Interview

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"The most miserable, boring, long-winded pathetic pitch I had ever heard in my life," is how producer and screenwriter James Schamus describes his first meeting with director Ang Lee.

Their first meeting might have been a dud, but twenty years, eight movies, and a few Oscars later, the partnership has turned out to be one of the most successful in Hollywood.  Lee was equally effusive about their collaboration, explaining, "James is always part of the movie. I don't see him as producer or writer: He's a collaborator." Last night, the National Arts Club celebrated the duo by giving each a Lifetime Achievement Award. Sneaking in among certified club members were Sigourney Weaver and Christina Ricci, both of whom starred in 1997's Schamus-Lee collaboration, The Ice Storm.

Crowded into an alcove filled with wood carvings of angry lions, Weaver remembered her own first encounter with the honorees, which occurred on the birth of Schamus's second child: "So there Ang and I were and we were so shy I don't think we spoke for twenty minutes." They finally decided that The Ice Storm should be a comedy, and Lee let Weaver pick her part among the cast of characters. Ricci, only fifteen at the time of shooting, remembers to Lee and Schamus as forgiving parental figures. Playing in a film set in the 1970s, the actress had no idea why she was wearing a Nixon mask: "I think they both secretly knew I didn't do the homework."

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Adventuring filmmaker Werner Herzog has been lots of places; until recently, on a film set with the likes of Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes was not one of them. His latest project, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, stars Cage as one of the most messed-up cops you've ever seen. It's a gonzo film noir, a hallucinatory dispatch from the post-Katrina gutter–a movie that is, like most of Herzog's work, best described simply as a Herzog film. I talked to the veteran provocateur about what he's learned from disastrous shoots in the jungle, "the bliss of evil," and the importance of Anna Nicole Smith.

DARRELL HARTMAN: You've been making movies for almost 50 years. Any particular reason you decided to try your hand at film noir now?

WERNER HERZOG: I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems–that's where film noir always hits fertile ground. The whole thing was conceived and done before the financial collapse, so it was a premonition.

HARTMAN: Watching this film, you can almost read Katrina as a foreshadowing of the financial collapse.

HERZOG: Sure, but the project was not originally written for New Orleans. It was written for York, and all of a sudden the three main players–the producer wanted tax incentives; I said this is the ideal place, New Orleans after Katrina and the collapse of civility; and at the same time, unbeknownst to either of us, Nicolas Cage was pushing for New Orleans. It's a very important place for him. He always liked the fluidity and the kind of music, and always hoped he could work there in a film like this and have it as an influence for his performance.

HARTMAN: Did you see cop movie clichés as an obstacle?

HERZOG: No. I think in this case we have a different step in film noir, where what is dark and pointing at an abyss in the human heart and in society is not an oppressive thing. It's almost getting so vile and so debased that it's hilarious. And that will come across. There's something like a secret conspiracy between the audience and the leading character, and I truly like that audiences [seem to] understand the humor.

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Twilight, for all its heat, takes no pleasure in flesh or fluids. (The Village Voice got it right when it called it "the vampire movie for vegetarians.") Thirst, a Korean vampire flick that comes out on DVD today, three days before New Moon hits theaters, has a good time with both. (PHOTO: KIM OK-VIN IN THIRST, COURTESY OF FOCUS FEATURES)

After volunteering for a risky inoculation experiment, a Catholic priest (Song Kang-ho) discovers he's not the man he was before: sunlight hurts, and the smell of blood gets him salivating. He also discovers a sexual appetite for the unhappily married girl next door, Tae-joo (Kim Ok-vin).

Upon learning his secret, Tae-joo begs him to make her a vampire. The priest has fewer qualms about biting a friend than Robert Pattinson's porcelain-cool Edward does, and soon finds himself trying to restrain his reckless lover from killing her next meal. (He prefers to get his blood from comatose hospital patients.)

A master of visual and audio shocks, director Park Chan-wook–best known for Oldboy, the most sucessful film in his so-called "Revenge Trilogy"–prefers wet scenes to dry ones, and uses long shots to emphasize squishy sound effects the way Herzog did in his 1979 Nosferatu.

This is a movie with an oral fixation, to say the least. If the sight of blood makes you squeamish, be advised that the vampires drink it chilled, chug it out of Nalgene bottles, and (more often) use a sharp object to slurp it straight from the source. There's also an amazing tailor-shop sex scene, the kind those abstaining Twilight protagonists can only dream of! These are vampires of drinking age, after all.

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The beloved All Tomorrow's Parties festivals have earned a reputation as the premier gathering for obsessive indie music fans. Now ATP has the concert documentary its fans deserve, simply called All Tomorrow's Parties. Jonathan Caouette, with a crew of 200 festival-goers-turned-camera operators, captures the frolicy vibe of the ATP getaway, mingling performance footage with off-stage antics, elliptical banter, and poignant moments of sincerity. Caouette, who made Tarnation, the surreal 2003 documentary about his childhood, draws from Cassavetes and Quadrophenia and uses the festival and its culture to tell a story about youth, nostalgia, and millenial expressions of tribal recreation. The end result isn't so much a collection of performances by some of the bands that have played ATP, but an ode to their moment, fleeting as it may be. Below, he explains some of his choices.


ALEX SHERMAN: This movie took hundreds of people to make? Sounds epic.

JONATHAN CAOUETTE: The amount of footage that we got was unbelievable. Like 800 hours. I never want to make another movie like that again, where you have too much content and too many choices. We really had no premeditated notion of what we were going to go for. Most of the people who did this were not professional DP's or videographers. They were just holding cameras.

SHERMAN: A lot of it reminds me of the audience scenes from the Woodstock documentary.

CAOUETTE: Woodstock has always been one of my favorite docs ever. Any film that has to do with a particular subculture is hopefully going to be pretty strong and honest in terms of seeing them as a reactionary component to the current state of times. People from this particular world or subculture are just that. They seem very hopeful to me.

SHERMAN: Like a tribal gathering.

CAOUETTE: Yeah, it feels like you have stumbled upon a big three-day event for a cult where music is the god.

SHERMAN: The scene with Grizzly Bear performing by the sea is really evocative of that experience. How did that come together?

CAOUETTE: I saw them outside one of the bars at ATP and said, "Hey, would you like to play this song on the beach." I had the Who movie Quadrophenia in my mind, the scene where all the mods are screaming on the beach.

SHERMAN: It's wonderful.

CAOUETTE: It wasn't really our intent. You never know what's going to happen. [But] it's almost like, "Here we are, a group of misfits on the beach making our own world." I think that's what ATP is–a bunch of wonderful misfits getting together to celebrate the music they love.

All Tomorrow's Parties will screen November 13 and 14 at IFC Center in New York and in Chicago on Novemeber 20. It will be available on DVD and for download November 24 from www.warpfilmstore.com.

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