SEBERG: THE BENEDICT ANDREWS INTERVIEW

The new film from Australian filmmaker Benedict Andrews explores a time in modern American history when those elected to enforce the will of the people instead turned on society’s progressive left. It was 1969, and the symbolic target of the conservative law enforcers was actress Jean Seberg, an expat American adored by those of her adopted homeland, France, but targeted by The F.B.I. for her views on racial injustice. Starring a remarkable Kristen Stewart, SEBERG captures an America at the dawn of a new, darker time and the young woman who bore the brunt of that shift in values. 

Fittingly, SCREEN-SPACE spoke to Andrews as the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump kicked off. “Over the course of production, history felt like it was accelerating at such a terrifying pace and things in the movie seemed to become more and more relevant,” said the director, from his home in Iceland, “It reflected a deliberate manipulation and lying and you see that in an institutional way.”

SCREEN-SPACE: At the Deauville Film Festival press conference, your leading lady defined Jean Seberg as impulsive, idealistic, naive, but well intentioned. Was Seberg the right sort of superstar at the wrong point in American history?

ANDREWS: Oh, that's an interesting question. The movie is certainly quite transparent about impulsive aspects of her behaviour that might have led her into the mixing up of her romantic life and her political life. But I don't believe that that was what caused the FBI to destroy her. The character ‘Hakim Jamal’ (played by Anthony Mackie) says that she got caught in the crossfire of white America's war on black America. You had a very conservative, reactionary, racist FBI mandate in the COINTELPRO program to basically destroy any chance of black power and change in America, and she allowed herself to be involved in that. Her husband, Romain Gary, said that she had a case of sympathy at first sight and I think she genuinely couldn't stand the injustice in America and unequal playing field in terms of race. So I believe everything that she was doing there was actually extremely well intentioned and from a really strong, clear place. And I think she believed in truth and she believed in having a voice. (pictured, above; Kirsten Stewart as Jean Seberg)

SCREEN-SPACE: Her activism had a public face, via her celebrity, but also a very private, personal aspect…

ANDREWS: I think she genuinely couldn't stand the injustice in America and unequal playing field in terms of race. And, yes, a lot of her activism was relatively private if you compare to her to a much more outspoken, perhaps even grandstanding figure like Jane Fonda. The activism is very much of her time too. It's what became derided by Tom Wolfe [who] invented this derogatory term of ‘radical chic’ for the big Hollywood people being involved in politics. But I think that was very much a move of the Conservative Right’s to undercut [activism], certainly in Jean's case. He wrote that about a buddy of Leonard Bernstein's case and I think there were just attacks on an engaged left within the cultural industry. (Pictured, above; Jean Seberg)

SCREEN-SPACE: Your film comes along at a time when US politics and its very dark undercurrent is being exposed. Does that put a spotlight on this film's view on American politics? Does it give it a pertinent relevance that you may not have otherwise counted on?

ANDREWS: I always kind of knew that 1969 was going to speak to 2019. Jean says, "America, this country's at war with itself." On one hand, the unresolved questions of racial injustice in America, but more especially the question of what we see in the movie, in an embryonic DNA form, the culture that we now live in. You see all the seeds of a culture of mass surveillance. In a very personal way, our narrative shows what happens when privacy is violated and weaponized and turned against somebody for their beliefs. And we see the horrific cost of that in the emotional toll on Jean and the political cost of that in terms of the relationships that are undermined and destroyed. That's something that in a terrifying way is speaking to our times.

SCREEN-SPACE: I get the feeling that there's a lot of people in Washington at the moment who are a lot like FBI agent Jack (played by Jack O’Connell) – patriots torn between allegiance and morality.

ANDREWS: That's what I think is really interesting. There's an echo of an Edward Snowden in there and I was quite aware that the story was ultimately, in a way, going to be about truth. In these early stages of the impeachment hearings, we’re seeing these career bureaucrats stepping up and saying, "Actually I have to speak the truth, even if I'm going to risk something in that. I don't believe in what's going on." And Jack goes from [being] a soldier who believes in the war, to realizing that the institution he's in is fighting a dirty war that he can't believe in any anymore.

SCREEN-SPACE: I'm hopeful that if any good is going to come out of the current political climate, it will be a return to what I think is the last great era of American filmmaking, the 1970s, and cinema's strength at interpreting the times; films like The Parallax View, The Conversation, All the President’s Men. Hopefully Seberg is at the forefront of a new introspection in our cinema.

ANDREWS: I hope so. They were very important movies for me in this. I mean you've touched upon nearly all of them. Medium Cool was also really important for me, which is a little looser, freer film, in a way. I love the tensions of those cooler thrillers. Klute was really important, too, because it has a woman at the centre of it and that strange relationship with her and Donald Sutherland that reminded me of the Jean/Jack relationship. Those films are so important because they come at a time of absolute crisis in the political identity of the country. We used the similar lenses, the Panavision C-series lenses in order to reference them and we have a couple of nods to The Conversation. One of my favourite shots in the movie is where the camera drifts through the van, Jack's there and the two black girls come up and do their makeup. That's a really deliberate homage to a scene where Gene Hackman's looking out and you see the two women come and do their makeup. It's just a beautiful metaphor for the screen of cinema, but also it shows us the drug of surveillance that Jack has there, which you don't want the audience to think about this while they're watching It's exactly the same drug they have watching on a screen. (Pictured, above; Stewart and Andrews, on-set)

SCREEN-SPACE: We should have a chat about your leading lady. I love the line describing Jean that says she's bigger in France than she is here and that talks very much to Kristen. What was the methodology you and she employed in crafting the Seberg character?

ANDREWS: Yeah, she was the perfect fit. There is no version of this movie without her in it. I think that the movies happen when they're meant to happen. This was a story that people have been trying to get made at different points in time and the script had a couple of other lives before I came on board. I really believe that things come to life when the film gods want them to; the political relevance of the movie is one of those reasons, but the other really is Kristen. It's kind of a miracle to have this young American actress who has an understanding of what it means to work in mainstream Hollywood and to work in French cinema. I think she and Jean Seberg, and maybe Jane Fonda, are the only people to achieve that. For both of them to be style icons, for both of them to have this forward looking yet classical fashion sense and both of them have such a singular idiosyncratic and androgynous look was also just incredible. They were both thrust into the public eye at a very tender age, Jean with the competition for the Saint Joan film of Preminger and Kristen obviously following on from the Fincher movie (Panic Room) with the Twilight films and both of them, perhaps Jean more so, had a tough time with the domestic press, were both treated a bit unfairly. (Pictured, above; l-r, Anthony Mackie, Zazie Beetz, Stewart, Andrews, Jack O'Connell and Margaret Qualley)

SCREEN-SPACE: Her unconventionality suits a film that is an unconventional biopic.

ANDREWS: I'm bored shitless of one-way biopics. And I was never interested in an actress who would only do an impersonation. I knew very quickly from Kristen and just also having an impulse about the type of actress that she was that that wasn't really the case. We were going to be able to find Jean together from the inside out. And I'm just so incredibly impressed and proud of how she puts herself on the line and how in this performance she transforms in a way that she hasn't in other movies. She has a huge emotional range in it. We watched a lot of Jean's films together. She had a voice coach, but we decided to only make the smallest alteration to her voice. She was just really prepared to put herself on the line and to really go there. And I felt we just had a really good trust and then this special thing happened that you hope for in a director, actor relationship, where it starts to become a dance.

SEBERG is in selected Australian cinemas from January 30 through ICON Films.

1BR GIVES HORRORS OF RENTAL LIVING A NEW LEASE

David Marmor’s directorial debut, 1BR, will play well with Australia’s capital city audiences, for whom rental-house hunting is its own nightmarish reality. For Marmor's protagonist Sarah, the gated apartment community she’s found in sunny LA seems too good to be true; in true spine-tingling psychological-horror style, so it proves to be. Working from his lean, taut script and with a fearless leading lady in Nicole Brydon Bloom, Marmor (pictured, below) has crafted an intensely gripping examination of modern urban living. Ahead of the Australian Premiere of 1BR at Fangoria x Monster Fest 2019, Marmor spoke with SCREEN-SPACE about the film that RogerEbert.com praised as “unique horror.” 

SCREEN-SPACE: Your understated directing style serves the simmering tension and unfolding puzzle of the film superbly. Films such as Polanski's The Tenant and Rosemary's Baby came to mind for me, as well as Brian Yuzna's Society. Who are the filmmakers and what are the films that inform your directing?

DAVID MARMOR: You hit the nail on the head with Polanski. I'm not sure it'd be possible to make a movie like this without being influenced by his apartment trilogy. I also found inspiration in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, which I think is a masterful example of subjective storytelling, planting us firmly in Nina's troubled mind from start to finish. Michael Haneke and Stanley Kubrick always influence me, and for 1BR I drew especially from Caché and A Clockwork Orange. Other influences are harder to pin down, as I think I've subconsciously absorbed lessons from so many filmmakers I grew up on. Odd as it may seem, there's probably a little Spielberg in there, too. (Pictured, right; Nicole Brydon Bloom, as Sarah, in 1BR)

SCREEN-SPACE: There's a strong thematic subtext that explores the sacrifice we have to make to conform; one of my favourite lines is, "The sooner you give up, the sooner you'll be free." Is your film a call-to-arms, to cling to your individuality and personal voice? Did you come at the story with a socio-political agenda?

DAVID MARMOR: I really don't have any political agenda. I know there's at least one reviewer out there who was convinced the movie is an Alex Jones-style paranoid fantasy, and someone else once came up to me and said conspiratorially that he understood my real meaning - that it was all an indictment of socialism. I'm actually happy that different audiences are finding different meanings in the movie, but my intent in creating the community was in fact to give it very positive underlying values--and then twist them into something terrible. That was the most frightening idea to me, and it's also the way these things often seem to evolve in real life. I don't think anybody starts out intending to create a repressive religion or a violent death cult (at least I hope not!), but when your goal is to save all of humanity, there are no limits to the means you can justify to yourself. If there's any deeper meaning underlying the story, for me it's more metaphorical than political. I think many people struggle with the tension between being true to ourselves and what we owe our family, our friends, and our society. Those obligations, as important as they are, can make us feel trapped in our lives. On some level, I think of this story as a kind of extreme exploration of that internal tension. (Pictured, above; Marmor, right, directing Bloom during principal photography)

SCREEN-SPACE: The dark psychology that goes into breaking Sarah's spirit is agonisingly specific. Is the methodology you employ based upon research or just plucked from the dark recesses of your own mind?

DAVID MARMOR: Sadly, the world has much darker recesses than my mind, and I found I didn't need to make much up. The methods in the movie are almost entirely based in reality. Many of the physical methods come directly from techniques the U.S. government has used in the Iraq War and other recent conflicts, as well as practices employed by the British government during the Troubles. I also drew heavily from my research into cults, many of which seem to share a common set of psychological tools for isolating people and keeping them dependent.

David Marmor's 1BR will screen as part of Fangoria x Monster Fest 2019 (Melbourne - Oct 13/16; other states Oct 31-Nov 3). Full session and venue details available at the official website. 

PIERCING: THE MIA WASIKOWSKA INTERVIEW

Mia Wasikowska has spent the last decade establishing herself as one of the most daring and in-demand actresses working in film today. With only a handful of local credits to her name (including Greg McLean’s killer-croc romp, Rogue), Wasikowska hit the Hollywood casting circuit, where everyone noticed her immediately opposite Gabriel Byrne in the TV series In Treatment. In quick succession, she was sought out by such A-list directors as Edward Zwick (Defiance, with Daniel Craig); Lisa Cholodenko (the Oscar-nominated The Kids are All Right, with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore); Tim Burton (her breakthrough lead role in the blockbuster Alice in Wonderland, opposite Johnny Depp); Gus Van Sant (Restless); John Hillcoat (Lawless, with Tom Hardy); Chan-wook Park (Stoker, opposite Nicole Kidman); Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive, with Tilda Swinton); John Curran (Tracks, for which she was AACTA-nominated); David Cronenberg (Maps to The Stars, co-starring Robert Pattinson); and, Guillermo del Toro (Crimson Peak, with Jessica Chastain).

Her latest is the body-horror/romantic thriller Piercing, in which she stars opposite wanna-be psychopath Chris Abbott as a prostitute willing to go the gory distance with her latest john. The sophomore effort from The Eyes of The Mother director Nicolas Pesce, the film is playing a limited season in Australia before its US run begins on February 1. In front of a sold-out session at her local cinema, the Dendy arthouse multiplex in the cool inner-city Sydney suburb of Newtown (“It’s the first time I’ve been able to walk to a Q&A!”), Mia Wasikowska joined SCREEN-SPACE managing editor Simon Foster to discuss the light and dark of her latest challenging role… (Main photo: Sharif Hamza) 

SCREEN-SPACE: You were coming off a string of very big productions – Crimson Peak, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Man With The Iron Heart – when you took on the part of ‘Jackie’ in Piercing. Was part of the appeal its two-room shoot?

WASIKOWSKA: Yeah, sort of. I really wanted to do something modern, very contemporary, very different to the repressed women I’d been playing for the last few years; anything that means I didn’t have to wear a corset. This was the most obvious antidote. I was originally approached to play the wife, with an older actress set to play ‘Jackie’. Then, a week before shooting, shat actress fell out and Nicholas came to me and said, “How about you play Jackie?” I had 24 hours to decide and then I was into the role. (Pictured, right; with co-star, Christoper Abbott)

SCREEN-SPACE: So not a great deal of time was spent crafting a backstory for her?

WASIKOWSKA: I used to do that quite a bit, in my earlier days, but [now] I just like jumping in, not thinking about it too much. Especially with a character like Jackie, who is a character that could have overwhelmed me, it was better just to not overthink the part. As I get older, I’m looking for more and more movies that I just hope I am going to enjoy making.

SCREEN-SPACE: You put a lot of faith in your collaborators when taking on this sort of material. How did you find those early days with your director, Nicolas Pesce?

WASIKOWSKA: I was a little dubious (laughs). It is a bunch of men making this type of movie and I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to get when I turned up. I couldn’t quite figure out who was going to make this movie. But when I first met Nic I was really comforted by the fact that he just seemed like a really genuine guy, someone I could trust, and then the excitement set in. (Pictured, left; l-r, star Chris Abbott, Wasikowska, director Nicolas Pesce)

SCREEN-SPACE: Did you draw upon the same source material as Nicolas? Did you read Ryû Murakami novel?

WASIKOWSKA: No, I didn’t. I still haven’t (laughs). I didn’t have time. Chris, Nic and I decided that this film talks about the affect of trauma, notably childhood trauma. You get an indication, in those flashbacks, of what Reed has been through and how that applies to who he is now. We applied a similar thinking to Jackie. Although there is nothing stated in the film, I took the notion of two traumatised souls finding each other as a starting point to understanding her and their dynamic.

SCREEN-SPACE: Despite all the on-screen nastiness, it is a very sweet film, a true romance in every sense…

WASIKOWSKA: When we were making the film, we were always conscious of both sides of these characters. Of course, there is their darkness but there’s also a kind of childlike vulnerability or sweetness that comes through in their interactions. That subtext was really fun to play, given the outwardly nasty nature of the film’s context. (Pictured, right; Mia Wasikowska as 'Jackie' in Piercing)

SCREEN-SPACE: Piercing exists within the same sub-genre as Secretary or American Mary; the author’s previous work was adapted into Takashi Miike’s shocking masterpiece, Audition. Are these stories you would gravitate towards as viewer?

WASIKOWSKA: I would much sooner make this movie than watch it (laughs). I loved the idea of playing Jackie, not least because it allows you to be somewhat removed from the stylised graphic elements of the story. When we shot the scene where I stab my leg, I was fitted with the prosthetic and two guys on the other side of the room pumped blood through the holes. That’s hard to watch, but it was fun to play. When I made it clear to Nic that on-screen violence is not something I am always comfortable watching, he rationalised it away by telling me, “There’s no murder in the film, there’s no sex.” (Laughs) 

SCREEN-SPACE: The slightly surreal sense of time and place adds to the film’s allure…

WASIKOWSKA: I love that so much about Nic’s vision. You never see daylight in the film. Part of the set was a window, and outside that window was a screen that showed Asian cities that kept changing. He wanted everything about the setting to be somewhat disorienting, never allowing the audience to be sure where they were. He allowed me to use my normal accent, as part of bringing this eclectic style and feel into the mix. That confusion, that sense of slight unreality, is so much part of what the film is. (Pictured, left; Chris Abbott and Wasikowska)

SCREEN-SPACE: You’ve made inner city Sydney your home. Does this mean you will be focussing on making more Australian films, or is this the hub from which you continue an international career?

WASIKOWSKA: I guess both, really. Of course, I’d love to do more work here at home. We have such a great industry, with wonderful storytellers and craftsman, so it is more just about if we have the funding to inspire them and increase the numbers of productions here. We have so much talent but sometimes we just don’t have the [financial] resources. That’s something that’s not necessarily in my control, but I’d love to work here more. I love living here and would love to be able to stay here to do my work.

Presented by Monster Fest in conjunction with Rialto Distribution, PIERCING is screening for a limited time via Dendy Cinemas. It is released in selected US markets and on VOD on February 1.  

SRI LANKAN STAR SOARS IN HELMER'S HARD-HITTING '28'

One of Sri Lanka’s most adored stars, Mahendra Perera has been a box office draw for over three decades. But his latest work, Prasanna Jayakody’s 28, is a challenging social drama that refuses to pander to the mainstream; it follows three working class men as they transport a murdered woman across mountain roads for a hometown burial. As Abasiri, Perera loses himself in one of the most complex screen characters of his long career; the performance earned the veteran star a Best Actor nomination at the 2014 Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA). With his writer/director by his side (for whom the actor kindly provided translation), Perera spoke with SCREEN-SPACE about the career-defining role, the establishment’s reaction to the non-conformist narrative, and the fearlessness being embraced by Sri Lanka’s new wave of talent… 

"When I first read the script, I was a little confused,” admits Perera, star of such regional blockbusters as Walls Within (1997), Flying with One Wing (2002), Boungiorno Italia (2004) and Machan (2008). “I did not form too many ideas. It took a dialogue with Prasanna (pictured, below), and many discussions afterwards, for me to form a picture of this man.” His character is unaware until the day of the long journey that his cargo is to be his late ex-wife, Suddhi (Semini Iddamalgoda). “Finally, I was able to understand his emotional side and bring that out. The inconsistent nature of his behaviour, the ways in which he confronted the situations he found himself facing…well, it proved a challenge to get to the core of this complex character but somehow we did it.”

The inspiration for 28 (the title representing the morgue drawer in which Suddhi’s body is kept) was, as they say, ripped from today’s headlines. Writer/director Jayakody (Sankara, 2007; Karma, 2011) had become disillusioned by the violence that had become increasingly endemic to his homeland and wrote the script as a means by which to interpret this dark shift in the population’s psyche. “In the past few years in Sri Lanka, the newpapers have been full of horrible accounts of violent crimes, especially sexual crimes against women,” says the softly spoken auteur. “Sex is a beautiful, natural thing and it is always disturbing when human desires lead to horrible acts. It is destructive to our society, to any society.”

Wavering between pitch-black character comedy, a searing indictment of patriarchal brutality and open-road travelogue, the film is at its most daring when Suddhi breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience from beyond the grave. Jayakody acknowledges the bravery required for his leading lady (pictured, left) to take on such an artistically and culturally challenging part. “Semini was required to do some extraordinary things, perform in a way that she had never been called upon to do in her other movies,” he says. “Her character is a portrayal of so many Sri Lankan women and hopefully conveys so much of what the women of Sri Lanka must endure. Sri Lankan women can’t speak the truth when they are alive; it is only possible for a dead woman to speak the truth.”

A revelation as the everyman Abasiri, Perera establishes a rich chemistry with his male co-stars Sarath Kothawala and Rukmal Nirosh (pictured, below). But it is likely that a single scene, in which the identity of the woman dawns upon Abasiri and grief and memory overwhelm him, impacted most upon the APSA judging panel. “My studies in the Stanislavsky method of acting were called upon in that scene,” the actor recalls. “I sought out friends who had suffered through a similar grief and drew upon them for guidance, to spark that emotion deep within myself. I was determined not to act, but to try and find that truth within myself, as if that was my wife. It was very difficult, because we shot that scene many times, to get the precise emotion.”

28 has emerged as one of the ‘new wave’ Sri Lankan works, steeped in both high-end artistry and strong social commentary. For Perera, the period represents a rebirth-of-sorts for the local sector. “After 30 years of war and terrorism, it is finding a new shape,” he says. “We still have problems, and there are still those for whom films like 28 will be too disturbing, but we have new, young filmmakers who are willing to work with very challenging concepts. And we have a huge audience in Sri Lanka for this movie, for any movie that comes with new ideas or new themes that can be discussed.”

The national cinema of Sri Lanka faces a number of uphill battles to retain its potency. The exhibition sector is dire; prior to the outbreak of war, 400 cinemas serviced the population. Today, 120 operate; only half of those screen locally made product (it is expected that the region will be fully upgraded to DCP technology in 2017). More worryingly, cinema is often overseen by conservative governing bodies, which monitor content and distribution channels. Says Perera, “There are these political and philosophical officials, who think that these films do damage to our country, but these are unique subjects that need to be addressed in our cinema. As the films begin to get recognition at international events like APSA, a new respect forms.”