On paper I Want Your Love, a film backed by porno dollars and bursting (or rather, pulsating) with genuine sex scenes, is unlikely to attract attention beyond those with a penchant for blue cinema and a ready supply of lube and tissues. But according to its director Travis Mathews, the film is far more than a series of steamy scenes threaded together by a laboured and unfulfilling narrative. “I wanted to show sex in a way that isn’t necessarily for titillation, but for story and character,” he says.

But wait, isn’t this project funded by Nakedsword.com? (Need we underline the fact this link is super, super NSFW?). Well, yes.

But the porn producers, apparently, didn’t want Mathews to massage his script into the sort of thing you might find on their website. “They were very clear from the beginning that they didn’t want me to make porn,” says Mathews. The two parties actually linked up after NS saw Mathews’ project In Their Room, an intimate documentary series that explores the private lives and sexual habits of gay men in cities across the globe. Impressed with Mathews’ bold approach to sex and nudity, the porn supremos asked him to develop the existing script for I Want Your Love into a full-length feature.

I Want Your Love revolves around Jesse, a 30-year old gay man who moved to San Francisco from Ohio in his early twenties. Over the years, Jesse has been seduced by the city’s cosseting atmosphere, and is subsequently plagued by a state of inertia and dissatisfaction. He decides to leave, ashamed of his lack of direction, but not before having one last weekend in the city. His friends and ex-lovers want to throw him a going-away party, but given his turbulent state of mind, having love showered on him is the last thing he wants. Not least because of a really tricky one night stand the previous week.

Mathews uses sex to allow the audience a voyeuristic look into Jesse’s intimate world and private angst. “The one night stand happens days before he already knows he’s leaving. It’s another instance of him trying to do what he thinks he should do and trying to be free and easy – very San Fran – but the anxiety of what he’s leaving behind and about what’s in front of him is short-circuiting him,” says Mathews.

Mathews argues that sex is a powerful tool in portraying three-dimensional characters who are as beautiful as they are flawed. His decision to weave graphic sex into I Want Your Love is not for banal eroticism – porn connections aside – but because he believes that audiences are ready to accept the reality of what it is to be gay. He seeks to deconstruct traditional representations of gay men as stereotypes and tropes by presenting a character who happens to be gay, but not for the purpose of plot. “Jesse’s struggles have nothing to do with his sexuality,” claims Matthews. “He struggles with life, sex and relationships in much the same way as anyone would, regardless of sexuality,” he adds.

I Want Your Love comes out in the UK on 28th June.

Words: Gavin Jewkes

The post I Want Your Love: Travis Matthews Interview appeared first on Wonderland.

The first time music video directors Daniels met, they despised each other. So much so, that after being pitted together in classes at summer school, Daniel Kwan ended up throwing a bowl of salad over his prospective partner, Scheinert. “He smelt like vomit for the rest of the day,” Kwan reminisces fondly, adding, “we eventually realised all we had was each other, and that it was better than being alone. Thus, Daniels began.” Wonderland thought it would be fun to sit the pair down and discuss the ins-and-outs of their mesmerising, internationally-lauded work.

What was the first project you worked on together?

The very first was a short we made at summer camp. It was like three or four in the morning and we were outside with a 5D Mark II, just screwing around. We sort of accidentally discovered our way into making half-arsed visual effects that night. The short ended up being called Swingers – it was extremely dumb and crazy, but eventually got ‘Staff Picked’ at Vimeo. We realised the general public tends to like really dumb things – it’s sort of become the motto we adopt with all of our projects.

Swingers from Daniel Scheinert on Vimeo.

Do you share interests, obsessions, heroes?

Yes,  but we differ on certain things. Kwan loves greasy fast food and Daniel Scheinert loves his girlfriend.  

Who would you most like to meet?

A masseuse, a midget, and/or rich film financiers.  Or, even better – someone who is all of these things: a ‘ma$$eudgit’.

You’ve said that you tend to let the music you’re writing visuals to inspire ideas. How did this come into practice with the Battles video?
 
It’s a wonderfully unusual song.  So stressful: no chorus; the vocals just cut out halfway through.  We wanted to make a video that took advantage of that.  The one-shot escalator fall felt right. Amazingly, we separately had short film ideas in college about someone falling down an escalator forever.  We asked our friends if they’d do it, and they were all like, “What if I get hurt?  Wah wah I’m a baby.”  Now that we’re a big deal, we just paid a guy to do it.  

Battles “My Machines” from DANIELS on Vimeo.

How did you overcome the shoot’s obvious dangers – sharp escalator stair edges, general falling motions, electricity and feral shopping?

We had a wonderful stunt coordinator called Jess Harbeck, who made it safe.  He had pads under his clothes and as a stuntman he knew how to fall safely.  But we wanted it to be real – it’s a real escalator.  Our job was to be so clear with our direction that he only had to do it once, maybe twice… The project so nearly fell through, though: we almost resorted to hiring an actor who didn’t know what the video was about and sneaking into a mall in the night with a camera.

Your super-short animation/live action piece Tides of the Heart follows similar themes of general misadventure. Are you big fans of black comedy?

We wouldn’t say we are big fans of black comedy, specifically – we’re just really into comedy that doesn’t feel like a comedy. We like tonally-confusing films that make you feel three or four different things at once, so everyone takes something different from it. The Battles video is straight up confusing. People don’t know if its supposed to be funny or scary or sad or just plain dumb. The truth is, it’s all of these things.

Tides of the Heart from dunkwun on Vimeo.

What can fans look forward to from DANIELS in the coming months? 

We’ve done a couple of music videos for Foster the People, which was really fun – they have a great sense of humour and love being playful with their image. But mostly, we’ve been taking the past few months off to develop our own personal projects: high-concept short films; features that would be impossible to produce; a TV show about high school;  a project about people pooping their pants.
 
Wow – we just leap-frogged five years into the future. What are you up to?

We never wanna do the same thing twice because we get bored too easily. We’re also trying to wean ourselves off of visual effects, which has sort of been a crutch for us. It’s pretty possible that we’ll leave filmmaking altogether. Daniel Scheinert loves to act and is probably going to pursue that, eventually. Daniel Kwan wants to write and illustrate children’s books.

The DANIELS site
The DANIELS blog
Words: Jack Mills

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How did your association with Kenneth Anger begin?  
With ‘Hollywood Babylon’ being the international classic that it has been over the last few decades, that book was my and countless others’ first introduction to Kenneth Anger and his mordant wit. Anger was doing a world tour in 1993 with a stop in Auckland, New Zealand, where i was a student at the time studying art history, and masters film studies with Roger Horrocks, Len Lye’s biographer. The fabulous civic theater hosted a memorable screening of Anger’s masterwork ‘The Magick Lantern Cycle,’ and after standing in a long line of die-hard fans, he signed my black notebook with a silver marker I’d brought along. Professor Horrocks had just introduced us to the radical film work of the American avant-garde, which is really foundational for film studies globally, and I almost levitated when I saw ‘Scorpio Rising’ for the first time (you see I am a Scorpio, and my birthday is on Halloween. Ha!) But on an aesthetic and very visceral level, it was a profound experience. The years passed, I became a Curator and Art Writer, lived in New York, London and moved to Los Angeles in 1998 as Associate Director and Curator for Ace Gallery. In 2003 I proposed writing a feature on Kenneth Anger looking at his influence on contemporary artists who’d adopted the moving image as their medium, for the LA-London journal ‘After all,’ which provided the occasion to interview him in person. Again, the occasion was so memorable – meeting at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Blvd. Under a large Christmas tree; and there I met this most charming, gracious, interesting, and witty gentleman. I was completely overcome… he allowed me to produce the first new color frame enlargements from his films. The ‘Scorpio Rising’ image was then on the cover…  

Describe anger in 5 words.
The five letters of his name, or in seven letters: THELEMA

Can you divulge what his latest project, “Uniform Attraction” is about?  
Rather than give you my 7-page draft on this substantial new (2008) film (there wasn’t room in the new book for it either), a few summary thoughts here may not necessarily reflect those of the filmmaker or other viewers. The men in uniforms are reminiscent of his 1947 classic “Fireworks,” and indeed the iconic image of the sailor makes prevalent present military economy- very cleverly co-opting TV recruitment propaganda for the marines into self-reflexive critique. The dramatic TV commercials are so theatrical, (even having Kenneth Anger-inspired fast cut editing) and over-produced, they almost seem to aspire to “triumph of the will.” The “patriotic pencils” which are emblazoned with the Statue of Liberty and the stars and stripes- made in china- encapsulates our world in one ironic image…an explosive ending too.

Why did you think a book about Anger was important?
There were two small books in french written on Kenneth Anger in homage, Pierre Hecker is an author in Paris whom I met, and he was incredibly generous to send me copies of his anger correspondence from the Cinematheque Francais and other French archives from Kenneth’s decade in Paris in the 1950s. Some of these letters and press clippings are in the book, with my translations. Celebrated contemporary film director Olivier Assayas also wrote a beautifully written book on Anger, quite passionate in fact, which i also referred to, translated from and quoted in my book. With Robert Haller’s early small monograph of 1980 (which was really the primary source for discussion of ‘lucifer rising’), a great British film institute publication and ‘Moonchild’ were precursors. And yet none had consulted Kenneth in regard to doing a book. As Kenneth had allowed me to make new frame enlargements from his films, many for the first time in color, a visual publication with his cooperation, was a first. His images became central. It was about acknowledging his influence in an art context, moreover, not solely his foundational status as a pioneering filmmaker.    

How does Anger influence / inspire you in everyday life?  
Kenneth Anger introduced me to profound knowledge, the understanding of which is a work in progress.  

What is your favourite or most relevant piece that Anger has done?  
‘Scorpio Rising’ …And ‘Puce Moment’ …And ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’ … – But if only we could find his very early work from the 1940s, like ‘Drastic Demise,’ and also the lost documentary he made for English TV on Thelema Abbey in the 1950s… Maybe this will provide an opportunity for someone in London to finally track it down.

Interview by Eunice Jera Lee

The post Kenneth Anger Revisited appeared first on Wonderland.

“It’s hard to really say it’s a full-on documentary,” says legendary German director Wim Wenders about his latest, 3D extravaganza Pina. And it’s true, though Wenders is well known for his incisive, technically innovative documentaries, including Tokyo Ga (a film that’s sort-of about Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, but really about flashing pachinko machines) and the Academy Award-nominated Buena Vista Social Club, Pina is a far cry from his previous work in this, or any genre.

Celebrating the innovative creations of the late Pina Bausch, a pioneering choreographer who, via her emotive, cathartic plays, invented the concept of Tanztheater, Pina is part performance movie, part elegy and – thanks to its mindblowing use of the third dimension – part fairground ride. It centers around four live recordings of Bausch’s work, performed by her dance company and filmed with an elaborate crane apparatus that takes the viewer within inches of the panting, sweating and wildly thrashing performers.

The 3D is beautiful – perhaps the most sophisticated, subtle, and immersive use of this emerging technology that has ever been accomplished. But the film’s history is a troubled one. Wenders and Bausch, who first met in 1985, had been talking about making a film together ever since, with little progress made because of Wenders’ concern that traditional cinema could hardly do justice to the sheer power of Bausch’s work. “Anybody I ever took to see a play of Pina’s – even tough guys who said, ‘Oh, dance is not for me, you’re out of your mind’ – they sat next to me and they started weeping because they could not believe that Pina’s work could concern them that much,” he says, abstractedly sipping tea at London’s Cavendish Hotel. It was only when Wenders encountered this decade’s obsession – 3D cinema – via U2’s U2-3D film at Cannes Film Festival in 2007, that he thought “that maybe that would put me in a position to participate more. Let people participate in a different way.” “That’s when we really started to prepare,” he says, “when we decided we would do it with this unknown technology.”

By 2009, Wenders was set to film the first few 3D test shots with Bausch. But then, completely without warning, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and died five days later. “For me, the movie was over,” says Wenders. “It was only weeks later that it dawned on us that it really was wrong not to do it. The dancers had given us an example – they had even danced the night that she died. They performed crying their hearts out, saying Pina had taught them, in spite of everything, to dance.”

So Wenders embarked on a new, unknown film. “Even the concept that Pina and I had put together was quite an elaborate one,” he says. “Then that concept was down the drain and it was really flying with no instruments.” What he ended up with, after months of struggling with his massive 3D cameras – and their initial inability to capture the explosive movements of Bausch’s troupe without flickering and strobing – is a solemn, but poetic tribute to a woman who found a new, physical language to communicate the pain and adulation of human existence, composed from snippets of performance, archive footage, and interviews with Bausch’s troupe of longtime collaborators and friends. “I think what really connected us was a sense of research, and starting from reality, whatever was coming out of it,” Wenders says of his relation to Bausch “All of Pina’s work started, radically, from experience. With improvisation and going deeper and deeper. Then she turned what she found into a dance.”

As if to emphasize this connection between Bausch’s Tanztheater and the keenly felt emotions of everyday life, Wenders also punctuated Pina with scenes of dancers performing in mundane locations around Wupperthal, the home of the Pina Bausch troupe, enacting the snippets of her work to which they are most deeply connected. At one point, one of Bausch’s disciples stomps around the gliding carriage of the city’s funicular rail service, devastating, explosive noises emanating from behind a thick mass of hair thrown over her face. At another, a graceful duet unfolds under a concrete overpass. It’s at times devastating, but always, thanks to those dorky 3D spectacles, completely entrancing. “ It goes to show that 3D can be taken seriously as a medium,” says Wenders. “I’m totally convinced.”

Pina was released April 22.

This article first appeared in Wonderland Issue 26, April/May 2011

Words: Adam Welch

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Most directors would have jumped at the chance to make the next instalment of Harry Potter or Narnia. But Guillermo del Toro is not most directors. And besides, this natural heir to Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam & Co had his own fairytale plans – namely Pan’s Labyrinth, the triple Oscar-winning box-office smash that turned him into a Hollywood sensation. Alan Jones meets the Mexican maestro on the set of his latest offering, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

“I’m into eye protein, not eye candy,” announces Guillermo del Toro as he watches actor Ron Perlman bound into view dressed as red-skinned demon Hellboy. Del Toro, a 43-year-old cuddly bear of a man who inspires Messianic devotion in all around him, is standing in the middle of what looks very like a Manhattan street. In fact we are on the massive Korda Studio back-lot in Budapest for Hellboy II: The Golden Army. It’s been four years since the first Hellboy outing and in that time everything has changed for del Toro. The sequel was dead in the water as far as the moneymen were concerned. Until, that is, Pan’s Labyrinth made del Toro box-office dynamite.

Before Pan’s Labyrinth del Toro had been crafting elaborate fantasy films for 13 years. His 1993 debut Cronos – a south-of-the-border take on the vampire story – won critical acclaim but never found a mass audience. Mimic, a Miramax-backed monster movie, was a text-book sophomore muddle. But del Toro returned to form with his next outing, The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story set in the dying days of Spain’s civil war. Two comic-book adaptations followed: Hellboy, based on the paranormal investigator created by cult graphic novelist Mike Mignola; and vampire-slaying actioner Blade II. Both were lost in a blitz of superhero cinema releases. Del Toro is philosophical about the hit-and-miss nature of his early CV. “It works like this,” he explains. “I do one film for Hollywood, then one for me. Mimic and Blade II were great dates, but the others are commitments for life.”

Del Toro doesn’t include Pan’s Labyrinth in this relationship analogy, instead describing it as a “beautiful daughter”. Its combination of heart-wrenching wartime dramatics with exquisite monsters won over the multiplex-going public. But the film was not originally conceived with a crossover in mind: “I wanted my hardcore audience to see genre possibilities beyond the easy scare,” he says, “to embrace its multi-faceted richness.”

With Oscar glory, though, came a worldwide audience far beyond gore geekdom. Del Toro can now choose between A-List projects like the big-screen remake of The Hobbit (which will be two films budgeted at $150 million each) and Universal’s Frankenstein re-brand. He can now return confidently to the Hellboy franchise, armoured with total creative control, commercial muscle and a $72 million budget.

Unlike other filmmakers who have made the jump to vast budgets, del Toro has changed neither his priorities nor his personality. He has remained fiercely loyal to a troupe of actors that includes ex-Bros singer Luke Goss, on whom del Toro gambled for Blade II, and who now plays Hellboy II’s villain, elf-prince Nuada. And he has retained a highly contagious passion for every aspect of filmmaking. He refuses to start using a 2nd unit camera team, preferring to oversee every shot with trusty cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who has shot all of his movies.

On Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro did much more than just hang fire to make sure the film was right. He put his money where his mouth is. “I ploughed my entire fee back into the film to complete it the way I wanted,” he explains. “So far it’s made over $150 million and I won’t see a penny. My wife is more upset about that than I am, because it got me to the top of my game. It had the audacity not to fit into any category, yet be successful. I used that clout to benefit Hellboy II and my list of people to help if I ever got into that position.”

Top of that “People-To-Help List” were Ecuadorian director Sebastián Cordero (Crónicas) and Spain’s Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage). Del Toro produced both films. “It’s all about new talent,” he insists. “That’s what keeps our industry alive and fresh. On The Orphanage I made everyone a first-timer from the director downwards, and it worked.”

Brutality is something del Toro knows all about. He was born in 1964 during a particularly volatile period in Mexico’s history. On the streets around his parents’ home in Guadalajara, paramilitary troops regularly executed students, and drug barons dished out revenge. “Blood, guts and violence were a way of life,” he confesses. “I saw my first corpse at four, I worked next door to a morgue as a teenager, I’ve had guns put to my head and seen people killed in front of me. That’s why I turned down directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Chronicles of Narnia – I don’t understand youth because I’ve never had one.”

Violence has persisted into del Toro’s adult life. In 1997 his father was kidnapped and held prisoner for 72 days. “I lost 18 months of my life trying to find out who was responsible,” he tearfully recollects. “Then a cop said, ‘Give me $10,000 and when we catch them I’ll leave you alone with them and a steel pipe for an hour’. I couldn’t do it. I’m not a perfect human being by any means but that wasn’t the way to confront my pain.

“I work in a genre most people don’t take seriously yet, and I try to imbue it with meaning. I don’t care if films like Hellboy II are considered pulp fiction by most. I will always leave breadcrumb trails to follow into the darkest forests if people want to learn more about themselves.”

Words: Alan Jones

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #13, April/May 2008

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is released on August 22

The post Guillermo del Toro appeared first on Wonderland.

Iconic moviemaker, Pedro Almodovar, has a long history of producing female-centric stories. To mark the release of his latest film, Broken Embraces, Damon Wise discusses the importance of women with the Spanish director.

“I think,” says Pedro Almodovar, “that the reason that there are mostly female characters in my films is that when I was a child – like many children of my generation, at the end of the 50s – I was brought up by women. I was surrounded by women. My mother took me round with her all the time, and when she didn’t, she left me with our female neighbours, or she sat me on the patio. So I was able to observe this kind of family life that was completely governed by women – by strong women, this generation of post-war women.” He sighs. “I don’t know how they got by, but they did. They managed to feed us and clothe us every day. I think my country owes them so much.”

For many people, Pedro Almodovar is a once absurdly camp Spanish filmmaker who, over the last 25 years, has somehow mellowed into something more soulful and classical. It is true that his early films featured penis-measuring competitions, close-ups of splattered diarrhoea and a love story featuring not one but two serial killers locked in a torrid romance. But there’s a side to Almodovar that has always been serious. His films focus on women not as empty, shallow drag queens but as fully fleshed, emotional creations, and even his trashy comedies treasure freedom in a political way, reacting against the tyrannical reign of the dictator General Franco, who held Spain in his ultra-conservative grasp for nearly 40 years.

Almodovar’s new film, Broken Embraces, re-teams him with Penelope Cruz, the muse he discovered on his 1999 film All About My Mother and to whom he gave a blistering role in his last film, Volver. Volver was a film about life after death, in several unexpected ways, and so is Broken Embraces. But where Volver was bright and earthy, Broken Embraces is dark and sad, a melancholy study of loss starring Lluis Homar as a film director who has lost his sight and his lover (Cruz) and lives in a state of denial. Taking the fake name Harry Caine, he refuses to face the painful memories of the past – of the struggling starlet he discovered and fell for, and the jealous millionaire producer who drove them apart.

Like several of Almodovar’s previous films – notably Women On the Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1990) – it’s a film that explicitly references the movie world, but the reason here is not to foreground artifice of the film itself but to reveal how far real life falls short of the movies. “I realise that, over time, I’ve become more aware of what filmmaking means to me,” says Almodovar. “I could almost say that cinema perfects all the imperfections of life. And the gravity of my recent films, the seriousness, is a result of age, I think. One can’t help maturing. Over time, I grew up, I changed, and I believe my films reflect that.”

In person, Almodovar is a surprisingly sober individual; a thoughtful chatterbox who prefers to ‘habla espana’ when talking about his movies but who can’t help interrupting his translator (in English) to clarify certain points. He’s big too, and the shock of wiry, bouffant grey hair makes him look elemental, and much more masculine than his films might suggest. It’s interesting to note, then, that Broken Embraces is as much a film about a man as a woman, in particular the forlorn Harry Caine.

“In this film, there’s much more equality than in the other films,” agrees Almodovar. “There are as many male parts as there are female parts, so it’s perfectly balanced. It’s true, though, that there are usually more female characters in my films, and the female characters are much stronger. Much more tough and solid. Robust. These are women who struggle but they can fight, whereas the male characters are much weaker and more hermetic. They’re darker. Why?” He pauses, then laughs. “Perhaps a psychoanalyst could explain it to me! But I don’t ask myself that question.”

Almodovar turns 58 on September 25, and insists he has loved films since he was small, growing up in a small village out in the plains of La Mancha. He went to the cinema every weekend, and in the early 60s saw pretty much everything that played there, thanks to a doorman that let him in even to see adult movies such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. “I used to see all the movies of the period with my sisters,” he recalls. “And when they went out with their friends they’d say, ‘Pedro, tell us the story of the movie that we saw yesterday.’ And I would. But I was so enthusiastic that, in the middle, I invented completely new scenes. My sisters liked just to listen to me, because it was a new movie that I was making in my head.”

Almodovar still works this way, using the characters to dictate the story, and not the other way round. “In the case of some actors,” he says, “I provide them with the full information before we begin shooting the film. I fill them in on the way I view the character and the way I see the part, but on other occasions I’ll say nothing. I provide no information, because I want them to play the scene instinctively, based on intuition. But, if necessary, I will play all the parts myself on the set. Now, I’m actually very shy, even if I don’t appear so and you may not believe me. But when I’m shooting a film, I’m absolutely prepared to play all the parts just to show the actors. In one of the films I shot some time ago – I won’t give you the title! – I even performed cunnilingus on an actress to show the actor how he was supposed to play the part.”

It’s this attention to detail that gives Almodovar’s films their humanity, and even when the storylines are at their most bizarre – as with the drug-taking, lesbian nuns of 1983’s deceptively tragic Dark Habits – there is always a powerful life force present. “The actors are truly essential in my films,” he nods, “whatever kind of tale I’m telling. And when the film is provocative, or a bit exaggerated, or a bit crazy, then it’s even more essential for the actors to play it in a realistic way. So, in those cases, and even though the situation may appear ridiculous, I ask actors to be as realistic and natural as possible in their portrayal of the characters. That’s the key to all my films. That’s why those scenes appear quite real, and they do look like something that could actually occur in real life.”

This seamless blending of high and low art made Almodovar attractive to Hollywood from the start, with Jane Fonda snapping up the remake rights to Women On The Verge just as soon as it appeared on the release circuit. No movie version has so far emerged, but, according to Almodovar, two other major US versions are in the pipeline and imminent. “The first is a TV series produced by Fox,” he grins. “They’ve finished the adaptation and they’d like this series to go on forever. I don’t know whether they’ll manage to do that, but let’s hope, for them, that they can. Anyhow, the pilot has been shot, and the screenplay writer did Grey’s Anatomy, so who knows? The second adaptation is a musical adaptation on Broadway. They’ve been working on this for more than a year; the dialogue is ready, the songs are virtually all ready, and the director is the director who did South Pacific.”

But despite his enthusiasm, Almodovar has steadfastly resisted all the overtures he’s had to make a studio movie in America. “I have been offered projects – many projects – in Hollywood,” he reveals. “But I feel it’s increasingly unlikely that I’ll take them up. Because the way I work, and the way they work over there, are very different. I would even say they’re opposites.”

To put this into perspective, it’s worth noting that what happens to Harry Caine in Broken Embraces goes beyond just the loss of a woman: his last film, Girls With Suitcases, is taken from him by his enraged producer and deliberately cut to ribbons. “If that happened to me,” Almodovar growls, “or rather one of my films, I think I would kill the producer or the person who destroyed the material that I had shot. In Europe we’re very fortunate because we have laws that protect the rights of authors. The laws are very clear and well established, so in fact this is the kind of situation that could never arise in Europe. However, such a situation could occur in the United States, and it’s even frequent.”

“What’s very important to me is the very last line of the film,” he concludes. “Harry says, ‘Films always have to be finished, even if it is done blindly.’ For me, that’s very important. One shouldn’t let somebody else come between the author and the film. The director must go through with it to the very end, even if he ends up in a wheelchair or has catheters all over the place. Even if he’s being given oxygen, he has to make that film. But I also wanted to add this last line, because I fully believe that the cinema can make life more perfect.” He smiles. “You know, even if the characters go through all sorts of trials and tribulations in their life, in the cinema, everything works out.”

WORDS: Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #19, Sep/Oct 2009

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Marc Almond and Gene Pitney have knocked Jason and Kylie off the top of the UK charts. Reagan has just left the White House. The last Soviet tanks are rolling out of Afghanistan. Madonna is filing for divorce from Sean Penn. Ayatollah Khomeini has slapped a $3million bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head. The poll tax that will bring down Margaret Thatcher is a month away from being introduced.

Oblivious to these international convulsions, a small grey-brown wren, native to Washington State, cocks its head. A sawmill belches smoke. Machines whirr, giant rusty cogs spin, sparks spray. A forlorn town sign, crudely painted with two mountaintops, stands against a background of Douglas Firs. Music swells. Water falls.

Lumberjack Pete Martell says goodbye to his indifferent wife and steps outside their lakeside lodge into the crisp North Western morning. “The lonesome foghorn blows,” he murmurs to himself. On the shore, next to a massive fallen tree bleached to concrete by the elements, Martell sees a white bundle. He edges closer. The package has come unstuck like some vile, abandoned birthday present. It’s a human parcel, tied with string round the torso and at the knees. A golden spray of hair tumbles from the nearest end. Martell begins to shake uncontrollably. He calls the sheriff’s office, trying to figure this thing, this terrible thing, but can’t find the words. “She’s //de-e-ead//,” he cries in a wavering voice. “Wra-a-a-apped in pla-a-stic…”

So begins the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. The director is David Lynch. The girl is Laura Palmer. And, as of the show’s debut on ABC in April 1990, not only is she Homecoming Queen of the local high school and the apple of her father’s eye, she’s the most famous corpse in television history. Each week, millions will tune in to watch FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) find her killer…

Lynch and screenwriter Mark Frost were struggling. For three years the pair had been working on a film adaptation of Goddess, the best-selling biography of Marilyn Monroe. After a trio of dark, challenging outings (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet) Lynch was keen to edge towards something a little more mainstream – and Goddess fitted the bill. But it just wasn’t gelling. “I loved the story of this woman in trouble,” says Lynch, “but I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story.”

When the studio refused their script, the duo’s agent, Tony Krantz, had an idea. Frost had been involved with the hit cop series Hill Street Blues, and Krantz suggested they collaborate instead on a TV project. At the back of Krantz’s mind was Peyton Place – the torrid 60s soap juggernaut in which illicit passions, insanity, murder and secrets ran amok. Lynch and Frost loved the idea of a soap opera with bite, and came up with a new idea they called Northwest Passage, which they took to ABC in 1988. “We just described a murder-mystery loosely set in a small town in the Pacific north-west,” says Frost. “And that was about all we had at that point. We said we wanted it to have the feel of a lush 50s melodrama; David made some strange motions with his hand as he described the wind. And they seemed to like that.”

Six months later, ABC greenlit the pilot. And in a booth at DuPar’s coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard in downtown LA, Lynch and Frost came up with the newly christened Twin Peaks’ most enduring image: a girl’s body bound in plastic sheeting. “We developed the town before the people,” explains Frost. “We drew a map. We knew it had a lake and a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” Lynch continues: “We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.” Frost admits that it took them a while to solve the murder: “We had to know the town before we could make up a list of suspects. Only after we knew most of its people was the killer revealed to us.”

Though its roots were in the soaps of the past, the action would take place just one year before Twin Peaks aired; in this fictional world, Laura Palmer drew her last breath in the early hours of 24th February 1989. “We always felt it should be in the present,” says Frost, “but that it should have a kind of timeless feel, as small towns in America often do. This is a place where time has stood still for a while.” Having grown up in a succession of Montanan small towns, Lynch was only too familiar with the atmosphere it needed. “I love a small town,” he smiles. “But it has to be a certain size. It can’t be too small. It has to be big enough so that you don’t know everybody and yet there’s these pleasant places and then strange secrets and sickness there as well.”

The crime-solving elements came from Frost, a longtime fan of Arthur Conan Doyle. Thanks to him, the series’ hero emerged as Agent Cooper, Sherlock Holmes with Bryl-cremed black hair and a biscuit-coloured macintosh. “When you come down to it,” ponders Frost, “the art of the detective is pretty basic. Whatever period you’re in it’s ratiocination, deductive and inductive reasoning, and then a smattering – sometimes mysterious – of intuition. Though I think we pumped intuition a little bit more than people were used to seeing!” Cooper’s unorthodox methods of investigation involved mystical Tibetan and Native American shamanism, and visions in his bedroom of a helpful giant in a bow-tie.

The Twin Peaks pilot was written in just nine days and shot in 23. Lynch embraced the chaos of such a fast turnaround. Mistakes ended up in the show – like a flickering fluorescent light that distracted one extra so much that when McLachlan asked him to leave the room he inexplicably answered, “Jim”, his real name. Lynch loved that. But not as much as he loved a scene in which Laura Palmer’s mother Sarah (a skull-faced Grace Zabriskie) looked into her daughter’s bedroom. Set-dresser and sometime actor Frank Silva had been moving furniture, and Lynch shot some footage of him crouched at the foot of Laura’s bed. At this point, Lynch had no idea what he’d be doing with it. Later, he shot a scene in which Sarah Palmer wakes up screaming. It was ruined because a crewmember was visible in a nearby mirror. The crewmember was Silva; and the film’s supernatural villain, Bob, was born.

Lynch always planned Twin Peaks to be the soap to end them all; a show so twisted that even its own soap-within-a-soap, Invitation To Love, was eventually phased out because it exhausted the writers. “I really like soap operas,” he explains. “I got hooked when I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with was so completely addicted to two particular soaps – Another World and The Edge Of Night – that I got hooked as well. I dug them. But the frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest torments out forever. It works, but it’s frustrating.”

For Twin Peaks, Lynch didn’t want drawn-out torments. He wanted detail. And lots of it. He daydreamed about a mysterious red curtained room, which he put into the show. There, Agent Cooper encounters the Man From Another Place, a dwarf dressed in a red three-piece suit and brown cowboy boots, who dances a funny little jive, feeding Cooper lines like “When you see me again, it won’t be me” and “That gum you like is coming back in style”. To achieve the strange-sounding dialogue, diminutive actor Michael J Anderson had to say his lines backwards for them to be flipped around in the edit. For most performers it would have been a Herculean task but, bizarrely, Anderson had actually used backward-speak as a secret language with his school friends. What Anderson did have a problem with, however, were last-minute scenes that he believed had “no context”. He even claims to have heard Lynch in the edit suite whooping, “I’ll betcha that’s what I meant by that!”

McLachlan, who had previously starred in Dune and Blue Velvet, knew Lynch better than anyone. “Whenever David would come in and do an episode,” he remembers, “the script would just end up being destroyed. He would take out pages, we’d rearrange scenes, we’d change dialogue. I mean, we’d just completely bastardise what we had. And that was fun. It really felt like the inmates were taking over the asylum for a week, which he enjoyed as well. But it was always with a purpose.”

When it came to the Twin Peaks score, Lynch was just as purposeful. He brought in composer Angelo Badalamenti – Isabella Rossellini’s music coach from Blue Velvet – and together they created a nightmarish wall of sound, alternately mournful and playful, with 50s fingerclicks, Roy Orbison guitar licks and snare-drum shuffles. “David would say that the music should begin very dark and slow,” recalls Badalamenti. “He said, ‘Imagine you’re alone in the woods at night and you hear only the sound of wind, and possibly the soft cry of an animal.’ I’d start playing and David would say, ‘That’s it, that’s it! Now keep playing for a minute, but get ready for a change because now you see a beautiful girl. She’s coming out from behind a tree, she’s all alone and troubled, so now go into a beautiful melody that climbs ever so slowly until it reaches a climax. Let it tear your heart out…’” Not a single note was ever changed.

When it debuted in April 1990, facing off against Cheers in a Thursday-night slot that had been tough to Dynasty and killed off The Colbys, the pilot took a third of the available viewing audience. This show had everything; deliberately steeped in teenage sex, it made instant pin-ups of the sultry Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the demure Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the moody bad-boy Bobby (Dana Ashbrook). At its height it was watched by 35 million Americans. “We were in exact the right place, at the right network, at the right time,” believes Frost.

Inevitably, though, the moment couldn’t last. Frost and Lynch had resisted constant network pressure to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer, ensuring that Twin Peaks was commissioned for a second season. And then – in episode 16 of series two – they caved in. “The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was the goose that laid the golden egg,” Lynch says. “Then ABC asked us to snip the goose’s head off, and it killed the goose. And there went everything.

“The murder of Laura Palmer was the centre of the story,” he continues, “the thing around which all the show’s other elements revolved, like a sun in a little solar system. It was not supposed to get solved. The idea was for it to recede a bit into the background, and the foreground would be that week’s show. But the mystery of the death of Laura Palmer would stay alive. And it’s true: as soon as that was over, it was basically the end. There were a couple of moments later when a wind of that mystery, a wind from that other world, would come blowing back in, but it just wasn’t the same.”

Lynch’s hunch was right. With the murder solved, the audience lost interest. And so did ABC, who finally put it on “indefinite hiatus” in February 1991. Bowing to massive fan demand, the network agreed to six more shows, including a brilliantly baffling final episode in June 1991, directed by Lynch. It was both too much and not enough. Lynch being Lynch just walked away. “I left it because you can’t do everything,” he shrugs. “I have misgivings about the way it went but I still – and always will – love that world.”

Words:Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post David Lynch appeared first on Wonderland.

It’s only now, after forty years of neglect – and a desperate email from his wife Jackie that miraculously found its target – that the British Film Institute has finally acknowledged his position as one of the country’s seminal filmmakers with a season of his work on the South Bank and the release of Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen on DVD. Better late than never, you might say. But the BFI’s art-gallery arm needs a hard slap. In a feat of spectacular short-sightedness, not one of his dazzling paintings, sketches, photo-novellas, posters or installations – many of which, as he puts it, “sprout out from” his extraordinary animations – will be on show. So, even as his cinematic endeavours are celebrated and saved for posterity, Keen’s art will be completely ignored. Again.

A Jeff Keen film is singularly difficult to describe. But it’s no exaggeration to say that he has melted, burned, blasted, torn, cut, scribbled and spray-painted his way to a new understanding of cinema’s potential. Almost forty movies since 1960, all made on a pittance by a man on a mission to rip up the medium and start again. The titles give you a sense of the gleeful spirit with which they were created: Marvo Movie, Meatdaze, Joy Thru Film, Mad Love, Omozap, Artwar. Together, they function as a series of barely controlled animated explosions, the celluloid embodiment of Picasso’s maxim that ‘every act of creation is first an act of destruction’. They’re what the projected contents of Topol’s mind – as he has his brain washed in Flash Gordon – ought to have looked like. Legendary New York filmmaker Jack Smith came closest to capturing the assault of wild colours, graffiti, plastic toys, home nudity, comic-book graphics, melodrama, carnival, and hardboiled men’s mags, when he wrote of Keen’s Autumn Feast that “it sends us spinning into the street, undone and toothless”.

Today though, Keen is drained of fervour. His memory is not what it was; his appetite for some sort of recognition as an artist, even as the BFI pumps thousands of pounds into his cause, is gone. It’s all too little, too late. He’s 85. He’s tired. And he has cancer. “They’ve left it too long,” he says, without bitterness, when I ask how he feels about all the attention. “If they’d done it even a couple of years ago, I could’ve been much more… flexible.” But Jackie – whose once striking beauty is captured in many of her husband’s films – still burns with the kind of rage that inflamed Dylan Thomas. The fuel is not the fact that Keen is growing weak. But the fact that it is happening here: in penury and in obscurity.

Jackie and Jeff have been married for 53 years, but before his illness, were in fact living apart. Keen’s own tiny rented flat is five minutes’ walk away. It’s a journey he has been strong enough to make only once in recent months. Today he’s too ill to come with me. Jackie gives me the key. It’s like walking into someone’s mind. Every available scrap of space is filled with evidence of his deep love of pop culture. Plastic guns form a collage on the wall; Sindy dolls are crammed into accidentally compromising positions with Action Men; melted plastic sculptures litter the surfaces. The effect is overwhelming; and somehow desperately sad. Fifty years of paintings and drawings – page after page of green-bound books with felt-tip squiggles, sketches or exquisitely rendered pen-and-wash creations – are stacked against the walls, piled in drawers, crammed in shoeboxes, wardrobes, or on the floor… “I’ll have to get someone in to get rid of it all,” says Keen, back at Jackie’s place. “I’m going to go round and just stand in there and decide what to do. The last time I was there I had ideas, you see. Now I have none at all.”

Incredibly – ridiculously, when you see the skill and wit obvious in even his crudest doodle – Keen has never sold a piece of his art. Last summer, an unscrupulous acquaintance from Jackie’s college days offered the Keens ten thousand pounds “for everything”. Mercifully, they felt uncomfortable with the offer and, although desperate for the cash, turned her down. But the strain is beginning to show. The council are threatening to stop paying the rent on Jeff’s flat because he is being cared for round the corner. “It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads,” says Jackie, turning to her husband. Her voice cracks: “I just… I wish for the impossible, that someone could help us find somewhere warm with a bit of space where you could be comfortable and you could have your work with you and it would be safe. Instead you’re imprisoned here with me, sitting in that chair all day.” His reply is gentle: “Yeah. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me, love.”

WONDERLAND: Why are people finally taking notice of your films?

JACKIE KEEN: A year ago I wrote to the BFI saying that it was disgusting that my husband had been sidelined. I explained that I had seen him devoted to making movies for decades working on a shoestring, doing the whole thing by himself, and never stopping –

JEFF: Well, I’ve stopped now. [Laughs]

WONDERLAND: Why have you been ignored for so long?

JACKIE: Partly it’s his fault, because he’s not interested in chatting people up. He’s too shy. In fact, I said in the email to the BFI that if Jeff knew I was writing at all, he’d be cross with me.

JEFF: Oh well. It’s old stuff, that is, Jackie. I’ve given up film now.

JACKIE: Yes. But it hasn’t given you up.

JEFF: Well, it has in a way, I think.

WONDERLAND: How do you mean?

JEFF: I’ve kicked the film habit.

JACKIE: But you haven’t kicked the drawing habit.

JEFF: No. I can’t kick that. I fall back on that. I’m still drawing all the time.
[Jackie goes into the next room and comes back with her arms full of boxes, plastic wallets and folders. She hands over the sketchbooks]

WONDERLAND: These are incredible.

JEFF: These are just from the top of the pile… It’s all part of it. It’s all part of the story.

JACKIE: He was never //not// drawing, were you Jeff?

JEFF: No, love. [Little laugh] I used to sit in my flat; I have a chair that’s convenient, and I used to sit there until it got too dark, every night. So I’ve got quite a lot of books lying about.

WONDERLAND: These are the contents of your mind, Jeff!

JEFF: Pouring out. But they don’t want to see them, that’s the damn trouble. The BFI obviously are just thinking in terms of film and I understand that but… I have been bored by it. To be honest, I am exhausted by it. And I don’t want to talk about it.

JACKIE: Now, don’t say that.

JEFF: Anyway, a lot of my stuff was outdoors. It’s gone.

WONDERLAND: Did you used to go around Brighton graffiti-ing?

JEFF: I started doing graffiti in the 60s. I remember the first time, it was the other end of town, the road running underneath the railway bridge where the London trains go over.

JACKIE: I was keeping watch to see nobody came to arrest him. And you were spray-painting ‘Deep War Hurts Says Doctor Gaz’

WONDERLAND: Why did you first move here?

JEFF: I came on a chance a few years after the war. It was a very different place then, almost like life on another planet. I got a summer job working in parks and gardens and stayed on for 12 years. That job came to an end in ’63: we had a very bad winter, and I remember going along the seafront scraping up sludge and snow, throwing it into the road for cars to spin it back at me again as I walked along the road, and that was the end for me.

WONDERLAND: And how did you get into film?

JEFF: I wasn’t thinking about film at all when I was younger. I was an artist, really, from the start. It was only much later that filmmaking was thrust upon me, when Jackie was at the art college.

JACKIE: There was no film society, so Jeff did everything, behind the scenes. It was ostensibly me, but it was all Jeff: he was the backroom boy.

JEFF: I found I liked getting behind a camera. I was the only person with spare time, so I finished up making the films to show.

WONDERLAND: Did you teach yourself?

JEFF: Yeah. Nothing in it really. [Laughs] You can learn to use a camera in a few days, and the rest follows.

WONDERLAND: Do you think in pictures?

JEFF: I suppose I do.

JACKIE: That was one of your slogans, ‘Kill The Word’ –

JEFF: ‘Don’t Let It Kill You!’

WONDERLAND: How did you meet?

JEFF: In a coffee bar called Tinkie’s.

JACKIE: Jeff saw me in the street first.

JEFF: Oh yes, actually, when I first saw her, it was rather terrific. She was walking down from the Clocktower, all in green: green hat, green coat, green shoes. And I thought, ‘God, there’s someone with style.’ [Laughs] She was being chased by a loping man.

JACKIE: Oh Jeff you make it sound –

JEFF: No, it’s true. [Laughs]

WONDERLAND: Have you always felt like an outsider?

JEFF: Living here in Brighton I’d always been outside the mainstream. From the very outset I never really fitted in, even as a filmmaker. Not that it mattered much, you know, I didn’t mind. I just carried on filming.

WONDERLAND: Did you want to be accepted?

JEFF:No. Not really. I never really tried for it.

WONDERLAND: Let’s talk a bit about your childhood. Where were you born?

JEFF: Trowbridge, Wilts. I remember the road. I don’t remember the house. It was a bad birth. My mother was quite old, forty-something. And I was the first one. And it was November and from then on it has been a difficult road!

WONDERLAND: What did your parents do?

JEFF: My mother took on local nursing. And my father didn’t do anything really. He was out of the war, the First World War, where he’d been in a minesweeper off the coast of Ireland, rescuing bodies from the Lusitania, when it sank in 1915, all that sort of thing. Over a thousand people died, a hundred children. And he didn’t want anything more to do with that.

JACKIE: Jeff’s father was amazing. [Jackie goes to the shelf and brings down a photo album] He had the most fantastic sense of humour, and he used to love dressing up.

JEFF: Actually these photographs say far more than words. They need sticking back in again, Jackie.

JACKIE: [Takes one out, a headshot of Jeff in soldier’s uniform] I love this one of him as a soldier. His face radiates warmth, intelligence and his poetic nature.

WONDERLAND: Did you do a lot of destroying things when you were a kid?

JEFF: No I don’t think I did. I was very mild-mannered. [Laughs] I didn’t like the destruction of birds’ eggs, all that. The things I destroy in my films don’t answer back! I remember my cousin, who lived next door, he had this habit of shooting little birds, he got a Diana air pistol for Christmas. He had these starlings down from the nest, on a little table and he put them out on there and shot them and it was a bit of a shock. That night I felt this irritation in the throat, and that was the Scarlet Fever starting.

WONDERLAND: What did you want to be when you grew up?

JEFF: I think I always wanted to draw. I used to draw birds, natural history. My first job was at the local store in Trowbridge just before WW2. Sainsburys, actually, and I remember drawing aeroplanes there. Bombers and things like that. Everyone was talking about war. It was in the air.

WONDERLAND: Comics are obviously crucial to your art. Did you read them when you were a boy?

JEFF: I discovered comics when they started to become popular in this country in the late 50s. They were quite sensational: you could buy them in corner shops, you’d get a collection of comics down beside the door as you went in, mostly national comics, not Marvel then. But I don’t draw like comics. I love them, but I don’t set out to imitate them, you know?

WONDERLAND: Do you remember your first trip to the cinema?

JEFF: My mother took me. It was Chaplin’s film about the circus, I was less than five and I remember screaming out: I was upset when the horse goes on the loose, and everything started to fall about. I was frightened… It’s difficult to imagine really how important the cinema was to us. During the war, of course, it became even more important. People would just flock to them, it was the only entertainment… and the smoke from all the cigarettes used to rise.

WONDERLAND: What did you do in WW2?

JEFF: Nothing much! I was at a secret location about ten miles inland from Great Yarmouth, fitting reject flying fortress engines into Sherman tanks for D-Day.

WONDERLAND: You said earlier that you’ve given up film –

JEFF: I haven’t been making films for some time. And I feel now I’m too weak. [Laughs] You’ve got to be strong, I think, to make films. Unless you’ve got other people to help you. I work in that precarious place of being without money most of the time… It’s strange, you know. I was always happier making films than trying to explain them. Now it’s come to an end, I should be stopping and thinking, but I’m not really. I’m trying to forget.

Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Jeff Keen appeared first on Wonderland.