Darren Lynn Bousman Makes A Date For "11-11-11"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 19 May 2012 09:56

Written by Brad Balfour

According to Wikipedia, "11-11-11 is a date which reoccurs every 100 years (every 300 years for it to fall on a Friday), when written in a 2-digit year style. For various and often not well understood reasons, people often ascribe different kinds of significance to dates and numbers; for example the 2011 "11-11-11" showed an increase number of marriages taking place in different areas throughout the world, including the U.S. and across the Asian continent. Babies born on this date also received special media attention."

It is also the title of a supernatural thriller created and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. The 33 year old director established his genre creds directing Saw 2, Saw 3 and Saw 4 and then went even further creating his horror sci-fi musical, Repo! The Genetic Opera. 

Continuing to explore these genres he's done a re-make of Mother's Day and now 11-11-11 -- an apocalytic tale of a non-believing writer confronted by what appears to be the Messiah -- or the anti-christ.

DLB: The fear of actually getting a real job did it to me. I don't think I have the mentality or wherewithal to do a 9-5 job so I tried everything in my power to find something that I could do to not have to deal with that, something fun that allowed me to escape the real world. When the fear of having to go into the workforce hit me, I tried really, really hard to get to film school and luckily it worked out for me.

Q: What a way to stay out of the conventional workforce -- make a film like Saw. If you do such movies bosses will be afraid to hire you. This one's a little safer. You almost convince people that you believe in religion.

DLB: This is very much a different kind of film. I'm trying to not be pigeonholed into doing one type of film. I'm trying to experiment with a bunch of other stuff. I did Saw, which is very heavily into torture, violence, that kind of thing. Then going on from something like Repo! which is music-based to Mother's Day, which is very much a crime thriller. 

I wanted to do something that didn't rely on violence or shock value, and on top of that, do something that was more audience-friendly in a PG-13 kind of way. I've always been fascinated with religion, with people's beliefs, so it was a natural progression for me to make something like this where I can delve into the beliefs that people have.

Q: When you speak about beliefs is it that you have them or that you want to shake us up about ours?

DLB: A little bit of both. I don't know. I flip flop every day on what my real beliefs are. It goes from believing absolutely nothing to absolutely believing in everything. So I think that changes daily and I think that anyone that claims to have an answer or know the answer are hypocrites and lying because no one knows the answer.

When it's called belief you have to believe in something, you have faith. The only faith that I adhere to 100% is I faithfully believe I don't know everything. This is me working out my own demons in the script. Then they actually decided to make the script and turn it into a film, and when I wrote the script it was me voicing my opinions and thoughts.

Q: Have your beliefs changed? Are you going to become a priest?

DLB: They have, and I'll tell you how. There's a behind-the-scenes on the disc, a making of 11-11-11, and when I went to Barcelona I didn't really believe in anything. I grew up Christian but nothing that I could walk around and say I was a bible thumper or a holy roller or anything like that. 

But going into this house, the house had a horrible, negative energy in it, and there's no way to describe it outside of saying it was evil. The house felt evil. None of the crew members wanted to shoot there. I don't speak Spanish, so I had a hard time understanding what was going on at the time, but a lot of crew members started quitting and there was something about this house.

I demanded to find information about the house -- they researched it and helped me uncover that the house actually had been used for cult séances and rituals, and there were all sorts of weird, cult-like symbols all over the house. And the further we traced it back the more horrible things we found out took place in this house.

This is not an exaggeration; I'm not joking about this. This is not a ploy for publicity for the movie; it was real. Through the course of filming there was a presence, there were no aberrations I saw, I didn't see ghosts, I didn't see anything, but there was a presence of a weight on your chest, something that drew you down and made you anxious at all times.  

Knowing what people will do in the name of their belief system, whether they murder, kill, sacrifice, whatever, is a crazy thing for me to realize. But more importantly than that, being in the middle of this horrible feeling, realizing that the energy that was very much real, and again, unless you were there you can't really describe it, but it was very, very real, it made me question things, to see things differently instead of just writing it off and saying it's a joke. 

I was there and saw it, felt it, and it opened my eyes to a lot of things I've got to say.

Q: Did you look at the predecessors to this film like The Omen and some of the others?

DLB: My original edit was much longer, drawn out, very much more Rosemary's Baby, in a way. when you watch Rosemary's Baby, it is very slow and deliberate. You might stay on a lingering shot as we're walking down the hallway for 30 seconds. 

The problem is when I turn that version of the movie in you're in a different marketplace now than you were in the '70s when those types of movies were prevalent. You have much more immediate gratification. It’s all now, now, now [these days]. So the movie was trimmed down considerably to make it more accessible to the masses.

But my favorite time of filmmaking came out of the '70s. My favorite style of film was the slow burning films and musicals. In the '70s you had things such as The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby or The Sentinel.

My other favorite type of film was [the rock musical] like Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar and Rocky Horror Picture Show. So you had the gamut in the '70s of these out-of-the-box kexperimental films that were appealing to mass audiences at the time.

Q: When you said Tommy I was also thinking about one of director Ken Russell's other great films, The Devils.

DLB: I was lucky enough to meet Ken Russell and do a Q&A and introduce The Devils last year. But the night before I saw The Devils he'd come into town to do the screening I actually got to have dinner with the guy, which was kind of an amazing experience. 

First off, the guy is a legend; doing Tommy and then going to do [The Devils]. But he was the most awesome, awkward, hilarious, wrong dude I've ever met. His question and answer at The Devils made me more uncomfortable than I think anything I've done. 

An example, someone who raised their hand would ask a question and he would just shake his head and say, “That’s a dumb question. I'm not answering it.” And it would just be silent in the room for like 30 seconds. It was pretty epic.

Q: Were there similarities between you and The Joe Crone character because you're a writer too and do find yourself in isolation when creating?

Rihanna Says: "Battleship" Made Me Confront My Sensitive Side...

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 18 May 2012 12:28

Written by Marie Moore

At a special screening of Battleship for a select few at the Nite Hawk Cinema in Brooklyn -- where the seats had miniature tables attached -- there were bowls of regular and gourmet popcorn. Drinks were also served before and during the screening as waiters crouched down slinking through the aisles so as to not disturb the viewing.

This was a perfect setting for the interview that followed with singing star Rihanna via Skype who was in Hawaii -- where the sci-fi action thriller had been shot.

I began by asking the sultry pop music diva now making her acting debut what characteristics she shared with her sailor character Raikes -- a beautiful-yet-tough-as-nails gunner -- other than the same monogram.

“I think mostly being one of the boys,” Rihanna replied. “I really liked that. I was used to that, growing up with my brothers, and all my cousins. It was rarely any girls around, and I didn’t feel out of place.”

Boys love playing with guns and she went on to say that what she will miss most about playing her character were the guns. “Most of the fun was on set, doing the actual shooting, and using the weapons. That was some of my favorite parts, the weapons, all the stunts and the fighting scenes. I did a lot of training with a female soldier, who's a real weapons officer. She taught me a lot about weapons and drills, the whole etiquette, and the body language. I would have never had those experiences, had it not been for shooting this film. That was definitely fun to play.”

In addition to having fun, the Battleship shoot was very revealing for the Barbados-born Robyn Rihanna Fenty.  “I actually learned a lot about myself,” the 24-year-old disclosed. “I mean, I had to delve into, you know, different emotions and things that I had been avoiding, I guess, not even knowing.  I guess I put up this face, and I don't want people to see me weak or anything, or vulnerable.  I did that for so long that I kind of had to break that down. And it really taught me a lot about myself. It was a great experience.”

The award-winning pop idol also learned that being a video queen does not help when on set of a big blockbuster movie. “I thought the [video work] would help,” she laughed, “but little did I know. It was a completely different beast. It was brand new, and it was a whole different experience. It was a much bigger set. I had to use dialog and I never really use that in my videos; it's usually just me acting to a track, a musical track. That was different. Having an accent, too.”

And director Peter Berg was taking no prisons, she explained. “Peter Berg, he's very spontaneous and fearless. He pushed me a lot and he threw me out there, right away from day one.  I didn't even have a chance to really think about what I was doing.  I was right out into the scenes. 

"On the first day I had no lines. So I didn't have lines prepared, I was just in character. Then all of a sudden, It was like, I had 12 lines in my first scene. I liked that, the improv. I had to learn really, really quickly.”

She added, “Working with Peter as a director made me feel safe. His enthusiasm made me trust him and I believed he could really putt it [what he needed in the role] out of me.”

With a big budget movie under her belt, millionaire Rihanna, who is now #4 on Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list with an array of hit singles, has no intentions of putting music on pause.

“I don't think music could ever be on hold for me,” she acknowledged, “because it's something that I love to do.  So even if  there isn’t a deadline or a specific project, I will always feel empty not making music.  I will always get that bug. Even right now, I'm still going a little crazy. I can't wait to go in the studio, just to play around with songs. 

"I can do that, because that doesn't become work for me. I am going to make time to do some more films. I really liked my first experience with Battleship, so I'm looking forward to doing more. But I can't say goodbye to music.”

Oran Etkin: Teaching the Language of Music

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 17 May 2012 20:52

Written by Laura Blum

What do Edie Falco, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts and Harvey Keitel have in common besides Actor's Equity? Google "Oran Etkin" and find out. Judging by the raves posted on his site, they're among the ecstatic parents whose children are now mini music mavens thanks to the Grammy Award winner's imaginative instruction. 

Fairfield County parents -- and kids -- can see what the fuss is about when Oran presents PJ Jamboree: Jammin' in the Park on June 18, 2012, at Old Greenwich, Connecticut's Binney Park. (Details are at jccgreenwich.org, site of host organization JCC Greenwich.) They won't come away humming nursery rhymes. Rather, they'll be vibing to his global adventures and the melodies and rhythms he picked up along the way. 

Oran is a linguist and a language teacher. That is, if you consider music a universal language. He does. The Israeli-born, U.S.-raised musician and composer is fluent in several dialects: klezmer, West African music and jazz. His method of teaching music to newborns-to-6 year olds, "Timbalooloo," incorporates the basic grammar and vocabulary of music through games, stories, songs and dance.

Do children learn music as instinctively as verbal language? When reached for insight, Oran confirmed that children have a natural musicality. "They’re always singing -- it’s like they live in a musical." He also gave a teaser of what to expect on the 18th.

Q: What are the perils of waiting till kids are older to teach music?

A: Like spoken language, the earlier they assimilate it the better. But it's also about how we teach at an older age. You take a course and after you´ve learned all the rules, you can kind of piece something together and it kind of sounds like a sentence -- but not -- because there are mistakes.

You never see a child studying like that. We can teach all the techniques and rules about harmony, but it's not the same as internalizing it intuitively in early childhood.

Q: How do you teach music to infants?

A: For them it's more about connecting with the care-giver through rhythm and melody and starting to experience all the contrasts. Why do people enjoy music, what makes it fundamentally happen? A big part of that is all the contrasts. So you can break it down to the most fundamental contrast, which is sound versus silence. That’s kind of like a peekaboo game, if you will -- seeing versus not seeing. So even when the kids are very small, they enjoy that contrast between shaking the shaker and all of a sudden the silence when it stops.

Q: How do you teach instruments?

A: Once they’re verbal, it opens up a whole new world where we can teach them through storytelling and humor. They start to respond to silly things like the idea of a clarinet coming to the concert or class in its bed. In Wake Up, Clarinet!, I’ll tell the kids my friend Clara came and she’s really excited about being there but she's still sleepy. So I "wake up" my clarinet and she starts talking, "Ma Ma, I want Ma Ma." Pretty soon we're all singing and dancing.

Q: While learning music, what else can kids discover?

A: In a safe environment, kids can explore all the emotions they naturally feel. Music doesn’t always have to be superficially happy; there can be some kind of depth to it. For me, the deepest music has happiness and sadness and melancholy all mixed in. Kids also learn to listen to the silence and put something beautiful in there -- and then figure out how to add their own voice to create more beauty. When you think about skills for life, that’s one of the most important ones.

Q: So they can get more attuned to listening to people through music?

A: Even if you’re the CEO of a big company, what you're really doing is listening to what’s going on, and then trying to do whatever's necessary to create more beauty.

Q: Maybe they'll start listening to their parents...

A: Family therapy through music!

Q: At least they'll get good grades in History -- talk a little about how your storytelling approach gives historical and cultural context.

A: So for the older kids we´ll sing a Creole song called Eh La Bas, and there'll be a story about King Louis XIV that leads into a bit of the history of France and Louisiana -- because that’s who Louisiana is named after -- and why they speak French there. They see pictures of King Louis and start to get a feel and a flavor for that time period and what it was like to go for days over the ocean and see water all around until you come to land and suddenly discover a swamp.

They´ll also learn what the Creole lyrics mean. It's a fun story about a king that helps children personally connect to the song. With other stories they become very close to Dizzy Gillespie or Herbie Hancock or Mozart. I tell a story about Mozart as a little boy going to see the king and they imagine themselves in his place.

Q: How do you turn them on to jazz?

A: We tell a story about the kingdom of jazz with the Duke -- Duke Elington -- and the Princess -- Ella Fitzgerald -- that leads us into singing songs by Ellington, George Gershwin, etc. and learning to play some of them on the instruments. So we sing and play [the Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke classic] Salt Peanuts. Then we take a trip around the world, all the way from Duke's place down to Africa. By pretending that certain notes are characters or places, we use the stories to explain how to play a song.

Q: Do they naturally take to different genres or is it like trying to get a kid who only likes cereal and peanut butter to sample exotic cuisine?

A: There's a wide musical vocabulary that comes from listening to music from all over the world. When you think about the kind of music we grew up with for children here in the US, things like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, it’s all quarter notes. The melody is all major scale 4/4; it’s all a very straight-and-narrow set of vocabulary. You wouldn’t talk to kids with such a narrow vocabulary; you talk to them with the full vocabulary so they learn everything.

When they hear different sounds, whether jazz, blues, classical or African, Cuban, Brazilian, they get to explore and be transported beyond where they are physically and understand that the world is bigger than what they see. They learn about each culture and see how they can mix and cooperate together.

Q: The name of your band, Kelenia, translates to “love for other.”

A: Yes, exactly.

[Adult fans may want to check out his Kelenia album on the Motema label, which boasts a fusion of American jazz and Malian sounds with oniony Jewish accents. It took a 2010 Independent Music Award for best world-beat CD.]