Hanna: wild thing runs fast

Our titular adolescent home-schooled superathlete (Saoirse Ronan) grows up near the North Pole receiving instruction in hunting and fighting by her survivalist dad with a past (Eric Bana). When she’s finally ready to leave their frozen nest she does so knowing that a certain nefarious CIA operative (Cate Blanchett) will instantly be out to kill dad and maybe do something worse to her: there are intimations that she’s got some sort of top-secret experimental juice in her genes. A genuine wild child whose knowledge of culture has been culled entirely from a slim encyclopedia but whose strength and agility is ninjalike, Hanna’s story slides between her discovering the world and her killing a whole lot of people in it. (Though, if it makes you feel better, she doesn’t seem to enjoy her displays of lethal child-violence nearly as much as Chloë Moretz does in Kick-Ass.)

Director Joe Wright reportedly inherited the project from Danny Boyle, to whom Hanna, with its pulsing chase narrative, techno-friendliness and air of childish awe, seems more naturally suited. But then again, Wright, who previously helmed Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, hasn’t really distinguished himself as being naturally suited for anything besides ultra-high production values, which he exploits very professionally (and I don’t use that word casually). Employing jump cuts, flashing lights and the Chemical Brothers, Wright seems eager to shake off the stateliness of his extant work, get the blood pumping, and start acting his age (he’s not yet 40). Some of this is pretty fun and intriguing, but it’s also uneven and confused, its sci-fi aspects are barely even glazed over, and I’m just not sure what to make it as a whole. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to eschew certain globalized thriller conventions (there are no titles announcing our current location being typed over establishing shots) and focus on sensation over story (a good thing since David Farr and Seth Lochhead’s sub-Bourne script is riddled with gaping holes: where did our snowy middle-of-nowhere forest-spawned Hanna learn to use handguns and personal computers anyway?), but if my praise feels miserly it’s just that Wright’s rebooted stylistics feel tacked on much of the time, more schematic than suasive. Bizarrely, Wright claims to be influenced here by David Lynch, while Hanna feels so much more like less trigger-happy (with regards to both guns and editing) Tony Scott.

But okay, I think I can spot the Lynch-pin. There are some roaming kooky villains on little Hanna’s trail. The sadistic leader (Tom Hollander, who it must be said really seems to having a great time) wears silly jumpsuits and does a little soft-shoe while interrogating an English family in a yard full of shipping containers, all very theatrical. His underlings are all skinheads, because apparently it’s easy as pie to find neo-Nazis just hanging around in North Africa, right? Does self-consciously quirky, menacing nonsense constitute a “Lynchian” touch? Perhaps if you don’t watch Lynch’s films very carefully. Or at all.

Beware of cat power: Criterion unleashes Obayashi's Hausu on DVD and Blu-ray

When Japanese movie studio Toho asked Obayashi Nobuhiko to give them something like Jaws (1975), Obayashi asked his 10-year-old daughter Chigumi for advice. She thought all Japanese movies were boring, so her dad urged her to offer a remedy. The ball got rolling with Chigumi’s assertion that it would be pretty freaky if her reflection in the mirror attacked her. “I always discuss important matters with the children,” Obayashi claims, and Hausu (77), the product of this collaboration, indeed represents an exceedingly rare marriage of cross-generational sensibilities. It’s a fantasy film as seen from the perspective of a child, yet it’s imbued with the larger mythological-psychotronic-experimentalist scope of an adult with a background in advertising. It’s aggressively playful, enamored with optical tricks and with soundscapes and repeated musical themes that seem culled from Godard and blaxploitation. It’s oblivious to generic orientation—okay, it’s oblivious to many forms of orientation, yet it also has a perfectly coherent narrative through-line with roots in the Western Gothic tradition, Japanese ghost stories, and Hansel and Gretel. You could call it a cautionary tale, but then you’d just have to look out for everything. Especially cats. And watermelons.

Hausu is the Japanese appropriation of the English word House. The former sounds vaguely more menacing to me, maybe because of that extra syllable, maybe because of the pleasing weirdness of hearing a familiar word mispronounced, but Criterion has emblazoned their terrific new DVD and Blu-ray packages with the latter term, perhaps in the hope that potential viewers will intuit that, as David Lynch once said, there’s just something inherently scary about a house. Whatever you want to call it, Obayashi’s fevered debut feature follows seven teenage girls with seven smurfy names as they travel to the countryside for their summer vacation and wind up at the house of a wheelchair-bound spinster. Before they arrive, the sky is always glowing warm and soft like some hazy dream you can’t pull away from, perhaps built on crude memories of Technicolor musicals. Once they’re installed in the titular dwelling, the world turns crepuscular and shadowy, and malice becomes boundless. Futons and pianos eat people. Cats’ eyes shimmer as though sending cryptic signals from the abyss. Heads emerge from wells and bite asses. Everything is deadly, yet these girls just wanna have fun. Dismemberment is scary, but who said death can’t be like ice cream? The realm of Hausu is one of relentless colour and geometrical flourish, the screen always being divided by walls, doors, corners, irises, and literal fissures in the filmic image that remind you of how very dry and adult Peter Greenaway’s formal noodling can be. It’s a realm of trapdoors and illusion, of cornball effects executed with verve, of preposterous panty-clad derring-do, of music and morbid delight, a realm where every childish suspicion about adults is wholly confirmed and then some. Western audiences may struggle to interpret this perverse, seemingly contradictory mash-up of fear and frolicking as something terribly exotic and coded in the Japanese culture, but you could also just think of it as a far more imaginative version of this thing we call Halloween.

Generously included in Criterion’s package and equally worth checking out is Emotion (66) Obayashi’s 40-minute piece about a girl from the seaside who travels far from home, makes a friend, and enters a secret world of sadomasochistic romance. A love triangle emerges, and parents are again not to be trusted. There’s no synch-sound, so the great American-born Japanese film scholar Donald Richie provides the English narration, which often seems slightly different in meaning from the Japanese narration, for which we’re given subtitles. Never one to use a stylistic trope once if he can use it 50 times, Obayashi is crazy for flash-cuts here, and is surely even more deeply under the spell of Godard in this use of on-screen text and his determination to push continuity to its outer limits while maintaining the minimum requirements for a forward-moving story. And there’s dancing! The images are often beautiful, and yes, fraught with dizzy emotion. At one point a title card appears that reads: NOW THE STORY DESCENDS INTO A RUINOUS ABYSS WITH VIOLENT MUSIC, which doesn’t exactly signal a radical shift in tone. There’s also a dream sequence that’s only marginally more bizarre than the rest of the movie. Like Hausu, it’s all kind of exhausting, but this sort of blind and wild adventure is bound to wear anyone out, so think of it as a work-out, and watch it before bed. Your brain will rest better afterwards.

"By walking and walking and walking, everything stands still": Werner Herzog on My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

There once was a man named Brad, who even in his mid-30s still lived with his mother, but Brad went a little mad somewhere along the rapids in deepest Peru, and when he came back he was talking about inner voices, about how god lives in his house, about basketball. He was to play Orestes in a Los Angeles-based production, but was dismissed for erratic behaviour. Unable to kill his mother on stage he wound up doing it in real life, with a sword, at the neighbour’s house one sunny suburban San Diego morning. All this has already transpired by the time we tune in to My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which plays out mainly through flashbacks prompted by Brad’s girlfriend and former director, who arrive on the scene to discover Brad’s holed up inside his bungalow with a pair of flamingos for hostages, while baffled police surround the house, order pizza, and ponder Brad’s cryptic declarations and offerings of oatmeal and old gospel tunes.

Ostensibly based on a true story, the movie was scripted by Werner Herzog and longtime collaborator Herbert Golder, directed by Herzog, and granted an executive producer’s blessing by David Lynch, who otherwise had nothing to do with the picture, though its particular brand of quirks seem at times almost an homage to the director of Blue Velvet, and Brad’s irritation with his hippy friend’s meditation practice reads as a friendly jab at Lynch’s outspoken advocacy for TM. Songs from Chavela Vargas, Washington Phillips and Caetano Veloso, as well as a haunting score for strings, piano and accordion from Herzog regular Ernst Reijseger provide haunting accompaniment to this strange study of untreated schizophrenia and unbridled eccentricity. Michael Shannon imbues Brad with tremendous conviction, this Aguirre returned from his Amazonian raft to transform into Woyzeck. Grace Zabriskie plays the over-attentive mom, Chloë Sevigny the worried girlfriend, Udo Kier the thespian and father figure. Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña play the homicide cops too fascinated by the enigma of Brad to attend to their duties with due rigour, the latter especially seeming eager to do whatever it takes to get close to the raving murderer. Brad Dourif turns up as a bigoted rancher uncle. There are ostriches, tiny horses, and a well-dressed dwarf. There are inexplicable sojourns to Tijuana and Central Asia. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Herzog is simply cramming the movie with truckloads of weird items he likes having around. It’s equally hard to resist the movie’s magisterial control of atmosphere, its charismatic performances, and brilliant bits of humour.

My Son, My Son had its world premiere at Venice 2009, alongside Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans. Though unsavoury and ill-behaved in its own right, the latter got a decent theatrical release while My Son, My Son, perhaps considered the more difficult of these spastic cinematic siblings on account of its countless knee-jerk non-sequiturs, has been ushered directly from the festival circuit to home video. I posted part of my TIFF 2009 roundtable interview with Herzog earlier this year when Bad Lieutenant turned up on video store shelves, and now offer up the remaining exchanges that deal specifically with My Son, My Son.

As we settle down and surround our captive subject with a battalion of recording devices, a bespectacled young fellow launches right in and asks Herzog about collaborating with Lynch on My Son, My Son, pointing out numerous elements that strike him as being especially Lynchian.

“There was no collaboration,” Herzog replies.

“Really? None whatsoever?”
“He read the screenplay,” says Herzog, signaling for the next question.

Another writer asks Herzog if he could describe the movie’s reportedly long genesis.
“There was an early phase of the project at least a dozen years back,” Herzog explains, “when I wrote the screenplay together with a friend of mine, Herb Golder, who has been my assistant director. He collected materials from a murder case which took place around a staging of The Oresteia. Herb Golder had translated The Oresteia into English. He kept a huge pile of homicide detective reports, psychiatric evaluations and these sorts of things. He always wanted to write a screenplay yet could never come up with one. I told him to give it to me and I will write the screenplay. It will take me a week, not three years! So we sat together and in five days we wrote the screenplay. Then it fell dormant. It couldn’t be produced. Now to answer the earlier question in a way, I like David Lynch’s work. We have great respect for each other. I was with him and I kept saying in this financial crisis the budgets of big movies are still skyrocketing. 100 million, 180 million dollars: this is not sustainable. Almost like a manifesto I suggested that we should make films that cost no more than two million dollars, but with the best of the best of actors, and with a great story. David Lynch and the producer Eric Bassett founded a company which is some sort of offspring of David Lynch’s production company. So David Lynch said, ‘Yeah, we should do it! Do you have a project?’ I said sure, we have a project. He said, ‘When can you start?’ I said tomorrow. He said, ‘Then borrow my name and you can probably sell it better to France. Canal Plus has always bought my stuff.’ So I said fine, yes, put your name as executive producer. Otherwise, if we see any points of comparison in the film to Lynch’s work than he must certainly have learned from me!”
Everyone laughs. Herzog smiles, reconsiders.
“However, yeah, there’s a small homage to him. You will see in one scene there’s a man on a treadmill running and he has an oxygen mask. I put that in to say hello to David Lynch. Otherwise he has nothing to do with it. We are very, very different in character, and in our personal lives we couldn’t be more different.”

A bossy woman asks Herzog what it is about The Oresteia that endures.

“I can’t really discuss it,” Herzog replies. “It’s going to be too deep plowing. The fact is that it has been alive for more than two and a half thousand years now, and rightly so. It’s a very beautiful text. However, what you hear in the staging of the film was actually taken from a variety of ancient Greek tragedies. We concocted some sort of a text which is not just The Oresteia. But that doesn’t really matter. We improved it!”
Everyone laughs.

I ask about the moments of stillness in My Son, My Son, when the actors suddenly fall silent and create tableaus. These scenes made me think about the Russian tradition alluded to in Incident at Loch Ness of sitting silently for a minute before embarking on a significant journey.
“It’s good that you refer to those because they are somehow pivotal moments in the film,” Herzog replies. “There’s a standstill. Quite often the leading character is puzzled by the tunnel of time. By walking and walking and walking, everything stands still. During the rehearsals of the ancient Greek drama he speaks about basketball and how he was a three-point man and he gets the ball and jumps and in mid-air and realizes he’s 70 feet away from the basket, just shy of mid-court, and then he freezes, and everything else freezes, and he contemplates, and he’s suspended in mid-air, and then he shoots, and the director says, ‘And then in swished in?’ And he says, ‘No, it kind of rattled. It hit the rim hard and rattled in.’ And he speaks of the pivot of time. It’s a motif which is very important in the film, this stand-still of time, of persons who all of a sudden turn toward the camera and look and look and look until the song is over. I love these central moments. For example, the tree stump with the midget on it and the tiniest horse in the world. It’s at the exact centre of the movie, like the pivoting point of the movie.”
I ask what made him choose the Vargas and Veloso songs.
“They’re very beautiful,” he says with a shrug. “That’s it. Yes. I immediately knew I had to do that. There was not one second of deliberation.”
And suddenly there was not one second left for more questions. I asked Herzog to sing my copy of Conquest of the Useless, which he did with pleasure, repeating his belief that his books will outlast his movies, and the lot of us collected our things and shuffled out.

Wilson: 71 fragments of a morphology of chance

The eponymous protagonist of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly, $23.95) may or may not be a sociopath. He typically greets complete strangers with flamboyantly presumptuous terms of endearment like “brother” or “sister.” In several of the 71 single-page, six-paneled episodes chronicling several years of his troubled if largely banal life we see him make what appears to be genuine attempts at meaningful contact with a fellow human—only to be inevitably disappointed with the response his random act of conditional kindness incites and thence counter-respond with a venomous outburst of pent-up rage. In one episode he waits seated at the post office for no apparent reason other than to convince a stranger to hold onto a large box he’s filled to the brim with dog shit. Wilson does love his dog.

Wilson, like Clowes, was born in the 1960s, hails from Chicago, and currently resides, for reasons he can’t muster, in Oakland, California. Wilson’s baffled by the modern world. He sees a man take a nocturnal dump on a sidewalk. He notes with horror the inexplicable proliferation of nail salons in his community. He struggles with despair: “Not only will I leave no trace of my existence behind, there won’t even be anything from my entire generation lift in another fifty years…” His wife Pippi left him 16 years ago while pregnant. Wilson fantasizes Pippi fell into a life of drug-addled prostitution. They eventually reunite. They seek out their long-lost and now teenaged daughter, who they take on a road trip, though some may call it kidnapping. Wilson’s life accumulates in drama, yet fails to yield the desired sense of order and inner peace, not to mention gainful employment. The final episode, however, may suggest some soul-fortifying autumnal revelation. If this is the case, Wilson, who can usually be relied upon to think out loud, decides not express it. This sudden reticence might sound perverse, but I take it as evidence that certain deeper sensations are simply ineffable.

The way Clowes draws a motel swimming pool makes it hard to tell if it’s full or empty. There’s a deliberately elusiveness to the visuals in Wilson, most notably in its ongoing alternating of jarringly different drawing styles, which render Wilson consistently recognizable yet in an ongoing state of flux. Here he seems younger. Here he has a lazy eye. Here he’s a good 40 lbs overweight. Here his body looks like an orb on sticks. If Clowes were primarily a filmmaker we could say that he shows two main tendencies, one toward the twisted surrealism and narrative density of David Lynch, the other toward the cerebral formalism and uneasy balance of misanthropy and affection of Todd Solondz. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is very much in the Lynch mode. Wilson is more Solondz. But it’s good Solondz. Initially Wilson threatens to amount to nothing more than one depressing punch-line after another, but something’s quietly building in Clowes' hapless character. He nears the precipice of accepting the world. Maybe. In any case his willingness to try to make peace, to communicate, maybe even to gather something like a family around him, is hilariously, almost touchingly relentless. His persistence allows him to take risks the best of us mightn’t ever venture.

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Apocalypse Now (1979)

I learned of Dennis Hoper’s death in a bowling alley in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, while drinking warm Canadian, trying to figure out what I was doing in this place, and losing badly at five-pin. I tend to take it hard when my heroes die, even when they’ve had a good run, and this didn’t seem the ideal scenario in which to hear sad news. Yet somehow, there in that bowling alley, with the leering local drunks and ill-fitting shoes and the unseasonably bone-chilling, desperately lonesome prairies unfolding forever just outside the doors, it struck me that this place was perfectly emblematic of my personal experience of Hopper’s singular body of work. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Feck, Hopper’s character from River’s Edge (1986), perched by the bar, slapping his artificial leg, embracing his rubber doll, hardening his beady eyes, and launching into a monologue about bikes, beer, and pussy. This gave me comfort.

River's Edge (1986)

Feck. Father. Photojournalist. Frank Booth. For moviegoers of my generation, Hopper’s story didn’t begin with Rebel Without a Cause (55) or Giant (55), or even with Easy Rider (69). It began with River’s Edge and Blue Velvet (86). That famous anecdote, how Hopper phoned David Lynch, already in production in North Carolina, just to assure him that he could play the drug-addled, sexually deranged, murderous, mommy-fixated sociopath Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, how Lynch got off the phone and confessed to Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan that Hopper’s identification with the character could be great for the movie but how are they going to have lunch with him?, endures not only because it fuels the legend of the then recently rehabilitated Hopper, but, more importantly, because it functions as a declaration of an artist’s devotion to his work. Hopper recognized something of his own weaknesses in Frank Booth, and he used that recognition to elevate what in less disciplined hands might have been a cartoon villain. I will never forget hearing in an interview how the only thing that got Hopper through his worst times was his persistent belief that the cameras were always rolling.

Blue Velvet (1986)

In any case, Frank led me to Feck, then back to Father, his wonderful supporting role in Rumble Fish (83), and to Apocalypse Now (79), and Hopper’s unforgettable photojournalist or, as Hopper enunciates it in the movie, “I’m a photo. Journalist.” Between moments of eerie stillness he rattles off his monologues like a Beat auctioneer, with multiple cameras dangling round his neck like so many eyes, trying manically to take in everything. By the 1980s Hopper’s infamous past exploits, even Easy Rider and The Last Movie (71), didn’t matter as much as what he was doing right then, giving one performance after another that seemed that much more virtuosic, focused, dynamic, scary, and inventive for Hopper’s new straight edge. He seemed to convey genuine craziness with greater force when he wasn’t wasted. His work from this period, at least in the better movies—there were plenty of very bad ones, too—dispelled the notion that the demise of the New Hollywood meant the demise of great ambition in American movies. Blue Velvet was a masterpiece, and Frank Booth a walking, talking, horny, nightmare Id figure, at once terrifying and hilarious and the likes of which we’d never seen, barking lines as impossibly banal as “Let’s fuuuuck!” and rendering them gleeful howls from the collective unconscious.

Night Tide (1961)

Over time I began to grasp the larger story, to catch up with Hopper’s long and winding career, his photography and art collection and years in alcoholic abyss. For years I was merrily tracking down The Trip (67) or Out of the Blue (80) or, wow!, Night Tide (61) on VHS, while still trying to see every new movie he appeared in or directed, which wasn't easy because there were so damn many. He was always coming back, from blacklisting, humiliation, disaster, and addiction, but even Dennis Hopper’s resurrections are numbered. His death from metastasized prostate cancer at 74 came not as the last ember of a long fading away but as a sudden burning out. To the very end he worked like a madman, perhaps because he was a madman, a suggestion not meant to diminish his talents but simply contextualize his sensibility. He radiated unnerving intensity, and while he could play softer, more palatable roles, such as the schoolteacher hero of Carried Away (96), he had a special gift for weirdoes who left such indelible impressions on a movie that he barely needed names, guys known only as Goon, Moon, Prophet, Chicken, Shooter, Cracker, Doggie, and Kansas, his state of birth. He first left Kansas at 13, and it was then he first saw mountains, skyscrapers and the ocean. In every case he was disappointed because in his imagination these things were always grander than reality. For better and for worse he was born to seek grandeur, and through the most ragged and at times ridiculous routes, whether scaling the lower depths or shooting to dazzling heights, his life and work achieved it.

"To disappear into something greater than you...": a conversation with Willem Dafoe

It’s 2019. The citizenry of our unnamed setting are pale, listless, and seem perpetually hung-over, garbed in Prada undertaker. You can smoke again on subway platforms, where you can also grab a coffee that’s 20% blood. A devastating pandemic has rendered nearly everyone a vampire. The non-vampire population, whose fluids are essential to vampire survival, is rapidly dwindling. Social commentary abounds in Daybreakers: sustainability, the erosion of civil rights, drug addiction, and health care are all carefully woven as key metaphors into what’s otherwise a pretty familiar narrative that fuses horror movie tropes with science-fiction’s grandiose scope and goofy expository dialogue.

Daybreakers (2009)

Our hero, a vampire hematologist played by Ethan Hawke, is captured by renegade humans, led by the charismatic Lionel, who’ve devised a cure for the vampire disease. Dressed in baseball jacket, T-shirt and jeans, comfortably scarred and ready to kick undead ass, Lionel’s entrance literally breathes life into Daybreakers. It should come as no surprise that Lionel, who greatly helps to ensure this sophomore effort from the brothers Michael and Peter Spierig becomes something pretty fun, is played by Willem Dafoe. Both a character actor and an occasional leading man, Dafoe has one of the most interesting faces in movies, though those familiar with his extensive background in theatre, his long-time association with New York’s Wooster Group especially, or those who’ve seen his more flamboyantly physical performances in films like The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, Body of Evidence, Shadow of the Vampire or Antichrist, know that Dafoe also inhabits one of the movies’ most extraordinary bodies, which at the age of 54 still seems capable of just about anything.

I had the great honour, and pleasure, of speaking with Dafoe about his work on Daybreakers and much more. An inspiring, unusually articulate and thoughtful yet utterly unpretentious actor, he was delightfully engaged and generous, making the most of the short time we had.

Shadow of the Vampire (00)

JB: What drew you to Daybreakers?

Willem Dafoe: It seemed like it would be fun. I was in the mood to do something like it. It’s always a combination of things that make you want to do something. I was very struck by the Spierigs. I saw their first film, Undead, and while I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece it certainly had some stuff in it. It was very inventive. I admired how they made it, practically self-financing it, doing all the effects in-house, by themselves. While the results aren’t always of the highest level technically, sometimes that homemade feeling has an immediacy I can really appreciate.

JB: Resourcefulness seems an especially attractive quality in your choice of collaborators.

WD: That’s true. A script or a character is not enough. Those are things you can only anticipate—I have more faith in people. I like being around people that are excited and passionate about what they do, and who are very clear about how I collaborate with them. With a horror movie, traditionally at least, the performances aren’t that important. You scratch your head and say you could get anybody to do this. But they way the Spierigs talked about the material was very specific and they wanted me to have some input, so it seemed like a creative proposal.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (04)

JB: Your character, Lionel “Elvis” Cormac, has gone from being human to vampire and back again, he’s survived being roasted alive—nothing seems to get him too worked up. He’s about as cool as they come. Is it more fun to play these cocky, confident characters, or do you prefer playing someone more vulnerable, like Klaus Daimler from The Life Aquatic, for example?

WD: Klaus is pretty cocky in his own way; it’s just he caves in every once in a while. Basically, with Lionel, I liked the idea of this blue-collar custom car modification guy who’s working with a scientist and a woman to save the human race. That’s pretty good!

The Last Temptation of Christ (88)

JB: I’ve been watching your work since I was a kid, and I’ve been trying to decide which performances or collaborations have kept me the most engaged, and I find myself coming back to your work with Paul Schrader. If we count The Last Temptation of Christ you’ve worked with on six projects now. Would you describe your experiences with him as unique?

WD: Each one is very specific. You’re right that he’s the guy that I’ve worked with probably more than anyone else outside of the theatre. He always proposes something interesting to do. I like his writing. His approach is very pragmatic. He deals with very hot things in a very composed, clear way. That’s an interesting aesthetic.

JB: Do you have a sense as what it is he especially likes about you?

WD: I don’t. And I never pressed him on it. As I say, each time I’ve functioned differently. Three of the things that I did with him were quite small, because we’re friends and he knows I like to support his work and to be around him. With Affliction, I knew Russell Banks very well, the novelist. I liked the story very much. I liked the cast. That one I didn’t do so much for Paul but because of the whole project. With Adam Resurrected, he really needed me to do that to help get it financed. The Walker was just a quick thing, and I thought it was interesting. The more expansive ones, Light Sleeper and Auto-Focus, those were just flat-out good roles.

Light Sleeper (92), Auto-Focus (02), Adam Resurrected (08)

JB: I always felt like Light Sleeper was a sort of turning point in your career.

WD: It was important to me because it was a role that was very thinly veiled. I could have been that guy if my life was different.

JB: There seemed to be less of a mask.

WD: Yes, less of a mask. I enjoy working with a mask, but that was very sincere. As far as it being a turning point, it’s hard to say. It had its admirers, but it wasn’t widely seen.

Wild at Heart (90)

JB: I imagine Schrader as very clear. Do you find you’re able to respond to direction that’s more abstract? I recall another interview you did where you said that while working on Wild at Heart David Lynch once asked that a scene go from “a maroon to a deep brown.”

WD: [Laughs] I figure that’s the most interesting part of my job. Every time I do something, I adapt to the dominant way of working. I almost don’t have a preference. I know I have certain tendencies, but I like to fight those tendencies. The truth is every time you approach something you reinvent your process. I think of myself less as an actor sometimes than as a person who makes things. In order to do that I usually attach myself to a director with a very strong vision of what they want.

JB: You recently had the opportunity to work with Werner Herzog. He’s habitually worked with actors who are either infamously eccentric, such as Klaus Kinski, or who aren’t really actors at all, such as Bruno S. or the stars of his many documentaries. Was he an effective communicator?

WD: He was very clear. My role was very clear. It’s not that I don’t try to make it a full character, but the role I played in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is very much a device. It’s a case where I have to have a certain clarity, a certain tone, to enter the world and serve the story. Maybe it wasn’t the sexiest collaboration in the world, but he’s a very bright guy and he’s great to be around. I had a good time working with him and I hope to do it again in a more expansive way, where there’s more stakes emotionally for me.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (09)

JB: I wonder how he directed you in that peculiar scene where you and Michael Peña are sort of hovering very still outside of suspected killer Brad McCullum’s house for a long while. I guess with your particular theatrical background your task in that scene can seem more straightforward than it might for other actors.

WD: I don’t ask. I try to be receptive. You’re right that because of my theatre background I’m a little more flexible. If you remember, there was that beautiful song playing, that spiritual. [Singing] “I was born to preach the gospel…” Remember? Now, that song is beautiful, and where he places it in the story is beautiful, so as an actor I can invest myself in the pretending, in the situation of being a cop out there, but at the same time there’s another part of me that’s listening to the song and taking in how beautiful it is. It’s a magical cinema moment that I can absolutely get behind.

Idiot Savant (09)

JB: You recently closed a show in New York with Richard Foreman. How was that?

WD: I worked with him 25 years ago. I’ve known him for years. He’s always been one of my favourite theatre-makers. He’s one of the great granddaddies of the American avant-garde as far as I’m concerned. Many people I know, including Elizabeth LeCompte, who I worked with for so many years at the Wooster Group, were influenced so much by his work. He says Idiot Savant will be his last show. Some people don’t quite believe him, but I sort of do. I felt honored that he chose me—the show very much hung on my character. He’s got a very rigid way. He’s very clear about what he likes and doesn’t like. But I found that it was one of the most satisfying collaborations I’ve ever had.

JB: Different as they are, do you find that your theatre and film work feed one another?

WD: Always.

JB: Are you aware of learning tricks of the trade, so to speak?

WD: I don’t think those are necessarily what you learn. You learn a character thing, a personal philosophy of how you activate yourself. This thing I said about receptivity, that’s something I learned doing theatre. There’s a physicality that I’m reminded of when doing theatre that’s typically missing in film, where sometimes it seems that everything conspires against you using your body. Film is so influenced by television that the close-up has kind of polluted film language. There’s a tendency to act from the shoulders up. But to answer your question, I know nothing! [Laughs] All I know is that I feel stronger, more confident, very turned-on when I’m working in the theatre, and that helps my work in film.

Platoon (86)

JB: As you said, some of your strengths an actor are receptivity and flexibility, but have you ever had to fight for a choice you believe correct?

WD: Nope. It’s funny. When I’m approaching a scene I have certain things that I anticipate—those are usually the things you should let go. The stuff that you cling to or that you’re proud of sometimes is the stuff you should wriggle free of. Obviously I make choices, but I make them instinctively. When I don’t feel comfortable, or when I’m limited, I’m very vocal, very clear. I try to find out why I feel stuck. But I don’t think of conveying something. It’s more a feeling, a sense of being in a world, having the story work on you. When I fight for things I’m usually fighting for a feeling that I’m on the right track.

JB: Is it hard to watch yourself in movies?

WD: I go through phases. Sometimes I can’t stand it. Sometimes I sort of enjoy it. Generally I try not to dwell on things. When watching your work, if you like what you see it doesn’t necessarily help you, and if you don’t like what you see it doesn’t necessarily help you. There’s a part of you that wants to know how it turned out in a very practical way, but as far as learning lessons or studying it, I can’t do that. I’m too close to it. It’s a record. It prompts associations, and that’s all I can think about. The experience of making the movie, for me, is always stronger than the movie itself.

To Live and Die in L.A. (85)

JB: What about watching something you did say, 20 years ago?

WD: That’s even worse, because I’m thinking things like, my god, you look like such a little kid! Suddenly I have an onslaught of memories of my life that don’t even include the movie. It becomes the family album, a meditation, a stirring of memory that can be disturbing, can be pleasurable.

JB: I know Jim Jarmusch never watches his movies, not even when he’s asked to do audio commentaries.

WD: That makes sense. But if I’m at a film festival, let’s say, and something’s playing, I don’t close my eyes. On the other hand I don’t say, hey, I’ve got a little time on my hands—let’s take a look at Streets of Fire! Let’s see how that one holds up!

JB: Your work has been so diverse, but I wonder if you get a lot of scripts that seem to be trying to cater to a Willem Dafoe type, whatever that may be?

WD: I’ve been doing this long enough that hopefully there are different Willem Dafoe types for different people. I feel like as I get older the range of what gets offered to me is, oddly enough, broader. I shouldn’t brag, but even as movies are shrinking I feel like there’s actually more for me to do.

Inside Man (06)

JB: Do you think you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life?

WD: I do. You know, I’m an idiot! I love performing. I love the state it puts me in. It allows for this experience of working on something with people where you don’t know quite what it is. It parallels life. It’s a wonderful game, and the playing of it is a wonderful way to disappear into something greater than you. We all seek that in our different ways, but I’ve very much found it in this strange trade.

Inland Empire: Lynch and Dern crawl deep inside to break out, crack up, throw down the gauntlet for exploring the new digital landscape

A new neighbour with a Martian-like head drops in on actress Nikki Grace (the fearless, inimitable, marvelous Laura Dern). She accurately predicts that Nikki will be selected for a much-sought-after role and then recalls a folktale about a boy who, leaving his house one day, catches sight of himself in a mirror, inadvertently releasing evil unto the world.

The notion of evil residing in one’s reflection exists in many myths; in Inland Empire it brilliantly manifests as the fearful fascination one finds when one’s image looks back at them from a movie screen.

Polish mobsters, Hollywood prostitutes, movie people, a Balkan circus troupe, anthropomorphic rabbits confined to a room like the trio in No Exit: each of these milieus intersect, refracting off each other over the course of Inland Empire. Things shift from menacing, basically realistic intrigue into a layered world of overlapping anxieties and violence. Causality becomes overwhelmingly tenuous, lucidity evaporates and fantasy takes hold, clenching the fabric of the established reality in its bared teeth. Nikki’s new movie, it’s discovered, has secret, cursed roots in an earlier, unfinished production. She comes to identify with her adulterous role, so closely that her persona blurs into it completely.

While aligning to his previous tropes and unbridled appetite for portent, the self-distributed Inland Empire breaks much new ground for David Lynch. It’s an epic set—not on some vast landscape but in a largely insular, even interior region. It’s visually dynamic, hauntingly image-saturated, yet shot with low-grade DV cameras. It’s more resistant to simple summation than anything since Eraserhead, and so rich with a sense of discovery, goofy humour (enter a panhandling Harry Dean Stanton) and billowing strangeness as to be considered among Lynch’s masterworks.

Exiting a press screening for Inland Empire, I overheard one critic say, “Good thing they didn’t cut that down to only two-hours; then it wouldn’t have many any sense!” A clever quip, but misleading commentary. Yes, Inland Empire is three hours long, much of it audaciously perplexing, rippling with ambiguity even in its resolution. Admittedly, there’s the sense of Lynch being somewhat indecisive, inviting one too many freaks for dinner, but still I’d argue that the movie’s protracted duration itself is a key factor in how it works on you.

Like Hitchcock, Lynch is interested in “putting the audience through it,” the “it” signifying normally unpleasant sensations such as terror and unease. Inland Empire is extremely successful at inflicting unease and one of the ways in which it does so is through sheer hallucinatory relentlessness. Spend enough time in Nikki’s nightmare and you’ll leave the theatre feeling very much like you’ve been through something—and I don’t know about you, but this sort of transporting experience is precisely what I go to the movies hoping to have.

At a crucial juncture, Nikki is putting some groceries in her car when she spots some cryptic writing on a wall. She’s compelled to enter a darkened door and, in a memorably chilling sequence sees—in a manner of speaking—her reflection. From here, Nikki tumbles down the rabbit hole, where she’s lost for a very long time. She enters what appears to be a two-dimensional set. Once she’s inside, however, it proves to be a real, furnished bungalow, one Dorothy Vallens might have inhabited if she moved to the Los Angeles suburbs. She’s entered the labyrinth of Inland Empire, crossing over into a realm where identity, place and even time assume a tempestuous fluidity.

And Lynch himself has crossed over into new territory. His grainy DV creates unstable, textured shadows, looming close-ups, distorting rays of light and the most ghostly hand-held camerawork I think I’ve ever seen. (Lynch says what he loves about these cameras is that he can hold the image in the palm of his hand—accordingly, the camerawork assumes an unusually physical, choreographic quality.) He’s renovated his sensibility to embrace a now primitive technology, ironically employed to capture images of glamour; in doing so, he’s revealed glamour’s darkest underbelly, picking up where Mulholland Drive left off and moving even deeper into the empire of our movie-infected subconscious. 

As a post script, I think it's also worth mentioning that Inland Empire pretty much has my new favourite closing credit sequence ever, employing Nina Simone's rendition of 'Sinnerman' to a very different yet equally tremendous effect as Golden Door did the same year. It's wonderful, flashy, loopy, sort of delirious, featuring numerous cast members, friends, lip-synching performers, a monkey. It's also a shrewd move, a way to keep exasperated audiences in their seats (if they've made it this far...) rather than jolt up or run out screaming, to come down a bit from a long, frequently insane ride. 

Caché: The murderers are among us

Making good on one of the enigmatic triggers that gradually evaporated in the mirror-miasma of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke’s Caché begins with a VHS tape left on a doorstep, a little act of psychological terrorism perfectly blurring the innocuous and the sinister. The tape reveals only hours of the same fixed shot of the exterior of the recipients’ Parisian home. They come and go, unknowing while nothing happens, their walls remaining uncompromised—at least, physically.

Yet the tape-maker has more than succeeded in his act of invasion: the camera may never move into the house but the tape does (and more soon follow), along with some crude cryptic drawings, penetrating not only personal boundaries but psychic ones buried in the troubled memories of Georges (Daniel Auteuil). Like the tape-maker, Georges prefers to keep his thoughts and motivations hidden, even from his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche, superb) and pre-teen son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). And the tape becomes a catalyst for mistrust, which spreads like a contagion through the family.

In his chillingly clean, understated exploitation of the thriller genre, Haneke manipulates our frames of perception from the film’s opening moment, offering us suspense but no privileged information, no sudden close-ups constructed to clarify intent, no transitions that might guide us toward an easier contextualizing of what we’re watching, whether it be surveillance, dramatic action, memory or fragment of a dream. Everything in Caché is presented in the same directorial deadpan, which functions all the better toward implicating us in the very deep murk lying just outside the film’s periphery.

By accident or design, Georges is being led back 40 years to unpleasant childhood experiences shared with Majid (Maurice Bénichou), the son of an Algerian couple once briefly employed by Georges’s family. Georges’s guilt is, in fact, the true engine of the story, and Auteuil’s heavily guarded panic inspires both our identification and our dread. This is a remarkable performance that draws no attention to itself—indeed, rather than play for the camera, Auteuil’s Georges becomes so fearful of hidden viewers as to be afflicted with pretend calm that he can’t let go of no matter where he is.

But where we in the audience are being led as witnesses of Georges’s fruitless search for resolution is toward equally confrontational if unspoken questions of long-term responsibility that reach far beyond a single character’s psychological closets and into the collective consciousness: the failures of the integrationist model of French citizenship, France’s ghastly mistreatment of Algerians, and, broadening the historical scope, global paranoia about terror and Islam. For all the ambiguity, perhaps the one certainty we share with Georges is the knowledge that our sense of home comes at a terrible cost to others.

The evocation of home is as questionable on a literal level as it is on the figurative: the neatly arranged walls of books that envelope Georges and Anne’s place, while signifying educated, rationalist, middle-class comfort, are eerily echoed by the representational walls of fake books that envelope the set of the literary chat show Georges hosts. The tension between reality and theatre is left suspended in Caché; there is a deliberate lack of release (though you’re advised to sit through the closing credits if you want every chance at closure). This tension then hovers disconcertingly in our consciousness as we leave the theatre and try to make sense of the film, its final triumph being the way it finally denies a solid form to its bogeyman, knowing full well that he’s lurking inside the formless fluids of our minds.

Reverie under rubber, walking through fire: Metro Cinema visits four films by David Lynch

With the labyrinthine billowing video miasma of Inland Empire now marking a new point of departure in his ever-shifting approach to filmmaking, the time seems about right for a fresh survey of David Lynch’s always strange, sinuous and stimulating body of work. This weekend Edmonton's finest venue Metro Cinema is doing just that, screening a mini-retrospective as well as the Edmonton premiere of the anonymously authored documentary Lynch. The quartet of features screened may represent only a fraction of the Lynch canon, yet it’s an intriguing and diverse selection that includes his defining debut, an indisputable classic, as well as two other titles, both of which I’ll look at more closely, that help flesh out a sense of the distinctive filmmaker’s considerable adaptability as well as the extent to which he can follow his most single-minded tangents into utter weirdness.

After making one of the most startling debuts of the decade with Eraserhead (1977), an endlessly wondrous, deeply oneiric odyssey into paternal anxiety, deadpan humour, painterly grotesquerie and mechanical subjugation, Lynch could have followed any number of paths. How curious that the one he’d eventually take would lead him to a Hollywood biopic, albeit one entirely in keeping with Lynch’s aesthetic and thematic concerns, and one that would allow him to have his cake and eat it: an unapologetically humanist, prestige-laden, Oscar-nominated film that’s also drenched in phantasmagorical imagery and the faux-naïve poeticism that would become his stock in trade.

The Elephant Man (80) tells the tragic story of John Merrick, the astoundingly disfigured man that would gradually go from thrilling the Victorian working class as a sideshow freak bar none to titillating the Victorian upper class as the pet project of the well-intentioned Dr Frederick Treves. A nightmarish montage reveals a photograph, a parade of elephants, and a woman twisting her head back and forth in agony in an ashen blur, a low bestial moan standing in for her silent screams: the film’s haunting opening alone is as indicative of Lynch’s tack as anything in Eraserhead.

Photographed by Freddie Francis in silvery hues that seem to coat the sinister industrial landscapes, patterned floors and cobblestones in mercury, with Lynch marveling at Merrick’s collection of talismans with the same awe as their owner, the film is as elegant as it is harrowing. John Hurt, unrecognizable beneath a masterful coat of prosthetics, brings a dignity and attentiveness to Merrick that’s deeply affecting. Anthony Hopkins gives what I consider to be among his absolute finest performances as Treves, carrying that weary face that, however guarded or reserved, seems never at ease but rather conveys the character’s mounting feeling that he may be just as guilty of exploitation as Merrick’s previous “proprietor.”

Blue Velvet (86), which I wrote about the last time Metro screened it, is nothing less than Lynch’s most eloquent synthesis of Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon, an unforgettable vision of the hidden darkness and madness in postcard America, a small town noir seething with desire, degradation, beauty, obsession, and the loss of innocence. (If you’ve never seen it: SEE THIS MOVIE. If you’ve already seen it: SEE THIS MOVIE.) It also features the best ensemble cast Lynch has ever assembled, one of whom, Kyle MacLachlan, would go on to be the star of Twin Peaks (90-91), Lynch’s tremendously successful foray into television –which leads us to the last film in Metro’s quartet.

There’s a section in the superb book Lynch on Lynch where Lynch explains to interviewer Chris Rodley his mind-set post-Twin Peaks. “At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn’t get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move and talk.”

This longing to resurrect the dead in a tender embrace, this sort of artistic necrophilia if you will, permeates and, some would say, plagues Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (92). It is at once a tormented, death-haunted, funereal thing and an otherwise straightforward, linear story of sexual abuse escalating to filicide that is continually subverted by wildly eccentric digressions and fragments of minutia left over from a complicated and much beloved television series. Somehow, for all its problems it’s also finally tremendously moving.

An extensive prequel, which itself has a rather amusing prelude that consumes the first half-hour, Fire Walk With Me would, admittedly, be the last film I’d ever tell a Lynch neophyte to see. Its heroine, Laura Palmer, whose death kicked off the series, is most often in a state of agitation if not hysteria, a precariously static emotional plateau that does no favours for actress Sheryl Lee. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast –conspicuously disaffected rural folk, pouty 28-year-old teens, the hoser clientele of an extravagantly art directed bar owned by a salacious French Canadian– is so uniformly quirky that the more inspired and significant oddities find it difficult to stand-out. The film also ranks as the unholiest collaboration between Lynch and regular composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose score is by far the most gratingly soapiest of a distinctly soapy body of work.

Yet there are moments of absolute terror and palpable discovery in Fire Walk With Me, as well as a number of ingenious set pieces, and more than a hint of the grasping in the darkness for narrative cohesion that made elements of Inland Empire so electrifying. It’s the most frustrating work from a visionary and enduring filmmaker, but its visionary nonetheless.