Camera in the Sun Locations Under the Lens

It starts off simply enough, an establishing shot over Juneau, Alaska gives way to a panoramic view of Stewart, British Columbia (the director’s stand in for the South Pole circa 1982).  Amidst a heavy bassy monotone soundtrack, a helicopter can be seen chasing an Alaskan Malamute across the “Antarctic” plains.  There’s a man, a sniper, hanging over the side, he’s firing frantically at the dog.  This chase will end -fatally- for the Norwegians at United States Science Institute Station 4 (later referred to -mistakenly- by Kurt Russell’s character as “Outpost 31″), as miscommunication and panic leads to the death of the two men who tried, in vain, to kill a harmless seeming animal.  What, if anything, does all this have to do with the flying saucer we just saw during that foreboding framing sequence?  We, and the American researchers at USSIS 4/”Outpost 31,” will spend the next 90 minutes learning just that…

John Carpenter’s The Thing, a remake of The Thing from Another World (1951), itself an adaptation of John W. Campbell’s masterful novella Who Goes There? (1938) , is considered by many (this writer included) as the best sci-fi horror movie -if not the best horror movie, period- ever filmed.  It’s also the first of three thematically related films Carpenter refers to as his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” comprising this film, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and, finally, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness.

The Thing was arguably the most subtle of these “Apocalypse” films, perhaps owing to its source material (an adaptation of an adaptation of a book written in 1938), and the location of the story itself.  While the latter two films in Carpenter’s thematic trilogy take place in Los Angeles and the fictional town of Hobb’s End, New Hampshire, respectively, the titular Thing sows its terror in utter isolation, in the dead of winter on the coldest continent at the end of the world.  Indeed, only a few fleeting sequences within the film suggest that the creature’s threat is global in scale, and even those dire warnings are liable to fall on deaf ears as the audience hears them from a rather unreliable source, the increasingly unhinged Dr. Blair (played charmingly -amusingly?- enough by Wilford “Diabeetus” Brimley) while the viewers, as well as the characters themselves, are instead subjected to less subtle threats in the form of the alien’s grotesque means of procreation/consumption.

If there was an official rulebook on crafting the “perfect” horror film, this movie could arguably serve as the standard.  Certainly it has its flaws (questionable cast choices in particular, and just what were those researchers researching anyway?).  But between its masterful blend of fear of the unknown (an unknown evil.. froooom spaaaace!!!), fear of isolation (Antarctica), fear of abandonment (during the winter), fear of betrayal (shapeshifter in our midst), all of our primal anxieties are masterfully interwoven into the framework of John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror masterpiece, as the alien thing preys on its human victims just as winter descends on “Outpost 31″ and leaves the researchers stranded for a season, alone against a threat that can take their very shapes -and sets a group who should be banding together at each others throats.  The very conceits that we take for granted as human beings, be they subliminal or otherwise, as social animals, as predators, are completely uprooted by this “Thing” which can steal our shapes and turn us, “the pack,” against one another even as it devours us one by one and spreads like the ultimate virus.

Despite it’s scenic locale, most of the film was shot indoors on several sound stages at Universal Studios, right in the heart of sunny California -in the middle of the summer, no less.  That didn’t stop the director from traveling to Steward, British Columbia (specifically, Salmon Glacier) to build a mock up of the American/Norwegian “camps” (actually one and the same… the “Norwegian Camp” is actually just the American outpost after they blow it up at the end of the film.  The camp was built specifically for the film and no longer exists, sadly, although remains of it were found around Salmon Glacier as late as 2003).  Nor did they spare any expense sending a second unit crew over Juneau, Alaska to set up establishing shots -as well as the shots of the Norwegian researchers discovering the alien ship.

As for Universal Studios’ Stage 27 itself, Carpenter and crew made sure to keep the environs at or near freezing temperatures at all times, which doubtless had the (desired?) side effect of causing the cast to become that much more miserable and anxious on set, anxieties which bled into their performances (Kurt Russell and Keith David’s in particular, I think).

The last weeks of shooting -primarily the exterior shots of the camp, were actually done in November and December of that year at Steward, so that artificial freezing was no longer necessary.  They had chosen a location near the Alaskan border during the late autumn/early winter months.  Snow and ice -and isolation- were virtually guaranteed, and granted those exterior scenes an added layer of hopelessness.  No one was coming for them, no one would ever know what happened or why… and that was the optimistic outcome.  The worst case scenario saw the alien surviving, going into hibernation, and waking up to infiltrate the rescue teams only to spread outwards from there, eventually consuming the whole planet.

The ending of the film itself is suitably nihilistic.  While the final scene can be interpreted in several ways, none of the likely scenarios seem kind or even fair to the remaining survivors, one of whom might in fact be the alien in disguise, merely waiting for the other to drop his guard.  And so the film ends as it began, with that foreboding brassy monotone, a shot of the title card (much more subdued this time), and an ending which is neither happy, nor complete, but leaves the viewer riven with anxiety -assuming said viewer cares enough about the characters at this point to worry about their fates.  Indeed, depending on how one takes the film, the viewer is likely to be just as resigned to the characters’ fates as the characters themselves on screen, which in itself is horrific enough.

Upon its release, the film suffered from lackluster reviews, owing mostly to the graphic nature of the alien and the necessarily gory special effects needed to communicate its various forms, but the film has since gained a strong cult following which has spawned a video game sequel, comic books, and a prequel film -also titled simply The Thing- which narrates the plight of that doomed Norwegian team.  This prequel is CGI laden and arguably tamer than Carpenter’s original, although the last few sequences in that film are much more over the top than Carpenter’s third act, and overall 2011′s The Thing falls flat compared to the ’82 version highlighted by Rob Bottin’s grotesque puppetry and Kurt Russell’s increasingly volatile performance.  Indeed, it can be argued that the ’82 film’s initially negative reception earns it a spot amongst the greatest horror films of all time, as most of the negative reviews come back to the same points… the special effects were repulsive, the story was depressing.  In other words, you didn’t want to be the men at that American outpost, nor did you root for the monster.  This was horror, quite simply, as it should be, not romanticized or condoned, but merely endured, which makes The Thing a rarity in American horror cinema, especially during and after the “slasher” craze of the 80s and 90s… the monster isn’t there to be cheered for, it’s there to be reviled.

Carpenter himself was disheartened by the film’s initial reception and took it as a personal failure. It would be a few more years before he attempted again to revisit his Apocalypse “trilogy,” a slightly campier (but no less creepier) affair which starred alumni from his pulp adventure Big Trouble in Little China and featured not a shapeshifting alien, but The Prince of Darkness itself…

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Tags: John Carpenter, The Thing, The Thing from Another World

Who: Kimberly Reed is a New York-based, Montana-born filmmaker. Her documentary, Prodigal Sons charts her return to Montana on the occasion of her 20th high school reunion, and reconnecting with friends and family who knew her as ‘Paul McKerrow’, before transitioning after college to become female. The film was a critically acclaimed hit on the film festival circuit, during which time Reed was approached by filmmaker Jonathan Lee to edit a documentary about the late influential writer and speaker, Paul Goodman. Reed’s critical role during the project’s long editing process grew to that of producer by the time of its 2011 theatrical release as Paul Goodman Changed My Life. Reed’s next project is a film documenting her attempt, with fiancee Claire Jones, to get married in all of America’s 50 states — tentatively titled Fifty States of Wedlock. On the eye of her and Jones’ departure to begin filming, Camera In The Sun sat down with Reed to discuss her film work, as well as her take on how her beloved home state of Montana has been depicted in film over the years.

How culturally diverse was the Montanan society you grew up in?

I felt like I was in a very urban setting in Montana, which meant a city of 25,000 people when I was growing up. And this is not a city of 25,000 people that’s a suburb of the big city right next door. You had to drive an hour to hit another city of the same size. And then there’s basically five or six of those in the whole state, and that’s kind of it. So, I feel very “urban” in Montana terms. And a lot of the Native American populations still center around the Nations, the reservations, so there wasn’t a lot of interaction. There was some, but it was something that you would see when you were driving from one city to another, and you would go through the reservation. But you would also see that Montana is more culturally diverse than a lot of people think it is. I go to places like Brooklyn, and it kind of reminds of these neighborhoods [in Helena] which were by-and-large populated by immigrant labor. They were either farmers or miners that were going to strike it rich in a lot of ways with a big gold rush. Helena, the capital of the state, is a gold rush town. The mythology and place names that you hear is all about the “Four Georgians” who came out, and went to Last Chance Gulch. That’s our main street, because they were gonna give it one last chance and see if they could find gold. If they found it, they would stay. Then they found it, and there you go. So there was a lot of ethnic diversity from Irish and Italian and Yugoslavian miners, and there was a huge Asian population that also came to work on the railroads. So, things do get mixed up. This may be more individual, but I remember just not really having a lot of ideas about what ethnic background people had. And now that I look back, I can kind of say, “Oh wait, that guy was Peruvian,” or “Yeah, he must have been Native American,” or “Of course, there was a big strong Italian strain running through our town.” But at the time, we were this kind of washed-out American melting pot where people didn’t cling too strongly to, “My family is Swedish, and your family is German,” or “My family is Italian, and your family is Irish,” in a way that I think happens a lot more in New York. I definitely think people [in New York] identify themselves that way much more strongly.

Do you think Montanan society is generally tolerant of transgender people like yourself?

One of the comments that I often get on Prodigal Sons is this kind of mild and cautious surprise from audiences after they’ve seen the film. They say, “Wow, when you went back to Montana, everybody was pretty cool.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” That is not a really surprising thing to me. Because I know Montanans, and I think it’s maybe a quality that comes from a Mountain West thing — this sort of rugged individualism, probably coming from pioneer stock of one form or another. And with that, I think people have evolved this empathy that allows people to kind of say, “Whatever floats your boat is cool. You do that. I’ll do whatever I want to do. Just don’t tell me what to do, and I won’t tell you what to do.” I think it accounts for sort of a libertarian streak that you see in some people. And by that, I don’t mean this really far-right libertarianism. There’s just kind of like this, “You stay out of my business, and I’ll stay out of your business” sort of detente. And if you can kind of show up, and not put on a lot of airs, and just be a genuine person who’s kind of uninhibited about just saying, “Yeah, this is who I am. This is what I’m about,” then I’ve seen people in Montana and the Mountain West have a lot of understanding for that. They give you a lot of rope, to use a Western metaphor. That’s something that didn’t surprise me when I returned home in Prodigal Sons. It’s something that does surprise a lot of people, because they’re thinking, “small town in the Midwest where everybody’s whispering behind everybody else’s back, and there’s lots of cultural checks and balances just keeping an eye on everybody.” And Montanans don’t really role that way. So, I wasn’t surprised at all.

How did your childhood in Montana inspire you to become a filmmaker?

I just remember always being fascinated with film. My father was an ophthalmologist, and he always had these visual things. We would go to his office and play with the lenses — like “one or two? Better, same or worse?” That was our play. And he always had cameras. He had still cameras, and he was the first guy on the block to have a super 8, and the first guy on the block to have a video camera. One of the first things that I remember ever getting from my dad that I really wanted was a dark room. And he went out and got this really old large-format camera, so that I wouldn’t have to buy an enlarger. Because if you have a massive negative, you can just make a contact print of that. And so this whole thing of these visual systems, whether they were my father’s expensive German opthalmic equipment to examine patients, or whether it was cameras, it helped me have a pretty intuitive understanding of F-stop, and depth-of-field, and shutter speed, and how light and visual systems work. It was just something I always remember being interested in. And so when I was going to school, I don’t know how I did this, but I always used to be able to convince people that I should write a screenplay to fulfill this assignment, or I should make a movie. In seventh grade, instead of writing a report about Balboa, I made a film about Balboa discovering the New World. It was horrendous. It was a guy with a tinfoil-covered cardboard sword hacking through the brush, and finding a duck pond at the fairgrounds, and saying, “I’ve discovered the Pacific Ocean!” I don’t know how I got away with that. It was something I was always interested in, and I studied it as much as I could at whatever school I was at. So I studied that at U.C. Berkeley, and then I decided to stay in the Bay Area and go to film school there. Then when I graduated, the whole dot-com thing was going nuts in the Bay Area, and I actually had to force myself to go back and finish my film degree. Because I was already working and doing film stuff, and traveling around and making all these documentary films right out of film school. Like traveling around the world and scuba diving, and all this really cool stuff. So I caught that crest of digital video just as it was starting to happen, and that was kind of at the same time as I was transitioning. So I started working in publishing about digital filmmaking, and that was a way for me to kind of shift gears and start with a new group of people after I transitioned. It was kind of this twofold thing. I was always talking about digital filmmaking, but I kind of jumped tracks and did this. Instead of making digital films, I was writing about making digital films. That was what I needed to do to have a new community of people after I transitioned, and also to just have health insurance.

What did you think of the LGBT homecoming themes in the independent film, Big Eden?

One of the things I really like about that film is how it’s a pretty similar story to mine. You’ve got this person living in New York, and they’ve got this hip New York thing going on. And all of a sudden, they go back home. The overriding questions are, “How are they going to be accepted?” and “What do they have to deal with in their past that they left behind?” Those are some common strains for the two stories. And I think that gets back to, if you grow up feeling this sense of provincialism, and then feeling like you have to get out and explore the big world out there — the flip side of that is what happens when you return home. What happens when you deal with the stuff you left behind? I think that’s a really universal theme in storytelling. I mean, that’s Odysseus, right? And as such, the thing I find really compelling about Big Eden, which is shot in a really beautiful part of Montana. And the part I’m thinking about is Lake McDonald in Glacier Park, which is one of the most beautiful spots on Earth. Just really, really gorgeous. My father used to paint, and he painted a scene of Lake Mcdonald that’s hanging by my bed. To me, that is the definition of the word, “placid,” or “calm,” or “grace.” So aside from being really gorgeous, the movie Big Eden was interesting to me. I guess at the time it came out, I was toying with, “How do I go back home? What is that gonna look like? Could it ever happen?” In Prodigal Sons, I kind of get tossed into it because of the death of my father that pulls me back — which also happens in Big Eden. His grandfather is dying, and he gets pulled back to his home town. You see what people are really made of when, not only can you go to the big city and handle it, but also revisit history, revisit where you came from, revisit all those things that maybe you weren’t ready to deal with when you left.

Have you read A River Runs Through It, and what did you think of the film’s version of Montana?

I actually haven’t read the book. I have seen the film. It’s one of those things that I always meant to read, and I think a lot of people are really familiar with it. It’s like in Travels with Charley by Steinbeck, there’s a chapter on Montana where he says something to the effect of, “For other states I have admiration, but for Montana I have a deep abiding love.” And I think Montanans are really proud of our state. There’s not a lot of us. Last time I checked, Montana had the second-smallest population, and it’s the fourth-biggest state. So hardly anybody is there in a really, really big space. And so, I think that Montanans adhere to a state identity more than people from other states. In other words, we don’t really have these city affiliations, as much as we have state affiliations. And as such, we know that book. It’s been sitting on my shelf, and I probably moved it to like eight different apartments. I just never read it, because I think I already knew it. I don’t know. I’m not a fly fisher, but I really think I understand the psychology of what comes across in that film about the father teaching the sons how to fly fish the “Presbyterian way” to a metronome — tick, tock, tick, tock. And there’s something about this very tight integration of place in spirituality, and of nature. And I don’t know quite what to call it, but I know that when it comes to Montana nature, I’m just soaked in it at such a deep level that it’s something that never leaves you. It’s something I really, really miss. I’ve lived in New York for almost twelve years now, and I need my fix. I just have to go be in the mountains, and Western Montana is just stunningly beautiful, as you can tell from that film.

I actually haven’t seen a lot of the big major release motion pictures set in Montana, because as I was growing up, I think I was a film snob kind of right out of the gate. And if something was really big and really popular, I didn’t want to see it. We had like two movie theaters in town, which soon got reduced to one. And there were very few movies to see, and not a lot of places to see them. But I was still very selective with which ones I wanted to see, and had this antipathy towards big major release Hollywood motion pictures. So for example, I haven’t seen E.T. I think I’m the only one I know that hasn’t seen E.T. And as a filmmaker, that’s pretty ridiculous. Also, some of those big Montana films, like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, I haven’t seen. But I know where that was shot, because people still tell stories about that being shot. It was shot in the Great Falls area, which is where in Prodigal Sons we go to the family farm. That’s in that Great Falls area. People there still tell stories about Northfork. And there’s a place called Sip-N-Dip. You go in there, and they’re very proud of the fact that they showed up in Northfork.

What’s your opinion on the cost/benefit of shooting Montana wolves in the film, Sweetgrass?

There’s two sides to me when it comes to the questions of protecting wolves, which I think is very important. If you just talked to the sort of cloistered New York recycling environmentalist lefty side of me, I’ll say, “Of course, protect the wolves. How could we shoot these beautiful creatures? Blah, blah, blah.” I could probably give you a pretty good recitation about why we need to protect that population. At the same time, I think you get a sense from Sweetgrass alone that if one sheep’s attacked, that’s a big chunk of one family’s livelihood for the year. So, you would want to do what you could to protect that. But I think where the big debate comes in is with how we are gonna do both. And there are a lot of farmers and ranchers who are very conservationist. I think there’s an interesting connection between the word “conservative” and the word “conservation.” I mean, the original conservative was Teddy Roosevelt, who was like, “This is a beautiful land. We’re gonna create a national park system to protect all of this. We need to conserve.” It’s not a progressive movement. It’s a conservative one. And as such, I can get really nostalgic and really protectionist about that. But I don’t think it needs to be a polarized argument between environmentalists on one side, and conservatives on the other, because it used to be flipped. It used to be that conservatives were the conservationists. And I do think there’s a way to do both. But I think it is pretty easy for a lot of us — and I include myself in this — these urban conservationists who want to go out and protect all of that other beautiful stuff out there, without really ever having lived there. In other words, I could probably theoretically support the idea of not cutting down all these trees, and just recycling paper. But for one rancher’s family to chop down their own trees, they could probably, if they had the right amount of land, chop down all the trees they wanted and sustain their family for their whole lives. I think the stuff that gets really sketchy is once you lose that idea of sustainability, and you start talking about corporate interests that are doing very greedy things that can really mess up an environment for a long, long, long time. That’s where you have to start being very careful. Montana has seen a lot of exploitation by corporate interests, especially the mining interests, where you can still see the impact on Montana today. If you’re driving toward Butte, you know you’re getting close because the vegetation starts to fall away. It’s all gone once you get to Butte. And then you see the massive Berkeley Pit, which is a Superfund site. The long term effects of the mining operations there are still very, very apparent.

What did you think of The Slaughter Rule, and did it remind you of your own football experience.

I saw The Slaughter Rule, and I loved that film. I’ve met the directors, Alex and Andrew Smith. We kind of traveled in some of the same circles. We know some of the same people. Montana’s kind of a small town, as it were. I think that they did a really a good job of capturing that world of six-man football. But I don’t really know that world very well. That’s the world that is a lot closer to my father, and where he grew up. Our family farm is in the area of Montana where they shot that. If my father had lived one or two towns over, he probably would have been playing six-man football. But he lived close enough to go into the big city, so he ran the full eleven-man team. I think it was very natural for me to fall into that sport as an activity, because it’s kind of the only game in town, literally. A film I really adore is The Last Picture Show. I find it just absolutely hilarious and kind of painfully funny how basically the first reel of that film is all about the local football team being ostracized by all of the people in town, because they played so poorly that weekend. Everybody knew exactly who did what, and who did what good, and who did what bad. They lost, and they’re shamed by the townspeople, who are full of all sorts of advice about how they would have done it when they were in high school. It’s really important. There’s a lot of focus on it, and it gets a lot of coverage. I think that for me, I was working on all these identity issues of gender, and trying to figure how I fit in to all of that. So having that masculinity challenged made it really an easy root for me to jump into the one thing where I could hopefully prove that there wasn’t something wrong with me, prove that I wasn’t different, prove that I could actually fit in. So I think the importance of that game, not just in Montana, but I think in a lot of smaller towns, it’s kind of hard to overstate it. It’s really a big cultural event. I always know how my old high school team is doing, how the cross-town rivals are doing, and there’s a college in our hometown too. And my mom is very well-updated on that, because she totally follows all of it. She’s on top of everything. And with The Slaughter Rule, the way that Alex and Andrew Smith captured that world, they just did a magnificent job. I think everyone knows who Ryan Gosling is now. And the real breakout role that most people would say for Ryan Gosling was The Believer. But I think that they were actually shooting right next to each other, and Alex and Andrew cast him in their film before The Believer. There was something like they shot first, but the other was released first. Anyway, it was a very close call about what his first film was, and I always felt they should have gotten credit for discovering Ryan Gosling, who everybody knows now. That’s a powerful film, and a really powerful performance. It’s also a bleak world they portray in that film. I mean, it’s called The Slaughter Rule.

What is your favorite film that was shot in the Montana region?

I don’t know if I can really call this a Montana film, but I think of it that way because it’s so close. Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven was actually shot just over the border. It reminds me of the country where our family farm is, which again is just really, really beautiful. A lot of the reason for that too is that it’s a period piece that was shot at a time when all of the wheat harvesting was done manually. And the old photos at our family farm have those same machines, and people picking up big sheaves of wheat, and either threshing it themselves or tossing it into a mechanical thresher. And so, I think of that as a very Montana film.

Rosco makes gels, makes a lot of expendables that you put in front of lights. Rosco used to make like a “Scandinavian collection,” or a “Sven Nykvist collection” of gels that would emulate this softer light coming from northern climes. And I found that interesting, because the light is really, really different. The reason is that as the sun approaches the horizon, it’s at a much gentler angle, and sets slower, so that your golden hour is longer. When that happens, you have a much longer period where the sun is being filtered through lots of extra layers of atmosphere, which softens the light. It makes the light wrap around people’s faces much more in a way that’s really, really beautiful. I mean, when I think of Days of Heaven, I think of the light wrapping around Richard Gere’s face in some of the close-ups. As a filmmaker, I find it hard to imagine a film that isn’t shot in Montana. I mean, this is how deeply that place is rooted with me. And a lot of times I have to kind of shift gears and put it in some other place, because I know that it’s just not feasible to shoot it there at this time or place. But that’s how I think of these shots. In other words, almost to go back where we started, place is almost inseparable from story when I think about films like these.

What were the challenges of editing Paul Goodman Changed My Life, and then selling it abroad?

The film Paul Goodman Changed My Life is something that the director Jonathan Lee, he originally came to me as an editor, and wanted me to cut a short fundraising trailer. And I did that, and then he asked me to edit the whole film. And it’s one of those projects where I just kept doing more and more and more. And it was Jonathan’s first feature, so I was able to guide him through some of the stages that need to happen when you’re editing and releasing a film. So I ended up ultimately editing and producing, and getting a writing credit on the film too. You know, the relationship between a director and an editor on a non-fiction film can take a lot of different forms. Sometimes the director can be very explicit about what they want. Sometimes there’s just a ton of leeway. And that’s how this film was. I just kind of ran with it, and all of this was taking place as I was on the road for Prodigal Sons. So I would travel two or three weeks out of the month, and then I’d come home and edit furiously on this, and then go back out. That kind of hectic life was a very big compliment, because I think we ended up doing over 100 film festivals with Prodigal Sons. So, there was a lot of travel involved. And editing Paul Goodman Changed My Life was a pretty steep climb, because if you think about it, a lot of the biopics that come out are about people who you already know who they are. And you’re probably going because you’re especially interested in learning a little bit more about this person who you already find interesting. But with Paul Goodman, the challenge was that he had really been forgotten, and had really fallen out of the public conversation. Very few people actually knew who he was. I mean, people would ask what I was working on, and I would tell them, and I almost always had to kind of make the case for who this guy was. I’d explain what influence he had, and every once in a while I got a person who said, “Oh yeah! I always wondered what happened to him. He was enormously influential, and then he just disappeared.” So in editing this film, we had to first explain who this guy was, before we could explore him even further. Now on top of that, it was a steep climb in the edit because the stuff that he was involved in are pretty complex intellectual ideas that come from a really wide swath of intellectual history. So in other words, this guy was not easily pigeonholed, and that’s what made him interesting. It also makes him hard to talk about. It also, in large part, accounts for why he’s really disappeared from the public conversation. Because you couldn’t really slot him into, “Oh, he’s a great this,” or “He’s the best known that.” He was a poet. He was a novelist. He wrote the founding text for Gestalt therapy. He jumps over, and then writes one of the founding texts for Utopian community urban design with his brother. So this guy, you couldn’t really coast along and assume that people knew anything. You kind of had to introduce, and then explore, and then totally shift gears into this other thing where you introduce and then explore. On top of everything else, he was openly gay in the ’40′s and ’50′s and ’60′s, which made him just a really kind of curious and enigmatic person. So he’s a really great character, and it was a lot of fun to explore. But there’s a lot jammed into that film, and hopefully in a really lyrical and fun way, because that’s how he really was.

For documentary films over the last couple of years, there has been a big reduction in the number of feature film slots that exist for broadcast outlets around the world. And almost all of those have been cut down to 60-minute slots. So instead of being able to sit down and watch your hour and a half long feature on the Swedish version of PBS, there’s many more 60-minute slots. So if you’re gonna sell a documentary for broadcast overseas, you almost always have to cut it down to 60 minutes. So taking this complicated portrait, with how compressed it already is, and then cutting out a third of that — cutting it from 90 down to 60 — it’s an even steeper climb. But we were kind of helped by some things that had more resonance in America, than they did in other countries. There were some sections, like in Gestalt therapy for example, where we really felt like there was a greater understanding of it in the local cultures. So we didn’t have to ramp that up as much in Germany as we did here, for example. Now, you can really cut a different version for every country, but you’d soon go insane. But you just try to find the best sweet spot that’s gonna satisfy the most countries. The market for that is still, by and large, Western Europe and then other English-speaking countries like Australia. But that world is changing quite a bit. It used to be that was really one of the few places that documentary filmmakers could make back some of their money, was overseas broadcast. And the amount that a lot of those broadcast outlets are paying has really dropped. Also I think that in general, even though the costs of production are getting lower, the amount that you get reimbursed for that for broadcast licensing overseas has fallen right along with that. The long cut of Paul Goodman is 90 minutes, and that’s gonna be the version that comes out on Zeitgeist Films’ release of the DVD.

[Note: That DVD can be ordered at the Zeitgeist site]

What will be the focus of your next documentary film project?

The next project that I’m working on is tentatively titled Fifty States of Wedlock. And in it is my partner Claire, who I’ve been together with for 12 years. We recently got engaged, and we decided that we really wanted to make a statement with our being engaged. And a lot of people are familiar with the fact that marriage laws change from state to state, in terms of whether a state allows same-sex marriage. The other thing that changes from state to state, that not a lot of people realize, is the way in which a state determines what my legal sex is. Now, the only thing that your legal sex really matters for is for your ability to enter into a marriage contract. And so, what that means is Claire and I can go to one state and get married as a same-sex couple. We can cross a state line, enter a state that does not allow same-sex marriage, and depending on what that state is, and how they determine my legal sex, we may or may not be able to get married as a same-sex couple. We may or may not be able to get married as an opposite-sex couple. Some of the states look at my drivers license, and some look at my passport. Some only look at my birth certificate. Some states allow one who was born there to amend their birth certificate, and some states don’t. You can never amend it. You’re stuck with that. Some states, and these are the really interesting ones, have decided that none of that i.d. stuff matters. They say if you were born with XY chromosomes, then you are and will always be male, no matter what you do. You can’t ever change your sex. So one of the first places that Claire and I decided to go to is Texas, which is where they had a decision like this, saying that I legally could never change my sex. Which means, of course, that I can go there with my same-sex partner, and they are forced to give us a marriage license. So the basic plan with Fifty States of Wedlock is to go to every state and reveal the hypocrisies of a lot of these marriage laws, which in many cases set out just to thwart same-sex marriage. But in doing so, they don’t realize all the repercussions that happen with a couple like me. And the point isn’t really that they should change their laws to accommodate me, or people like me. The point is just that if two people love each other, isn’t that what should constitute marriage? Isn’t that what a wedding is? Isn’t that why we need to have this contract that allows two people to get married? And in the end, the film is meant to just kind of scramble all of those laws and let them contradict each other in a really humorous way, so that Claire and I can just stand back and point at this mayhem of contradictory patchwork quilt laws that all contradict each other. We can point at that and say, “Look how ridiculous all of this is.” When we talk about marriage, what is it that we are really talking about? We’re really talking about two people who really love each other, and are committed. Shouldn’t that be the basis of it?

Are transgendered people underrepresented in cinema, compared to gay, lesbian and bi people?

Absolutely. Things are changing a little bit. This year was kind of wild. Albert Nobbs, which I don’t know if that was depicting someone who is transgender, or whether it’s depicting a time when a woman was forced by circumstances to adopt another persona — one which he is or isn’t willingly embracing. I think the film was, for me at least, a bit unclear about the extent to which, all things being equal, this is where Albert would have ended up. The ‘T’ at the end of LGBT, in some ways it’s understandable that it falls into a different category. Because if you think about it, the LGB part of that acronym has to do with who you are attracted to. The T part has to do with who you are. It’s not necessarily who you are attracted to. Although, that may or may not be a factor in ones gender expression. It’s really not about who you wanna sleep with. It’s more about who you wanna sleep as. So in some ways, there is a significant difference. But I think that ultimately the T community has a lot more in common with the LGB community, and we all need to fall under the same umbrella for that reason. And actually, if we just forget for a second about who is sleeping with who, and who wants to sleep with whom, I think that in terms of how we are seen by people who aren’t in the LGBT community, that it kind of doesn’t matter. I mean, we may be making this distinction between our sexual orientation and our gender identity as being two very distinct things. But when it comes to being ostracized or being discriminated against, or all of the things that the LGBT community has to ally against — when it comes to those issues the people who are being discriminatory, the people who are bullying, the people who are ostracizing — those people are the ones who are really blending gender identity and sexual orientation together, so that an accusation talking about someone’s sexual orientation ends up coming out as some clumsy accusation like, “You’re a woman.” These things get all mixed and matched. They kind of become the same thing. So that’s what we really need to ally against, I think. And I think we’re making progress. I think that Prodigal Sons shows progress is being made just within the context of my family, and this one setting. It shows that things can go right sometimes. But I think it’s also important to realize that it doesn’t always go right. In fact, it’s much more common for trans people to be discriminated against. You know, half of trans kids attempt suicide. Half. I can’t even wrap my head around that figure. It’s just horrendous. And as hard as it is for the LGB part of that equation, I think that we’re making a lot of progress. For the T part of the equation, I think we’re making a bit of progress, but we have a lot further to go. So I just hope that with my films, with my storytelling, and with being out in the public eye a bit, I hope to just take as many steps as I can in demystifying it, which I think is a big part of it. Just giving people someone to feel like they know a bit about this person, and can start to wrap their heads around the idea, so it’s not just such a big deal. That’s just how I’m hoping to role that rock down the road a little bit further. Prodigal Sons is really constructed in a way that you’re introduced to me as being trans. And then what I think happens, what is intended and what a lot of people confirm, is that it’s really not too long before you forget about what in a lot of films would be the story. That’s what this whole adventure is about. And it’s very important to me that that not be the only issue going on in this film — that that issue disappears. And once that disappears and people forget that, “Oh, this is this trans person,” and once audiences can affiliate with a trans character on a much deeper level that has to do with humanitarian issues, when they forget about this label that was stamped on my forehead in the first act as it were — I think that’s the point when people have forgotten that label, and you can really get audiences to experience what the word “sympathy” literally means. The same feelings, the same emotions as this character whose story you’re listening to. That’s the point when you can really push that rock down the road. Other people have ways of doing it politically. Other people have ways of doing it with the work that they’re doing. The best way I know is to tell stories, and enroll people in those stories. Then let all of the issues fall out of this close identification with this character whose story you’ve just been enrolled in. Let the politics fall out of that, and kind of work backwards into it. But I think in the end, all of those methods are necessary. I’ve just seen so many times where all people really needed was to meet someone who was gay, or lesbian, or bi, or trans. Then you get to just demystify a lot of the preconceptions that they had about what these labels meant. I’ve seen it happen again, and again, and again. And now that more people are meeting more LGB people, we’re making a bit of progress. We’ve got a ways to go, of course, especially with kids and bullying. All of that stuff is just really important to focus on youth now, I think. I’m on the board of GLSEN: Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. The reason I’m on that board is because I feel like dealing with prejudice at a young age is kind of where we’re moving now, and I hope that all facets of our society can start to handle that ‘T’ at the end of LGBT a little bit better.

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Tags: A River Runs Through It, Big Eden, Days of Heaven, Kimberly Reed, Paul Goodman Changed My Life, Prodigal Sons, Sweetgrass, The Slaughter Rule

Who: Agnieszka Holland is a Polish-born filmmaker whose feature directing career began in 1978, and has been highlighted with three Oscar nominations. The first was a Best Foreign Language nomination for 1985′s Angry Harvest, about a Polish Catholic farmer who hides an Austrian Jewish refugee during World War II. The second was a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for 1990′s Europa Europa, about the harrowing experiences of teenaged Solomon Perel, who hides his Jewish identity to evade the Holocaust. Her 2011 film, In Darkness earned a Best Foreign Language nomination at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, and concerns a dozen Polish Jews who spent 14 months hiding in the city sewers of Nazi-occupied Lvov, and the Polish Catholic sewer worker (and sometime-thief) named Leopold Socha who proved to be their savior. The film opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, February 10th with screenings in New York and Los Angeles.

[Publisher's Note: Special thanks to the staff at Sophie Gluck PR]

How did you depict the wartime relationship between Lvov’s Catholics and Jews?

In the script and in the story it was shown in quite an unconventional way, and I think a deeply honest way. It means neither Poles nor Jews are the angelic faceless people, or the innocent victims only, or the bad guys only. So the complexity of this relationship, and kind of the objective point of view, I really liked it in this story. And I think what happened to Socha, it is not sentimental, it is not moralistic. It’s very ambiguous, until some point. And it’s dramatic, because for a long time you don’t know what he will do, and he doesn’t know himself. What he finally does, which is good, is a surprise to himself. But what is also interesting is I am from a mixed family. My mother is Polish, my father was a Jew. But my mother was not like a typical Polish Catholic person. She’s not a believer. She was as a young girl saving a Jewish family, and has the title of Righteous Among the Nations and the tree in Jerusalem, and she was always very sensitive to the subject. But I have explored the Polish anti-Semitism and the Jewish Anti-Polishness for a long time, and I know how dramatic, complex and traumatic it was. But at the same time, to show how it’s possible to pass this border when you see in another person not the enemy or stranger, but somebody who is human. And you know, [Socha] has all these stereotypes he was born and raised with by the community, by the church, by everybody. [The Jews] also don’t trust him. They treat him as a possible enemy, and there’s even some moments where the most courageous person in the group, Mundak Margulies, wants to kill him. So you see the complexity of that. And you see also how they are overcoming the things, and that it’s a slow and difficult process.

The real Socha was a worker, and he was also a crook. Before the war, he was twice or three times in prison for robbery. And after he married, actually he started to have a more respectable life. But he was on the bottom [of Polish society]. He wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t a middle-class guy. He was the working-class.

There’s some captions when the film ends, saying Socha was killed by a drunken Soviet in a truck, he died, and then that at his funeral somebody said, “God’s punishment for saving the Jews.” And it happened in reality. Krystyna Chiger and other survivors have been the witnesses of this, and it wasn’t uncommon. I put it in because it was what was felt by many people in Poland after the war — that it wasn’t right helping Jews. And the Righteous Among the Nations, they’d been mostly in hiding. You know, they didn’t come out and say, “We’ve been saving Jews.” No, they rather didn’t talk about it. I remember in ’68 when Władysław Bartoszewski, who was one of the persons organizing the Polish Home Army, the organization to help the Jews who had been in hiding in Warsaw, he wrote a book called He is From My Home Country, about people who had been saving Jews. And he had the big problem of getting the permission of those people to give their real names. And it’s changing only in the last 10 years. I think it’s an incredible change from this point of view, and for reasons which are very complicated and complex. It was also because some books have been published by Jan Thomas Gross and other Polish historians pointing to the very painful and terrible facts from Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation, when some Poles killed their neighbors, and some Poles were also blackmailing. And you know, that relatively big group of Polish society had been Hitler’s helpers during this time. And those books are of course very painful for the Polish conscience, because Poles look at themselves as heroic innocent victims, and they are not used to playing the different role in history. And suddenly, they have to face those facts which are facts, and to deal morally and psychologically with that. And it is a process, but I think it’s a very positive process for most of the population. Of course, you always have the groups which absolutely refuse these facts. But it’s not like Turkey, for example, where the government and everybody is refusing responsibility for the Armenian genocide. In Poland, the main politicians, Presidents of the country and Prime Ministers, they took this responsibility and they tried to repair those relationships and to analyze them in an honest way. And paradoxically, at the same time, when the Poles had to face the fact that they had not been the innocent victims only, they also wanted to embrace this part of the population which had been heroically helping Jews during the war. So suddenly, those people who had been non-existent in the Polish conscience as the real national heroes, they became the national heroes. It is an interesting change. For example, in the obituaries, Poles are very close to the question of the dead, and have funerals and all of that. So the section of the obituaries in Polish newspapers is mostly much bigger than in any newspapers, and it’s a lot of the eulogies about the dead people. And for the first time, lately I’ve started to [notice] quite often the mention in the obituary that, “He was Righteous Among the Nations.” Before, it was unthinkable, and now it’s the reason for the family to be proud.

How did you and the film’s leads become involved in this project?

I was courted by the producers, because I was refusing to make this film for quite a long time. And the screenwriter, who is Canadian, David Shamoon contacted me and sent several versions of the script, and was very insistent. Because I did another two Holocaust movies, and I wrote one, and I’m very knowledgeable about it, and read everything which is possible to read, and talked with the people. I knew it was so painful to go through that, and making the movie is a long process. It means you are spending at least three years of your life dealing with this subject. And I thought, “I did it already. It’s enough.” And another reason why I was hesitating was that I didn’t want to make it, as most of the Holocaust movies are made these days, in English with some kind of international Hollywood stars. I felt that if I want to tell this story, and at some point it started to haunt me, I have to do it in a very alternative way, and to try to make the real journey to this time and place to give the [viewer] the feeling they are watching the reality, not the theatrical version of the reality.

Robert Wieckiewicz is a fantastic actor, and his career in Polish cinema started quite late, but he did some important movies. And when I saw him for the first time, it was probably like five or six years ago. I thought, “I want to work with this guy.” And when I read David Shamoon’s script, even before I had accepted it, I had immediately his face in my mind. So, I thought he would be perfect for this part. And also, Kinga Preis, who plays his wife is also a very interesting actress, and I always wanted to work with her. So, I thought she would be perfect for the wife. The rest of the group I was casting with the casting tests, but I knew most of the actors before. I wanted them to be really believable.

It means I cast some really thin actresses. But I told the other group that they had to try to go on a diet, which they did to some extent. You cannot really cast only from this point of view, but it was important to me that they were not fat. And it was difficult to cast the children, because I wanted them to be very present all of the time without acting too much. The actors have been incredibly generous and really hardworking. And the conditions of the shooting have been really difficult.

What were those filming conditions like for the sewer scenes?

We’ve been shooting in Germany and Poland, and the sewers have been built on the stage by the German production designer. And about 20%, we shot in the real sewers in Lodz and in Leipzig. And there, it was really difficult. It was technically difficult. The conditions have been really harsh. But even on the stage, it wasn’t very easy. It was a very harsh winter, and it was probably the most difficult shoot I ever had. Also, we didn’t have enough money, enough time, so it was fighting every day to do what was necessary to do. And the actors, they also learned the languages, because it’s several languages in this story. German actors had to learn Polish. Polish actors had to learn Lvov slang, which is very specific. And Yiddish, I had some Yiddish-speaking people there who learned Polish a bit. It means it was like a language school for some moments. But I think it helped them in the process of going through the characters.

They were in real sewers in Lodz, but not shit sewers. They were in water sewers, which join the shit sewers at some points. And in Berlin, we shot once in the shit sewers, which was pretty bad. But the sewers are very sticky. They are very claustrophobic. And if you spend more than two or three hours, you have a problem with breathing. So, I don’t know how they survived it — especially the Lvov sewers. The real sewers of the story were probably the worst among those I visited.

For example, the chambers are tighter. The chambers where they had been hiding were lower. In reality, it was like 150 centimeters, meaning a grownup person has to duck down. We made it a little bigger. Because if not, it would be very difficult to shoot. Where the children were shot, it was the best. The children have been comfortable.

You know, when you talk to Krystyna Chiger, who is the last survivor of this story, who was the little girl in the film, she wrote in her book — which is a very wonderful book, that I can advise you to read it, The Girl in the Green Sweater — that in some ways the stay in the sewer, this year and two months, was the happiest part of her childhood. Because when the Germans came, the children were taken quite quickly from the parents to send to the gas chambers. So her parents had kept the two kids in hiding in small places, and they’d been alone in the dark for the entire day when the parents had been working. So when they finally went to the sewer, they spent all the time with their parents, and they felt safe. And they became friends even with the rats. They’d been treating the rats like their pets. So, everything is very subjective. I think for those who survived the sewers, it was a terrible experience, but it probably wasn’t the worse one.

What has the response been like in Poland to this film?

The response is incredibly strong. I didn’t dream that it would be such a strong response. Both on the level of the box office, that the people are going to a cinema and watching this film, and for this kind of movie, I think it will probably be one of the biggest successes ever in Polish box office [returns]. But also, the emotional reaction of the audience is very strong. I had a lot of letters, a lot of text messages from total strangers, and everybody who’s been in the theaters tell that the people are sitting in total silence for 2-and-a-half hours. Even if they bought popcorn at the beginning, they never touch it during the screening. It’s very emotional. So I think that it’s a good lesson in some ways. And I didn’t want it to be against anyone. I didn’t want to make this film as a district attorney. I wanted to show all the complexity of the human condition. And I think it pays off, because the people can identify with this main character in Poland, but identify also with the people in the sewers. And [Polish viewers] don’t feel attacked, but they feel concerned, which I think is good.

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Tags: Agnieszka Holland, In Darkness, Krystyna Chiger, Robert Wieckiewicz, The Girl in the Green Sweater

From 1905′s Ulysses and the Giant Polyphemus (L’Île de Calypso: Ulysse et le géant Polyphème) up to 2011′s Immortals and this year’s upcoming Wrath of the Titans, Greek mythology has long proven an extremely rich and deep well from which fantasists and filmmakers have never hesitated to draw. The “swords and sandals” variety of genre film has waxed and waned in popularity even just in my own lifetime, with stories that seemed extremely popular in the ’80s falling out of favor for years until, now, our pop culture seems filled with everything from very loosely based “historical” epics that mix fact with fancy (300; Spartacus: Blood and Sand, et al),

to “pure” mythological epics which take the old stories and breathe modern sensibility into them (DC Comics’ Wonder Woman; the God of War video game series; the Percy Jackson series of young adult novels and films).

But there’s one story, one film in particular, a “sword and sandals” reinterpretation of the Perseus myth, which served as my personal entry not only into Greek mythology but into the fantasy genre in general. By modern standards the film suffers from overwrought, downright campy, performances by its leads, and the numerous stop motion special effects are laughably dated, but for me, personally, this is where it all began, my love for fantasy and (to a lesser extent in this case) the horror genre: a British-American fantasy film released on June 12, 1981, with the suitably epic (though somewhat inaccurate) title, Clash of The Titans.

This, to me, was Greek mythology as it was originally intended, a cautionary tale of man versus the supernatural, where man was at a distinct disadvantage. The Olympians are not our friends, not patrons to be appealed to for succor, but rather petty tyrants with unimaginable power who are meant only to be appeased. Our hero, Perseus, only prevails because he has a god’s blood in his veins, and the mortal men he leads into battle in the end are only victims — and collateral ones at that — to the wanton cruelties of immortals. 2010′s big budget remake starring Sam Worthington as Perseus and Liam “Release the Kraken” Neeson as Zeus — with a sequel, the aforementioned Wrath, set to release this year — benefits from 30 years of special effects technology and certainly looks much better on a big screen (or a smaller one, for that matter), but for my money I much prefer the Desmond Davis helmed feature with its operatic leads and Ray Harryhausen-crafted stop motion monsters. In a time before Lucasfilm was A-list and James Cameron was sweeping Academy Awards, Harryhausen was the go-to guy for making the impossible seem real on screen.

And Clash of the Titans was his swan song.

Filmed at various locations which provide a sort of who’s who of fantasy/period piece filming sites from the ’70s onto today — including Andulucia, Spain (ye land of Spaghetti Westerns), Campania, Italy (of Jason and the Argonauts fame), Malta (which would later serve as backdrop for 2000′s Gladiator and 2004′s Troy, but which served here as the site for the climactic scene with the Kraken),

and the considerably less exotic (but much more storied) Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England, UK (where, even today, seemingly everything is filmed these days that isn’t filmed in Hollywood), Clash in many ways serves as a bridge between the genre films of the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s up to the FX driven renaissance which began with Star Wars only four years earlier. Although Harryhausen was at the top of his game for this production, this was still, for better or worse, an actor driven drama, and perhaps Harry Hamlin and company can be forgiven for taking themselves a bit too seriously for this film which serves as a sort of belated capstone for pre-Lucasfilm fantasy fare.

But it isn’t just the lack of a Lucasfilm stamp or Cameron credit which sets Clash of the Titans apart from the ’80s renaissance. This film, despite its PG rating, was very much a “pulp” film, with character deaths aplenty and a plot which was less about “good” versus “evil” than it was about clashing egos and powerful men, women and gods answering insults with murder. Perseus himself comes off as something of a blowhard, his advantages are largely handed to him, and unlike the subdued, tortuous performance of Sam “If I do this, I do it as a man” Worthington in the 2010 remake, Hamlin’s clean shaven, curly locked Perseus seems just fine being the son of Zeus and leading his company to certain death against demon dogs, Gorgons, and giant scorpions as he quests for what he needs to save the life of Andromeda, his bride to be — a woman who’s hand he won in marriage earlier in the movie by literally producing the hand of another would be suitor…

But the highlight of this film, for me, and what sets this one apart from its CGI laden successor, is the Medusa scene. Here we have something that would fit right into any classic horror film.

Perhaps nostalgia gets in the way of my viewing here, but personally I think this Medusa is downright creepy. The stop motion and dim lighting actually adds to the overall effect to create a tension filled cat and mouse scenario where you actually worry about our hero’s chances. Perseus and the Medusa are fighting (or rather hunting one another), in a dark, confined space, and when the Medusa isn’t pelting Perseus’s men with arrows, she’s killing them straight out by simply staring at them!

Compare it to this scene, which definitely looks “cooler” but loses a lot of the tension of the original.

For one, the Medusa in this version is kinda hot, snake hair and tail notwithstanding, and with the lighting and the music and wide open battlefield this seems less like a monster hunt and more like a videogame boss battle. I was never concerned for the lives of any of the characters involved, even as I watched them fall one by one, because I knew that the Medusa was only one slow motion swing away from getting her head lopped off by the hero. …although it does look cool.

In March, Worthington, Neeson and company return to the story they remade in 2010, and finally realize that Clash sequel which never came to be in the early ’80s. Unlike the proposed Force of the Trojans, which would have detailed the story of Aeneas’s flight from Troy at the conclusion of the Trojan War (for those not up on their Greek mythology, Aeneas is that kid who Orlando Bloom gives the sword to at the end of Troy), Wrath of the Titans sees the return of Worthington’s Perseus, sporting Hamlin-esque longer locks, and actually “clashing” against “Titans” for the first time ever on screen, as the predecessors of the Greek gods awaken to take their vengeance against their usurper children, the Olympians, and tap into that 2012 zeitgeist of apocalyptic terror just in time for the early blockbuster holiday season.

I actually enjoyed the Clash remake just enough to look forward to Wrath, if only to see Liam Neeson have another turn at Zeus (sorry, fans of the the original, but I prefer Neeson’s Zeus to Laurence Olivier’s… even if I can’t believe I just typed that). But, barring the intervention of a time machine, Davis’s original Clash of the Titans will forever remain my gateway into the realms of fantasy, horror, and science fiction (hi, Bubo!), and even if I take a too critical eye to it today as a 30 something adult, there will always remain that little six year old who gazed in wonder at Harry Hamlin’s exploits on the small screen on a Saturday afternoon oh so many years ago. Where too many fantasy films since Star Wars seem less like actual films and more like special effects portfolios, Clash of the Titans still holds up, today, as a classic of the genre and an example of fantastical storytelling over FX storyboarding.

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Tags: clash of the titans, greek mythology, malta, pinewood studios, ray harryhausen, wrath of the titans