FILM CRITICISM BLOGATHON—Phillip Lopate: Codys Bookstore Reading and Q&A

Oh, why not be excessive?! It's not every day you have the chance to learn from someone as erudite as Phillip Lopate. And it's not every day you get to reciprocate the kind support of a fellow blogger like Andy Horbal, whose No More Marriages! blogathon on film criticism has already proven to be a fount of insight and information to which I will have to return again and again before fully sated.

Around the same time that Lopate had been invited by the Pacific Film Archives to lecture on both Mikio Naruse and his anthology of American film criticism, he was likewise promoting the book at Codys Bookstore when it was still on Telegraph in Berkeley. Initially, he was to dialogue with David Thomson but David, unfortunately, took ill and had to bow out. Ever the trouper, Lopate fashioned up a lecture that somewhat replicated his PFA piece but interestingly ventured into variant material as well.

"There must be some kind of weird identification that we do with movie critics," Lopate began, "and then disenchantment with them, and then reenchantment. I think that we have complicated relationships to movie critics.

"It's fitting that the book was published by Library of America because I wanted to assert that movie criticism has been a terrific fount of energy and insight and good prose, excellent prose. I have edited an anthology of the art of the personal essay, so I was already interested in essayistic prose and really I was looking to movie criticism, not for, y'know, what happened yesterday, but really going back to the roots, and trying to tell the story of this discipline, as it developed. At the beginning, of course, film critics were all amateurs and there was not even that much agreement that it was worth being a film critic because movies were disparaged by lots of people who thought that they were just for the cretin masses. But they always attracted as well certain writers and intellectuals who seemed to like this entertainment and find artistry in it.

"One of the first was Vachel Lindsay, a poet, and another one was the poet Carl Sandburg who was a regular film critic for a Chicago daily newspaper. So, it seems clear that at the beginning poets were attracted to film criticism. There was the silent period and you had this flow of images and poetry was going through its imagistic phase as well. But really there were no standards, there was no sense of how do you judge a film, everybody was flying by the seat of their pants, and standards eventually evolved though no real agreement. What we have now instead of standards, I think, are a series of arguments, a series of tensions and dialectics which different critics deal with in different ways. So for instance, some critics tend to approach a film as a kind of staged play and critique the characters and the plausibility of it. And others tend to look at it more as a series of moving paintings with a kind of visual ravishment or lack of visual ravishment; so the call—you might say—between the formalist and the thematic critics is finally resolved because no critic can afford to ignore either of these sides of the equation.

"There's the question: are movies an artform? I don't know that that's ever been decisively settled. I think the answer is that it can be an art form but is not always an art form. Clearly, many many movies are made without any intention of being works of art. It would be painful to have to judge every movie that came down the pike as though it were a work of art, and a failure if it didn't rise to that level of artistry. But of course there are films which are the equal of the greatest art in the 20th century and 21st century.

"I have to say that I approached this as a writer. I've written a lot of film criticism myself and I wanted to have within covers the tradition, or a kind of attempt at a canon, of film criticism. All my favorite film critics are in here, plus a lot who I discovered and some who I feel ambivalent about but I think are very good writers and I didn't have to agree with their every opinion. And I think that's what happens with film criticism: a conversation gets going. That's why I think it's a pleasure to read wonderful film critics like Manny Farber, and James Agee, and Otis Ferguson, and Robert Warshow, and Parker Tyler, and Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael, and Stanley Kauffmann, etc., etc., because we don't have to just go to them to see what to see Friday night. When we approach it as writing, we discover that there's a special kind of delight and pleasure in reading about movies of the past and what were decided about them, including movies that some people generally regard as classics now. So for instance, we get Pauline Kael's jaundiced take on The Graduate. We get Otis Ferguson registering his doubts about Citizen Kane. We get hilarious pieces about the original King Kong. These critics were responding—unreverentially, you might say—to whatever was thrown at them and trying to piece it out, and sometimes they changed their minds.

"What I wanted to get at tonight perhaps was the different strategies by which film critics shape a piece. How do they go at it? It's funny, because I did a radio interview today and somebody called in and said, 'Why can't film critics always start out with a description, and then tell who was in the film, and then tell what you thought about it?' This was like, y'know, trying to use a kind of Consumer Reports format and project it onto all film criticism. I shudder to think that I would have to do that with every film piece that I write. When I write a piece of film criticism, part of the mystery is what am I going to do? How am I going to structure it this time? How am I going to get some suspense going, some interest going?"

Lopate then read from his introduction to American Movie Critics: An Anthology From Silents to Now: "[F]ilm criticism has particular demands alongside those addressing other art forms. How, given such a complexly collaborative medium, to disentangle the different aspects that go into moviemaking (acting, direction, screenplay, sound, cinematography, art direction, editing); how also to suggest career patterns and shifts, by considering to what degree the film under review fits this actor's, director's, or studio's previous output; how to situate it in terms of its genre, and consider along those lines its originality or triteness, how to address its implicit social or political meanings, which may need to be teased out of its glossy surface; how to analyze the mass audience's response, which may differ from your own. All this often within a thousand words or less, sometimes juggling three films per column. Space limitations foster a style of witty compression. The critic learns to come at a film from a distinct angle or setup. Hence, the tendency for film criticism to move in an essayistic direction, as the writer gropes for some opening paragraph that can help generalize about the example(s) under discussion.

"A premium is placed on the film critic's ability to translate visual representation into crisply vivid verbal descriptions. Further professional considerations include: how do you structure a piece of film criticism so that it builds toward a satisfying conclusion? How do you sustain tension—by coming out swinging, by staging a bout between your ambivalencies, or by deferring an overall judgment as long as possible? How do you evolve a stylish prose that is textured, surprising, contemporary without pandering, neither too lightweight nor too solemn? How do you maintain enough resilience not to suffer burnout or get overly crabby, given the vast preponderance of bad movies?" (2006:xx)

"So obviously," Lopate quipped, "you do need a strategy to talk about what Pauline Kael called trash."

Lopate then read an excerpt from Carl Sanburg's piece about a Gloria Swanson movie called Manhandled. "What's interesting to me about this," Lopate pointed out, "is that he's not going to treat the whole film, he's just going to treat mainly one scene as a kind of emblem of how the whole film feels." The scene involves how Swanson removes her shoes after a long day's work. "And if I show you what it looks like," Lopate added, referring to the written text as published in his anthology, "you'll see that it's all these short paragraphs which are rather like a Carl Sanburg poem. So he was writing poems in the form of film reviews."

As an example of how to get into a difficult subject, Lopate read the opening paragraphs of Brendan Gill's essay on pornography, "Blue Notes". After his set-up, Gill then proceeded to deconstruct blue movies—which Lopate declined to read—but he wanted to illustrate how a writer had approached movies from the point of view of genre.

In a passage by Gilbert Seldes—who, Lopate claimed, was one of the earliest appreciators of movies and wrote a book about the seven lively arts—Seldes demonstrated that he was a great celebrator of Max Sennett and the Keystone Cops and tried to explain in a paragraph his rationale and what his attraction was to the Keystone Cops. "So here," Lopate instructed, "[Seldes is] trying to give you analytically a whole sense of what this humor was all about."

Offering up Cecilia Ager as "a writer who was very funny herself" and one who "tended to focus on women and women's roles", Lopate read an excerpt from Ager's review of the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races and her profile of Margaret Dumont—"that very large woman who was Groucho's foil": "There ought to be a statue erected, or a Congressional Medal awarded, or a national holiday proclaimed, to honor that great woman, Margaret Dumont, the dame who takes the raps from the Marx Bros. For she is of the stuff of which our pioneer women were made, combining in her highly indignant person Duse, stalwart oak, and Chief Fall Guy—a lady of epic ability to take it, a lady whose mighty love for Groucho is a saga of devotion, a lady who asks but little and gets it.

"Disappointment can't down her, nor pefidy shake her faith. Always she comes back for more though slapsticks have crippled her, custard pies spattered her trusting face. Surrounded by brothers who are surely a little odd, she does not think so. To her, her world of Marx Bros. pictures is rational, comprehensible, secure. Calmy she surveys it, with infinite resource she fights to keep on her feet in it. Equally ready for amorous dalliance or hair-pulling, for Groucho's sudden tender moods, or base betrayal, all her magnificent qualities are on display in A Day At the Races, where once again her fortitude is nothing human. It's godlike." (2006:84)

Assessing the stylistic strategies of various film critics, Lopate opined: "Some of them looked at directorial styles, some of them looked at actors. For instance, Otis Ferguson—who I mentioned is one of my favorite film critics—has a beautiful passage about James Cagney in which he really tries to argue what was so great about Cagney. Ferguson loved American movies, and there's always been this kind of snobbism toward American movies, for instance Laurence Olivier was a great actor but James Cagney or Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne are only playing themselves and this is, in my opinion, nonsense. Because if you look at early John Wayne movies, for instance, he's a sweet young man, but he's hardly the John Wayne that has that odd walk, and he's hardly got that way of pausing in the middle of his sentences. Cagney too constructed this persona of Jimmy Cagney, bit by bit, very consciously, the way a great actor goes about it.

"Looking at a performer and realizing that some actors build a character from film to film, it's not just the person they're acting in this particular film, but they're shadowed by all their previous performances and it produces a kind of depth. So for instance when you get a James Stewart in Vertigo and you get him doing slightly mean things to Kim Novak, you can't help but remember all the movies when he didn't do any mean things to anybody and it has a kind of depth to it. This is something that film critics are aware of and it's something that passes lineally as well as looking at the individual film.

"One of the way that film critics work is that they stage ambivalences and talk about how they experienced a movie as they were watching it. This is something that I often think of: Well, I liked the first part, it started to lose me here, and so on."

Lopate then opened it up for questions and comments.

One fan of James Agee—whose review of The Song of Bernadette Lopate likewise excerpted for his Codys audience—recounted that the poet W.H. Auden made wonderful remarks about Agee. They both kept very different hours in their daily lives and nightly lives, but this fellow asked Lopate if they weren't both living on Cornelia Street in the Village? And did they know each other?

Lopate responded that Auden was known to have said that he rarely went to the cinema but that he read James Agee's pieces with the greatest interest, his being the most interesting regular performance. "It's interesting," Lopate culled out, "that he saw it as a performance, I think that's important. Auden was, in fact, a generous critic who himself said that he didn't really see any point in writing negative criticisms; he usually wrote about things he loved, and he loved Agee's criticism. And I'm fairly certain that they knew each other because … at that point, the literary world [of New York] was much smaller than it is now, so I would absolutely be certain that he knew him. Though he obviously was not a film buff."

Lopate was asked if there were any contemporary critics that he particularly admired? He responded, "I like Manohla Dargis very much. She's a breath of fresh air. She's very passionate and she comes at a movie hard! She's very knowledgeable about movies. To use a critic who most people like who I like but didn't put in the book because he's English—but I don't like him as much as Manohla Dargis—Anthony Lane. Anthony Lane always is acting like the tired businessman who's saying I'm just like you folks, he's witty, but he refuses to enter the ranks of the specialist, you might say. In doing so he always manages to be superior to film culture. Manohla Dargis is a proselytizer for film culture. She wants people to know about obscure Taiwanese directors, she wants them to know about avant garde filmmakers, and she's defended a lot of work that doesn't have $10,000,000 advertising budgets behind it. I'm very pleased with it. I also think A.O. Scott is very good. Very different from her. Much more benign, thoughtful, bemused, very hard to get A.O. Scott outraged."

FILM CRITICISM BLOGATHON—Phillip Lopate: PFA Readings on Cinema Lecture and Q&A

Back in early April, Phillip Lopate guest-lectured at the Pacific Film Archives on both the films of Mikio Naruse—specifically Wife! Be Like A Rose, which I wrote up for The Evening Class—and his then-recently-published anthology of film criticism. I appreciate the invitation to contribute to Andy Horbal's film criticism blogathon as an opportunity to finally work up Lapote's introduction to and excerpts from American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now.

Lopate first of all thanked Susan Oxtoby for the pleasure of returning to Berkeley and the Pacific Film Archives. Previous to his anthology of American movie critics, Lopate had edited another anthology: The Art of the Personal Essay. "I've been very involved in the field of essay writing," he explained, "and I wanted to put together my two great loves, which were movies and essays. I wanted there to be this book, but it didn't exist. I wanted to teach a course in American movie critics and there had been some anthologies that have long gone out of print [but] nothing really comprehensive and extensive. So I realized I would have to do it myself. I started digging and talking to friends and put together a kind of chronology—it's a kind of story in a way—of how this profession of movie criticism came to be in America.

"It started out with really a bunch of poets like Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg. Vachel Lindsay wrote the first serious book about movies called The Art of the Moving Picture and he insisted that it was an art, or could be an art. Movies were really looked down on by most of the intelligentsia who thought they were one step below burlesque or nickelodeons. Lindsay was somebody who had a great deal of enthusiasm for Griffiths' work, Fairbanks' work. And Carl Sandburg it turns out was a regular film critic for a Chicago daily.

"But you also had people who were wandering into this profession like Robert E. Sherwood, who later became a playwright, and a psychologist named Hugo Münsterberg (a great name!) who wrote a book about the psychology of the motion picture. I wanted to assert that movie criticism could be, deserved to be considered a part of American letters, deserved to be included in the canon of the best American non-fiction. I not only looked at the film critics, but I also looked at people who were great writers who wrote some film criticism, like Edmund Wilson, or H.D., or James Baldwin, or John Ashbery, Paul Goodman. Maybe I was using these obviously great writers to buttress my argument that it has been a bastion of critical energy; probably more interesting writing has been done on film in the last 50 years in America than in any other art form.

"You had people who didn't know anything about movies and they strayed into film criticism on the Army principle that if someone's a painter you put them in the kitchen and if they know how to cook, you put them on painting duty. There was some of that—a guy has been a stringer or somebody who's been working in Cairo and now he wants to come in, so let's have him be our movie critic for a while.

"I think the first person who really put it all together as an American movie critic was Otis Ferguson because a lot of the critics had been deploring American movies, Hollywood movies, saying how shabby they were compared to the Swedish, the German, the Russian, saying to American moviemaking: "Why don't you grow up?" And Ferguson had an appreciation for what you would call the genius of the system. He understood how a well-oiled American movie could be a fragile kind of magic when everything came together. And he championed some of the talents like Jimmy Cagney and Mae West and Humphrey Bogart, people who he felt were very American. This was another debate: Were movies a quintessentially American art form or were they an international art form? Were American movies even good? You had this sort of debate about were they entertainment or were they art? Were they American or were they foreign? Of course the answer is both. America was getting these infusions of directors from abroad, great directors who were working in Hollywood.

"Then you had these other kinds of tensions. During WWII, for instance, there started to be a school of sociological criticism, people who looked at movies as indications of national character and, in fact, the Army employed film critics to do an analyses of the Japanese character, what was the enemy's character like just by watching Japanese movies? What was our character like? All of this came out in the way of Siegfried Kracauer's book From Caligari to Hitler[: A Psychological History of the German Film], which said that you can read a people's character from their movies.

"That sort of opened up a rich, fertile avenue of exploration. But then there was a kind of backlash because some critics felt that this was too literary of an approach, too sociological of an approach, and [that] you couldn't necessarily read a movie just in terms of [the piece], you have to consider the visual impact of a movie, the composition, the lighting, the cutting, everything like that, the mise en scène. So you had critics like Manny Farber, who was a painter, who looked at the screen as a visual dynamic, and that whole kind of formalist orientation was done in a kind of struggle with the sociologist. Of course everybody ends up doing both. All the great film critics have, of course, analyzed form and content. They have, of course, looked at the way a film plays visually and the themes and the characters. But at different times there have been different emphases, people have exaggerated one or the other. It's a question of proportion really.

"Parker Tyler who is very interested in gender and sex in the movies and did beautiful things with them. Andrew Sarris brought to America a kind of an awareness of the film director as an auteur. Who was responsible for it? This was always the question. How does a film critic go about apportioning praise or blame? I've also been fascinated in putting this book together with the issue of writing. How do you write a piece of film criticism? How do you figure out a line of attack? If you start talking about everything in the movie, you have 300 pages, and let's say you only have 300 words? You have to come at it at from some angle. Someone like Pauline Kael who was one of the great American film critics eventually was given a fair amount of space in the New Yorker to look at a film from many different angles and she also is an obvious example of a great essayist who was a film critic.

"So there were the daily reviewers—I think Vincent Canby was one of the best we've ever had—and I don't really make this great distinction between film criticism and film reviewing. I think there are people who can nail a film today in a daily review in 500 words and others who can write larger academic exegesis that still don't get at the heart of it in 40 or 400 pages."

Wanting then to quote a little from some of these critics to give a feeling of how literary styles intersect with a movie, Lopate read William Troy's review of King Kong, the first King Kong, where he wrote in a semi-joshing facetious style that couldn't be taken too seriously. In the book's introduction to Troy's review, Lapote wrote: "[Troy] was also film critic of The Nation from 1933 to 1935. To that post he brought an educated, almost professorial tone, which he used sometimes for comic effect (see his query about interspecies love an anatomy in the King Kong review). Troy also managed to approach each piece of film criticism as the occasion for some larger essayistic rumination. His feeling for the carpentry of the short review piece is superb." (2006:73) "You see," Lopate commented, "how Troy takes this as an occasion for meditating on some larger, genre issues as well as national character issues."

Lopate then compared what Cecilia Ager had to say about King Kong. "Another writer of the 1930s, Cecilia Ager, covered what was considered the woman's angle. She would write movie criticism with a great emphasis on women's fashions, on women's parts. She was really writing about the parts that women were assigned and the ways that they were construed." He quoted Ager: "Despite all her experience with picture beasties, Fay Wray can't seem to condition herself against the horrid old things. She's just as terrified at King Kong, she screams quite as shrilly as if she couldn't remember from her past encounters that she will surely be saved at the end. She won't learn, Miss Wray, she won't learn. All that's come of her former run-ins with monsters is the overnight change of her hair from black to blonde, but it doesn't help. The curious attraction she has for man-beast combos is not to be denied by superficial hair-color transformation. It's made matters even worse for her. Blonde, she looks even more the part of Beauty in the fable, Beauty and the Beast, so what can the beast do but act good and beasty." (2006:79)

Lopate then read Ager's wry critique of Barbara Stanwyck's film, Ladies They Talk About, wherein she considers that movie stars continue the character of themselves from movie to movie even as we're watching them in individual roles. Lopate appreciates Ager's "having some fun with the movie."

Another kind of fun, Lopate offered, is had by Paul Rudnick who took on the masquerade of being Libby Gelman-Waxner, a Jewish suburban housewife. Rudnick, he lectured, "wrote film criticism which in a way attempted to be quite silly but is really quite astute because he/she is really talking about how housewives try to have it both ways, have their cake and eat it too." He read from Rudnick's piece on Dances With Wolves entitled "A Boy Named Sioux": "I have often wondered what would have happened if, instead of having my own room with a canopy bed and a Snoopy phone in Great Neck, I had been kidnapped as a child by Indians and raised as a Sioux. Now, thanks to Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, I have my answer. In this three-hour cinematic epic, Mary McDonnell plays a white woman who was brought up in a tepee after her pioneer family was slaughtered and scalped. As a squaw, Mary behaves just the way I would: she wears stunning suede outfits trimmed with shells and Ralph Lauren-style Santa Fe fringe; she does her hair in a flattering shag look instead of too-severe tribal braids; and after her first husband dies, she holds out until a white movie star shows up. Mary is called Stands With a Fist because she once hit an Indian girl who gave her a hard time. In my high school yearbook, the Great Neck Senior Serenade, I was voted Best Accessories and Most Likely to Marry Within Her Faith, so the comparison is obvious." (2006:606)

Lopate then read from Vincent Canby's review of Easy Rider at the end of the '60s, distinguishable for how Canby worked his way through the film with his initial impressions, then his ambivalences, then his suddenly coming alive when something different happens (namely, the entrance of Jack Nicholson who then proceeds to steal the show). "All of that," Lopate commended, "within a short review."

Having tantalized his audience with these choice readings, Lopate then opened himself up for questions and comments.

Noting that Lapote had opined that he didn't see much division between a critic and a reviewer, one audience member wondered about the issue of writing for people who you assume have seen a film, and who you can go into depth about it, and writing for people who are trying to decide whether they should go see the film and don't want to know certain things about it before they see it. He asked how Lopate envisioned a critic managing those two conflicting courses?

Lopate responded: "That, in fact, has been the traditional distinction: that reviewers write for the audience that's making up its mind whereas critics weigh in after it is assumed that people have seen the film. I think that most times when film critics, for instance, write in literary magazines like The Times Daily Supplement, they're writing about films that people haven't seen for the most part. Because if they're writing about art films, for instance, they're writing about films that haven't gotten that much of an audience. In both cases tact is required and the writer has to finesse it and the reader has to know how to read a piece. When I read a daily reviewer, for instance, and I haven't made up my mind whether to see the movie or not … if I think I'm going to see the movie, I read at the piece, I don't read the piece word for word. If I think it's going to tell me something I don't want to know, I skip that passage, y'know? I want to get the sensibility of the writer. I want to get some sense of judgment, perhaps. What I'm after also is the mind of the critic whether it's in a review or if it's several months after the fact. We do read in a kind of hit-or-miss way when we're reading reviewers or critics. Part of the idea of this book was in some cases you're reading reviewers writing about things that are very fresh and we've already seen the movie, we know we've seen them, so this allows us to read without it spoiling. But you know daily reviewers also try to hold back certain elements of the plot and suspense; they're berated if they tell the ending of a film."

Another person queried if Lopate—after researching film criticism from various time periods and trends—could say anything about how criticism reflects what an audience is interested in or how the audiences for movies have changed over time?

"That's interesting," Lopate mused, "whether film criticism has changed over time. Obviously, one thing that's happened is that we now have a long history, we have a century of films. Film critics are not just writing about the current product but they're also—especially the best ones—always reconsidering that history, that century. So there's much more self-consciousness about it. This was a point that Sarris and Kael [made] in their own ways, which was that if you don't know anything about movies, you think all this is shocking and new (like The Graduate, an older woman and the young man); but, if you've seen movies a long time you know that this is not a new move on the part of movies. This sense of genre, this sense of structures of feeling that are built into movies from decade to decade and how it changes, that historical consciousness is one of the big differences. I think that film studies have really changed film criticism because now many people who are film critics come out of film studies, they get a degree in film studies. In the early decades, film critics were all flying by the seat of their pants, they were all making it up as they were going along, they were making up the categories, the standards, and there was this feeling of both freedom and ignorance, if you will. There were no film studies! Even when I went to college I didn't take any film studies courses. It was a kind of private knowledge. It was something you expected to get on your own in a way. And so now this is much more codified and also there's much more theory and so a lot of people who graduate from film studies classes and then try to become written film critics, they have to negotiate between all the semiotics that they've got in their brain and the audience, their readers, who couldn't care less. Just as Virginia Woolf speaks about the common reader—which is someone who is educated and curious and not a specialist—the reviewer used to be more like the common cultivated person who was responding, not as a specialist. Whereas now there tends to be more of a polarity between, on the one hand, very glib thumbs up thumbs down, slimey kind of criticism or reviewing, and very theoretical, academic criticism with not that much space in the middle, which is where, let's say, the cultivated amateur in the best sense—amateur meaning lover—could come."

Susan Oxtoby then posed a related question, curious from her perspective as a film programmer. Lapote's comments were very much true in Toronto where the daily papers only reviewed films in current release. She likewise observed that the same seems to be the case to a certain degree in the Bay Area. Susan wondered with the demise of the art house, if the general public is being left with only mainstream films being reviewed in the daily papers? She mentioned the trend seen on the Internet where there are all kinds of fabulous websites for bloggers with specialized discussion; but wondered generally what Lapote's thoughts were on criticism in the daily papers?

"I wanted to say something and you just jogged my memory," Lopate thanked Oxtoby. "One of the reasons why I will always revere Vincent Canby is because, at one point Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums opened up in Bleeker Street in some small theater downtown. Obviously it was a revival and Canby went and reviewed it just as though it were the big spectacle. He just reviewed it and wrote very intelligently about it and he just liked the movies, y'know? I see in the Times that Manohla Dargis is often performing a kind of educational function where she'll pick out a revival, this week's revival, or something like that, and there are other critics who do that, and just try to—it sounds so dreary—but to be educational, to educate the audience, y'know? Embedded in your question is the one about film criticism on the Internet and it's one that I feel a little shaky answering because I see that on the one hand you can be fantastically esoteric and geeky, and there are Hou Hsiao-hsien websites and things like that, which is great, but for my money it seems to me like a lot of writing on the Internet is still kind of stream of consciousness and doesn't quite have the elegance or the economy that I associate with the best film criticism, the mediated reflected prose style, maybe because it seems it's something like … almost like electrodes attached to the brain unmediated by the fingers. I do think that there's already some very good film criticism on the Internet and increasingly there will be as people begin to read it. People said the same thing about computers. They said literature would die because it would be too easy to write. Well, somehow, writers have adapted."

One fellow recalled his great fortune at discovering The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, Andrew Sarris's opinionated assessment of films of the sound era, organized by director. The book was influential on other critics and helped raise an awareness of the role of the film director among the general public. It certainly became this man's bible with regard to the pantheon of directors. He enquired after Lopate's view of the whole auteur theory and if that is still considered a fairly orthodox construct of how films are put together by the better directors?

Lopate answered: "I can't help but have the same autobiographical response. That book was the Talmud for me. I still have it. I was programming movies for a group called Filmmakers at Columbia and I went through that book and I underlined every possibility, I remember Robert Parish, The Purple Plain, things like that, y'know, I would get so excited I would have to see this movie. Obviously that's something that fed into my adolescent desire both for marching orders and for lists, something like baseball cards or something like that, batting averages. Sarris has made many modest statements about this, it wasn't an attempt to encompass everything. It was an investigation and he certainly has reconsidered. That's one thing I love about Sarris as a critic; he reconsiders. For instance, Billy Wilder. He wrote a kind of snotty dismissal of Billy Wilder and then, years later [he reconsidered]. By the way, I put both pieces in this anthology because I wanted to show how [Sarris] revises his thinking. He also reconsidered about 2001. He has a very amusing passage that I also put in here how he smoked a joint and suddenly he had a much greater respect for 2001. He admitted that his generation got much more of a kick out of a vermouth cassis. But even imagining, if you know Andrew Sarris, smoking a joint…. So yeah, I still love that particular book!"

Lopate was asked if he had any theories why Americans seem to be increasingly reluctant to see foreign films?

"I have some theories about it," he admitted. "I don't know if I could dignify them with theory but certainly, as Susan mentioned, it has to do with the demise of the art house circuit and the whole ancillary activity of film culture. That is, great films are still being made but there aren't as many film magazines. The art house circuit doesn't exist. But I also have this feeling—and correct me if I'm wrong—that when foreign films were European films; that is, when white people made them, y'know, there was much more of an easiness for Americans to identify and when great films started being made by Iranian and Taiwanese filmmakers suddenly Americans acted like, I can't remember that name, Kiarostami, it's too hard, Hou Hsiao-hsien, y'know, so it just seemed it was an extra leap of identification whereas it seemed like when they were French, Italian, German, it seemed that it was easier to promote directors as demigods. That's part of the reason. But obviously it all comes down to dollars and cents. You mustn't think that audiences were so sophisticated in the early 60s that they ate up these films. I reprinted a piece by Pauline Kael about Bande à Part, which was an appreciation of Godard's Bande à Part. Bande à Part opened and closed in a week, y'know.

"But I think what changed was it wasn't quite as costly to open a film in those days and now—because of the cost of ads, both print ads and t.v.—films routinely tend to have $10,000,000 budgets. How do you promote a film when you don't have that kind of money to spend? That's part of it. But I also have to say that in a weird way, everything does come through in America. The films don't always get distribution but they show in places like the Pacific Film Archives. There's still a network—Cleveland Cinemateque, places like the Walter Reade theater in New York, there are still a lot of places around where you can see these films, in Chicago, in Columbus, Ohio and so on, Houston, Texas. It means you just have to be very alert. When a foreign film passes through one of these places, you can't think, well, in about three weeks time I'll really be ready to see it. You've got to leap!"

One fellow commented that, glancing at Lopate's anthology which he had just purchased and which he confirmed was well worth the price, he noticed that Lopate included a number of selections from both Otis Ferguson and Cecilia Ager, moreso than any of the high-profile critics of the period with whom most of the audience would be more familiar by proclivity of age. He asked if Lopate was attempting to engender a revival of interest in Ferguson?

"I was brought to Ferguson by my friend Meridith Brody," Lopate said, "who did her thesis on Ferguson and Farber, two of my absolute favorites. Let me just say in explanation that one of the reasons I put [in] so much Otis Ferguson was because he wrote much shorter. A piece by Pauline Kael is 40 pages long. So it may seem that I'm dissing Miss Kael but she has more pages than Ferguson. Cecilia Ager also wrote short. What I love most about this book—and I can speak about it as though I were not the author because I'm merely the editor—is the historical section seems to be fresh and important and I love looking back from the shadows at people like Otis Ferguson who really is … I had to stop myself from putting in 100 pages of Otis Ferguson. The more I read him over and over again I thought, 'This piece is good. This piece is good.' The editors would say, 'That's enough. No more Otis Ferguson.' People like Harry Alan Potamkin, to bring them back in, to find a place for Jonas Mekas who, afterall, was a writer on film. The cautious part of me wanted to end it at 1980 because I was so sure of the writers I had selected from 1917 to 1980. I felt that essentially—I don't want to say it's unassailable, I really feel I can stand behind it

"But I wanted to say, I didn't want to have this elegiac nostalgic sense that film criticism is no longer good or no longer important. I think there is some terrific film criticism being written now. So I had to bring it to the present. I also knew there were many many practitioners out there who I couldn't include. After I'd gotten through the history, which I felt most connected to and most of a sense of filial obligation to, I knew I wouldn't have enough pages certainly to soothe the feelings of all the good critics out there. Including myself! I was criticized by several reviewers for not putting myself in. But that's the prerogative of an anthologist afterall. What I did instead was to lay a few bets and to say, well, I like these peoples' prose styles and sensibilities. There are many more like them.

"Those who buy the book, on the one hand it is a kind of one-stop shopping. But no one book can replace a whole library of film criticism. So the idea is that if it's somebody you like, then go out and buy a collection of Otis Ferguson, or go to the library or get it at the out of print, because a lot of this is out of print now. So that is moreorless the answer to your question."

Somone quoted Jean Luc Godard as saying that—up until about 1950—if you were very rigorous you could grasp the whole history of film because it was, as Lopate had mentioned, more Eurocentric. Lopate was questioned what he thought of that statement?

Lopate answered: "When I was a teenager I was very involved with movies and jazz. Both of them had histories that I felt I could do, y'know? I tried to see every movie in the index and it was still possible to do that. There was a moment when you could at least think you could kind of touch the milestones. And now it's much more diverse and we know more. But there's so much great African—well, not so much—but there's some very good African film like Idrissa Quedraogo and Ousmane Sembene and people like that. I remember when people thought about Japanese films, 'It's too far from us. We don't really understand their customs.' But the kind of stream of humanism that runs underneath Japanese film, that I believe runs underneath African film, finally makes us understand what is at stake here: dramas with family, dramas with the individual in society, comes down to some very basic material."

BEYOND THE CALL—The Evening Class Interview With Adrian Belic (Pt. 2)

Guillén: So you're a storyteller who loves characters and yet you're a wary and shrewd traveler who measures character. Character, in its original Greek meaning, refers to an engraving tool, something that marks or inscribes, and the wrinkles in one's face, laugh lines and such, refer to the scratchings of time and the marks engraved on one's face by experience. How do you hope your films about characters will serve to strengthen character in the people who watch them?

Belic: Here in San Francisco I have a lot of friends who do video and activist work and they do it very well. I'm definitely far left of center. The way I look at storytelling or my art form is that the number one thing in terms of my relationship to the audience is that the film be entertaining. If it's entertaining, I have a better chance of reaching 90% of the audience who will come in and see the film for whatever reason—an interesting title, the people look like me, I'm interested in Afghanistan, my brother picked up a flyer off the street, whatever—I want them to go and come out at minimum and say, "That was pretty damn cool." Maybe they don't think of the film again, but, that's the minimum. If people are looking for something, or open to something, that's the self-reflective part, the part I have no control over, but, I try and imbue my films with stuff to nurture that. The number one thing for my films in terms of the audience and entertainment is that it leaves a self-reflexive resonance with the audience. Often you will see documentaries or fiction films that are so outlandish that you watch from the outside through a frame. When the credits roll it's almost like you close the shutters on that and it's over. It bounces off of you. Nothing settles in. The lights come up, you walk out of the theater, and it's almost like you've already forgot what you've just experienced because [it's outside of you]. Whether someone has a lot of money like Jim who can fund stuff, great. If it's someone like Ed who has these amazing social skills to get stuff done, maybe that. I love engaging with people who see my film because I love to hear how it resonates with them. I'm only half of that dance. They're the other half of that dance in discussion: where they've been, what they've experienced, what their resources are, what their dreams are. It's that meeting point where the synergy's created and where you get something from two relatively benign things—film and someone viewing it. If you're able to touch and connect, you get this synergistic catalytic reaction. That's what I love.

I go into environments where I don't know the language or the culture. I don't know the geography. So what I always tell my friends is that I don't assume anything and I anticipate everything. I use that same principle with my audiences. I assume nothing from the audience but I anticipate everything from the audience. Anything that the interaction can create.

Guillén: I appreciate your devotion to an aesthetic of entertainment because I agree with you that education flies more smoothly on the wings of entertainment. Recently, I interviewed Stanley Nelson for his Jonestown documentary and he expressed something comparable, that one of the things that most affected him from the many promotional screenings across the country was one fellow who came up to him and said, "That documentary was entertaining." He said it made the hairs go up on his neck.

Belic: I just got the same reaction!

Guillén: Another subject that came up briefly at the Q&A was that you felt a lot of empathy for the soldiers. I felt the audience bristle. We live in such a polemicized urban environment and one of the things I felt most successful about Beyond the Call was that it cuts through those polemics to focus on the humanity of not only the people attempting to be humanitarians and those receiving humanitarian aid, but all the various agents involved. I was struck by the scene where the Knightsbridge trio were interacting with the military personnel in the Southern Philippines and how surprised the military were that Knightsbridge were able to secure so much medicine through donations. As someone who describes himself as left of center, can you talk a bit about your experiences with stationed military personnel?

Belic: I have a moustache that's usually waxed like Dali and long hair and all the rest of it, but one thing that Ed Artis noticed in Genghis Blues—and I have now noticed in him—is that we all have this idealistic belief that everyone has a humanity. That no matter how they're bred or raised or painted or dressed or educated, that under all that everyone has a humanity and the idea is to try and engage with that. We're in such a hyper-polarized environment now. During the Reagan administration, yeah, I hated that guy but we could discuss stuff, we could discuss anything, both the left and the right, we sized the other side up and you were written off. One of the reasons we included the whole Southern Philippines mission is 1) because it happened, 2) because it brought the film full circle. If you were grooving on the humanity of the film and not just on all the details, that Ed's in Afghanistan, that he's old, that he's an ex-soldier; but, here's a guy who started on the mean streets of America, went into the military to avoid prison, in the military—it seems so incongruous—he not only saw humanity around him but saw his own humanity. Now here's this old guy coming back to where it all began in this place that no one would imagine one would find humanity and tries to give back. Again, for the hyper-polarized people, the hardcore lefties and righties, they're either going to love it or hate it. And it's broadening. Here we are the day after the elections and the Democrats have taken over and I think there's a broadening and freeing of the minds of many Americans to try and look at a third path. These guys in many ways represent vanguards in that. So in the Southern Philippines sequence you have the meeting of the young bucks and the old guy in this construct that should be completely devoid of humanity.

Guillén: Along with the many hats that you wear as a filmmaker, you have generated a persona of being a world traveler. I likewise consider myself a world traveler, I've been many places throughout my lifetime.

Belic: You're lucky.

Guillén: Lucky's a good word to use. You also said something at your Q&A that's recently been resonating with me regarding how traveling now as an American citizen is very different than it was when we were younger. In my youth when I was exploring the world it was exciting because, at that time, things hadn't accelerated into the globalized homogeneity you witness now. You could actually find places that were different and learn from that difference. You mentioned that traveling during the Clinton administration were almost party years and a huge contrast to traveling through the Bush years. Could you define that difference? It might seem apparent, but maybe not.

Belic: I agree. We sit here and it's so obvious, it's right in your face, but there's still a majority of Americans who don't own a passport. It's hard to describe and for me it's extremely sad how to travel around the world now and say you're an American means something completely different than what it did before 9/11 and the Bush administration. Even during the years of the Clinton administration, you could go down to Latin America—and we were doing all kinds of horrible stuff down there—but there was this separation: hate the government, love the people. After the 2004 elections, when it was clear what was going on in this country—the entire world saw it—when the American people voted George Bush back into office, well, disillusion would be an understatement. Then you would travel around the world and it would be like: "You know what? Screw your government and screw you." That sentiment persists to this day. We're still in the middle of it. It's funny, we're talking about this right after an election where it appears that the Democrats have won back both the House and the Senate so it may change, but, discussing traveling around the world as an American pre-Bush II and now during the Bush administration to someone who has never traveled is like Neil Armstrong explaining what weightlessness is to the rest of us and what it's like to see the beauty of the earth floating beneath you. That's how profound it is.

Guillén: In retrospect, as I think back on my own sojourns around the world, I feel how blessed I was to have that energy to explore, to be relatively fearless—maybe naïve—and to realize that now it's not the same. I just feel so blessed that I got to be part of a global experience that has shifted so dramatically and become much more polemicized.


Belic: I agree with you. One thing: I love hanging around with young people. I'm now 37 so I'm inbetween. I'm still looking up at all these elders around me and just reveling in their wisdom and all I can learn from them but yet I've moved on enough in my life that there are a lot of people who are younger than me that look up to my brother and I. The one thing that I'm always cautious about—because I remember hating hearing this crap from older people when I was young—is, "Oh back in the '60s, that was a kick ass time!" Because I was growing up in the '80s and the '80s it just sucked, it was like the '50s again. One thing I'm very cautious about is, yeah, it was great traveling during the Clinton administration, but I have complete faith that it will be great again. I just look at my German friends. My friends' grandparents lived during the Nazis. It kind of sucks here but we have no idea how bad it can get. Yes, we're at a very low point right now, but I have great faith that—like every other disease—eventually this will go by the wayside. The political-social disease that we have in this country and this insulary perspective that we have, it will all pass.

Guillén: So noted. I stand chastized. I often look at politics as if I'm watching a grandfather clock, watching the pendulum swing to and fro, and then at some point, I simply no longer want to watch the grandfather clock. There are other concerns to pay attention to. I want to go outside and work on my garden or take a bicycle ride. So, I recognize what you're saying, but my real question was more a personal reminisce of younger days. What I do like about your films—at least the two I've seen—and where I think they speak across the generations is in their emphasis on the authentic life. They speak to authentic purpose as the spine of an authentic life, not only in the characters that you're profiling but in your process of making your films themselves. Your brave documentary filmmaking provides a example of living an authentic life.

Belic: I try. We're all surrounded by polarizing crap. We're fed this junk all the time. Who are you? Are you rich? Are you poor? Are you a Prada person? Are you a Gap guy? I don't give a rat's ass about that stuff. I don't want to feed into that. And, again, I have total faith that everyone has their humanity, some are more in touch than others, but it is something we are all born with. If you want to talk about inalienable rights! We can layer it, we can reject it, we can fight against it, we can pervert it, but it's still there. I'm just very compelled and intrigued by that. I try to connect the character's humanity to the audience's humanity and, if you do it in a dynamic way that's entertaining, engaging and thought-provoking, that is the best way for people to feel empowered and inspired to get more in touch with their humanity. Part of your humanity is what the hell are your dreams? What are your wishes? What are your desires? What are your interests? What makes you happy? What gets you up early in the morning? What keeps you up late at night? Independent filmmaking does that for me.

Guillén: So where are your dreams, wishes, desires, interests and pursuit for happiness taking you next? You've worked four years on filming Beyond the Call, another year on editing, shepherded it through the festival circuit, and it's now just about to open in theaters so you're just about to let it go?

Belic: Kind of. We're independently distributing the film so I'm talking to Landmark, I'm talking to PBS, talking to Larsen Associates, no, I'm still hand holding the baby for another couple of months and, hopefully, by that time there will be enough people singing, dancing and skipping with it that I won't have to hand hold it as much and it will have a life of its own with all its new friends.

Guillén: Have you started any new projects? Or do you have to wait until it's skipping along on its own before you start developing anything new?

Belic: This is still the number one focus for me, but, one thing that we learned with Genghis Blues—and it was a very rude, shocking awakening—was when the film premiered at Sundance. We had been working five years on that film, finally got to Sundance, just like now raising money for the 35mm blowup and all that kind of stuff, my brother flew in from L.A. with the print inbetween his legs from the lab in L.A. We hadn't screened it yet. We were going to be screening it the following morning. We had arrived and we were enjoying talking to people, reveling in all this, and we totally didn't realize this but at Sundance no one cares that you're at Sundance because everyone's at Sundance. So the only question is "What's your next film?" We were totally not prepared for that. We were like, "Our next film? Dude, we got our second screening tomorrow, you want to come? Want tickets?" [Laughs.] So, to answer your question, there are a few projects that I'm developing. I was in Cuba earlier this year looking at a documentary project down there I'd like to shoot. One about Hugo Chavez; I know some people who were closely connected to him. I've always been intrigued by him when he came into power. There's a project in Venezuela. Then there's two in Laos in Southeast Asia that I'm looking at. I'm also looking at projects at different levels of complexity. The Cuba thing is about people who are leaving Cuba, the people who escape, and the whole idea of immigration and how people are seen. You stand on one soil and you have this paper and you're seen one way, then you stand on another soil and you have another piece of paper and you're seen another way. What happens if you're not on any soil and none of your papers mean anything anymore? That's going to be a passion project. I might find one or two benefactors who want to fund it. Venezuela, I think I can get some European funding for that one. The ones in Laos, one is just a short film about this amazing little village that uses all these ordinances to build canoes, some surreal Alice in Wonderland meets the Global War scene, and that would be like a PBS thing, Frontline, World, turn it in in a few months kind of stuff. Then there's another one in Laos about U.S. soldiers that were there during the Vietnam war, the special forces that worked with the people and the legacy there. Again, I met some key people when I was traveling with the Knightsbridge guys making Beyond the Call. So those are about four that we're working on.

Guillén: So you learned your Sundance lesson?

Belic: Yeah. We've always got stuff in the burner.

Guillén: Any narrative pieces? You said your agent was pressing you to create a narrative feature?

Belic: That's why I'm going to be in L.A. again in two days with meetings. We're going to do a 35mm blowup of Beyond the Call for the theatrical release but we also have meetings. One of the things we're working diligently on from many different angles is to turn Beyond the Call into a fiction film.

Guillén: Originally that was what you were going to do, right?

Belic: Yeah, that was the original idea. My agent was on my brother and I to turn our success with Genghis Blues into a fiction film so we could all make money. We don't know how to do that stuff so we did the whole Hollywood thing, took all these meetings in these fancy offices on Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset and, honestly, either the story sucked or the people sucked. Not that my brother and I are stuck-up or anything. Through a lot of hard work and some opportunities we did a film Genghis Blues that did well so we thought we can do this again so we decided just to pick wisely. So, through our agent, we took all these meetings and had to report back to him, "No way."

Guillén: Well, you mentioned to me after the Roxie Q&A that your childhood hero Harrison Ford has expressed some interest in the project and that you've provided him a copy of Beyond the Call, as well as George Clooney who you also admire. So we'll see, eh? Anyways, congratulations with Beyond the Call and good luck with its theatrical release.

BEYOND THE CALL—The Evening Class Interview With Adrian Belic (Pt. 1)

Beyond the Call, Adrian Belic's latest documentary profiling the three members of Knightsbridge International, opens at San Francisco's Embarcadero Cinema and Berkeley's Shattuck Theater this weekend and Belic, who has been tirelessly promoting and self-distributing the documentary, has made himself readily available for interviews and Q&A sessions after each screening. I transcribed my Q&A notes from the UNAFF screening; Justin Juul interviewed Adrian for SF360; Hannah Eaves' interview for Greencine Daily has just gone up; and Sara Schieron has weighed in with her recommendation at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

As additional incentive, joining Belic this weekend at the Landmark screenings will be Ed Artis, one of the subjects of the documentary. I had the chance to interview Adrian a few weeks back at the offices of Larsen Associates. Because he was running a little late, I waited for Adrian outside the Larsen Associates offices, enjoying a cookie, a cappuccino, and some Indian Summer sunshine. Adrian arrived with his long hair flowing and his moustache relaxed. Reintroducing myself (we had met at the Roxie screening), I reminisced on having met his brother Roko several years back at a party where Roko attempted to synopsize Genghis Blues. At the time I thought he sounded crazy: a blind blues singer obsessed with tuva throat singing? Adrian laughed.

Genghis Blues, of course, went on to win the Sundance Audience Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. The film played in nearly 100 cities around the US and 40 countries around the world. It continues to play in theaters and festivals around the world today, as well as being a top selling DVD. Beyond the Call had its world premiere at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York, and has won numerous awards around the country. Adrian Belic travels extensively, selectively shooting and producing for other productions and channels. Beyond the Call is his latest effort.

* * *

Michael Guillén: At the UNAFF Roxie Film Center Q&A, you were asked about the genesis of Beyond the Call and mentioned that the documentary had been kickstarted by your agent pressing you to put out a fiction feature following the success of your last documentary, Genghis Blues. Every first-time filmmaker dreams of receiving an Academy Award nomination, but you and your brother Roko actually achieved that dream. But the subsequent pressure from your agent made me wonder if the Oscar nomination truly opened doors for you or if that success has hindered you somewhat as an independent filmmaker? At the Q&A, you sounded disgruntled by what your agent was asking you to do.

Adrian Belic: Well, when you're Oscar-nominated, even in your wildest dreams, you have no clue as to what that's like. It's really been nothing but good. When we call someone up and we say, "Hi, we made Genghis Blues" and if they don't know Genghis Blues—which is often the case—we say, "Y'know, we won the Sundance Audience Award and we were nominated for an Academy Award," and all of a sudden they're like, "Ooooooh yes! Please, let's chat! Or send me whatever you've got!" So an Oscar nomination is a wonderful thing. The thing that was interesting after Genghis Blues—and I'm even finding that now with Beyond the Call—is that, after Genghis Blues, people were pitching us stories about indigenous music around the world or indigenous music in America. With Beyond the Call people are pitching me stuff about humanitarian work and the reality is that for me—and I think I may have mentioned it at the screening—I consider myself a storyteller. I look for compelling stories, interesting characters and exotic locations—which may not necessarily be the other side of the planet; they could be parts of America that I have never traveled to—but, it's character-driven, it's not issues, it's not, "Oh my God, we need more humanitarians" or "Music is the coolest thing on the planet." It's, "Wow, Paul Peña is the most extraordinary person I've met and anywhere he goes great things will happen." Or with Beyond the Call, it's here are these unassuming ordinary guys that could be your uncle, your next-door neighbor, your grandfather, whatever, or your peer, and here they do this stuff that will blow your mind. And on top of that you have this entertaining component where they're unique and quirky and rough around the edges, they're not your classic humanitarian do-gooder kind of characters and I thought, "That makes for such a great story." So with Genghis Blues, we experienced firsthand what it's like to be pigeonholed and for people really not to look at what you're trying to say but just what you've said in terms of how they read it, which is, "Oh, it's about music and indigenous cultures." So we were kind of feeling that. We were getting this pressure from our agent. But we also had personal pressure. We wanted to do something. Like you said, it's a dream come true for filmmakers and Genghis Blues was our first film. We basically made that instead of going to graduate school. We thought, "Okay, let's go to grad school or let's buy two tickets on Aeroflot." Two tickets on Aeroflot won. Then we came back. We thought it would be done in a year or two. Five years later….

And so, y'know, there was … not necessarily pressure because I don't think my brother and I feel pressure, but there was personal expectation. "Hey, we had a kick ass ride and, for ourselves, we should see if we could achieve that again." We were looking at stories very carefully. The other thing about doing these [films]—Genghis Blues, Beyond the Call—those are passion projects. I don't do that for the money. I don't even do that for the accolades because frankly with Genghis Blues, as you said walking up here, when you met my brother for the first time and he pitched you Genghis Blues, I mean, you're up against someone who's insane, an idiot, or lying! [Chuckles.] Beyond the Call was the same sort of response.

Guillén: To backtrack a bit, the subjects of Beyond the Call, I would agree that they're ordinary-looking; but, I wouldn't say that they're ordinary guys. My understanding is that you met Ed Artis at a screening of Genghis Blues? Or at the Academy Awards?


Belic: No, we met Ed Artis, the main character, the guy who was the Vietnam vet paratrooper medic, at a screening of Genghis Blues at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Their mottoe is "High adventure in service to humanity." So they heard about Tuva, contacted Ralph Leighton who was the founder and head of Friends of Tuva who gave us the whole Genghis Blues story, contacted him and said, "Hey, we want to go to Tuva. This is what we do around the world, this hardcore kind of stuff. Heard about Tuva. You're the only guy we know that's ever been there"—which is the same pitch we gave to Ralph seven years earlier—"We really want to help in Tuva." Ralph said, "Tuva doesn't really need your kind of assistance. Many other places, unfortunately, need your kind of assistance. But if you're interested to see what Tuva looks like, these two brothers shot this film in Tuva and you might get a kick out of it." So he came to Santa Barbara, Ed lives in L.A., went up the road, saw the film kind of for kicks, and really enjoyed it. Then heard what my brother and I had to say as to why we make films, how we make films, and he realized in many ways that's the exact same way he does his stuff. He does his humanitarian stuff because he can, when he can, that's it, period. He figures it out along the way. He wants to go to Rwanda, he didn't know how to even spell the damn country when he went there in 1994, but, he started going there and he met people and it all kind of turned into this big thing, and that's kind of how my brother and I seem to make our films.

Guillén: You say Ed Artis does this because he can and at the Roxie Q&A you mentioned there were a couple of people who had walked out of the screening leaving some scathing remarks and some people in the audience who took issue with the fact that Knightsbridge International does this because they can. What's your take on that?

Belic: It's interesting now that we've started to screen the film around the country—and we've screened from Tribeca in Manhattan to Homer, Alaska, a tiny little place, Taos, New Mexico, San Francisco—these guys break a lot of molds. These guys aren't your average Vietnam vet. They're not your average do-gooder. They're not your average old person. They do stuff that college kids would dream of having the guts and the ability to do. So I knew that there would be … at the extreme poles these guys would rub some people funny. In the most liberal of places around the country, San Francisco being one of them, there are some people who take umbrage with these guys enjoying what they do, with adventure being a big part of it.

Guillén: And yet the good of what they do is undeniable.

Belic. Yeah. And that's what makes me realize that Genghis Blues was a much more benign story, a loveable guy doing wonderful things. This one has some edge to it. It's got political connotations. Everyone's looking for an angle and this film is in the middle of all that stuff. Ex-soldiers and humanitarian work and war zones. So we get from some groups, y'know, yeah some groups these guys don't totally fit what they assume. And that's fine. Because, honestly, this film is made for the middle 80% of this country or 90% of this country. It's meant for every single person who's ever dreamed of doing something and every single person who's fed up with systems, whatever it is, governmental, corporate, their family, whatever….

Guillén: I know a few people like that.

Belic: [Laughs.] We all know them! And I'm sure that each and every one of us has had our moments where we've said, "Man, if I only had the balls or the opportunity to just say, 'Go screw it and I'm going to do my own thing!', these guys embody that.

Guillén: In terms of demographics and showing the film in different parts of the United States, do the audiences in the Midwest react differently to the documentary than they do here in urban centers like San Francisco?

Belic: As someone commented at the Roxie screening, in the beginning there were a couple of people in the audience who didn't quite warm up to these guys, who were skeptical, who didn't understand what they were doing, were suspicious of their motives, but as the film goes on it's clear, it's undeniable, these guys are on the front line. And whatever joy they get out of this that the tried-and-true leftwingers might find issue with, as you said what they do is undeniable, and that supercedes—for 99% of the audience—any qualms they may have about how they do it, what other motives they may have about doing it like personal joy, curiousity. For people who sit through the whole film, they get it. Just like with Genghis Blues the power of this film is that, yeah, it many ways it's totally outside your comfort zone, it's totally outside your knowledge base, it's totally outside your experiential life, but ultimately it's a story about our humanity and it's the story about the journey of an individual in a very complicated world. I had an idea for the film, met the guys, thought this would be an interesting story, I then lived it for four years. I then came back and crafted it for two years. And now the final stage in the storytelling is I'm showing it and it's amazing what people come back with, what they see in it, and what I always dreamt of this film being is not so much a film about those guys, it's a film about me, me the individual sitting in the audience with my ideas, with my friends, with my experiences, with my abilities and resources, and me in the audience thinking, "What the hell am I doing? And what do I really want to do? Because if these guys can do what they're doing, damn sure I can do something."

Guillén: That is the power and the inspiration of Beyond the Call. Going to see one of your films is always a geography lesson, which is important because we live in a country whose citizens have barely a rudimentary grasp of geography. Further, your film reminds us that humanitarianism is not just an intellectual exercise; it's a visceral exercise. As a filmmaker who has lived this story for four years, you appear to have no obvious fear to enter these war zones and landscapes of crisis. Aren't you afraid?

Belic: Sure. You hear that all the time with people who do extreme sports or soldiers or whatever: "Aren't you afraid to go into these places?" Some people say, "No, you can't be afraid." And others say, "Of course. Because if you weren't afraid, you'd be insane." I know what I'm good at and I know what my resources are and I know what my skills and talents are and I know what I'm not good at. I try, in whatever I've done in my life, whether it's sports or making films, girl friends or friends, is to team myself up with good people. Ed, Jim and Walt, the Knightride guys, they've had guys interested in doing their story before and theye never said yes to any of them. Then we met, that was one of those weird things: we never wrote a contract. We just talked in Santa Barbara, chatted on the phone for a few more months, while my brother and I were traveling around the world with Genghis Blues, and we sat down one night for what we thought would be a one-hour interview, ended up being six and a half hours, and Ed told us all these stories. We shared stories of ours. Then a few months later Ed called me up and said, "Do you want to go to Afghanistan?" I said, "Yes!" People have asked Ed, "Why'd you pick Adrian to invite to go?" He goes, "I'm not sure. I felt something about him that he's an upstanding guy and it was a test and he passed it. And so we invited him again and again and again." So scared? Yeah, you're scared. But it's a calculated scare. I've a poster in my room that I got in college that has this picture of these cool islands in Thailand, azure water, and underneath [the picture] it says: "Destiny is the choices you make not the chances you take that determines one's destiny." Honestly, when I was in college, I had no idea what the hell that meant. Because we were all gung-ho, full of testosterone, and I was going to live forever and it was all about chances. I was a guy who takes crazy chances and goes to far-off places, and now as I guess that I've matured, I realize that the reason I'm successful and the reason I'm alive—which is one level of success—is because I think I'm fairly educated and savvy about the choices I make.

Guillén: And the company you keep. The people who guide you.

Belic: That's one of the choices. When I was in Afghanistan in October, 2001, as the bombing first began and I was leaving, there were all kinds of journalists coming in and wanting to do stories and there were all kinds of people bailing out when there was talk of tactical nuclear weapons and all this insanity was going on. This was before the Northern Alliance bought on with the U.S. side again, when they were in that twilight zone. The bombing began before the Northern Alliance signed on so no one knew what was happening. [I had] a lot of offers in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, as I was meandering my way back out of Afghanistan. You could see the people that were coming in because all their clothes were clean and the few that were coming out, we were all covered in dust. The sand in northern Afghanistan is like talcum powder. In these huge lobbies where all these journalists and foreign people were, you could tell the ones who had been; they were just a few. So I got all these offers from people who would say, "Hey, we'll pay you twice the money, cash up front, to go back in." I'd have a drink with them or go and have something to eat. They'd get plastered drunk, forget their wallet, can't find their way back four blocks to where the hotel was. Now, I'm not going to walk with that dude across Market Street in San Francisco let alone go back into a war zone where no one's got a clue what's going on. So, yes, I'm scared. Yes, I'm fearful. But I think that I make the right choices and [side] myself with the right people that I increase my chances of success, one of those being coming out alive.


Growing up, I loved quotes. I'm not really into novels and long dissertations; I'm into pithy little things. Because I want to understand fundamental lessons so that I can extrapolate anything I want out of those lessons and I can apply them anywhere and scale them anywhere. Growing up half in the United States and half in Eastern Europe, [with] English not being my first language, and spending many of my summers in Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union, I realized that I'd never fit anywhere so I had to figure out ways of fitting everywhere. One of those things was to try to figure out what are the fundamental lessons and what are my fundamental skills. Me being able to survive in a war zone, the skills that I learned there, are just as applicable as choosing who my producing partner is, who I'm going to go clubbing with, who I'm going to go mountainbiking with, who I'm going to go sailing with. I have to size up their character and size up what kind of personality are they? If we flip in the sailboat in the Bay, are they going to have their heads screwed on straight? Or are they going to bail? If I go clubbing, is someone going to get totally plastered and be a liability to me? The lessons that I've learned doing these extreme [activities], I apply [them] to each and every day of my life. Taxis in New York: do I get into this taxi or that taxi? All those skills, all those kinds of gut instincts and heightened sensory perception, I use every single day of my life no matter what I'm doing.

BEYOND THE CALL—UNAFF Q&A With Director Adrian Belic

Adrian Belic's documentary Beyond The Call had its official world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened shortly thereafter at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this year, but, I caught it when it was featured at the United Nations Association Film Festival at the Roxie Film Center screening where Adrian was present to answer questions afterwards.

Introduced by UNAFF executive director Jasmina Bojic and asked about the current status of the three members of Knightsbridge International, Adrian responded that Ed Artis had just returned from the southern Philippines, where he brought in another $6,000,000 worth of medicine. Walt Ratterman just got out of Tajikistan, recently was in Northern Pakistan and is heading back into Burma to deliver medicines and solar panels, and Jim Laws was "doing his doctor stuff in Dayton, Ohio."

Bojic incorporated Beyond The Call's poster of the Afghanistan children sitting on the bags of grain as the presiding graphic for UNAFF and—admitting he was deeply flattered that UNAFF had used the photograph for their program cover—Adrian advised that the photograph was taken October 16, 17, or 18, 2001, in Afghanistan when Ed and Walt were delivering food and medicine. He emphasized that the U.S. bombing filmed in the documentary was no less than 8 kilometers away from where these children were photographed resting on the bags of wheat.

I expressed my fascination with Adrian's participation in this relief-aid process via his documentary coverage and asked how filming these individuals had affected him individually. Adrian expressed that he had first met them in 1999, when he first sat down and interviewed Ed; ancient history for the young people in the audience since it harkened back to the last millennium and the Clinton administration, "when traveling around the planet was party time as an American, relatively speaking." Things have, of course, changed dramatically since then. Noting that his appearance (long hair, waxed moustache) evidenced he was not military, there were nonetheless many times in 2001, 2002, 2003 when he went into Iraq and 2004 when he traveled overseas shooting and came back that he'd be sitting in a bar listening to Americans bitch that their food was cold, or they couldn't find parking, or the valet was slow, and he'd look over and there would be another person who was obviously military who was likewise assessing the complaints of these Americans who seemed all the more bizarre after what they had experienced in their military service. Adrian found it interesting that he found himself commiserating with these soldiers. Admitting it was difficult to talk about these insights, Adrian offered that his experience had taught him that "killing people is not the way to get people to like you." Jim and Walt had taught him not to get involved in the politics of the people they were helping, "don't get into the God business, don't make any money off of them, and bring a gift."

It was shocking for Adrian to travel around the world and watch these small groups of people providing relief-aid and then return to the indifferent belligerence of most people in the States. Anyone who has traveled outside of the United States in the last five years, can't help but notice attitudinal developments. It used to be the Western perspective and everyone else; but, now, it's the American perspective and everyone else. As a European citizen with dual citizenship, he can live in Europe any time he wants but he chooses to live in the U.S. because he still believes it's the best country on the planet even though it has a lot of problems at the moment. Dealing with Ed, Walt and Jim inspired Adrian. He wanted to make his film because when he met Ed and learned about what they did and how they did it, he felt they embodied the greatness of this country and the greatness of individuals in this country. He had no idea when he began the project how poignant these stories would become. Initially, six years ago, he thought the story would be a fun story. Little did he know that all this time later people seeing the film would come up to him and say, "Hey, thanks man, I haven't seen something good about America in a long time." He didn't plan on making a film that showed anything good about America—he just wanted to show something good about individuals—but, things have become so polarized and complex that the film has produced unexpected effects. Living the way he has for the last six years has been complex and has shown him that things are not all good and evil.


Adrian solicited further criticism. He truly wanted to know if anyone thought these guys were assholes because a couple of people had left the screening 10 minutes or so before it ended and had written down comments that they considered the subjects of Adrian's documentary to be a bunch of missionary neocolonialists, which is something he'd never considered. One fellow in the audience admitted that he could understand that negative reaction. He had felt himself feeling those things, especially as the film started, and even somewhat afterwards. He could personally acknowledge the good these men were doing and know he himself would never have the balls to do the same; but, at the same time, those men had all the bad things that come with balls, like the ridiculous train and all that. Conceding it was the challenge to the filmmaker not to judge what he was filming, just to record it, to look at it, he was nonetheless curious if Adrian had ever considered the ridiculous edge of these guys? Was it a challenge for him to present the different sides of their personalities and lives?

Adrian said that was part of the reason why he loved these guys. Admittedly, he's hardcore left of center, no doubt about that, but what he found so endearing about these guys was precisely their characters. He explained that he doesn't make films for their issues. He comes from a background of fiction filmmaking and so his thing is characters. Compelling, entertaining characters. The bottom line for his films is they have to be entertaining. Beneath that he imbues them with ideas. When he met these guys he saw the dichotomy between what other guys wish they had the balls or guts to do and these eccentric aspects to their personalities.

Originally Beyond the Call was supposed to be a fiction film. After he and his brother Roko were nominated for an Academy Award for Genghis Blues, their agent was hounding them to do a fiction film so they could actually earn some money. Actually, Adrian met Ed at a screening for Genghis Blues when their agent was hounding them to do a fiction film, and he learned Ed's story, but didn't think anyone would believe such a story unless he made a documentary first to set the groundwork and prove the premise was real. Returning to the question at hand, Adrian said he tries not to pass any judgment on these guys. He just looks on them as fascinating characters with their quirkiness being part of that.

Asked about the timeline and production process of the film, Adrian reiterated he met Ed in 1999, conducted the first interview, traveled with him in 2000, 2001 and 2002. He couldn't find a penny for the film in 2003 at the advent of the Iraq war either domestically or internationally. PBS came on board at the beginning of 2004 but he didn't get the money until the end of 2004 after seven months of contract negotiations. They cut the film at the end of 2004 and 2005 and premiered it at Tribeca and then the S.F. International in early 2006. "Again," Adrian confessed, "I don't know how you're supposed to do this stuff. I had a credit card, a valid passport, and camera equipment and so I just got on planes and traveled with them and just filmed my ass off. That was the process. My passion is as-they-happen documentaries, not historical, so that every single moment you're rethinking the story. You hear something, you smell something, you see something and you're always thinking, 'How will that fit into the story?' I traveled with them on four trips overseas and I visited them each twice, in Dayton and Pennyslvania. That was over 3-3½ years and the whole time we were just rethinking the whole story. We sat down with 248 hours worth of footage, down to 82 minutes, there was nearly 10 months of editing. But the other thing is, you can see these guys are characters, so the dvd's going to be fabulous because there's so much funny stuff in there, little personal kind of stuff. But that's it. What's the process? Do it! Shoot it. Think about it. Don't get killed. Come home. Do a job or two. That's it."

THE QUEEN—Q&A With Director Stephen Frears

Stephen Frears' The Queen serves privilege and protocol brilliantly chilled. I'm, perhaps, the last blog on the block to see the film; but, as they say, all good things come to those who wait. After tonight's San Francisco Film Society members screening at the Metreon, Stephen Frears dropped by for Q&A. His wryly-timed answers revealed his charming candor and amplified my appreciation and enjoyment of the film.

Tim Sika of Celluloid Dreams.Net introduced Frears and moderated the discussion. Noting screenwriter Peter Morgan has described Frears as a "writer's director" and adding he's already well-known as "an actors' director", Sika started off the questioning by observing that the film negotiates a fine line between what we know happened and what we imagine happened within the monarchy at the time of Princess Diana's death. He enquired after the screenplay's sources.

"You mean you want the phone number of the chamber maid?" Frears quipped. Actually, he continued, Morgan tested initial drafts among people to confirm the story's plausibility. "So, in a sense, he wrote it out of his imagination. You have to understand, if you're British you know a lot about the royal family and you know nothing.

"You're a British subject," Sika confirmed.

"I'm a British subject," Frears retorted. His audience laughed. "There are shackles on my legs. My knees are worn out from groveling before the Royal Family."


Sika wondered if—from Frears' perspective as a British subject—the Royal Family isn't perceived as something of a joke? "It's true," Frears confirmed, "they are made fun of 24 hours a day, yes, and indeed they are ridiculous. It is very hard to take them seriously except they also rule over us. They are there … and they're everywhere. They're semi-divine."

"Does Britain really know what it wants from its royals?" Sika queried and Frears answered, "Well, I think we're very sentimental about them. It's a very conservative country too and I don't think there's going to be a revolution or anything. They don't have instincts for republicanism. Like most people you want things to go on in the same way. There's not a great deal of questioning of them but there is a lot of mockery of them. The rather odd thing about this film is it takes them seriously."

"Yes it does," Sika agreed and recalled that when he first saw the film—whether because of Helen Mirren's performance, Frears' direction, or Morgan's writing, though most likely a combination of the three—he had feeling for Queen Elizabeth II, which he hadn't thought possible. He was touched by her portrayal in the film. "Is that what you mean by 'odd'?"

"I have no idea if we got it right," Frears explained, "For all I know she's very very stupid but we choose to present her as an intelligent woman who realizes the incongruity of her position. Quite simply, there's a contradiction between monarchy and democracy and she has made it work. It's the only time in my lifetime that she's ever been criticized or appeared to get something wrong. But, of course, in getting it wrong, she revealed her humanness."


A man from the audience said The Queen reminded him of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. He wondered if Renoir's film had influenced Frears? Frears was clearly flattered. "You always have a film like that in your mind," Frears replied, "and it took place in a large country house and they were killing animals in the middle of it all. I can see the similarity. But, if you're paying me a compliment, thank you very much."

Why had Frears made the film, one woman asked. First it appeared as an investigation and then it romantically glossed over who these people truly might be. Why all the contradictions? "I made an earlier film about Tony Blair," Frears said, "and the producer came and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a second film about the events in this film with Helen playing the Queen. The truth is, nobody'd ever made a film about the Queen before. If you're British, she and her family and the institution dominate everything in a completely unspoken way. So really what I've made is a film about my country. I figured that people all around the world would be interested in the Queen. It's complicated because it's actually an extremely well-known story so I—certainly in Britain—was making a film in which everyone in the audience knew exactly what I knew, knew as much as I knew, so I guess it's one of the misfortunes of bringing it over here in some ways. There are no surprises in the film. It's full of things that are very very familiar, certainly to a British audience."

Sika expressed his surprise to discover a member of the public could rent a cottage at Balmoral and that Peter Morgan took advantage of that when he was writing the screenplay. Frears admitted, "I didn't know that either; but, I guess they're hard up or something."


One fellow wondered if, through The Queen, Frears wasn't offering British Prime Minister Tony Blair some advice, especially in the scene where the Queen cautions him about becoming too complacent about being popular with the public, that a time would come when they would turn on him too. "Is that your advice to Tony Blair?" the fellow asked. "That you will fall from grace?" Frears synopsized the question. "Well, I would've given him other advice before I'd give him that. But he wouldn't have taken it because he's not interested. It was particularly galling. The truth is that at that time he'd just won an enormous election and he was enormously popular. He was thought to understand the mood of the country. Now he's enormously unpopular and appears to have completely missed the mood of the country, in ways," Frears smiled, "that I'm sure you understand." His audience laughed knowingly. "So it was a mark of my incredible maturity that I was able to make a film about his good times. Perhaps it was even more cruel to remind him of what might have been?"

Frears was asked what the monarchy's reaction was to the film? "Well, the Queen rang me up," he joked, "and she said she didn't like the second reel. I have no idea. They don't tell you these things. I have no idea if she's seen it. I was told that one member of the royal family had seen it but not who it was. You must understand these people are above us. They're not like you. If you cut them, they don't bleed. [Laughter.] They are semi-divine."


One woman was struck by how Prince Charles was depicted as emotional and humane, something she would not have associated with him at all. "Well, in a sense, clearly we set out to show them to be human beings as well as members of this historic institution. It is very curious—24 hours a day he looks a complete idiot—but I've actually seen real film of him acting very intelligently." As for his being depicted as "emotional" Frears said, "I would have thought he would have been crucified with guilt and worried about his children so the idea that he wouldn't be emotional, no, he'd be a nervous wreck that week."

Was the complimentary portrait of Prince Charles intentional? "You mean, I should be ashamed of myself?" Frears grinned. "It's quite difficult when you make a film about real people, the truth is they're so vulnerable that actually you bend over backwards to find reasons for them and, in fact, it does actually go back to Renoir that everybody has his reasons. So, in a sense, you have to make the film on their side because it's so easy to make them look ridiculous and show them to be dreadful."

Another thing Sika learned with regard to the film was that Prince Charles developed a fear for his life after Princess Diana's death. "Well, when he got married to Diana," Frears explained, "they opened supermarkets or whatever it was and he would take one side of the road and she would take the other. Nobody was interested in him. So he'd actually witnessed Diana's popularity. He'd, therefore, also witnessed his own unpopularity. I'm told that story's completely true. In fact, he wrote a note 'In the event of my death….' "


Another audience member wondered if screenwriter Peter Morgan had told Frears how he came up with the scene of the Queen crying? "No," Frears admitted, "but in a sense if you're making a film about a woman who doesn't show her emotions, that doesn't necessarily mean that the emotions are entirely absent. What we couldn't have is her constantly analyzing herself and say, 'Well, I'm in this predicament' or 'I can't do this.' The idea of having her have a moment on her own seemed entirely believable. It came out of [Morgan's] imagination. There's no recorded evidence that the Queen has ever cried." [Laughter.]

"Is that why the scene was shot from the back?" another person pursued. "Well, you're making a film about restraint," Frears reminded us, "For being someone who [doesn't] show their emotions, it seemed to me it would be somehow intrusive to shove a camera in somebody's face."


One fellow wondered if the funeral scene—where the filmed sequences with the actors inside the church and the stock footage of the British subjects outside were edited together—if Frears was trying to make a statement about how the subjects were the ones who caused this big public funeral to occur yet were still on the outside of the church? "I hadn't actually thought about that," Frears admitted, "but it is true that it was being broadcast on screens to the people outside and they did start the applause. Of course there'd never been applause in a church before so they were absolutely shocked by this. This was evidence of the mob rising up to take the scaffold. It had never happened before so it did come from the people generally; but, it never occurred to me what you were suggesting, no." The same fellow then related that he had spent some time in London and noted that the British didn't have a lot of respect for Tony Blair, that he flipflopped, that when he was with President Clinton he would act like Clinton, now that he's with Bush, he acts like Bush. "Yes," Frears agreed drolly, "he was very good in the 20th century." [Laughter.]

Sika wondered if Frears had ever given any thought to what would have happened to the monarchy had Diana lived? If she would have impacted it more severely? "The impact, really, had come earlier than that," Frears delineated. "She'd already had this enormous impact just by being modern and liking the movies and Elton John and Versace and things like that. She was such a modern girl. She'd already had that kind of impact. In a way—somebody was saying about trying to hint at other things—I thought the marriage was the really dreadful thing. It's a ridiculous thing to say but I think the marriage was worse than the death. The marriage was just appalling."

Having skewered Thatcher in earlier films, and now Blair (though more lightly) in this one, a woman wondered if Frears felt any hope for the British. "There is enormous hope because Blair is going," Frears opined. "It's great. He's going. It's preposterous that he's not in jail, but, he's on the way out so things are looking up. It's very difficult. He was enormously popular then and—though it was tempting to have him say at the end of the film, 'Maybe I'll go and invade Iraq' [laughter]—historically, unlikely."

Frears was asked if he'd ever met any member of the Royal Family. No, he stated flatly. "Do you want to?" Sika asked. "No, not for a minute," Frears answered. "People famously go weak, they giggle and become completely foolish in the presence of the Queen. So I'd rather not."

One woman was curious about the focus on restraint in The Queen when Frears' previous films—like Dangerous Liaisons—focused so much on passion. "Dangerous Liaisons," Frears reminded her, "was not about the British. [Laughter.] It was a relief, a sort of holiday, a holiday from lack of passion. I did have to behave well and I've always found behaving well rather difficult."

Frears was asked if the stag in the movie was a symbol for the Royal Family? Frears responded, "The truth is that in Scotland they cull the deer, they keep the numbers down, because otherwise they destroy the vegetation. The deer they try to kill are the old ones. If you have 14 [points], that means that it's very old. That means it should have been killed. That means it's sort of passed the date that it should have expired, which I guess is a metaphor for …." His trailing silence prompted laughter.


Frears was asked what it was like to work with Helen Mirren? "She's just a wonderful actress. The truth is she just got on with the job. No one's ever made a film about the Queen before. It's very very impertinent. In the end, she's up there; I can hide. She was very intelligent about it, very humane, she's just a wonderful actress." Sika imagined that Mirren must have struggled with the role, that at some point in her process she would have had to. Then again, maybe his actors didn't bare their souls to him? "Well, I couldn't bear to see them if they did," Frears quipped. [Laughter.] "She's very very good. She'd done her homework. I didn't know she was going to look so much like the Queen until one day she came out of the dressing room. I was completely amazed. But, you know, the Queen's been in my life for 60 years so it is someone you're very very familiar with and, at the same time, you know nothing about [her]. So it's quite complicated in that way. But Helen's wonderful, wonderful."

Cross-published on Twitch.