2007 MVFF30: LUST, CAUTION—The Evening Class Interview With Ang Lee & Tang Wei

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution—the opening night feature for the 30th Mill Valley Film Festival—is an unsettling piece of film. At first, I felt tripped up by the ample length of its Asian brocade; but, in the days after seeing the film, it kept coming back to me. I kept thinking about it, feeling about it, questioning. In contrast to films that I forget nearly as soon as I leave the theater, Lust, Caution drew me back to Eileen Chang's provocative short story and I found intimations of myself and sifted relevancies from the moral dilemmas of its protagonist Wong Chia-chih, intricately enfleshed by Tang Wei. This marks a great film for me, when its internal conflicts are presented in such austere lines that it's almost like catching one's silhouette in a mirror; when the questions a film raises are, in essence, the questions you ask yourself.

I felt tremendously privileged to deliver my questions directly to director Ang Lee and his lead actress Tang Wei. They are explicit in their responses and, therefore, this conversation is not for the spoiler-wary.

* * *

Michael Guillén: May I start with the obvious question? I think James Schamus has already responded to this, but, why did she do it? Why did she make this decision?

Ang Lee: That is the question. [Chuckles.]

Guillén: Is it one that can be answered?

Lee: No. I think it is something deep inside in the murkiest, most sensitive place at heart, that is very hard to detect. You see how she struggled. How can she let China down? I don't know. When I read [Eileen Chang's] short story, I asked myself: Is it the diamond? Is she bourgeoise? Is it because she had a good time in the sex? Does she think she loves him? Does she think he loves her? All those things. Obviously, she made a big mistake; but, a very sympathetic mistake, I think. It is so challenging, so frightful, to recognize that—being Chinese—to put female feelings and sexuality and that point of view to the glorious war, the holy war against the Japanese, in a patriarchal societal structure, that's unbelievable. It's courageous from the writer. I can't believe she wrote that. I just couldn't believe it. For a long time I thought there was no way anybody could make this into a movie. [Chuckles.] They should be shot!


But then, it just kept calling. Yes, that's a profound question to me; but, it really doesn't have an answer. She just did it. I think that's the movie and we're very moved. Personally, I think she did the wrong thing. That's why she's shot, along with her friends. It feels very painful.

Guillén: What is your impression of the ending, Tang Wei, and why she did it?

Tang Wei: I think to her, it's very good. She understands everything. She controls herself. She controls her life. It's good.

Lee: Women say no.

Wei: Really?

Lee: When they're not collaborating.


Guillén: [To Ang Lee] In the introduction to the published script, Schamus characterized that you have become "ensnared in a game of cinematic and literary mirrors." Whether or not that's true, it made me think that you've chosen two short stories in a row out of which you've conjured epic narratives. What is it that you see in the short story that you can unpack and transform into these epics?

Lee: Elements. We spent months and months and months writing the script. But what is the element? Is it rich enough to take off? To go on the journey? That's what I'm seeing in those materials.

Guillén: In this particular short story by Chang, what were the specific elements that you felt you could amplify through film?

Lee: Performance. Things about acting. Performance not only in a stage play and her parts but in general. A big part of life is about performance. Think about sex, how it's about performance. To me that's very important and that's what I do too. So, the illusion and disillusion is something I know I can dig in a lot and then—even though it's short—it has enough indications of the story poem. It has the theater group. It has the Chinese resistance and the Japanese collaboration and the government. After she loses her virginity, how do they respond? There's nothing written there, just a little bit, but you can imagine that, you can elaborate on that. It's full of potentials. The party in Shanghai. How do they go about their relationship? It's minimally written [in the short story], but you can feel a wealth of possibilities. It's storytelling. It's not just like, "They say…."; it's storytelling. It indicates a lot of possibility.


For Brokeback, it was a story of 20 years. Each one line could make you feel like you have to fill in five years each time you see them, so on and so forth. I think potential in our judgment or intuition, just react to the material, sometimes you can read a long book and think, "Okay, that's the story" and describe it in three sentences. Sometimes it could be poetry that can expand your imagination. So, I think I'm intrigued by the possibility of the short story. It's very lack of depiction—what's her character? Any of the characters?—and things underdeveloped. [Chang] avoided a lot of the details I really need to know. It was written very smartly. Actually, when you go into it, it is not easy.

Guillén: Were you tempted to include the omniscient narrator, which is so noticeable in the short story especially with regard to how Mr. Yee is feeling towards the end? Were you tempted to include that?


Lee: I think I did. It's a very strange structure, I must say, from the short story. We take the girl's perspective and at the end, after she's killed, we switch narrative to Mr. Yee. I don't know if that's legal. [Laughs.] It's totally uncultured; but, it's totally effective. Not only by middle-aged men who think, "Ooooooh." It seems like the ghost of Wong Chia-chih has come to the heart of the man. It has that feeling to me. It's written in a very ghostly way. It's curious and haunting. I think I did inherit [the omniscient narration] but in a cinematic way, with Mr. Yee carrying the death scene of these six students to him opening up the curtain, carrying the weight of killing her. And the reflection of the shadow on the empty blanket. I think he does carry the ghost of her.

Guillén: You don't depict their deaths. And you don't depict any of his atrocities.

Lee: That would be too real. That would be too objective instead of subjective. It has to be switched into more internal feelings that the man has to carry. You almost feel that living is painful and dying is a relief.

* * *

Random House first sent me a photocopy of Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang)'s short story "Lust, Caution" earlier this year, and then followed through with the Pantheon hard cover publication of Lust, Caution: The Story, the Screenplay, and the Making of the Film, which—along with Chang's short story and the screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus—includes a preface by Ang Lee, an introduction by Schamus, an essay by translator Julia Lowell, and production notes by Co-Producer David Lee, First Assistant Director Roseanna Ng, Line Producer Doris Tse, Director of Photography Rodrigo Prieto, Script Supervisor Sherrie Liu, Production Sound Mixer Drew Kunin, and Editor Tim Squyres. The volume provides a fascinating and well-rounded exploration of this project from root to fruit.

In his preface, Ang Lee writes: "Making our film, we didn't really 'adapt' Zhang's work, we simply kept returning to her theater of cruelty and love until we had enough to make a movie of it." (2007:vii)


Though he touched upon it in the interview above, Ang Lee provides some fascinating, insightful amplification to the character of Mr. Yee, played to ruthless perfection by Tony Leung: "Zhang is very specific in the traps her words set. For example, in Chinese we have the figure of the tiger who kills a person. Thereafter, the person's ghost willingly works for the tiger, helping to lure more prey into the jungle. The Chinese phrase for this is wei hu dzuo chung. It's a common phrase and was often used to refer to the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese occupiers during the war. In the story Zhang has Yee allude to this phrase to describe the relationship between men and women. Alive, Chia-chih was his woman; dead, she is his ghost, his chung. But perhaps she already was one when they first met, and now, from beyond her grave, she is luring him closer to the tiger…." (2007:vii-viii)

"Interestingly," Ang Lee adds, "the word for tiger's ghost sounds exactly like the word for prostitute. So, in the movie, in the Japanese tavern scene, Yee refers to himself with this word. It could refer to his relationship to the Japanese—he is both their whore and their chung. But it also means he knows he is already a dead man." (2007:viii)


In the interview above, where Ang claimed that "performance" was one of the elements that convinced him Eileen Chang's short story could be unpacked and transformed into a film, he emphasized the importance of "performance" in his own life. In his preface, he elaborates: "Zhang describes the feeling Chia-chih had after performing on stage as a young woman, the rush she felt afterward, that she could barely calm down even after a late-night meal with her friends from the theater and a ride on the upper deck of a tram. When I read that, my mind raced back to my own first experience on the stage, back in 1973 at the Academy of Art in Taipei: the same rush of energy at the end of the play, the same late-night camaraderie, the same wandering. I realized how that experience was central to Zhang's work, and how it could be transformed into film. She understood playacting and mimicry as something by nature cruel and brutal: animals, like her characters, use camoflauge to evade their enemies and lure their prey. But mimicry and performance are also ways we open ourselves as human beings to greater experience, indefinable connections to others, higher meanings, art, and the truth." (2007:viii-ix)

James Schamus pursues the multivalency of performance in his introduction, distinguishing between "acting" and "performing" and suggestively implying that when we exercise free will through conscious decision and choice, we "act" on free will. Free will becomes, in essence, just another performance.


Schamus accepts the premise that masks reveal as much as they conceal when he writes: "One could say that Lust, Caution depicts a heroine who 'becomes herself' only when she takes on the identity of another, for only behind the mask of the character Mai Tai-tai can Chia-chih truly desire, and thus truly live—playacting allows her to discover her one real love. But this is too reductive. For the performer always, by definition, performs for someone. And that audience, no matter how entranced, is always complicit; it knows deep down that the performance isn't real, but it also knows the cathartic truth the performer strives for is attainable only when that truth is, indeed, performed. …[L]ust and caution are, in Zhang's work, functions of each other, not because we desire what is dangerous, but because our love is, no matter how earnest, an act, and therefore always an object of suspicion. If Chia-chih's act at the end of the story is indeed an expression of love, it paradoxically destroys the very theatrical contract that made the performance of that love possible—in killing off her fictional character, she effectively kills herself." (2007: xi-xii)


Schamus's description of this "theatrical contract" adds significant heft to the two words Chia-chih utters—"Go, now!"—upon which the moral complexity of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution pivots. It reminds me how heightened sexual dynamics and their power plays are configured as "scenes." And it sheds enlightened relief upon Chia-chih's anguished monologue in her encounter with Old Wu; a monologue that chilled me to the bone as it unfolded on the screen. Old Wu praises Chia-chih and tells her to keep Mr. Yee in her trap. She responds: "You think I have him in a trap? Between my legs, maybe? You think he can't smell the spy in me when he opens up my legs? Who do you think he is?" Old Wu listens but becomes increasingly nervous. Chia-chih continues: "He knows better than you how to act the part. He not only gets inside me, but he worms his way into my heart. I take him in like a slave. I play my part loyally, so I too can get inside him. And every time he hurts me until I bleed and scream before he comes, before he feels alive. In the dark only he knows it's all true."

This is as sophisticated as anything I have ever read, heard or seen with regard to the power dynamics of impassioned sex, where "consensuality" is only a safe word. Perhaps it is as Roman Polanski once observed: "Sex is not a pastime. It's a force, it's a drive. It changes your way of thinking."

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF: THE MIX-UP—The Evening Class Interview With A.J. Eaton

Late last month, when I had my mini-meltdown during the Buñuelathon and experienced serious doubts about continuing with online journalism, I received such a rush of confirmation and encouragement that I pivoted back into place. I'm sincerely grateful to each and every kind comment I received. Thank you.

Brian Darr of Hell on Frisco Bay called me on one of my comments, however, wherein I said that something had to change in order for me to continue writing online. He wanted to know what I meant by that. I mulled it over and realized that what I wanted to change was the "right sizedness" of my film writing. This is a directive for no one but myself so children beware.

Though it has been a fun challenge to secure press credentials and establish working relationships with regional and national publicists and distributors, I sometimes have issue with the fact that the whole PR machine is geared towards defining movies as calendared commerce, moreso than art. At times I find myself feeling—as Brian has himself characterized it—like a dancing monkey for the publicists. It seems like no matter how much I give them, often by way of free writing, they always want a little more. And what I've been noticing of late is that what I value as a film writer has become distorted by how the publicists wish to structure their proffered opportunities. In gist, their's is an interference pattern. With regard to interviews, I prefer one-on-ones; but, certain publicists (you know who you are) would prefer to group online journalists into round tables. So sometimes, if I want to talk to a particular individual, it has to be through a round table, which doesn't feel right-sized or comfortable at all. In such instances, the interviews—as I perceive their purpose—suffer. So why bother?

I've taken lately to consciously weaning myself away specifically from the round table press junkets—no matter who it is—and generally from the publicists altogether to solicit interviews on my own through my own resources. That feels right. I get to do it my way, by my interests, through my contacts, and more importantly by my timing. That means that sometimes I'm going to interview someone who just isn't in the glossies of current popularity. It means that sometimes I'm going to interview complete unknowns because I'm interested in how they're starting out. That's one of the reasons I accepted Bruce Fletcher's invitation to cover this year's Idaho International. It's a festival that's basically inconsequential or invisible as far as the festival circuit goes. But as I stated in my previous post, its regionality holds a certain allure and a refreshing authenticity.

In an effort to remain "right sized" about my film reportage, I've long practiced the philosophy that for every "famous" name I talk to, I turn around and talk to someone who's not famous at all. I want to strike that balance. It's the triple Libran in me, I guess. As a consequence, after interviewing an auteur like Bela Tarr at the Toronto International, something feels just right about interviewing a young 27-year old director at his second festival with his first short. It's important for me to include such an interview in my body of work. Perhaps, down the line when A.J. Eaton is gathering his laurels, I can say I was one of the first to recognize his talent and champion his work. Believe it or not, such delayed gratification would give this old film writer much pleasure and satisfaction.

As I wrote previously, A.J. Eaton's The Mix-Up started IIFF's "Local Heroes" program of shorts and set an unsurpassed bar for the evening. A perfectly pitched comedy, crisply edited, well-acted, and concisely written, The Mix-Up is an intact professional piece of filmmaking, integral unto itself. Having already played at the 2007 Palm Springs ShortFest, IIFF was its second stop, on what should be a robust festival run. We got together for coffee, raspberry shortbread, and a friendly (and informative!) conversation on shorts filmmaking.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Where did the idea for The Mix-Up originate? How did you develop this impressively tight script?

A.J. Eaton: It was a conglomeration of a few things. I wanted to do a well-done short film and so I started pursuing two ideas. One idea was a play called Sure Thing [by David Ives] where the same scene [is played out] over and over again. I phoned the author's agent and I said, "Hey, I'm trying to do a short film and I'm really interested in Sure Thing." She goes, "Well, you're about the fifth person to call this week on that. It's a really popular piece and the author's been adamant that it's going to remain in the theater." So that idea was gone.

I decided to go on an idea that my brother and I [had worked up]. We were just joking around in the car. My brother's a musician and we're both theatrical when we get together. I said, "What you need to do is get yourself a ball peen hammer and just beat the hell out of it" and then it just kind of evolved from there. I started thinking about my grandfather who's this little Italian guy who's had this hobby where he does construction. But the problem is that he's never quite done it right. The house that he and my grandmother live in is a 40-year conglomeration of bad construction projects. He took a deck one time and turned it into a TV room. The ceiling's sagging and all of that but it's his work and he's very proud of it.

Guillén: So your grandfather became the template for the character of Bill in The Mix-Up?

Eaton: Somewhat, yeah. But my main concept for the character was like a roly poly older Chris Farley. When I was starting to write it, I thought, "What's my grandpa's value?" Obviously, I love him dearly and his attitude is his value

Guillén: At the Q&A you mentioned that the idea of the mix-up came from when you were working for a television studio?

Eaton: One of my first jobs in live TV was working at a local TV station in Pocatello, Idaho. It was an NBC affiliate and I was a camera operator and production assistant on this early morning show. We were on the air live at 6:00 AM every day. It was murder. We had to fill an hour's worth of news content every day and there isn't a lot of news in Eastern Idaho. I mean, there isn't that much news in Boise, Idaho. At least news that comes reaching out at you. The TV station didn't have the staff or resources to get reporters to actually do hard hitting news stories so we would find ourselves getting "experts" from a variety of different places. Some guy would show up about 10 minutes before he was supposed to be on the air. "Oh yeah," he'd say, "Duffy [the anchor] said I'd be on the second half, so just show up at 6:30" and his segment was at 6:40. My job was to go into the break room where they had bad coffee and go get that person and bring him on to the interview set and I was like, "Now, what are you here for? What are you talking about?" "Oh," he'd say, "I'm going to be talking about fertilizer." "Are you from some kind of greenhouse?" "Oh no, I work for the school district. But I just met Duffy at dinner the other night and I told her that I'd been fertilizing my lawn…" and the rest was history.

Guillén: Would you say that early haphazard environment is why you now favor a tight, lean production style?

Eaton: Yes, absolutely.

Guillén: Among the shorts in the "Local Heroes" program, yours stood out for its fully-realized production value. Some of the shorts were being used to pitch for seed money for features, as the one filmmaker admitted, but what I admired about The Mix-Up was that it was complete; it was an intact universe. Clearly, you'd had some training in production?

Eaton: I started doing production when I was about 15. I was lucky because my dad is a songwriter [Steve Eaton] and he enjoyed some moderate success in the late '70s-early '80s. I spent a lot of time in his recording studio. That's how I got into film production. He was working on some TV music and the two filmmakers from PBS came to my dad's studio. He lived a Sun Valley lifestyle with a recording studio in the basement. We lived on an acreage where a lot of people would come to the studio and work. These guys were talking about sounds and shots and how the sounds work together. From that point forward I was addicted.

Guillén: Has that opportunity for early production training and access put you in conflict with peers who are operating off more of a DIY aesthetic? I sensed this last night. What I recognized as professional, I suspected others felt was privilege. Has this caused tension between you and other filmmakers your age?

Eaton: Absolutely.

Guillén: So what's the philosophy behind your filmmaking? What are you going for?

Eaton: I have a lot of films that I've made that were that DIY type of idea; but, they're not films that I feel comfortable showing in public. However, public feedback is always good; but, I would get the feedback after I showed it to a friend or family member. I've been involved in a few projects where I wasn't the director and I learned from the director's mistakes. A lot. I was so gung-ho by 21 to be a film director but I learned to be patient. I don't know all that I don't know.

Guillén: Let's talk about your directorial style. Your actors are natural. Do you have a way you work with your actors or do you let them bring what they're going to do?

Eaton: With The Mix-Up I took the approach that I was going to let the actors fill in the grout inbetween the bricks, if you will. I knew who was going to be [right] in the casting process. We went with something of an improvisational approach on this. But it all depends on the piece. I have another piece right now that I'm working on [where I] will be very strict with the actors because of the style of it. With this piece, I was so lucky to get all of the actors I got.

Guillén: You had a very good cast.

Eaton: They were. And thank Patti Kalles, who's a casting agent. Casting agents have become almost like executive producers these days. They have access. They know who's out there. They know who's not working. She was very encouraging. I was so concerned for our first day of shooting because even though Wally Dalton ["Bill"] and Rodney Sherwood ["the construction boss"] had worked together before, I hadn't rehearsed their scene. So I wasn't sure how these guys would gel. When I called Wally Dalton, I said, "I'm so excited to work with you, Wally. Your audition was amazing. I cast a guy named Rodney Sherwood to be your nemesis in that first scene…." He said, "Rodney and I used to tour on stand-up comedy together." The chemistry between those two was an absolute blessing; they had this unspoken communication. It was just right on.

I rehearsed everything else, especially that scene where they take Bill into the studio and the people are pouring in and they're testing his microphone; I felt the timing had to be just right on that. I had the script. I had the group of people for the rehearsal. I said, "Here's what we're thinking. The camera's going to be here. You guys are going to be doing that." The actors would come up with ideas, they'd do stuff and I'd say, "Y'know, I don't think that's working for me. That's not right for the character." But they were all very detailed and so eager to work.

Guillén: The Mix-Up runs 13 minutes. How long did it take you to make the film? From the germ idea to writing the script to burnishing the script to actually shooting, which I understand took three days?

Eaton: Right. I started more than a year ago. My feet were on the ground where I decided, "I'm going to do this short film right away." There was a program On the Lot that Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett were producing. I thought, "That would be really cool to get my short on that program." The deadline for that was January 1, I believe, so I was gung-ho to get The Mix-Up done by January 1. We were going to make this happen. No one else was going to hire me to make the film. We shot 80% of the film in November in Seattle. Then we edited it. I put in temporary music and some of the temporary sound effects and then deemed that, okay, I'm going to do some pick-up shots, put in a few more insert shots, and set up the crew again to do some of the fill-in shots that I knew that I was going to need when I was shooting the first two days but we just didn't have the time to do them. So I went back to Seattle and shot. I completed the film after editing in July. There was always something that I wanted to do. "Okay, we're going to have to remix the sound because it's not right." I was really really picky on this. We did it on a full digital intermediate. We shot high definition and the digital intermediate process is becoming an essential part to every great film production. I was lucky enough to get some time with the top colorists in Hollywood.

Guillén: Where did The Mix-Up's central joke of using construction metaphors to represent relationships come from?

Eaton: That came out of thin air, I suppose, going on the theme of how can someone's bad work still be valuable? The last line that Bill says when he's on the show is a verbatim quote from my grandfather. We had this friend who was visiting, came to my grandparents' house with us, and he's kind of a makeshift construction guy himself, but he does things right. He's sitting in my grandfather's living room and says, "Boy, Johnny, this is quite the production you got going here," or something to that effect and [my grandfather responded, tapping the side of his head], "Yeah, it's all about engineering." I worked backwards from that. Engineering, y'know.

Guillén: Let's talk a little bit about reception. You've shown The Mix-Up at the Palm Springs Short Fest and now here at the Idaho International. Have you confirmed any further festival appearances?

Eaton: Not yet. I've been invited to submit to five film festivals.

Guillén: Explain that process a bit. How does that work with a short film? I imagine most filmmakers would start with a short. How do you go about knowing where you want to place it?

Eaton: I'm learning a lot about this. I was reluctant to step to the director's chair until I knew that I was going to do a good short. I happened to come into contact with a lady named Kathleen McGinnis. She is a leading shorts programmer. I didn't even know that when I met her. Someone said she was a film festival consultant. She's programmed the Seattle International, was one of the programmers at Palm Springs, and is a qualified publicist and producer as well. She's so eager to help people, which is amazing. She said, "Well, send me a copy of the film and I'll take a look at it." I Fed-Exed a copy to her and she said, "I like it." One of the things that Kathleen and I talked about is that there are shorts film festivals that are all about shorts [where] the shorts aren't just a side thing to the features, which can be a good strategy. She said, "You want to premiere at a shorts festival and these are the festivals you want to go to." She gave me a list and said, "Good luck." As they say in the business, it only takes one yes. I applied to CineVegas. I was so excited about CineVegas. I thought it was a huge growing film festival. We didn't get into that, but there's only 10 slots for short films. I applied to a number of others but got a yes from Palm Springs. They called me personally on the phone and said, "Is this Mr. Eaton?" and I was like, "It is." They said, "This is Alan Spano and we're from Palm Springs Film Festival and we just want to wish you congratulations." For a second I was like, "Congratulations for what?" They said, "We love your film and we love the character of Bill and we really think it's going to play well here in Palm Springs."

Guillén: Did it?

Eaton: It did! The audience was laughing out loud, which was validating.

Guillén: What's it like starting out as a director where you've been accepted into a program of shorts with five or six other directors? What are the dynamics of that? Do you find yourself interacting a lot with those other directors who are submitting shorts? How do you gauge yourself against your peers?

Eaton: I can see the problems with my film but compared with others [here at the Idaho International] I can say, "We might have something." But in Palm Springs, I almost felt like I was the underdog.

Guillén: The caliber was higher?

Eaton: Yeah! Absolutely. These guys are coming from Great Britain and Canada and Australia where they have lottery funding for filmmakers. Budgets were up to $500,000 for a short film.

Guillén: So humility becomes requisite?

Eaton: Absolutely. The other thing I was really nervous about—because, I think, directors are type A personalities; I know that I am—sometimes egos can clash, not as bad as actors together, but egos can clash. When I went to Palm Springs—which was the first big festival of that caliber that I had been to—I was nervous to go into a room with all these other filmmakers because I was thinking it was going to be more of a defense mechanism where I was going to have to defend the choices I'd made in my film. But there were no egos. It was all congratulatory and other people giving points; but, it's from an artist to an artist, so it was really great. The British films that I saw absolutely blew my mind. They were deep, great directing, everything about them was perfect. I've seen movies that have been box office smashes that didn't have the technical prowess that these films had. There was actually one director—Mal Woolford—who had two films in the festival, which was remarkable. One was this dark moody piece called Redblack, a perfect short film, and the other piece was a comedy piece called Fluffy. He and I sat down and we started talking about styles and "How did you shoot that?" It was so inspirational.

Guillén: So shorts directorship then and these festival opportunities become a training ground for you?

Eaton: It's like camp.

Guillén: Is your intention to do a few more shorts before attempting a full feature? Do you want to film a full feature?

Eaton: I do want to go to full features, but when the time is right, when I feel that I'm ready. Even with this short film, I decided I'm going to wait a few years, save up some professional capital, before I'm ready. I feel like I'm getting ready to do a feature. I've got two that I'm really pushing for; but, a lot of people are saying, "We want to see the darker side of A.J. We want to see the angst-ridden A.J."

Guillén: Is there an angst-ridden A.J.?

Eaton: There can be; I'm a chameleon! I just talked to a producer yesterday about doing a short film that takes place in … either the first scenes would take place in New York or Los Angeles at a high-rise music corporation office and then it goes to the French district in New Orleans. It's a story that has a definite twist but it will be dark, it will be very moody, it will be the opposite of The Mix-Up. I want to do it to prove to myself that I can do it. I also want to show everyone else that I'm versatile because I think that's what makes a successful director these days, is versatility.

Guillén: Let's talk some about how a young first-time director like yourself markets a short like The Mix-Up. Marketing. Distribution. Do you have a gameplan of how you want to get your film out there or what you hope it will do for you? How it will pay for itself?

Eaton: I do. It's transformed as the production process has gone about; but, surprisingly enough, there is a fertile market for short form content right now. With media expanding daily, with iTunes. I've gone into debt, obviously, to do this. We built sets. The way that we shot The Mix-Up was to look a little bit Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque. My DP is from Curb Your Enthusiasm. I wanted it to look a little bit more on the video side rather than the film side; but, the construction scene … we shot on a practical location for that; but, the TV set and the TV studio, those are all sets. On the TV monitors we digitally put in the logo of my fictitious TV station. We built risers in a big movie studio and put curtains down and the whole thing. So I thought, "Okay, I'm going to spend some money on this and I'm going to use it as momentum to get me another piece." I've cut my teeth on commercials, working as a producer or whatever on commercials, doing the music for commercials, so I thought, "I can show them this piece to show I can direct a 13-minute movie pretty well. I know where to put a camera and I know how to mix things together." But now I'm finding that—I've been talking to a company in Toronto—they buy short form content and put it on airlines.

I had done a lot of research before fully going forward on The Mix-Up to find out what are my options? HBO and Cinemax, they're dealing with odd-numbered content, movies that can be 105 minutes long, so they end up finding themselves needing 13 minutes. I thought, if we do it well enough, we can possibly sell it there. In Canada there's two short film channels, two! One's called Movieola; the other one's Channel Zero. In Europe Shorts International just launched their own shorts channel too.

Guillén: Are there money prizes for shorts at the festivals?

Eaton: Yeah, at Palm Springs the shorts that won—which were very well-done and now are Oscar contenders—one of the prizes was a $30,000 Panavision package. It's like, "You've done great, kid, now here's your Panavision. Go and shoot another." I think there were some prizes that went down to $5,000 or $3,000. That would be nice to win that. But right now, my goal is to get into AFI.

Guillén: When does that run?

Eaton: That runs in November. I'll hear probably in three weeks whether that happens. I'd also love to get into Toronto Worldwide Shorts or the Aspen Shorts Fest or Clermont-Ferrand, which is a big shorts film festival in France. In fact, right now, I'm working on getting the French translation of The Mix-Up, which has been a fun, amusing [process].

Cross-published on Twitch.

PASTE 36—Rob Davis on Antonioni & Bergman

Though flung off a hyphenated abyss on page 63 only to land face front on page 64, Rob Davis's essay “Bending Light & Baring the Soul” in the current issue of Paste (No. 36, 10/07) is an essential grasp on the cinephilic loss of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman earlier this Summer.

Burnishing his insights on the films of Antonioni, Rob explains that he was a director for whom “existence is an indistinct concept.” “Again and again,” Rob writes, “Antonioni hid his plot in shadows but pulled the questions into the light.”

As for Ingmar? Rob concludes that Bergman “didn’t seem to have any answers to the questions he raised … but he kept asking them, and had a knack for bringing his stories to an appropriately dramatic conclusion without cauterizing all of his characters’ wounds. He was a smooth, precise director, but one who—unlike Antonioni—worked within the conventions of film grammar rather than pressing at the medium’s edges.”

Myself, I am reminded that no less than a month before Antonioni’s demise, Darren Hughes and I—on our way to a film at the San Francisco International—were tickled by a couple in a tennis court volleying with imaginary rackets.

Life is only so much cinematic citation after all.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF—Ten Canoes

Along with the theme of the regionality of Idaho's International Film Festival (IIFF), there’s the theme of how films brought in for IIFF will play regionally. At the closing night gala I overheard a woman complaining to her friend about the closing night feature Ten Canoes: “All they did was talk about poop!” I shook my head in disbelief and thought, “Regional is as regional does.”

I first caught Rolf de Heer's ethnographic photograph come to life—Ten Canoes—at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It had won a special mention at Cannes and had just been announced as Australia's Oscars entry in the foreign film category. The screening was problematic in that the print projected did not have subtitles. Misled by the English narrative voiceover, however, I didn’t know there were supposed to be subtitles so I absorbed the film on its projected merits. More than a year later, I finally caught Ten Canoes with its randy subtitles here in Boise, Idaho, which did indeed add another layer of comic meaning onto the film. One of the reel changes was a bit messy and the sound dropped out and I momentarily worried, “Oh no, am I going to get subtitles this time but no sound?” Fortunately, the projectionist pulled it together and I have finally seen the film as it was meant to be seen. I replicate (and tweak) my writeup from 2006 TIFF.

Ten Canoes is visually stunning, depicting movement between real time and dream time through strategic shifts of color and black and white cinematography. The story is simple even as the storytelling is complex. While hunting for geese and geese eggs, an elder tells his younger brother a story that proves relevant for the younger’s own inappropriate feelings for the elder's youngest wife.

During the Q&A after the Toronto screening, Rolf de Heer was asked how he cast Ten Canoes. He responded by saying he would have to paraphrase the question: how the film was cast. It was the most remarkable casting process he'd ever been through. In many respects he could do little. The inspiration for the film was a photograph by the Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson of ten men in canoes on a swamp. The initial casting of the movie was for four of those ten. It was the community itself who moreoreless decided who was going to do what. The ten men in the canoes in the photograph were all named and everyone was related to them in some way and so the people who were most closely related chose to "be" them. The last of the ten canoeists were cast in that way. For the rest of the casting, a number of aspects came into play. Primarily, there is a complex kinship system where everyone belongs to one of two moieties with subsections and classifications that determine who can marry who. As far as he could understand it, in the aboriginal culture there is no concept of "fiction." Thus, the relationships on the screen between the characters had to be allowed in real life between actors playing those characters. This was so complex that there was nothing he could do to even determine who he could cast from. It didn't work for him to ask each actor which moiety they belonged to and try to figure it out from there; they moreorless determined these casting choices themselves. He had to concede to their cultural imperatives.

He was asked how Australians and the aboriginal communities reacted when they saw the finished film. The very first people to see the film were the aboriginals who saw the version that was completely in their language, including the storyteller's narration (in our version the narration was in English). It was the wildest screening he had ever been to. It was complete madness, chaotic, wonderful. It was the first time any of them had seen anything on the screen that was about them in their own language. There was yelling, screaming, laughing. The response was tremendous.

He was asked how he came about to write this story, to know this community, and to become so involved, and whether he spoke aboriginal. Not at all, he admitted, maybe five or six words. It started when he made a film called The Tracker and he cast David Gulpilil [who, incidentally, is the English-speaking narrator of Ten Canoes]. After he cast David, he found himself not knowing how to deal with him because he was so different from anyone he'd ever dealt with before. He didn't even know how to talk to him. David invited him to come meet his people and de Heer realized he had to accept that invitation so he could understand him better to direct him. As their relationship developed during the filming of The Tracker, David kept asking de Heer to make a movie that would be about his people starring his people. As the project developed, David himself moved away from his community and became distant from the project, but, by then de Heer had developed a relationship with everyone else in David's community.

When de Heer was at the Toronto International for his previous film Alexandra's Project, he was walking across one of Toronto's parks ruminating on Ten Canoes when all the contradictory elements of the script's thematic necessities and cinematic structure fell into place. In gist, the story of ten men hunting for geese and geese eggs was fundamentally undramatic but this was what the community wanted in the film and what he had to work with. The community was very attached to the Donald Thomson photograph and they wanted de Heer to bring it to life. They wanted the film to be about old times but they didn't want the old times to be depicted as a time of conflict. Because Thomson's historical photograph was in black and white, it seemed obvious that the recapturing of that image should be in black and white but he was under contract to deliver a film in color. It was while walking through the park in Toronto three years ago that de Heer figured out that if the film was set in mythic time when anything could happen, it would be sufficiently removed from historical old times, and could be contrasted by being shot in color. If the mythic times could be told by a storyteller as the old times geese hunt was occurring, then the film would be provided a dramatic structure that would make it compelling to western audiences while still satisfying aboriginal requests.

Because of his familiarity with the community, de Heer was asked if it has changed much since he first met them. Some aspects remain close to what he first encountered, they retain tribal customs even as some of the aborigines have become enamored with on-line banking.

The script was developed by de Heer sitting down with the aborigines, talking through each scene, discussing what needed to be said to further the scene, complicated by his inability to speak Aborigine and many of them unable to speak English. There was always a lot of talk before they could finally get down to a shoot. Despite all this complication, the performances are amazingly consistent and de Heer explains this as being a consequence of the aboriginal perspective that they were not playing their ancestors, they were their ancestors. This temporal aspect is difficult for Westerners mired in temporal tense to understand. Comparable to the aboriginal assertions that they are the land and the land is them. The western subject/object split, which we presume to be literal, collapses in the face of the aboriginal belief in their own literal connection. In being their ancestors, they could perform with relative ease and continuity.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF—Praising Regionality & Local Heroes

What distinguishes the Idaho International Film Festival (which just wrapped up yesterday evening) is precisely its regionality. Sure, programmer Bruce Fletcher brought Boise some choice films—the U.S. premiere of The Walker, S.F. audience favorite Rolling, vintage ‘70s O, Lucky Man! and the Cannes-acclaimed Ten Canoes from Down Under, but it was the platform he provided independent filmmakers from Idaho and surrounding Oregon and Washington states that characterized the spirit of IIFF’s mission: to encourage local filmmakers with the incentive of exhibition. Motivated by a variety of visions and ambitions, the regional line-up was admittedly a mixed bag of efforts, but here’s a selection of the titles that caught my eye and/or ear.


At each of its screenings, Drew Wattle’s five-minute short Miller Time provoked ire and outrage among its audience, some of who vociferously demanded a refund. This kinky scenario, interpreted by Wattle from writer Will Schmeckpeper’s otherwise innocent script, positions a diorama that ingeniously combines DeWalt power tools, a dildo, and some S&M-tinged revenge wafting in the air. The short’s sardonic humor clearly catapulted over its Boise audience even though it will probably cause a San Francisco audience to cheer gleefully when it (hopefully) arrives Bayside. Wattle and Schmeckpeper interpret the outrage as a “badge of honor”; as well they should.


Inversely, a regional darling at the festival given prime coverage in the Idaho Statesman was Brandon Freeman’s The Broken Quiet, which initially made me want to hurl a few epithets or both of my boots at the screen for its Christian anti-abortionist stance. But as I settled into the screening, I found myself respecting the film if not liking it much. I suspect The Broken Quiet would be booed off the stage of San Francisco’s exhibition venues, which demands some consideration of who the film is for and how it will find its appropriate audience? My respect increased when I discovered this first feature was made for $700! And when it gradually dawned on me that it’s a film that will not completely satisfy Christians because of its strong language and because it somewhat downplays the issue of abortion to focus on the effect such a powerful issue has upon the film’s characters. Which shifts it out of the realm of simpleminded proselytization and brings it down to the work of a single visionary with a story to tell and some notable talent and potential to tell it. That’s not to downplay the film’s position, which I confirmed with Freeman. He is definitely an anti-abortionist, no bones about it. As he explained to Erin Ryan at the Idaho Statesman: “Everything I do, in the end, my motivation is to glorify God, not to preach or evangelize, but to do the best I can for Him.” Conflating prayer with a punching bag, Freeman makes clear this will be a lifelong fight.

So just as the woman in Miller Time’s audience protested that the short had no business being in an international film festival; a comparable argument could be levied at The Broken Quiet. And yet these two examples of regional filmmaking balanced against each other somehow demonstrate the appropriateness of both, and cancel out the crisscrossing objections. Film is meant not only to entertain but to challenge and agitate, no matter which side of an issue you’re on, and perhaps even more importantly, no matter what you’re intending to do with the film. Perhaps precisely because of his short’s acquired status as IIFF's lightning rod, Drew Wattles might push Miller Time out into the world, now that he knows he can get such a rise out of it. It doesn’t sound like that was his original intention; but, his festival experience has provided the insight. Likewise, Brandon Freeman didn’t make his film to solicit a Hollywood deal but because he felt compelled to by the dictates of his faith. As Bruce Fletcher recognized, “[Brandon’s film is] fiercely non-commercial. He made the film to tell a story; he didn’t make it as a calling card to get a job as a director.”

The Broken Quiet’s best scene, however, is when the aborted fetus returns as the vision of the grown man he could have been. Chills ran up my arms as I thought, “Oh my God, this is becoming an effective horror piece based upon Christian principles!” But it was only a tease. Freeman then returned to a more traditional narrative trajectory when he could have yanked open one of the doors to Hell. Regret has rarely been rendered so ominously and it would be interesting to see what Freeman could accomplish combining his faith and the horror genre.

I wish both filmmakers luck navigating the rocky waters of protest.


Arid Lands, directed by Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert could easily have been two or three separate films. There’s a lot of information to digest, all of it quite interesting, but some trimming might help this film punctuate its points more effectively. Several scenarios are laid out in sedimentary fashion, layer upon historical layer, layer upon geological layer, layer upon cultural layer. Focusing on the arid lands of the mid-Columbian basin with its indigenous scrub brush steppes, Aaker and Wallaert succeed in reconfiguring geography as a cultural force that affects the daily lives of individuals and communities. The relationship of how man shapes his environment is notated in succession by the respectful harvesting of indigenous Amerindians; the reclamation by advancing agriculturalists of godforsaken land via irrigational “baptism”; the Federal appropriation of the land for the Hanford nuclear site where plutonium was produced for the Trinity tests and the bombing of Nagasaki; and the urban sprawl encouraged by the largest environmental cleanup in history with its relentless development tracts and the rise of vineyard agritourism. Arid Lands is essentially an ode to the spirit of a particular place; a landscape of incredible contradictions marked by conflicting perceptions of wilderness and nature.


This Is War: Memories of Iraq, produced by Scot Laney and directed by Gary Mortensen chronicles the yearlong deployment of members of the Oregon National Guard 2/162 in Iraq, specifically through home movies made by the soldiers during their 2004 deployment. Though I will be writing this film up in greater detail, I do want to note that what distinguishes it from the many documentaries and features I have seen in the last two years on the subject is the unexpected usage of necessary gallows humor to survive the horrific circumstances the Bravo Co., 2/162 battalion is subjected to daily. Surprisingly, this movie made me laugh a lot because the soldiers themselves were so damn funny about their experiences under extreme stress, which is not to say that it does not soberly address the horrors of war through a personal register not usually heard in mainstream reportage.


Another great opportunity for the “Local Heroes” to flex their creativity was at a program of shorts under just that title. The program began with A.J. Eaton’s The Mix-Up, which set the unsurpassed bar for the evening. A perfectly pitched comedy, crisply edited, well-acted, and concisely written, The Mix-Up is an intact professional piece of filmmaking, integral unto itself. Having already played at the 2007 Palm Springs ShortFest, IIFF was its second stop, on what should be a robust festival run.

I’m not quite sure why Mack Lewis’s 1991 short Double Crossing has taken so long to be shown. But better late than never, especially with this clever homage to the classic police procedurals of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Filmed entirely in Boise in atmospheric black and white, Double Crossing delivers its script with tongue frequently in cheek.

John Jensen’s Land of the Free is a well-produced dystopian vision of the not-too-distant future where fighting Homeland Security becomes the second American Revolution. Marred only by the fact that it’s meant to be a calling card to solicit funding for a larger project, it frustrates for introducing elements it never develops. Here’s hoping Jensen finds the money to burnish, let alone finish, his vision.

300 Pounds by Ron Torres is an admittedly silly spoof of Zack Snyder’s 300. Torres, who appeared on stage mohawked and happy knows who he is, what he’s created, and how he wants to distribute it, reminding that DYI can be fun. I loved the Spartan helmets that looked like they were made with cardboard, masking tape and bronze spraypaint.

Cross-published on Twitch.

10/01/07 UPDATE: Double Crossing director Mack Lewis emailed an explanation for the timelag between the film’s shooting date (1991) and its presentation at this year’s IIFF. Essentially, this was a revival screening.

"The film was shot over a day and a half in August 1990 with extra shots picked up the following April. Post-production was completed late August 1991. …Several of the locations no longer exist and show a vastly different Boise than the one we live in today. Scenes shot before the revitalization of Boise are the more apparent examples.

"The film can almost be seen as a period film or even a time capsule of sorts. It reflects a different time and style of filmmaking in a way that gives it a uniqueness that it didn't have when originally produced.

"The short was entered in the Idaho Film and Video Association's Nell Shipman Awards in 1992 and won for Best Short and Best Director. The screening held at the Idaho International Film Festival is its first public screening in 16 years.

"The short was also available for many years as a free rental at the Flicks. Over the course of the weekend, many people recounted tales of having rented the VHS tape and enjoying see the short on the big screen for the first time."