Brad Bird and Oscar

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Paramount) is fun. It’s that simple. The fourth film in the high-tech super spy series finds Tom Cruise’s Agent Ethan Hunt a little older  and a little more mortal, scrambling to put together a rogue mission off the grid with a makeshift team, unreliable equipment, and no tech support. The set pieces are spectacular and the ingenious locations are like nothing we’ve seen in spy movies before, but a lot of the film’s success can be attributed to the director: Oscar-winner animation director Brad Bird, making his live action debut.

Cruise showed a lot of faith in trusting a first-time live-action filmmaker with his blockbuster franchise and Bird came through with a clever, inventive, high-energy trip. While he had never directed a film like this, Bird was no stranger to big, complicated productions thanks to his days at Pixar, and more importantly, Bird had proved himself one of the best storytellers around, no matter the medium.

To mark the release of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol on Blu-ray and DVD, Brad Bird took the time for a few brief phone interviews. Very brief, it turned out, for a filmmaker who has plenty to say about making films. As usual, we began by asking him what he’s been watching.

What are you watching?

The last one I saw was actually a movie that I’ve seen several times before but I love it, which is “The Red Shoes,” which is just a great, weird, fantastic movie. It came out on Criterion Blu-ray fairly recently and I just showed it to my sons, who had never seen it before. They’ve been prompting me to show them movies that I think are great, so every once in a while I’ll get them in there and I’ll show them “Yojimbo” or something that they would not normally see and they are loving it.

As an animation director, your involvement begins at the story level. When did you get involved in the process of developing “Mission: Impossible.”

J.J. and Tom had been working with the writers, Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, for almost a year on this script but the script was in happy flux when I showed up, meaning that I asked to see a script and J.J. kept dodging me and then finally I said, “Look, if I’m going to do this, I gotta see a script, ” and he said, “Sure, I’ll show you a script. Which one do you want to see? I have fifteen scripts and we just keep rewriting it and redoing it and throwing new ideas in there.” He said, “It’s probably better if I just pitch the movie and then we talk about set pieces and we can talk about where it’s going because it’s in constant flux.” So I got sold the overarching idea of the story that Ethan Hunt is thrust together with a team, rather than a team he picks, and then that team is isolated. They had the ideas for the set pieces in but other than that, it was up for grabs, and some of the set pieces, like the car park thing at the end, they literally had a photo of a car park, a really unusual car park in, I think it was Germany, and they said, “He chases the bad guy and they have a fight in a car park.” And that’s literally what I had, so I got to really shape, shot by shot, what that car park would be: First they do this and then they kick the case under the car and then they do this. I got to basically riff on that very basic idea.

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Before he embarked on his impressive but unfinished adaptation of “Lord of the Rings,” maverick American animator Ralph Bakshi createdWizards (Fox), a futuristic fantasy set in the aftermath of the apocalypse. A mix of Tolkein-esque quest epic and seventies attitude, it was like a PG version of an underground comic book made for the big screen, and was Bakshi’s first effort to reach a mainstream audience. It was a hit that got overlooked when another 20th Century Fox science fiction film, a little thing called Star Wars, opened just a few weeks later, but a cult following kept it alive through revival house, college campuses, and video releases ever since.

Wizards debuts on Blu-ray this week in illustrated Blu-ray book with commentary by director Bakshi and the excellent interview featurette “The Wizard of Animation” (both originally produced for the DVD release).

To mark the film’s 35th Anniversary, Ralph Bakshi, now 73 years old and long retired from animated features, talked to Videodrone aboutWizards, his career, and what he’s been watching from his mountaintop home in New Mexico.

What are you watching?

Ralph Bakshi: Japanese, Korean, and oriental films off of Netflix. I don’t remember the names, but the ones that are subtitled are the good ones and the production values and the shooting and the camerawork is incredible. And there are also some low budget detective films that they do. I think it’s sensational filmmaking. I’ve been watching an awful lot of that, and I’ve been watching British street films, films made in England about the working classes and their problems, and they’ve been very, very excellent. I’ve been doing a lot of that because they are films I never would have gone to the movies to see. I’m watching no animation.

You say you’re not watching animated films. What’s it like revisiting “Wizards” again after all these years.

How do I say this? My complete budget on “Wizards,” to make the entire film, is spent in a Pixar film in the first minute and a half. What they spend on a minute and a half of a Pixar film, I made my complete movie for. It’s hard looking at these movies that had so many problems. I had no money to do it the way I saw it in my mind, so I get very edgy looking at it. The fact that people are still finding it and enjoying it after all these years is kind of stunning to me. To be quite frank, I thought that they would never be shown again, they were so low budget, so I’ve come to the conclusion that though the work is important and quality is important, what films say might be more important than how they look and what their production values are. The Pixar films and the Sony films and the Fox films are all done incredibly well, visually, and it’s so hard to compete against that with my $1 million “Wizards.” But somehow it does and I don’t quite understand that except maybe it’s content. They’re hard to look at, is what I’m trying to say. They’re hard to look at it.

Continue reading on Videodrone and see clips from the film

Todd Haynes’ 1999 film “Velvet Goldmine” (Miramax) reimagines the Glam rock era and the iconic influence of David Bowie through the kaleidoscopic lens of “Citizen Kane” and the fictionalized persona of rock legend and bi-sexual pop icon Brian Slade (played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers). A young, fresh-faced Christian Bale plays the reporter digging into the mystery of Slade’s rise and fall and Ewan MacGregor almost steals the film as the punk pioneer Curt Wild (equal parts Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain), the genuine article to Slade’s calculated, coifed image of glitter stardom.

It’s a blast, with bouncy music, flamboyant costumes, a fab sense of period, and a complex narrative interweaving of flashbacks, shifting perspectives, public personas and private personalities with Slade as the film’s slippery Charles Foster Kane. But it’s also a study in reinvention and the fluid definition of identity and sexuality embraced by the subculture around the music, the first youth movement to openly accept and embrace ideas of bisexuality and homosexuality.

Haynes revisited the film in November when he recorded a brand new commentary track with producer Christine Vachon for the film’s Blu-ray debut and talked with Videodrone about the revisiting the film, its reverberations with his other fictionalized biography “I’m Not There” and, as always, what he’s been watching.

What are you watching?

Todd Haynes: I’ll tell you one really cool thing I watched. I recently met Stephen Sondheim, who is an *intense* movie buff, and he asked me what my favorite Douglas Sirk movie is. And he said, “I have mine,” and I said, “Well, I want to hear yours.” And he said, “Mine is ‘Scandal in Paris’ from the late forties,” which is one of his very first English-speaking films that Douglas Sirk directed in the United States. You can get it on Amazon. I had read about the movie and I had seen a lot of more obscure Sirk films over the years but it was fantastic. It knocked my socks off. And you can see a connection between the great director Max Ophuls and Sirk like you never have before in this film. That was a complete surprise.

Otherwise I have been watching some of the screeners of new movies that have been coming out bit by bit. I just watched “Young Adult” last night, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Are you a voting member of the Academy?

Haynes: I am.

What are some of the films this year that you have most liked?

Haynes: I had the treat of watching “Hugo,” Scorsese’s new 3D movie, on Thanksgiving Day at the Ziegfeld Theater. And it was just such a complete and total treat, just visually in its aesthetic, just such a tribute to early cinema and the origins of what obviously started to make Scorsese’s mind tick with this love poem to the Méliès story. That was a really fun one. But I’m still waiting to see some serious films that are still emerging. It seems like it’s backloaded this year from Christmas so there are still a lot of stuff I haven’t seen that I’ve been hearing about.

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John Landis had his finger on the pulse of pop culture – and in particular the intersection of comedy, horror and music – from the late 1970s through the 1980s: “Animal House,” “The Blues Brothers,” “An American Werewolf in London,” the epic music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” This week “¡Three Amigos!” (HBO) debuts on Blu-ray, a film that was (at least by Hollywood standards) a “disappointment” upon original release but found an audience on home video.

All these years later, this affectionate tribute to old Hollywood and innocent matinee westerns is just as funny, thanks to a knowing script (by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman), engaging performances (by Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short) and Landis’ savvy direction, which is larger than life in all the ways that those original westerns were. Landis has a real affection for this film and shared in a brief interview where we discussed the film, his love of horror movies and what he’s been watching.

MSN: What are you watching?

John Landis: I just was given the new Blu-ray of “Ben-Hur” which I’m very curious to watch because I think the most gorgeous Blu-ray I’ve ever seen is the DeMille “The Ten Commandments.”

MSN: That’s a stunning disc.

JL: It’s magnificent. I was really blown away by it.

MSN: Comedy is such a product of its time. In the eighties, you and Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis dominated with madcap antics and energized comedy. Now there’s a whole new comedy aesthetic, which is focused on gross-out humor and arrested adolescence. What do you think has changed?

JL: A lot has to do with the movies the studios are making. It’s a different time and they won’t take the risk that they used to take. Things are a lot more conservative. But having said that, I thought “Bridesmaids” was funny. I mean it wasn’t perfect but it made me laugh and that’s what you want from a comedy.

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Ken Burns has spent all of his thirty year (and running) career as a documentary filmmaker turning his camera back on the history of the United States: the defining people, events and accomplishments that defined, divided and united the country. From “Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Statue of Liberty” to “The Civil War” and “Jazz” and “The National Parks” (to name but a few), he has tackled subjects small and expansive with the same focus: finding the human stories that illuminate the history. His latest production, “Prohibition” (PBS/Paramount), presents a complex story of unlikely allies, disastrous political misjudgments and destructive consequences, and a political climate that is eerily familiar today.

Ken Burns

The three-part documentary debuted over three nights on PBS and arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, October 4. Videodrone spoke with Burns about “Prohibition,” his fascination with American history and what he’s been watching.

What have you been watching?

Ken Burns: Not much. I’ve been working 24/7 promoting the “Prohibition” series. Basically I’ve been watching “Boardwalk Empire,” which is a kind of cousin of what we’ve done, a dramatic, fictionalized version of the themes that we tackled with our documentary on “Prohibition.”

What does Ken Burns pull out of his DVD library to watch to relax after working on a documentary all day?

I’m a child of R&B and rock and roll, I was born in the early fifties and grew up in the late fifties and early sixties and that was my music, but in 2001 we released a 17 ½-hour history of jazz and everything is filled with jazz, I listen to it all the time. I like the old stuff, I like the new stuff, I listen to Louis Armstrong, I think he’s God. I think he is to music in the 20th century — and I didn’t say jazz — I think he is to music in the 20th century what Einstein was to physics, what Freud was to medicine and what the Wright Brothers are to travel, that is to say, a quantum leap in our musical understanding.

My father told me stories of my grandfather, who as a child in the Dakotas would accompany my uncle as he made deliveries of moonshine that his family made from a still in the hills.

Burns: You know what? We traveled all around the country on this promotional tour, every walk of life, and I don’t know anybody that doesn’t have some related prohibition story. It’s really wonderful. I love the way our films — “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “The National Parks” — but this one in particular draws out stories in people quite apart from our own stories that we’re trying to tell.

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Kristin Wiig, one of the only reasons to check in with “Saturday Night Live” in recent years, has been turning bit parts into defining comedy moment in films as “Ghost Town” and “Adventureland,” not to mention a half dozen Judd Apatow comedies. Now Wiig takes charge as co-writer and star of “Bridesmaids,” a boys night out comedy for women that defied all industry expectations, becoming a smash hit and the most successful comedy to date for producer Apatow. It’s also a necessary reminder that, Hollywood’s obsession with making films for adolescent males aside, effective comedy cuts across gender lines. Especially when you throw in a little bathroom humor. “Bridesmaids” hits DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download this week and Videodrone checked in with the multi-talented Ms. Wiig to talk movies, DVDs, Jon Hamm and doing nasty things in bridal shops.

Kristen Wiig

MSN: I just listened to the “Bridesmaids” commentary track, with you, director Paul Feig, co-writer Annie Mumolo and most of your fellow bridesmaids.

Kristen Wiig: Uh-oh.

It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun.

Wiig: We did. I’m actually nervous because I haven’t heard it yet. Did I say anything to embarrass myself?

Let’s just say that you didn’t say anything that was more embarrassing than anything you said in the movie.

Wiig: There! Okay, that’s fair.

You recorded that commentary track the day before the film opened, when you had no idea that it was going to be huge.

Wiig: Yeah, that’s crazy. I was probably very, very nervous. It’s probably why we were drinking wine.

If the commentary track is anything to go by, it sounds like you all had quite a time on the set as well.

Wiig: We did. It was like summer camp for three months. It was so fun and the cast made it so special. We just got lucky. All the girls all fell in love with each other and, yeah, those are my girls.

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The director talks about gods, superheroes, ‘Wallander’ and what he’s been watching at home

Kenneth Branagh may not be the first name that comes to mind to direct a superhero film, but when that hero is Thor, the Norse god of thunder, who better than a director steeped in the Shakespeare and the classics? Which is not to pigeon-hole Branagh, whose heart belongs to Shakespeare but whose career spans stage, cinema and TV and all manner of projects, including a portrayal of Sir Laurence Olivier in the upcoming feature My Week With Marilyn and another BBC series as the gloomy Swedish detective Wallander. To mark the release of Thor on DVD, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D this week (reviewed on Videodrone here), we talked with the Branagh about gods, superheroes and what he’s been watching at home.

What have you been watching?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, I can tell you I’ve been watching Thor for the past few days because I was checking on how the DVD worked out. Ah, what a question, because my mind’s gone blank now. Just the other day I watched for the second time Taken, which was on BBC. My wife is a fan of that movie and I’m a great fan of Liam Neeson so I enjoyed that very much.

I’m quite a fan of that movie and the Luc Besson-produced European action films in general. They remind me of what American action films used to be like in the seventies and eighties, when they were on a budget.

Branagh: You’re absolutely right. And I think they have a distinct style and flair to them. That film has a great economy and knew exactly what it was and the action elements of it were most impressive.

I enjoy seeing older actors play action figures defined by experience. What would you think of becoming one of Besson’s action heroes?

Branagh: I’ve just been making my TV show Wallander and we just shot an episode of it, a ninety-minute film based on a book called “The Dogs of Riga,” in Latvia. By the time we were a week into it and I was running around for the fourth or fifth day with a gun in the market in Riga, someone said, “Hey, this is like The Bourne Ultimatum. I like this. I want to see this film.” So maybe that’s my audition for Besson.

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See my review of the home video release of Thor here at Videodrone

Stephen Frears

The cover of the DVD and Blu-ray release of Tamara Drewe reads: “From the director of “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons“,” which is true and certainly something to brag about—director Stephen Frears has a rich career and those are two of his most celebrated films—but doesn’t quite communicate the flavor of this mix of British pastoral and modern sex comedy. This is more like the Stephen Frears of “High Fidelity” and “Mrs. Henderson Presents” (the latter a lovely little piece which will live in infamy for offering a not-quite-so-lovely Bob Hoskins nude scene). The 69-year-old Mr. Frears, speaking by phone from his home in England, agreed. “It is a lighthearted film,” he says, but hasn’t much of an opinion either way on the advertising. “I just make them and let my personality come out in different ways.”

In fact, he doesn’t really seem to like talking about his films. A thoroughly pleasant and friendly gentleman, he is also modest and reticent to go into detail about the film. But he does have a sense of humor and a sense of pride in his co-stars. “They are very, very good actors,” he explains when I ask about the actors. “I mean, I don’t know. It wasn’t difficult to achieve an ensemble.” Perhaps not. There certainly is an ease that comes across in the little community that Tamara Drewe creates. I guess when you have the career that Stephen Frears has, you don’t feel the need to explain yourself. It’s all there on the screen.

What’s in your DVD player?

“Only Angels Have Wings.” I was asked to talk about Howard Hawks.

“Tamara Drewe” was based on a graphic novel, but understand it ran in the newspaper The Guardian before it was published in graphic novel form.

It ran in The Guardian as a strip, where I remember seeing it, and then it became a book, where I didn’t see it, and then it turned into a film script.

In an interview on the DVD, you said that you had read the strip and enjoyed it, but it was the script that excited you about the project.

I didn’t think you could make a film of it until I read the script.

Continue reading at MSN Videodrone.

I had the opportunity to interview Lloyd Kaufman last year when he came to Seattle to participate in a Horror convention. That interview is now up at Parallax View. Best known as the face of Troma and the director of The Toxic Avenger, he’s also very active in supporting independent filmmaking and fighting the studio stranglehold on distribution and exhibition. We talk about it all…

Lloyd Kaufman

You have a very interesting set of credits. You worked on Rocky and you were production manager on My Dinner With Andre.

Yes, I was indeed. Those movies, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, those were my film school.

How did you move from working on those industry productions to creating the outsider studio Troma?

I was making my own movies constantly, I was always making my own damn movies and I was interested in long form, so at the one time we were trying to figure out… I did Sugar Cookies in 1970, I didn’t direct it, I made the mistake of just raising money and writing and producing, and then the distribution didn’t work out too well. And then we made a movie in Israel that’s probably the worst movie in history, called Big Gus, What’s the Fuss (1971), it’s the only movie I’m embarrassed to show and we got screwed on that one, and then Michael Herz and I decided that we had better learn distribution, and that’s when we started Troma in 1974 to both produce and distribute ourselves. Of course in those days there was just theatrical.

But while we were trying to get Troma going, I would take jobs which would help pay the rent and also I’d learn. And I think in the seventies and into the eighties, we still entertained the notion that maybe we could work with one of these companies and they could distribute our films. We made a film called Stuck On You (1983), and we’d send the 35mm print, or I’d actually hand carry it to the West Coast to bring it to Warner Bros. acquisition department, or to Paramount in hopes that maybe Paramount would pick up and distribute it, but usually I’d get to the gate and they wouldn’t have my pass and it would be 180 degrees and I’d be in my little Bar Mitzvah suit and sweating like a pig and I’d have to then run to a phone book, the cars would be backed up behind me because the studio exec forget to leave the pass, and they’d be honking and then I’d get out of line and go to a pay phone and call and then they’d tell me to park in Guam, then I’d have to carry the 35mm print ten miles to people that had absolutely no interest in distributing it. So it didn’t take too long to realize that (laughs) I’d better stick with being an auteur film director and do it ourselves.

Read the complete feature at Parallax View here.

I interviewed John Noble for a feature I’m writing for MSN on the TV show Fringe. It turned out to be a pretty good discussion so I published it in full on Parallax View.

Fringe is about a lot of things, but the most interesting story to me is the human story of Walter Bishop rediscovering his conscience and his humanity as he reconnects with his son and starts to care for the people he works with, and starts to see the damage that his experiments have cause on people that he loves and cares about.

The retreat into insanity was a defense mechanism based on the theory you’re taking, which I do agree with. He became aware that he effected basically the whole stability of society. So whether he retreated into society to survive that or it’s a defense mechanism, which is also possible, I think it’s a very good point. However, coming out of it, he’s having to face all that again and it’s tragic. It’s bloody awful, isn’t it.

Read the complete interview here.

I know that I have a habit of writing “I had the pleasure of interviewing…” in my introductions, but most of the time that is generally true, and never has it been more true than when I got the chance to interview Kathryn Bigelow at SIFF last year, when she brought The Hurt Locker to Seattle. I didn’t have nearly enough time, but the time I had was great. And yes, as so many interviewers and commentators feel compelled to remind us, she is beautiful. More importantly, however, she is engaging, introspective, compelling. It felt we had just gotten started when my time was up, before I had a chance to reach back to the dynamic, passionate, cinematically thrilling films that marked her as one of the great directors of her time: Strange Days, Point Break and especially Near Dark, the film that grabbed me by the throat when I caught it on its last night of an abbreviated run at a second run house (it had skipped the first run theaters altogether).

Kathryn Bigelow

My interview is now running on Parallax View as part of the site’s spotlight on Kathryn Bigelow.

You start the film off with a quote by Chris Hedges: “War is a drug.” There’s a real simplified reading of that comment, which is that likes the challenge and he thrives on the thrill. But I think it’s more complex than that. He’s the best at what he does and he’s at his best under pressure. He’s in charge and, for all the danger, he’s as in control as he ever is. When he gets back, he’s lost.

That’s beautifully put. I couldn’t improve on that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book that Chris Hedges has written, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” it’s a great book and required reading. He talks about that you’re looking today at a volunteer military and one of the many things he confronts is, war’s dirty little secret is some men love it. This isn’t everybody, it’s just a particular type of psychological state with some men, there’s a psychological allure that combat creates, some kind of attractiveness, and it does create an almost addictive quality that they can’t replicate in any other way and are lost in any other context.

Read the rest of it here.