EXCULSIVE INTERVIEW: MATT PORTERFIELD

Putty Hill writer-director Matt Porterfield.

In his hands

By Don Simpson

I am a real sucker for cinematic realism, so writer-director Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill is right up my proverbial alley. The setting is a poor, working-class suburb of Baltimore where descriptive adjectives such as decrepit, depressing and boring seem to fit best. There is nothing of merit or worth here. It seems as though no one works -- with the exception of drug dealers. This is a community of tattoos, dreadlocks, torn clothes, skaters and BMXers, graffiti, paintball, video games and drugs. Nonetheless, a place in Porterfield’s sympathetic hands.

JEsther Entertainment met up with Porterfield at Putty Hill’s U.S. premiere at SXSW 2010 to chat about the collaborative nature of his sophomore effort and his unique brand of cinematic realism.

JEsther Entertainment: Something that really intrigues me about Putty Hill is the high level of realism. Did you set any specific standards for yourself, the cast and the crew to achieve this?

Matt Porterfield: When I made my first feature film, Hamilton -- which is also an attempt at cinematic realism -- I did set strict rules for myself to follow, like [Robert] Bresson’s model. No score, only diegetic sound of an onscreen source. The approach to the aesthetic, as well, was really pared back -- a kind of an economy to the aesthetic. This time going in -- because the circumstances were so different -- the only devise in place was the interviews with the cast. That served to make all of us aware that we were attempting, self-consciously, this exercise in realism. All of us were aware of the mechanism and aware of the fictive and truer elements of the film and how they kept intersecting, and that's the experience that the audience has as well. I didn’t give the actors too much back story. I told them about the fictive character Cory who ties all of their worlds together. I told them that I would be off-camera interviewing them and if I asked questions that they could answer truthfully from within their own life than I encouraged them to do so. I have an aesthetic sensibility that favors long masters and I use non-professionals principally. Working that way allows every scene to have its own internal breath and potentially a little bit of magic; and those things contrast well with the more traditional documentary style interviews throughout, so its like this dialectic at play.

JE: The documentary format works especially well because so many of the characters seemed so naturally introverted, so the only way these characters would speak -- especially to reveal personal information -- would be if a third party intervened.

MP: At the time we were shooting there was a question on all of our minds regarding how this would play out and work together. I didn’t really see it until we started cutting. I like that the questions aren’t too probing, that they maintain a respectful distance from the characters. I could have dug deeper but it just didn’t feel right. On some level it’s just appropriate.

JE: A lot of the actors were carryovers from Metal Gods. How did you approach them initially for Metal Gods and then how did you bring them over to Putty Hill?

MP:  Metal Gods is about young people, so we held auditions at area high schools. I was inspired by the stories I heard from the casting of Paranoid Park -- how the casting agents in Portland, whom Gus Van Zant was working with, used MySpace and also advertised public auditions. So I kind of followed that model. We set up a MySpace page just for casting the movie and then used that as an Internet reference point. I had some friends helping me, so, in addition to seeing people on the street, we would find people via the Internet. We just did a lot of digging around. We printed postcards, so we would flyer the street or hand them out at malls. We had these more formal auditions at high schools that I was able to set up -- focusing on the high schools with performing arts programs -- and then we tried to use every means that we could to publicize the public auditions around town. We had about six of those altogether. I saw upwards around 500 to 600 people probably. Along the way I met some kids that I really wanted to work with but I wasn’t certain how well they’d fit or how they would handle the Metal Gods material. So when our hand was forced and we switched gears, it was really liberating then to create a scenario just using the people that I wanted to see on screen as a sort of thread or inspiration. I took a casting credit on Putty Hill.

JE: And you mentioned that you didn’t really coach the actors, but so many of the performances are so consistently quiet and toned down – so that just came naturally with the actors that you chose?

MP: There’s a certain way in which I feel like I’m learning more -- and I’ve definitely learned a lot between Hamilton and Putty Hill -- ways of working with actors. One of the most important things is that I’ve honed a way to communicate with actors that conveys the kind of energy on set that translates on screen. It’s a balance. You have to give a nonprofessional actor enough information to feel safe and secure. Some will ask you very directly for specific things that they need, but then also don’t give them too much information. You could very easily crowd their heads with directions. So I try just to focus on the reality of the action. If we’re shooting a wide master, then it’s really about getting them comfortable with a few key actions that they can then focus on. The scene where the mom is playing the guitar in the kitchen is an example of something that really just came about organically. I knew I wanted to shoot in the kitchen. I knew Cody was going to come in. I planned to have his girlfriend and his baby there. But mom happened to be there that morning playing guitar, so I decided to keep her in the scene -- pretty much where she had been. And it was just a matter of giving Cody specific movements to get him from point A to point B. Then, in running through it together we came up with lines. It wasn’t so important to me what they said as long as they were comfortable with the dialogue and it felt natural.

JE: Let’s discuss your use of sound. In some scenes you use noises that almost blur out the audio -- there’s the scene in the tattoo shop during which you wound up having to use subtitles because the sound was so obscured.

MP: Traditionally we would have shot that scene without the tattoo gun turned on and then just added that in post, to get the dialogue, but you can’t do that when you’re working the way we were.

JE: And it added another level of realism.

MP: Exactly. The whole film is an exercise in the perception of objective and subjective cinematic reality -- if there is such a thing -- and just playing with the audience’s awareness of that relationship. I was selective. There is dialogue in scenes that we chose not to bring up because it wasn’t important. Sometimes we keep the relationship between camera and subject realistic and other times we don’t. There are scenes [when] we broke our own rules, like the scene where they take that long walk and we can hear the dialogue all the way. But then there is that scene in the woods, where you can’t hear anything the girls are saying. It was just a matter of scene by scene what felt right -- what we wanted to highlight. And then, in post, it was just trying to create just the right balance. Bring down some of the treble on the tattoo gun so it’s not too annoying for an audience but maintains its integrity, and we chose to subtitle really because I was thinking about my mom in the theater -- she wouldn’t pick up anything if she watched that scene. For me, it’s an example of what is important. What’s important is what they are saying as well as everything else, so it needs to be intelligible. In this case, subtitles were the answer. And then of course being the second scene of the film adds that sort of extra “is there a documentary feeling?” Subtitles again reinforce this idea that we’re blending the lines between fiction and non-fiction.

JE: Did you intend any specific economic or political message with Putty Hill?

MP: That’s always on my mind. I am very aware -- having grown up in Baltimore and lived there as an adult for almost ten years -- that it’s a very stratified city, like so many American cities, along the lines of race and class. Despite the fact that in the city proper there’s diversity -- in that we all live on top of one another. Those lines of communication are severed. There was a purpose -- and it’s maybe the reason that I stay working in Baltimore -- I would like to portray the diversity of experience onscreen of a very particular place that I know and love. As artists working in America it is important to show other visions of America; and a city like Baltimore can be a tool to bridge gaps and open lines of communication. It’s about a place that I know very well, so anything about the particular economy of that world is just part of the realism that we were attempting.

JE: There is also the degradation of the family element in Putty Hill. Though most of the family lives close to each other, they just don’t communicate. Nobody really spoke to Cory. Nobody really knew him…

MP: And the guy that was most connected with Cory in the film is Dustin. It is crazy to think that they had to be in prison together to really connect at that level. It’s true that a lot of the characters in Cory’s family don’t have much to say. I think that’s just true. I was meditating a lot on the idea of loss and what a family would go through if they lost someone.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: SUSANNE BIER

In a Better World director Susanne Bier.

Senseless and sensitivity

By John Esther

Another intense family drama by the director behind Open Hearts, Brothers, After the Wedding and Things We Lost in the Fire, the latest film by Susanne Bier, In a Better World, examines the various levels of tolerance some people will accept before retaliating.

Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a doctor working in an African desert camp where girls are often brought in after being cut open by a local warlord named Big Man (Odiege Matthew in a role he seems born to play).

Back home in Denmark, Anton's estranged wife, Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), is trying to raise their son, Elias (Markus Rygaard), a socially misfit kid who gets into a heap of trouble after befriending the new boy in town, Christian (William Jørgennsen), a bitter boy with a chip on his shoulder called Dad (Ulrich Thomsen).

When a plan of attack goes dreadfully awry -- although it could have been much worse -- it becomes clear that mother, father, husband, wife and son need to learn the value of forgiveness in a world riddled with revenge.

Days before In a Better World won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (Denmark) I met up with the Danish director in Beverly Hills. As she moved around on the slippery couch quite a bit, we talked about her latest film.

JEsther Entertainment: Why did you want to make this film, tell these stories?
Susanne Bier: Because I thought it was interesting. I thought the whole thing about revenge and forgiveness seemed like something which sort of creeps upon us in our vocabulary. It's about time to make a movie that dealt with those kinds of things.

JE: Do you think there is a greater thirst for revenge now than in the past? SB: There's a greater acceptance of revenge as a notion. If you look back the past five or six years the notion has become an accepted term.

JE: Worldwide? In particular places?
SB: In the Western World, yes. It's very hard for me to say what it's like in Asia.

JE: What kind of political intentions did you have behind making In a Better World?
SB: I don’t think I had political intentions. I had intentions dealing with ethic or moral issues. I very consciously did not deal with political things. This film deals with moral issues: the whole issue of revenge and forgiveness; the whole notion of violence and non-violence; and the whole ideal about being a decent human being and what that implies. I didn’t want to set it in a definite political context or religious context either. That way we could keep the universality of the moral issues.

JE: Do you think Anton has the right response in these situations, incidences where people are seeking revenge?
SB: I don’t think he has a correct or non-correct response. He's trying hard to remain stoic upon what he believes is right and, like all of us, at some point he has a breaking point. His breaking point is an interesting point because that's where you as an audience feel, "Oh great, we got rid of this guy. We don’t want Big Man to go around doing the sort of atrocities we know he's going to be doing. Once he's well he's going to go out and cut up stomachs of small pregnant girls." You don’t want him to be able to do that so there's a strange sense of relief at the same time you clearly realize Anton is feeling defeated.

JE: Big Man's death is a self-defense mechanism for the "girls of the future."
SB: You can say that. I'm not sure that's the correct mechanics, but you can say that.

JE: How do you deal with your thirsts for revenge? How do you negotiate that energy into something else?
SB: The way we feel offended in everyday life and the way we want to deal with feeling offended is usually pretty easy to deal with. Unless you've been exposed to real atrocities, it's hard to predict your capability to deal with them. As a general rule I do believe in forgiveness. All adult human beings know that the spiral of revenge is terribly tragic.

JE: A lot of your films deal with tragedy. Is there a reason why you are drawn to characters with intense internal conflicts that manifest themselves outward?
SB: My movies are dramatic movies. If you look at great dramas, they are pretty violent, pretty powerful. There's been a particularly European tradition of being withheld and sort of subdued by your scale of dramatic expression and I don’t really believe in that. I actually believe in telling the stories with a lot of emotion. You're probably much more capable of reaching an audience if you feel you've got an important story or if you feel you have something in your heart which you think is important to convey.

JE: Do you see your films as a response to the lack of intensity in European drama?
SB: You don’t make sort of intense movies because you think other movies are boring. You make movies because you think this particular story is right. When I get the criticism of my movies being incredibly dramatic, I kind of go, "Yes, great. Thank you," even if it's not meant that way. I actually happen to think it's great.

JE: I was not posing it as a criticism –
SB: No, I know you were not.

JE: Do people actually criticize your films for being too dramatic?
SB: Actually it's interesting here, because I'm Danish, my movies are sort of "art house." In Europe I'm so mainstream, that I'm not entirely accepted among certain movie circles in Europe. I'm quite pleased with that. I mean, if you think moviemaking is about talking to two people in a very sophisticated cinema, far away from everything, be my guest. I just don’t believe it. I actually believe in making accessible movies with real content.

JE: Now that you say that, when I was at Sundance in January (where In a Better World screened), I was sitting around with a few Scandinavian filmmakers and there was a surprisingly intense debate over your films.
SB: Yeah.

JE: What do you think about the film's Oscar nomination?
SB: I'm very happy. I'm very proud. I get to wear a long dress.

JE: Do you think the Oscars usually get it right with the winners?
SB: Nobody gets it right always. I do tend to like the Oscar movies.

JE: They are usually dramas.
SB: [Laughs]. Yeah. Sometimes certain comedic performances do not get appreciated because they are comedic performances. And those can be the most difficult to put out. So tell me about this Sundance Scandinavian discussion. I think that's very interesting.

JE: Some thought you were too commercial. They thought your Oscar nomination came through name recognition since you had done Things We Lost in the Fire (with Halle Berry) and Brothers was adapted into English (withTobey Maguire). Others did not see how being commercial was a bad thing. And how could your films be so commercial since they were so intense? There were fans for Sweden's Simple Simon, which did not make the cut.
SB: Okay.

JE: You are also one of the few female filmmakers consistently working. Do you see progress for women trying to make it in this business?
SB: It's probably a bit easier, but society still places a big emphasis on women having to choose between their careers and having children. Society should change that. It's a huge pressure on younger women.

JE: Lastly, what do you think of these interviews where you discuss yourself and your work? Does it serve the film? Should the work speak for itself?
SB: That's a very theoretical question. Yes, I would prefer for my work to speak for itself, but that's not the reality. The reality is that I need to generate interest. If you are serious about your work, this is just as an important part as shooting the film.

JE: Do you read interviews with other directors?
SB: Sometimes. In Europe, particularly, directors can be very pretentious. That doesn’t make me terribly keen to see a film. I'm very sensitive to the education of a particular project. If I read a director, and the director seems sincerely dedicated, it is going to make me interested.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: SHERRY HORMANN & LIYA KEBEDE

Liya Kebede (left) plays Waris Dirie (right) in Desert Flower.

Years to bloom

By John Esther

After a childhood diet of abuse, slavery and disfigurement, at the age of 13 Waris Dirie escaped from the desert of Somalia to London, England, where she spent her adolescent years and early adulthood as a maid in her country's London embassy. After she lost her thankless job, Dirie was homeless.

Thanks to lots of luck and a little love, the poor, illiterate nomad from Africa climbed out from under the seedy streets and slummy hotels of London to the runways of some of the most glamorous fashion designers in the world.

On the surface, Dirie's story sounds like some random-fated rags-to-riches story, but behind the cover girl lurks a child scarred with terror.

Based on the European-best selling book by Dirie and Cathleen Miller, writer-director Sherry Hormann's seemingly light treatment of Dirie's youth during much of Desert Flower – although there are some horrific parts of Dirie's life exposed between the film's incidents of female camaraderie and model runways (from sparkling shoots to dreary London hotel hallways) – works its way into a crescendo of outcry against the barbaric practice of female genitalia mutilation.

With no legitimate basis in law or religion, female genitalia mutilation is an injustice happening to six thousand girls worldwide every day. That means one female is mutilated every 14.4 seconds around the clock; or, to put it another way, during the 124-minute running time of Desert Flower, over 516 girls fell victim to a practice nowhere mentioned in the Koran; or, to put it another way, during the estimated five minutes it will take you to read this article, nearly 21 girls have been traumatized, sliced and stitched without anesthesia, but with parental consent, if not participation, too.

For the role of Dirie, Hormann (Silent Shadow; Father's Day) cast Ethiopian-born Liya Kebede (The Good Shepherd; Lord of War), a supermodel and Goodwill Ambassador for the World Health Organization. The film also stars Sally Hawkins as Dirie's best friend, Marilyn, and Timothy Spall as the photographer who discovered the working girl with a great profile and made her a star.

In this exclusive interview we spoke to Hormann and Kebede about Desert Flower.

JEsther Entertainment: Why did you want to make this film?
Sherry Hormann: It's a story that has to be told. It's an issue we don’t know a lot about and knowing that 6000 girls a day are mutilated. And, just think about it, a nomad girl, illiterate, survives war, being a maid and then giving that historic speech in front of the U.N. It gives me a lot of hope.
Liya Kebede: It's a really an amazing story; one that needs to be told. She's an incredible woman; I was inspired by her.

JE: Did you have any more direct political intentions with the film?
SH: Political intentions? I'm not a politician. I'm an entertainer. I strongly believe in human rights. I strongly believe no human being should be hurt. I believe humor is the best weapon to survive. The grayer it gets during the day, the more I try to pull out my sense of humor. This is why I tried to balance the drama with comedy. Otherwise you can't digest what's going on in her life.

JE: How did the making of the film change you?
SH: My next film has a political topic as well and Desert Flower might provide me with more courage, maybe, and more attention on what's going on.
LK: Before making this film, Sherry and I sat down and I remember Sherry said to me, "You know this film is going to change your life, right?" It did. [Laughs.] We learned a lot. I had a lot of personal growth in this movie. I was really inspired by her. This film will change everyone who comes close to it, whether you are making it or watching it.

JE: What do you think you have in common with Waris?
LK: We have some things. To a certain degree I can see what it must have felt like to leave your home and go somewhere new and start all over and learn the ropes, adjust yourself and all these kinds of things. I can see a little bit how she must have felt, even though we come from different backgrounds. I can see how she went into fashion.

JE: She goes from such impoverishment to high fashion.
LK: It's a stark contrast – the access of everything. She can't even understand it. Even when she becomes a successful model, her house is so stark. It's like she's now comfortable and she doesn’t really know what to do with it. She's never really comfortable, even in the end.

JE: How have American audiences responded so far? Are they different from other audiences around the globe?
SH: The screenings I've had around the globe are great. We had it at film festivals, but in Europe we've had school classes streaming in and we had the European Union supporting us, even though they didn’t support me at all while I was writing (the screenplay). We've had a huge response from South America – where I never expected it. You never know. This movie has no stars attached. It's a low budget movie. It's a difficult topic, but it comes along as an entertaining movie. It's not the art house-ish movie. I don’t know how the American audiences will respond. What do you think?

JE:It will probably work on a few levels. Liya, have people changed toward you?
LK: We've really had the kind of reaction we wanted from the audience. People come out of the screeners overwhelmed and touched and moved and educated about something new. It's a wonderful reaction. People were able to go to the cinema and spend two hours on a journey.

JE:How do you think the way the film ends will impact audiences, especially with regard to younger American females?
LK: Because it ends with the U.S. speech?

JE:Not so much the U.N. speech as the penultimate scene where we see the worst of the worst happens to Waris?
SH: I debated that a lot, believe me. I've rewritten the script several times and in the editing room I changed the structure many times. At the every end, I decided with the editor (Clara Fabry) that I wanted the hero to be understood, to be loved. I wanted to give her a huge hug. I also didn’t want it to look like becoming a model is easy. I wanted to come with a hammer at the end. Nothing was easy. There's a huge scar, a secret, behind the whole life of this woman. I wanted people to leave the movie theater being pensive, debating what's going on.
LK: It's a bold move on Sherry's part. It's a necessary one. It has truth. It's important that something like this is shown truthfully.


JE: When I was watching it, I started to become more and more apprehensive because I thought the film was going to be a rags-to-riches story and that the worst of the worst things that happened to Waris would be reduced to a conversation Waris had with Marilyn in the bedroom.
LK: And then they gave you exactly what you wanted. [Laughs.]

JE: To the film's considerable credit. It wallops the viewer in the face with some hard truth. The viewer will not depart from your film with a "feel good" feeling. Sure, they will be happy Waris survived and the work she does to bring this phenomenon to the world's attention, but there are other deep issues involved. For example, there is the issue of American girls not being able to live up to the images of the media. Maybe American girls who can afford a film ticket will not feel so sorry for themselves after watching the film? Maybe they will think, "Okay, I may never be the cover girl, but I don’t have that kind of horror inside me, either. I have a more balanced life."
SH: Right. Look beyond your pink bubble. You open up the news and it's always the same topic. You just have to turn your head a little to see what's going on. Africa is always the forgotten continent. You can watch a movie where you laugh and it's lighthearted, but also where you feel pain and where you cry.