Film news: director

Showing posts with label director. Show all posts

Sunday, July 31, 2011

The incidental director

Gianni Di Gregorio in a scene from The Salt of Life.

Gianni Di Gregorio became successful, suddenly, at 60. But what if he hadn't? How might his life have been? "Allora!" He shakes his head, gummy eyes a-twinkle. "Terribile! Dead under a bridge. Alcoholic, at least." He laughs, sips his wine and rolls a fag, and isn't kidding.

The Salt of LifeProduction year: 2011Country: ItalyRuntime: 90 minsDirectors: Gianni di GregorioCast: Alfonso Santagata, Gianni di Gregorio, Valeria Cavalli, Valeria de FranciscisMore on this film

What changed everything was Mid-August Lunch, which Di Gregorio wrote, directed, starred in and shot at his own flat. A gentle comedy about a man caring for his imperious 93-year-old mother, who then has three extra ageing mammas dumped on him by friends, it won the debut director prize at the Venice film festival in 2008 and hoovered up many other awards. It took ?7m round the world from a budget of ?400,000: a rare Italian arthouse hit, and one that relied on neither melodrama nor glamour (the average cast age nudged 80).

After a career backstage, first in theatre, then assistant directing and writing for film (most fruitfully on Gomorrah), Di Gregorio was thrust into the spotlight. "It was disorientating. But I see it almost as an act of providence. To be able to express yourself like that comes as a positive after years of forced enclosure within one's self. Perhaps I'm not being very rational today, but I feel it to be a natural compensation."

Good for the soul, then, as well as the wallet and, presumably, the personal life. After all, at the time he made Mid-August Lunch, Di Gregorio noticed an unwelcome development: women no longer noticed him. And when they did, it was paternally, not romantically. Nothing like new-found fame to change that, right?

"That's what I thought! Instead it became much more evident that the underlying problem – my age – remained the same. Younger women were out of bounds; not that they'd see me anyway. And older women also would consider me too old. That combination completely threw me. I didn't know what to do.

"It was at that point I began to develop this film as a therapy. Rather than despairing, like my friends, I would try to make light of it, to exorcise my fears." He flashes a sweet, fanged grin. "But as a therapy, it's been absolutely ineffective. Nothing has changed!"

The Salt of Life has Gianni back in a flat with a wife who hasn't shared his bed in years, a student daughter (his real-life daughter), a dog (his own) and no employment other than running errands for them. And for his mother, now in her own villa, living it up with lavish lunches, cared for by an attractive blonde – one of the women Gianni pursues after a pal urges him not to resign himself to a romance-free future. The others include a flirtatious neighbour whose St Bernard he dutifully walks round Rome, an operatic family friend, some identical twins, and an old flame who blames their split on his mother.

It's a view close to Di Gregorio's heart. "I think that mothers in Italy quite deeply affect the romantic and sexual lives of their sons, wherever you are on the social spectrum. Today even more so, because young men are held back by other forces. It's much harder to afford your own home."

Di Gregorio, an only child, was raised by fairly elderly parents under what he describes as formal conditions. His mother, whom he nursed for 10 years before her death, was, he says, "very kind, very lovely. But I was totally enslaved to her. She would say things in the nicest possible way, but it created a relationship that was absolutely impossible to move out of."

And for all The Salt of Life's sunny charm, the domestic servitude set-up feels frightening. Di Gregorio smiles. "Perhaps all those things like food and wine and sun and pleasure are another form of compensation for what is the underlying reality. If you reduce things to a skeleton, then life is terrifying.

"I didn't realise it at the time but it's a film about solitude. These themes of loneliness and melancholy I wanted to keep in the background, but somehow they were pervasive."

For a comedy, it seems steeped in dismay – isolation, even. What does Di Gregorio fear about ageing? "Mental immobility," he says, after a pause. And then: "The passing of that hope of love, of that idea that something still could happen. I think we should have those feelings for ever, until we're 100. But you have to take account of reality: one's own age; that of a potential partner. But that little flame must remain alive."

It's a moving answer: for its frankness and piquancy. And it turns out Di Gregorio is still married. It's clearly a complicated situation – The Salt of Life, he says, is 99% autobiographical. Does he feel it's inevitable that long-term relationships cool?

"You must not pretend a marriage won't have its up and downs, or that you'll have the same raging sex life after 30 years. The most important thing is respect. Not to hurl abuse. All it takes is one word to unhinge the whole edifice. But there are very personal things that happen to you that you can't begin to share with your partner. You can't go to your wife and say: women just don't see me any more. I have done it – my wife just laughed."

This gender difference is crucial, and it's something Di Gregorio is especially alive to. While Gianni's mother and her cronies in both films enjoy a blissful existence, thriving on Krug and the poker channel, the men are discontented. Are women simply not as persistently interested in sex?

He sees it less crudely. "In the end, we're all slaves of our desires and lusts. But women are better able to cope with the passage of time, while men are less accepting of change. They're in denial and they say an awful lot of bullshit – stories about romantic episodes that are completely untrue to big themselves up a bit. Men are much less mature, less able to regard themselves with irony."

Save Di Gregorio himself, perhaps. For its his combination of personal candour and slightly reckless benevolence that makes him such an unusual film-maker – maybe the most incisive male director to tackle domestic life since Bergman. But in the flesh, the person he reminds you of is Larry David: they share the same loose-limbed cheer, the same passivity in the face of female force, the same basic frustration, despite material ease. What separates them is confidence: Di Gregorio may be appreciative of attention – at a Q&A the night before, he seems to bloom – but he has miles less of it than you'd imagine.

Though the success of Mid-August Lunch may have saved him from a boozy end beneath a bridge, it appears to have only vaguely aided his sense of self-worth. "I'm not sure I have taken the acclaim onboard, or understand it myself properly. But people around me, my daughter especially, experience it with great joy. And my pleasure is in their pleasure; it's easier to access it like that. In reality, I don't give myself a lot in life apart from film – I'm always rather surprised and confused when someone gives me a present. It's almost as though I didn't exist."

It's a startling statement: when asked to unpack it, he gets smilingly tangled. The translator – who's known him some years – steps in to offer, with his assent, her analysis: "As a personality, Gianni has such a degree of self-abrogation he doesn't know how to feel those things directly. He's reserved, and that's why he has a sense he doesn't exist. But the pleasure he has in telling stories and making other people proud of him is easier to process."

It's sounds a dignified way to live, I say. Does he feel others veer too far the other way? "Yes. You shouldn't force yourself to be aggressively the protagonist."

How curious that someone who's finally found fame by making himself the hero should be so self-effacing. He nods: it is a strange space to inhabit. "It's not dignified to force yourself to be the centre of attention, but neither is it to suppress who you are. There is virtue in the right balance. It's just I'm incapable of finding it!"

The Salt of Life is released on 12 August.

View the original article here

Sunday, July 17, 2011

'Indie' director Mike Mills is as happy shooting for Nike as Sonic Youth

Mike Mills (right) on the set of Beginners with Ewan McGregor. Photograph:Focus/Everett/Rex

One could be forgiven for associating director Mike Mills with the word "quirky". His debut film Thumbsucker was a little-seen critically acclaimed tale of a young appendage-obsessed man, complete with a cornucopia of odd characters (including Keanu Reeves as a creepy, philosophical dentist). His music video resume (Moby, Yoko Ono and Air) practically demands the word's use. Plus, he's married to Miranda July, she of "quirky indie darling" film Me And You And Everyone We Know. But mention the "Q" word, and it's like a red rag to a very chilled out, straggly-bearded, bull.

BeginnersProduction year: 2010Country: USADirectors: Mike MillsCast: Bill Oberst Jr., Christopher Plummer, Ewan McGregor, Goran Visnjic, Mary Page Keller, Melanie LaurentMore on this film

"I hate it, I really do," he says. "I hate all those words – quirky, indie, and dysfunctional. It's been turned into a brand and it shouldn't be. And they're never positive, these words. They're always used like 'another fucking quirky indie film about dysfunction'. It implies a cliche or a rut and yet all humans are dysfunctional to some degree, whether it's the raging alcoholic or the guy who's just a bit self-defeating. Humans are vulnerable, messy little animals and that's normal. And all I want to do is make a space for that in my films."

In that, he has certainly succeeded. In the first few minutes of Thumbsucker, the confused and miserable character of Audrey, played by Tilda Swinton, tells her son desperately, "I have to find something distinctive about myself." It's a perfect line, that sums up not only the dearest wish of every character in the film (and some might say those outside it), but also one that lays the foundations for the film we're discussing now, Beginners. With its palpable melancholy and infinite sadness, Beginners is no story of teenage angst manifested weirdly. It is the story of how Mike Mills's dad came dancing out of the closet at the age of 75, before dying from cancer five sex-filled years later.

"My mom had just died, which had been incredibly traumatic," Mills recalls, "and a few months later, my dad said to me: 'Tomorrow I'm going to throw you a ball and I want you to catch it.' I had no idea what he was going to say. Seriously, I thought he wanted to move in with me; he still couldn't really work out how to defrost food. So when it turned out he'd been gay for the last 50 years, I was hugely relieved! And the fact that he wanted to actually do something about it was amazing; it proved he hadn't given up on life."

The film is less an autobiography, and more of a deeply personal, yet widely universal portrait, utilising Mills's background as a graphic designer and video director to create a film that manages to say nothing, and everything at the same time. Christopher Plummer is jaw-dropping as the newly gay pensioner, his unstoppable lust for life outweighed only by his equally indestructible terminal cancer. A subtle Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, a Mills-type taciturn graphic designer who struggles less with his father's out-and-proudness, and more with his own inability to conduct intimate relationships with the same amount of joie de vivre as his dying father.

"I wanted to make a film that really concentrates on people's specific stories," says Mills. "In the UK there's a tradition of realism and humour and domestic storylines, Mike Leigh-style. What's more real than your dad coming out at 75, and wanting not just to come out, but also to actually go and be gay, go and have lots of sex? And just wanting to fucking talk about it all the time! And I didn't really want to hear about it; not because he's having sex with men, obviously – I went to art school in New York, I have a lot of gay men in my life – but because he's my 75-year-old dad and it's weird! He had this one phrase that he liked to say which weirded me out, which was trying to say, "Son, I'm horny!" He'd put it a lot nicer, but that's basically what it was. And I'd be like, "La la la, not listening!" Children are always mildly repulsed by their parents having sex and now all my formerly sweet, appropriate and low-key dad wanted to talk about was gay gay gay gay gay gay gay! Occasionally, I'd say, 'Could we please, please talk about something else?' and he'd laugh and change the subject and then 10 minutes later he'd be talking about sex all over again."

Photograph: Matt Carr/Getty

Geriatric sex aside, there is something reassuringly Leigh-esque about Mills's film-making style; characters steeped in melancholy, confusion and self-wrought misery, but with a deep vein of humour and love running through. While Leigh employs a style of so-called kitchen-sink realism so gritty you're spitting gravel for a week however, Mills – while clearly paying homage – prefers a more effervescent approach. Hence the Godard-influenced vignette-style layering of authentic photos that place the film's events firmly into their historical context, a choppy narrative timeline and, rather more surreally, a talking dog. Yes, for a man who dislikes the concept of "quirk", Mills certainly takes it by the hand and gives it a friendly squeeze. "I don't think that's weird," he counters. "Everyone talks to their dog, and then in your mind the dog talks back. A talking dog can provide the words that a stunted protagonist finds difficult to muster."

Like Leigh, love and relationships play a huge part in Mills's narrative, as fans will remember from his warmly observational portrait of a real-life California couple chattering over the melody for his video to Air's All I Need. And just like Leigh with Vera Drake, Mills is equally interested in a portrait that drenches the deeply personal with the wider political and social context that defines it. Here, it's the quashed lives of gay men born before the second world war who, like his father, were forced to hide their sexuality all their lives. And it is in utilising this very real story, told with a deeply personal twist, that Mills intends to move from that annoyingly reductive indie pool, into something that resembles whatever "mainstream" is.

"Well, I don't care for traditional narrative," he says dismissively. "What's important is historical consciousness, as any irritating Marxist student will attest to. It's about how we came to be here, how things got to be here. Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here."

Which would all be fine, I venture, except that few people hanker after a big tub of popcorn on a Saturday night to watch a socially engaged, left-slanting film.

Mills respectfully disagrees: "I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details is how you get the big, big audiences; by talking about your relationships, or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people. I don't know what it's like to be a gay man in the 1950s but I love Howl because I connect via the specificity of Ginsberg's rage and via the historical moment it was born from. And that's what I want to do, how I want to get a bigger audience."

Sonic Youth's cover for Washing Machine, designed by Mike Mills.

Despite his so-called indie credentials, Mills really does want those big, big audiences. With a background in advertorial design, he's a strange blend of hippy capitalism, a man who believes Starbucks is organised vandalism, but unapologetically makes Nike ads to pay the mortgage.

"I do corporate work to make a living, sure," he says. "But unlike a lot of artists, I really love the public sphere. I think you can reach a lot more people on a huge billboard than in some little gallery – or even a big gallery."

An early Mills project was the cover of Sonic Youth's Washing Machine, an album that came out in 1995 just as the band, fresh from headlining Lollapalooza, faced fan accusations of selling out and going mainstream. The cover is a picture (taken by Kim Gordon) of two fans wearing "merch" sporting the band name plastered on to a washing machine graphic; in Mills's opinion, it's a perfect example of an organic concept, a way for the band to be a part of the wider discussion. As far as the frankly outdated idea of "selling out" goes, former indie darling Mills is on board, oars at the ready, gentle whimsy left firmly at the door like a bad teenage habit (thumb sucking, anyone?).

"Look, it's great getting good reviews but let's face it, nobody saw Thumbsucker!" he says with a sudden grin. "I want to be part of the discussion, too. I want to engage. I don't want to be a niche film-maker. I don't want to be diminutised by 'quirky'. Quirky is not a genre. Indie is not a genre."

Mills pauses a beat, and then smiles: "I do think I can get those big audiences, I really do. But you know, Beginners took five years to make! I'm never going to make money from my films. But money isn't the most important thing and that's kind of liberating."

A beautiful film about human relationships made by a modern auteur who doesn't care about money? Forgive me, but for a man with his eyes on a Hollywood-sized audience, that's definitely still a little quirky.

View the original article here