Kiyoshi Kurosawa at the New York Film Festival

At the October 9 New York Film Festival screening of Tokyo Sonata, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa appeared briefly before the film began to complement the Ziegfeld: “There’s no way my movie can compete with this palace,” he said through his translator (also the film’s subtitler). He later added, “This [film] reflects the Tokyo I live in. The production crew tried to make the shabby part of town look suitable for film—but they’ll lose out to Ziegfeld.”

After the screening, he participated in a Q&A with the audience. What follows are the minutes of that session, captured as best as I could. Questions and answers may contain spoilers. Direct quotes are noted; the rest is paraphrase. The interview was conducted through the director’s translator, as Kurosawa speaks very little English.

--------------

Why does the film end with ‘Clair de Lune’?
(asked by Film Comment editor, and Q&A moderator, Kent Jones)
The director wanted a piece of music commensurate to the age/skill level of the performer, as well as something not too long so the piece could run in its entirety. Most importantly though, he said, was to find a piece complex enough that it would be difficult for a child to interpret—to find something beyond his age level emotionally.

Were you influenced by Death of a Salesman?
Kurosawa chortled. “I know it’s really famous, I think it’s a play but I never read it.” He said he was flattered by the comparison though because the play is so famous, and he promised to read it right away.

What neighborhood did you shoot in? It didn’t look so shabby.
It’s not the most beautiful of cinematic neighborhood in Tokyo, Kurosawa said, but he’s already shot in every other part of the city, so he made a film in the areas he’d said he never would. Tokyo is arranged like a series of rings, with a center and then outskirts. The inner ring, around the center (where the film is set), is not all that aesthetically pleasing, he said, with visible electrical wires and crammed houses. Also: “I had never ever wanted to make a movie in the shopping mall…and I’ll never do it again.”

Does a dissatisfaction with traditional roles exist in modern Japan, as appears in the film?
It’s not just the Japanese—many people want to run from defined roles but are terrified of discovering that they don’t know who they are. So people are increasingly adopting simple roles, especially in urban centers. He said he shot the movie in December 2007 and hasn’t shot anything since. “I tell myself to assuage my anxiety that I’m a still a movie director…so I have anxieties, too.”

As the film isn’t a paranormal or ghost story, like Cure or Pulse, does this signal a change in direction?
“I’m sure I will” return to horror films, he said, but he has no real plans yet. He hopes to return to horror films with a fresh perspective. Or to develop Tokyo Sonata’s themes in a new way—not repetitively. Kurosawa also expressed resentment that his movies get lumped together as “horror films”.

The ending is a huge release. Did you do that as a favor to the audience?
“I appreciate your insight,” Kurosawa said. He said each character has a secret that, when shared, transforms into a fight. The end is a chunk of time that allows the characters to focus on one person and absorb the music.

What I Took from 'Film Criticism in Crisis?'

The New York Film Festival hosted a seven critic-panel on Saturday afternoon called “Film Criticism in Crisis?,” moderated by Film Comment’s editor-in-chief, Gavin Smith. The purpose, Smith said, was not to discuss the print vs. Internet debate; “that argument is over and done with.” Instead, the talk was intended to focus on the “larger picture.” Like the fact that David Denby and Richard Brody sat next to each other in the audience?

Film criticism is not in crisis so much as it’s the victim of the many crises going on all around it. Kent Jones, editor-at-large of Film Comment, noted, of course, the economic crisis happening in newspapers and magazines, which has a direct effect on the health of film criticism. But as long as people take criticism seriously, Jones said, the practice itself won’t be in crisis.

But that’s the issue—what role does film criticism play in our culture today? Seung Hoon-Jeong, formerly a writer for the Korean film magazine Cine21, noted that in his native country people look to criticism as a consumer guide, the equivalent of a recommendation from a friend. “They don’t want to suffer from any headache,” he said. Jones noted the same thing happening in this country: “there’s a lot of reviewing,” he said, “not necessarily criticism.”

“Criticism is writing and re-writing,” Jones added. Increasingly, however, editors are encouraging critics to move in the opposite direction.

Film criticism might be in crisis because the national, even international, film culture is in crisis.

Keep reading at The L Magazine's blog.

Gus van Sant at the New York Film Festival

Gus van Sant was on-hand in New York on Monday (10/8) to discuss his new film, Paranoid Park, which was screening there as part of the New York Film Festival. The following are the minutes of the conversation.

There are some spoilers below, clearly marked, as the conversation took place after the screening of the film, so proceed cautiously.

1. The film is based on a novel by Blake Nelson, who was once something of a "savage poet" of Portland but lately has been writing young adult books. van Sant was originally interested in a book called Rock Star Superstar and after expressing that to Nelson, the author sent van Sant the galleys to his book Paranoid Park and, liking it, he decided to adapt that instead. Also, since it's set in Portland, it gave van Sant "something to do in my hometown."

"He did the work," van Sant said of Blake, referring to the basic plot which the director claimed was lifted pretty directly from the source material.

He also noted that the main character is an amateur skater, and is therefore coming to the skating world that the film (and book, presumably) depicts as an outsider, "sort of like us (the audience)".

2. On the music

They edited the film on a Macintosh laptop, which also had assistant editor Eric Hill's iTunes on there. He's "also a musicologist of sorts," van Sant said, and so a lot of the music was chosen from Hill's collection, just sort of playing around in the editing process, "mixing and matching," as van Sant said. The Nino Rota material was taken from van Sant's own record collection; originally, they tried to make modern re-recordings of Rota's music but it didn't quite work out, so they contacted Rota's estate who allowed them to use the music.

3. On Long Takes (Spoiler!)

van Sant said that his whole career he has filmed "longish scenes", three to five minutes. He films scenes as a whole, not line-by-line, and also claimed "I've always worked with non-professionals (actors)." In his last few films extremely long takes have been written directly into the script; he used Elephant as an example, where he would write, say, "boys play football -- six minutes". Paranoid Park's script was only 56 pages long. (That's much shorter than the average film script! --ed.) He shot two angles for most of the dialogue scenes, one from each side of the conversation. These are edited in the film so that half the scene focuses on one character, and the other half on the other. This method of splitting, he felt, was in line with the film's motif of halfs, best expressed in the image of the man cut in half that cuts the film in half.

4. Chris Doyle

The film's cinematographer was Christopher Doyle, who also appears in a small part as the main character's "Uncle Tommy". He was already on the set and they wanted a face for that character, so they stuck him in there. van Sant saw the character of Uncle Tommy as "the gay uncle who had this beach house."

Doyle is known primarily for the work he's done with Wong Kar-Wai; characterizing the process of working with him, van Sant said it was "a lot of discussion, a lot of analyzing."

The skating sequences were shot by a "skate filmmaker", someone who makes skating videos.

5. Gabe Nevins

Someone asked if Gabe Nevins, the lead actor, ever asked critical questions about how his character behaves, or try to input his own self into the role. van Sant said no.

"Maybe he just understood the screenplay," van Sant said. "He was also very unexperienced."

"Maybe we prepped him as well," he added later.

6. The Security Guard (Spoiler!)

The moderator asked about the startling image of the man cut in half, noting that it was unexpected since van Sant's work doesn't usually feature such images.

van Sant noted it was from the book, but that the book had a different grotesque scene. (i.e. not a man cut in half.) van Sant changed it because it "fits thematically, metaphorically."

7. Hipster Horror

Someone asked if van Sant was trying to make a "Hipster Horror Film"

"Hmmmm," he responded, and after a beat answered, "young adult film, that's what I was trying to make."

8. Parallels to previous films

van Sant said the film was similar to Elephant in that it's set in a high school, but that that film was a "meditation on a horrific event I knew mostly through the news." Paranoid Park is a fictional film, so in that regard it's very different.

9. Fire

Someone asked about the role of fire, specifically campfires, in his oeuvre. van Sant admitted that fire has a "primal sort of meaning to me" as it's "where stories used to be told."

The scene near the end of the film in which Nevins burns the pages of the letter he's been writing was originally set in his living room, but they couldn't stage it to their liking (so that you could see Nevins' face and the fire in the same shot) that way so they moved it outside.

10. Casting

To cast the film, van Sant & Co. had an open casting, putting ads in local Portland media and also on MySpace. "Kids just came in," he said, about 1500 of them. They recorded them and then called people back for actual auditions, that is, to read in front of them.

The detectives were real detectives that they got because someone on the casting crew had connections to the police department.

11. Using Academy Ratio

van Sant's last few films were shot in 1.38:1, or full screen format. "Big square format" as he called it. He said he began doing this with Elephant because it was shot for HBO and 1.38:1 is television format. HBO asked him not to because they wanted to "make it seem more like a movie" by having it letterboxed, but van Sant declined. They made a deal that if they shot in 1.38:1 that HBO could show it letterboxed, that they could "cut off the top and bottom" so van Sant "had to make sure no one gets cut off too much."

He said he'd grown tired of 1.85:1 and "that wide screen." He and his directors of photography feel more like photographers, like Diane Arbus, when they can shoot in a square ratio, and it also brings them back to their 16mm student days.

12. Ending

Someone asked if the ending was supposed to mean "business as usual." van Sant eventually said sure. He also said it was "just a bookend of skateboarding," which is used throughout the film as interludes.

13. Different from previous work

Someone asked if he made a conscious effort to make this film different from his previous work. He said there were differences in the story, source material, and style of storytelling, which was more specifically psychological, more old-fashioned in style.

He said, "sometimes it was like Chris Doyle, Wong Kar-Wai," and said at other times it was a hybrid style, more "austere" like Elephant.

14. Film

The moderator asked him if he'd ever go back to celluloid, and van Sant said all his work is celluloid. He's never used HD. How embarrassing.

Retribution (Sakebi)

Stopped in at the New York Asian Film Festival, then at the IFC Center and now finishing up at the Japan Society, to check out the latest from one of my favorite living directors; screened July 3, 2007.

Retribution
Written & Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

"[Retribution is] best described as the host of the screening at the New York Asian Film Festival, where I caught it, explained it for the audience: half standard J-Horror, complete with a female ghost sporting long and straight black hair, and half far-out Kurosawa, a generic hybrid if Kurosawa could be considered his very own genre. Unfortunately, it's infected with the lesser aspects of both; from Kurosawa, it's incredibly difficult to follow, and as J-horror it's merely boilerplate. But as a testament to Kurosawa's commanding directorial acumen—he's no run-of-the-mill director, even when he's a little bit off—Retribution, remarkably, ultimately succeeds in at least as many ways as it fails, and though it won't be the focal feature of any Kurosawa retrospectives anytime soon, it's rife with clever symbolism and a biting subtext about the nature and causes of contemporary culture's decay."

Read the full review here.

Let's Get Lost

Currently playing at Film Forum, through June 28.

Directed by Bruce Weber

"Bruce Weber's desultory film is the meandering visual equivalent of beat verse, with the obscure but deliberate intention of a jazzy improv. There's no story or narrative arc to speak of; Let's Get Lost, a sauntering character portrait, just gets lost...but while [it's] easy to admire, it's tougher to enjoy."

Read the full review here