The Last One for the Road

The first thing to say about Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) is that they probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel. At the start of The Last One for the Road, they are snoozing in the front seats of their car. The scene is bathed in red, and the pair are oblivious to that light turning green, until the beeping horn of an irate motorist rouses them from their slumber. “Shall we have one last drink?” Carlobianchi groggily asks his friend as they drive off.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

A Private Life

A Private Life is the kind of flimsy genre exercise that needs a strong star performance to keep it on course. Thankfully, Rebecca Zlotowski has cast Jodie Foster at the centre of the film, and it’s hard to imagine a stronger linchpin. Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychiatrist living in Paris who, we quickly surmise. has been doing this work for a long time. perhaps too long. She barely seems to listen to her patients’ woes, allowing her ever-present Dictaphone to do the work for her, and her emotions are regimented to such a degree that she is brusque and distant even around her own family.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

"I don't feel like my path is very different to the traditional route." - An Interview with Curry Barker

Curry Barker may be an unfamiliar name for most cinemagoers, but like a number of the horror filmmakers who have emerged in recent years, he already has a loyal following thanks to his YouTube work. On their channel That’s a Bad Idea, Barker and his friend Cooper Tomlinson have posted comic sketches that they've written and performed in, while Barker has posted a series of short horror films on the channel. Barker’s short The Chair (2023) earned him attention from the studios, and this was followed by Milk & Serial (2024), an hour-long film that Barker and Tomlinson made for $800, which became a viral word-of-mouth hit. Barker’s YouTube work showed some promise, but Obsession is a huge step up. Obsession is the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), who harbours an unspoken crush on his work colleague Nikki (Inde Navarrette). When he flippantly makes a wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world, he instantly turns her into the girlfriend from hell, unwilling to be apart from him for a moment, and consumed by a murderous rage if anyone comes between them. Obsession is a tight, clever and terrifically entertaining horror film, and I recently had the opportunity to talk to Barker about his hugely impressive debut.

One thing I liked about Obsession is the way it manages to put a fresh, modern spin on the old idea of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ What was it that drew you to this premise?

I was really intrigued by this idea. I have so many different ideas in my phone, I’m constantly trying to come up with cool film ideas, but I was really intrigued by the idea of obsession. I had this idea about a man and a woman who were so infatuated with each other that they became violent, but it didn't work. There was no story, because if they're both obsessed, then what is the movie? I was watching this Simpsons episode one day and Bart had a monkey paw. He made a wish and all this crazy stuff happened, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is perfect for my obsession idea.' It kind of becomes a wish-gone-wrong scenario. It’s pretty simple idea that we probably have seen before, but I just had to make it as different and unique as possible.

Was this an idea that always felt like a feature to you rather than a short?

I thought of it as a short at first because at that moment in my career I was doing a lot of short films. I don't know if you could even call it a career at that point, it was just a hobby and trying to build my resume and portfolio. I thought of it as a short film but I always think about a feature, you know, just to hope and pray that it could ever be a possibility.

When you were writing the film, did it feel like a very different challenge to sustain a narrative at feature length?

Definitely, yeah. I mean, the one thing you don't want is for it to just feel like a short film that's been stretched into an hour and 30 minutes. You have to keep it engaging. The main challenge for me with this movie is making sure it's not repetitive, because there's only so many things you can do with this idea, there's only so many ways she can go crazy. I didn't want to make it a rampage killing movie where she becomes possessed and starts killing people for no reason. If she's gonna kill somebody, it has to be because she sees that as a huge obstacle between her and Bear, so I was just reminding myself constantly when writing, what is the goal of each character? What's the goal of Nikki? The goal of Nikki is just to be with Bear, that's all she wants. What are the obstacles in her way? When you remember that, it becomes a little easier to write a film like this.

While there are elements of violence and horror in the film, I appreciated the amount of time you take to build up to those aspects. For much of the movie, we’re just sitting in these awkward situations with the characters and observing that shifting dynamic.

Yeah, I wanted the movie to have a build up to it, I feel like it wouldn't have been as powerful if some of the crazy stuff happened earlier and it wouldn't have been as effective. One of my favourite movies in the last ten years is Joker, the Todd Phillips film, and I'm always thinking about ‘What's my Joker moment?’ Because that movie is great at showing us, okay, he's definitely not a good person, he's got mental health issues, there's something weird going on here. Yeah, he kills those people on the subway, but it all feels like it's building up to something…and then boom! He shoots the guy on live television. That was such a crazy moment for me in the theatre. So to recreate that was my goal. Like a Joker moment. What's the moment where you're like, ‘Wow! Holy crap!”

A large part of why the film works is Inde Navarrette’s performance. She's great at immediately showing us who Nikki is and then she does some amazing work as the character gradually gets more unhinged. What is your process for working with actors and drawing a performance out of them like that?

As a horror director, it's your job to wrap everybody's head around what you're trying to do, because everyone's first instincts are going to be to do the thing we've seen before. I always told Inde I want her to play a crazy jealous girlfriend, not to play a demon-possessed woman, so leaning into crazy jealous girlfriend, you get a lot of whininess and pleading, and that was what we worked on a lot. Sometimes I would make a fool of myself on set because I would be doing this weird whining and trying to show her what I want, and I like to keep it really light on set. I think just because we're making something with really dark subject matter, it doesn't mean everybody can't laugh and have a good time on set, so we would laugh and I'd show her my whine, and it kind of worked like that. We watched some movies together too. We watched Pearl, that's a movie about being obsessed with wanting to be a movie star. We watched Hereditary, which is a movie that's got very raw and very real emotion, so we wanted her to see that, and just going scene by scene with her.

 
I think the real horror in the movie is when you consider the situation from her perspective, and when you give us these flashes that remind us the real Nikki is still in there somewhere.

Yeah, and you don't know where she is, you don't know what she's going through. You just know that whatever it is, it's bad. There's something really creepy about the unknown, that dark void that your mind goes to when you don't really know, and I wanted to keep it like that. That mystery is so much scarier than flashing to her in Hell and seeing her being burnt by fire or whatever you want to say. It wouldn’t be as effective, for sure.

It’s also an interesting film about the nature of relationships between young men and women today, especially when the young woman can have no power in that situation.

I mean, I was more looking to make a really fun horror film. I think the movies that I look up to push the boundaries, and the movies that excite me have characters that are grey and don't always do the right thing. This movie is a fictional film, so there's elements in it that couldn't possibly happen in real life, when you're dealing with magic and stuff like that. Bear comes from a very innocent place at first. I think we can all relate to having a crush on a girl and that crush not being reciprocated and really feeling upset about that. It's what he chooses to do afterwards, that's very, very questionable. I wanted to write a character that was grey in that way because it's so much more intriguing to me to see him trying to make this work and trying to keep her as his girlfriend, rather than doing the right thing and making the whole movie about him trying to fix his mistake. It felt like a more intriguing story for me, and we don't often see the possessed person becoming the victim.

Watching a number of your shorts this week, one aspect of your style that certainly carries through into Obsession is the way you edit. You seem to really like an abrupt cut, and you often edit in and out of scenes in a way that’s unexpected and jarring.

Well, you’ve got to know the rules to break the rules, and I've been editing since I was 10 years old. It's something that I've been doing for a very, very long time. I know the flow of the scene and I know how it's supposed to go, and yeah, it is something that I really like to play with. These weird cuts and this way of cutting out before something finishes, or even sometimes lingering on something when the moment should be over, these are techniques that you can use to either build tension or make people feel weird. It's a thing that I'm still experimenting with, but I think that's part of my style and I'll continue to do that. 

The other consistent aspect of your style is that you favour a dark image, you use a lot of shadows to obscure what we can see. How did you work with cinematographer Taylor Clemons to create that look?

Yeah, oh my gosh, Taylor is so amazing. He's a fantastic cinematographer and I think that he will go down in history as one of the greats one day. This was his first feature as well but he is doing my next film and he is just so good. But you know, I had to get him on board for what I wanted to do, and I was very nervous about that, having never worked with a cinematographer before. I had to explain to him what I wanted to do with the aspect ratio and the framing, keeping it very still and not cutting a lot and being very intentional with it. But he was so on board that and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna work great!” The aspect ratio really lends itself to picture frames, if you notice the ratio of the film is actually the same as a picture you would take on your phone, but not the same aspect ratio of a cinematic movie. We wanted to create frames and keep the camera very still, almost as if you're just watching pictures of someone's life in a weird way. He's a master at lighting as well and we were having conversations about keeping her in the shadows but also being very intentional with it, you know, it's not every time, it's certain moments.

When you’re making films on YouTube you only have to please yourself, essentially. Here you have a number of producers who are all invested in the film and all have their own opinions. What was it like negotiating that?

Everyone has ideas and a lot of times they're good ideas, so you can listen to those, but people are also really good about letting me do my thing. In a different scenario, maybe I would have been working with people that weren't letting me do my thing and maybe the film wouldn't have been as good, but I'm lucky because they let me do my thing on this one, and now they're letting me do my thing on my next one. I got really lucky that I'm looked at and respected in that way. Even on this next one, all the suggestions that the producers had were actually really great, and I usually ended up taking their advice. I've been allowed to play, which I don't think is always the case, so it's been very good.

I know you made Milk & Serial for $800 so it’s a big leap to the budget for Obsession, but I think you made this for under a million dollars, which is still a very tight budget for this kind of movie.

Yeah, it was very low budget, under a million for sure. You could feel it on set, I mean, we were scraping pennies every single day. It was a very difficult project. It's so funny because we have the premiere in Los Angeles coming up and Focus is showing me what they're doing for the premiere and everything, and there are crazy things that we could not afford to do in the movie, you know what I mean? The premiere is going to have a more detailed XYZ than we even had in the film, because we just didn't have the money to do it. It's really funny and interesting.

Do you feel like your YouTuber background and mindset helps you work within the confines of a very tight budget?

Definitely, yeah. I mean, the only thing that is tough is that it doesn't really matter anymore what I'm used to, because everything takes so much longer. Even just getting an insert of a lamp or an insert of your phone or whatever can take 45 minutes. I'm used to just, ‘Put the camera there, get the shot, move on’. I try as much as I can to stick to my roots and I think, 'There's a scene where we're driving, let's just hop in the car and drive,' but no, we need police escorts, we need to be on a trailer. Like, Jesus Christ, you know? Everything becomes so difficult. I do try to cling on to my old ways as much as possible, but it mostly just becomes an annoyance for people that are used to doing things the traditional Hollywood way, and their way becomes an annoyance to me. Time is money and that can become stressful, because when that stuff takes really long time, I know I could have just knocked out this shot.

When you started making videos on YouTube, was working towards being a feature filmmaker always the goal?

I've been acting since I was four and then I was making little videos with my friends when I was 11 years old. I come from a very small town in Alabama where if you want to act in film, that opportunity doesn't really exist, so I realised I had to make my own films if I wanted to act in them, and I very quickly fell in love with the process of creating films. I mean, I was always looking towards the stars, always was striving to be a filmmaker, so everything was means to an end for me. I wasn’t anticipating how it was going to work out, not knowing that YouTube was the answer to everything. I tried everything, I tried film festivals, I tried local plays, I tried YouTube, and YouTube was the thing that took off.

Your story is not that uncommon at the moment because we're seeing a number of YouTubers transitioning to feature filmmaking. Are you conscious of a growing interest from distributors and the studios in YouTube creators, and what do you think is driving that?

It's so interesting because of course the buzzy thing is to say ‘YouTuber Curry Barker has become a filmmaker in the traditional space’, but my path doesn't feel that different to David Fincher or Steven Spielberg or whoever. I mean, watch The Fablemans. Steven Spielberg was making shorts as a little kid and he becomes a filmmaker, like I made short films over and over again, trial and error, harnessing my craft. I just happened to have a platform called YouTube where they got attention. The discoverability is so much more vast now because of platforms like YouTube, but I don't feel like my path is very different to the traditional route.

 
Do you feel there's a sense of community with the other filmmakers of your generation who are coming up through YouTube? You feel like you're part of a new wave?

I think so because I talked to the Filippo brothers and I'm also super familiar with the influencer space. I've also been lucky enough to talk to Ari Aster and Zach Cregger and I have their phone numbers and they give me great advice. It does feel like a little bit of a community. Anytime we link up, we do talk about it, that we're this generation, this is our moment, you know? It does feel like a community.

One of the things that connects you with many of the filmmakers who are of your generation and some just before as well, is that you're making horror films but you kind of have a background in comedy. I'm thinking of the Filippo brothers, Zach Cregger, Jordan Peele, etc, who all have sketch comedy backgrounds. Do you see that as a natural progression?

I absolutely do. I don't think it's that comedy and horror are similar, because they're very different, but I think what's similar is the muscles and the skills that you use to create tension and fear in a scene can be very similar to the skills that you use to create comedy. I can only speak for myself, but I've spent a lot of time studying the human condition. In sketch comedy after sketch comedy, you start to realise that the way humans act is very funny and you start to find humour in the awkward moments. My brain is always turned on, whether I'm at a drive-through or a restaurant, or I'm in an elevator and there's some awkward beat or whatever; ‘Oh, it would be funny if this happened or it'd be funny if the waiter said this.’ When you're constantly studying the human condition and the psychology of why people say things or how people react to things, that really lends itself well to horror. The horror I try to make is all about dread and discomfort and those things are often very funny too. 

After years of releasing your work on YouTube, it must have been a real kick to see Obsession on the big screen with a crowd.

Oh, absolutely. All that hard work and the time that you pour into a film when you're in the middle of creating it, it feels really great to finally see people react to it. ‘Oh, that moment actually worked, I didn't know if that moment was gonna work or people would picked up on that small dialogue thing there.’ It really all pays off. Sometimes moments don't pay off and you're like, ‘Ah, nobody understood it.’

Did you do test screenings with the film?

Yeah, we did. Small test screenings, very discreet. People had the note of Bear not wanting to fix it and that kind of encouraged me to go even further the opposite way. People wanted him to go on a journey to fix it and it made me go, no, I'm going to make him go on a journey to make this work. Sometimes people don't necessarily know what they want, they know that there's a problem but they don't know how to fix it. I understood what the problem was and then I kind of flipped how to fix it.

Do you see yourself continuing to produce YouTube videos going forward or do you think that stage is behind you now and you're going to focus on features?

There's a couple of short film ideas in my phone that I'm dying to make. It would be so cool to just make a short and throw it up, but oh man, it's so tough because I have no time. I mean, I'm about to hop right into Texas Chainsaw and write that as soon as I have free time, and I'm editing anything but Ghosts right now. It's just me, I'm the editor, so I have 12-hour days of editing until it's done, just refining and perfecting that film. You know, every film is my baby, so I want to nurture it as much as possible. It becomes really hard to do the YouTube thing now, but me and Cooper still want keep the sketches going for as long as we can, it just probably won't be as often as people are used to.

Jason Blum has come on board Obsession as an Executive Producer, and you’re working with him on Anything But Ghosts as well. What has his involvement brought to the project?

Well, it's brought his fan base, the Blumhouse fan base, which is very loyal. You can see the uptick in comments of people that love what Blumhouse does. He wasn't really involved in the making of the film, but he's very involved in marketing and selling the film and making sure people go and watch it, which is very, very helpful for me. He's a huge part of my next film, in this case he is involved in the making of it, and he's a great collaborator. Again, really letting me do my thing, and the notes that he's had have been very short and sweet and helpful. I’ve enjoyed my collaboration with him a lot.

You mentioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'm sure you can't say a great deal about your approach to that story at this stage, but what are your thoughts on taking on such an iconic property, which will bring a whole new level of attention and pressure with it?

For my own personal wellbeing, I have to push all of that away. I know that the real pressure is that this franchise is so dear to so many people, but that’s not just with Texas Chainsaw, it’s with every film. Back when I was just doing YouTube stuff, I could fly. Whatever I wanted to do, I would do. If it was bad, then whatever, maybe I wouldn’t even post it or maybe I would post it and see what people thought, but it didn’t really matter. It was so low-stakes, so I was taking risks left and right. The thing is, the risks that I was taking were the things that made me the best. I need to hold onto that and not let the pressure get to me, focusing on what made my voice different and what people appreciated about my work in the first place.

Obsession is in UK cinemas now.

The Wizard of the Kremlin

The increasingly porous line between entertainment and politics is the central theme of The Wizard of the Kremlin. Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano) is the theatre director and reality TV producer earmarked as the man to help position Vladimir Putin as the successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin. "It's the same job, I'm merely suggesting that you graduate to the next level,” he’s told when he protests that he’s unqualified for a role in politics. “Stop making up stories, start inventing reality."

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

"I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be." - An Interview with Hlynur Pálmason.

Time is of the essence in Hlynur Pálmason’s films. For his extraordinary epic Godland (2022), the director spent two years photographing the decomposing remains of a horse; in the film, this is presented as a minute-long montage, evoking time’s inexorable passage. A few months before Godland premiered at Cannes, Pálmason screened Nest at the Berlin Film Festival, a 22-minute short that took 18 months to film. His latest feature The Love That Remains continues that trend, as Pálmason follows a single family over the course of a year, with the changing climate and landscapes being as integral to the film as any of the dramatic, humorous and surreal incidents that he captures during the course of the narrative. This is Pálmason's fourth feature and it further solidifies my belief that he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss the film with him shortly before its UK premiere at last year's London Film Festival. 

One of the things I really appreciate about your films is that every time it feels like you're pushing yourself in a new direction. Is that something that you're consciously striving for when you develop a new project?

I think you at least hope that it's a natural step forward, that you're not forcing anything. I mean, I never think, ‘OK, now I'm going to do something completely different,’ it's more like it's the process that dictates where we're going. When we moved back to Iceland, we bought a film camera because I had this idea of wanting to make films constantly. I didn't want to write and develop for four years and then shoot a film over two months, I wanted to shoot every week. It was more like a painter’s process, just like being a painter in a studio. I felt that if there was such a long time between filming, I didn't feel like a filmmaker, you know? When it came to filming, I was rusty.
 
I also felt that by filming every week, and by creating material and watching the material, I became much more stimulated by it and the ideas came more naturally. The process for the last couple of years has been working on parallel things rather than one thing, and I've found it very satisfying and very exciting. Of course, I’m interested in certain things, I'm always interested in how time passes and you can see that in my films, but I'm always trying – or we as a group of collaborators, we are trying – not to repeat ourselves. We're trying to make things that resonate with us, but hopefully also out there.
 
You work across a lot of different artistic practices. Do you see it all as part of a singular process?
 
More and more, I think it’s just the same. Sometimes it's like, you just work, you just create a daily routine and ritual so that you can be productive, and even that's hard sometimes, because you have to somehow support your family and you have to be part of the world. If you can create a daily routine that is kind of productive, then I have a very strong feeling that the ideas and projects kind of decipher themselves what they want to be and I just have to spend time with it and work on it. The project decides if it's a short film or if it's a little bit longer or and has a bigger narrative. I just try to allow them to decide what they want to be, and then I collaborate with others and try to get things financed if they feel very serious and they feel like they are feature films. But yeah, it's very much about allowing things to just emerge naturally for me now.
 
So, at what point did this story start to emerge and begin to announce itself as a feature?
 
It's a long time ago. I mean, the first image you see in the film was shot in 2017, so it's even before Godland. There are different kinds of triggers and different kinds of seeds that I've planted over the years, but I remember that being the first image that was created for the film. At that time I had the project The Love That Remains, but I didn't know that I was creating an image for The Love That Remains, that came later. I remember one of the most important places in the process was actually when I was shooting this short film called Nest, which was kind of like a COVID project. I was just filming my kids building a treehouse and I wanted the elements and animals and everything to be part of the film, so I had to build this kind of camera house around my camera so the animals wouldn't see me. I ended up spending a lot of time in this small shed, just sitting there and waiting, recording sound and reading and writing, and I started thinking about what the parents of these kids are doing. I was seeing these kids build a treehouse, so I started writing these narratives of the parents, and I think that was one of the places where it began to be serious.
 
We see a lot of movies that are about couples separating and going through a divorce, but generally, the movie is about that subject, and it's the driving force behind all the drama. In this film, it's not really about that. The separation is just one thing that's happening in the lives of these characters. Was that something you were very keen not to emphasise?
 
I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be. You start by saying, “OK, I don't want this film to be another separation film where people are screaming at each other,” because I know people go through those processes, we all know that, and we don't need to always emphasise the most dramatic things. I think sometimes the more effortless things are just as important. They're a little bit trickier to capture, but I think if you really give yourself time, you can capture that also and create a film that is as strong as the more dramatic film.
 
I also felt that I hadn't seen it before. I was more interested in how you spend time with the people you love when a family is fractured and separated, because you still have these kids together. You see it too often in real life, the negative side of people not being able to spend time together anymore, but they still have this history of love and a relationship and all kinds of things that they went through. I just felt there was so much to explore there and it was a very open canvas for people to put in their own experiences, because I really like work that is open for interpretation. I felt like this was a really good concept and narrative that would allow people to put their own feelings into it, instead of telling you exactly what happened, because often when you create certain plots you tend to use a lot of time explaining these things, and that means less time to just experience it. I think I prioritised experience instead of explaining with this one.
 
Was it important to you to have a maternal figure at the centre of it? Your previous films have been following men and very much about male ego and tension and conflict.
 
I think it just happened very naturally because I was looking at a family, and in this family there's one female and one male and then the kids. Then if you look a little bit further there's also chickens and a dog and the horses, and if you go even further there's grandparents and there's friends, etc. So I didn't really decide anything, it was more like I was looking at this very typical nuclear family or this very normal family where both parents are working, which is kind of the norm today, and it was just about exploring them. I didn't have any preconceived thoughts about what this family was, but there were some things I knew. I knew that we would follow him and I knew that one of the threads was following her and one of the threads was following the kids, and I had this feeling that it would be interesting to see these threads weave into each other throughout the film.
 
Very early on, I knew that he was a fisherman. I had been documenting over three summers how you fish during these modern times because it's changing very fast. I was doing this for a company in my hometown, so I was spending a lot of time there and getting to know all these people and seeing a lot of possibilities in capturing this, because it was so beautiful, but it’s a very strange industrial world, not as romantic as a lot of people think it is. I really wanted to capture that, but then I also wanted to spend time with her. He's working the sea and I wanted her to sort of be working the earth, so I tried to find a process for her that could be a nice dialogue with what he was doing.
 
Her artworks are a metaphor for the filmmaking as well. It's about collaboration, it's about the passage of time, it involves the natural world, so it feels like a very fitting choice of process for her.
 
My idea was not to use that at first because this is a process that I've been doing for years. I've always found it to be a very visual and physical process, so I knew that I wanted her to have something similar. In the beginning, I did try to find an artist in Iceland that could be both the actress and the artist herself, and as we go through it we would get to know her work, but I couldn't find a process that fit. I found an actress that I really liked working with in Saga [Garðarsdóttir], so we decided that that she would collaborate with us and would go through what I call a winter process series. You harvest one series a year and you do it during the cold months. You make these sketches and then these sketches become big cutouts in metal, then you put them out during the cold months on top of linen or cotton, and it sort of eats itself into the cotton and makes these paintings or prints. It was so natural for me to do that because it's a process that I've done so many times, but also it's a process that I think fits with the core of the film and it helped to just lift the film.
 
Tell me about casting Saga Garðarsdóttir because she's not someone who does a lot of movies. I believe she's primarily a comedian, is that right?

 
Yeah, she wrote these TV sketches, and she was also directing them and acting in them. She was just so natural and funny, and she has a very striking look. I met her and we talked and I immediately felt I could write for her, so it was a very easy process with her. It took a little bit longer to find her husband, but I knew that I wanted someone that was different, you know, I didn't want them to be the same kind of type. It’s almost as if they met very early in their life and then maybe grew a little bit apart, but I wanted to feel it naturally without explaining it.
 
How do you cultivate that kind of intimacy between your actors? When you're watching these scenes of the family together they feel very comfortable and she has to interact with your kids like she's their mother. Do you create a rehearsal space and bring them together before shooting?
 
That was one of the keys for the film to work. I knew that this film was very playful and I knew that I wanted to push it into places where it was very close to the edge, you know? Close to catastrophic, close to not working, close to being too absurd or comical, but I knew that none of these things would work if the fundament wasn't strong. You needed to believe that this was a real family, that was the most important thing. I invited them to come to my hometown to stay over the weekend, and we made this scene on top of a car in a river. We made it almost like a short film where I just tested them together, and they played and they improvised a text that I wrote. I felt very quickly that this is going to work because they're interested in making the film together and they're okay with this very low-key way of making films. I mean, there's no catering, there's no screens anywhere, there's no chairs, it's just a couple of people making some things together, and they were up for it so I felt it would turn out fine.
 
How is it for you directing your children, because on set you have to be their director not their dad. Is that a different kind of relationship with them?
 
I've always been the same with them ever since they were born. I don't have many faces, it's just one, so it's very natural and easy for me to direct them. I'm kind of blunt, just very straightforward, and that's how I am with all of my actors and crew. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it or I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, I just try to be very clear. If something doesn't work I just say it doesn't work, and then we try to figure out why and if we can fix it or do something else. I'm also like that with my kids, and they have been doing it for so long they’re in all of my projects. Right now with this film the boys have a much larger role, but they're very used to a camera and they're very used to my friends, because it's basically a group of friends that we're making films with, so they know all of them and they love them. It's very easy for me to invite them into the process because it's a very homemade. All of my projects, even Godland, are extremely homemade and it's all very family oriented.
 
You need a considerable amount of time to make these projects that span the changing seasons. How do you factor that into the production schedule and a budget? Whenever you talk to independent filmmakers they are always talking about running out of money or racing against the clock because they don't have enough days.
 
I know. One of the hardest things is actually the finance. I'm not talking for everyone, but the problem of making films for me is always money, and we have to go from film to film just to be able to survive, because we're not getting enough money for making a film. I mean, we'll never get the right amount of money for the hours we use in our projects, that's never going to happen in my life, but we are enjoying ourselves and we're making things that we really love, so we have been trying to make a setup where we're always working on a couple of projects in parallel. I just made a book called Lament for a Horse, with the horse I photographed in the process of making Godland. This was a two-year process of photographing and now I have a book probably five years later, so there are these different processes, and for some of the projects there's no money that comes out of it, but I think I'm really lucky that I have a very solid crew of my editor, my sound designer and my producers and distributors. They're working with me not on only one project, but they're working with me on a body of work, so whatever we make they try to help us figure out how we make this so it's never about the one project, it's more about the body of work and the direction. We have a certain amount of time and we're going this direction, and then the projects kind of decide for themselves what project wants to be made now, because I think each project has its moment.
 
You're working without a cinematographer on this one How did that affect your process?
 
I've always worked very closely with Maria [von Hausswolff], who has filmed everything, but with this one I was beginning to stretch time so much and I was filming so much of the material, so it was strange to suddenly invite someone to come in a process where I already shot 30% of the film. It was impossible for her to move to my hometown, I mean it would be impossible for anyone to just move away from their family or bring their whole family there, so it just didn't fit this film. The next one is kind of like that too, but hopefully I'll collaborate with her soon because we still want to work together. Some of the projects don't allow that because the process is just so different, but it was quite natural for me. I've always been very into the process and it's always been a very much hands-on process for me to make films; I load the film, I do the technical stuff, I'm carrying a tripod. It's all very hands-on and homemade, and it feels natural, but of course miss Maria and I hope I'm going to work with her again.
 

You shot A White White Day in 2.40:1, but you've since gone back to Academy ratio in the last couple of features. The Nest was Academy ratio as well so is that your preferred format? How did you feel about shooting wide?

 
I didn't like it. It's a very strange thing because I really like to be excited about what I do, so when I'm setting up the camera and putting on the lens it's something that excites me, but with the wide lens – it was actually spherical lenses, it was only the opening scene of A White White Day that was anamorphic and then we changed it into spherical lenses the rest of the film – I was kind of annoyed the whole time. This wide format doesn't fit my temperament and right now I see the whole world through a lens like this 1.33 Academy aspect ratio, because both of my still cameras are also this format. Maybe this will change, I'm not saying this is going to be my format for the rest of the films, but it's like if you talk to people that write a lot in notebooks [he holds up and looks at his pencil] it's really important for them if it is a 0.7 or is 0.5. It's a huge difference for people that really work with something, these details are really important, because to enjoy the work you have to feel comfortable and you have to feel that it fits your temperament.
 
There are loads of unexpected comical moments in this film that I loved. My audience really enjoyed the guy on TV singing a song about his mother-in-law. It's a really funny bit.
 
I was born in 1984, and if you were born around that era these were kind of the comics that you really loved growing, they were really radical and funny. There was this character named Helgi the Troubadour and he had these sketches where he was singing about really brutal things but doing it in this funny manner like a troubadour. He was singing about his family, his parents, his ex-wife and his children, and he being brutally honest about these conflicts he had in life. When I was writing, one of these songs just kept repeating in my head and I had to have it. They allowed me to have it, thank God!

 
The other thing I wanted to ask you about is Joan of Arc. This is an hour-long film that's connected to the scenes involving the children in this film. Do you know how that's going to be available?

We just finished it and we only screened it in one place. We premiered it in San Sebastian so I have no idea of its future because it's an odd little thing, it's not that long, it's not that short, so it's kind of an in-between film. I'm trying to figure out what kind of distribution it's going to have, whether Curzon going to take it or if they find it a little bit too experimental. I don't know yet, but people are getting a chance to see it now, so we'll know soon what kind of life it will have. It will definitely come out but I don't know what format. I wanted to make a trilogy of short films, Nest was number one and the second one was supposed to be Joan of Arc, but it just became so big that it became a feature. We are actually working on the third one, it's called Blue, so the idea is that it's like a trilogy of films where we are working with time in that way, but each time it's a little different. It's been extremely fun to make these films, for me it's the most fun I have with films, and Joan of Arc was one of my highlights of the year. Just spending time with them and just spending time with the weather, it's something that I really enjoy.

The Love That Remains is in UK cinemas from March 13th

Frederick Wiseman Obituary

Stretching from 1967 to 2023, Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking career was a model of consistency. From the unprepossessing titles onwards, Wiseman stripped his portraits of institutions and communities down to their essentials. There is no non-diegetic music in Wiseman films to help guide our emotions, there is no voiceover narration, there are no onscreen captions to add context to what we are seeing, and there are no interviews with the participants. It is documentary filmmaking in its purest form. “His movies are stylistically ur-vérité,” Errol Morris wrote in a Paris Review essay in 2011, before adding, “but Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”

Read the rest of my obituary on the BFI website.

Saipan Review

 

For Irish football fans of a certain age, the phrase “You can stick it up your bollocks” is etched in our collective memory. This was captain Roy Keane’s parting shot to manager Mick McCarthy as he left the Irish squad one week before the start of the 2002 World Cup. Anyone living in Ireland then will recall the hysteria that ensued as this issue divided the nation, a period that Saipan evokes with its opening montage of TV and radio soundbites. “This is like our Princess Diana,” one interviewee says, which didn’t feel like an overstatement at the time.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Essay on Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento

Written for the now-discontinued Eureka blu-ray edition in 2016.

In August 1974, Gideon Bachmann arrived in Italy to report on the production of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento for Sight & Sound. He had planned to spend one day on the set, but ended up staying for a whole week, with a diary of his experiences being published in the magazine a few months later. After a couple of days spent watching Bertolucci at work, taking note of the impressive scale (and spiralling cost) of everything, and growing frustrated at his failure to secure an interview with the director, he wrote, “What is it that makes film directors so sure of their value? Whence this presumption of being involved in an activity that must take precedence over other human obligations? Haven't we perhaps allowed them too much mythology, too much adoration?”

Cut to three years later. The fruits of Bertolucci's labours were finally presented to the paying American public in November 1977, but only after a long, acrimonious and very public battle between the director and his producer Alberto Grimaldi. The 315-minute version of Novecento shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival was whittled down to a relatively skimpy 195 minutes by Grimaldi, conscious of his contractual obligations to Paramount. Grimaldi had banned Bertolucci from the editing room, prompting the director to take legal action to protect his vision. “That isn't my film; that's a trailer, a travesty,” Bertolucci exclaimed in the press when asked about the new cut commissioned by his producer. “My friend is surrounded by sycophants who tell him he is God,” Grimaldi responded. “It started with Tango.”

The film made by a director after enjoying their first enormous success is a test. A few years before Michael Cimino went off the deep end and killed a studio with Heaven's Gate, Novecento was viewed as the prime example of a wunderkind being given his freedom and running for the hills with it. Last Tango in Paris was not only an astonishing critical and commercial hit in 1972, but a film that was instantly seen as a cinematic landmark, a breakthrough in adult artistic filmmaking. Following the more modest but still widely admired The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem in the previous years, this was the kind of achievement that has other filmmakers heaping praise on the director (“How dare I make another film?” Robert Altman said, “My personal and artistic life will never be the same.”), has every actor lining up to work with him, and has studios throwing money in his direction in the hope of reaping the same artistic and financial rewards. Where does a young director go in that situation? Bertolucci decided to go big. Although his film is titled 1900 in many countries, a more accurate translation of Novecento is Twentieth Century, which immediately gives you a sense of the scale of his ambition.

Novecento was briefly mooted as a six-part series for Italian television, although what small screen in the mid-1970s could have contained the scope of Bertolucci’s images? This is self-consciously an epic work, large in every sense, and it’s no coincidence that Bertolucci begins his tale on January 27^th 1901, with the announcement of the death of Giuseppe Verdi. The director is taking his lead from Verdi and telling his story in an operatic register, demanding grand, emotive performances from his actors (compare the dignified restraint Burt Lancaster exhibited in Visconti’s The Leopard to his work here), and instead of finding a consistent rhythm or narrative flow throughout the film, he focuses on staging loosely connected individual sequences that each build to a crescendo and aim to enrapture the viewer with their swelling melodramatic fervour. No wonder Pauline Kael spent much of her famous New Yorker review marvelling in equal parts at Bertolucci’s brilliance and foolhardiness, before summing up the film’s appeal by stating that “Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”

But despite the gigantic size of Novecento, Bertolucci’s flirtation with the idea of presenting it on television is telling. He wanted his socialist epic to be a film that spoke directly to the masses, a film that bypassed intellectual analysis and worked on a level of pure emotion, through arresting images and rousing rhetoric, culminating in a climactic speech being delivered directly into the camera. The film can be blunt and even crude in its approach, with Bertolucci taking a broad strokes approach to his storytelling, and the people we see in the film are less characters than symbols. His two protagonists Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu) are born into different classes on the same day in 1901. Alfredo is the scion of a bourgeois landowning family while Olmo is the bastard son of a peasant, and as the film charts their fluctuating fortunes and enduring, if complicated, friendship over the subsequent half-century, it becomes clear that the weight of history rests heavily on their shoulders. Through these two characters – plus a third, Attila, who we meet a little later – Bertolucci’s microcosmic film aims to show us the changing face of Italian politics, industry and class across five decades. Novecento pits the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the communists against the fascists in a struggle for the country’s soul, and there is no doubt whose side the director is on.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1901 painting The Fourth Estate, which is shown under the opening credits, sets the visual tone, with Bertolucci and Vittorio Storario shooting the communists and the peasant masses as heroic figures throughout Novecento. They are noble, dignified, the salt of the earth; they work, eat, sing and dance together; they are a community. When faced with superior force during the workers’ strike of 1908, they band together and lay down in the road against the armed soldiers on horseback. When four men are killed in a building burned by fascists, they carry the charred bodies through the streets in protest, unafraid of reprisals. When women working in the fields take up pitchforks against the fleeing fascists on Liberation Day in 1945, they sing, “Even though we are women, we are not afraid,” a song that became popular again among left-wing Italian women during the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s – Bertolucci linking then and now.

Compare this with the way Bertolucci shoots the fascists. It’s hard to think of many more despicable characters in the history of cinema than Attila Mellanchini. Played with leering, eye-popping intensity by Donald Sutherland and egged on by his Lady Macbeth-like wife (Laura Betti), he’s a grotesque embodiment of fascist ideology; a sadist and pervert who gleefully attacks children, animals and old women and is responsible for the most violent and upsetting moments in the film. Attila is the only fascist who really exists as a character in Novecento and therefore he acts as a representative for the entire order. On the few occasions when Attila does get his comeuppance – his humiliation escalating from straw to horse shit to pitchforks – it’s always the collective that rounds on him, but Attila is not in fact acting alone, he has a whole support network behind him, and you could even argue that, despite his cartoonish villainy, he is not Novecento’s true villain.

A key scene in Novecento takes place inside a church, where the landowners meet to discuss the growing unrest among the peasants. They agree to employ a private army of Blackshirts to maintain control, and thus, the fascist movement in Italy is born, with the links between the church, the bourgeoisie and the fascists being explicitly made. When his father dies, Alfredo becomes the padrone, inheriting the increasingly violent Attila along with the land, but he can do nothing to curb his fascist attack dog. Right from the start of Novecento, when both Alfredo and Olmo are boys, Bertolucci keeps finding ways to show us Alfredo’s inferiority in contrast to his lower-class friend. From comparing their penises (Alfredo’s foreskin is too tight) to daring to lie on the tracks as a train passes overhead (Alfredo flees at the last minute), to the fact that Olmo leaves to fight in the war, returning as a man, while Alfredo dresses as a soldier but stays at home, having been kept out of harm’s way by his rich father. Alfredo is fundamentally weak, and it is this weakness that allows fascism to flourish on his watch.

On a number of occasions he is encouraged to take action against Attila and stand up for Olmo and the peasants, often by his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda, whom Angela Dalle-Vacche suggested only exists in the film to deflect attention from the homoerotic tension between Alfredo and Olmo), but all Alfredo can do is look away and withdraw. Even when Olmo is taking a vicious beating from the fascists, Alfredo hesitates, only stepping in when the danger has passed. When he finally dismisses Attila towards the end of the film, Alfredo knocks on the peasants' doors and proclaims his action as if expecting applause, but it is too little, too late. Alfredo is not a fascist, but as he is told throughout the film, he is something even worse; a landowner who pays lip service to the needs of those in his care but who ensures his own protection above all else. He is an enabler.

Bertolucci has spoken of Novecento as being a film partially born from a sense of guilt, the guilt of being a member of the Italian Communist party but hailing from bourgeois origins. Thus, for all of its sprawling and outsized ambitions, the character of Alfredo makes this a deeply personal epic for the director, and reminds us of an era when such films were possible. Even in the mid-1970s, however, it's hard to believe that a major American studio could invest millions of dollars in a five-hour Italian epic replete with shocking violence and full-frontal nudity, not to mention the explicit celebration of communist values that occurs at the end of the film. Novecento's finale led to accusations of political naïveté on the part of the filmmaker, with the fascists being run off and the peasants putting Alfredo on trial, but Bertolucci insisted this was less naïveté than hope. “In my film the trial of the landowners seems to be taking place in 1945, but in reality it is situated in the future. It is a dream,” he told Le cinéma italien in 1978. “This entire sequence is an anticipation; it is a dream of something yet to be”; but the utopian vision of the sequence is complicated in the film's closing moments.

Olmo steps in to save Alfredo from execution, insisting that the padrone, the cause of their ills, is now dead, and Alfredo Berlinghieri should be allowed to walk away as a living testament to the padrone's demise; the villagers celebrate with songs and the triumphant waving of red flags, cheering as if the country is now theirs, but this celebratory mood is short-lived. The provisional government arrives to confiscate their guns, and as Alfredo is rescued by Olmo, he tells his old friend with a wry smile, “The padrone is still alive,” before the two begin tussling once more in a futile, comical manner. The country does not yet belong to the people, there will always be a padrone, and the struggle continues.