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.

To celebrate the DVD release of the complete run of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, I had the very great pleasure of interviewing creator/writer/star Garry Shandling. He second TV series, the made-for-HBO The Larry Sanders Show, is one of my favorite television shows of all time. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show is a very different kind of show, less savagely satirical and show-biz savvy for one thing, but it is just as creative and self-aware. And just as funny.

Garry shares everything with his audience

Here’s a few excerpts:

“It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” was your first series, but more people are aware of your second series, “The Larry Sanders Show.” How do you see them within your career as a writer and performer?

Looking back on it, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” is really the beginning of just being funny. I look back on this and to me it almost looks like looking back at a college play that I did. But it’s very funny and you can see that it’s actually quite a different character than Larry Sanders. It was halfway through the last season of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” that I realized that I wanted to do something that had more texture to it in terms of human behavior and that’s what sent me into “The Larry Sanders Show.” So I think this is the jumping off point of a lot of my creativity.

I watched the outtakes on the DVD set and I loved seeing how you kept the spirit of the show even in a flub. You would make the outtake an aside to the audience just like any other scene in the show.

Yeah, yeah, I noticed that, too. Don’t forget, it’s 22 years ago for me and so I look back on it as a part viewer, part writer, part actor. That happened all the time. We would constantly change lines because, again, the idea of the show was to be funny. There weren’t that many emotional underpinnings to the scenes so you could just play with the lines a lot more, and since there was a live audience there, I was doing two things. In between takes I would keep the audience alive and going so that they would be happy and enjoy it, and also so they would stay fresh for the taping of the next scene because an audience is really helpful in adding energy to the show. And thirdly, I enjoy the audience. I have a lot of fun playing to an audience.

Read the complete feature on MSN here.

Last month I interviewed Harry Shearer for MSN Music, and then lost track of the feature. It went up in September, just in time for the 25th anniversary of Spinal Tap and the DVD release of his latest musical adventure: an acoustic tour with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest playing the music made famous by Spinal Tap, The Folksman and other fictional legends of music history.

Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer

Here are some highlights from the piece:

MSN Music: Did you ever expect heavy metal to have such resilience 25 years after “This Is Spinal Tap”?

Harry Shearer: Well, I think the idea of Spinal Tap was to prevent it from having that kind of resilience, so I’m as amazed as the next guy. I think everybody’s surprised that various musical genres tend to outlive their moment for one reason or another. Heavy metal has been as resilient in its own way, if not more so, than neo-punk or neo-soul or any of the neo revivals of earlier genres, but it speaks to something deep within the adolescent boy, I guess. Like Howard Stern.

And somehow those adolescent boys keep their adolescence well into middle age.

Yes, and I think that’s why women are so bewildered by men.

How hard was it to write a song that is both parody and a legitimate song in a genre that is defined by theatricality and excess, where many of the songs already border on parody?

Strictly speaking, parody is what “Weird” Al [Yankovic] does — and does very well — where you take an existing song and redo it. These are original songs, but they are satirical in the sense that we’re not serious about it. We’re making fun, as you say, of a genre that is known for its bombast and its pomposity. Very often people think you have to exaggerate something to make fun of it, and so they end up doing something that’s sort of ludicrous, and I don’t mean the hip-hop artist. We weren’t trying to exaggerate so much as distill what we perceived to be the funny parts of that style of music and then place it in the context of this band that you found funny, which made it OK to laugh at it. And we’re trying to be inside that line: Yes, you really could believe these guys would get up and perform a song called “Sex Farm.” It didn’t stretch credulity.

Read the complete interview at MSN here.

Here’s my latest SIFF coverage at the Seattle Weekly:

- Francis Ford Coppola presents his new film Tetro on Wednesday;

- reviews of ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, The Karamazovs and Sandy Cioffi’s Sweet Crude;

Plus I excerpt selections from my interview with Humpay director Lynn Shelton.

“Film has always been a personal medium for me. Some people write with journals. I have always made little films that shoot right out of my soul. And I’m making them with my hands.

I profile Seattle-based film director David Russo and his feature film The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (which plays at the Seattle International Film Festival this weekend) for the Seattle Weekly.

Morning shower, morning sickness

For more than 15 years, David Russo has been making films, short films, funded out-of-pocket or by arts grants, rarely seen by a general audience. Until recently, they have been the creation of a solitary artist carving personal visions out of the world around him. His animated shorts typically combine painting, sculpture, photography, music, poetry, and soundscapes on unique moving canvases. In Pan With Us (2003), he takes the cel off the studio animation stand and makes it a canvas floating freely through space. As his paintings are photographed frame by frame on 35mm film, then transformed into a flowing, flying image, the surrounding throngs of people become pixilated, jittery, impermanent things.

I Am (Not) Van Gogh (2005) uses the same stop-motion and animation techniques to produce a visual stream of consciousness, set to a soundtrack of Russo explaining his idea for a project that an arts organization doesn’t understand. To date, his short films have been entirely non-narrative, works of wonder and grace, chaotic and visionary, unlike those of any other artist in Seattle.

Which is why you’ve probably never heard of him. Until now.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle represents a major leap for Russo: his first feature, his first narrative, and in many ways his first collaborative endeavor. Certainly it’s his first picture with actors (including troubled former starlet Natasha Lyonne), a substantial budget, and the pressures and compromises that inevitably come with indie filmmaking. “It is extremely distracting at first,” says Russo of his 19-day Seattle shoot last year, “especially being the kind of filmmaker I was—that always worked by myself. It was a nightmare.”

Read the complete feature here.

Update 5/21: More from my David Russo interview at the Seattle Weekly here.

The Burrowers, JT Petty’s minor key take on the horror western, arrives direct to DVD on April 21. I interviewed JT Petty, the director, for Parallax View.

Clancy Brown and William Mapother in "The Burrowers"

Why a horror western?

I’m always trying to get a little bit outside the genre. I think people who watch scary movies now are such a sophisticated group of watchers. We’re probably the first generation that takes multiple viewings for granted, that you can see anything as many times as you want to see it. We’re sort of the video generation and the twenty-year-olds now just assume they can see anything they want anytime they want as many times as they want. So what’s already been done, we’ve seen so many times that I think it’s hard to actually scare people inside that framework. So once you get a little outside the genre, you can hopefully surprise people again.

What makes the combination of western and horror so resonant for you as a filmmaker?

A lot of it is just they’re two of the most cinematic experiences that you have watching a movie. If a horror movie does well, it’s entirely because of the direction, it’s classically not the performance. All the things that do make a horror movie pornographic also make it exceptionally cinematic. If you have a well directed horror movie with a crappy story and bad actors, it can still be a pretty awesome horror movie. And to some extent, the same thing with the western. All of those spaghetti westerns with dubbed voices and obvious cartoonish characters but have this amazing cinematic strength to them still resonate. So I guess horror and western movies are both, in a very specific way, the most cinematic movie you can make. Is that a fair statement to make?

Read the complete interview here.

My Matt Groening interview, part of my “What’s in Your DVD Player” series, is up on the new “Parallel Universe” section of MSN Entertainment. I previously excerpted an outtake for my blog here, but here is an excerpt from the official version of the interview.

I’ve heard plenty of rumors about the origins of naming the town Springfield in “The Simpsons,” but I recently learned that you were actually born in Springfield, Oregon.

Springfield, of course, was my inspiration. For not a particularly great reason: Because that was the name of the town where “Father Knows Best” took place and I thought they were talking about Springfield, Oregon. I was so excited. So that’s where it originated.

You’ve been quoted as saying: “I’m a writer who just happens to draw.” What cartoonists or artists do you look to for inspiration or just your own pleasure?

I love “Peanuts” by Charles Schulz. He’s probably my single biggest influence as a cartoonist. “The Chronological Peanuts” that Fantagraphics is publishing — they’re up to 1970 or something now — has been great to wade through. I wrote the introduction to one of the early anthologies. Dr. Seuss, visually, was very important to me, and probably my biggest single teenage influence was Robert Crumb, the early underground comics by Crumb.

Because he pushed the envelope of subject matter?

Because he had this nostalgic, 1930s, E.C. Segar style combined with LSD — not that I ever took LSD — that I found very exciting.

Read the complete interview here.

I interview Bryan Cranston for my MSN series “What’s In Your DVD  Player?” and ask him about his role on Breaking Bad.

How do you prepare for a part like Walter White? Did you apprentice in a meth lab?

(Laughs) No. Making meth is just chemistry so what I did do is go to the USC chemistry department and shadowed a professor there for a couple days. I just boned up on it, just crash coursed, on not only the vernacular, but how to handle this equipment and what you do touch, what you have to be careful with, what chemicals do you need to wear protective gear on, just over and over. Actors and writers and directors, we’re all storytellers and we try to get as close to the truth as we possibly can be, but really it’s all a show, it’s not real. Our job is to make it look real.

“Breaking Bad” is like the dark side of shows like “CSI” and “Bones” and “Numbers,” and Walter is the flip side of the scientist hero, a talented chemist who is not using his powers for good.

I often say that he’s cooking crystal meth because that’s the only way he knows how he can make money. If he was a mathematician instead of a chemist, I think he would be counting cards in Vegas, something up his alley to be able to do what needs to do to set his family up for when he’s gone.

Read the complete interview on MSN here.

Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton won the “Someone to Watch” award at the 2009 Spirit Awards, for her 2008 film My Effortless Brilliance.

My Effortless Brilliance [focuses on] male relationships, specifically the “break-up” of old friends and the desperation with which one man (played by Sean Nelson – singer, songwriter, former frontman for Harvey Danger and, in the interest of disclosure, my friend and colleague), a novelist struggling to repeat the success of his first book, attempts to reconnect. His motivations are less out of affection than ego – dude, he was dumped! The film’s reception was mixed, which may have as much to do with the seeming lack of narrative drive and plotting and its undeniable similarities to Old Joy as with the discomforting portrait of male relationships. Yet I found the texture of the relationships and the sly humor winning and was impressed with the performances, especially Nelson, who’s a natural in the role, subtly establishing the sense of ego and vulnerability and self-aggrandizement in the character with brave intimacy. Shelton’s observations of male relationships and the rhythms of old friends falling into old patterns are spot on, helped immensely, surely, by the collaboration of the cast, who played the scenes without a script, only an outline.

I interviewed her about the film in 2008 and revisit that interview for Parallax View here.

I recently conducted a phone interview with Matt Groening for an upcoming MSN  feature. He was a pretty cool guy and I lived for a time in his home town of Springfield, Oregon (though long after he had left), so we reminisced about the town and talked movies and DVDs and TV and such. And then, as we talked blogs and newspapers and such, he asked about my blog, and then realized that he’d found it. Here’s the excerpt of the original interview where, in the midst of drifting off into all sorts of detours, Matt Groening gave me my first celebrity endorsement!

Thursday, February 19, 2009, phone interview.

I lived in Eugene, OR, for years and worked in Eugene even when I lived in Springfield, and I read “Life in Hell” in the local art weekly. I moved to Seattle 14 years ago and none of the papers – neither the two dailies nor either of the two alternative weekly papers – carry “Life in Hell.”

Matt Groening (image from his Wikipedia page)

Yeah, I got kicked out of whatever paper I was in up there. I think Seattle Weekly was a little too yuppy for my stuff. I’ll tell you something, the alternative newsweekly community is a real heartbreaker if you’re a cartoonist because times are tough for newspapers and alternative newsweeklies in particular. They’re running out of money and it’s really sad. In fact, next week is my final week in my local paper, the LA Weekly. They’re dropping all the cartoonists, they can’t afford them. And who knows, maybe they’ll bounce back, but I don’t know.

I’m a freelance critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and it will likely be shut down in a month.

Oh, my God. Is the Seattle Times still around?

Yes. They are, however, deeply in debt.

God, it’s so crazy.

Read more »

I interviewed Darren Aronofsky almost two months ago, when he was touring the nation to promote a little film he made called The Wrestler. It’s been the darling of Top Ten lists and star Mickey Rourke has been riding high on actor accolades and awards. Today, it earned Oscar nominations for Rourke and co-star Marisa Tomei and my interview with Aronofsky is up at Parallax View.

Early in the film, in the scene where Mickey Rourke’s character, Randy, has slept in his van and wakes up the next morning, he’s instantly surrounded by kids who adore him and he adores them, I though to myself, “He’s Wallace Beery in The Champ!”

(laughs) Sure. When we cast Mickey it was pretty hard to get the film made, and the reason was is because pretty much every financer in the world said that Mickey Rourke wasn’t sympathetic. So it was important for me to prove them wrong. And I think after the first three or four minutes of the film, you’re kind of hooked into Mickey. It’s partly because of that scene but I think it’s also because you look into his eyes and he’s very truthful, he’s filled with soul, he’s filled with spirit, and there’s just a burning desire in him.

Mickey Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson

Mickey Rourke has been doing great work for the last eight years but no one has been noticing it because they’re mostly small films and supporting roles.

He’s also had to play tough guys a lot. One of the great things about Mickey, that I remember from Angel Heart and The Pope of Greenwich Village and Barfly, is that even when he’s this incredible tough guy with all this machismo, there’s so much softness inside. And when you meet Mickey, that’s who he is. There’s a lot of armor built up, but it’s really covering up all this fear.

Casting him as a wrestler also evokes the boxing career he had after he left acting in the nineties.

Sure. I thought that, since he was a boxer, it would be very easy for him to learn how to wrestle. It was actually, I think, twice as hard for him. In boxing you want to hide your punches, you don’t want your opponent to see the punches. In wrestling, you want people in the back rows to see the punch coming two minutes before it ever happens. So Mickey really had to unlearn how he moved in the ring. I think also, as a boxer, you really look down on wrestling because it lampoons what you are doing. So it was hard, at the beginning, until Mickey learned to respect it as something that was as much sport as theater. Once he accepted that there was something theatrical going on, he was able to understand how to approach it.

Read the complete interview at Parallax View here.

As IFC prepared to release Steven Soderbergh’s Che in a special roadshow edition – both films, back-to-back with an intermission – in ten cities (including Seattle), I had the opportunity to interview Soderbergh in a phone interview last week. An abbreviated set of highlights from the interview is running at the Seattle P-I. The full version is at Parallax View.

Benicio Del Toro had been trying to get this film made for some time before you got involved. What was it about the project that made you want to jump on board and do it?

Well, really him [Del Toro], because there was nothing other than his desire and [producer] Laura Bickford’s desire to see it made, but that was it. They were working off of John Lee’s book, but John Lee’s book covered his whole life and they didn’t really have a take on it yet. So I honestly said yes without really knowing what I was saying yes to.

Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara

Was there even a treatment?

Nothing.

So when you became a collaborator on the project, where did you begin?

Step one is research, going to Cuba, talking to people, reading everything that was available, and there is a lot, just trying to collect a lot of information and see what stuck. I guess I started gravitating toward… First, the movie was just going to be Bolivia and I think that’s mostly because that part of his life was the most unknown to all of us. So initially we were just going to do that but then we began to feel like, if you just see Bolivia, you’d just be sitting there saying to yourself “Why doesn’t he leave?” You don’t understand why he thought this was going to work, and that’s when we started thinking about Cuba. And it was about that time when I found out about the New York trip and suddenly I thought, you’ve to have that, that’s really good stuff. That’s the way to address that other part of Che that a lot of people have an issue with. And the thing just started to balloon at a certain point and then it got so distended that I decided we had to cut this thing in half. It’s not going to work as one piece, it needs to be… Like I said, to me it was still one movie, it just needed to be in two parts.

You focus directly on two distinct parts of his life. The film leaps over his entire life between the military triumph in Cuba and leaving for Bolivia: five years of his life.

That was a personal choice on my part. I just wasn’t that interested in his life as a bureaucrat, frankly, and like I said, the New York visit was a way to address his ideology, the criticisms that people had of him and of Cuba and the image of him. The more I heard about what he did on the trip and reading the transcripts of the speeches at the U.N., imagining that, thinking of it already in terms of black and white, I just felt that cutting back and forth to the jungle from the concrete is going to be very nice.

Read the complete piece here. The shorter “A Moment With Steven Soderbergh” is at the Seattle P-I here.