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PASSENGER SIDE: Q&A with Matt Bissonnette

In Matt Bissonnette’s psychological comedy-drama Passenger Side, recently screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, two brothers go on a road trip throughout the Los Angeles area and the desert nearby.
Michael Brown (Adam Scott) begins his birthday with a telephone call from his estranged brother, Tobey (Joel Bissonnette), who has a long history of drug addiction. Tobey needs a ride to several places throughout town, but is initially reluctant to explain exactly where he wants to go and why. Just as reluctantly, Michael becomes Tobey’s chauffeur for the day.

What happens next is a series of vignettes featuring disparate characters in the Southern California landscape, among them a transvestite sex worker (Vitta Quinn, above), a young migrant worker who’s [...]

SÉRAPHINE: Q&A with Martin Provost

The winner of 7 French Academy Awards, including best film, best original screenplay, and best actress, Martin Provost’s Séraphine stars Yolande Moreau as painter Séraphine Louis, aka Séraphine de Senlis, a plain, poor, uncultured, devoutly Catholic, and emotionally unbalanced housekeeper who became known as a major artistic talent in the early 20th century.
Written by Provost and Marc Abdelnour, Séraphine focuses on the artist’s relationship with avant-garde art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (played by Ulrich Tukur), who one day discovered that his cleaning lady in the town of Senlis was a masterful painter.
A sleeper hit in France, Séraphine has been met with raves on this side of the Atlantic as well. The LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas called it "the best movie [...]

THE HISTORY OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA: Q&A with Phil Hall

"Independent film is a vast and varied territory, and Phil Hall’s remarkable book explores every inch of it with wit, intelligence, a sympathetic spirit, and a wide-open mind. Fresh discoveries and surprising revelations abound on every topic from Edison to Aronofsky, Anger to Warhol, the silent era to the Internet age. It’s hard to imagine a study more keenly in tune with one of cinema’s liveliest, most multifaceted fields.” — David Sterritt, Ph.D, chairman, National Society of Film Critics
The "remarkable book" in question is called The History of Independent Cinema, which, as the title implies, covers the century-long development of American filmmaking outside the big-studio lots. Published by BearManor Media, The History [...]

LEMON TREE: Q&A with Eran Riklis

Based on actual events, Eran Riklis‘ Lemon Tree (no connection to Sandy Tolan’s novel The Lemon Tree), which opens today in the Los Angeles area, chronicles a Palestinian widow’s fight to prevent the Israeli army from razing her lemon grove. The problem is that all those lemon trees are located right next door to the brand new house — actually, "fortress" would be a better description — of the Israeli minister of defense. Security agents have deemed the grove a potential hide-out for terrorists, who could then fire rockets right onto the minister’s dining table.
Sounds like a political film? Well, sure. Lemon Tree is definitely political. (The real-life case was that of defense minister Shaul Mofaz and his [...]

AMERICAN SWING: Q&A with Co-Director Jon Hart

Jon Hart and Mathew Kaufman’s entertaining documentary American Swing chronicles the rise and fall of Larry Levenson, whose nightclub & sex club Plato’s Retreat became, along with Studio 54, one of the top New York City hangouts of the late 1970s.
Jon Hart (right) has kindly answered (via e-mail) a few brief questions about American Swing. See below.
American Swing is currently playing at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood.
Photos: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
 
How difficult (or easy) was it to get all those people who had worked at or gone to Plato’s Retreat to be so candid about their experiences at the club? Did you run into many who refused to discuss the past?
Almost everyone was extremely apprehensive about being [...]

HAPPY HOLIDAYS: Q&A with Filmmaker James C. Ferguson

I’m always happy when a filmmaker is inspired by Woody Allen — as opposed to, say, Quentin Tarantino or Zack Snyder.
Case in point: First-timer James C. Ferguson (right, in blue), whose Happy Holidays (written by Ferguson and Tom Misuraca) is a three-way character study about old school friends who are reunited at their Connecticut hometown for a brief period right before Christmas. During that time, deeply buried emotions burst to the surface, old secrets are revealed, and one character ends up suffering a nervous breakdown. Old buddies can do that to you.
Shot in black in white during the course of two weeks, Happy Holidays features Paul Hungerford as Patrick Donovan, an openly gay man and avowed [...]

THE SINGING REVOLUTION: Q&A with Filmmakers James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty

"Imagine the scene in Casablanca in which the French patrons sing ‘La Marseillaise’ in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of The Singing Revolution," wrote Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times in his review of James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty’s documentary about Estonia’s struggle to end Soviet occupation in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The curiously titled The Singing Revolution chronicles the history behind the little-known, nonviolent protests that began in the late 1980s in the small Baltic republic of Estonia, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union nearly half a century earlier.
With glasnost and [...]

LEADING COUPLES: Q&A with Author Frank Miller

In Leading Couples: The Most Unforgettable Screen Romances of the Studio Era (Chronicle Books, 2008), author Frank Miller, whose previous books include Leading Ladies, Leading Men, and Censored Hollywood, presents nearly forty highly successful movie pairings from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Among those featured in Leading Couples are dancing lovebirds Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, singing lovebirds Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, singing & dancing lovebirds Betty Grable and Dan Dailey, sparring lovebirds Doris Day and Rock Hudson, and costumed lovebirds Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn (above, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex).
Also, odd lovebirds Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery, sentimental lovebirds Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, cool lovebirds Alan Ladd and Veronica [...]

Irving Thalberg: Q&A with Mark Vieira

"The Wedding of the Painted Doll" number from the musical The Broadway Melody (1929), the first talkie to win a best picture Academy Award; Louis B. Mayer, director Reginald Barker, Irving Thalberg on the set of The Dixie Handicap (1925); Norma Shearer and Chester Morris in the popular pre-Code melodrama The Divorcee (1930).
 
HOLLYWOOD DREAMS MADE REAL: IRVING THALBERG AND THE RISE OF M-G-M — Q&A with Mark Vieira (Introduction)
 
First of all, why did you decide to write a book on Irving Thalberg?
Ben-Hur, Flesh and the Devil, Tarzan the Ape Man, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, The Good Earth — most filmgoers today have heard of these Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [...]

HOLLYWOOD DREAMS MADE REAL: IRVING THALBERG AND THE RISE OF M-G-M – Q&A with Mark Vieira

Author and photographer Mark A. Vieira (right), who’s been a friend for a number of years, has recently written no less than two books on Irving G. Thalberg, the young MGM mogul whose high-quality productions earned him both a reputation as Hollywood’s "Boy Wonder" and a special place in Oscar history as the name attached to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Memorial Award given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Thalberg even inspired a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, the unfinished The Last Tycoon.
Now, Mark’s two books may cover the same ground in terms of subject matter, but they’re radically different in terms of approach to same:
Hollywood [...]

David Spaltro Interview II

David Spaltro Interview Part I
What about Molly Ryman? Is her character based on a real person?
Molly was an absolute joy to work with and a real find for the role of Allyson, which is based mostly on one real person and also a few others. She was cast in a marathon casting session in January ‘07 out of thirty NY actresses. Other than being a very gifted actress and a classically beautiful girl, she has the ability to walk into a room and light it up with just a genuine sweetness and energy. She’s so committed to the work that her level of excitement about it brings up everyone on [...]

Miriam Hopkins: Allan Ellenberger Interview I

Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins in All of Me

Miriam Hopkins: Allan Ellenberger Interview Intro
First of all, why Miriam Hopkins?
The films she made with Bette Davis — The Old Maid (1939) and Old Acquaintance (1943) — first attracted me to Miriam Hopkins. Also, the stories of their purported feud and Davis’ virulent comments that she spouted forth during her last days piqued my interest. Davis has always been a favorite of mine, so anyone who could incur this diva’s wrath must have something going on. I also felt that Hopkins is one of the most underrated actresses from Hollywood’s golden era. Regardless of the quality of her vehicles, she always gave an interesting performance.
 
When people think of the major [...]

WERE THE WORLD MINE: Tom Gustafson Interview

Tanner Cohen, Nathaniel David Becker in Were the World Mine

Q&A with Tom Gustafson Intro
Were the World Mine is an "expansion" of your 2003 short Faeries. How did you come up with the idea for Faeries?
I loved the idea of a teenager in his basement working away at a potion that would make people gay, probably because I always wished I had one. That idea seemed too silly to stand on its own, so my partner ([Cory Krueckeberg,] co-writer of WTWM) suggested I ground it in something. We started thinking of literature that you are forced to read in school, and Midsummer seemed like a perfect match.
 
I haven’t watched Faeries. [...]

BEFORE THE FALL: Q&A with F. Javier Gutiérrez

F. Javier Gutiérrez’s 3 Días / Before the Fall, the filmmaker’s feature-film debut (co-produced by Antonio Banderas), has an unlikely premise: as a giant meteorite is about to destroy the planet and all its denizens in three days — hence the original Spanish-language title — a young man (Victor Clavijo) living in a remote village in the south of Spain readies himself to protect his mother (Mariana Cordero, in a role akin to that of Lillian Gish in The Night of the Hunter) and his absent brother’s four children from a psycho (Eduard Fernández) on the loose. What follows is not a science-fiction tale, but a suspenseful character-driven drama about the importance of old loyalties and [...]

TAPESTRIES OF HOPE: Q&A with Michealene Cristini Risley

American filmmaker Michealene Cristini Risley (right) met Zimbabwean social activist Betty Makoni at an International Development Exchange event in San Francisco. Risley was impressed with Makoni’s achievements as the founder of Zimbabwe’s Girl Child Network, an organization dedicated to helping young women and girls who have survived rape, a not uncommon occurrence in a part of the world where the spread of HIV remains out of control and "healers" prescribe "young (female) virgins" as a cure for males infected with the virus.
Now in post-production, Tapestries of Hope became — or rather, is becoming — the film that chronicles Makoni’s efforts to empower women in a country ravaged by disease, poverty, corruption, and civil rights abuses. [...]

UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US: Q&A with Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until the Light Takes Us was one of the most unusual entries at the 2008 AFI FEST held in Los Angeles in early November. In the words of co-director Ewell, the film is "a feature length documentary chronicling the history, ideology and aesthetic of Norwegian black metal — a musical subculture infamous as much for a series of murders and church arsons as it is for its unique musical and visual aesthetics. This is the first (and only) film to truly shed light on a movement that has heretofore been shrouded in darkness and rumor and obscured by inaccurate and shallow depictions."
I’d never heard of Norwegian black metal, [...]

ANTARCTICA: Q&A with Yair Hochner

In writer-director Yair Hochner’s intriguing, multi-layered, remarkably well-acted Antarctica, which Regent Releasing is opening tomorrow, November 14, at the Regent Showcase in Hollywood, several gay men and a couple of lesbians get enmeshed in a complex web of sexual/romantic entanglements set in the streets, clubs, and apartment houses of Tel Aviv.
There’s Omer (Tomer Ilan), a handsome, soft-spoken — and still single — librarian who’s about to turn thirty; his sister, Shirley (Lucy Dubinchik), who feels the need to get away from it all despite her love for club owner Michal (Liat Ekta), who also happens to be madly in love with the younger woman; the journalist Ronen (Guy Zo-Aretz), who has recently returned from London to Tel Aviv [...]

SAVING MARRIAGE: Q&A with Mike Roth

Mike Roth and John Henning’s Saving Marriage chronicles the recent fight to save marriage in the United States. Save that failed institution? From whom? Those millions of cheating husbands and wives all over the country?
Nope. From gays and lesbians, cheating or otherwise.
And you thought that traditionalists would want to embrace anyone who could give a boost to an institution that is as traditional as can be (even if procedural details — big and small — have varied throughout the ages and assorted cultures).
Well, think again. To allow gays and lesbians to marry would be to recognize them as human beings whose relationships are on an equal footing with those of heterosexuals. Who would want that?
Well, how about [...]

THE AMAZING TRUTH ABOUT QUEEN RAQUELA: Q&A with Olaf de Fleur Johannesson

The winner of the Teddy Award for best film with a gay/lesbian/bi/transgendered lead/theme, Icelandic filmmaker Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela chronicles the day-to-day fantasies and struggles of a Filipino male-to-female transsexual, Raquela Rios, working the streets of Cebu City while dreaming of one day traveling the world to meet Mr. Right.
Though some have called it a documentary, The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela is a hybrid of sorts. No, it’s not a mockumentary — instead, it’s what one might call a fictiomentary, along the lines of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross‘ The Road to Guantanamo — though, needless to say, with a considerably lighter theme.
Queen Raquela, which also won the Best Foreign [...]

SAVE ME: Q&A with Robert Cary

A few days ago, when I read an Associated Press report stating that US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s church "is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer," I immediately thought of Save Me.
Directed by Robert Cary (right) from a screenplay by Robert Desiderio, Save Me, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, September 19, chronicles the inner awakening of three characters at Genesis House, a Christian retreat in New Mexico where gay men undergo something called "conversion therapy" — a treatment that is supposed to cure gay men of their "affliction." ("Pray away the gay," some call it.)
Indeed, there’s lots of healing taking place at Genesis, though not exactly the way the [...]

THE WAY I SEE THINGS: Q&A with Brian Pera

A few weeks ago, when I began watching a screener of director-screenwriter-etc-etc. Brian Pera’s The Way I See Things, I had no idea what to expect. At first, I wasn’t able to get into the film, as I wondered — with dread — if I was in for a gay version of a John Cassavetes flick. About fifteen minutes later, I went for a chocolate milk break and when I returned, I decided to start the film from scratch.
Curiously, the second time around I became immediately immersed in the story, in the lead character’s inner conflicts, and in Pera’s spare, dispassionate style. That evening, long after The Way I See Things was over, I couldn’t get the film out [...]

THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION: Q&A with Cao Hamburger

Set in 1970, the year Brazil (or rather, the soccer team representing the country) won the World Cup, O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias / The Year My Parents Went on Vacation tells the story of a (away from) home-alone kid whose parents (Eduardo Moreira, Simone Spoladore) are on the run from Brazil’s brutal military apparatus.
The boy, Mauro (Michel Joelsas), who believes his parents have taken off on a long vacation, is left at the home of his grandfather (veteran Paulo Autran) in the Bom Retiro district of São Paulo. The problem is that the old man died shortly before his grandson’s arrival. Now, who’s going to be taking care of the kid in this ethnically [...]

Ann Dvorak: Q&A with Biographer/Collector Christina Rice

The name Ann Dvorak wouldn’t ring even a faint bell for most people around at the beginning of the 21st century. Most people, I said — but definitely not everyone.
A few days ago, author James Robert Parish heard a loud gong when I told him during lunch at a West Hollywood restaurant that I was working on a q&a with collector-turned-biographer Christina Rice, who’s currently writing Ann Dvorak’s life story.
"I love Ann Dvorak! I still remember her in I Was an American Spy, when the Japanese villains stick a hose down her throat. I never forgot that!"
I haven’t watched I Was an American Spy (see q&a below for more info on that little-seen film), but I remember being impressed by [...]

REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA: Darren Lynn Bousman, Alexa Vega Interview

On July 18, the day of the world premiere of Repo! The Genetic Opera, I was fortunate enough to be able to interview the film’s director, Darren Lynn Bousman, best known for his Saw films, and star, Alexa Vega, of Spy Kids fame, at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. They had been doing interviews all morning and I was around for some of that time watching them be passed around from media to media, each time giving the most excited and passionate responses. Even though they had been probably answering the same questions hundreds of times, they never lacked enthusiasm or gave a hint of boredom.
Whereas most media present interviewed the director and star together, I got to [...]

THE BETRAYAL: NERAKHOON — Q&A with Ellen Kuras

Directed by Ellen Kuras, with the assistance of the film’s main subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath (who shares co-director credit), The Betrayal: Nerakhoon follows a family of Lao immigrants in New York struggling to rebuild their lives after sociopolitical upheavals forced them to leave their native country. (Phrasavath’s father had worked for the CIA, choosing targets for U.S. bombings.)
Approximately 20 years in the making, The Betrayal: Nerakhoon, which was screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, marked the directorial debut of New Jersey-born cinematographer Ellen Kuras. A two-time Emmy and Independent Spirit Award nominee, winner of three Sundance best cinematography awards, and a recipient of the Cinereach Award (given to "the filmmaker who exemplifies masterful use of craft in conveying a vital [...]

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