled-yet-scuzzy Van Nuys, CA recording studio of the same name where Nirvana , Neil Young , Fleetwood Mac, Rick Springfield , Rage Against the Machine and Fear recorded landmark albums — felt like an all-star rock concert. Fans stood on street corners near the Marc theater, where the film debuted, offering to purchase tickets from anyone with a spare, and the musical artists who turned out to watch the documentary, included former Creedence Clearwater frontman John Fogerty, Grohl’s former Nirvana bandmates Krist Novoselic (pictured on the right) and Pat Smear, Springfield and Stevie Nicks, most or all of whom are expected to play with Grohl in a live show later tonight on Main Street in Park City. Before the screening, Grohl called the film “the most important thing I’ve done artistically,” and at the Q&A session that followed the movie, noted that the digital revolution, which transformed music industry (and essentially killed Sound City, which did things the analog way) enabled him to become a filmmaker and tell the story of the recording studio’s rightful place in rock ‘n’ roll history. “I made a movie. It’s shocking, really,” Grohl said. “Next, I’ll be flying your plane to Dulles.” Grohl and Sound City got an enthusiastic standing ovation at the end, and the people in the audience around me seemed to really be rocking out to a segment that has the surviving members of Nirvana playing with former Beatle Paul McCartney . The part of the movie that rocked my world, however, was when Grohl performed the gritty “The Man That Never Was,” with Springfield. Like a number of other performances, the song, which was co-written by Springfield, Grohl and others was recorded on Sound City’s fabled Neve console, which the Foo Fighter bought for his own 606 Studios when Sound City closed its doors as a commercial recording business in 2011. Grohl said these songs will be released on a Sound City album in March. I especially loved it when, after the performance, Nevermind producer (and Garbage drummer) Butch Vig tells Springfield: “You got some darkness in you, boy!” Springfield also turns out to have been an important part of the studio’s history and vice versa. He recorded his 1981 Working Class Dog there, which contained his breakthrough hit “Jessie’s Girl.” The success of that album was important to Sound City’s success. Springfield was also managed by Sound City’s original owner and even met his wife, Barbara Porter, who was an assistant there. I’m hoping that Springfield performs with Grohl on Main Street tonight, and that, as a result, Sundance sees a warp in the time-space continuum. See you on the other side. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
In Tree of Life , Jessica Chastain played a mother who could float. In Mama , she’s attacked by one. Chastain shot this dignified little thriller in fall 2011 during the stretch when literally every arthouse theater played at least two of her pictures—between Tree , Coriolanus , The Help , Take Shelter , Texas Killing Fields and The Debt , she was indie cinema’s inescapable new queen. Universal intended to release the Guillermo del Toro -produced Mama last October, but shelved it until the week after Chastain was nominated for an Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty . Is this her reputation-besmirching Norbit ? Pshaw — for my money, it’s her best performance yet. Mama starts with a child’s hand scrawling “Once upon a time,” words that send us all the way back to, uh, the financial collapse of 2008. A Wall Street bigshot (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has a nervous breakdown: He shoots his co-workers, shoots his wife, and kidnaps his two girls, ages 3 and 1, with the intent of hiding out and shooting them, too. (Alas, murder-suicide is today’s version of parents in the Brothers Grimm casting out their children to survive in the forest.) The place he chooses to pull the trigger is a cabin in the woods that belongs to “Mama,” a ghost who doesn’t take kindly to deadly dads. Side note: Why is Hollywood newly obsessed with monsters who are painfully thin and flexible? It’s as if our entire generation grew up having nightmares about a double-jointed Karen Carpenter. As the opening credits roll, kiddie crayon sketches show us what happened next: The scared blonde tykes cling to their new ghost mommy and revert to crawling on all fours and eating rats. It’s a feral child fairy tale! Cut to the present where we first meet rocker girl Annabel (Chastain) beaming at an EPT test, overjoyed that her boyfriend (Coster-Waldau again) hasn’t gotten her pregnant. Alas, her guy turns out to be the girls’ uncle, and his detectives have finally found Mama’s lair. Surprise! Annabel’s about to be the adopted mother of two crab-walking nightmares, and she really doesn’t want to meet their babysitter. Every beat in Mama is familiar, down to the exact moment you need to close your eyes to dodge a jump-scare, and there’s a goofy child psychiatrist (Daniel Kash) whose actions make about as much sense as Claire Danes in Homeland . But damned if Mama doesn’t transcend its nonsense. As in Paranormal Activity 3 , the girls — now 6 and 8, but psychologically closer to wildcats in captivity — spend a lot of time in their bedroom playing tug-of-war with their spooky spectral caretaker and humming creepy hymns. Young actresses Isabelle Nelisse and Megan Charpentier are excellent, with Nelisse frighteningly primal, and Charpentier as her guilt-stricken and watchful older sister. The best call in the script is the slow wedge that’s driven between the girls, the real world, and the world only they believe in. The kids are scary but they don’t thrill to see Chastain scream. Instead, their loyalty is torn between the only mother they’ve ever known and, you know, the one who doesn’t look like an anorexic hellbeast. One standout chase sequence shows us Mama’s back story in a retro filmstrip style that looks like one of D.W. Griffith’s nightmares. But Mama ‘s smartest choice is the decision by helmer Andres Muschietti (who also co-wrote the script with Barbara Muschietti and Neil Cross) to cast Chastain for insta-class. Chastain has carved out a career in shockingly fast time, but she’s been oddly ill-used by her directors, who tend to see her as a figurehead, not a woman. She’s been shoehorned into archetypes: The fragile doll, the vision of womanly perfection, the sexless drone. It takes this slight but ambitious horror flick to let her be flesh-and-blood fun. Her Annabel is a tough, short-haired dame who’s inked with tattoos under her Misfits t-shirts. She plays guitar in a ’90s-esque girl band — god, I wish we had more of those today — and her cellphone voicemail barks: “This is Annabel. Leave a message at the beep. Fuck you — beep .” As she warms, slowly, to the beast-children, Chastain gets to play an arc, not an archetype, and Mama becomes an honest-to-god film instead of a quickie horror cash-in or a bone-dry drama that relies on Chastain to do all the heavy lifting. Kathryn Bigelow , take note: Surround Chastain with an actual movie, and you might get a Oscar nod the next go-round. Amy Nicholson is a critic, playwright and editor. Her interests include hot dogs, standard poodles, Bruce Willis, and comedies about the utter futility of existence. Follow her on Twitter. Follow Amy Nicholson on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Pacific Rim looks awesome and all, but let’s talk about science for a second. Specifically, let’s talk about the science, or lack thereof, behind completely awesome giant robots. Guillermo Del Toro ‘s upcoming sci-fi action pic is probably going to be as awesome as the trailers make it look, unless you’re the kind of person who hates the sight of huge mecha fighting against equally huge monsters, in which case please show yourself out. How could you not love enormous robots punching out enormous monsters who lay waste to entire cities? Giant robots represents 90 percent of what we want the future to be like (the other 10 percent: flying cars, and a male birth control pill.) They’re extremely cool looking, they transform, and for sheer shock factor they’re impossible to beat. We want them so badly, but could we have them in real life? Unfortunately, hell no. Not because of budgetary constraints, frustratingly missing confirmation of alien life, or the lack of a decent fuel source. There’s a bigger problem facing these robots than any alien invasion: Physics. Yes, the terrible dictator that ruins everything from warp drive to immortality also has a bone to pick with Del Toro’s supersized combatants. And unfortunately, as inherently awesome as it sounds, having giant robots brawling with giant monsters in regular ol’ planet earth gravity runs right up against the twin problems of weight distribution and the nefarious square cube law . The square cube law is a paradoxical-sounding mathematical concept, first identified by Galileo, which states that when a given object increases proportionally in size the new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier, but the new volume is proportional to the multiplier’s cube. Or restated for those of us whose eyes begin to bleed when the subject of math comes up: When something increases in size, its volume increases faster than its area. If you double the size of an object for instance, surface area increases by four times, but the volume of that object, which is (duh) all the space inside it, increases eightfold. This law has implications for numerous scientific disciplines, including construction and biology. To get an idea of how it works, let’s say you take an average human woman, someone approximately 5 feet, 5 inches tall. Increase her size to 11 feet. You now have a woman whose heart is four times bigger, forced to pump a presumably proportional increase in blood through 8 times the amount of circulatory system her smaller incarnation had. That’s a tremendous amount of stress and likely to kill anyone who grows beyond a certain height*. Of course, animals which have evolved to be big, rather than having had a gene preventing abnormal growth turned off, have developed the respiratory and circulatory systems necessary to handle their needs. But before you break out the snacks for your ‘Yay, monsters for everyone!’ party, bear in mind that all that volume comes with a ton of additional weight. Mice, for example, don’t look like miniature elephants for the very excellent reason that an elephant’s bones have to be much bigger in proportion to its body size than a mouse’s skeleton does, in order to support all that weight. In fact, if you zapped a mouse with magic to increase it to the size of an elephant, its bones would probably be crushed under the weight of its soft tissue within seconds. EEK! And even though the elephant’s bones can support it, it still has to deal with the fact that it’s far easier to break something heavy than something light, which is why a mouse could jump off a waist-high kitchen table with no ill-effect, but an elephant can break a leg simply tripping over something. Complicating things further, all that weight needs musculature capable of dealing with it, and that’s another way the square cube law totally screws over giant animals. It takes considerably more muscles to manipulate the animal’s limbs and moving parts, but those muscles have to deal with a hell of a lot more weight. This means larger animals tend to be slower and less agile than smaller animals and beyond a certain point there’s no amount of naturally evolved biomechanical components that can do the job. In fact, this is why earth’s largest animals are water-dwelling, where buoyancy mitigates a lot of the stressors caused by huge mass and weight. Forget deftly sweeping cars off a bridge with the swipe of a taloned hand; a giant monster like the beasts in Pacific Rim might find it difficult to even stand up. * Read Orson Scott Card’s Shadow series for an excellent depiction of the problem. But ignore his reactionary politics which become insufferable as the series goes on. NEXT: The square cube law and giant freaking robots
Following a whirlwind rise to fame in his native Sweden, actor Joel Kinnaman is beginning to make his mark on American audiences thanks to a breakout turn as Detective Holder on AMC’s The Killing and his high-profile casting in the upcoming RoboCop remake . For the Stockholm-born 32-year-old, who breaks Greta Gerwig’s heart at the start of this week’s Lola Versus (but manages to remain sympathetic — a rarity in romantic comedies), setting out for Hollywood couldn’t have come at a better time. And according to him, taking risks — in work and beyond — is what living is all about: “Nothing is more important than the choices we make and the life we choose to live.” Over the course of a decade, the blond, strikingly handsome Kinnaman has emerged as one of Sweden’s most promising talents. Crossing over to Hollywood, he appeared in The Darkest Hour , The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , and Safe House , while his 2010 Swedish crime thriller Snabba Cash — set to be remade in English with Zac Efron — will debut stateside this summer. In Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister Jones’s Lola Versus Kinnaman takes a slight detour from the “darkness and grittiness” he’s embraced for years, playing Luke, the NYC artist who gets cold feet and breaks his engagement to Greta Gerwig’s Lola, forcing her to re-examine herself and her fairytale expectations of life and love. Kinnaman rang Movieline from London for a wide-ranging conversation about living without regret, leaving Sweden in time to avoid waking up at 45 years old “doing auditions for the third swordsman on Game of Thrones ,” why he quit Twitter but can’t help Googling himself every now and then, and (of course!) our robot future. Hi there! Where are you calling from, by the way? I’m walking around in my robe in a hotel room in London. What are you doing in London? I’m shooting an H&M commercial. Aha! So, let me get this out of the way right off the bat: I got hooked on The Killing and watched all of the first season, on demand, in a matter of days. [Laughs] That’s the way I like to watch stuff, too! Given that most folks here know you as Holder from The Killing , Lola Versus is an interesting project to come out for you now that you’re starting to cross-over from Swedish film and TV into Hollywood. Was it appealing, the variation? Well, yes — it was a very welcome light side step from all the darkness and grittiness that I’ve been involved with, pretty much throughout my whole career. I’m a pretty light and light-spirited person; I’m not a depressed guy. I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries there’s this whole mythology of the wounded artist, that you can’t really do any great art unless you’re suffering. And I always thought that was bullshit, I thought it was out of not being able to trust yourself to dive into those deep waters, so you create this persona of a struggling person that in turn would make it believable that you could portray these characters. But I’ve usually been cast as these dark, complex, struggling people. Why do you think that is? I don’t know. Of course I have that in me, too, but that’s not what I nourish in life. I don’t think that anybody that is depressed wants to be depressed, and that’s often what you see from performances with actors like that; it’s a depressed character from the first step onstage or the first frame of a movie and it’s like [sighs] and there’s no real journey to it. Does this make you a sort of anti-method actor? Well, I’m not a method actor per se, but if I’m playing a character that at its core of its persona has experiences I don’t have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about. I think my technique is always evolving, and I think every character has its technique, but the thread through the way I work is that I usually try to get myself real experience doing what the character does so I have something real to fantasize about. Along those lines, you did ride-alongs with police officers to prepare to play Holder on The Killing , so I’m assuming you’ll spend some time with robots for RoboCop … [Laughs] Yeah, I’m going to Japan and spending time with [real life robots]. Have you seen those? Pretty cool. I have, and it blows my mind that a RoboCop -like future may not be too far away. It’s not. Have you seen these Japanese hospital droids, or humanoids, or whatever they call it? They’ve perfected the skin, and the skin looks so real. They have these motors between the eyes for when they smile. It’s just mind-blowing. We’re pretty close already. You can find it on YouTube! It’s spooky. Lola Versus is a relationship movie, an alternative romantic dramedy, but it’s surprisingly balanced and complex as these movies go — your character is a character who in any average rom-com might be written as evil, so we can hate him off the bat for dumping Lola. But we can’t really do that here. Yeah, it feels more balanced and not so formulaic in that sense. And I like that it starts out where most rom-coms end. And the message of the movie was one of the things that drew me to it; this message of ‘freedom for solitude.’ But at its main core it says, don’t throw your life away by living your life by a formula, like how things are supposed to be done. I think that’s what freaks Luke out — he’s realizing that life is a precious thing and maybe he hasn’t given it everything he could. It’s like being a little bit of a coward. One of the things that came to mind when I read the script, and something I think about a lot, is I believe that this life is everything that we have, and nothing happens after it — nothing is more important than the choices we make and the life we choose to live. There was this, I think, Danish documentary where they did interviews with old people, in their 80s, all over the world, from different classes and histories of wealth, different ethnicities, different religious backgrounds. Interviewing them on life; how they looked upon life. And of course the answers were all across the board, because everyone has such a different outlook on life, because of where they’re from. But there was one question that had a much higher resonance of the quality of answers, all over the world, in different classes and ethnicities, and that was, “What is your biggest regret in life?” And the answer that was common was, “That I didn’t take more emotional risks.” I’m turning 31, and having been thinking about those kinds of questions lately, I’ll be honest with you — watching Lola Versus at times was a little too real for me. [Laughs] Those are the kinds of reality checks that we need! If you got that feeling, that’s the best thing that can happen to you. I think that being a coward within yourself and not exposing yourself to life, giving yourself an opportunity to be everything that you can be — giving yourself the opportunity to evolve fully, to the furthest extent of where you could come — that’s a crime to yourself. You have to be brave. Speaking of such things as bravery, the leap you made from Sweden to Hollywood seems like a challenging transition to make. You’ve talked about going out for auditions, having to deal with not having a big enough “name”… I got out of acting school in 2007, and I had two very intense years — I did nine features in 16 months, where I played the lead in all of them, and at the same time I was playing the lead, Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment . It was like a three hour and 45 minute play that was a big success in Sweden. So I had a very intense two first years after I got out of acting school, and it was after that whole period before those movies had come out, that I made the decision to move. It was a good choice, and I was aware of my situation, [thinking] it’s a good time to go now, because in three or four years I’ll be established in a way, in Sweden, where I’m going to be used to being treated in a certain way and that can be difficult to change. So it was very easy to come over to the State without having an ego about things like that. You were afraid that a few more years of success in Sweden and you’d be too famous? Maybe you get too used to not having to fight for stuff. It’s more difficult when you’ve been working as an established actor for 20 years and then as a 45-year-old, everyone respects you and knows your body of work, and then all of a sudden you come to the States and nobody knows who you are, and you’re doing auditions for the third swordsman on Game of Thrones . That can be humiliating, but… so it was a good time for me to come over. You’ve got The Killing and Lola Versus out and, soon, American audiences will see you in a Swedish film, Snabba Cash . And then, Robocop . When I spoke with Jose Padilha about his Elite Squad films, he shared his take on RoboCop and why it was compelling on a human level and it was really interesting to hear his philosophical approach. I mean, he’s a young master, and a very strong visionary. He wants to make something with a lot of substance. And if you’ve seen Elite Squad , you know that the action sequences are a walk in the park for him. He can portray action very realistically — and that’s how he wants to do this movie. It takes place in the future, and it’s RoboCop , but it’s still going to feel like a gritty, down to earth movie… with a lot of fireworks around it. You’ve described a difference in your acting approach to the character, that this RoboCop would be more of an “acting piece” than the original. How so, and why? It just comes from the realization of, as we were talking about robots earlier, our vision of a robot 30 years from now is very different from what a robot was in the future in 1987. That is the main thing, and then there are obviously some things in the script that lead into that that I can’t talk about. Lastly, you spoke about your fame in Sweden and there is certainly a wealth of admiration online for your work there. Now that you’re carving out a career here, do you go online and read what’s written about yourself? Are you tempted to be on Twitter, as some actors and filmmakers are? I did have a Twitter account, but five episodes into The Killing I terminated it. [Laughs] I felt that it’s enough of a struggle to keep my narcissism at bay, I don’t need to know what everybody’s saying about me. It’s just not healthy. But of course, I’ll Google my name time and again. But I try not to dive too deep into it. Of course, it’s always tempting, and it’s always there and it’s fascinating to hear what people say about you, but my experience of doing that is it’s like Russian roulette. You won’t stop looking until you find somebody saying something really nasty about you, and that’s the only way you’re satisfied. It doesn’t matter if there are 200 people saying great things, you’re only going to remember that one person that said something horrible about you, and there’s no point in that. Lola Versus is in select theaters today. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Total Film has the first look at Idris Elba in Guillermo del Toro’s alien invasion flick Pacific Rim , for which he built — and destroyed — replica sets, kaiju style. Elba stars alongside Charlie Hunnam , Ron Perlman, Charlie Day and Rinko Kikuchi in the mecha-epic, which pits robot-piloting humans in battle against interplanetary monsters. In the magazine’s latest issue, Del Toro spills about the process of destroying entire city blocks and rigging robot hydraulic rigs on the set: When we’re talking about the physicality of the fight, we ended up building several blocks of Hong Kong. And literally demolished them. We built a building and then we took down the buildings. We built command centres of the robots that were the size of the house. We started them on hydraulic rigs that shoot and elevated them and moved them round so you could really get a sense of the physical nature driving a robot like this. “The thing I love most in the world is monsters, and we are creating great monsters,” del Toro told Movieline last year , when he was just starting on the film. Pacific Rim is set for release on July 13, 2013. [ Total Film via Moviehole ]
Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro has been in the craft of filmmaking since he was 16, filling roles as diverse as P.A., assistant director and makeup effects. He made his first film Cronos at 28 and received his Academy Award-nomination in 2007 for Pan’s Labyrinth , making him one of the most prominent filmmakers to emerge from his native Mexico. In a candid interview, he explains how he learned filmmaking in author Mike Goodridge’s new book, FilmCraft: Directing . Goodridge, who until recently served as editor of Screen International and is now CEO of the international sales and financing company Protagonist Pictures wrote the book which features in-depth interviews with 16 of the world’s celebrated and respected film directors including Del Toro, Clint Eastwood ( Million Dollar Baby ) Paul Greengrass ( The Bourne Supremacy ), Peter Weir ( The Truman Show ), Terry Gilliam ( Brazil ) and Park Chan-wook ( Oldboy ). These and other filmmakers share their insights and experiences on development, storytelling/writing, working with actors and cinematographers, as well as other areas necessary to completing a successful film. In this excerpt from the book, which will be available via Amazon beginning June 15th, Guillermo del Toro gives his take on the mistakes and triumphs of his first movie as well as the first movie of other filmmaking greats, a life lesson courtesy of John Lennon, Tom Cruise’s take on filmmaking, what made him cry during his first movie, making ‘everything’ theatrical and why having “enough money” will get you, err… screwed. Director Guillermo Del Toro excerpt from FilmCraft: Directing : I came from the provinces, from Guadalajara, which is the second largest city in Mexico and nobody makes movies there. When I was a teenager, I started building relationships in Mexico City and I started as a blue-collar member of the crew. I was either a boom guy or a PA or an assistant director. I was makeup effects. I did my floor time in both TV and movies. My first professional work on a movie was at the age of 16 and I made Cronos when I was 28, so I had twelve solid years of doing just about everything in between. If somebody needed something, I would do it. I even did illegal stunt driving. But what happened is that I learned a little bit of everything and, once you put your time into exploring everything, you get to know what every piece of grip equipment is called and how many you need, and how to do post — I edited my own movies and did the post sound effects on all of them. So to some extent, directing came naturally to me from my first movie. My first movie Cronos is not in any way a perfect movie, but it’s a movie full of conviction. When you make your first movie, whatever mistakes you make are very glaring, but if you have conviction, and I would even say cinematic faith, this also shines through. I recently watched Cronos again and I thought, “I like this kid,” he has possibilities. After your first movie, with a little bit of craft, diligence, and more importantly, experience, you learn to make virtues out of some of your defects. What I mean is that any first movie has good moments, even if it is not entirely perfect. It can be a filmmaker as famous as you like, such as Stanley Kubrick, whose first film F ear and Desire (1953) is about 70 minutes long and stars Paul Mazursky. It is very stilted, very awkwardly paced, full of stuff that doesn’t work, the actors speak in a patois, and it has a very non-naturalistic rhythm. But what is incredibly fascinating is that the very stilted quality, that artificial rhythm, eventually became his trademark in later films. He bypasses it in more naturalistic films like The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), but comes back to that type of hyperrealism or strange filtered reality in his later movies, and he is in complete control of it there. Kubrick used the tools he acquired in making other films to transform what you thought was a defect in Fear and Desire into a virtue. In my case, when I make movies in Spanish, starting with Cronos , I purposefully avoid characterizing certain things in the conventional Hollywood sense, and that comes out as a blatant defect. Specifically, I had shot a much longer film, including a whole section between the husband and wife where she noticed that he is getting younger and they start falling in love again. At night, he would come and sleep underneath her bed. But I couldn’t make it work. The way I staged it was simply too stilted and strange, and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it as part of the movie. Even to this day, I think there is a mix of different tones in that movie. I change from the dramatic to the comedic too often. I try to do it generically, mixing horror with melodrama, and there are moments in Cronos that are really jarring for me. I sometimes allowed Ron Perlman to be too broad and it simply didn’t work. I think I did it better in my later movies. I don’t know whether that mix of genres is my trademark. One of the things that was very influential for me when I was kid was the book by Tolkien in which he discussed fairy stories in literature. I remember him saying in that book that you should make the story recognizable enough to be rooted in reality, but outlandish enough to be a flight of fancy. So I try to mix an almost prosaic approach, or at least a rigid historical context, with fantastic elements. I treat the fantasy characters very naturalistically or else I root the story in a precise context like The Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth , or in Cronos , post-NAFTA Mexico. As Tolkien says, when you give the audience a taste of what they can recognize, they immediately accept the rest of the concoction; it’s almost like wrapping a pill in bacon for a dog to swallow it. You need, for example, the bacon of domesticity in Cronos . I wanted to shoot that family as a very middle-class family in Mexico. I wanted a kitchen that looked like a kitchen you’d recognize, a really ordinary bedroom and very mild, neat clothing design. Out of that middle-class reality, I wanted a single anomaly — the mechanical clockwork scarab device. If the audience believes that this abnormality is as real as it can be, they will respond to the story. Many directors think that the more you keep the creature in the shadows and don’t show it, the better it is, but I don’t believe that. I don’t have monsters in my movies, I have characters, so I shoot the monsters as characters. For example, in Hellboy , I shot Abe Sapien, the fish-man, like any other actor. I didn’t fuss about it, I shot the monster with the same conviction that I would shoot Cary Grant or Brad Pitt; in other words, if I shot it in a different way than I would the regular actors, I would be making a mistake. What I do in every movie very consciously is to ensure that this anomaly is shot two notches above actual reality, so it’s weird enough to accommodate the monster, but not too stylistic that it’s unrecognizable. For example, everything you see in Pan’s Labyrinth — the house, the furniture — is fabricated to be slightly more theatrical than it needed to be. The uniforms for the captain and his guards are exactly what were worn at the time, but we tweaked the cut and the collar to make them more theatrical. Everything around the creatures, therefore, exists like a terrarium for them to live in so that when it comes to shoot them, I can shoot them in a normal way. I was very nervous on Cronos , but the adrenaline carried me through. Directing is almost like keeping four balls in the air on a monocycle with a train approaching behind you. There were days, for example, like the scene with the husband sleeping under the bed, where I knew I’d fucked up. The makeup was wrong and we didn’t have time to go back and change it, we didn’t even have time to test it. The light was wrong. Everything was wrong, and I arrived home to my wife that night and cried. I said that I had destroyed the scene I had dreamt of for years. I didn’t have the luxury of reshoots. Of course, you can only break down in front of your wife, or your partner, or your parents. In front of the staff on the film, you need to keep total control. You don’t want anyone thinking the general is afraid—you have to be leading the charge. There are two very lonely positions on a movie set: the actor and the director. The cinematographer has a close liaison with the director, the gaffer, the grip, etc. The director is alone on one end of the lens and the actor is alone on the other. That’s why the great, most satisfying partnerships on set are when a director and actor come to love and support each other. Being from Mexico is an enormous part of who I am as a filmmaker. The panache, the sense of melodrama, and the madness I have in my movies that allows me to mix historical events with fictional creatures, all comes from an almost surreal Mexican sensibility. I’m really prone to melodrama. This comes from watching Mexican melodrama obsessively, to the point where I was watching The Devil’s Backbone with a Spanish architect and the architect said to me that it was more Mexico than Spain; the characters were acting like Latin characters. If my father hadn’t been kidnapped in 1998 then frankly I would be making Mexican movies interspersed with the European and American. Since 1998, I cannot go back to Mexico because I would be too visible a target, especially when there is a printed schedule of where I am going to be every day for the entire run of a shoot. I think of the audience every second during writing; I think of them as me. I question how I would understand something, or what would make me feel a certain way. When I’m shooting a scene that moves the characters, I weep, I feel the emotion on set, so when I am writing it, if it doesn’t work, I don’t print it out until I have that feeling. Creating tension is a different skill to creating fear. For fear, you try to create atmosphere. You ensure the scene is alive visually before anything is added, then you craft the silence very carefully because silence often equals fear. Rarely can you elicit fear with music unless the music is used very discreetly, underlining the scene in a way that is almost invisible. When the Pale Man appears in Pan’s Labyrinth there is music, but Javier [Navarrete, the film’s composer] is almost just underlining his movements. It becomes like a sound effect. Silence is one of the things that you learn to craft the most because there is never real silence in a movie; you always have distant wind, cars, dogs barking, or crickets in the distance. I think really well-crafted silence creates tension, and by the same token an empty frame, an empty corridor for example — if it’s empty in the right, creepy way — is a tool. You know if a scene’s not working on set, and as you get older and craftier, you can learn to re-direct it in post. You can patch it up in your coverage and recover it—you can even end up with a great scene because beauty rarely comes out of perfection. For something to work, I think it has to come out of emotional turmoil. You can’t encapsulate the perfect melody; a huge component of it is instinctive. Then, of course, there are the actors. Many times you storyboard and rehearse with the actor, and then you come to the scene and it’s not working. But then you try something different and something suddenly happens that makes it work. It’s very raw. It’s funny, we enthrone this idea of the perfect filmmaker, this myth of the all controlling, all-seeing, all-encompassing person, but even for Kubrick or von Stroheim there is a part of the process that is entirely instinctive. I once asked Tom Cruise about it and he confirmed that Kubrick often found things in a panic on Eyes Wide Shut (1999). I love imperfection. I have been friends with James Cameron since 1992 and because he is so incredibly precise, people sometimes don’t think he is human, but the beauty of being a close friend is that I’ve seen him burn the midnight oil and toil and sweat. These imperfections in the façade are what make the work more admirable. Art depends on that human touch that doesn’t make perfection; in fact the filmmakers and films I am most attracted to require a level of human imperfection. On the big effects films, you try to prepare thoroughly but there are always surprises. John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you are making other plans” and I think film is what happens when you are making other plans. You come onto the set and either the actor or the material doesn’t come out as you expect and the film comes out better for it. If you have either experience or inspiration, one of the two will get you through. One you accumulate through the years, the other you cherish. As a young filmmaker you’re full of inspiration and if you are unlucky you are only trading it in for experience. You need to remain on dangerous ground to continue to be inspired. I am always tackling things I shouldn’t tackle and meddling with stuff I shouldn’t meddle with. You never have enough money. If you ever feel one day you have enough money, that’s the day you’re fucked. FilmCraft: Directing is available via Amazon beginning June 15th. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Also in Thursday morning’s Biz Break: Another star may be leaving Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained , getting to know this year’s Cannes competition jury and a new ‘bear’ animation heads for production. Russell Brand to Host MTV Movie Awards Brand will host the awards show for the first time on June 3 from the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City in California. Drive, Like Crazy, The Descendants, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and My Week with Marilyn are among this year’s nominees . Thai Cannes Palme d’Or Winner to Head Locarno Jury Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives , will lead the jury at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland this summer. The 65th edition will take place August 1 – 11. Vulgaria to Open New York Asian Film Festival The comedy by Pang Ho-cheung is described as a “movie about making movies,” featuring gangsters with names like Brother Tyrannosaur, sleazy lawyers, the sex-film industry, and men who “love donkeys perhaps a little too much.” The 2012 NYAFF Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Korean action director Chung Chang-Wha. Around the ‘net… Guillermo Del Toro Boards Pinocchio Del Toro will co-direct Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio along with Mark Gustafson, animation director on The Fantastic Mr. Fox . The project is a 3-D stop-motion animated production from the Jim Henson Company. Shooting begins in summer 2013, Variety reports . Sacha Baron Cohen Unties from Django He was originally attached to play the role of Scotty Harmony, a role described in the screenplay as an overweight 24-year-old who receives a female slave as a gift from his father. Dictator commitments are keeping him away from the Quentin Tarantino-directed feature. Kurt Russell may also be on the way out, Cinemapulse reports . Meet the Jury Who Will Decide the Cannes Palme d’Or Actors, directors and a fashion designer are among this group of people who will decide on Cannes winners this year, including the top prize, the Palme d’Or. THR reports . Producer David Heyman and StudioCanal Team for Paddington Bear Paul King will direct the story of the curious young bear who travels from Peru to London’s Paddington station where he’s taken in by an English family, Deadline reports .
After writer-director Lynne Ramsay ( Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar ) debuts her latest film, this December’s moody Tilda Swinton-Ezra Miller pic We Need to Talk About Kevin , she’ll set her sights on more classic fare: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick … only, set in space. “We’re taking the premise into the realm of the galaxy; it’s creating a whole new world, and a new alien, a very psychological piece” Ramsay told Radio 5 Live’s Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo. “Mainly taking place in the ship, a bit like Das Boot , so it’s quite claustrophobic. It’s another monster movie, in a way, ’cause the monster’s Ahab.” Stick around for more happenings in today’s Buzz Break.
When Guillermo del Toro ( Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth ) set out to update the scariest movie he’d ever seen as a child — the 1973 made-for-television movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark , about inhabitants of a house who discover sinister creatures living in the basement — he intended to frighten and thrill a new generation of youngsters. Even co-star Katie Holmes , who makes a rare genre appearance in the Del Toro-produced and co-scripted horror pic, found the script to so terrifying that she knew she had to do it. But is Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark , as the MPAA deemed, too scary for kids?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Or, rather: First came the agony — the surprise shut-down of production on his ambitious At the Mountains of Madness — but now filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is having a ball prepping his next directorial effort, the futuristic alien invasion action movie Pacific Rim . He spoke with Movieline about the two projects while making the press rounds for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark .
