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”The 19th-century Halsted Street building was painter Roger Brown’s residence and studio. It awaits landmark approval by the city’s zoning committee and the full City Council,” records Block Club Chicago.

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“The commission cited the building’s value as a critical part of Chicago’s cultural heritage and its identification with Brown, a leading figure in the city’s Imagist art movement. Brown, who lived and worked in the three-story Halsted Street home from 1974 until shortly before his 1997 death, used the building as a combined residence, studio and display space.” Does the ghost sign count, too?

A link to the text and a different selection of images is here.

I was seeking urban hieroglyphs the other afternoon, as I’ve spent many a recent passage of golden hour, charting and recording traces of advertising and faded word formations, remnants, palimpsests—ghosts, even—of painted signs and forgotten notices on buildings and sidings that have dared survive this Chicago century’s swarm of teardown and build-up, when I discovered simple stencils adorning the girders holding up the El tracks. My exploration, which started from Western Avenue, gradually moved south to downtown [continued]…

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From cultural landmark to enshittification: demolition permits have been issued for the former Danny’s Tavern and its detached garage at 1951 West Dickens in Bucktown, reports Chicago YIMBY. Danny’s closed during the pandemic. “The two-story, 1898-built edifice was purchased in November for $821,000 by a Blue Island developer. B&K Concrete 1 is the demolition contractor named in the permit, at a reported cost of $18,000, and it appears they are also the property owner.”

Twenty from a year with at least fifty good features I’ve seen, plus two serials.

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)

Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay) Review. Ramsay on the music here.

Final Destination: Blood Lines (Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein) Review

The Fishing Place (Rob Tregenza) Review.

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) Review.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt) Review.

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)

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One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) Review.

Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs) Review. Interview.

Resurrection (Bi Gan) Review.

Room Temperature (Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley)

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) Review.

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) Review.

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg) Interview.

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Sirāt (Oliver Laxe)

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Where To Land (Hal Hartley) Review.

And/or: Andor; “I have friends everywhere.”

Adolescence.

Then there was the time James Cameron had to save my life over that piece of “Doom Generation” swag.

There was a press junket at the Regency Hotel in New York City, and Twentieth Century Fox was excited about the possibilities of Kathryn Bigelow’s fiery, feverish fifth feature, “Strange Days,” set in that distant future of 1999 tying into the new millennium. The vivid, violent screenplay was by Jay Cocks and her ex-husband of a couple of years, James Cameron.

The half-filled elevator opens onto the ground floor. There’s a scrum of men in the area, and they are surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who would be assassinated less than a month after the release of the movie.

The Shin Bet security detail looks the motley group of interviewers and publicists up and down, and I am dressed down, casual as they come. My faded canvas messenger bag has a small white-on-black all-caps button pinned to the shoulder strap, promoting “The Doom Generation,” which debuted in January of that year at Sundance:

A barely perceived instant and, oh, I am against that wall, three-four of the phalanx of security muscle pressing me and Rabin’s face a couple feet from mine. Asks one, “What is this… EAT? FUCK? KILL?”

A beat. A bell dings. Another elevator arrives. James Cameron takes one look to size up the circumstance and confidently strides into the moment.

“Whoa!” Cameron says, “What’s going on here? Hi, hello, I know this guy,” he says, indicating me to the wall of security. “We were just talking!”

He extends his hand toward the group and says, “Hi, I’m James Cameron, I made ‘The Terminator,’ and we’re working here.” (I have a memory of a low, “Hmmmm!” from one of the men.)

So I’m standing in the lobby of a Park Avenue hotel within feet of the prime minister of Israel, taken as a likely threat and James Cameron has saved me in seconds from hours or even days of interrogation. The group disperses quickly, one of the half-dozen or so men holding the door open as they hustle Rabin onto an elevator.

Cameron puts a hand on my shoulder as he’s about to step away.

“Eat, fuck, kill? Really? Really, Ray?” Cameron laughs and laughs again.

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That story didn’t make it into my article in 1995. Strange Days went into wide release on October 13, 1995. A few weeks earlier, I interviewed Katheryn Bigelow at a press junket in New York City. Her 2025 film, House of Dynamite, is streaming on Netflix.

Kathryn Bigelow on her audacious, headlong Strange Days

A fallen man, once a cop, is reduced to shreds of his former self by an obsessive love for a callow younger woman, Faith (Juliette Lewis), a throaty torch-singer. “Strange Days” works in vintage film noir territory, despite an imminently millennial setting, a setting of glistening, rain-damped mean streets down which an honest, if weedy, man (Ralph Fiennes) must walk, seldom pausing to wonder whether past promises will smother any chance he has at a future. Fiennes’ Lenny Nero, fiddling with virtual pornography while L. A. burns on New Year’s Eve 1999, is the anti-hero of Kathryn Bigelow’s alternately raw and polished new movie, a spectacular, violent thriller that traffics in anomaly, a romantic story told in unromantic terms, a regrettable love story that turns into another love story (with uncompromising sidekick Mace, played by a muscular Angela Bassett) that in turn offers some modest hope for a new millennium.

Bigelow’s movies favor spectacle, sometimes over immediate, literal sense. She began as a fine artist, and when the six-foot director strides into a room, she has the striking, refined looks you might attribute to a New York gallery owner. But in her movies, she’s as concerned with the results of violence and machismo as were genre primitives of the past such as Sam Fuller. But there’s an intellectual hiding under the long hair and the insistent ka-pow! Strange Days is strong stuff, a headlong, audacious tale that indulges in some of the hysteria it cautions against. How far can a director push the layering of information before overwhelming the story? “In a piece like ‘Strange Days,’ I think it’s very important, since so much is going on,” Bigelow says. “It’s a more complicated story than ‘Near Dark’ [her brilliantly-paced 1987 vampire romance]. In terms of the thriller elements, part of the story’s told in flashback, with everyone responding to a murder that takes place before the story begins. The challenge is to keep all of it balanced, to keep it from being like a landscape or a canvas that might overwhelm the characters. It’s a judgment call on a moment-to-moment basis.”

Bigelow’s art training shines through, both in her intellectualizing conversation and her intense, visceral visual stride. Are the layers something planned on the page, or is there a process of discovery? I ask in particular about a key visual motif, where the poisonous virtual reality videoclips dissolve into a frieze of disintegrating pixels, then into the last half hour of the movie, filled with blizzards of multicolored, pixel-like confetti.

“The confetti came from when I was in New York in 1993 shooting Times Square on New Year’s eve,” she says. “I saw this amazing image, this colorful snow, drifts of paper and then how the light would hit it and how it would create these funnels of multicolored pixels on a sea of black. So I got this idea it would be a great juxtaposition to the more horrific, intense elements. How could I make the ending happen in these snowdrifts of confetti? So obviously, it all comes to you in different ways. You just have to have the whole picture in your head before you start shooting. The rest is just trying to get everyone else to see it the same way. Then it’s all about communication.”

The forbidden videoclips begin by depicting crimes such as violent hold-ups, then a horrific rape and murder. Did Bigelow worry about the movie itself becoming pornographic? “I wasn’t [worried about the rape scenes being titillating] because I cut it in a such a way, in my opinion, that you do see it and experience it through Lenny’s eyes and you see his revulsion and you experience it. That’s how you are identifying with it, through his revulsion and his horror. I guess my point is that it’s application, it’s context. in the case of ‘Strange Days,’ you have a woman who is the subject of a really horrible crime. But you also have a woman, Mace, who is empowering and powerful and represents another viewpoint. There’s a spectrum of choices out there.”

There are obvious parallels to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as well as to dystopian visions like “Blade Runner.” “One thing we were trying to do,” Bigelow says, “is treat the story as a cautionary tale, a wake-up call. The future is something we’re creating right now. We’re about to live in it in one second. The social issues of civil unrest and economic disparity, these are facts of our lives. I think the film holds a mirror, in a slightly exaggerated way, to society. You can’t fault the mirror—this is stuff that exists. Maybe it’s more cleaned up in some areas, and not in others, but I don’t think it’s a pessimistic view of the future only because I believe that as you walk with the film all the way to the end, you have a strong insistence of hope that takes us into the next millennium, into humanity and love. It definitely culminates in something positive.”

The deep sadness of “Strange Days” is Lenny’s lack of faith in the future, his nostalgia for the memories of Faith that he consumes as video clips. He has to throw away those memories—”And the past,” Bigelow interjects. “Ultimately, it’s a movie about the future and about facing the future. And it’s Mace, whose character is really the moral center of the film, who literally takes this guy who’s mired in the past, his back is to the future and she literally takes and turns him around and breaks the feedback loop he seems to be on. That’s what it’s really about. I’m not saying we, the filmmakers are collectively saying, don’t look back, but look forward, move ahead.”

In January, Bigelow starts shooting her dream project of more than a dozen years, “Company of Angels,” the story of Joan of Arc, which she wrote with “Strange Days” screenwriter Jay Cocks. “She’s a 16-year-old girl in the fourteenth century, who changes the course of history because she believes strongly enough, because she believes she can. That’s a really timely, wonderful message. It doesn’t matter who you are, what class, cultural or economic category you find yourself in, that’s a great sort of metaphor—that if you believe strongly enough, you can do anything.”

My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev) Theatrical release through spring 2026. Trailer here.

Apocalypse in the Tropics (Petra Costa) Review. Netflix here.

Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath)

Secret Mall Apartment (Jeremy Workman) Review. On video-on-demand here.

Orwell: 2+2=5 (Raoul Peck) Review. On video-on-demand.

2000 Meters To Andriivka (Mstyslav Chernov) Review. Streaming free on Frontline here.

The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir) Review. Netflix here.

Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackleton) Review. In theaters via Music Box Films.

Predators (David Osit) Review. MTV Documentaries on Paramount+ here.

\The Alabama Solution (Andrew Jarecki & Charlotte Kaufman) Review. HBO here.

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra) MUBI here.

shifty (Adam Curtis) Link here.

Most films seen via Sundance and Chicago’s invaluable Doc10.

British photographer Martin Parr may be the tallest. yet most unobtrusive figure at Stephen Daiter Gallery Friday night, leaning toward admirers, adding quiet comments. Handed fliers, Parr slides a Sharpie from the pocket of his crisp blue shirt. He has a look a photographer would affect: bemused, unremarkable, with fleeting but deadly accurate awareness. The room is crowded and the dozens of pictures on the walls range across three decades of his career, sampling from the satirical eye that has made him perhaps the most controversial of the Magnum Agency’s members. It’s hard not to type the milling observers the way this quiet man might. There are crackers and crudités and dip, and wittily enough, green gummy soldiers on their bellies on a bright red plate near his “British Food” images: of WHITE SUGAR packet, a wad of chewed gum in a glass ashtray like a kidney in a surgery tray, a bitten donut proffered in front of a homely tweed jacket, clumsily extruded baby bangers ready for a fry-up. Nearby, a man compares his need for a personal trainer to the work of an art restorer. “I just want to be lean and hard.” A little girl is cautioned against scarfing little red sugar buttons. The floor’s bright with women’s spring shoes, from skyscraper spikes to silver ballet flats to red leather cowgirl boots and knee-high rain waders. The palette’s bright, garments matching the large print of a cocktail that brims with cherries held by a hand with crimson enameled nails. It’s sugar on wry. At first glass, the work can appear condescending, but there’s more to it, as in the image framing three tourists whose friends are framing them as bulwarks against the Tower leaning in the Pisa sky: he turns it into Tai Chi for wisenheimers. Parr doesn’t shoot digital, but handed a camera, it goes straight to his eye and he frames what he sees. A woman iTypes into her phone as he watches him.  “I try to maintain some kind of structure in my day,” another woman is saying, dredging oversized cauliflower floret into peppery dip. Closer to closing, more cups of wine doffed, more cameras are broken out, framing the framed. Parr sees me jabbing into a small orange Rhodia block, steps close. “That’s a serious notepad.” You know from iconic, I say. I have this idea, I want him to call his work “cheery,” I pose a quick case. I could go on about how just noticing the frailties and foibles of the figures is a kind of admiration, a respect, if far from love, but I know better. “Cheery,” he says after a moment, “I don’t know,” pausing, twinkling, “Cheery and depressing.”

Newcity, 2010.

Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange And The Price Of Truth opens at the end of 2025. His third documentary feature played in 2006; this is his eighth. We had a long talk about his great Why We Fight before it was released.

January 30, 2006. I’m meeting Eugene Jarecki in Chicago to talk about Why We Fight. A string quartet plays in the lobby of the Peninsula lobby. Somewhere in the background, the cloture vote for Sam Alito to be elevated to the Supreme Court for life is taking place.

Good Night, And Good Luck (2005) ends with that footage of Eisenhower. It’s the long view of current affairs. It so resonates.

Eisenhower stopped me in my tracks. I had never seen a president talk as honestly about anything to the American people He was looking right at me and his eyes were extremely concerned and there was something about... It was immediately clear to me how much courage it had to take, to take your last few moments in office if you’ve devoted your entire life to being a soldier and a president, to take your last few moments and spend a disproportionate number of them on a warning of that gravity about forces that you, yourself were part of creating, an architect, not just a solider, right? So here he is, basically looking us in the eye, and saying, for many reasons, we’ve unleashed a kind of monster. What are we going to do about it? We’ve got to do something about it. There’s a kind of vigilance needed to keep this monster in check, to recognize its strength. And also to recognize the capacity for danger. You can’t watch something like that [Eisenhower’s speech] if you’re caring citizen, not run with it in some way, there’s no way to ignore that. At least for me, there wasn’t it. It was immediately clear to me that there was a film there. I would apply Eisenhower’s thinking to today and try to understand to what extend his concerns were coming to pass.

I’m assuming it went in different directions once you started. What do you take to someone like [BBC commissioning editor] Nick Fraser that gets them to let you pull the trigger and start doing this kind of exploration?

It’s very funny that you ask it about Nick Fraser, because the idea for Why We Fight was first expressed in a conversation I had with him, where he basically asked me what every filmmaker has ever wanted to be asked, which is, ‘What do you want to do next?” And he asked it in a very encouraging way and therefore I felt at ease to tell him the most sort of off-the-top-of-my-head blue-sky scenario. And I told him, I want to make a film about the threat posed to democracy by our contemporary form of unbridled capitalism.

There’s a big topic.

Yeah, that’s what he said! He said, “That’s a big topic, how are you going to do that,” that’s exactly what he said. And I said, well, nowhere are the friction points between capitalism and democracy more clear than in the mechanics and impact of the military-industrial complex. So I’d like to make a movie about that. And he said, “What do you want to call it?” And I said, “Well, on a separate note, I’ve always wanted to make a movie in the spirit of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight movies. So I dunno, maybe I’ll just call it Why We Fight and I’ll have that speech from Eisenhower, that military-industrial complex speech be one of the voices heard in terms of a kind of partial answer to that larger questions. I kid you not! That’s literally how articulate the conversation was! Because I guess it was Nick letting off a head of steam that I’d built over a long period, recognizing that I had been murmuring about a lot of different things related to this, but that they hadn’t coalesced into a pitch of any kind and by asking me in the way that her did with the kind of loving—he’s a wonderful commissioning editor, he’s the man. He’s the classic, he’s really the classic artist’s benefactor from Renaissance times. If he were living in the Renaissance, he’s one of these guys who’d be supporting a bunch of people that nobody else understood. And then later, you’d hear of them, and if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t have a roof over their heads. He does that with a lot of us, and he did it that day with me by reaching out a branch and saying, what do you want to do with this?

Socratic commissioning instead of Socratic questioning.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. It’s a great thing, he’ll love that, too. What happened at that moment was that Nick allowed me, Nick is a kind of, he’s a Brit, and he’s lived a lot in America and he loves America, he had said at that time, I’m fed up with all these people making movies that are critical about America, because that’s all I seem to show [on BBC] and I think he recognized what I was going to do was a kind of tough-love portrait of American at a crossroads at a time of great and critical importance in which our future is being shaped, for good and bad. The far-reaching qualities of the film, and the film’s capacity for warmth alongside analysis, and for, y’know, suspense alongside revelation was something that spoke to him cinematically and spoke to him philosophically. Thank God!

It’s wonderful to see a lot of the things I know from my reading laid out in Why We Fight in such an articulate way. But the other thing… is noticing the women. I find them more compelling than the gentleman whose son died… These warm, round, open faces—

Yeah—

—Of women who had been believers. There’s a level, still, of innocence and not jadedness in their faces.

I learned a lot of things about America’s military family and one of the things that I learned about the family is that there are a lot of women in it. A surprising number of women working in arms factories, working on defense assembly lines, working behind the scenes and on the scene in many capacities. That, like many other things I learned, is one of the things that shook many of my preconceptions about military life, about the life within the military-industrial complex and about how Americans think about war at a time of conflict. Because, y’know, yes, we would meet people like the woman in the film who says she would rather be helping Santa make toys. We would meet people who were the most ordinary people in the world and who would have to go to work every day and reconcile their belief in basic values of decency and humanity with the fact that they are producing tools of destruction all day. Many of them don’t have any problem reconciling that because they truly believe in America’s greater cause and that the weapons are only used occasionally and sparingly in the service of that greater cause in which they believe. That’s a very understandable way to go through your life, and I would argue that their sacrifice, the sacrifice that those people are making on those assembly lines, on those frontlines, is disrespected when policymakers take for granted their belief and their commitment to the system and make decisions about war that are less defensible than that, decisions that are perhaps driven by forces to which those everyday people [don’t agree with].

Having grown up in a poor part of Kentucky, I’m always torn by stories like that of Jessica Lynch, this petite woman in West Virginia who just wanted to teach children but could only afford to go to school to become a schoolteacher by going to war. She couldn’t get a job in Palestine, West Virginia.

I think that you’re touching on something of great importance, which is that Americans today live in a kind of misplaced comfort, that things have not gotten bad enough yet in Iraq for us to have a draft. When we see a draft, on the street, when we see people lined up at Selective Service offices, that’s when we know that the bad stuff has really come. That ignores that there is a kind of backdoor draft in this country that is compelling young people to go to work because they have few other options. So, in a way, the pointing finger of Uncle Sam, which once pushed people off to war, has now become the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Basically, young people are being ushered by that calm little invisible hand onto the ships, onto the planes, off to fight in wars that are dangerous to them and others. They are doing so because of exactly what Eisenhower warned us about. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex is, after all, a warning about the way a society can change, and it can shift so that before long, in the vain pursuit of perfect security, you can end up creating a garrison state, a state in which you have taken resources away from crucial elements of your national life, like healthcare, education, infrastructure, and diverted those assets disproportionately into the military expression of national power. The armed forces, It’s like a bodybuilder, developing the right arm, but letting the rest of the body atrophy away to nothing. You end up with a tilted society. In that tilted society, it is tilted toward militarism, because the military looks like, and indeed is very often, the best solution to the problems we face. So that a young person like Jessica Lynch or a young person like William Solomon in my film, they’re going into the military because it can provide social services that are no longer available to the mainstream public. Education, y’know, you go to the military to get educated because we took the money out of schools and gave it to the military and now the military promises to educate you. Likewise, when you see the streets of Katrina, of New Orleans underwater, why? Because we took money away from our basic infrastructural commitments and put it into the military. So when the floods come? Send in the Guard. Before long, you start to see a military solution to every problem, and that is at the heart of militarism.

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There were analyses I read recently that suggested that the V.A., that Veterans’ Affairs, is in fact, the most efficient embodiment of socialized medicine on earth.

That is one of the things that really is Eisenhower’s genius. And I‘m sorry to always harp on him, but he has so much to offer. Eisenhower understood that national defense is about more than just bombs. There are a lot of components to national defense, and one of them is education, because you cannot defend a country if people are too dumb to operate the machines you want them to operate. Healthcare—

—plus recognition of mental health needs for returning veterans--

Absolutely, that’s on the reacharound end, where now the folklore coming back from war no longer inspires recruitment. When that happens, when you don’t take care of your returning vets, the stories they tell to young hopefuls are not inspiring. Eisenhower saw this at every end of the pike. He understood that to allow the forces of corporatism to be let loose in our democracy, they will threaten so many areas of national life, that for example, you’ll see a situation like Katrina, where the public sees that their government has forsaken them and they see that something is wrong at the heart of the country. When they see that, they lose their capacity to rather blindly be willing to die for that country, because too much of what the country stands for is in doubt. So now that we shrinking recruitment figures, the danger is that those chickens are coming home to roost. What you’re having is Eisenhower’s warning bearing itself out now on the new issue of a crisis of confidence. He was very aware, as a man who understood troop morale, he understood how you motivate people to go to war and he understood the necessity that America would have to maintain her ideals, that the country is at its best and at its strongest when it sets and follows an example. When it fails to do so, it opens itself up, not just to moral and ethical challenges, but to national security challenges as well.

When Capra made his When We Fight films, he drew from Axis sources—

He drew from Axis sources, and he also filmed his own stuff. He collected a group of artists together to make the films. He brought Mel Blanc, he brought Chuck Jones, Dr. Seuss, John Huston, Irving Wallace, Anatole Litvak. He brought a lot of artists under one roof at that time to create indoctrination films for the troops of one kind or another. Some cartoons, some live-action, and he incorporated original material with archival.

What I’m moving toward, and I don’t want you to respond specifically to this. I assume that you read reviews. You seem like the sort of person who might—

Yeah.

I’m not asking you to respond to this specific review, but I was floored by the incredibly jejune review that David Denby wrote of Why We Fight in the New Yorker. “This is merely a collage film; this guy went in with a point to make; this is not true filmmaking.” Does that trouble you when a reviewer is so obstinate, so resistant to what you’ve made?

I think it’s a form of unfortunate elitism where the reviewer probably does not have sufficient experience sitting in an audience and feeling the way people are affected by the movie. So their review reveals more about the rarefied world in which they watch films than about the way those films actually impact the public. In the particular case of that review, I think Mr. Denby literally didn’t realize that most of the film he was watching was original footage. A lot of the shots that he referred to as being stock or archival were shot by… We had 21 cinematographers who worked on the film, some of whom were in combat for many, many months. Many of them were very, very, very hurt and very pained by what Mr. Denby wrote, and actually disillusioned by it, because one would have hoped that a reviewer of his credentials would know the difference [archival] and original material shot on hi-def, for example. Particularly if he’s going to take a position by which documentary makers should operate. He often invokes the name Marcel Ophüls in the review. I daresay, I think Marcel Ophüls, wherever in this universe he is, was an artist who would not have thought that a critic should set parameters by which artist should operate. It’s just a tragic closure of the American mind, and thankfully audiences have not seen the film the way Mr. Denby did. I think if he had seen it with an audience, with the public… Also, I didn’t really know what he meant by having a point of view. I mean, there are 24 people in the film, 20 of them are Republicans. And of the people in the film, there are many with whom I agree, and many with whom I disagree and all of them challenged my conceptions about life. And actually Marcel Ophüls himself said that all films are subjective, but his goal in his films was to show how difficult [it is] to come to the perceptions that he has. That’s what I try to do in making my films. I agree with that part of Ophüls’ philosophy. I do go out of my way to find people who disagree with whatever impulses I have when I start. Mr. Denby would probably not recognized that I had never met Wilton Sekzer before making my film, so I could never have gone on the journey with him that was only Wilton’s to go on. I’m not exactly sure what that meant. It’s not like these are stories that one creates; one follows them as they unfold. I’m happy for you to write anything you want about David Denby. I honestly believe that David Denby has hurt too many filmmakers by writing things in the mainstream press that are vicious, that reveal a too-great distance from the creative process. If that makes me unpopular with David Denby, I think that any artist should be unpopular with any critic who sets tyrannical parameters about art. I also was angry at the insult he dealt my cinematographers, my crews. To call what they’re doing stock footage ignores their work, it ignores the commitment they made to time in the field. They wrote a note about this; they were extremely upset about it and co-signed it, 19 of them. It’s a big deal. And it sends a shockwave. It’s kind of like, I guess, the way Mr. Denby would see the world, you’re either with him or you’re with the terrorists.

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Among documentary makers I’ve encountered in the past decade, a great generosity and a genuine curiosity seems to prevail. Like I.F. Stone used to say, it’s more important to know what the enemies are writing than your friends are saying. And he’d read primary documents, a far cry from journalistic handouts and stand-ups in front of public buildings and at cocktail parties. There’s curiosity and passion, and very little guardedness, it seems.

Yeah… And I think, y’know, the one thing is that anybody who tells you that these things are objective is lying. They’re subjective. What you try to do when you set out is try to be very aware of your own inclinations and to challenge them. To keep them in check. You do that by confronting yourself with experts with whom you don’t agree. They’re either experts because of firsthand life experience that is irreplaceable or they’re experts because they’ve made whatever the subject is their focus of study for a lifetime. Those are the people I go out to. Those are the only people who appear in my film. I’m a changed person for knowing them and the film is a changed film for including them.

Why is that?

I do that because that’s how the audience can be invited into the dialogue I am hoping to promote. If the audience comes, and what they see on screen is simply a paint-by-numbers along ideological lines, they’re going to walk out, and maybe they’ll find it short-term entertaining, but long-term, they won’t feel it respected their participation in the dialogue, because it was one-sided. Because they wonder later on why they didn’t hear the other half of the story. I’m no dummy. I want people to think about this for a long time to come. So I ask myself, if I see something that might appear simplistic, what can I do to include greater texture around this subject, what can I do to complicate this subject? Where can I go and find primary subjects that will support what I am saying, where can I find primary subjects that will challenge what I am saying? And go to find people who are experts on both sides and let them talk, let the viewer come to his understanding based on the information he is being provided. John Maynard Keynes has a wonderful expression, where he he was once accused of having his views be inconsistent, and he said, “Well, when I get new information, I change my views. What, sir, do you do?” I trust the audience to be able to take new information and to evolve. I often go out and find figures who do that. That was one of the most disconcerting things about that review, [it stating] that our film is dominated by people whose stories unfold and their personalities change over the course of my film. Eisenhower goes from being a hawkish general to being a contemplative president in the autumn of his life. Wilton Sekzer goes from serving his country with blind faith. He’s a Vietnam vet, a New York cop, and after losing his son Jason [during 9/11], goes from intense desire for revenge to a higher place in reflection and self-awareness. It’s that very capacity for change—Karen Kwiatkowski lives her life in the military and then has a revelation around the Iraq war. These people come to revelations, and by the way, their revelations are different. It doesn’t matter what the content of their revelation is. For me, what’s important is the capacity for change they demonstrate, because we are all living in a time where we don’t see the prospect of change. We feel very frightened and disillusioned by the systems that we see in place, and we see as insurmountable and unchangeable. To see characters who themselves see themselves and their world as works-in-progress is terribly inspiring.

There are places where you could have scored points, from footage that’s available, that could have characterized the president and those around him.

I could have made, if I had wanted to, the material exists in the world that makes the collage film Denby is talking about. And I’m not sure what film he watched. But if we had wanted to make that film, we would have disproportionately used television archives in the film and we would have used the mountain of material that exists in the world to take potshots at one political [position] or another and make a very shallow, contemporary point. But instead, we rejected that in deference to human stories, which are all live-action. The six characters in the film and their entire stories are filmed by us, by a group of inner-city kids who are camera people, they filmed the story of William, by a group of other hardworking camera professionals, who traveled all around the world, including in war zones, to film the rest of the material, including in 25 American states. That, we did, to get away from the unfortunate tradition that Mr. Denby notes, which is that television is infecting much of our society, and television is a collage of shrill, simplistic collisions of images put together with little respect for the viewer and a compromised sense of journalistic responsibility. Thankfully, we avoided that.

The only moment I’d isolate is a remarkable cut at the end of the picture, from William being shoehorned into a small car on his way to war and then making a straight cut to another traveling shot, this with an army vehicle making its way in the desert. That’s a swell coup de théâtre. Coup de cinema. Kid gets in the car, now he’s in the war.

Yeah. Things happen. That day, the idea that that recruiter puts him in a car and drives him away shows so much desperation by the armed forces at a time of diminishing recruitment, they’ve gotten to the point of scraping the bottom of the barrel where they are literally driving these kids in solitary car pools off to the front lines.

Solitary, the recruits don’t speak among themselves…

It’s that, and it’s also that there aren’t enough of them to fill a bus. That’s what astonishing, that it’s so valuable to get a recruit, that you’ll burn gas mileage to drive him there in one car. Don’t you find that amazing? When that happened, I knew he was about to take off, and I was like, where is the bus? And ultimately he’s getting in this tiny little thing. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, you’re going to put this kid in this car, this is the end of my movie?” What happened to the bus and all of the recruits and the Star-Spangled Banner? And then I [thought], that’s exactly the point. Those are the kind of buses you fill when men are eager to go off and fight for their country. But this is the little car you fill when what you’re doing is having people go off, who have nothing better to, because something’s wrong with the country.

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The movie is deeply sad, making it seem like the old apothegm is wrecked: the first time was tragedy, the next time’s tragedy, hey, it’s tragedy again, where’s the comedy iteration? Fahrenheit 9/11 and Michael Moore notwithstanding, there’s not the awareness for there to be comedy, the laughter of outrage. Where’s that groundswell?

I think Jon Stewart is servicing that. I think The Onion is servicing that. I think Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock are servicing that. I applaud people who can find humor in the challenges we face, because humor is a tremendous tool for helping us all find our common ground, because we all finally laugh at similar things, and when we laugh together, we can do other things together. So I’m a huge advocate for comedy as a tool for political change. I am not necessarily particularly good at it, because I find it hard myself sometimes to get past the depth of anguish in what I see and the way that I get past is by reminding myself of the power of the human spirit. That, again, is not funny so much as it is emboldening. It can be funny and what is so important about comedies about politics is that being able to laugh at a situation is the first step in being able to take something lightly and to see it in contrast and to not let it bury you. I think people will look back at Jon Stewart, and not just because I was on his show, but they’ll look back on him and say this was a guy who in many ways got them through these years and helped keep the fire burning for the hopes of a better world being possible. Because his irony about the unraveling of the world we live in was a reality check, that it was unraveling but let that not be mistaken for the way it has to be. Our generation will owe Jon Stewart an enormous debt of gratitude for having kept us sane during a period of compromise of national and human standards.

Give me the names of figures other than Ophüls who you think handle large subjects capably.

I look at, just for example, I look at Leon Gast, who told the remarkable story of When We Were Kings, capturing so much about America and so much about the man, Muhammad Ali, and so much about the human spirit in a couple of hours. I look at Werner Herzog and his creativity in portraying truth and employing fictional devices to go deeper, to a more basic truth than the condition he calls “the accountant’s truth.” I think that’s a very savvy distinction.

He’s looking out for his “ecstatic truth.”

Ecstatic truth is the deeper one. That’s right. That he wants to go deeper, to the ecstatic truth that lies beneath the accountant’s truth. I like that very much. I don’t myself, I tend to be more fact-based and I tend to be less inclined toward fictional elements, but I think we are all juggling the demands of entertainment value against the demands of truth-telling where increasingly the public is looking to the documentary to provide information that is truthful and reliable because people have experienced a crisis of trust in mainstream journalism. They experience that crisis of trust right at a time when the world is becoming more complicated and they need better access to information. Likewise, I think what my brother [Andrew Jarecki] did in Capturing the Friedmans was very admirable in how he, and I don’t just say this because he’s my brother. And by the way, David Denby loved his film so he’s not always wrong! I think that my brother did an extremely good job of really reminding the public how important it is to think independently and to understand the danger of, sort of the contagious nature of misperception and how quickly ideas can spread in a media-driven society and how much the public mind can be a victim of those forces, until it’s very hard to know who’s in control of the truth. That’s a hard thing to get across in a film because the film is all by itself wrestling with that issue. I thought it was a very interesting sort of internally relevant film for that reason. So at least Mr. Denby and I agree with that.

What are audiences teaching you?

We’ve had incredible experiences with audiences in this country that goes a long way to challenge what a couple of critics have said. I read a recent criticism of the film that wondered if it was preaching to the choir—and I was reading that from the library at West Point where I’d just shown the film. We’ve shown it to military audiences across the country and we’ve gotten an incredible reception to the film. We’re going back to West Point to show it a few more times. Y’know, one of the most interesting things is just to see, that we’ve been taught to think that people are unengaged, whether they’re in the military or outside the military. As far as the military goes, the military is far more engaged in these issues than people think they are. After all, they’re living and dying around these issues. They have a lot of engagement the rest of us don’t have. And the public, I’ve been taught to think, is apathetic and disinterested—I don’t find that at all. And I travel around this country enough, day and night now, to tell you, that every audience dispels that rumor more and more. What I learn is that people aren’t apathetic, they just feel helpless. They don’t know in contemporary life, which is busy and complicated, how to get a handle on this massive structure of a society, which, if it has flaws, is very hard to fix and it’s hard to know where to start, and it’s hard to know where to get a handle on things. That’s what people are feeling. They’re not feeling apathetic. That’s very emboldening to me. Showing the film to audiences has given me a window into an America that’s possible, driven by the aspirations of its people for something better than what we’re settling for.

So everyone wants something better.

One thing to keep in mind is that for someone like myself who is committed to nonpartisanship, when I go to show the film to military audiences, I meet people, who, like me, have taken a pledge of nonpartisanship. So in fact, there’s a tremendous amount of shared understanding between myself and military audiences. My film does not have a party agenda and neither do they. They are there serving whoever is in power. I am there, challenging whoever is in power, to make sure that the decisions made by the powerful that put our men and women in harms’ way do so with validity, with legitimacy and in a spirit consistent with our traditions of republican democracy.

Neil Young has turned eighty, and he’s still making and performing music. Movies, too. I spoke to Young in Chicago on the release of Greendale in 2003 for Canada’s Cinema Scope. He had a show at United Center that night, and was scrupulously tending to his tea.

Greendale is a splendid example of an older man sent to do a young filmmaker’s work.

Neil Young uses the simplest and also the most advanced tools to build a self-enclosed narrative world and offer up a hearteningly pissed-off commentary on the fucked-up world around us. Something so oddball and so personal, in fact, Young’s characters, old, young, female, male, in the remote fictive California hamlet of Greendale all sing in Young’s voice. It’s haunting, and within its 80 or so minutes of dancing grain and powerful music, some kind of masterpiece. It’s not for everyone, but those who tumble into Young’s allusive, passionately political fable are in for an adventure.

Directing under his customary pseudonym (shared by his previous four features) of Bernard Shakey, Young also edits as “Toshi Onuki” and shot much of the movie himself on Super 8 film, using a small, easily handheld underwater camera. Young then avails himself of contemporary digital post-production techniques, tweaking the dancing grunge of his filmic image into something even more forceful.

There are parallels in the elliptically told story of the Green family, to be drawn from other work--Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” a hint of Brecht, and Lars von Trier’s “Dogville.” Several days—and lives—pass within the Green clan, which includes a disenchanted grandfather, a failed artist father who inadvertently shoots a state trooper, a comically broad trickster-Devil figure and a contrary figure, 20-ish Sun Green, an idealist-activist modeled after eco-activist Julia “Butterfly” Hill, hits the highway in hopes of saving Alaska. Sun is the fresh-faced embodiment of youthful optimism, and takes over Greendale’s narrative in its anthemic, thrilling final fifteen minutes. Her refrain courses with what seems an older person’s learned simplicity: “Be the rain.” Talking to Young, I ask him why he shows such faith in, well, the young. “It’s just an eternal optimism. I think it comes from youth. Idealism, optimism, all those things are there,” he says. “They’re naturally there. They’re put there to help us to make it over each generation change. Sun Green typifies that.”

There’s something special about the handcrafted idea. Writing, you can pick up a pencil, music, a guitar. Most movies aren’t made that way. It’s especially inspiring to see someone who’s older breaking from expectations. “It’s a beautiful form, or medium, Super 8,” he says in the tones of the true believer. “It really is just a quarter of a 35mm frame and it’s got a look. It makes it possible for you to get into the picture, to enjoy it, the colors, the saturation. I really love that quality. It’s not an imposing format, it’s almost like it’s not there when we’re doing it. It’s like, ‘When are you going to bring in the real camera?’ Y’know? It’s like [if at] a photo shoot, they use the Polaroid [instead]. We were able to be very versatile and very agile to move from one scene to another without having these huge set-ups, which are sometimes counterproductive to the actors. It may be right for everything else, but I try to make the actors to feel that basically they could live in their characters and they wouldn’t have to wait around a long time [for us to shoot]. They just got the feeling that they’d never have to re-do a scene for a technical reason. When we got the feeling that I wanted, the performance, everything else was secondary.”

Some cinematographer said God’s the greatest lighting assistant ever. “Oh yeah. You’ve gotta be happy with what he’s doin’ all the time and you go for it when you’ve got it.”

Young says the final form of the movie surprised even him. “It started by me writing the songs. I recorded them all, in order, one at a time. Finish each one before I start the next one. I hadn’t even written the song that would follow a song when I was finishing it. I just went along like that. When the whole thing was done, we started shooting the visuals of the dialogue. With the characters. Just for something to oppose the filming of the sessions that we’d done. We thought we were going to cut around it, create a long-form video or something out of it, with me playing my guitar, the actors back-sand-forth between one scene and another. We had green screens. But that was all terrible. It didn’t work. It was very distracting, going back-and-forth. After seeing the Super 8, that world was perfect. I just loved the way it looked. So we just abandoned everything else and filmed the entire thing in Super 8.”

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And he was surprised again by positive critical reaction to the film of “Greendale.” “I’m very happy with the reception we’ve gotten. Actually, I was stunned by the reaction to the film. I was wondering if, like you talked about the form of people all mouthing to my words, and the Super 8 camera. I thought it was cool, but I just didn’t know if anyone else was gonna. I didn’t know if it was going to pass muster. Whether they were just gonna walk out, going, “This is the fucking movie? What’s this shit?”

“This is all we get for ten lousy bucks?” I joke.

“Yeah!” Young says, laughing. “’What is this? A cheap imitation of a real picture? What are these people trying to perpetrate on us here?’”

Lynne Ramsay’s fifth feature, finally, Die, My Love, is in theaters now. I spoke to Ramsay in 2002 for the cover story of Cinema Scope 13.

Lynne Ramsay’s second feature, the beautiful, opaque Morvern Callar, is the sort of adaptation drawn from Alan Warner’s dizzying 1995 fiction of the same name that drives lit-minded (and literal-minded) critics against the wall.

Morvern Callar is a triumph of a different sort, the rare movie that captures the essence of a tale, its mood and emotion more than the lonely bones of narrative. Movies aren’t texts and plots; at their best, they’re pretexts to eavesdrop on behavior or to see through the eyes of a perceptive artist. And adaptations are not projects for the pedantically bookish; the most intriguing adaptations come when a director and her team–screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, music supervisor – find an unlikely and gratifying way to fashion someone else’s material to their sensibility. (Another terrific example is Claire Denis’ latest, Vendredi Soir, a daydreamy mood piece about female desire that evokes the photographic work of Nan Goldin in every patch of the frame.) Let’s put it simply: to say that a movie wasn’t “as good as the book” is the most meaningless of judgements. A movie is not a book.

While Lynne Ramsay and co-writer Liana Dognini have made a radical adaptation of Warner’s novel, it’s not so mad as Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, their vivid comic vivisection of Susan Orleans’ “The Orchid Thief.” Nonetheless, Alan Warner’s 1995 novel is a 240-page monologue of I-did-this, then-I-did-that. Here’s a typical passage from the book, more an evocation of sensation than a prescription for specific images:

I walked through to the rave catacombs down the curved corridors. You heard the trancey ambient getting louder. You pulled aside the curtain and stepped into the hot complete pitch darkness. You could tell it was DJ Sacaea: swirly bass patterns coming out the bins and darkside fx getting fed in. You felt air, responding to bodies moving about quickly to the sounds in the blackness. You saw the orangey brightening then steadying tips of joints by the row of carpets and cushions behind the pillars... There were topless girls in shorts and beads doing their thing to the music with guys wearing shorts and baseball caps. A couple were snogging or maybe even going dirty on each other, down on the cushions, it was difficult to tell what was going on even with the low lights up. You saw people on their own, drinking Red Bulls and looking the same as me then the darkness came again… A dreamy repeating pulse began. Immersed in the darkness, feet kept on the floor by the water bottle, bottom half followed the pulse and drone. Sometimes torso and arms were everything else: the bleepers or synth patterns; sometimes I stretched up fingers--my keys banging, banging against collarbone.

“Autistic” and “childlike” are two of Ramsay’s favorite adjectives for both the run-at-the-mouth fiction and the behavior of the character. Morvern is a chain-smoking 21-year-old supermarket clerk in a small, seaside West Scotland town. Her boyfriend commits suicide and she finds him resting in a streak of darkening blood on the kitchen floor. She opens his Christmas presents to her, pops in a mix tape he’s left. After a night out with her best friend, Lanna, she finds he’s left her money and his unpublished novel. What’s a girl to do? In the case of Morvern, she places her name on the title page and ships the printout to a big London publisher, gets rid of the body and lights off with Lanna on a package holiday to southern Spain. Lost on the dance floor and otherwise in search of a modest measure of human intimacy, her holiday’s interrupted by a visit from the publishers, who, over champagne, offer a staggering amount of money for her “brilliant” book.

A London Times critic wasn’t having any of it when he ended his review with the observation, “Morvern changes her hair, gets a nice ethnic dress and hangs out with two publishers. In other words, she becomes a right snooty bourgeois cow. This is radical cinema?”

Someone lend him a set of eyes and a pair of ears. Ramsay is the rare director who understands how to shoot nightlife, a parallel talent to Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien. She has a photographer’s knack for capturing the blush and blur of glimpse in an intoxicated instant. Ramsay and recurrent cinematographer Alwin Kuchler construct a remarkable emotional subjectivity, a shimmering use of focus and focal lengths that disorient our perceptions at the right instant. You get the sensation of presence and absence, admiring how she can capture what it feels like to be in a room.

The 32-year-old director also has exquisite taste in contemporary music, which she often thwarts by cutting away, or having Morvern click off her Walkman as a song gets to the good parts. (We hear strands of Stereolab, Boards of Canada, Velvet Underground, Can and Aphex Twin.)

While Ramsay’s work, including her two Cannes-winning short films [Small Death (1996) and Gasman (1998)] and 1999’s Ratcatcher, relies largely on non-professional actors, Samantha Morton, whose face can move vertiginously from elation to barren lack of emotion, plays Morvern. She’s a modern incarnation of silent-era actors who were born ready for their close-up. Is Morvern opaque or inhuman? Is the story nihilist or one lacking a discernible moral stance? Watch the face.

Ramsay herself talks with a pronounced Scots accent, and she’s gleeful about whatever we discuss. (You can sample her speedy rap in a video interview on the Ratcatcher DVD.) Since she wanted a smoke or two, we spoke outside a Chicago café on a 40 degree morning, bundled up and trading stories. Her enthusiasm is infectious, even childlike.

I scribbled the word tactile a lot during the movie. It’s almost as if the film could be a biography of Morvern’s fingertips. There’s even a shot of Samantha’s hand trailing along a door facing.

I guess so. I think it’s kind of essential to the film, y’know. With Morvern and her dead boyfriend, obviously, they look like lovers at the beginning, which was intentional.

Since I’d read Alan Warner’s novel, it wasn’t a surprise to me, but it is sweet, that tiny glimpse you offer at first—did I see it, did I not?—of the slashmarks on his wrist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah! I know. But if you’ve read the novel, that’s the first scene of the book. She cuts off his hand with a kitchen knife or something. I used bits of monologue [in the script], but it’s a monologue that doesn’t really exactly explain the character. It’s more a chain of thoughts. Almost like a police interview, “I did this, I did that.” Lots of lists, kind of autistic, almost. Childlike. I felt like if I could get that into the film. How do I get this across, this character, that she’s almost autistic, where details get in her way? Something that Alan Warner said that struck me was the minute she commits the first banal act, after the death, she loses herself, she shuts down. I always saw her as a character who was very pragmatic, who didn’t analyse herself. When she put her name on the novel [when I read] the book, I thought, “Wow, that’s kind of quite punk rock, y’know.” I love the fact he kills the author on the first page and then you go to the supermarket, she takes over. I thought that was a stroke of genius. And I like the identity play, where she takes over his identity.

It’s nice how you don’t reveal all of his letters on the computer screen until later, when we see he’s written, “This is for you.” Then she takes it so literally, putting her name on it!

I know! I guess I kept thinking about a child’s actions.

It’s a sturdy adaptation, yet all that interior monologue, the very form of the book, is stripped away.

The film’s quite different from the book, but I think it’s truer to the character [of Morvern] than if we stuck on a voiceover to explain everything. I wanted to keep that rawness, the edginess of the book while making this emotional journey. I really tried to distil what I thought was good about it, because here’s a man who writes a woman really well. The great thing is [Warner] really loves it, which is fantastic, ‘cos it was nerve-wracking asking the writer. We showed him the script and he gave us some funny notes, but he never really saw the film until it was finished.

I saw the film at a sold-out festival audience and the sound design is so minimal at times, the cranky woman beside me actually said the scratching of my pen was “breaking her concentration.”

Ramsay laughs. I always look at the notes I have after things, and I think, “What the fuck does that mean?,” these scribbles.

I’m interested in how Morvern was a muse to the writer. The boyfriend was stealing by or inspired by—

Her, right—

He wrote this novel for her, a tribute to her, to who she is. But then what we observe through your film, is essentially an unknowable woman. We watch thoughts flicker, eloquent but mute, across Samantha’s face. Here’s someone who’s supposed to have inspired a writer, but we have to invent her, project our need for a muse onto her just as he did.

Yeh! (She laughs.) I think that’s a really good interpretation. In terms of being a muse? I think I saw him probably as a writer, intellectual, who maybe saw something non-academic from her, drawing something different from her. She’s a muse who takes over, y’know? That’s what’s fantastic. I think he’s learned from her. But then she takes that back, while in the same process, losing her identity.

You don’t want to imagine another actor in the role. The film could exist, but it’s like watching Samantha in Under the Skin and even Minority Report. There are shots of her in Spielberg’s film where you’re in a different movie. You can rationalize that her character is otherworldly in Spielberg’s film, but here? There’s a shot at the end of her conversation with the two publishers. You hold on her face, all this remarkable stuff is going on, quicksilver changes of mood, then another mood. Then another.

Oh yeah, that was great. When I shot that scene, I knew she’d nailed it. I think she really understood that, and so did I. I’ve been in a very similar situation myself. I’d done one short film, it won a prize at Cannes, I was like this kid just out of film school. It was the first film I directed, Cannes was the first film festival I went to, which is a bit weird in the first place!

Nowhere to go but down.

Exactly! People were asking, what’s your next film? And me kind of like busking it. Whatever I said, they’d go, wow, that’s interesting. In a sense, I have these two worlds coming together and Sam really got that. Also, she had a very similar background to Morvern. In fact, she’d had [left] her parents and was a drifter for a while. It was the first time I’d cast somebody the first time I met them. She’d read the book, she got the character, but there’s something about her, I realized she was capable of everything. I’d believe she’d work in the supermarket. She has an incredibly beautiful face, but y’know, it’s not in the very conventional sense. She can be lit from plain to incredibly beautiful. I don’t think she looks the same in any film she’s been in. She works the way I like working with non-professional actors a bit like me. She’s really private about it. It’s not like she’s asking, what’s the motivation or the backstory. She’s very much in the moment. She’s a professional, but she can do things that are very spontaneous. Working with her is like filming a documentary. Sometimes with her, I wouldn’t cut when I thought I was going to cut. The whole beginning, it was weird filming it. She was like in a catatonic state.

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You’ve used non-professional actors from tjhe start. I know a filmmaker who wanted to elicit a telling expression from a non-actor, and he recently ran out a 30-minute DV cassette just to capture five or seven seconds of something flickering across her face.

That’s very Andy Warhol, that. Those Andy Warhol films are really quite beautiful, really quite moving. Some of them, the faces, the masks fall away. Something else happens. But it takes about fifteen minutes!

We can always fall back on Bergman’s observation that the essence of cinema is a close-up of the human face.

I couldn’t agree more. In theater, there’s projection of voice, stuff like that. With cinema, you ultimately try to get more reality. In terms of non-professionals, it’s not that you just pick up anybody and that’s it. It’s much more, if you find the right person. It’s especially easy with children. They do things themselves, you don’t say pick up the box of matches, as actors they’ll just do something, you won’t ask them. It won’t be to try and bring in reality; they’re just doing it unconsciously. Sometimes I’ve seen the actors fiddle a bit just to get something into their performance. The great thing about Sam is, again, that lack of the analytical. Very in the moment. I think she’s a bit like a kid. A bit like a child the way she looks at things, very unpretentious. I think it’s difficult to find non-professionals. But when you get it right, I think you get something that really goes with the medium. It depends on the style you like.

The obvious example there is Bresson, who you’ve mentioned in the past as having influenced you through his book of epigrams before you’d even seen one of his films. But he was looking for a lack of inflection—

Yeah, yeah—

That it’s easier to drain it away from non-professionals.

Definitely. I can see where he’s coming from. I loved lines like, being instead of acting. I love that book, “Notes on Cinematography.” I’d never seen any of his films; I just read the book. I thought, “Wow!” Very inspiring. I think he had a slightly different way of working, but anything can happen when you take a picture. That came out of that. Often in Ratcatcher, I’d let things run longer, they’d improvise, they’d go out, and really great things came from that. Something opens up in the face, or, I don’t know, there’s just a magic that happens.

Was there a reason you began with non-actors beyond the pragmatic, “these are the performers I can afford”?

Actually, as a cinematographer at film school, I worked with a director who was sometimes in her own movies and used non-professional actors. I just thought, this is something very interesting. It was a raw energy that felt different from acting and performing. Having that experience working with other actors who had done that and shooting a lot of documentaries made me open to that at the beginning. I asked my brother in the first short, just to walk it through with the camera, and I thought, “He’s really good! He’s much better than the actors I saw!” That’s where it kind of started, I guess.

The films that excite me nowadays are ones where ideas drawn from documentary and non-fiction films come into play. By the time a viewer’s 32, your age, you’ve seen so many movies, heard the stories, you know the permutations of plot.

I know, I know, I find that. I think more and more, the Hollywood movies, there’s information, lots of information, plot information, boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom, then the characterization suffers from that. You get tons of information; you’re bombarded with information, like you’re on a website. It becomes disorienting, it’s confusing watching films like that.

Kiarostami’s 10 is one of the simplest yet most emotionally direct films I’ve seen in ages.

I tried to see it at Cannes.

It’s the cinema of surveillance: turn the camera on and run away. He’d work with the actors, turn the cameras on, tell them to drive away.

Fucking hell, that’s brilliant. I really want to see that. I really loved Taste of Cherry, I thought that was amazing. His use of sound is amazing, too.

Your sound design is very specific in Morvern Callar, with some stretches of almost total silence, with the slightest isolated effects.

It’s really weird, the film is so quiet in the beginning. I’d hate to see anyone with popcorn in there. They asked me to choose a film to present at [London’s National Film Theatre], I chose Days of Heaven, the Malick film. I went and there was this guy who brought in his popcorn, this is quite a quiet film as well, even with a beautiful score. I’d’ve liked to have killed him. It was such a lovely experience, and on behalf of another filmmaker, I felt really furious! I think popcorn should be banned, man, y’know?

The woman who complained about my note taking was also eating popcorn.

Oh fuck, that all makes sense now!

Let’s talk about ellipsis… Discussing his movie Demonlover at Vancouver this year, Olivier Assayas said something I loved, that he didn’t want to put things in his movies that “force on you the bullshit that bores me in other people’s movies.”

I couldn’t, I mean, that’s, I think that’s a fucking great statement. I feel exactly the same; I feel exactly the same. Music? Y’know, like “Feel happy, feel sad, feel good.” Personally, I go to see films a lot and feel completely manipulated, I guess. Like I’m dumb, like someone’s telling me dumb, y’know. I like to give that audience quite a lot of room. Some audiences like that and some don’t, y’know. Unfortunately, I think people want to be spoon-fed sometimes. But I think there is an audience that doesn’t. It’s harder and harder to make this kind of movies.

I like to think you’re getting away with it.

I hope so. I think this film plays with a younger audience, and the music seems to make it accessible in a way it might not have been. Maybe it’s kind of like, I don’t know, kids looking for something different, y’know?

I like a quote I’ve seen a couple of times, you saying, “I like a wee bit of work myself.”

That’s the truth, I do.

There’s a wonderful thing you do in the film with space. We see the apartment with the dead body in a certain way, and once it’s gone, the framing recurs, showing us the gloomy living room in the foreground and the kitchen in the background. There’s a decided absence there, and in the distance, the two women are pelting each other with flour, being girlish, goofy, oblivious to what’s no longer there. As I watched, I wondered if you were going to do that with the various bits of music, recontexualize the emotional effect. I think you do it once?

Yeah, there’s one piece we use [in two different ways]. That’s a good idea, but the music was important to me as another layer, part of the narrative.

Morvern disrespects the music her boyfriend’s left behind on his mixtape, she’s always clicking the Walkman off—

That’s funny, because Boards of Canada came in, there’s a track from them, it’s a beautiful track, it gets switched off. They loved the film, but, “Why did you switch this off?” I said, I think the opening’s the best part! I thought [what we chose, also talking to Alan Warner, was] what this guy would listen to, things like Can, but all the music is cinematic, too. The [mixtape he left behind] was another way of [Morvern] blocking out the world. I was very careful about how I used that. I didn’t want to do the manipulative thing, using modern music, filling sound over something, and it just sounds like a promo. I did really simple things in the sound design, like the EQ [shifts]. It was nothing fancy or special, people are going, “How’d you do that?” Actually, I used a lot of silence and two faders! It’s a joy to do the unexpected.

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What about sound versus music?

Less with the music, but with the sound design, we did things on a subliminal level. The buzz of a light. Even when she’s in the bath, the dead body’s there, the buzz of the light represents he’s still there. Not to be too pretentious about it, but sound’s a great thing, because people don’t realize it.

It’s that Bresson thing, the eye is passive, the ear is active.

Yeah. In a sense, it works on a more subliminal way, a deeper level, often. I like using it in the simplest way.

Some of the use of shadow and grain reminds me of Richard Billingham’s great book of photos of his wreck of a family, “Ray’s A Laugh.”

Oh, I love that book. I love that book. He’s a great guy. He’s very, very modest. That was my favorite photography book for awhile, but meeting him was even nicer, ‘cos it’s like, what’s this guy doing an art gallery in London? I don’t think he loved being there, put it that way. He’s doing some lovely films now.

I saw your film with a real dog lover. There’s a sweet series of shots when the pair first land in Spain, a little dog goes by on a motorcycle, then Sam puts her head out the window, taking in the sun, she goes, “She’s being a dog!”

(Ramsay laughs.) I love the way people interpret bits of a film when nothing’s really happening!

The bug leading her out of her hotel room toward the first man she’s with after the boyfriend is a strange thing, too, “an Asian thing,” my friend wondered, trying to figure it out.

They’re two strangers who meet in the hotel. It’s quite surreal how she’s led there. He’s grieving, she’s grieving, and it’s the first physical contact she has in the film. But that’s great, I’m going to tell everybody it was because of the Asian bug thing! Often my reaction, is like, well? I like hearing other people’s interpretations. That’s what’s most interesting after you’re done.

It’s what Kiarostami calls the “half-finished film.” The audience is invited in.

Yes. Often, in interviews, you sit back, listen to interpretations. I totally agree with that. Once it’s out there, it doesn’t matter what you think of it. It’s on its own, it’s something else. I’m trying not to make moral judgements on the characters.

But audiences invent whole scenarios…

Yes, I love it when people go, “What does Morvern do next, does she write a novel?” I say, “Whatever.” I love it that people are projecting into the future.

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Let’s start with Diane Keaton’s ensemble—black vinyl pants and longcoat, a skinny black tie over a crisp white shirt with a small, pointy collar, small pewter-colored glasses she lets fall down the bridge of her nose. In a half-hour conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival, she eats a roll the entire time: “Just ask questions as I spill crumbs all over the place.”

She’s here to talk about her second feature as a director, Unstrung Heroes, one of the sweetest American movies of the year, the screwball story of Danny, a young boy (Nathan Watt) growing up in early sixties L. A. in an eccentric family—inventor father (John Turturro, superb), his gravely ill mother (Andie MacDowell, charming) and two dazed uncles (manic Michael Richards, gentle Maury Chaykin).

Stories such as this tempt sentiment and soft-headedness, but Unstrung Heroes is told with gentle craft. In many scenes, characters inadvertently catch sight of intimate moments—Danny surreptitiously films his mother with his father’s camera, he catches sight of moments of tenderness between them. You realize these privileged moments will become Danny’s most precious adult memories.

Like many actors who turn to directing, Keaton is comfortable talking about technical choices than emotional underpinnings. With her reputation as a frequenter of fleamarkets, I ask Keaton about storytelling through decor. “Oh yeah! A lot of research. Books, books, books. It was [more of being told], it’s all right for you to do what you love to do. I have a huge photographic archive and I made a notebook of everybody’s house, everybody’s apartment. The streets, the home, the hotel where the uncles live. Their clothes. There wasn’t anything I didn’t plan. I presented the notebook to the production designer and we picked out what we liked and didn’t like. Another very important thing for me was that I wanted everything to be a practical; I mean, the house had to be a house.”

Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese also admires that lived-in warmth. “The design and visual aspect is Diane, it’s just really well done.” But what about your own contribution? There’s a scene where uncle Maury Chaykin explains to Danny, “I station myself here to catch all the lost balls of city,” and it’s delivered with a certain delicacy that’s madness and common sense at the same time. How do you get away with a line like that?

“That felt totally honest for his character that he would say it like that. I play all the parts as I write them, and if I can’t feel it authentically, as an actor, if I can’t pull it off, I’ll rewrite it. [Clint] Eastwood taught me something about that. there was stuff in the rewrite of Bridges of Madison County and I remember saying to him that some of the lines felt unactable, lines taken from the book. He said, y’know, it’s funny but sometimes when you read a script, in all his years of experience, he said, you get it up on its feet and it reads really well and it doesn’t work and there are lines that you feel unactable yet when you get them up on their feet, and they really work. So you really don’t know until you get the actors in there. I do a lot of rewriting in rehearsals [for that reason].”

My favorite scene is an early one, between Danny and his mother. “Your hands smell good,” Danny tells her, and after a pause, she says, “I have pretty hands, don’t you think?” He holds her hand in his, examining it, then asks, “Are my hands like yours?” The intimacy of the scene is lovely. “I feel very proud of that,” LaGravenese says. Is that yours? “Yeah. I like that moment a lot. I remember being a kid and thinking those things and for me, my mom was the center of my world, too. My father was kind of distant, he worked nights and stuff. I remember thinking those things, any kind of connection you can find. You’re assembling your own history.”

Talking to Keaton about that scene, she again waxed technical. “I love that scene! To me, I can remember things with my mother—do you know what I’m saying—where she’s encouraging you to go out there and do what you want to do, and you’re afraid, and all that. That was really a nice thing, to make it all one shot. I tried to do as much as I could in a one-shot with that and just get more and more close to them as it became more and more intimate and not to cut it up. That’s one thing you learn from Woody Allen, the master is key. If you design it so that’s not all head-head-head, behavior plays better in a one-shot because you see two people interact. When you cut, it separates the people.”

In a roundtable later, a Québécois journalist asks, “What is you would say you have most embarrassing, the moment in your career?”

“Acting or directing?”

“Yes.”

A pause. “Now. Right now. When you have to let it go. If I had my choice, I’d do the work, I love doing the work, but then I’d put it in a closet. I mean, I’d still want to be paid and all!”

Keaton stands and crumbs fly across the room. “Ah. Well. Um,” and she laughs a familiar laugh.

Published in a different form in Newcity, September 1995.

Tipsters want to be hipsters, it’s God’s honest truth. A startling movie comes screaming across the sky, everybody’s found their new best friend.

Boogie Nights played the New York Film Festival last weekend and now Paul Thomas Anderson, the 27-year-old Studio City, California, born-and-bred writer-director is atop a heap of hype. The Sunday papers were lined with long columns of spicy prose about Anderson’s epic portrait of a surrogate family—damaged souls seeking a little dignity while churning out porno in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley in the late 1970s. On its surface, Anderson’s second movie is nonjudgmental, and there’s keen intelligence at work in shaping the gaudy set pieces and potentially trashy drama. Offhandedly witty and sleekly paced, it’s a terrific, energetic commercial picture.

Owen Gleiberman’s heat-seeking missile of hype in Entertainment Weekly aimed to be the first in the hemisphere to detonate and crown Boogie Nights and Anderson the hottest commodities since Pulp Fiction and Quentin Tarantino. Or was that Mean Streets and Martin Scorsese? Or was that Pauline Kael and her notorious pre-release rave for Robert Altman’s Nashville?

Boogie Nights doesn’t need the push—it’s confident and clear-headed enough on its own, drawing lessons about camera and performance style from both Scorsese and Altman without being slavish or derivative. Anderson doesn’t need the push, either, with this and the astringent, little-seen Hard Eight (or Sydney, his preferred title) under his belt. While the compulsive cinephile cites Nashville as one of his favorites, interviewers and reviewers alike seem keen to instead match Kael’s classic gush about that cruel canvas—”Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers—but an orgy without excess?... I sat there smiling at the screen in complete happiness.”

At the same terminal stage of her career, Kael wrote an introduction to the published screenplay of Citizen Kane, and dubbed that film a “shallow masterpiece.” There’s the sweet conundrum about Boogie Nights—Boogie Nights is about shallow people with shallow dreams. They wouldn’t know what to do with their fantasies if they came true, because they do, and everything goes crazy anyway.

What does Anderson think? It will take some time to figure it out—and probably a lot of heated discussions in months and years to come.

Boogie Nights takes place between the late 1970s when porn was shot on film, and the early 1980s when cheap, fast video took over. Burt Reynolds, grave yet wry, is Jack Horner, a maker of smut who believes he can elevate the form. Julianne Moore is his troubled wife, using the nom de porn Amber Waves. Their coterie of cast-and-crew misfits grows by one when Horner encounters nightclub busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg). Horner sizes Eddie up as a prime prospect for exotic stardom, a confused young man with a particular gift to whom Horner says, more businessman than hedonist, “I bet you have something wonderful in your pants wanting to get out.”

When I met Anderson at the Toronto Film Festival, he was beat, still in the midst of the sound mix on the two-hour, forty-minute feature. Still, he was hyper and chain-smoking, bright-eyed behind round, wire-rim glasses. Looking at this skinny guy, he could have been 15, but he talks a much older man’s game.

Anderson says the movie comes out of growing up in the Valley. “When this story begins, I was 7 years old,” he says, cigarette at hand, “and 14 when it ends. I wanted to show the place where I grew up, and also show how it really looks. In movies, L.A. is usually a Venice Beach montage of roller-skating girls and guys bench-lifting. I’ve been to Venice Beach once. It always feels phony to me. I wanted to be as specific as I could.”

But Anderson was aware of another fact about the area. “Growing up in the Valley, it wasn’t smack in front of me, but I knew it’s where ninety-percent of the pornos are made, that was the seed of the story. It was around. I saw pornos from the age of 9 or 10.”

Anderson got the germ of the story when he was 17 and saw a “Current Affair” profile of Shauna Grant, a performer who killed herself, as well as an in-depth Rolling Stone article about John Holmes, whose infamous gift is shared by Wahlberg’s character. “I started getting really familiar with porno and I got an understanding beyond the camp, the funny stuff that’s obvious about it.”

Boogie Nights races through the fall of its characters, leading some viewers to describe his film as moralistic. Anderson winces. “I think that much porno and that much drug use is going to lead to violence. It just is. Y’know? It’s just the equation in that world. Someone’s going to fucking get hurt sooner or later. These stories have happened in the world of pornography again and again.”

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The great strength of Anderson’s work is the earnestness of his characters, their clueless desire to somehow better themselves. They dream, they scheme, they fail. “Yeah, the desire is there and the intention is there and that’s cool and important to me. They’re just trying to make some kind of dignity out of it, or to rationalize it. All the people I know in the porno business are completely aware but they’re trying as hard as they can to legitimize what they do. Go on one of those sets. They know what they’re in, but when you’re in the middle of it, and the camera is running? You care. You’re not just fluffing it off. They’re even more self-conscious with me there, a legitimate filmmaker. But the time comes and they’re going for the cum shot, you’re going for cumming on a girls’ face, this weird, derogatory thing—but let’s make sure it’s in focus. They’re just fucking trying to scrape something up from this life.”

Anderson wrote Boogie Nights before shooting his first feature, Hard Eight. Anderson refers to it by his original, preferred title, Sydney, and rues other run-ins with its distributor. “After I shot Sydney, I knew I really wanted to make Boogie Nights next. I really love actors, and Sydney was basically four actors. Then I wanted to write a movie where I could have eighty actors. I rewrote the movie to add more actors! You have to be careful not to do a disservice to the actors, you can be so in love with what the actors are doing, you have to step back.

“But when I wrote Boogie Nights, I went nuts, because I had such a hellish time in the editing room. This became a kind of bitter fuck-you, I’m writing a movie for myself, I don’t fucking care. It’s going to be long and it’s going to be about this subject, and I’m going to make myself happy. So there’s a lot of Jack Horner in me.”

And the result is long. “I wrote the movie and I knew the running time would be just under three hours, and that’s what it came in at. Literally just under. But there was no pressure from the studio to cut it down. They did say, we’d like it if you cut it down, but do what you want. Only two major chunks are cut out, and I don’t miss them at all. Otherwise they’d be in. New Line was cool because they knew they were getting a three-hour movie, and they got one at two-hours-thirty-seven. [New Line production head] Mike DeLuca wanted me to put it back in and I said, I don’t want it, it’s better without it.”

“A Star is Porn” appeared in a slightly different form in Newcity in October 1997.

Ah, yes, the 1990s holistic report from a film festival: just so many words, just so many films. I posted a version of this piece on September 17, 1999. I recollect the theaters and seats and streets and smells and Bistro 990 and Cameron House and Queen Street house parties more vividly than the notetaking, which is always copious yet seldom consulted.

Like any film festival with more than a couple dozen selections, Toronto is both great and impossible. You surf the zeitgeist. You let chance take you. It's like falling in love overnight: sometimes you don't know how you wound up in that dark room and can't figure out how to escape.

It runs like clockwork. It runs like a train. It will run you down. Over nine days, 256 feature films are on display at the twenty-fourth edition, ticking along in the cool and collected hands of 280 paid staff and 950 volunteers. There are screenings for the public, a separate schedule for 760 foreign press. There is no official market, but films are bought and sold here, in other neighborhoods, at invitation-only screening rooms at film and sound labs.

"I'm so hungry, I forgot I'm hungry," I heard colleagues say more than once. There's a wonderful city there: cosmopolitan, polyglot, modern and almost clean. But you can't dip into much outside the spiffy center of yupscale Yorkville, where most everything transpires. Another fest perplex: Just how many movies a day are fair to your critical faculties, to your responsibility to understand the filmmaker's work, to your gut?

Public screenings are almost always wildly enthusiastic, yhe Q&As smart and articulate. There are exceptions, including the feared representational fallacy. "Were you concerned showing violence encourages violence?" And all at once, an end to conversation—and art.

Then there is the gilded roundelay of celebrity and paparazzi. As one of Canada's leading cultural institutions, the festival has gained ever more cachet as a launchpad for movies in North America. Celebrities hurtle across red carpets toward clandestine VIP lounges, streaming from ranks of black Town Cars, each shiny as a new-minted promise. This is yet another festival. Journalists align themselves in packs for or against a film or a colleague. Notes are compared and grudges trotted out. They are vertical orgies. You want to be polite: "Thank you for schmoozing all over me!" The raft of older academics bird-dogging younger women is amusing -- if you're not a woman; that woman.

New filmmakers are justly feted for their work, talking to journalists about art and passion. There are gala, red carpet premieres at the Roy Thomson Hall, an immense modern opera house. Then there are "Special Presentations"—a section with a not-so-special twenty-eight selections—films that add a little glitz as second-tier or career-regrouping stars drop into town. (There are stars, but niche ones.) The Canadian press is filled with vipers. The gossip columnists are cutting. They mock the rituals. They mock the cocktail parties. They are fed and then they bite. Their prose lazes through fresh bursts of vitriol. The VIPs cower, out of commoners' sight, if not out of the next day's newsprint.

Only a few days in, you can already tell those who are seeing five or six films (or more) in a day. Puffy faces, dazed expressions, an oleaginous walk like moonmen back on Earth. The dreamy look or the thrilled look is more rare -- undiluted joy from having witnessed a good thing take place in the dark. Three days in, the pop revelation was Human Traffic, a shared buzz among those who laughed and grinned their way all the way through. Writer-director Justin Kerrigan, twenty-seven, is an unlikely Welsh Woody Allen—while his subject is a gleeful lost weekend among a crew of ecstasy-chomping Cardiff twentysomethings—the unrelenting zest of the filmmaking made comparisons to Trainspotting inevitable. Yet it's more of a piece with another much-beloved, much-quoted mosaic of a movie—Human Traffic is an Annie Hall for the next generation. Or, quickly, a Miramax movie for some coming season.

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The streets and elevators of Yorkville are filled with filmmakers less well-known than stars and left alone. I said hello to a grinning, ever-energetic Harmony Korine a couple days before the first showing of his julien donkey-boy, eyes clear but his hair and beard looking like they had just been rubbed with a sheet of Snuggle. Celebs need hand-holding, but filmmakers bask in the comfortable atmosphere.

A few watering holes are allowed to stay open later than at other times of year. Cell phones glow in the warm gloom like fireflies on a late summer night. The fest's official watering hole is called Bistro 990. If a real man knows two good bartenders in every city of the world, Alex and Chris are my Toronto samurai. Day or night, almost to a sole, women wear sandals, stiletto hell before the long season of mukluks and snowshoes. So many beautiful faces, I tell a Canadian friend the night before the festival begins. "Wait until tomorrow," she says, "With all the Americans, it'll bring the curve right back down."

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Variety's Todd McCarthy figured out the math: With 256 features in nine days, "It would be possible for seven different people to attend four films daily and still see entirely different sets of films." One writer claims to have seen ninety-five films. A colleague notes, "That's a lot of little cat naps."

Notes on a few: Felicia's Journey, sleek with the majesty of things in muted light. Hitchcockian guilt and mother love doused in Atom Egoyan's elegant, stately fashion. Ang Lee's Civil War intimate epic, Ride with the Devil, reveals the Taiwan-born filmmaker to be our decade's equivalent of the Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz: always ready to leap nimbly into a fresh or style at short notice. Bruno Dumont's Cannes-prize sharer, Humanity, (L'humanité) shot with a nonjudgmental stare and tranquil pacing, is filled with revulsion, minimalist shrieks of horror at the cruelty of the world. It's exquisite and near-unbearable.

Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, a wry riff on John Boorman's stylish Point Blank where Terence Stamp steps into the force-of-nature shoes of Lee Marvin. (Ed Lachman's deeply burnished cinematography is a love letter to Los Angeles’ grimy light.) Abbas Kiarostami's rigorous, rewarding journey, Where the Wind Takes Us. François Ozon's Les amants criminel (Criminal Lovers) is a night-black outlaw couple story that turns into Hansel and Gretel, a fine return to form for the still-young, bracingly clever director of See the Sea.

Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Two Girls is mature work from a filmmaker whose films are too few and far between. His first film to make it to the screen since 1993's Being Human it's a weave of comedic musings rather than a bravura work like his melancholy masterpiece of mood and tone, 1987's Housekeeping.

In My Best Fiend, Werner Herzog revisits the sites of his epic collaborations with the late, mad actor Klaus Kinski. In Peru, on the location of the great, mad Aguirre the Wrath of God, Herzog tells his camera, "Every gray hair on my head, I call Kinski." (He displays the same personality as an abusive father in julien donkey-boy.)

At a screening for Benoît Jacquot's icy, oblique family drama Pas de scandale, (Keep It Quiet) starring Isabelle Huppert, a major arthouse distributor dashed out for coffee halfway in. I asked the person between us, "Does that mean it's a pass?" No, she said, he's just trying to stay awake.

I wonder if he saw Alex Winter's Fever, with Henry Thomas as a sympathetic hero who may or not be losing his mind as he grows sicker. His life is not a sleepwalking "Crime and Punishment," but it's uncommonly well-crafted entertainment that embellishes on Winter's influences—mostly Tarkovsky, Dreyer and Mizoguchi. Winter also shows a fine ear for urban murmur and yowl, inventing a grimy Brooklyn with only a green and black palette of Euro-murk.

Sex is on the mind of many movies at festivals. This year was no exception, and journalists were quick to align movies with titles like the challenging, explicit French Romance; the Korean Lies, a stylish tale of mutual and reciprocal self-debasement; the Belgian A Pornographic Affair and the Spanish Between Your Legs. Nice hook for your articles, guys and girls. But check out some of the more mysterious, dreamy, furtive work from the likes of Kiarostami, Korine, Jacquot, Kitano, Christopher Doyle. There was scatty grace in Wong Kar-Wai's cinematographer's much-maligned first feature, Away with Words, perfumed with voluptuous ennui, the camera as drunk as his protagonist, a gay bar owner whose every babble is an ode to beplasterment, the inside of bars and the mind of a corroded liver.

Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro is a sweetly nutty story of a yakuza softened up by an acquaintance with a young boy. Many critics, wanting more violent-cop material from the Japanese master, dismissed it. They're wrong. A documentary on the making of Kikujiro, Jam Session: The Official Bootleg Of Kikujiro was a sweet sidebar, showing the unflappable Kitano at work, laughing at himself, the filmmaking process, the wacky story he's constantly rejiggering. There was a delirious Hong Kong cop comedy, Bullets Over Summer, that made my last day at the festival; Jeremy Podeswa's elegant, aromatic The Five Senses; and Lynn Ramsay's dour but swimmingly visualized slab of social realism in a Glasgow slum, Ratcatcher.

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More: Alison Maclean's likable, loping adaptation of Denis Johnson's remarkable story collection of the same name, Jesus' Son. Billy Crudup as "F.H." (for Fuck Head), a 1970s junkie who wide-eye puppy-dogs his way through life and its unceasing troubles. There is need and want, but there is thankfulness for each instant's experience. Maclean's the same way: She's so happy to be directing for the screen again that she can't help but keep showing you things. As in her 1992 debut, Crush, Maclean composes a limpid, effortless visual style that matches the tossed-off poetry of Johnson's piercing, off-kilter dialogue.

Still more: Tim Roth's The War Zone is a refined directorial debut that is redolent of the most intimate horror: incest and its horrible results. The look of the film is epic; the acting is dauntingly visceral, particularly by the non-actors who play teenage siblings, Lara Belmont and Freddie Cunliffe. Veterans Ray Winstone and Tilda Swinton are fine. Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai boasts Robby Müller's acetylene-lit metropolis, RZA's trip-hoppy score, Forest Whitaker's lumbering, ursine hitman who is both cartoon and embodiment of the samurai creed (as well as a knowing nod to Jean-Pierre Melville’s well-dressed incantation of murder and alienation, Le Samouraï.

I run into a filmmaker who's out drinking late one night after the premiere of a fine, dark film, but says the next will be darker. "The image will have to be completely black, it's so dark." Then there are the handful of stunners that don't require the fine-tuning of consensus, the honing of buzz. That's the case of Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry, a bracing, horrific vision of a life interrupted. There's the rare film that, from the first few shots, composition, music selections, dialogue, acting, you know you're in good hands, even in an exuberant, monstrous ride like this. Hilary Swank's sweetly butch androgyne is only the center of a totally controlled piece. "Either I'm fucked up," a character says at one point, "Or something's totally weird." It's a sterling portrait of l'amour fou. Perfect love is always doomed: the social order cannot take being excluded. Swank embodies the polymorphous effervescence ascribed to the real life Brandon Teena. Like those around her, you can't tell from scene to scene what sexuality she's oozing, but you're swept away by a singular joie de vivre. She wants to be female, but we also want Brandon to survive. It’s one of the best murder-in-the-heartland chillers, alongside Badlands and Lawrence Schiller’s feature version of The Executioner's Song.

But one of most venturesome films, steeped in confusion and a closing half-hour that strains for the transcend and may, shockingly, have attained it, is Harmony Korine's unregenerately experimental, shot-on-video, transferred-to-film julien donkey-boy: Dogme 6. There is a band of defenders of Korine's first, Gummo, and most were shocked at what he wrought this time up. julien partakes of the consciousness of a troubled schizophrenic (Ewen Bremner), and while Korine tosses off longeurs along the way, the effulgent, smudgy look is that of faded religious icons, and at the end, you know what you have seen but cannot reconcile the depth of emotions it churns up.

But that's only the beginning. That's the start of the story. Three hundred nineteen films total, 171 of them world and North American premieres. Fifty-two countries. Ten days in another town. Seven hundred sixty certified foreign journalists (the number of certifiable may be half that).

Thousands of enthusiastic Torontonians. Countless mendacities, epiphanies without number.

You can't see everything. You can't write about everything.

You can't share all the stories generous storytellers have shared, hangovers are not confessed.

Sleep is indicated.

David Mamet appreciates a challenge at his desk, but not in latter-day interviews, such as the flameout in early August with podcaster Sam Fragoso on his “Talk Easy” program. (The eighty-minute episode is here. The testy two-and-a-half-minute climax is here.) The seventy-seven-year-old Chicago guy was always contentious in conversation, but not so confrontational as has been his recent remit.

For Filmmaker, I spoke to Mamet at Sundance in 1997 when The Spanish Prisoner was making it to market.

David Mamet takes his fascination with the grift, the cheat, the con, the human capacity for self-delusion to new heights in The Spanish Prisoner, a light-yet-clammy thriller filled with twists and reversals, partaking of the gloss of a Hitchcock picture like North by Northwest and the labyrinthine turnings of movies like the more recent The Usual Suspects. Campbell Scott stars as Joe Ross, a mathematician who's invented something called "The Process," a kind of algorithm that could shake the financial markets and make a pretty penny for his employers. Joe doesn't think he's getting his fair share of the potential proceeds; enter suave and mysterious Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), who proceeds to turn Joe's world upside down. Mamet regular--and expert on cons and magic--Ricky Jay is on hand as a confidant of Jimmy's, as well as Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, playing a new secretary who's putting a different kind of make on Jimmy.

Among his own cons, Mamet has cultivated a reputation as a tough interview, batting away questions with sage quotations from esteemed forebears, brooking little discussion of the easily-parodied, hard-to-duplicate cadences of his best work for stage and film. A 1997 Men's Journal article written by a Mamet friend of two decades contains about half-a-dozen words of direct quotation. Yet after the American premiere of The Spanish Prisoner at the Sundance festival, Mamet was voluble, chatty, even. In a October interview with the on-line magazine Salon, Mamet fretted that the greatest vexation of being interviewed was a danger of "warp[ing] the process toward some inappropriate, ulterior ends... To try to defend one's self. To try to explain one's personal life. To do anything other than explain why the public might enjoy the film." But, despite his reservations, he's made all sorts of pronouncements on the Festival circuit, from Toronto to Deauville to Sundance prior to the movie's April release. Still, he held to his burnished reputation at a screening where he greeted the audience, "I'll be glad to try to avoid a couple of your questions."

Along with selling The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet has published two books of essays, "True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor" and "Three Uses of the Knife”; has a play on Broadway, "The Old Neighborhood”; and his script for Wag the Dog was Oscar-nominated. But with his fifth movie, the 50-year-old Chicago native, who now lives and writes in Vermont and Cambridge, has entered the realm of the truly independent filmmaker. How so? Jean Doumanian, longtime producer of Woody Allen's work, functioned, in Mamet's words, as his "Mama Warbucks," raising the money and telling Mamet to come back with a finished picture. At a Toronto press conference, Mamet said, laughing, "The old joke has it that the perfect date is one who makes love until two a.m. and then turns into a pizza. The perfect producer is one who gives you the money and says 'See you at the opening,' and that is exactly what happened here."

What was the germ of making this movie, putting your fascinations into the form of a light thriller?

I was in Florida and I witnessed a motor yacht with a helicopter on top. It was the kind of lifestyle I couldn't imagine and then I proceeded to imagine it.

Were there particular predecessors you looked to? Or was it general style or genre?

t wasn't so much a style, but as you say, it was the genre, which is fairly strict, the genre of the light thriller. It's like paint by numbers, you fill it in. I found the thriller form really demanding and gratifying. Of course, I realized if I was going to do that I would have to look at Hitchcock, the master. And I've wanted to work with Campbell Scott since I saw Longtime Companion. I wanted to do this story in the Hitchcock-Donen clean-cut-patrician-Leyendecker-Arrow-shirt kind of mold and he was right for it. Somebody said something, it might have been Jules Dassin on genre. He said this wonderful thing, "For example, a gangster film, your only choice is whether the hero dies at the bottom of the church steps or the top of the church steps." I thought that was pretty good.

Well, a lot of people who have worked extensively in genre say that it frees you up for your own concerns, you provide some kind of thrill every fifteen minutes, in the meantime you can follow another path alongside that familiar path.

Yeah, I do think that's true. The same as with sort of the essay form, the essay form is so strict, it allows you to be outrageous as well. I love that.

Do you presume that audiences, as they watch, will forget all the plants, the props and little details that later produce plot points?

The magical technique or theory of anticipation, is that the trick has to happen before you are aware the trick is taking place. That's when the [con in this film] happens, before you are aware it is taking place. I think that precept may also take place in the planting of information. It should take place before you are aware it's significant or sufficiently far away from the event that you've forgotten about it.

How do you divide your day with all the writing pursuits you follow? Are there different trails of inspiration for a play, a film, an essay?

Yeah. You write it down. You work on one, you have to finish it. Finish that, work on another one.

There's such a prodigious amount of material out there right now with your name on it.

Well, yeah, I-I-I tend to write a lot. And also just by accident these last six months a lot of stuff has been produced. Those essays I've been working on for a long tie. It's just an accident they all appeared. I work on a lot of things. Usually one thing demands to be finished. What sequence they came in, that's lost to the misty morass of time.

Do you still use a typewriter?

Yeah. First I write in longhand.

Is that strictly custom, habit?

I type much faster than I can think so that's why I write it out in longhand first. See, I get scared a lot. So I like having my various drafts around me, my notes up on the wall. They all exist there. They comfort me: Perhaps I'm not the undisciplined, lazy sot that know myself to be. But also perhaps the presence of all these notes might indicate the future culmination of the project, at some point I might be able to wend my way down through it all and come up with a pristine draft. I have no doubt [that using a computer would affect my style]. Just the scrolling. The couple of times that I've written on electronic typewriters. You do something ten hours a day over the years you get used to the sound, the he rhythm of the keys, the rhythm of the line and all of a sudden there is no sound of the keys, there's no resistance or rhythm of the line.

The con here is more intricate than ones you've portrayed before, but it's based on a traditional one?

Yeah. The Spanish Prisoner con is still being done today. It's a fairly long con. The guys who are involved with long cons, which involves getting a substantial amount of money off a person and putting the person 'on the send.' Making a connection with the guy and sending him off to get some money and come back. That's the long con. Of course, I've seen a lot of the short con. In New York, a short con takes place on a street corner, someone's trying to sell you a stolen watch or a set of stamps or to get you to lend you money to x, y, z. You see that in New York all the time. I think everybody's fascinated with cons. There's something fascinating about people not being what they are, and our capacity to use our intelligence to try to anticipate where they're going, and then failing and being tricked. That's like magic, I mean. Most people like magic.

There's a popular Oprah guest who put out a book called "Scam School," and the litany of cons there are assembled, it seems, to wag a finger to a little old lady, when the guy comes to the door? Don't-Fall-For-This. Joe Ross has a hell of a lot more at stake where he allows the switch to take place. How conscious were you of building up to that point, where we would continue to believe that a man of his intelligence and experience would allow himself to be taken?

Well, writing a movie like this is exactly the same as if we were developing a con, because I am developing a con. Just as the people in the movie have to get something from the people in the movie which he would not want to give them, the filmmaker has to get something from the audience--their belief, their credulity--which they wouldn't normally do if they were thinking about it. So, just as in any magic trick, you don't do a magic trick by telling a person what you're going to do and then doing it. You do a magic trick by letting the person anticipate where you're going and while they're doing that, you pull your rabbit out.

How do you walk the line between too complex for an audience and it being too simple to convince?

That's really the question. The answer is that's the craft of doing it, to the extent it's done correctly in this movie. That is the trick. There's a great con that happened to my friend, the actor Mike Nussbaum. He was walking down the street one day in New York, he's a white guy, this African American kid comes up, says, Mike, Mike, how are you? Mike says, "I'm, I'm fine." Kid says don't you know me?" Mike says, "I, I, no." Kid says, "Who's your best black friend in New York?" He said who it was, "I'm blah-blah's son!" Mike says, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, f course." The kid gets into, "Jesus Christ, somebody just stole my wallet, can you lend me fifty bucks, blah blah blah." Mike said, and I think he's a right, it's a brilliant confidence game because it played on the distraction caused by letting Mike create the idea in his mind, "Isn't it because you don't like African Americans that you don't know who I am?" when in fact Mike'd never seen the kid in his life. The kid just used that phrase, "Who's your best black friend in New York," to get the money. The idea is so distracting, can I have forgotten the son of my best friend, oh my god am I that stupid? Which allows his money to be stolen. Whoever thought that up was a very smart individual.

Social unease substituting for narrative suspense.

Exactly so, exactly so. Like the pickpocket. You can't steal a guy's wallet, the guy's thinking about his wallet. The pickpocket steals your wallet by getting you to think of something else.

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Why is Steve Martin's Jimmy such a good con man?

Well, first off, he's a terrific actor, Steve. What Jimmy keeps doing is pushing the other guy away. Rather than saying, come over her, let me take advantage of you, he keeps in effect whacking the guy in the face and treating him like a pile of shit. Which makes the guy hate him. Then it allows Steve to apologize time and again, oh my god, I'm so sorry, you're the real gentleman it's not me. Although I'm the richest man in the world, blah-blah, you, the working man, you have such good manners. So like in any confidence game, it works not because the victim gives confidence to the thief, It works in confidence games because the thief gives his confidence. "Oh I've just been robbed , can you help me." "Although I'm the richest man in the world, my manners aren't that good, I admire you."

At times it’s like sexual seduction. Where someone finds themselves reluctantly in a relationship and instead of addressing it, starts treating the other person abusively. Then the more the other person pushes, the more the first person comes toward them.

Yeah, that's right.

So what's the weakness, what's the need?

It's always some need or other. It's always said, you can't cheat an honest man. It varies from con to con, or it's the same thing in abusive relationships. The person who's being abused is offered something, perhaps it's not something they might be conscious of. All confidence game pays on or exploit a desire of the victim's ride or ego. The Campbell Scott character, his greed is played upon in the sense that he is not getting what he deserves. Which is a common human button. He wants to be well thought of: he feels he's not getting what he deserves from his employers. So he's offered this perfect world where everything is simple, there's this beautiful, imaginary woman waiting for him because Jimmy gave him this two-dollar camera. Somehow the other guy has perceived his excellence. That's where the con starts. Anybody can be conned and I think we all are in one way or another all the time. There's a wonderful book called "Swindling and Selling" that I read after I made this movie. He says that most American selling is really no different from the confidence game.

You've also written that directing is a lot more simple than people think it to be. How do work with the actors, particularly in trying to keep to the cadences that you indicate so stringently on the page.

As Sophocles said, stand there and say that. I've worked with so many of the same people over the years, we go over the lines a little bit, then a little bit more on the set, then a little more while we're setting the lights, we go over them. I just tell 'em, say the words best they can.

Pause. A long pause.

No, I try to write dialogue so that it's easy to say. It's natural to say. I hope that the dialogue is easy to say and easy to film but there are exigencies in filming any conversation scene, particularly in masters.

Do you know what stories are going to become plays or films?

No idea. It's like, some days you get up and take a shower, you get up this morning, I want to take a bath today. Why does that seem like a better idea?

So should we trust appearances? Or assume no one is who they seem to be?

There's the old poker adage: trust everybody, but cut the cards.

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I wrote about “Jafsie and John Henry: Essays by David Mamet” in 1999 for Newcity.

IT IS HARD TO RESIST A SLIM BOOK THAT OPENS WITH THE CONFESSION, "I do not know how I escaped being a criminal." David Mamet, 51, has avoided his criminality, he asserts, through diligent application to his ever-burgeoning output of twenty-five or so plays, ten published books atop published play scripts, fourteen produced screenplays (five of which he has also directed), as well as blah and blah and blah. His essays, however, amuse me to no end.

"The essay form is so strict, it allows you to be outrageous as well," he said one of the chances I had to interview him, "I love that."

Alongside his breezy flipbook for the director, "On Directing," we now have heavier compendia that also includes his occasional pieces and magazine forays, bearing title-subtitle constructions like "True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor" and "3 Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama."

Sounds heavy, but a typical aside in Mamet's essays is the offhand, sleight-of-hand "But I digress..." His is playful oratory at its most elevated moments, provocative and contrary. "Like the pickpocket," he told me amid a pageant of commerce, peddling The Spanish Prisoner at Park City just as Bill Clinton was being revealed as a wagged dog. "You can't steal a guy's wallet, the guy's thinking about his wallet. The pickpocket steals your wallet by getting you to think of something else."

The same applies to the strongest of his written assertions. Some readers would perhaps turn to safe and restful sleep, sleep, sleep at Mamet's laconic verbiage and pithy parries, but at his most perceptive the terse phrasings are a gentlemanly form of rhetorical terrorism. Dismissals and the amassing of absolutes are customary. "I can't abide stainless steel... I will accept it in a toaster, but I can't see that it has any place in the blade of a knife." In "Looking at Fifty" in the present volume, Mamet writes, "We see that Yesterday and Today, the Angry Young Man and the Old Fart, are one. The astounding breakthrough is, time after time and yet again, revealed as the scourge of humankind, and 'that's how it is on this bitch of an earth'—the process of history is ongoing, unchanging save for lesser or greater novelties of folly. It will end much as it began and no one the better for it." And you wish to nod, in Mametian holograph, Exactly so, exactly so. "I am sick of being young," the voice says, "I haven't been young for years."

Words on moral necessities alternate with passages on the elegance of the black cashmere sweater or the banality of the reversed baseball cap. Mamet speaks of the prevailing mendacity of the Hollywood producer, a favored figure of fun: "'Let me take your cow to market for you, son,' the highwayman says... One could meet, on that road, the confidence man, the thief, and on arrival at the marketplace, one could meet, in addition, the entrepreneur, willing to blur and cross the line between business, sharp practice, and outright theft. In the modern producer one can meet them all."

He follows that excursion with horror tales of the surplus display of value common to "L.A. Homes," wherein he asks, "What are these savages doing in these lovely homes? I wonder. For the homes are actually lovely." The words come: "These folks, who greenlit or greenlighted blah blah blah part Eye Vee, should display the proverbial moose-on-satin with the eyes which follow one about. These people should, by rights, have the bullfight poster with one's name upon it hanging in the john INSTEAD OF WHICH we find the pure, unscented handmade soap from some off-brand country lying, pristine, in the small, green Hampshire soap dish." Umbrage is a dish served piping-hot: "Now, friends, let me tell you what I mean. How dare these anti-literate traffic-cops at the roadside crash which is our culture, how dare they dare to have anything around them which is lovely?"

And, too, Poker and Scotch and the Hunt must make their necessary appearances. Sentences end dramatically, suddenly; scholarly citations are diminished by verbal shrugs. Blunt schist alternates with surly flip. There is not little, but instead no patience for fools, and the only foolishness forgiven is essential human folly. There are times when Mamet could even be Bobby Gould doing a dialectical toe-to-toe with the devil himself.

In "Bad Boys," he hectors well, dissecting the supposition that men are more "arrogant, uncaring, and selfish" than women, noting: "Now, the truly arrogant, selfish individual, is unconcerned with the opinion of others, and to him or her these accusations have no weight. The non-arrogant individual, concerned at the presence or possibility of these unfortunate propensities in him or herself, however, can be upset and/or controlled by accusations of arrogance and selfishness."

Whose voice is this? That of a poker-player? An academic who curries the pose of pedantry? A resentful child? An impatient polymath? No. A Dramatist. A Storyteller who understands Voice. Art is spoken of as Art, and italics are not uncommon: "Do not internalize the industrial model," he coerced actors in "True and False," "You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.”