A NOTE FROM FILMMAKER BILL MOUSOULIS SEEKING FUNDING FOR HIS NEXT FILM

Hi everyone -

For my next feature film, I’m making something in association with the young Adelaide crew Moviejuice (a really vibrant group of filmmakers, actors, critics). It’s an anarchic comedy called CRISPY CRACKERS, and it’s inspired by the films of Jerry Lewis in particular. Official film funding for such a film is not an option (we tried with Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, but they didn’t come through), so we have put together a crowdfunding campaign, asking for the modest sum of $7,500 (and I will put in the same amount of money myself, from my own pocket), to get the film shot and edited.

Please contribute to this if you can.  Here’s the funding page: 

And here’s the Trailer we have put together - 

Streaming on Prime Video from 27 February - Rod Bishop recommends "the first great film of 2025" - NICKEL BOYS (RaMell Ross, USA, 2024)

 

This year, one of the films nominated for Best Picture might have you thinking a  filmmaker from the 1960s American avant-garde had resurrected and crashed the Oscars.

Some fifteen years ago, the Oscars increased the number of films nominated for Best Picture from five to nine, and later on to ten.

It allowed occasional low budget independent films with unknown casts to make the cut. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2013) for instance, with a $1.8 million budget; Moonlight (2017), with a budget of $1.5 million; and Sound of Metal in 2021 on a budget of $5.5 million.

This year it’s Nickel Boys, adapted from a novel by Colson Whitehead (author of The Underground Railway) with a $20 million budget and an unknown cast. At the time of writing, the film had been released in only two territories, the USA (grossing a paltry $2.3 million) and the UK (grossing $158,000). Prime Video will start streaming the film from 27 February.

It’s been a resounding critical triumph, however. See below for some of the 24 awards the film has gathered already.

A disjunction between box office and critical reviews is nothing new, but where Nickel Boys differs from other low budget independents nominated for Best Picture is in film language. 

For his first dramatic feature, the director and co-writer, and previous documentary maker, RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning This Evening, 2018) has dispensed with most typical narrative devices.

Ethan Herisse as Elwood

Instead of the traditional third person, Ross chooses a first person point-of-view, narrating his story from inside his characters. We don’t see his central character Elwood (Ethan Herisse) for nearly 40 minutes and then only reflected in a clothes-iron, photo booths and in shop and bus windows. For 40 minutes, we only see events in the film from his gaze or from a point-of-view behind his head.

Then, we abruptly shift to the point-of-view of the second major character Turner (Brandon Wilson). Ross starts alternating between their two points-of-view, even when using two-shot reverses. In the entire 140 minutes, we only see Elwood and Turner together in one shot.

Often we are abruptly taken out of the point-of-view narrative by other devices and by intersecting footage – montages of time jumps, time exposures; brain scans, home movies, archival photographs of the victims of the real Nickel Academy (the Dozier School for Boys); and copious amounts of archival film, including space missions, Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights movement, and even Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.

Brandon Wilson as Turner

This is definitely not the film language of your common-or-garden Best Picture nominee.

Elwood is living with his grandmother (a superb Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), during the 1960s Civil Rights movement when he is falsely accused of car theft and thrown into a reform school, the Nickel Academy in Florida. With his friend Turner, he witnesses horrific racial degradation and hears of unmarked graves, yet resists and perseveres to retain his dignity and freedom.

For critic Carla Renata: “This may sound like another Black trauma porn motion picture sanctioned by Hollywood to exploit Black history for financial gain. Thankfully…Ross brings his unique cinematic sensibility, allowing audiences to experience this type of story from a sensory perspective.” 

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight): “This is a medium-defining work – aesthetically, spiritually – a rich and overwhelming cinema…RaMell has given us a new way of seeing. It is a thing to make one feel humbled…and filled with gratitude.”

The daring point-of-view direction means we see Elwood’s life between the 1960s and the early 2000s as a series of fractured pieces, to be sorted in the mind of the viewer and reassembled into a coherent narrative. It creates its own power; its own poetry; its own emotional intensity and heightens the immersive experience for the viewer.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian recently wrote a piece claiming Nickel Boys should be the Best Picture winner.

Punters have the film in excess of 100/1 to win the Oscar. Then again, what were the odds of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay 1080 Bruxelles becoming Sight and Sound’s Best Film Ever Made?

For me, Nickel Boys is the first great film of 2025.

 

New York Film Critics Circle Awards: Best Director, Best Cinematography

Los Angeles Critics Association Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Editing

Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Breakthrough Filmmaker

San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle:  Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay 

Toronto Film Critics Association: Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Cinematography

National Society of Film Critics: Best Picture, Best Cinematography

Black Reel Awards: Outstanding Film, Outstanding Director, Outstanding Screenplay, Outstanding Breakthrough Screen Writer, Outstanding Emerging Director, Outstanding Cinematography.

 

At the Thornbury Picture House - Peter Tammer presents his latest film TRIP OF A LIFETIME (Australia, 2025)

Peter writes:

I won't summarise the backstory or details of how the film came to me, that is very well covered by my friend Bill in his detailed notes which you can find if you click here 

As you can appreciate this has been a long drawn out process which started about 1988 and really kicked off when my friend Mike Reed helped me with the digitising of some of my films in 2007. It was only at that time I learned that I could make a telecine on a sprocketless machine, so no damage would be done to the fragile filmstock.

I made that telecine to Digital Tape at Complete Post but it took me another ten years to really get going in the restoration when I discovered Topaz and other AI engines for the first time. You could say that the serious work on the restoration started then, so I've been mucking around with it for 8 years now. That period also includes consideration of many different strategies in using the footage. I finally resolved against any narration or fictional narrative overlay.

Tuesday, March 18, time TBA (around 8:30 pm) Thornbury Picture House, house prices. Tickets from March 4.

Hoping to see many of you in March at the Thornbury Picture House.

MANY THANKS TO YOU BILL FOR YOUR WONDERFUL SUPPORT!

Peter.

Vale Nigel Buesst - Independent Forever

I'm not the first to publish some remarks about the passing of Nigel Buesst. For an extensive report on a long friendship I recommend the  heartfelt tribute published by Peter Tammer on his blog Friends of the Armchair Traveller. 

Nigel's death is another reminder of that time now long ago when a few pioneers just went out and made movies. Nigel; chronicled the age himself in his documentary cum memoir Carlton + Godard = Cinema.  There you can find sympathetic and insightful reportage on the activity in the 50s and 60s of the likes of Giorgio Mangiamele, Brian Davies, Peter Elliott and Buesst himself among others.

By my count these days there are hundreds of people stashed away in Federal and State Government film offices with the power to dole out money or rebates to make movies, to decide which movies are made, which film-makers are supported and most importantly, ensure that proper procedures are followed in the writing, preparation, drafting, redrafting, re-redrafting, casting and more. 

When Nigel started making movies in the sixties there were no people who had such responsibilities. There is now also a tax law that allows investors to gather quite a rich reward and return for any money they toss at a film project. So now we make a lot of movies, most of them still destined to remain almost invisible. Which is ironic in a way because back in the day of making films with your own money about the only places that regularly showed films like Nigel’s were the tiny theatrettes of the Film Co-ops and the annual binge at the city's big film festival.

Nigel started making films in 1963 with his terrific short Fun Radio. From then through the The Twentieth (1966), The Rise and Fall of Squizzy Taylor (1969), Bonjour Balwyn (1970) and Dead Easy (1970) he did them all from his own resources using his own camera and no doubt paying the inflated (tariff protected) price for film stock. In 1973 he made Come Out Fighting with some finance from the Experimental Film Fund.

I was never close enough to Nigel to sit down and talk to him about the future of an Australian film industry nor about what it was that was the driving force in his mind to make movies where no one got paid, the films were hardly ever shown and the biggest payday was to win a prize at the Sydney or Melbourne Film Festivals. 

Those days were about labouring for love, for the sheer enjoyment of making a movie, getting the team together again. People wanted to be on board and usually accepted when Nigel asked. The mark of someone people admired whom people went out of their way to help.

Vale…a life in film well lived.

THE CURRENT CINEMA - Bill Mousoulis presents his latest film MY DARLING IN STIRLING (Australia, 2023)

A shout out for friend Bill Mousoulis (above), the Charley Varrick of Australian independent film-making, an indefatigable force working constantly on behalf of a sector that simply doesn't get enough attention. Bill is almost a throwback to the days before subsidised film-making, government grants and bureaucrats who tell you they dont want to read scripts because that's not the right way to go about things. Bill promotes and supports Australian independent film-making through his various websites and finds time to make movies himself.

Bill's latest film, which premiered last year at the Adelaide International Film Festival, is an homage to Jacques Demy's 60s masterwork THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. It's a musical set in the Adelaide suburbs, a love story and according to Adrian Martin a film which "As a spectator, I felt a euphoria rising within me from about minute 2 all the way to minute 79 of My Darling in Stirling. This is not only because of a feeling of immense pride in the achievement of my dear friend, director-writer-editor (and also eternal webmaster of this site) Bill Mousoulis; but also because of the compact eloquence, stylistic finesse and emotional force of the work – a new and higher plateau for this artist."

The film is having one screening in Sydney at the Randwick Ritz next Wednesday 16th October at 7.00 pm. Bill will be there to introduce the film and take part in a Q&A with critic Anne Rutherford. You can get more info from The Ritz webpage and make a booking. https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/events/my-darling-in-stirling-sydney-premiere

At the Classic & Lido in Melbourne and the Randwick Ritz - SMALL FEELINGS: THE FILMS OF JOHN CASSAVETES - A Complete Retrospective

Classic, Lido & Ritz Cinemas are exploring the career of American maverick and provocateur John Cassavetes with a complete retrospective of his directorial features, from his breakthrough Shadows through to his final film Big Trouble. This is the first time all of Cassavetes’ films have been exhibited together in Australia.

 

Cassavetes' films were hugely collaborative, emphasising the actor’s role in exploring difficult characters and “small feelings” often ignored by the studio system. Created outside of this system, his films ultimately defined the idea of the independent film and expanded the possibilities of the medium.

Every Thursday at 7pm from August 29 to November 14. Tickets are on sale now.

 

FILM PROGRAM
Thursday 29 August, 7pm: Shadows (1959)
Thursday 5 September, 7pm: Too Late Blues (1961)
Thursday 12 September, 7pm: A Child is Waiting (1963)
Thursday 19 September, 7pm: Faces (1968)*
Thursday 26 September, 7pm: Husbands(1970)
Thursday 3 October, 7pm: Minnie & Moskowitz (1971)
Thursday 10 October, 7pm: A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Thursday 17 October, 7pm: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)**
Thursday 24 October, 7pm: Opening Night(1977)
Thursday 31 October, 7pm: Gloria (1980)
Thursday 7 November, 7pm: Love Streams (1984)
Thursday 14 November, 7pm: Big Trouble(1986)

*130 minute director's cut
**108 minute director's cut

TICKET LINKS
Session times and tickets for Classic Cinemas here.
Session times and tickets for Lido Cinemas here.
Session times and tickets for Ritz Cinemas here. 

"When I hear the term independent filmmaker, I think immediately of John Cassavetes. He was the most independent of them all. For me, he was and still is a guide and a teacher. Without his support and advice, I don't know what would have become of me as a filmmaker. The question 'What is an independent filmmaker?' has nothing to do with being inside or outside the industry or whether you live in New York or Los Angeles. It's about determination and strength, having the passion to say something that's so strong that no one or nothing can stop you.  

John made it possible for me to think that you could actually make a movie—which is crazy, because it's an enormous endevour, and you only realize how enormous when you're doing it. But by then it's too late.  

He once said, "You can't be afraid of anyone or anything if you want to make a movie." It's that simple. You have to be as tough as he was. He was a force of nature."

— Martin Scorsese, from a tribute to Cassavetes published in 1989

"Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world. The answer cannot be left in the hands of the money men, for their desire to accumulate material success is probably the reason they entered into filmmaking in the first place. The answer must come from the artist himself. He must become aware that the fault is his own, that art and the respect due to his vocation as an artist are his own responsibility. He must, therefore, make the producer realize, by whatever means at his disposal, that only by allowing the artist full and free creative expression will the art and the business of motion pictures survive." 

— John Cassavetes, ‘What’s Wrong With Hollywood’, from the Spring 1959 issue of Film Culture 

"What makes a film? A script is only words and description—a shorthand for a life situation, an abstraction. The interpretation of the script and the life of the people within it are what makes it real and important. A big passage of dialogue ina. Nervous actor’s hands is a traumatic experience and will either end up being cut at the rehearsal stage or, if shot, deleted when the film is edited. A big passage in John Marley’s hands, or Gena Rowlands’s, or Lynn Carlin’s, or Seymour Cassel’s —is like no words at all: you’re not even conscious of the numnber of words being used, or the time that is passing."

— John Cassavetes, from an introduction to the published screenplay of Faces  

For more information, contact Head of Marketing Jaymes Durante: jaymes@movingstory.com.au 

 

 

 

 

A shout out from Mike Retter for Adelaide's SAM HYDE FILM FESTIVAL - Free at the Palace Nova Cinema Adelaide on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th December

 Mike Retter writes:

 Sam Hyde giving a fake Ted Talk at Drexel University
called "Paradigm Shift 2070" 

The Sam Hyde Film Festival - New film festival embraces meme culture and YouTubers 

The Sam Hyde Film Festival is presenting a mixture of experimental video work in Adelaide this Friday and Saturday at Palace Nova. The festival is named after an American artist who started out as a YouTuber and later became a controversial meme. But beyond that controversy, there are a lot of different aesthetic choices in Hyde's work that make him worthy of cinephile attention. So the festival is a mixture of Hyde, his contemporaries and local filmmakers operating in an "artistic youtube" style. We spoke with Leroy, the creator of this event about why it's a good idea to put contemporary online work in the cinema. 

Leroy: There is a lot of great filmmaking today that is entirely online.. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be presented publicly in a cinema. In-fact it's quite odd that such work is rarely screened publicly when you consider how popular it is. Apart from Marvel movies and a few horror films, people are actually opting-out of contemporary cinema and choosing a mixture of long-form entertainment and youtube. But it's the latter, the independent youtubers that are speaking most to experimental cinema, even if the more beret-wearing haven't heard about that yet.  

Jet Neptune's Community Hour

Why is the festival named after Sam Hyde?

Sam Hyde is one of the icons that have emerged from YouTube and become this generation's Andy Warhol. The work often involves radical form and editing with a strong emphasis on graphic design. Early Hyde is often inspired by the "magazine program" format of Liquid Television or similar shows in Australia like Eat Carpet. The best way for people to learn about him is to experience his work and we have curated some of the best material from the start of his career to the present for this festival. Night one (Friday 15th, December) will have a classic documentary about Sam Hyde called "Blacklisted" and night two will have a documentary Sam Hyde shot while another documentary was being made about him by fellow youtuber Idubbbz. When Idubbbz refused to release his own documentary, Hyde decided to edit one from the footage he created himself.. It's an interesting dialogue between two prominent youtube artists and quite historic. 

Both nights also have a variety of important experimental shorts not just from Hyde, but also from his contemporaries such as Jet Neptune, acolytes and just interesting artists, mixture of local and international. Very excited to show some early work by Jet Neptune who would later become a Hyde collaborator. He has an incredible eye for editing and is able to take everyday footage and sculpt it into art. An obscure creator called Devived has submitted some exhilarating pieces too. Much of this is full of experimentation and constitutes the contemporary digital avant-garde. We can get a bit bogged down with labels and what qualifies as this or that. But we have to remember that David Lynch lived in poverty as a nobody to make his early experimental work, including Eraserhead. As did many others who we champion today in the academies. Some artists aren't appreciated in their own time. It takes a while for people to become canonised and acknowledged .. And academia has an unprecedented moat around it, so it's unlikely that they will be contextualising this work in any meaningful way soon.   

Why would academia ignore this work?

Academia is a bit slow and the world is moving fast. Like academia, in Australia almost all conventional filmmaking is funded by the Government. This allows them a level of control over the content because they fund it and much of the film culture surrounding it. The last thing the system wants is independent-minded work created outside their sphere of influence. And even outside that system, there is a lot of corporate censorship on platforms such as YouTube, which you could argue is the same thing in academia because corporations ultimately influence Governments. But this is fine, it creates opportunities for people like us to present the work and drive culture because there is an unmet need. Technology has enabled the average person to do a lot.  

Adelaide's Philippou Brothers, AKA Rackaracka and
their underwater car stunt

 

Why do an event like this in Adelaide and what kind of local work will be shown?

Well I'm from Adelaide so I have no interest in doing it anywhere else. And Adelaide being an obscure place adds an extra bit of randomness to things. We have a very interesting filmmaking history here, from the early days of the SAFC with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Breaker Morant (1980), Gallipoli (1981) and Bad Boy Bubby (1993). 

But when you look at the present, who are the most successful filmmakers in Adelaide? Well that would be the Philippou Brothers, AKA "Rackaracka", who are YouTubers. They haven't just mastered the viral video for YouTube, they have now made Talk to Me, an internationally successful horror feature film. That's right, a rare Australian film that actually made money! But their journey to making this hit movie wasn't a conventional one. As far as I know, they didn't go to university but learned the nuts and bolts of video production at a TAFE equivalent called MAPS under the tutelage of the iconoclastic Peter Thurmer. They then went on to make work in various forms and genres for youtube, often incredibly violent and controversial, culminating in a stunt that made national news and could have put them in jail. This involved creating a car filled with water to the roof so that passengers had to breathe through tubes or scuba gear. Their vision of the road while driving would be diffused through several feet of murky water. So they then took this car on the road and visited a drive-through alcohol shop..  

This stunt reminds me a little bit of Orson Welles and his 1938 "War Of The Worlds" mock-alien invasion live radio news bulletin. Many Americans were convinced by this broadcast that aliens were invading planet earth because it was presented as a news report and not just a conventional radio play. After this event, Welles had to be very apologetic to the nation or perhaps face some harsh legal punishment. But this national news story ultimately led him to becoming a huge star overnight and being given unheard of creative freedom for his wildly innovative debut feature film Citizen Kane. Welles was using radio in an experimental way with all the impulsiveness of a 23 year old. He would complete Kane by the age of 25 and with no conventional training - change cinema. Like Welles and Hyde, I think the Philippou Brothers pathway to success was built on breaking the rules and their work as youtubers. So we will be presenting the under-water-car video at the Sam Hyde Film Festival on night two. 

Molly Husan's Four Years One Day

What other local films will you be showing? 

We have a textured film clip from Molly Husan that is very melancholic. A bizarre and hilarious animation by Zach Sengstock. There is a direct tribute to some of Hyde's work, a kind of Aussie remake of the "Wine Party" sketch.. And some work by the Port Film Co-op including a film clip for Adelaide band Night Rites and collaboration with Russian martial artist called Kolesnikov's World. It should be a good night where local filmmakers can meet each other. 

Admission is free for this event, how is it all being funded?

Yeah we felt it was important to make this one accessible.. It feels like a bit of an experiment.. The entire event is funded by the Cinematic Cultural Research Unit (CCRU), an independent group partly operating out of an office in Adelaide University.  We are hardcore film buffs who obsessively study certain things and want to inject some life into film culture. Despite embracing a lot of new online filmmakers, we prefer to operate away from social media. So the best way to learn more about us is come along to the screenings. 

You can attend the Sam Hyde Film Festival over two nights 6:30pm this friday/Saturday (15th and 16th December) at the Palace Nova East End Cinema. This is a free event. 

Inquiries: shift2070@protonmail.com

Goodbye by Devived 

The Current Cinema - Michael Campi draws attention to a new film from Hong Kong - THE NARROW ROAD (Lam Sum, 2022)

The Narrow Road

In recent years the renaissance of independent Hong Kong films in Cantonese has been a welcome contribution to local and world cinema. Several prize-winning films have been popular inclusions in international film events. Lam Sum's THE NARROW ROAD premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2022 where Fionnuala Halligan expressed enthusiasm in Screen Daily: "tender, thoughtful film. "The film continues to be greeted by warm responses internationally along with prizes and citations. Let’s hope that such films will find more inclusion and recognition in arthouse cinemas around the world. Excitement in Hong Kong cinema is more than generic crime films or restorations of the work of Wong Kar-wai however timeless and superb many of them continue to be. 

 

In a Q&A, Lam Sum told an audience that the script for THE NARROW ROAD was started before the pandemic as the story of an honest man working in his small cleaning business in Sham Shui Po, living with his ailing mother while employing and assisting a young, likable single mother whose care for her young daughter might conflict with honesty in retail environments. 

 

When Covid became a harsh reality in Hong Kong, its inclusion in the final script provided more than a background to everyday events.  The narrative is very finely developed in terms of characterisations and a sympathetic look at unskilled people struggling to survive during health and economic uncertainties. 

 

As with Lam Sum's earlier short film OASIS, there is a genuine concern for younger people living in low or no rent situations.  Both films display a strong sense of understanding the importance of fine visuals, particularly in THE NARROW ROAD, with its exquisitely rendered scenes (cinematography by Meteor Cheung) especially nocturnal streetscapes.  Both films, along with the exceptionally fine DRIFTING by Jun Li, have memorable scores by composer Wong Hin-yan. Happily his recent work for THE NARROW ROAD is available on a commercial CD.

Angela Yuen The Narrow Road

 

The leading actor, Louis Cheung, has a long career in singing, writing songs and acting in theatre. His appearance on the stage as Stanley Kowalski in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE was well received. Early in his career, he voiced Anakin Skywalker in the Cantonese dubs of two STAR WARS films.  His co-star Angela Yuen provides a subtle performance as the bright young single mother, remaining a sympathetic presence even when she excuses small acts of retail larceny because of her young daughter's needs.  

 

This is a film that deserves a wide audience to appreciate its excellent narrative, visual and aural qualities.   One looks forward to more innovative independent Hong Kong Cantonese films and the future work of Lam Sum. 

 

Lam Sum, director of The Narrow Road

It's exciting to note that THE NARROW ROAD won the Hong Kong Film Critics' Awards for directing and leading actor.  The film was deservedly also awarded Best Director and Best Actor prizes by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society. It also achieved prizes for best original film score in the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan.

 

Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop recommends SR. (Chris Smith, USA, 2022)

Robert Downey Sr & Jr

Anyone who employed the underrated film score musician Jack Nitzsche to work on the oddball, low-budget, underground feature Greaser’s Palace(1972) deserves some respect.

Particularly if the film is about a mysterious figure literally parachuting into an 18th Century Western and capable of resurrecting the dead. The reviews called it “witless”, “unwatchable” and an “embarrassment”.

But Nitzsche, bless him, was back for the director’s next effort, Sticks and Bones(1973), a TV movie about a Vietnam vet returning home blind - variously described as “bizarre”, “unsettling” “controversial” “ugly” and “abrasive”. Consigned to the CBS vaults after its first screening, but apparently stolen in 2012, Sticks and Bones can now be found on YouTube.

And who is this director? It’s Robert Downey Jr’s pop Robert Downey Sr. 

An underground, anarchist, anti-establishment director in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Downey Sr. had one major hit with Putney Swope(1969) and there are another 11 features that are hard to find (try YouTube).

Growing up, Downey Jr. was surrounded by his father’s counter-cultural world and claims he never encountered anything ‘mainstream’. His charismatic dad – who in this documentary freely admits to having been a drug addict – used to think introducing his kids to drugs was the right thing to do. Once, on a road trip from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, his son “was in charge of the hash pipe”. Downey Jr. believes it set off his own downward spiral into drugs and alcohol and he later claimed in court, he’d been taking drugs since he was 8 years old. 

As a Hollywood actor, after a concentrated five-year period of arrests and convictions for drug and other offenses, Downey Jr. found himself unable to work, as any production game enough to cast him could not get completion bond insurance with him in the cast.

This film is not about Downey Jr’s drug problems, but about his relationship with his father during the period his dad succumbs to Parkinson’s. With his family supporting his every effort, Jr. engages in a wild attempt to document Sr’s even wilder career. For his part, the father just insists on access to the footage so he can cut his own version of the film. He spends a lot of time on the set of his son’s film, unable to stop directing the scenes.

Both father and son seem as difficult to handle as a box full of monkeys. But, despite everything they have been through, and despite everything Jr. could legitimately throw at his father, they clearly, quite simply, love each other. And that ain’t nothing.

 

  

"Hidden reservoirs and incredible dramas" - Tom Ryan talks to Jonathan Demme (Part 2) - On working across all forms of film-making, Hollywood, radical documentary, working with young directors and lifelong cinephilia

Editor's Note: This is a second part of an interview with the American film-maker Jonathan Demme. It was recorded by Melbourne film critic Tom Ryan in 2005 as the basis of a feature article for The Age. The first part devoted to Haiti and documentary film-making can be found IF YOU CLICK HERE

*******************

LisaGay Hamilton says of you, “The first thing I learned from Jonathan Demme is that you can never plan a documentary. I mean, you just kinda go with it.” Is this a fair description of how you’ve approached your documentaries over the years?

 Yes, it is, especially if it’s about an individual. But I feel that if you the filmmaker find a person or a situation of exceptional interest to you, if you’re beyond fascinated, if it’s easy for you to get consumed by the subject, if you don’t know how it’s gonna end, you don’t know how it’s even gonna begin really, you just wade in, you start filming, and your footage begins to speak. 

 

When we did the Mandela documentary [Mandela, 1996, directed by Angus Gibson and Jo Menell], we had the framework of an upcoming election. So, in that situation, we did have a final scene: he was either gonna win or lose the election. We were confident he was gonna win. But there was a wonderful clock ticking…

With the other ones, though, especially with the portrait ones that aren’t about someone running for office, you just enter their world and you learn more about their world. You’re learning on film and one situation triggers another. You also have to know when to stop filming and walk away from it for a while until something interesting happens again. 

 

When I did the portrait of my cousin who’s a radical minister in Harlem [Cousin Bobby, 1992], we didn’t know where the heck that was gonna go. And the more we talked to him, the more he revealed aspects of his previous life. It led us to hidden reservoirs and incredible dramas about his involvement with the Black Panthers and the police murder of a Black Panther who he’d become very close with. So you just gotta start diggin’. 

Beah Richards, Beah: A Black Woman Speaks
Dir: LisaGay Hamilton

I mean with Beah Richards [Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, 2003, directed by LisaGay Hamilton], that was amazing because the reason I gave LisaGay a camera was because she said to me, “Jonathan, when I visit Beah, she’s saying the most extraordinary things and it’s a tragedy that this woman’s wisdom isn’t being captured for posterity.” And so I said, “Well, go ahead. I’ll give you a camera and you go ahead and do it.”

Little did any of us know that while the filming was proceeding over the course of several months Beah’s health would decline, that she would choose to sell her home and return to the state of her birth, that she would have her final acting opportunity and win an Emmy. These were things that, had we known them, it would have been a different thing. You have to have faith in your subject.

 

Who is Patricia Benoit and how did she finish up making the documentaries on Haiti that you produced? I know she also directed a segment of Subway Stories, on which you were involved. I read somewhere that she’s 78.

 

Patricia Benoit

No, no, no (laughing). That statistic is wrong. Patricia’s probably 45, and she’s a very, very gifted Haitian filmmaker on the activist circuit. I looked at some of the things she’d filmed and thought they were terrific, and it was exciting for me to help create opportunities for a younger director, especially a Haitian director, especially a woman director. It was great to meet someone who I thought was very, very gifted and with whom I could collaborate on expanding the audio-visual literature on Haiti, which is pretty scant.

 

I understand that you’re a founding member of the Organisation of Artists for Democracy in Haiti as well.

 

Yes.

 

Which was established when?

 

Well, that was established at the time of Aristide’s coup. And I guess I pretty much started that. I took the initiative and reached out to many people because I was convinced that many, many people in the arts, in film, in music, if they knew what was going on in Haiti, would be concerned. So I felt that an organisation like this could help people who would care about this to form a sort of ad hoc lobbying group. We all wrote letters first to Bush and then to Clinton, and to the coup leaders. And we let the people who were calling the shots know that we knew what was going on in Haiti. That we knew that the United States foreign policy was corrupt in Haiti, and we demanded that that foreign policy be changed. And we were quite relentless. 

I’m not sure how much this works any more with our current President [in 2005, that was George W. Bush] because this guy seems to be just a stone wall. Actually I’m being too cynical, because I do believe that the process continues, that it does have an effect if enough people call up, if enough people write letters. They have to respond one way or the other. They have to acknowledge at least the situation and explain themselves. So that was exciting: I really enjoyed calling up Bob Dylan and telling him that we still hadn’t received his signature yet. 

I saw him last night, by the way, in concert at the Beacon Theatre here in New York. I think he’s coming to Australia.

 

I loved his book [‘Chronicles, Volume One’].

 

Me too.

 

Anyway, do you feel like “a man who leads parallel lives” (as a number of commentators have described you), or do you see there being a continuum between your Hollywood films and the documentaries you make and produce?

 

Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, Something Wild

I’m gonna think out loud because I was actually musing a little bit on that, when I knew we were gonna speak. I feel that when I started directing in the mid-’70s through the mid-’80s I was a director trying to establish himself. Up to Something Wild in ’86 or ’87. 

And then my little tiny company expanded and it gave me the opportunity to do two kinds of things at once. The company could be actively involved in the motion-picture industry and produce films that I directed or helped produce, and meanwhile we could always be making documentaries. And, from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, that was what I was all about: having a company that provided me the opportunity to do all that. 

Then I started wanting to scale down in the late-’90s and to not produce any more and only to direct and I think what I’ve turned into, Tom, is… I like to see myself today as an independent filmmaker who, from time to time, gets the chance to do a Hollywood script of very special interest. Like The Manchurian Candidate, which I think is a unique Hollywood project and I’m thrilled that I had the chance to go to Hollywood and make that. 

Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber
The Manchurian Candidate

And previously, it was not entirely successful on a number of levels but I felt I had a unique opportunity to go to Paris, France, and do a film that was a homage to the nouvelle vague [The Truth About Charlie, 2002]… If only that film had starred Will Smith, as had been originally envisioned, instead of Mark Wahlberg, who’s a good actor and has done good work on certain kinds of things but didn’t provide what that film really needed to succeed. 

And before that I did Beloved, another extraordinarily unexpected Hollywood film. 

I’ve taken a year off to reflect on all this stuff, so that’s why I’m able to glance back to do this kind of analysis, spend time with my kids and empty my big old office and shrink down to the tiny one that I entered today. And I’m planning this summer, if all goes well, to shoot a concert film with Neil Young performing live with an exceptional band of country musicians at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee… [that turned out to be Neil Young: Heart of Gold, 2006]

 

Which’ll be the second time you’ve worked with him.

 

Third, actually. In the sense that he provided a very, very beautiful song for the ending of Philadelphia. And I also did a short performance piece called The Complex Sessions with him. But, yes, this is the third and for me it’s a kind of fulfilment because the Grand Ole Opry is a very special American institution and Neil Young is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the giant American songwriters – North American, of course, because he’s from Canada – of all time. Right along with Cole Porter and Stephen Foster and whoever else, he has got to be in the Top 10 all-time songwriters, composers. 

So it’s an incredible opportunity to do something very, very special with his new body of songs which he’s just completed, which is called “Prairie Wind”, very much in the “Harvest” frame of mind, beautiful country-and-western songs, evocations of his childhood and of transitions in North American culture over the past century and reflections on mortality. Emmylou Harris is on many of the tracks and the music’s phenomenal.

 

I realise I’m taking a lot of your time. I’ve just got a few more questions...

 

You’re gonna have to wake up soon [it’s about 12.30am, my time].

 

This is a pleasure for me, so…. (laughing)

 

Thank you so much (laughing).

 

And this is not intended as a loaded question, but, now, which of your films are the ones that matter to you the most?

 

Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Beloved

Um, Beloved matters to me beyond calculation. Racism, the legacy of slavery in our country, is such an overwhelmingly important fact about America, in the country’s life, that to be able to make a film that shamelessly addresses that in a very creative way was a phenomenal opportunity. It was great to work with Oprah Winfrey. It was a perfect filmmaking experience. So that stands out very, very strongly.

Stop Making Sense also stands out in a very, very strong way. That was the first time that I worked directly with music on film and I had the good fortune of that experience enabling me to work with arguably the finest band of the moment with the most exciting singer/songwriter of the day: David Byrne. That was a very, very thrilling thing.

And Philadelphia stands out for me as well as a very, very special thing. We wanted to make a film that would contribute to getting the country behind a concerted effort to vanquish AIDS and we got to make that film and that was incredible. 

I also treasure working with the great actors that I’ve worked with: Jodie Foster, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. The joy of working with people like that is, in a way, bigger than the films that the work was done on.

 

Tell me, is it difficult to be an artist working in America at the moment?

 

I don’t think it’s any more difficult… On the one hand, it would seem to be a little more difficult to work on material that strays from predictable formulas. On the other hand, with the opening up to digital and through documentaries becoming films that are actually shown in the cinemas now – which has been a movement that I think Michael Moore has been responsible for – now the possibility to make your own film however you want to make it outside the confines of the corporately mandated filmmaking is probably greater than ever before. 

Until the film was done, there was never any corporate involvement in The Agronomist. Nobody was making any money – it was a labour of love for everybody. The digital technology permitted me to shoot very, very inexpensively and I was able to make that film exactly the way I wanted to outside the corporate realm. And then finally we entered the corporate realm a little bit, or at least the business realm, by getting advances from distributors that helped us pay for the very high price tag on the archival footage that’s in the film. 

So I can start making a new film this afternoon if I’ve got a subject that interests me.

 

Just a couple of other quick ones. Is there any truth to the story that there’s a bootleg copy of your version of Swing Shift floating around?

 

Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Swing Shift

Well, you know, there did exist some videotapes of the original version of Swing Shift. One copy even fell into the hands of Sight and Sound magazine who did a wonderful review of it to set the record straight [see Steve Vineberg,  “Swing Shift– A Tale of Hollywood”, Sight and Sound, Winter 1990/91, pp. 8 – 13]. And there were a couple of other things too. But, you know, these were tapes made in the ’80s and if any of them are still around I don’t know where they are. It was famously re-edited and re-conceived, and it was a movie that was famously taken away from the director and chopped to ribbons and there was all this new stuff imposed on it. So there certainly wouldn’t be any interest on Warner Bros.’ part in (laughs) participating in the restoration of a film that would prove they’d made a horrendous blunder previously. 

 

Is it water under the bridge for you or do you still have hard feelings about it?

 

No, it’s finally… When you raise it, I note that I don’t have any of that spontaneous adrenaline in my chest because that whole thing has been conjured up…  No I’ve made my peace with it and, you know, it’s very interesting because my experience on making Swing Shift really made me a very tough guy. From that moment forward, if I wasn’t gonna get final cut I wasn’t gonna do it. If I could work with exactly who I wanted to, and if I didn’t have complete trust in every single person participant on either side of the desk in the making of a film, I wasn’t gonna do it. If I smelled the slightest aroma of any disruptive force that might threaten the integrity of the film, I was all over it. 

So they say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or something like that. That’s what happened there, although, that said, I was profoundly depressed at the time and wondered if I had the courage to actually go back through that process. And you know, come to think of it, Stop Making Sense was made at exactly the time of the Swing Shift debacle, so that, even as I was experiencing the lowest possible experience that can happen to a filmmaker, I was also experiencing the highest possible one, working with a bunch of brilliant people and making the film the way we wanted to. So that kept me in the ball game.

 

So you’ve actually had final cut ever since?

 

For better or worse, I’ve had final cut from Something Wild on.

 

Are you still as hooked on the movies as you were earlier in your life? I know you started off writing reviews…

 

I did and I am. Yes, I’ve been a movie nut since I saw Treasure Island  in 1954 at age 10. And now I get to see films with my kids and I get to see crappy stuff at the mall in the guilty pleasure realm that I would never waste my time on but I get to be with my kids so I go. And I get to drag them to films that I have loved previously or found incredibly interesting. That’s the price they must pay. If they go to the mall to see the crap, they’ve gotta balance it by seeing something they otherwise might not see.

 

Fair enough too. (laughter)

 

In fact, we’ve got a wonderful, wonderful film centre in a community about 15 miles from where I live that’s called the Jacob Burns Film Center in the amusingly named community of Pleasantville in New York [at 364 Manville Road in Pleasantville, NY, in fact, centrally located in the heart of Westchester County]. They have great, great stuff there. I’ve got to know the people there and next month will be the beginning of Demme’s Rarely Seen Film Festival.

I get to pick something that’s really off-the-radar and whoever dares to show up will watch it and then we’ll talk about if afterwards.

 

Well, your off-the-radar work for me is Who Am I This Time? which turned up here on TV 20 years ago. I happened to tape it and I just loved it.

 

Hey, that’s a Kurt Vonnegut concept. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that and Susan (Sarandon) and Chris (Walken) were so charming. That was really fun.

But I want to clarify something: the Demme’s Rarely Seen Film Festival aren’t rarely seen films made by me. They’re rarely seen films that I have loved made by other people.

 

Tell me what they are.

 

Chappaqua, (Conrad Rooks, 1966)

Well the lead-off is a film called Chappaqua made by Conrad Rooks back in the late ’60s, photographed by Robert Frank. A very independent American film that’s for some inexplicable reason sort of just vanished and they’ve tracked down a print for me. Then we’re gonna show Alain Resnais’ Muriel, a film by Glauber Rocha, Antonio Das Mortes, from Brazil.

 

That’s your favourite film of all time according to the ‘Sight and Sound’ poll in 1992.

 

Have you seen it?

 

Oh, yes.

 

It’s dazzling, isn’t it?

 

It is. 

 

And in America nobody has seen it any more…

 

That whole ‘cinema novo’ movement was just so exciting…

 

So exciting. There’s a little section in The Agronomist where we show about a minute of a film that was very important to Jean Dominique called Anita that was directed by Rassoul Labuchin. That is gonna be our second film in the Rarely Seen Film Festival and I’m gonna bring Labuchin up from Haiti to talk about the film with us. 

I’m sure you know, there’s that thing where at a certain point in your life you’re always trying to get your friends to come back to your place to play them the new music you’ve discovered. This is a version of that. (laughter) It’s just like: come to this movie theatre and look at a film that I think is worth rediscovering.