Mark Cousins and I met in the press lounge at the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) where I parked myself on an armchair next to his to wolf down crudité and sliced fruit. When I glanced up at him, his mirthful eyes were twinkling and he was smiling impishly from ear to ear. "Hello," he immediately greeted me the moment we made eye contact, as if he wanted to become friends straight away. We introduced ourselves and I discovered he had brought his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) for its U.S. premiere to the festival, as well as guest curating PSIFF's Archival Treasures sidebar. Though I had already missed a couple of the early morning three-hour segments of his ambitious survey of film, I arranged to attend the film's weekend marathon, which proved to emulate not only the pereginations of Homer's wandering protagonist; but, also Homer's literary precedent of mentorship.
The Story of Film began its journey last September at a Telluride gallery installation although the film's official world premiere occurred at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where local journalist James McNally wrote: "Choosing to focus on the history of cinematic innovation rather than on the standard Hollywood narrative, the series ties together advances in technique, technology and influence from places as far-flung as India, Mexico, Iran, China and several African countries." From TIFF, The Story of Film returned to the UK for a televised broadcast on Channel Four and since then individual segments have teased festival audiences here and there, such as at the Mill Valley Film Festival. The Story of Film is currently screening at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through February 16 and David Hudson has rounded up a suite of reviews for MUBI. For those unable or unwilling to sit through 15 hours of film history, the DVD of The Story of Film will be released in the UK on April 23 by Network Releasing, and will soon be available to preorder on Amazon.
One would think that sitting in a theater for two days straight at eight hours a stretch with only an hour off for lunch would prove exhausting; but, instead, The Story of Film's passionate focus on innovation was invigorating and—with Cousins on hand to introduce each day's segments and to field questions at the end of each day—the experience is already guaranteed to be one of this year's cinematic highlights. "Sometimes you can learn to drive in a weekend or you can learn to make pasta sauce or you can take a refresher course in a foreign language," Cousins mused at the onset of the marathon. "Maybe The Story of Film is something of a refresher course in movie language. Maybe come Monday morning if you've stayed here and you've liked it, you'll have learned some new things about this bright-lit, luminous, flickering language of the movies."
* * *
Michael Guillén: Mark, what distinguishes your survey of cinema from other histories of cinema?
Mark Cousins: There have been other histories of the movies, but none of them in my opinion quite do justice to a number of things: first of all, African cinema is usually overlooked and you're going to see tons of African cinema in The Story of Film; secondly, and very importantly, women directors. So many histories of cinema overlook or slightly patronize women directors. You're going to see tons of women directors in The Story of Film. Not only because they're women; but, because they're brilliant at their art.
Guillén: Can you speak to the style you've applied to your film, both generally but especially with regard to your interstitial footage?
Cousins: I didn't want The Story of Film to be a dry description of cinema. I didn't want it to be reportage. When I make documentaries, I try not to make them too pedagogic or sociological. I try to make them a bit more poetic. So, hopefully, there's a degree of poetry in The Story of Film. This is something of a love letter to cinema. In particular—with regard to the style I've used—there are no reverse angles, very few close-ups, and very few camera moves in the bits that I've filmed. I kept saying to myself, "Imagine that you're making a magic lantern show with glass slides lit from behind to elicit the gorgeous luminosity of the early movies." That's when movies were born: in that Victorian period of the magic lantern shows. That's the style I tried to adopt in The Story of Film. In particular, often a shot wipes in from the right of the screen, as in a magic lantern show. I wanted my footage to have its own unobtrusive style and to not be doing a lot of jazzy things, even though there's not a single still image in the full 15 hours. There were no name tabs on people. These were all part of a number of things I decided to do.
Guillén: Can you speak to your location shots?
Cousins: These locations where the movies were shot were evocative. Either the building or the street or the studio is still there and that's evocative or not as evocative. One of my favorite books is George Steiner's Real Presences, which speaks to the idea of the authenticity of a place. I like to walk around with my camera—which is in my bag here—and film at dawn, going to those old studios in Calcutta, for example, to try to capture some of the magic of it.
Guillén: Where has the film shown previously?
Cousins: We showed it in a gallery space at the Telluride Film Festival and then it had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Palm Springs International Film Festival audience will be one of the first to see it in its entirety. It's playing next at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and from there to festivals and cities throughout the U.S. Our fingers are crossed that it will also sell to a TV station, even though it's designed to be seen on the big screen to capture the scale of the thing. There a thousand film clips within The Story of Film from many of the world's great movies so it's preferable to see it on a big screen.
Guillén: Can you speak to the process of making the film?
Cousins: It took six years to make. We started almost exactly six years ago. The first thing we shot was the interview with Youssef Chahine, the great Arab director, because we got a little bit of money. We worked bit by bit. As we got a little bit more money, we filmed a little bit more. The editing, of course, was a long period and took almost two years in the editing suite. We cut it totally out of sequence so that we would be cutting Brad Pitt and then going back to Thomas Edison and then going to Africa and then to Iran. I had to go to many of the great archives of the world—in Beijing, in Cairo, in Iran—to get the material I needed. No one has ever collected this material in this way before and only in the digital era has it been possible to do that.
Guillén: How did you finance this research?
Cousins: There wasn't much financing. We made The Story of Film mostly out of love. We took no fees ourselves, for example. I stayed in cheap hotels and traveled coach mostly. The money came from the European Media Programme, a bit of money from Scotland, and then British money, mostly from the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute.
Guillén: How did you arrange for clearance rights for all the clips you've used?
Cousins: None of the clips are cleared. We've used what is called the fair use law here in North America and the fair dealings law in Britain and this allows a film scholar to use an extract from a film for scholarly purpose, just like a literary scholar uses an extract from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" for literary purposes.
Guillén: Does the film have a website?
Cousins: There's a Wikipedia entry that lists most—though not all—of the films cited in The Story of Film. Plus, the official website we're building for the film will list all the films. The reason that site's not live at the moment is because we didn't want it to be a standard website that advertises the film—we wanted it to be more imaginative and creative than that—so once you visit the site when it goes live, you'll be plunged into an imaginary world in 2046 where cinema has been banned. You'll go into an underground world where a Norma Desmond figure is keeping cinema to herself. Hopefully, this will be an inventive way of looking at cinema.
Guillén: Seeking the inventors of cinema is, admittedly, a questionable enterprise. You referenced Auguste and Louis Lumière but not Max Skladanowsky?
Cousins: You're right. I didn't reference Skladanowsky. First of all, I couldn't fit everything into The Story of Film—the Brits have some claim to inventing cinema as well—but, I made my best judgment on this and decided that I wanted to look at the two figures who most certainly had a key creative role in inventing cinema: the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison. Skladanowsky's claim is good and strong but I didn't have space for him in the film. When you look at those early years of film history, there was something that was happening in the 1890s, which was across many countries. Many people were excited by that creative moment: the inventiveness of the Victorian time. I feel strongly that Edison and the Lumière Brothers were key and, beyond that, I felt I could go no further because we'd already taken quite a lot of time on the early years of cinema in The Story of Film and it would have taken even longer.
If you take any moment in the history of film—if you take 1952, for example, or 1921—you can expand it out and there's a kind of rich habitat of filmmaking going on, you know? I think you can tell from The Story of Film that I'm interested in ideas and—when I went to Edison's studio and saw that plaque hanging there that emphasized the great idea that ideas matter—that made him crucial for me. Edison is often thought of as a money-driven person; but, he was more about ideas than people think. That's why I wanted to give him his due. But, again, you can certainly expand any area and I'm happy to list things that I've left out. There's so much that I've left out! There's no Preston Sturges. I do mention Sturges in the last hour of this film, which is a very strange place to mention him but at least I did mention him.
Guillén: Who else would you have liked to have included but weren't able to?
Cousins: Sam Fuller is not in The Story of Film. Neither is Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette or Maya Deren. I could go on and on. At the end of the film where I say thanks, I really wanted to say apologies and then have a massive list of everyone who didn't make it into the film. At one point there was a 19-hour version of the film in which a lot of these people were in the film; but, I had to cut it down because 19 hours is a lot to ask of an audience. We sort of decided, "What is our limit? What can we conceivably ask people to watch in a weekend?" The PSIFF audience is actually one of the first audiences in the world to know whether it is watchable at 15 hours.
Guillén: For me the value of your project comes down to the art of the storytelling. A story can't be told unless you have a consummate and passionate storyteller and each storyteller has his or her conventions. I'm intrigued by your use of the Christmas ornament to reference the cinema of Hollywood, which immediately made me question my own collection of Christmas ornaments. [Cousins laughs.] Can you speak to why that metaphor expresses Hollywood for you?
Cousins: In my personal life?
Guillén: Yes.
Cousins: First of all, the bauble seems to me an interesting one because it's reflective, it's beautiful, it's attractive, a lot of which Hollywood was. I felt I needed to find some image to try to express the beauty of Hollywood. Lots of fancy people kick Hollywood and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do something slightly different than that.
In my personal life, the first film I ever saw was Herbie Rides Again. [Laughs.] But I remember sitting with my Dad when I was a boy and we were watching It's A Wonderful Life, that great Frank Capra picture. I want to say that it was Boxing Day or shortly after Christmas because I remember the Christmas lights. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that my Dad was crying. My Dad was a tough man, but he was crying watching It's A Wonderful Life and in a very simple, childish way I thought, "There's something in this. There's a power in this thing that we're watching." That was one of the things that attracted me to cinema: I was drawn in like the tractor beam in Star Trek. It got that hold on me and quite gently, but firmly, drew me into its world.
Guillén: What further strikes me—as a film writer or simply as someone who loves film—is that point at which you've watched enough film that you can begin to make the leaps between films and to recognize and sift out the continuity of film, how cinema evolves out of itself, which I feel you have brilliantly illustrated in The Story of Film. I loved the lineage you traced from the "troubled bubbles" of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out through Jean-Luc Godard's 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
Cousins: Thank you. That, for me, is what I love doing. Another example would be how—while watching Brad Pitt in Andrew Dominik's beautiful film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—I was reminded of Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's films. Brad Pitt is filmed in the same way as Lillian Gish. This kind of connective tissue, this kind of poetic impulse that filmmakers have had across this relatively young art form, and discovering this unexpected connection between Brad Pitt and Lillian Gish—there it is!—that's what's been the thrill of making The Story of Film: noticing those connections. I love it.
Guillén: So, in a sense, you were constantly educating yourself while making the film?
Cousins: That's right. I was constantly educating myself. I learned so much from Youssef Chahine—the wonderful, bold and daring Egyptian filmmaker who died a few years ago—not only about Egyptian cinema, I thought I knew Egyptian cinema, but also about human bravery. This is a guy who—when he made Cairo Station—tried to be more honest about sexuality and was spat at on the street; but, he kept going. In my interview with him for The Story of Film, he spoke quite openly and daringly about Egyptian politics long before the Arab Spring that happened recently, long before the end of Hosni Mubarak. I learned so much from the courage of filmmakers like Chahine. They were really pushing themselves and their societies. I was incredibly touched by that. I was permanently changed by the experience of making this film.
Guillén: That being said, clearly having access to these filmmakers and their films was directly instrumental in the process of educating yourself during the course of making the film. But what can you say to young people wanting to educate themselves about film at a time when so many independent video stores are going under? You point to so many incredible films in The Story of Film but how accessible are they?
Cousins: Let me tell you a story and this is quite an optimistic story. When I was making this film, I realized I knew nothing about Ethiopian cinema. I didn't even know if there was Ethiopian cinema. I started to research and I found that there was. I found one film in particular called Harvest: 3,000 Years. I ordered it from Facets in New York. It cost me $120 and took two weeks to arrive. In that period, my appetite to see this film grew and grew so that—when it arrived—I slammed it into my video recorder and watched it. It was a masterpiece. Now if you want to see that film, you can just click on YouTube and see it in all its glory, subtitled and everything. So that argues against the point you've just made; but, a crucial question, I think, from the lesson of my story is about appetite generation: I was getting hungrier and hungrier and hungrier to see that film. Now that it's so available and so easy to watch, the danger is that you think, "Well, I can watch it there so I'll watch it next Tuesday. Or I might watch it next year. Or I might watch it when I retire, or whatever." It's a different process. Actually the problem is not about accessibility but about generating an appetite for cinema. We're in an era of relative plenitude—not total plenitude but relative plenitude—therefore, the question for me as a sign poster is how to look at this Ethiopian film. As to the accessibility of these films, many of them are on YouTube so it's not as horrible as it sounds to hunt them out. Some of them are hard work and some of this is about shaming the rights holders of these films—who do nothing with these films—to make them available.
Guillén: In the documentary you defend the advances of digital production and the effect this will have on the future of cinema. Ironically enough, at that point in your documentary I detected the first evidence of pixellation.
Cousins: I noticed that as well.
Guillén: So having defended digital production, if I'm hearing you right you're now saying you have no issues with digital projection? You're not a celluloid purist?
Cousins: I absolutely love digital projection. I always sit right in the front row. If it's a film projection I notice immediately when it goes out of focus; but, with digital projection it doesn't. So I'm very new-fashioned about this. If you recall, there's a sequence in the documentary where I also talk about the colorization of an Indian film? Purists, I guess, would be against colorization but I felt in that case it worked. So I guess I'm not a purist about things like that.
Guillén: With regard to digital production, you reined the discussion in to industrial practices and didn't mention all the advances and trends in what has been termed "disposable" cinema; i.e., films made with handheld cameras by everyday folks?
Cousins: The democratization of the filmmaking process is crucial. That means that anyone in this room that might have a film talent but is not rich or not connected to the film industry will still be likely to make films. For me that's almost closer to the sociology of cinema rather than the poetics of cinema. I'm not a sociologist and, therefore, I've kept out of that discussion. People have asked me why I've not looked at audience reactions and marketing and that sort of thing and—though these are all very interesting—they're areas that I'm not qualified to speak. A lot of people think I should have done a big summary at the end of the film in my epilogue as to what cinema has achieved; but, I preferred to end it on something of a grace note with that scene of all the people holding hands at FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which was probably the most cinephilic place I've been in my life, even moreso than Hollywood.
Guillén: You and I both tend to interview filmmakers. I imagine it has come to be quite easy for you?
Cousins: No, it's very hard. Some filmmakers have been interviewed all their lives and that makes it difficult to ask something fresh. In a previous life about 10 years ago I was an interviewer and spent a lot of time on TV interviewing directors and actors and I used the technique then that I use now, which is to sit down and write a long sometimes-handwritten letter to the person after having watched all their work first. I introduce myself and say, "You don't know me. I know you've been interviewed all your life and here's why you need to give me 40 minutes of your time." Then I talk them through their career. For example, with Stanley Donen I wrote a long letter saying, "Here's why the leg of mutton dance in your last well-known film Bedazzled is one of my favorite sequences." In that way you show a knowledge of the work and a take on it. It mostly works. In most cases we got who we wanted. As you can see, we weren't necessarily going for the most famous people by any means; just the people who were at a key moment and who could be an eye witness to that moment.
Guillén: How closely does The Story of Film: An Odyssey follow your publication The Story of Film: A Worldwide History?
Cousins: I wrote my book The Story of Film: A Worldwide History in 2002-2003. I had actually suggested in a British newspaper that there should be a single volume history of cinema like E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art. Then I drove to India by camper van and when I got back there were two letters from publishers suggesting, "Why don't you write such a book?" I was in my thirties, which was probably a little too early, but I gave it a go. The book did well and was published all around the world in the '90s. Then my nutty producer John Archer said, "Why don't we try to make it into a film?"
Usually, adaptations of books are shorter than the books. My book is about 450-500 pages but my commentary for the film is also 500 pages. So The Story of Film is roughly as long as the book. What I would say is that the book covers lots of things that aren't in the film, but the film covers things that aren't in the book. I spend more time showing clips in The Story of Film than I do talking about them in the book. As I'm sure you know, when you're writing a book you're trying to conjure images in people's minds, for example the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. With a film, I don't have to conjure it in people's minds to make the image concrete; I can just show it. Instead, I have to try to help the audience see the imaginative process that leads to the image. It's like inside-out vs. outside-in, or back to front.
Guillén: One of the distinct spectatorial pleasures of watching The Story of Film in its entirety here at PSIFF is the fact that you hosted it. You're enthusiastic and somewhat impish, so why then did you choose such a calm tenor to narrate your film? Can you speak to the tone you sought for your film?
Cousins: The tone was crucial for me. I thought a lot about the tone. What I knew I didn't want was a kind of TV tone, which is fast. I didn't want the narrative voiceover to move fast. In the recording booth, I didn't want to lecture. I wanted to create the sense that I was sitting beside you in the audience looking at the screen with you, talking in your ear. I know it's a bit whispery and some people hate that, but—if you're interested in the poetics of something—you need to almost get a slightly nighttime feel. Whether that works, I don't know, but that's clearly what I was going for.
Guillén: How much do you think your being Irish has affected your perspective as an observer?
Cousins: That's a fair question. When I read the capsule for the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, it said something I hadn't even considered. It stressed that the film wasn't made by an institution. The British Film Institute's logo is on the film but they came in at the end. So it wasn't an institution or a cinematheque that made The Story of Film; it was me and my producer. So it's not really my Irishness that affects my perspective as an observer, but my independence and the smallness within which we worked. I didn't have layers of producers with whom I had to deal with. I didn't have to submit my editorial judgments for approval from a panel of experts. The fact that I live in Ireland and worked on the film in Scotland—places that are on the edge of Europe and not customarily associated with being at the center of the film world—sort of meant that we just got on with it. Nobody ever thought we'd finish it, I guess. Nobody took us too seriously.
Guillén: What I appreciated about your documentary is its stance of enthusiasm as criticism. Do you have anything to say about the responsibility of film writers or journalists or critics to advance the story of film?
Cousins: I know that the film writing I really enjoy is enthusiastic. I love François Truffaut's writing on cinema. I quoted a bit of it in The Story of Film when he's talking about Johnny Guitar. I love the passionate film criticism of Manny Farber. I love that thing that Rilke says: "Pray, poet, what do you do?" "I praise." So there's a degree of praise going on in The Story of Film. Beyond that, I don't think I have a good answer to your question other than to say that I would like film writers to write as well as possible about this medium and whatever mode they choose is fine.
Guillén: Finally, before we leave here, can you talk about your involvement with the 8½ Foundation?
Cousins: The 8½ Foundation was created by Tilda Swinton and me. We discovered that we both fell in love with movies about the same time, when we were eight-and-a-half. Tilda's son asked her once, "Mummy, what did people dream about before the movies were invented?" These things came together and made us think that maybe around the age of eight-and-a-half is a kind of threshold moment; a perfect time to fall in love with cinema before you become a teenager and try to be too cool. We decided to invent a movie bar mitzvah; an initiation into the world of cinema. The 8½ Foundation takes place in Scotland, though we've had offers to repeat it elsewhere. Children—when they're reaching the age of eight-and-a-half—log onto our website, which is set up as a magical world with little projectors in a midnight forest where there are clips of films that Tilda and I particularly love. If these children want to see any of these films or get one of them for their eight-and-a-half birthday, they write a handwritten letter to us. I get hundreds of letters now with drawings and everything. We wrap the film up in sparkly paper and send it off to the child. The idea behind all this is not simply to give the child a beautiful film—and it's a Chinese film or an Iranian film or a West African film—but it's also about appetite generation. As I mentioned earlier, in this modern day when everything is so accessible, if you have to write a letter, send it off and then wait for three weeks before the film arrives, there's a sense of build-up there and, hopefully, that's fun.
Michaël R. Roskam's Bullhead (Rundskop, 2011) first came to my attention at its North American premiere at the 2011 edition of the Fantasia Film Festival where Nicolas Archambault characterized it in his program note as "cinema writ large." He added that Roskam's debut feature "capably mixes elements of multiple genres with a sturdily dramatic premise, punctuating it with moments of sarcastic humor. While that streak of disarming self-mockery, centered around a pair of risible Walloon mechanics with a strong dislike of the Flemish, Bullhead remains a dark and dramatic suspense film anchored in reality, revealing the hyper-masculine world of backwoods crime culture and shattering the myths of brute machismo by way of the characters Jacky and Diederik."
Bullhead arrived in Montreal after a huge box office success in Belgium (400,000 tickets sold) and anointed with awards from European film festivals, winning its first prizes at the Beaune Film Festival in France (the Jury Award and the Critics Award) and at the Motovun Film Festival in Croatia (the main "Propeller" Award). It then proceeded to gain critical and popular traction by winning the Best First Film Award at Fantasia, gathering six Flemish Awards (Best Film, Best Director, Best Debut, Best Main Actor, Best Supporting Role, and Best Photography), being chosen as Belgium's official submission to the 84th Academy Awards®, claiming three awards at its U.S. premiere at Austin's Fantastic Fest (Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor) where it was likewise picked up by Drafthouse Films for U.S. distribution, Best Actor at Moscow's "2inOne" International Film Festival, the New Auteurs Audience Award and New Auteurs Critics Prize for Best Actor at AFI Fest 2011, and nine nominations at the Magritte Industry Awards (coming up on February 4).
Having failed to catch Bullhead at Fantasia, I was determined to catch it in the Awards Buzz program at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival, where director Roskam was likewise being honored as one of Variety's "10 Directors to Watch". Bullhead walked away from PSIFF with the FIPRESCI prize for Best Actor, given to Matthias Schoenaerts for his "superb portrayal of an innocent and sensitive man trapped in a truculent body." There is no question in my mind that this increased attention at PSIFF secured Bullhead's position on the short list for the Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards®, further confirming the vital importance of PSIFF for Oscar® track, especially in that category.
As Peter Debruge has outlined at Variety, however, Bullhead has not won its honors without some controversy: "Belgium's committee raised eyebrows this year after picking Bullhead, the winner of six Flanders Film Awards, over French-language Cannes grand jury winner The Kid With a Bike, directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne." Confiding that their "quasi-celebrity status in other countries" might have made certain people jealous, Luc Dardenne and his brother Jean-Pierre "reportedly attended a recent screening and cornered the star after the film to share their reaction: They loved it" (Eric Kohn, IndieWIRE). Kohn further asserted: "Watching Bullhead, it's easy to imagine that Roskam could inherit the heated world of double-crossers and violent avengers that put Martin Scorsese on the map."
[The following is not for the spoiler-wary!]
Bullhead was introduced at its PSIFF screening by producer Bart Van Langendonck. Roskam—who at an earlier luncheon had been fêted as one of Variety's "10 Directors to Watch"—was missing in action, apparently still celebrating the honor. Anticipating the questions he now expects after each screening, Van Langendonck listed that the film cost a million and a half, was shot in 37 days, and has had a fantastic festival career. Van Langendonck synopsized that Bullhead is set in a real milieu: the existing arena of the so-called Belgian hormone mafia. Hormones are illegal in Belgium as in most of Europe and, as is often the case with illegal matters, crime organizes itself around such illegalities. Twelve years ago, a veterinarian controller was murdered by the hormone mafia because he was on the trail of hormone trafficking and, thus, this has been and continues to be a big issue in Belgium. That is all that is essentially true about the plot of Bullhead, Van Langendonck advised, while the rest is the dramatization by fictional characters created by Roskam.
By film's end, Roskam had found his way to the Palm Regal for his Q&A, where he was asked about Matthias Schoenaerts' preparation for the role's physical requirements. "It's true, yes, he gained about 27 kilograms (almost 60 pounds) for this role. He's normally athletic, though not like this. We knew each other from working together on one of my short films where we became friends and where I first had the idea for making this movie. I talked to him about it and he said, 'Yeah, I want to do this.' I wrote my first version of the script, he read it, and then I said, 'You realize you are going to...?' and he finished my sentence and said, 'I will do what I have to do. Watch me.' " Schoenaerts worked on other movies while Roskam developed the project and then "at a certain moment he started to gain weight", about 10 kilograms at first, to capture the character's basic physical condition. About a year before the financing came through and it was definite the film would be shot, Schoenaerts gained another 15 kilograms. He was eating every three hours and pumping iron, developing special muscle parts. In that respect, Roskam stated, Schoenaerts was a dedicated artist, equally intelligent, as strong mentally as physically, preparing himself psychologically—as well as physically—for the role of Jacky Vanmarsenille a full year before shooting began. After shooting on Bullhead finished, Schoenaerts began losing weight but was then cast as a boxer in Jacques Audiard's upcoming film Rust and Bone (Un goût de rouille et d'os) alongside Marion Cotillard, so now he's physically preparing for that role. Schoenaerts swears that after Rust and Bone he will be done with bodybuilding and will stop eating.
As to whether it was Jacky's childhood abuse or his testosterone abuse that accounted for his violent and unpredictable behavior, Roskam qualified it was both. "Some people can go crazy for less," he explained, noting that Jacky's childhood trauma was something he had to fight his whole life; the implications of which—especially as a child—he couldn't fully understand. The psychological problems from such a childhood trauma could only grow and develop as Jacky physically grew and developed. By that point he was struggling for solutions and, of course, often a person will try to find solutions by themselves instead of going to someone who might be better trained to assist. Those self-medicating solutions are often the worst solutions because they're compensating for behavior, but end up exacerbating behavior. It doubles on itself. One feeds the other. An action / reaction. Emphasizing that hormones are one of the most important elements of the human system, and that it's not completely understood how they work, Roskam argued that it stands to follow that they should not be messed with. It's already been proven that many people abusing testosterone experience problems with identity and personality.
A visual parallel was drawn between Jacky's body, especially his neck and shoulders, and the scene where the cattle were being herded out of the corral. "The thing is that they are artefacts, so to speak," Roskam explained. The animals are a particular breed, the Belgian Blue, nicknamed "Big Butts", a breed of cattle that have been genetically modified over time for the food industry. They're given growth hormones to increase their volume and weight. They're already born with an increased muscle mass and a bull who has been receving hormone treatments would have to be placed next to one who hasn't been in order to see the difference; but, it's an increase of almost 100 kilograms. The herd in this particular scene were not, of course, treated with hormones because, again, that's illegal and he would never be allowed to film them. Still, already, they are huge in mass. Roskam joked that if he tried to film a hormonally-altered herd, he would probably receive a bullet in his mailbox as a warning to desist. The fact that these Belgian Blues have been genetically modified over time to have a sculpted, heavily muscled appearance is known as "double muscling" and accounts for why Caesarean sections are performed on neonatal calves—the calves are so large that they block the birth canal—yet Caesarean section is the normal form of delivery for the Belgian Blue and that's why he included a scene of same in his film.
Since he mentioned the bullet in the mailbox, Roskam was asked if he had experienced any backlash from the hormone mafia? "No," he answered, though while he was doing his research, he was a bit concerned about retaliation; but, a friend of his who had a good position in law enforcement kept track of whether or not his name was showing up anywhere. Further, he announced early on when discussing the project to the Belgian press that Bullhead would be a fictionalized narrative, more of a gangster movie, a thriller, and that his film didn't intend to vilify or expose the meat industry. As Van Langendonck had mentioned in his introduction, the hormone mafia killed a veterinarian inspector back in the '90s who had exposed the industry to the legal authorities. The mafia learned their lesson from that mistake because—though from a moral point of view it's bad to kill people—it's also bad for business to kill people; they expose themselves.
As to whether the illegal use of hormones is ongoing, Roskam affirmed that, yes, it still goes on but the meat industry as a whole is much more careful and sophisticated now in how this is done. The bulls still grow big fast, comparable to the controversy of atheletes using steroids in sports, but the law requires evidence. They need to find and name the kind of product that's in the blood, otherwise it's not a felony or a crime. They can see that there's a disturbance, but they can't name it and—once they have identified it—the hormone mafia have already moved on to a new cocktail. It's changing all the time with the law chasing them and never catching up. They can't do anything about it. Still, Roskam qualified, this is a minority activity. In the past all the farmers were involved because it wasn't seen as much of a crime. At the end, it's just an opinion whether growth hormones are still legal in the United States. In Europe, it's still illegal and it's just a matter of where you draw the line. Some say it's not healthy. Some say there's no proof, which Roskam posed might actually be true. In the long term, it can't yet be proven that beef injected with hormones are dangerous for human consumption; but, without knowing, perhaps it's better not to use them? That being said, Roskam opined that he feels they could be used under controlled conditions, as long as the consumer knows what hormones are being used. He prefers eating a steak in the States from cattle that have been given identified hormones than those in Europe where he doesn't know what's been pumped into the meat.
My question to Roskam was to speak to the tension between the visual style of the film, its physicality, and Raf Keunen's elevated score. Along with the actors and his DoP, Roskam has worked with Keunen before. All of them are close friends and have been part of the project from the very beginning. When Roskam talked about the script to Keunen, he was already playing themes on the piano. They communicated a lot on what music would work for each sequence and decided early on that they wanted to use the music like a character in the film, or more like "an emotional spirit" informing the film and guiding the audience to understand Jacky's emotional torment within an abbreviated period of time. "That's the power of music," Roskam asserted. Though not ordinarily done, Roskam asked his producer for a three-month break after he finished the final cut of the film specifically so Keunen could compose the music. Once he had the music, Roskam then went back to the editing room to shape the film with the use of the music. He termed it "an equal combination of two crafts."
As to why the characters within the film had trouble communicating with each other, Roskam explained that there is no official "Belgian" language, per se, and that instead Belgium has two languages: Flemish—which is similar to Dutch and distinguished by accentuation, much like the distinction between British and American English—and the Walloons, who are French-speaking. For complicated historical reasons, most of the time the Flemish speak French whereas the French don't speak Flemish. This is changing but remains the current reality. Roskam grew up in the same region as Jacky's farm, which is close to what they call "the linguistic border" where one side is Flemish-speaking and the other side (to the South) is French-speaking. When he was growing up, his family lived closer to the big French-speaking city than the Flemish-speaking cities so—when they wanted to shop at an urban shopping mall, for example—they went to the French-speaking city, which accounted for their familiarity with French. This holds especially true for the slaughter industry, which is largely situated at this linguistic border. Thus, it's realistic that Jacky should speak French to conduct business and also explains why his French love interest Lucia (Jeanne Dandoy) doesn't always understand him when he stops speaking French and reverts to Flemish, especially when he gets emotional at the end of the film and starts to speak in his own dialect. This obstacle of communication symbolizes the sensitivity of Belgium's political conflict where—after a recent election—Belgium had no government for nearly 500 days. Roskam decided to portray this lack of communication in his film because it's a real issue in his country. This brave aspect of the film was noted by Variety correspondent Ian Mundell who wrote that the mixing of Flemish- and French-speaking characters made for "a rare example of a story straddling Belgium's main language communities." It was only afterwards, however, that Roskam realized he probably should have distinguished the languages with French subtitles to make this issue less confusing to English-speaking audiences.
Asked to explain why he configured Jacky's childhood friend Diederik (Jeroen Perceval) as a gay character, Roskam detailed that in earlier versions of the script Diederik was not gay. As he developed the story and incorporated the characters of the cops that were interacting with Diederik, he wanted one of the cops to use her charms and seduce Diederik to solicit information; but, that struck him as a cliché that he had seen in movies countless times. It was actually Roskam's wife who suggested that Diederik should be gay so that a male cop would seduce him for information. Suddenly the script gained metaphorical force and weight and the character of Diederik became more interesting and somehow "new" because now, like Jacky, Diederik had his own internal obstacles to fight. Diederik is in an environment that is not gay-friendly so he has to hide who he is and pretend, which makes his character more realistic, complicated, and perhaps important because, clearly, it's still not easy for gay people. But he wanted to add this element in a just-so fashion, to place it in the narrative without making the film be about a gay guy in a gangster environment. "He's just gay; that's it." Further, this makes the relationship between the two boys even more nuanced and poetic. They were friends and then they grew up and drifted apart, not only because of their shared experience of trauma, but because of their orientations.
Roskam was asked if Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo had any influence on the film's final sequence when Jacky, pumped up on testosterone, descends the stairs? Roskam admitted that while they were developing their shots, they named that sequence the Hitchcock shot. Especially after they found the location and saw the stairs. Originally, he had another concept in mind; but, shifted gears when he found the stairwell. Along with the Hitchcock shot, they had a Terrence Mallick shot where grass was waving in the wind, and a Michael Mann shot; all the big guys entered his film, more than he could even name.
With the final image of the film being the close-up of Jacky as a young boy staring at the camera for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, and then the music finally calming down and the screen going to black, Roskam adhered his editing to the music, which decided the prolongation of the shot. He decided to cut the shot at the moment the wind lifted Jacky's hair. His editor Alain Dessauvage argued the shot was too long but Roskam insisted, "No, the wind, the wind." He felt the beats were better if they waited a bit longer and this convinced Dessauvage.
Of Related Interest: Bay Area audiences will have a chance to view Roskam's celebrated debut when Bullhead screens at SF IndieFest. At their press conference, I was surprised that no mention was even made of, perhaps, the most important headliner in their program; a significant omission.
Each year Turner Classic Movies performs calendrical wizardry by transforming the shortest month of the year into 31 days of Oscar®-worthy programming. For their 18th edition, TCM is taking "31 Days of Oscar®" on the road with 348 features organized—Robert Osborne wryly advises in his introduction to Now Playing—"according to where their stories occur, be that movie set in Chicago, China, Colorado, Canada, California, Connecticut or the Caribbean (or perhaps in Boston, Baghdad, Berlin, Belgium or Brigadoon)." It's a geographical conceit worth exploring. This globetrotting lineup features 25 Best Picture honorees and 30 movies appearing on TCM for the very first time. TCM's day-by-day schedule can be found here and the trailer for the program can be found here (impressive for its imaginative segues from one film into another, notably Gene Kelley's Singing in the Rain title sequence washing into From Here to Eternity's passionate seaside embrace and a bewildered Esther Blodgett stumbling into Ben Hur's chariot racetrack).
This year, film critic and historian Leonard Maltin will tweet live from @LeonardMaltin during some of his favorite 31 days of Oscar® prime-time films throughout the month. For more information, visit TCM's Facebook page or follow them on Twitter @TCM.
And to pretty up how battered your suitcase is going to become over the next 31 days, all month long you can check-in to movies using GetGlue to get exclusive 31 Days of Oscar® stickers. Happy Cinematic Travels!
If you're not aware of Pacific Film Archive's African Film Festival, you've missed some of this year's offerings already. The annual selections, occurring around the time Black History Month kicks in, are always fascinating, varied and sometimes astonishingly moving. Regrettably, I missed a second viewing of an example of the latter, the strongest dramatic entry of this year's festival: A Screaming Man (2010), by the Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Daratt; Abouna). Adam, a former swimming champion who sucks in his gut in the mirror, clings to his job as a pool attendant at a resort hotel about to be privatized (by a Chinese owner). When "Champ" loses his job to his adult son Abdel and is himself demoted to gatekeeper with a too-small uniform, an aging man's vanity and resentment begin to rumble like the approaching sounds of the long-running civil war. That larger struggle takes over their lives when Abdel is conscripted into the army, curfew is called in town and Abdel's pregnant girlfriend arrives at the older man's door. Haroun's film is a deeply felt, melancholy meditation on Chad's civil war that rivals Issa Serge Coelo's Daresalam (2000) from a previous African Film Festival.
One Way, a Tuareg Journey (2010) is ostensibly a documentary by an African immigrant boy aided by Italian filmmaker Fabio Caramaschi. The preteen boy is Sidi, a Tuareg from the Saharan country of Niger. The Tuareg are a nomadic desert people whose camel- and goatherding lifestyle can't be more different from life in the northern Italian town of Pordenone, where Sidi's factory-worker father has brought most of his family except for their six-year-old son Alkassoum. Sidi tells the camera, "I dream about him almost every Monday." When behind the camera, he interviews his father asking why his little brother was left behind and goes out in public interrogating the greengrocer and other Italians about immigrants. Either this child has been well-coached or he's incredibly bright: He says he'd like to be a journalist because, "When I'm behind the camera, everyone respects me," and notes that the camera can change the way a person behaves—this last insight borne out in the carefully diplomatic words of his Italian interviewees. At length little brother Alkassoum arrives in Italy, and Sidi shows him the ropes. The cross-cutting between Alka's days in the desert encampment and his new life in Italy forces the viewer to consider what exactly makes for a "better life."
One Way is preceded by the 14-minute-long live-action film Lezare (For Today), directed by Ethiopian filmmaker Zelalem Woldemariam Ezare (The 11th Hour) and based on a fable about short-term hunger threatening long-term sustainability.
One Way is a much more polished and disciplined counterpart to the Spanish-Moroccan You All Are Captains (2010), in which Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe apparently tries to get a bunch of unruly Tangier schoolboys to make a film about "burned" (illegal) immigrants. Translators, other teachers and the hustler on the street are no help: the kids rebel against discipline and procedure and can't agree on what the finished product should be. Finally they're sent off to the country without Laxe and evidently devise their own filmmaking ethos, but by the end a finished film seems completely beside the point. Fun and camaraderie are the important things, and the film's casual black-and-white shooting style brings back the long sunny days and beckoning distances of questing youth. The praise lavished on this film is highly exaggerated ("sublime," "immense artistic reach")—it's a minor childhood romp, a season in the sun before the kids' real encounters with money, crime and the tourist economy turn them into men.
The African country getting the most series attention this year is the Democratic Republic of Congo. An inspirational music documentary, an epic historical documentary and a hiphop-fueled crime saga all turn their genre lenses on this turbulent country. German filmmakers Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer's Kinshasa Symphony (2010) is about classical musicians and singers of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, preparing for an open-air concert celebrating the Congo's independence. Without much money or a classical-music support network, they encounter problems other symphonies don't: frequent power outages, choking billows of smoke, finding the right wood to make a double bass from scratch and hitting a bell in D with the wheel rim of a minibus. On concert day, the entire neighborhood puts on a show that transforms Beethoven's Ninth into an enthralling expression of the Kimbanguistes' own religious fervor and joy in their freedom from colonial rule.
The Belgian TV production Kongo: 50 Years of Independence of Congo (2010) is a rare and engaging look at another country's chronicle of colonialism. The first episode of three (total running time two hours and 36 minutes) wastes no time stating that the earliest white men's plans for Congo were for mining. The first European visit to Congo, by the Portuguese Duarte Lopes in 1579, was in search of slaves to work another broad land mass (America) recently "discovered" by Christopher Columbus. This dream coincided with that of Pope Sixtus V, who envisioned a new Christian empire in Black Africa to beat back the Islamic threat.
Meanwhile the Congolese themselves took the whites for mindeles, or ghosts of their ancestors who lived at the bottom of the sea and returned to the land with pale skin. Lopes encountered a highly organized regime of provincial governors controlled by a centralized, dynastic king. But the first white settlement in Africa shook this regime by the foundations. Between the 16th and 19th centuries a mind-boggling eight million slaves were sent to Brazil and the English, French, Dutch and Danish Caribbean and another two million to Spanish-controlled countries—five of those million from the mouth of the Congo River. Then a new chapter of Congolese history began when the 19th century yielded a new kind of European visitor: the explorer. Allied with the Catholic "White Fathers" and the young Belgian King Leopold II, these parties exploited the Congolese under the cover of the anti-slavery cause, cloaking Leopold's towering colonial ambitions under a philanthropic abolitionist banner. The king's 1878 commissioning of celebrity explorer Henry Morton Stanley to travel the interior was designed to secure commercial posts ahead of other European powers.
The cruelty and brutality of the rubber plantations, and the punishment inflicted for rebellion, is portrayed relentlessly. It's refreshing that there are no Ken Burns-style modern talking heads, but there are voiceover narrations of letters and journals, and I presume imagined monologues, by selected influential players. The stiff, eccentric and sometimes beautiful animation helps the early history come alive. But the overall impression, without a strong Congolese historical point of view, is that the natives were easy pickings and tragically destined to be victimized well into the 21st century—an impression that is visually strengthened by contrasting portraits of well-dressed white men and naked black men with their limbs lopped off in the earlier episodes, then by scenes of civil war and riots as the country struggles for independence in the later episodes. The evolution from the Belgian Congo to the Republic of Congo is a difficult and bloody one, and this series doesn't end with false optimism for a country with a three-century legacy of slavery and annihilation. An imagined monologue by martyred nationalist hero Patrice Lumumba haunts the narration to the end of the series, his spirit living beyond Mobutu and Kabila and other pretenders to his vision.
Finally, the film in this series that will appeal to action and crime-saga fans is Congolese director Djo Tunda Wa Munga's Viva Riva! (2010). Newly back-in-town hustler Riva hopes to make a killing on a truckload of precious black-market gasoline eyed by competitors, and he recklessly pursues the glamorous wife of the reigning crime boss. The world is his, so he thinks. The first film made in the Lingala language, Viva Riva! already had a short run in Bay Area Landmark Theatres in June 2011. However it may aspire to Hollywood adrenaline and genre thrills, its vivid Kinshasa locale and preoccupations make it so much more interesting than a routine American rise-and-fall epic. Although the film has been criticized for being full of gangster and prostitute (and perhaps Angolan?) stereotypes, I was impressed with the depiction of one character—a lesbian army commander—whose fate defies stereotypical expectations.
Mark Cousins and I met in the press lounge at the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) where I parked myself on an armchair next to his to wolf down crudité and sliced fruit. When I glanced up at him, his mirthful eyes were twinkling and he was smiling impishly from ear to ear. "Hello," he immediately greeted me the moment we made eye contact, as if he wanted to become friends straight away. We introduced ourselves and I discovered he had brought his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) for its U.S. premiere to the festival, as well as guest curating PSIFF's Archival Treasures sidebar. Though I had already missed a couple of the early morning three-hour segments of his ambitious survey of film, I arranged to attend the film's weekend marathon, which proved to emulate not only the pereginations of Homer's wandering protagonist; but, also Homer's literary precedent of mentorship.
The Story of Film began its journey last September at a Telluride gallery installation although the film's official world premiere occurred at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where local journalist James McNally wrote: "Choosing to focus on the history of cinematic innovation rather than on the standard Hollywood narrative, the series ties together advances in technique, technology and influence from places as far-flung as India, Mexico, Iran, China and several African countries." From TIFF, The Story of Film returned to the UK for a televised broadcast on Channel Four and since then individual segments have teased festival audiences here and there, such as at the Mill Valley Film Festival. The Story of Film is currently screening at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) through February 16 and David Hudson has rounded up a suite of reviews for MUBI. For those unable or unwilling to sit through 15 hours of film history, the DVD of The Story of Film will be released in the UK on April 23 by Network Releasing, and will soon be available to preorder on Amazon.
One would think that sitting in a theater for two days straight at eight hours a stretch with only an hour off for lunch would prove exhausting; but, instead, The Story of Film's passionate focus on innovation was invigorating and—with Cousins on hand to introduce each day's segments and to field questions at the end of each day—the experience is already guaranteed to be one of this year's cinematic highlights. "Sometimes you can learn to drive in a weekend or you can learn to make pasta sauce or you can take a refresher course in a foreign language," Cousins mused at the onset of the marathon. "Maybe The Story of Film is something of a refresher course in movie language. Maybe come Monday morning if you've stayed here and you've liked it, you'll have learned some new things about this bright-lit, luminous, flickering language of the movies."
Cousins: These locations where the movies were shot were evocative. Either the building or the street or the studio is still there and that's evocative or not as evocative. One of my favorite books is George Steiner's Real Presences, which speaks to the idea of the authenticity of a place. I like to walk around with my camera—which is in my bag here—and film at dawn, going to those old studios in Calcutta, for example, to try to capture some of the magic of it.
Cousins: It took six years to make. We started almost exactly six years ago. The first thing we shot was the interview with Youssef Chahine, the great Arab director, because we got a little bit of money. We worked bit by bit. As we got a little bit more money, we filmed a little bit more. The editing, of course, was a long period and took almost two years in the editing suite. We cut it totally out of sequence so that we would be cutting Brad Pitt and then going back to Thomas Edison and then going to Africa and then to Iran. I had to go to many of the great archives of the world—in Beijing, in Cairo, in Iran—to get the material I needed. No one has ever collected this material in this way before and only in the digital era has it been possible to do that.
Cousins: You're right. I didn't reference Skladanowsky. First of all, I couldn't fit everything into The Story of Film—the Brits have some claim to inventing cinema as well—but, I made my best judgment on this and decided that I wanted to look at the two figures who most certainly had a key creative role in inventing cinema: the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison. Skladanowsky's claim is good and strong but I didn't have space for him in the film. When you look at those early years of film history, there was something that was happening in the 1890s, which was across many countries. Many people were excited by that creative moment: the inventiveness of the Victorian time. I feel strongly that Edison and the Lumière Brothers were key and, beyond that, I felt I could go no further because we'd already taken quite a lot of time on the early years of cinema in The Story of Film and it would have taken even longer.
Guillén: For me the value of your project comes down to the art of the storytelling. A story can't be told unless you have a consummate and passionate storyteller and each storyteller has his or her conventions. I'm intrigued by your use of the Christmas ornament to reference the cinema of Hollywood, which immediately made me question my own collection of Christmas ornaments. [Cousins laughs.] Can you speak to why that metaphor expresses Hollywood for you?
Cousins: Thank you. That, for me, is what I love doing. Another example would be how—while watching Brad Pitt in Andrew Dominik's beautiful film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—I was reminded of Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's films. Brad Pitt is filmed in the same way as Lillian Gish. This kind of connective tissue, this kind of poetic impulse that filmmakers have had across this relatively young art form, and discovering this unexpected connection between Brad Pitt and Lillian Gish—there it is!—that's what's been the thrill of making The Story of Film: noticing those connections. I love it.
Cousins: That's right. I was constantly educating myself. I learned so much from Youssef Chahine—the wonderful, bold and daring Egyptian filmmaker who died a few years ago—not only about Egyptian cinema, I thought I knew Egyptian cinema, but also about human bravery. This is a guy who—when he made Cairo Station—tried to be more honest about sexuality and was spat at on the street; but, he kept going. In my interview with him for The Story of Film, he spoke quite openly and daringly about Egyptian politics long before the Arab Spring that happened recently, long before the end of Hosni Mubarak. I learned so much from the courage of filmmakers like Chahine. They were really pushing themselves and their societies. I was incredibly touched by that. I was permanently changed by the experience of making this film.
Cousins: Let me tell you a story and this is quite an optimistic story. When I was making this film, I realized I knew nothing about Ethiopian cinema. I didn't even know if there was Ethiopian cinema. I started to research and I found that there was. I found one film in particular called Harvest: 3,000 Years. I ordered it from Facets in New York. It cost me $120 and took two weeks to arrive. In that period, my appetite to see this film grew and grew so that—when it arrived—I slammed it into my video recorder and watched it. It was a masterpiece. Now if you want to see that film, you can just click on YouTube and see it in all its glory, subtitled and everything. So that argues against the point you've just made; but, a crucial question, I think, from the lesson of my story is about appetite generation: I was getting hungrier and hungrier and hungrier to see that film. Now that it's so available and so easy to watch, the danger is that you think, "Well, I can watch it there so I'll watch it next Tuesday. Or I might watch it next year. Or I might watch it when I retire, or whatever." It's a different process. Actually the problem is not about accessibility but about generating an appetite for cinema. We're in an era of relative plenitude—not total plenitude but relative plenitude—therefore, the question for me as a sign poster is how to look at this Ethiopian film. As to the accessibility of these films, many of them are on YouTube so it's not as horrible as it sounds to hunt them out. Some of them are hard work and some of this is about shaming the rights holders of these films—who do nothing with these films—to make them available.
Guillén: With regard to digital production, you reined the discussion in to industrial practices and didn't mention all the advances and trends in what has been termed "disposable" cinema; i.e., films made with handheld cameras by everyday folks?
Cousins: I wrote my book The Story of Film: A Worldwide History in 2002-2003. I had actually suggested in a British newspaper that there should be a single volume history of cinema like E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art. Then I drove to India by camper van and when I got back there were two letters from publishers suggesting, "Why don't you write such a book?" I was in my thirties, which was probably a little too early, but I gave it a go. The book did well and was published all around the world in the '90s. Then my nutty producer John Archer said, "Why don't we try to make it into a film?"
Cousins: The 8½ Foundation was created by Tilda Swinton and me. We discovered that we both fell in love with movies about the same time, when we were eight-and-a-half. Tilda's son asked her once, "Mummy, what did people dream about before the movies were invented?" These things came together and made us think that maybe around the age of eight-and-a-half is a kind of threshold moment; a perfect time to fall in love with cinema before you become a teenager and try to be too cool. We decided to invent a movie bar mitzvah; an initiation into the world of cinema. The 8½ Foundation takes place in Scotland, though we've had offers to repeat it elsewhere. Children—when they're reaching the age of eight-and-a-half—log onto our website, which is set up as a magical world with little projectors in a midnight forest where there are clips of films that Tilda and I particularly love. If these children want to see any of these films or get one of them for their eight-and-a-half birthday, they write a handwritten letter to us. I get hundreds of letters now with drawings and everything. We wrap the film up in sparkly paper and send it off to the child. The idea behind all this is not simply to give the child a beautiful film—and it's a Chinese film or an Iranian film or a West African film—but it's also about appetite generation. As I mentioned earlier, in this modern day when everything is so accessible, if you have to write a letter, send it off and then wait for three weeks before the film arrives, there's a sense of build-up there and, hopefully, that's fun.
