The Cinema Lounge

Q&A With Director Taika Waititi: Eagle vs. Shark

DC Film Society members took part in a Q&A with Eagle vs. Shark's director Taika Waititi at the AMC Loew's Georgetown theater on June 14. DC Film Society Director Michael Kyrioglou moderated.

Michael Kyrioglou: Where did the story come from?
Taika Waititi: I wanted to make a movie and I really wanted to work with Loren Horsley. We talked about it: she wanted to play someone who was not romantic, confident, and good looking and I wanted to do something different. She doesn't have a makeover scene but has internal beauty and looks gorgeous. Jemaine [Clement] and I and Loren have known each other for years. In Wellington there is a big artistic community and everyone works on others' projects.

Q: How was the film funded?
TW: By the New Zealand Film Commission. You write an application; it's a bureaucratic process. The script for the film was quite weird. That year I had made a short film [Two Cars, One Night] that won an Oscar nomination, so my project got funded faster. It was a hands off process. Usually people are in development for years but they just gave me the money. There wasn't much interest from outside investors and Americans find the accent to be a problem.

Q: Will people outside New Zealand get it?
TW: In capturing the New Zealand culture and dysfunction, I was worried that people wouldn't understand but it's normal in New Zealand. In my family there was a constant flow of visitors and people staying over; some were relatives. The father in the wheelchair is depressed and sits around in his wheelchair. It's okay if people don't relate to the quirky aspects of life. It's easy to make a film and populate it with eccentric people and sit back and say they are dorks. It's important that we have an emotional connection with their lives. Heartbreak is universal. I have love for my characters, not contempt. Jarrod has lots of bad male characteristics but I felt sympathy for him.

Q: Why the animation?
TW: I love animation and wanted to have some in the film. Stop motion animation is primitive and reflects the kind of film I was making. It was important to have that style. It's my first film and low budget; it's my chance to experiment and make mistakes. My next film will be bigger budget and I will have more pressure.

Q: How long did it take to shoot the sleeping bag [animated] scene?
TW: Six or seven hours.

Q: Was that movie theater in the film a real theater?
TW: No. All elements were made up--Meaty Boy, the fast food restaurant, and Fight Man, the video game. I love using stuff from the 1980s; it was the height of technology then and now it's obsolete. The murals were found wall hangings from real people's houses. We used backyards we found. Some things were taken from real life--I had a friend who made candles. The porn on the computer was something that happened with a friend--porn popped up on his screen and he pretended nothing had happened. Many things were based on my childhood and my friends' childhoods.

Q: Is the human hamster wheel a common item?
TW: It was popular in the 1980s and dangerous. I found a guy on the internet who was designing a safer version. All kids in neighborhood liked it, but we couldn't leave it behind.

Q: Is Jemaine still doing comedy?
TW: The HBO series "Flight of the Conchords" begins June 17.

Q: Were you involved in making the trailer?
TW: No. The trailer is out already. It's strange to see how your film is marketed.

Q: What is your next project?
TW: I'm making something called The Volcano. It's an extension of Two Cars, One Night, about kids growing up in the 1980s in a small town around the time when Thriller came out.

Eagle vs. Shark opened in the Washington area on June 22.

Slapsticon: Fifth Annual Comedy Film Festival

Zoe Cassavetes Talks about Broken English

This Q&A with Director Zoe Cassavetes took place at the Goethe Institute on June 21. DC Film Society Director Michael Kyriouglou moderated.

Michael Kyrioglou: Zoe comes from a film making pedigree--father John Cassavetes and mother Gena Rowlands. Did that influence you when you were growing up?
Zoe Cassavetes: It was so interesting. My parents made movies in the house and I was always hanging around. We lived in Hollywood Hills but we were the anti-Hollywood family. To me it was very romantic. I would come home from school and dad would be working on a film. I liked to write from a young age. As a director and writer you have to have something to say. I wrote the script four years ago but had to get financing. People read the script and thought it was a romantic comedy which was not my intention at all because it was about a woman who was lonely and was embarrassed about it. It had elements of romance. You'll say anything to get financing.

MK: What was the impetus for the story?
ZC: There wasn't anything specific. You evaluate your life in your mid thirties. I was talking to friends and eavesdropping on people's conversations which is easy to do in New York. I don't mind writing about my insecurities.

Q: Did you write with Parker Posey in mind?
ZC: No, I don't write with someone in mind because they might not be able to do it. But Parker Posey is such a magnificent actress and always has been. She is seen as specifically a comedic actress and people want you to keep doing what you do well. There was no doubt in my mind that she could play the part. We had lunch and talked for three hours; we clicked and she trusted me: "Honey, I'm in."

Q: This is your first feature. Your father had a stock company of people he liked to work with over and over again. Do you see yourself doing that?
ZC: I would definitely work with every single actor again and most of the crew but it would depend on the topic. It depends on what I write. I'll write about women again.

MK: You captured New York so well without relying on landmarks--the reality of where people live and go to cafes and parties.
ZC: I made it in New York because I live there. I wanted it to be claustrophobic because the character was having a claustrophobic moment in her life. She was a sophisticated woman who had never been to France or out of country but when she went to Paris she could breathe. New York can be very tiny if you don't have money; you end up nesting in your neighborhood.

Q: How did you choose Melvil Poupaud [Julien in the film]? ZC: I found him through my boyfriend. I looked at all the films he did including some short films about himself. I loved his spirit. It was a tricky part to write. He was so sincere and did a lot of work on his part.

Q: Was character of Nora's mother based on your mom [Gena Rowlands]?
ZC: No. She's not pushy like that. She's smart and open, not pushy on that level at all. It was the only part I wrote specifically. We worked for two days on her part; it was really fun to work with her.

Q: How did you decide on the ending?
ZC: She always bumped into him at the end. Originally it was a plane but that was too expensive. The train was a really a nightmare and we had only two hours to film it. My investors fought with me about that: "no way would anyone meet someone on the train." But it happens all the time. I wanted something nice to happen to her; she went through so much.

MK: Did you have any input on when during the course of the year your film got released?
ZC: When you sell a movie to someone you don't really have any say. My distributor, Magnolia, let me be part of the trailer and part of the poster. I've worked on this for so long, it's my baby; I feel like I've given birth to a 94 minute baby. But it's nice to follow through on the whole thing.

Q: How long was the shooting schedule?
ZC: It took twenty days to shoot the movie. We worked during the middle of May and early June of last year and finished in time for Sundance.

Q: What does the title mean?
ZC: It's about the lack of communication between two people.

Q: What sort of difficulties or barriers do women working in the industry have, whether writer or director?
ZC: I didn't think about being a man or woman, but as an interviewer pointed out, middle aged white men run things and you have to start way back of the starting line. There just aren't many women writers or women writer/directors. It's not a chick flick. It about people who are lonely and want to be loved. I'm interested in making movies about women because that's what I know. Go see independent movies. The studios eat us up; we need a 70s style revolution.

Broken English opens in the DC area on July 6.

Talk to Me: A Panel Discussion

Talk To Me stars Don Cheadle as Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene Jr., a radio personality in DC during the mid to late 1960s. A preview of the film with a panel discussion was held at Landmark's E Street Cinema on June 27. Present for discussion: Mark Lloyd from the Center for American Progress, Joe Madison, radio personality WOL and XM Satellite Radio channel 169, Denise Rolark Barnes, publisher of The Washington Informer, and moderator Melody Barnes from the Center for American Progress.

Q: Is there an audience today for people like Petey Greene?
Joe Madison: There were Petey Greenes in a lot of American cities--Georgie Woods in Philadelphia, Butterball Jr. It was a combination of music and talk, particularly in the morning. The DJs could pick their topics between the commercials and songs. In Detroit if you wanted to get a message out to the community you could go to the show, talk about policy, argue with the mayor. As radio station ownership changed from white-owned to black-owned, the message changed. If I'm the boss I define what the message should be and decide what you will hear. Right-wing conservative radio learned from that--that ownership of the radio station allowed them to control their message. And it's not necessarily an AM station--it can be XM, Internet or broadband.

Melody Barnes: Radio is powerful, with a greater concentration than newspaper or internet. 91% of programming is conservative.
Mark Lloyd: I started out doing radio in Detroit. When hearing about Dr. Martin Luther King's death it was important for me to go to a black-owned resource. It tells us about our lives and is important for how we see ourselves and our identity. Rules have changed. Now a radio owner can own 1,200 radio stations like Clear Channel. This is forcing out the Petey Greenes and hurts small communities. We no longer find about what is going on in the community, things you don't hear on TV or radio or read in the newspaper.
JM: I remember Cathy Hughes [owner of WOL] when taking on the Contra issue. If I had done that at Clear Channel, I would be kicked off the air. As owner she said, "I don't care what issue you get but find one and take it to the airways. That's what we are about." That's ownership. If I work for Clear Channel in Detroit and they fire me, I can't work for another station because they own so many stations. Black radio was the only place you could hear any community message. We used to get calls from small towns: "There's nothing like what you are doing. Where did you come from?" Back then, there were no blacks on TV reading the news. The first was Max Robinson, then Carol Simpson. There was not one black anchor on a single network news. Now, when CNN did the presidential debates, the presidential candidates were more diverse than the newsmen. There were four middle-aged white guys asking a woman, a black, a hispanic, and two or three white guys.
Denise Rolark Barnes: I'm trying to recall this period of time in DC; it was a tinderbox at the time of Dr. King's assassination. We lived a few blocks from WOOK and I remember the competition between them and WOL. The music was great on WOOK. WOL was more progressive. Some of the older generation became dependent on Joe Madison and didn't read newspapers. They relied on people who looked like them--Petey was a man of the streets; he knew what the community needed and people listened to him. Church was the only other place where people talked about the community.

Q: Why don't young people today know who Petey Greene is?
JM: We as parents are responsible for this. My folks came from Clarksdale, Mississippi and they never talked about the impact of segregation. In my black high school, the teacher never taught us about black history. Today's hip hop DJs don't talk.

Q: Where is the historical footage of Petey Greene?
DRB: My faher died in 1994 and I tried to get the tapes. They couldn't afford to archive it and taped over it. I called Channel 4 which had footage but they also taped over it.
ML: Someone must have some recordings.
JM: We have to be careful about that in this digital age. It's easy to delete things. I did a two-hour interview with Alex Haley and it no longer exists. We need to archive things now.

Q: Are there non-profit radio stations?
ML: The FCC allows low power radio stations in rural areas, just a few blocks area.

Q: How can I talk in my hip hop show?
JM: Go to XM radio. They are the alternative. Be as creative as you want. People are doing it and making a fortune.

Talk to Me opens in DC this month.

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