Getting "In Bed with Ulysses"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 31 May 2013 04:24

Written by Laura Blum

"Why would I bother to read Joyce?" is the cri de coeur from James Joyce's wife that opens Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna's engaging documentary In Bed with Ulysses. Free-thinking, uninhibited Nora Barnacle served as the model for Molly Bloom in Joyce's masterwork Ulysses. 

Yet she would also come to feel that she was "in bed with a novel," as we learn while the film reconstructs the seven-year saga behind the fiction and exposes how Joyce engineered marital drama for the sake of his art. Both muse and antagonist, the impassioned Irishwoman provided the love theme and the conflict of Joyce's opus and, by extension, of this filmed annotation.

Esteemed Joyceans including Ulysses publisher Syliva Beach, Irish novelist Colum McCann and actress Kathleen Chalfant advance the project through a mix of archival footage, sage commentary and staged readings. Along the way, we uncover such historical nuggets as Joyce's decision to set his story in 1904, the year of the anti-Semitic riots that flared up in Limerick.

Joyce chose protagonist Leopold Bloom because he wanted an outsider to enact his own role within Irish society, Adelson told FilmFestivalTraveler.com at a screening at Manhattan's Symphony Space in anticipation of Bloomsday, June 16. (Symphony Space will also show the film on June 2 and 9 at 8 pm.) "The theme and humanism of the novel are a scathing indictment of bigotry and intolerance," Adelson explained.

Editor and co-director Taverna joined in for an exclusive conversation about the filmmaking duo's creative affair with Ulysses.

Q: What made you want to bring Ulysses to today's audiences?

AA: The drives that Joyce explores -- male insecurity, the need to be relevant -- foreshadow the enormous alienation which began in modern society in the 1960s and has lingered like a plague over our lives ever since. Bloom's wanderings and his need to connect to human beings resonate eloquently. His humanity, his honesty, his compassion, his courtesy, his modesty, his flaws...make all other human beings' lives easier.

Q: Including the lives of writers?

AA: Joyce set out to redefine to art form of fiction. He got his way, but at an enormous price.

Q: The price being...

AA: It took an enormous toll on his family and his health. He was going blind. He nearly went mad three times during the writing of the novel. His daughter was probably schizophrenic, if we apply contemporary diagnoses. His son became an alcoholic and had a very difficult time finding any place in the world as well. That tore the heart out out of James Joyce. 

Q: How did the structure of the novel shape your filmmaking?

AA: We looked for points when the Joyces' lives coincided with moments in the novel, because it is so autobiographical and because we wanted to follow parallel tracks with the novel and being at home with the Joyces.

Q: For example?

AA: On their first date, when they went down to Dublin Harbor, Nora put her hands into Joyce's pants, which made a lasting impression. In the novel there's a moment when Bloom is thinking of Molly's hand on him the same way, and how wonderful it felt. We cut between narrating what happened on Jim and Nora's first date with that passage in the novel. Those moments continued to provide us with the touchstones when the parallel tracks would intersect with one another and speak to the way that Joyce built this novel out of his own love life.

Q: What else besides sex did Molly's "yes" mean?

AA: I think she's saying yes to life. She's refusing alienation. She has lost a baby son. She's had her husband at least half collapse; he's no longer functional as much of a lover to her. And she has refused to, as she puts it, "get into the glooms" about that. Instead she has built a psychic life for herself that's as fervent as any moment in modern literature with all of the associations that a sensual and intelligent woman can have.

Q: Nora's intelligence has been a subject of some debate.

AA: She portrayed herself as highly anti-intellectual. Joyce more or less disdained her lack of intellectual interest. She was not much of a reader. It galled the piss out of Joyce that she never read Ulysses. She had heard that Molly Bloom is fat. She resented that. But she is passionately alive and an inspiration to all of us. "Yes indeed!"

Q: Which other women played critical roles in Joyce's life?

AA: Wrapping around [the film's the staged readings] like a double helix is the narrative about Joyce writing the novel, censorship and the seven women without whom that novel would be totally unknown today. He burned relationships, almost constantly, especially with men. The women hung on, and a number of them were quite wealthy, such as Harriet Shaw Weaver, who deplored her wealth and handed it on to the Joyces. She sponsored James Joyce's almost endless series of eye operations.

Sylvia Beach was by no means wealthy, but she also basically opened up her finances. All four members of the Joyce family chronically stopped by [her Paris bookstore] Shakespeare & Company and took money out of the till. They were addicted to haute couture and Paris and living swell lives giving huge dinner parties. Jim was drinking like mad.

Q: What's the drink of choice to take with your film?

AA: If you want to go the way Jim did, white wine.

Q: What's the film's big take-away?

KT: "Love loves to love love."

Laura Blum is Senior Editor of FilmFestivalTraveler.com.

Oliver Marhdt Opens Up On Bringing German Cinema to America

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 16 April 2013 05:00

Written by Brad Balfour

Oliver Mahrdt, born in Germany met the late and legendary agent Hanns Wolters, who was one of Marlene Dietrich’s first agents in Berlin in the 20s and 30s, after studying directing at New York Film Academy. He started working at Hanns Wolters Theatrical Agency in 1996 and was responsible for key accounts like the Japanese film distributor  Daira for which he attended film festivals worldwide and he was responsible for acquisitions of more than 200 European and North American feature films. After the passing of the founder he became president and Senior-Agent of the company and changed the name to Hanns Wolters International Inc. to reflect the new corporate structure. 

Today, he represents among many others, the German Film Industry in the United States, as well as Canada. Mahrdt sat down with Film Festival Traveler's Brad Balfour to discuss Hans Wolter, how the distribution of foreign films is changing, and the international film festival circuit.

Q: How did you get started at the German Film Office?

OM: I was a junior partner at Hans Wolters [an office representing the German film industry abroad] in ‘96 and got my appointment to represent the German film industry in 2001.

Q: How does that work? Does Germany have a national culture office like there like Ireland?

OM: Yeah. uniFrance is our [French] equivalent. In every country there are people responsible for culture.

Q: What about film?

OM: Well we have the Kennedy Institute all over Germany and they have a film department within it… But it all ends up at the culture ministry of a country.

Q: Hans Wolter used to be a private agency until the family died off. Was the German film office merged with Hans Wolter?

OM: It’s a personal appointment and I just happened to be the boss of Hans Wolters, who’s also the representative for the German movie industry. In our corporate structure at Hans Wolters, it’s like our corporate client, and we have a couple of them.

Q: If you were not here, in NYC, would there be much an German film industry presence here?

OM: There have been before. It’s quite an old organization and deals worldwide, it’s just that the US is an important place to have someone. They closed all European offices because they say Florence is like a flight away from Munich or a drive.

Q: We know about national cinema in the sense of art films and we know about television, but it’s hard for it to distinguish itself except the rare moments where they get embraced by critics or artists, but now the whole dynamic is changed. Is it an easier area to negotiate or harder?

OM: It all depends. The devil is in the details. You have points where you go “it used to be a lot easier, over time it got more complicated.” Take a battlefield like New York for example. If you have someone working in the German book offices or the films office in New York, we all have to work together. How often is it that a German book is going be remade like The Life of Others? 

It starts with the book rights and it becomes quite interesting when you don’t have one big office to orchestrate that, but you have separate departments like film and book and all these other cultural departments that we have here. It’s hard because you don’t have someone who oversees [everything]. 

It’s much easier when you’re a small country and you have one who’s responsible for every cultural thing and then you really have your finger on it. Where we really have to make a conscious effort to meet and discuss these things.

Q: Not to mention that a lot of countries are not speaking German. So you’re up against this issue that the German speaking community has its limits. Spanish is pervasive, but there’s a sort of rivalry between Germany and Austria.

OM: It’s so unique. It’s not like a year old flare up between the German and the French. It’s interesting to see how it’s separated. Everyone has its own distribution ideas. Germany helps you with German distribution and support ideas to get German films out. France does a lot more by itself. 

We actually help American distributors release German films. The French do a lot, like they have their film series they do, then travel it through universities, which is something we don’t do. And it’s not a bad idea because they basically educate American audiences about what foreign films are.

Q: The Spanish have a chain of cultural centers -- the Cervantes.

OM: It’s interesting to see how we all have our own approach. It’s very, very hard. In the end I can always tell people that 93% of all movie theaters are a no-go because they’re all owned by studios. That means we all fight for 7% in the US.

Q: You mean owned by chains?

OM: Yes, [chains] that are owned by studios, so you can’t get into them. Then there’s the Art House Convergence, which is an association of the Independent Movie Houses, but it’s not a chain. It’s not like if you have one theater in New York that all of a sudden, oh cinemas that are independent will play your movie house. It’s a fight from movie house to movie house, not like when you produce a studio movie, and they see it’s working, you have this astronomical number of 2000 movie theaters that will play your film.

Q: Has digital distribution and the internet changed things for international cinema?

OM: With everyone cursing the internet, we really have to be happy that it exists because you can basically get any news like falls, riots, from every country fairly easily. It’s changed dramatically. In the old days I remember no one really cared [about] opening in France. Even in Germany they would say “hey, you share a border?” 

It is interesting. You don’t want people to know when they travel across the Rhine and see that the movie has been playing somewhere else for two months. You cannot afford [that]. The movie has to start the same time in all major markets, otherwise you have these glitches that are potentially damaging because you could get the copyright infringed version over the internet before your movie has opened. It’s just a drastic change from how business was done before to now.

Q: Now we have all these film societies.

OM: And they all know how to play. In the old days it was like basically New York and LA opened, and the rest had to march to that drum. Now if you have a smash hit in one of the ten major markets in the US, you might force everyone from the other metropolitan areas to follow you. That has also basically created a dog-eats-dog atmosphere that’s frightening too.

Q: But it has opened doors for you guys.

OM: For everyone. 

Q: More movies are done in Indonesia, Nigeria, and India, but now people can actually see them. There’s an audience for these things.

OM: You have direct access to these things now. If you’re interested in it, you will find it on the internet. Coming back to your first question, what I find helps us break into the US market is breakfast television with reading [scrolling] news on the bottom. With a busy screen every morning, people would be more used to watching foreign movies with subtitles. It has made things a lot easier. I really have to say over the years, it’s not like people say “I don’t feel like watching a movie” because then you’d have to say you stop watching breakfast television, which is the same thing. 

Q: You have any films in Tribeca?

OM: We have a couple co-productions. They cut it down substantially and they have new strategies, and let’s face it, right now all our major movies get finished for the fall festivals after Cannes. We have right now a break and then an onslaught of German movies in Toronto and Venice We have all these sensational  movies in the pipeline that I’m really excited about and they unfortunately didn’t get finished in time.

Q: Look at a director like Agnieszka Holland, she survives doing American TV, but she’s a master director.

OM: It’s a fascinating thing. Who would have thought that people could between television and film? In the old days it was unthinkable. Kathy Bates who wins an Oscar goes on to do a series like Harry’s Law.

Q: More actors want to get TV work now. Because they do a series for five or seven years they can pick and choose because they know they have these residuals.

OM:  It’s interesting to see how people are weighing in whether or not to make an independent movie when they don’t feel comfortable with it. If you have a series going on you can relax and say whether you do it or not. As a talent agent, a lot of people go “you should do this” and they say “…if this backfires, how damaging could it be?”

Q: Are your directors getting work in America or internationally?

OM: [Doing something like] Law and Order is not a career hindrance. It’s nice to have on a resume because you have the action and you can prove you know how to work with unions. It is different if you shoot a movie in Germany as opposed to shooting one here. It’s a totally different beast. Just trying to explain to German directors the difference between cameramen and camera operator and they don’t do the same thing.

Q: Many more international directors are making American films?

OM: It’s very easy if you have a key market like Germany. You can say the bottom line, if everything goes wrong in the US and you have a German director that will bring XYZ out of Germany no matter what, that makes people in difficult financial times like now feel more secure to take a risk with someone foreign if they can bring something else to the table. That is why a lot of people look at what’s happening in Europe. If you wanted a horror movie, look at Japanese directors.

Q: What’s happening in Germany genre-wise? Look at what Luc Besson did for France. 

OM: His company, EuropaCorp, has become a major player. Some of his stuff is nice to see, but they’re surprised how it works everywhere else, but not in Germany. The producers are looking at them confused.

Q: Do you find it difficult to get across comedies more than anything else? The one about East Germany….

OM: Goodbye Lenin. It came out here; it had a very good distributor. The luck of the draw was that Dutch dance movie that was nominated for an Oscar and it flew out. But after it didn’t work…

Q: What happened to Berlin Blues? Why didn’t that get a distributor?

OM: Sometimes I don’t understand why a movie isn’t sold either. When you’ve done this job as long as I have, you know every distributor. You know their niche, you know what they react to and what they don’t, what’s a deal breaker, and yet you have these films that you think will work, but then find out it doesn’t.

Q: You have a new opportunity with cross cultural directors.

OM: Same story with co-productions in general. What is a German movie? Right now we are fighting over what percent of the movie has to have, and that’s a healthy debate right now, if something has 5% German post-prod money, can that be sold in the US or is it taking because we have so many different movies in the film fund and we don’t have a budget high enough to good by all these movies. How much German representation is there?

Q: Who programs the thing at MoMA?

OM: MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art is picking the top German movies and I’m happy to be there, other foreign reps doing this are under fire, but I’m in a lucky position where I can say “you like it? Call MoMA.” It’s a museum and we cannot tell a museum, especially one as important as MoMA, “pick this movie because the producer is giving me a hard time on the phone.” 

This is why MOMA is so special and why we’re so happy to be in a relationship with them. I like having this regular thing with MoMA once every year where it’s a chance for us to also showcase German films. 

You have Wim Wenders retrospectives and other shows. Thank god we have a pool with a lot of people we can draw from. It’s a lucky position to be in. There weren’t always as many German films in the minds of the American public as now.

"The Company You Keep": Robert Redford and Cast Talk About Politics, Journalism, Making Movies

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 15 April 2013 13:41

Written by Paula Schwartz

Robert Redford directs and also stars in the political suspense thriller, The Company You Keep, his first starring role since An Unfinished Life in 2005. Last Monday, Redford, Jackie Evancho, Stanley Tucci and Brit Marling, appeared at a press conference at the Parker Meridien Hotel to talk about their new film.

Redford, now 76, still has his signature golden thatch and ice blue eyes. He looks great, and he still feels passionate about making films.

Annette Insdorf, from the film school at Columbia University, moderated the 45-minute press session that started very late; Redford gave at least 30 interviews that day.

Before the 45-minute press conference began, Redford requested coffee and asked his co-stars what they wanted. “Just a martini,” Tucci chimed.

Redford portrays a former member of the 1970’s radical anti-war group the Weather Underground, a fugitive wanted for murder for a crime he has not committed. He’s lived underground for more than 30 years under an assumed name (Jim Grant), is now a lawyer and single widowed father, who has a young daughter (Jackie Evancho) to whom he’s devoted. Shia LaBeouf plays an ambitious rookie reporter, who uncovers Grant’s past.

LaBeouf’s name was dropped off the press list only two days earlier; possibly he didn’t want to field any more questions about being fired from Orphans or his tweets about conflicts with Alec Baldwin. (Later that evening at the film’s premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, LaBeouf, who sported a bushy beard, hobbled down the red carpet wearing a medical boot.)

The rest of the cast of The Company You Keep, is starry, including Julie Christie, Sam Elliott, Nick Nolte, Brendan Gleeson, Terrence Howard, Susan Sarandon and Chris Cooper.

There were the usual sometimes long-winded and meandering questions from the press, which Redford always answered with aplomb and grace. To a journalist who went on at length about Redford’s films over the past half-century, and how they related to this film, Redford responded, “That’s such a great question I’ve forgotten it. Go back.”

Here are some highlights from the press conference:

Redford on what attracted him to the project, and if it was the book by Neil Gordon or the script by Lem Dobbs:

I was drawn to the book because it was a wide-ranging. It had a lot of plotlines. It had a lot of e-mail stuff going on…there was something in the core that kept my attention, so the next four or five years was shaping that material in what could be a film.

Brit Marling (“Arbitrage,” “Sound of My Voice”) on what interested her about the film as opposed to low-budget Indies:

For me it always comes down to the story…when I read the script I was really moved by the idea of the Weather Underground and how it’s not set back then but it’s set in the present day.

They’re looking back and wondering about the wisdom of the radicalism of their youth, and did they make the right choices and would they do it differently now, which I think my generation is grappling with a lot of the same ideas.

Stanley Tucci on how he approached playing the role of a “hard-boiled newspaper” editor:

He’s the sort of classic, curmudgeonly, exhausted editor. I think particularly in this day and age, he’s an interesting character because he’s the last of a dying breed.

Robert Redford on working with Stanley Tucci:

My dear friend, what’s his name? (Laughter) Stanley and I have some history together. We go a ways back, and like Brit, obviously I’m very indebted to people who come in for no money at all and volunteer their services to help me with a non-profit…There’s no money in film these days. It’s shrunk down to a nub, and you have to depend on the kindness of, not strangers, but colleagues to come in and help you, and I was blessed by having a wonderful cast…Stanley coming in, he didn’t have to. There was nothing in it for him except the joy of working with me. (Laughter).

Redford on the dynamics of watching scenes between LaBeouf and Tucci:

Shia has a fast mind and a fast tongue and for Stanley to work with that and still be the character that he had to play, he had to be a man in control with an industry that was going out of control…The fact that he could manage the energy by creating a counter energy, that as Shia got more crazed Stanley – if you watch the film - Stanley goes the other way. It creates a dynamic. As Shia slows down Stanley goes for his throat. I just enjoyed watching that. (Laughter.)

Redford on casting Jackie Evancho, a young singer who appeared on the television show “America’s Got Talent” and has released five CD’s:

This is one of those stories where you take a risk and it pays off…I was in Vancouver getting ready to film and I couldn’t find the young actress, the 11-year-old, to play my new daughter. Kids in films to me have always been a pretty big deal. Because I want to see a child just be, not act. I was frustrated in the interview process because I was interviewing girls who were lovely…and their mothers were dressed like they wanted a part in the movie so there was that, but the kids were too busy acting.

I’m sitting in the hotel room, depressed, kind of mindlessly surfing. Boom! There’s this vision on the screen, this angelic creature, 11 years old…She was singing Puccini. I was thinking, “Wait a minute! How does that work?” The camera pulls back and there’s this symphony hall, and this huge orchestra. And this creature just belted this music out that was so powerful and right away something just clicked into gear.

Somebody who has that composure and can do that from that kind of audience with that kind of register with that kind of complexity, maybe that could work…I contacted the agent, the casting person, I said find out this person where she is. They found out she was in Pittsburgh and living this normal life…they went down and taped her.

It was clear she didn’t know what was going on, and I thought, “I don’t know, there’s something, I’m going to take this chance.” She was hired on Tuesday. We filmed on Wednesday. We filmed the first day we met. From that point on, I figured I am one lucky man because she turned out to be absolutely lovely. We just played together and had fun together and improvised together.

Evancho was asked if she knew who Redford was:

My dad said he played a cowboy. That’s all I knew.

Tucci asked Evancho if she was nervous the first day on set:

I was extremely nervous. I didn’t know what to think.

Redford: She was so busy having fun that it disguised her nervousness.

On Redford’s political activism and what he’d like audiences to take from the film:

The first thing would be that they would think. Some films are like cotton candy. You have a wonderful ride and then they’re over. Other films are designed in a way to at least make you ask a question afterwards or think about what’s happened and maybe dialogue with somebody. That’s what I would prefer.

The second thing is a criticism I have of my own country, that I don’t think we’re very good at looking at history as a lesson to learn so we don’t repeat a negative historical experience. We’re not good at that.

When this happened I was of that age, I was of them in spirit. Because I was starting a career in the New York theater, and I was also starting to having a family, I was obligated to that task so I wasn’t a part of it but I was certainly empathetic to what they were doing because I also thought it (the Vietnam War) was a wrong war. I thought it was a war that was going to cost unnecessary lives.

Redford talking about the challenges of making a film that deals with journalism:

It’s tricky business when an artist tries to mess around with journalism. I’ve done that before. Basically I was protected by a story, which was written by somebody else…It’s tricky because I don’t know that if the media is comfortable being criticized by people that are not in their own world…Because I have such a keen interest in the media, because I think it plays such an important role in our society, I’m very concerned if it’s ever it’s threatened in any way.

Redford on whether he has any positive thoughts about journalism and the country:

Positive? I don’t know about positive as much valuable. Because I consider journalism so valuable, I would almost – I don’t want to have too much ego here – I would almost take it personally if journalism failed itself because that’s the one avenue we have to the truth, so if I’m going to portray journalism in a film, which is tricky business, then you want to at least give it its due and maybe describe the threats that are against it.

So in this case the idea of Shia’s character was to me more interesting if it was complicated by the fact that is he going after the story for his own personal aggrandizement? Is he going after it for the purity of just getting the story? You should dance between that as he moves forward, but then what should be unmistakable is what he learns about himself in his pursuit of finding something about somebody else.

Redford on his two favorite stories and how they related to The Company You Keep:

The two stories I loved as a kid, Phantom of the Opera, because I always wanted to play that part. [laughter]. No, I really did! And then Les Misérables. I saw similarities in that Shia’s character is Inspector Javert, and that I was Jean Valjean [in the film] in a sense that I go to prison for something I’ve done that’s wrong.

Redford on whether he’s had a chance to meet any of the radicals symbolically portrayed in the film:

No. I didn’t feel I needed to because I saw a documentary several years ago, it came to the festival, called The Weather Underground… and I felt that that documentary was very well made about the actual people, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn. I didn’t feel I needed to meet them. Also this was a piece of fiction that had to have the basis of truth to it but it was really about their lives later, so no I didn’t feel I needed too, but I did meet the son of Bernadine Dohnr and Bill Ayers, who lives here in New York and Chicago. He’s a teacher. And that was it. I figured I don’t want to go into far in this because this is a piece of fiction, dramatic fiction.

I’m happy to talk about this film. I’m proud of the actors who are in it. I was able to make the film I wanted to make the way I wanted to make it and I’m proud of that. But I think if you stay too long it’s not a good thing.

Redford on selecting photos of himself for the film and if it’s a “wink” to some of his earlier movies:

[Redford laughed] You think that’s a wink, huh? [laughter]

Redford on the difficulties of culling pictures from old movies and aging:

I just had to go through archival stuff and find old photos of myself and be depressed. [Laughter]

Redford on casting Julie Christie and what he will do about getting her an Oscar nomination:

I would never try to get somebody an Oscar nomination. That’s not my business. Awards are not my business. But Julie became my business. I saw her because I knew her when she was younger and we both had film exposure around the same time, and I realized that she was radical then and assumed she might stay that way. That would be something to draw on, but I had no idea beyond that.

She seemed to disappear from the face of the earth and then she showed up in a film about Alzheimer’s, and I thought, well unless that was a real life thing for her maybe I should call. It took a while to get her. She’s in a remote area of Spain and sometimes London. It took two months of conversations, first of all trying to find her, then secondly, listening to her tell me why she shouldn’t do it, on and on, didn’t want to do it, didn’t think she could do. But perseverance ruled the day.

Redford’s next film is All Is Lost, J.C. Candor’s follow-up to Margin Call. The film, out this spring, is an adventure survival story in which Redford seems to be the only actor.

Then in 2014, in the feverishly-awaited Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Redford plays the head of the espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D.

“It’s going to be very different,” Redford said about the role.

After a long press day, I saw Redford at the film’s swanky afterparty at Harlow on East 56th Street. Redford mingled with Chandor, Tony Shaloub (Monk), Zosia Mamet (Girls) and director Oren Moverman.

Redford slipped out at midnight, shaking hands and smiling at guests, as he exited through a side door.