Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

Chinatown (1974)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Robert Towne
Produced by Robert Evans
130 minutes

The only thing really left to debate about Chinatown is whether it belongs among the 25 best films ever made, 10 best or whether it vaults over titles like Citizen Kane or Casablanca as The Best Film Ever Made. According to the legend as repeated by screenwriter Robert Towne, its genesis was a 1969 photo essay in a Los Angeles Times about Raymond Chandler’s L.A. Conceived as a love letter to the vanishing city of his youth and using something as vague as land and water as catalysts, Towne would sell Paramount Pictures production head Robert Evans on his concept for a ‘30s detective mystery and writing with Jack Nicholson in mind, deliver a 178 page script that both intrigued and bewildered director Roman Polanski. Pruning the epic script with Polanski, a point of contention was the ending. The screenwriter wanted good to win the day. The director preferred tragedy.

The power of Chinatown is the care the film takes to recreate Depression Era Los Angeles — which Gittes refers to only half jokingly as “a small town” at one point — and fill it with a complex story that remains mesmerizing no matter how many times it’s replayed. Through stunning production design by Richard Sylbert, a desaturated color scheme that evokes black & white photography and a sensual musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown achieves the illusion it was produced in 1947 instead of 1974. Where most whodunits focus on little more than heists or serial killers, Towne weaves an ambitious tale of natural resources, corruption and family scandal that stretches clear into the horizon, much as the city of Los Angeles does. In addition to the sucker punch ending, Polanski contributes a rhythm that enables locations like a city morgue or a retirement home to leap off the screen and feel real.

In Los Angeles of the late 1930s, private detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired by “Evelyn Mulwray” (Diane Ladd) to verify that her husband Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) — chief of the Department of Water and Power — is having an affair. Gittes shadows Mulwray at City Hall, where the engineer cites safety concerns for his refusal to build a dam that would ease the burden on agriculture, which gripped in a drought are sharing the water supply with the public. Gittes completes his job by snapping photos of Mulwray with a blonde in Echo Park. The photos are mysteriously reprinted in the newspaper and the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) reveals herself to serve Gittes with a lawsuit. Eager to uncover who set him up, Gittes seeks help from Mrs. Mulwray, who now prefers to drop the matter entirely. Before Gittes can question her husband, Mulwray’s body is pulled out of a reservoir.

Pressed for information by Lt. Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez) — Gittes’ partner when they patrolled the morally ambiguous streets of Chinatown — Gittes is hired by Mrs. Mulwray to solve her husband’s death. Snooping around the reservoir where Mulwray died, Gittes is cornered by two goons (Roy Jenson, Roman Polanski) and has a nostril cut open. Sensing that Mrs. Mulwray is hiding something, Gittes visits her estranged father Noah Cross (John Huston), a power broker who once owned the city’s water supply with Mulwray. His interest lies in finding the girl the private eye photographed with Mulwray and he hires Gittes to do so. A key to the mystery lies in the San Fernando Valley, where farmers are being pressured to sell by an anonymous landowner who stands to make a fortune if the dam project that Mulwray blocked is now approved.

Alex Simon of The Hollywood Interview sat down with Robert Towne on the 35^th anniversary of Chinatown for an exhaustive interview on the development of the script.

Richard Ballad caught up with Roman Polanski 35 years previous for an interview in the August 1974 issue of Penthouse Magazine.

What do you say?

Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Polanski.

Tess (1979)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Gérard Brach & Roman Polanski and John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Produced by Claude Berri
172 minutes

As a sum of its dialogue, casting, photography, editing and music, Roman Polanski’s screen version of the 1891 novel by Thomas Hardy tantalizes with how thrift of imperfection it seems. Once a passion of producer David O. Selznick — who wanted wife Jennifer Jones to play Tess — actress Sharon Tate handed the book to her husband two decades later. Dedicating the finished film to his slain wife, Polanski adapted the novel with Gérard Brach and tasked John Brownjohn to translate their script from French to English, tuning an ear to the Dorset dialect. In this expensive co-production between France’s Renn Productions and England’s Burrill Productions, Polanski cast in the title role 17-year-old Nastassia Kinski, the West German ingénue who Francis Coppola would call “the most beautiful woman in films today” when he cast her in One From the Heart a few years later.

Tess is worth viewing as a visual feast alone. Shot extensively during the “magic hour” of dusk by Geoffrey Unsworth (who died during production to be relieved by Ghislain Cloquet), the splendor of the landscape and the way sunlight reveals character is present in every frame. Much of the film’s success lies in the casting of Nastassia Kinski, who is on-screen much of the running time and exhibits an unusual power mostly foreign to actresses her age. What’s striking about Tess is the tender loving care Polanski takes to let scenes breathe, neither overwhelming the audience in period detail or racing through the events of the book. A whole world materializes in which an outsider struggles to find her place. Nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, the playful yet majestic musical score by Philippe Sarde is a standout.

In rural Dorset of the late 19^th century, local girls assemble for their May dance. John Durbeyfield (John Collin) crosses paths with a new parson, who notifies the peasant that his research into local genealogy indicates the Durbeyfields descend from an old family, the d’Urbervilles. Though his ancestors have died off without any wealth, Durbeyfield and his wife (Rosemary Martin) dispatch their teenage daughter Tess (Nastassia Kinski) to call on a wealthy widow in the town of Trantridge who goes by the name d’Urberville. The farm girl encounters the widow’s playboy son Alec (Leigh Lawson) who takes a shine to Tess. Accepting a job on the property, she discovers the “d’Ubervilles” are not blood relatives at all but merely bought the name. Ultimately giving in to Alec’s salacious advances, she returns home bearing his illegitimate child.

When her child succumbs to illness and dies, Tess leaves home to take a job as a milkmaid. Just as her co-workers Izz (Suzanna Hamilton), Marian (Carolyn Pickles) and Retty (Caroline Embling) have, Tess falls in love with a young apprentice farmer named Angel Clare (Peter Firth). The son of a reverend, Angel is attracted to Tess’ earthy wisdom and announces to his family that he plans to marry the penniless girl. On their honeymoon, Tess reveals that she surrendered her maidenhood to a cousin and bore his child. Ruining her husband’s image of her, Tess is sent back to her destitute family while Angel leaves for Brazil to seek his fortune. Tess reunites with Izz to work on a farm owned by Alec d’Urberville. He offers to provide for Tess if she returns to him, but clinging to her pride, she chooses poverty instead. For a while.

Jeremy Richey’s ardor for Nastassja Kinski inspired him to name his blog Moon In the Gutter and in June 2009, he turned his attention to Tess.

This terrific behind the scenes article by Harlan Kennedy on the making of Tess appeared in the October 1979 issue of American Film.

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Tightrope (1984)
Directed by Richard Tuggle*
Written by Richard Tuggle
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Fritz Manes
114 minutes

Like a quarter shining in the gutter, Tightrope could stand a polish, but if you catch it on a rainy afternoon or late at night, this unabashed B-movie offers spills and thrills aplenty. Escape From Alcatraz scribe Richard Tuggle took his cue from a series of unsolved rapes in the Bay Area. His research resulted in a cop thriller sold to Clint Eastwood under the condition the screenwriter be allowed to make his directorial debut. Tuggle’s struggles on the set threatened his job security on day 1, but DGA guidelines — amended after Eastwood replaced Philip Kaufman as director of The Outlaw Josey Wales with himself — mandated that Tuggle remain on and receive a credit for directing. Whether you believe Eastwood collaborated with Tuggle from there or it was more likely the other way around, whoever directed Tightrope managed a good film that occasionally flirts with being a very good one.

Tightrope could either be considered a Cannon Films styled cop thriller like Cobra or Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects made with a real script and much better actors, or it could be considered just another Cannon Films styled cop thriller. The business of a serial killing rapist on the loose in a Red Light District is routine, repetitive and almost completely indistinguishable for a hundred other bad movies and TV shows. Where the picture shows life are its domestic scenes — where Eastwood’s chemistry with his 11-year-old daughter Alison glows — and the cop’s relationship with a rape counselor played by Geneviève Bujold. Eastwood relocated the script from San Francisco to New Orleans, and the offbeat French Canadian actress proves as alluring as the city itself. The killer is given no substance, but since the family he menaces is something we care about, at the very least, Tightrope provides a riveting ride to the finish.

In New Orleans, divorced police captain Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) cancels plans to watch the Saints game with his two young daughters (Alison Eastwood, Jennifer Beck) when a prostitute is found strangled to death in her home. When another working girl turns up drowned in a bathhouse, rape counselor Beryl Thibodeaux (Geneviève Bujold) presses Block to involve her office in the investigation. Prowling the brothels of The Big Easy to interview prostitutes, Block finds the time to indulge his dark side with a popsicle sucking tart (Rebecca Perle) and a nurse (Margaret Howell) among others moonlighting in the sex trade. Personal items Block leaves at his nocturnal activities — handcuffs, a necktie — begin to turn up alongside the bodies of the prostitutes he’s frequented.

Once she complains to City Hall about his lack of cooperation, Beryl Thibodeaux receives a visit from Block at the non-profit rape center she runs. The cop later seeks Beryl out at her gym and over an oyster lunch on the Mississippi, bluntly shares his attraction for her. She accepts his invitation to go trick or treating with his girls in the French Quarter and receives their approval to continue dating their dad. Meanwhile, Block and his partner (Dan Hedaya) trace glass fragments at the murder scenes to a local beer bottling plant. The killer responds by visiting Block’s daughters, killing their nanny and almost strangling Block. The cop narrows his manhunt onto one suspect in particular, but while he’s staking out the man’s apartment, the killer goes hunting for Beryl.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 11 users: 82% for Tightrope

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Mystic River (2003)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
Produced by Robert Lorenz, Judie G. Hoyt, Clint Eastwood
138 minutes

The most commercially successful movie Clint Eastwood has directed without also appearing in as an actor is a well-intentioned piece of hackwork. Neither assured filmmaking nor the presence of some of the best actors of their generation are capable to breathing more than a puff or two of emotional honesty into this overworked stock material, adapted by Brian Helgeland from an airport paperback mystery by Dennis Lehane. It’s preferable to the lifeless 1996 melodrama Sleepers, in which childhood sexual abuse formed cloudy skies over adult survivors played by Jason Patric, Billy Cudrup and Brad Pitt. This is because Eastwood and Lehane are more dedicated to their craft than Barry Levinson or Lorenzo Carcaterra, but any way you cut it, Mystic River suffers from an extreme rigor mortis of plot.

Though nothing in Mystic River feels unforced, there are bright spots. 17-year-old Emmy Rossum lights up the screen in her brief appearance as the murder victim, while Eastwood’s old bandit buddy Tuco (Eli Wallach) from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has a terrific cameo as a liquor store proprietor. Most everything else occurs in capital letters. Sean Penn gives an Award Winning Performance, baring a Boston accent and tattoos and allowed to launch into one of the greatest fits of ham in film history. The movie has nowhere left to go after Penn’s hysterics over the murdered body of his character’s daughter and it isn’t helped by a tired story about Dark Secrets lurking in The Old Neighborhood revealed through a Brutal Murder. This material deserves to be Abandoned and Left For Dead.

On the banks of the Mystic River in suburban Boston, young Jimmy Markum (Jason Kelly), Sean Devine (Connor Paolo) and Dave Boyle (Cameron Bowen) are caught scrawling their names in cement by two men posing as police officers. Dave is taken away in their car and manages to escape his tormentors after four days of captivity. Years later, Jimmy (Sean Penn) is a reformed thief who operates a small market with his strong willed 19-year-old daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum) working behind the counter. Jimmy’s daughter with his second wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) is celebrating her first communion. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a Massachusetts State Police detective estranged from his wife, who took off with another man while carrying Sean’s child. Dave (Tim Robbins) is a husband and father and is still haunted by the tragedy of his childhood.

A 911 call alerts police to Katie’s abandoned, blood soaked car not far from the church where she fails to appear for the communion. Sean and his partner Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne) lead the search for Katie’s body and find her shot twice, beaten and left in the old bear cages in Franklin Park. Emotionally devastated, Jimmy engages his former criminal associates the Savage Brothers (Kevin Chapman, Adam Nelson) to hit the neighborhood for information. Dave saw Katie at a bar the night she was murdered and when he returns home to his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) injured and covered in blood — not to mention mentally unstable — the detectives take notice. Celeste begins to wonder if he had a part in Katie’s murder and makes the mistake of sharing her fears with Jimmy.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 192 users: 88% for Mystic River

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 84 for Mystic River

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Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Albert S. Ruddy, Tom Rosenberg, Paul Haggis
132 minutes

This Academy Award winner for Best Picture of 2004 seemed to forge an unholy backlash of conservative pundits (claiming to be upset over the moral implications of the story), haters who had a problem with Hilary Swank and hipsters who perhaps felt critics over praised this boxing movie. The hipsters come closest to having an intelligent criticism, but what becomes apparent evaluating Million Dollar Baby on its own terms is that Eastwood is simply making the best ‘60s movies released in the 2000s. There’s no sex, no graphic violence, no special effects. The story is so modest — scaled to human beings — as to almost be considered a B-movie and the color is so unsaturated, it looks like it was shot in black & white. Earning every emotion it extracts, it’s also a film of power and beauty and worth every award it was handed.

Based on the short stories of trainer and cutman Jerry Boyd (writing under the pen name F.X. Toole), the picture is rich with distinctions. The adaptation by Paul Haggis has depth and vitality, with the outcome of a boxing card revealing more than winners and losers, but a lifetime of struggle rewarded or unrewarded for both the fighter and their trainers. Morgan Freeman’s narration has a bittersweet sagacity to it while detailing what makes boxing and its fans unique. The moral equation the film dials up had been sitting there for a while, waiting to be dealt with honestly and maturely in a movie; Eastwood answers that call. What enriches Million Dollar Baby most is the delicate, peaceful music composed by Eastwood, with Gennady Loktionov arranging and conducting a 25 piece orchestra — 23 strings, one piano and one spellbinding acoustic guitar picked by Bruce Forman.

Following a boxing match in which trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) inches his fighter “Big” Willie Little (Mike Colter) closer to a long awaited title bout, he’s approached by a girl named Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) and asked to train her. Frankie brushes her off, even after she claims that people who’ve seen her fight say she’s tough. “Girlie, tough ain’t enough.” When Frankie isn’t haranguing his community priest (Brian O’Byrne) or mailing his estranged daughter letters that are sent back “return to sender”, he runs a boxing gym in downtown Los Angeles called The Hit Pit. Employed as maintenance man and sleeping in the back is Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), blind in one eye from a fight 23 years ago that Frankie blames himself for being unable to stop when he was a cutman.

Watching her work out religiously at The Hit Pit, Eddie throws Maggie a few pointers and lets her mess around with a speedbag that belonged Frankie, who ultimately gives in and agrees to train the girl how to fight. When Maggie questions Frankie about his relationship with his daughter, he passes her off on a manager who throws Maggie into the ring before she’s ready. Learning to listen to Frankie, Maggie TKOs a trail of female boxers in the first round of her early fights. Taking Frankie to Missouri to visit her obtuse welfare recipient mother (Margo Martindale), Maggie surprises her family with keys to a house, but fails to win a shred of gratitude in return. Playing up Maggie’s Irish heritage, Frankie promotes her as “Mo Chuisle” and accepts a title fight in Las Vegas with a million dollar purse. A world championship seems within their reach.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 223 users: 91% for Million Dollar Baby

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 86 for Million Dollar Baby

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Lolita (1997)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Screenplay by Stephen Schiff, based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Produced by Mario Kassar, Joel B. Michaels
137 minutes

There’s a litany of reasons why the second film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is not something to enjoy. It’s based on a brilliant novel far too internal to put on film. It’s a remake of a film by Stanley Kubrick. It’s about a distasteful subject, so the film itself must be distasteful, if not banned outright. It’s too stylish, lacking in depth. It’s too cerebral, lacking in action. The case against Lolita is as fullproof as it’s ever been for director Adrian Lyne, who in spite of all of that, adds another entertaining, sometimes silly but always absorbing film to an impressive short list of credits. Far from great, it is great work, a haunting, skillfully made picture with terrific and unlikely performances from one of the few directors who can be relied upon for intelligent dirty movies. Sort of like John Woo, Lyne isn’t trying to win an Oscar here. He seems to know exactly the type of genre flick he wants to make, rarely gets delusions of grandeur and always delivers intense audience appreciation.

In terms of casting, this version of Lolita is on at least equal footing with Kubrick’s classic. In her first acting gig, Dominique Swain conveys the geeky exuberance of a clueless teenager without acting precocious; she seems closer in spirit to what Humbert lusted after, as opposed to Sue Lyon, who had the appeal of a 24-year-old stripper. Miscast in so many other films, Melanie Griffith really finds a niche here in the brusque Shelley Winters role of Lolita’s mother. Lyne shows a tin ear for wit, resisting savage satire with every fiber of his being to instead make a picturesque, European love story from Nabokov’s novel. Jeremy Irons is the ideal leading man for that movie, which I’m not sure I prefer to the one with an absurd sense of humor about its characters and underlying situations. Still, this Lolita is without question stunning to look at and listen to, with director of photography Howard Atherton handling the lighting and legendary composer Ennio Morricone providing the mournful musical score.

In New England of 1947, a professor of French literature named Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) decides to spend his summer in the town of “Ramsdale”, writing a textbook. Looking for a room to rent, Humbert arrives at the abode of the obnoxious Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith), whose manner doesn’t quite appeal to the fussy professor. Humbert changes his mind as soon as he lays eyes on Charlotte’s 14-year-old nymphet of a daughter Lolita (Dominique Swain), who unwittingly stirs feelings Humbert hasn’t felt since being with his very first girlfriend, who died of typhus when they were age 14. Obsessed with movie magazines, food and antagonizing her mother, Lolita becomes curious about what kind of rise she can get out of Humbert. Charlotte soon sends her wayward daughter away to summer camp before she’s to be enrolled in boarding school. Crushed at the prospect of losing Lolita, Humbert agrees to the lonely Charlotte’s marriage proposal.

Miserable in marriage, Humbert’s prayers are answered when Charlotte discovers his journal, which contains less than flattering descriptions of his new wife. Charlotte throws herself into the street, where she is struck by a car and killed. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, but rather than tell her about her mother’s death right away, takes cues from the girl’s incessant flirtations and checks them in to the Enchanted Hunters Inn. A Christian convention fails to deter them from consummating their love affair. Humbert breaks the news of Charlotte’s demise to Lolita the next day and takes her on a cross-country trek to spend more carefree time together. Reporting to his job at Beardsley Prep School, Humbert begins to suspect Lolita is socking away money to run away from him. His suspicions are validated by the appearance of the mysterious Clare Quilty (Frank Langella), a debauched playwright who seems to share his attraction to nymphets.

Stephen Schiff was a correspondent for the CBS news program West 57^th and a critic of theater, books and film for Vanity Fair magazine. Producer Lili Fini Zanuck had made an effort to steer Schiff toward screenwriting and in 1990, advised him that the estate of Vladimir Nabokov was optioning the film rights to various literary properties of the Russian born entomologist and author best known for his 1955 novel Lolita, which had been rejected by publishers in America due to the nature of it sexual content. Over the next 40 years – during which a controversial film adaptation starring James Mason was directed by Stanley Kubrick — many critics would rate Lolita as one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century. An admirer of the book, Schiff began an adaptation of his own. He would finish 40 pages before Zanuck told the budding screenwriter to forget it; in the current political climate, Lolita would never be made into a movie anyway.

Almost at the same time, Adrian Lyne reread Lolita. He mentioned his interest in a film adaptation that would hew closer to Nabokov’s work to the chairman of Carolco Pictures, Mario Kassar, who put up $1 million to purchase the film rights for the director of such highly stylized and hugely commercial forays into erotica as Flashdance, 9 ½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction. Several notable screenwriters attempted an adaptation before Lili Fini Zanuck and her husband Richard Zanuck — who was producing the project — turned to Schiff to fashion a script. On the film’s way to completion, Carolco Pictures would go bankrupt, the budget would climb and the U.S. Congress passed a law that threatened to land the filmmakers in prison if they moved forward. Protected from legal prosecution, Lolita was nonetheless shunned by distributors in the U.S. due to its high cost and difficult subject matter. Lolita opened in Europe and became the highest budgeted film to hold its U.S. premiere on cable television.

Journalist Stephen Schiff was living in New York in 1990 when producer Lili Fini Zanuck — who’d been compelling Schiff to try screenwriting — notified him that the Vladimir Nabokov estate was optioning the film rights to its catalog. She thought that Schiff would be ideal to adapt one of those works in particular. In Lolita: The Book of the Film, Schiff wrote, “Lolita is one of the most beautiful, poignant, funny, splendidly designed, gorgeously written, and psychologically acute works in the English language. To my mind, it is the greatest American novel of the postwar era. So the opportunity — if opportunity this was — to create a coherent artistic response to it was irresistible. I got to work, but, I hasten to add, I did so idiotically: I wrote some forty pages of screenplay, but it was all dialogue, no ‘stage direction.’” Instead of writing off-screen directions, Schiff merely scribbled “TK”, journo jargon for “to come”. He added, “Still, I was somewhat saddened when, a few weeks later, Lili called me back and said, rather presciently, ‘Forget about it. In this political environment, any version of Lolita would be too controversial. It’ll never get made.’”

Adrian Lyne had picked up a copy of Lolita as a teenager. Flipping to the lascivious parts and putting the novel down when he saw there weren’t any, Lyne was shooing Jacob’s Ladder for Carolco Pictures in the fall of 1989 when he read Lolita properly. On a making-of featurette on the film’s DVD release, Lyne stated, “I like movies that create discussion. I love it when they haven’t forgotten about your movie by dinnertime afterwards, you know, and they’re still arguing about it the next day. That’s what a movie should do. It should make you argue and disagree.” He added, “I wanted to make a movie of Nabokov’s novel because it’s — I think — one of the great novels of this century. The movie is about a middle aged man’s obsession for a 14-year-old girl and it’s about all that that entails. In the end, it’s a love story. It’s a strange and awful love story.” When proposing Lolita to Mario Kassar, the co-founder and chairman of Carolco was eager enough to work with Lyne again that he ultimately snapped up the film rights for $1 million.

The first screenwriter Lyne approached was James Dearden, who’d written the screenplay for Fatal Attraction. Up next was the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter, whose draft was considered far too cold for Lyne’s tastes. In the fall of 1994, Stephen Schiff’s phone rang and Lolita producer Richard Zanuck — Lili Fini’s husband — inquired about the pages Schiff had written. He was summoned to Los Angeles for a chat. Schiff recalled, “The first thing he and Adrian wanted to know was whether I could see my way clear to setting the film in the present. (Unbeknownst to me, that was what Dearden’s script had done). The answer was ‘No’. A Lolita growing up in America in this day and age would have been warned about the Humberts of the world from the age of three; her teachers would have talked about pedophiles; her mother would have been on the lookout. Besides, to set Nabokov’s story in the present is to lose much of what it is about, for this was not just a novel about a grown man’s love affair with his twelve-year old stepdaughter, it was about the dawning impingement on the European mind of postwar America.”

David Mamet was commissioned, but unconvinced that the playwright’s knack for American machismo would produce a usable draft of Lolita, Schiff started writing on spec. He elaborated, “Humbert is thoroughly equipped for greatness, and yet he winds up in an ignominy of his own making. Part of his tragedy — and a large part of his comedy — is that his enormous intelligence is always defeated by his obsession. He can’t get outside that obsession to see who Lolita is, to see that she is actually a fairly ordinary little girl, more charming than some and probably more sexually precocious than most, but still a child.” With very little dialogue available in the novel, Schiff invented most of it. “Another thing. Because Nabokov’s Humbert lives in a kind of exalted subjectivity, Lolita herself is so much a figment of his imagination that she barely exists on the page. In effect, I had to reinvent her, piecing her together from my own adolescence and from adolescents I knew.” One of Schiff’s ideas was to have Lolita constantly eating bananas or candy or ice cream.

Schiff’s intuitions and efforts won him the job. Concerned that audiences would be unwilling to sympathize with Humbert Humbert, Lyne was adamant about restoring the character’s childhood love affair — which Stanley Kubrick excised in his film version — that attempted to explain the man’s obsession with Lolita. Of the actors considered for the part, Anthony Hopkins was deemed too old. Hugh Grant cited Lolita as his favorite book and didn’t want to see any film version made. Lyne claimed that Warren Beatty flirted with the role “for about five minutes” before Jeremy Irons was approached. Lyne had met Irons while visiting the set of Reversal of Fortune in 1989 and soothed the actor’s fears that Lolita was too politically incorrect to get involved with. Dominique Swain hadn’t gone on an audition in two years, but learning of the part from her manager, read Lolita and sent Lyne a videotape of herself performing scenes from the book. She responded, “It’s all through Humbert’s eyes. Lolita doesn’t have a point of view. I think I can give her one.” The 14-year-old won the role of Lolita.

With Carolco Pictures heading into the sunset of bankruptcy and selling off its assets in 1995, the production of Lolita was picked up by the French corporation Chargeurs, which agreed to finance the film through a media group it owned called Pathé. With plans for shooting to begin in June, the film’s budget had climbed from $41 million to roughly $50 million. This was in part due to Adrian Lyne’s preference to shoot on location. The flashback to Humbert’s youth would be filmed in Les Cedres in the south of France. “Ramsdale” would be filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. The location for the Enchanted Hunters Inn was found in New Orleans, as was Humbert’s apartment. The production would also travel to Amarillo, Texas and Sonoma County, California to grab footage of Humbert and Lolita’s road trip. Perhaps balking at the price of what Richard Zanuck considered a $25 million or so production, the producer dropped out. Mario Kassar tapped Joel B. Michaels — producer of Universal Soldier and Stargate — to replace the Academy Award winning producer of Driving Miss Daisy.

Once shooting was underway in North Carolina in September 1995, weather delays, an illness to Melanie Griffith and the firing of director of photography Jeffrey Kimball (who was replaced by Howard Atherton) ballooned Lolita up to a budget of $58 million. In the background was the nature of the material. Invited to the set, Stephen Schiff noted, “At times I seemed to be the only one connected with the film who didn’t harbor visions of some small town sheriff descending on the set and carting us off to jail on obscenity charges, child pornography charges, or just general principle. During the shoot, we played by the strictest rules the film’s lawyers could devise. Any nudity required an adult body double for Dominique. If Dominique sat on Jeremy’s lap, a board was inserted between them. Dominique’s mother and tutor were on the set whenever she was. I often found myself in the position of reassuring everyone: We’re not going to be arrested, for Chrissake. This isn’t the ‘50s. We’re not making a pornographic film. We’re adapting one of the acknowledged great works of 20^th century literature. So I said. And so I thought.”

Coincidentally, while Lolita was in post-production, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) attached a rider known as the Child Pornography Act of 1996 onto a federal budget bill being passed through the U.S. Congress. The rider extended the definition of “child pornography” to cover anything that simulated a minor engaging in sexual activity. Critics charged that the law was so ambiguous that it was nearly impossible for filmmakers to know whether or not they were in compliance; at the risk of 15 years in prison, they would resort to self-censorship instead. A strict interpretation of the law would now classify such films as The Exorcist, Night Moves, Taxi Driver, Pretty Baby, Little Darlings and others as child pornography. Schiff recalled, “It was so vaguely worded that it seemed to me certifiably unconstitutional, although a judge later upheld it. Broadly interpreted, it could have resulted in the banning of any number of mainstream films, paintings, book covers, photographs, MTV videos, and so forth. We didn’t even know about it until Adrian read about it somewhere and went into a panic. And the panic was contagious.”

The firm that Pathé had contracted as production legal counsel before filming began — Troop Meisinger Steuber & Pasich of Los Angeles — suggested that the producers hire attorney John Weston to advise them on First Amendment issues. Weston was invited into the editing room to guarantee that Lolita was in compliance with the new law. Schiff admitted, “Sometimes, I thought, the cuts actually helped the film. Crotch shots had to go, and, indeed, there was a legal precedent for them to go, and their removal was fine with me. There was no legal precedent for the removal of breast shots, but we didn’t really need breast shots — in any case, they went.” But Weston also suggested that two pivotal scenes had to go; an encounter between Humbert and Lolita in a motel room in which we realize the pair are engaged in sex as she reads the comics, and a later scene in which an enraged Humbert pushes Lolita down on a bed and has sex with her. Neither scene was graphic enough to threaten the film’s R rating with the MPAA and when Lyne and Schiff challenged Weston on the exact wording of the new law, the attorney withdrew his objections.

In a February 1999 interview with The Bulletin, Lyne recalled, “I sat in a cutting room with a lawyer for six weeks. The law that came out said that essentially I couldn’t use any of the shots that I had shot with the body double; that I couldn’t have an adult imitating a juvenile. This law was aimed at the Internet and it was aimed at people putting children’s heads on mature bodies, if you see what I’m saying, and it carried over into films. So it was traumatic for me because, obviously, this lawyer was saying I had to take this out, I had to take that out … and I was hooting and hollowing and yelling and disagreeing with the guy but in the end, happily, I didn’t have to do much, actually. He was a fairly understanding man; but I did have to take out a few shots that I’d done with the body double, you know, her breasts or whatever. But I don’t think it affected the movie. It was a very unnerving period because we didn’t know, for example, where we stood in terms of legality with the film and at times we were worried about literally moving the film from California to New York. There was a lot of paranoia.”

Lolita was test screened three times in Los Angeles and according to Schiff, was well received. A screening was also arranged for Nabokov’s only child and executor of his late father’s estate, Dmitri, who enthusiastically supported the new film adaptation. In March 1997, the filmmakers began shopping for a U.S. distributor. Schiff recalled, “What happened next was very strange. One by one, the studios saw the film. Many of the executives went out of their way to congratulate Adrian, to tell him that it was his best film ever, to recount in detail their ravishment over it, to beg him to work with them on his next film. And then, one by one, they refused to distribute it.” Schiff believed the political climate had a lot to do with that. “Never in history had there been such a horrified awareness of the pedophilia lurking around the fringes of American life. The Megan Kanka case, the JonBenet Ramsay case, the Polly Klass murder, the Belgian sex murders — all these were in the air. The Christian right had been fulminating for years of the subject of family values, and no film courted controversy without running into efficiently organized watchdog groups run by zealots like Donald Wildmon and others of his ilk.”

Pressure never materialized from either Christian groups or from legislators, but no U.S. distributor wanted near Lolita. Pathé had hoped to sell U.S. distribution rights for $25 million, plus the cost of prints and advertising for an additional $20 million. That quote came down, but not even the so-called indies opened up a checkbook. Schiff revealed, “Miramax was part of Disney, and Disney, with its reputation and its stockholders, was never going to spring for Lolita. We heard that October Films, the distributors of Secrets and Lies and The Apostle, wanted it, but then they were bought by Universal, which was owned by Seagrams, which didn’t want a Lolita on its hands.” Pathé chose to release Lolita in Europe first, hoping positive response there might make an impression in Hollywood. Schiff added, “To me, this plan seemed naïve at best. Since when did American distributors look to Europe for guidance? Lolita would have to be a jawdropping blockbuster overseas to catch America’s attention, and I knew that, no matter how kindly it was received, it was never going to be Independence Day.”

Months after it premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain in September 1997, Showtime agreed to buy U.S. distribution rights and broadcast Lyne’s 137-minute cut of Lolita on both Showtime and the Sundance Channel in August 1998. Critics had mixed feelings about what they saw. Caryn James, The New York Times: “Mr. Lyne (whose commercial hits include Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) was expected to have made a titillating Lolita. Instead, he has risen to the level of his material. His direction, and Stephen Schiff’s discerning, faithful screenplay, are sensitive to Nabokov’s wit as well as his lyricism.” Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly: “A glum, dull, witless affair buoyed only by the minor scandal of its failure, until recently, to secure U.S. distribution, this newest translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s still-shocking novel has the singular attraction of not only confirming Lyne’s aesthetic irrelevance, but of making Stanley Kubrick’s flawed if brilliant 1962 film seem like a paragon of literary adaptation.” Newsweek (Jack Kroll) and Time Magazine (Richard Schnickel) posted positive reviews. The Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) and Variety (David Rooney) did not.

Samuel Goldwyn Films agreed to give Lolita a limited theatrical release. In September 1998, it played one theater in Los Angeles for a weeklong Oscar qualifying run. Lolita received no nominations and managed $1 million in domestic box office receipts. Stephen Schiff remained convinced that the political climate had kept Americans from being able to see the film in theaters. “Had we released Lolita in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I believe that it would have easily made its way into distribution. But the culture has contracted since then. And even if it hasn’t, its gatekeepers believe it has. (Thus the gap between the alarm the gatekeepers expected us to feel over President Clinton’s sexual shenanigans and the meager alarm we actually did feel). Still, whether or not there would have been some vast surge of outrage upon the release of Lolita, the potential distributors certainly thought there would be. Every advance article about the film included threats from advocates of child welfare and family togetherness: newspaper columns railed against the project, sight unseen, from a vantage of laborious ignorance.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Lolita Loses Her Chaperon” By Judy Brennan. The Los Angeles Times, 24 September 1995

“Girl Trouble” By Benjamin Svetkey. Entertainment Weekly, 9 August 1996

“Lolita Comes Again” By Elizabeth Kaye. Esquire, February 1997

“Lolita Reaches A U.S. Audience” By Bill Carter. The New York Times, 6 May 1998

“In Hollywood, Almost Anything Goes — Except For Lolita, That Is” By Claudia Eller. The Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1998

“Lawyers were forced to cut scenes from Lolita because of Vagueness in Obscenity laws” By Bob Van Voris. National Law Journal 17 August 1998

“Adrian Lyne: Lolita” By Andrew Urban. The Bulletin, 25 February 1999

Lolita: The Book of the Film. By Stephen Schiff. Applause Books (2000)

Lolita. DVD audio commentary by Adrian Lyne. Trimark (2001)

SherryBaby (2006)
Written by Laurie Collyer
Directed by Laurie Collyer
Produced by Elevation Filmworks/ Big Beach Films
MPAA rating: “R for strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug content”
Running time: 96 minutes

Should I Care?
Maggie Gyllenhaal picked up a Golden Globe nomination (her second) for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama” in SherryBaby and it’s a citation that doesn’t come close to giving the film the cred it deserves. SherryBaby is one of the better ‘70s movies to be released in the last decade. Tracing the ups and downs of a recently paroled young woman, the movie is an assured, refreshingly candid answer to Straight Time (1978). Instead of Dustin Hoffman reasserting himself on the streets of L.A. following parole, SherryBaby uses the suburbs as its arena and focuses on the reconciliation between an ex-con and her daughter. The narrative feature film debut of writer-director Laurie Collyer avoids cheap moral lessons, with an actress game to explore less than flattering aspects of her dysfunctional character.

As acutely as Straight Time portrayed the temptations available to an ex-con on the streets, SherryBaby traffics in the domestic minefield that awaits a woman trying to piece her life back together following time behind bars. Collyer manages to convey a high degree of tension with little or no violence and if it all feels small in scale, the movie surpasses expectations by rooting itself in reality. Russell Lee Fine — serving as director of photography between stints shooting MTV’s The Real World and HBO’s The Wire — lends the docudrama a rich look. As for Maggie Gyllenhaal, her salience has less to do with any ability to transform into character, but to come across as real and spontaneous and transform the audience into seeing the world from the point of view of that character. This is her best work yet.

So, What’s This About?
Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) climbs off a bus somewhere in New Jersey and makes her way to a halfway house. After checking in with parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), Sherry uses her feminine wiles to urge a male employment coordinator to overlook a drug history and give her the job she covets: working with kids in an afterschool program. She’s visited by her gentle brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) who drives Sherry to the suburbs for a reunion with her 4-year-old daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins). Sherry’s honesty and hard luck story are lost on her sister-in-law Lynette (Bridget Barkan), who has raised Alexis as if she were her own daughter and does not approve of an ex-con coming into the child’s life.

Unable to cope with the halfway house and refused quarter by Lynette, Sherry moves into a motel. She attends rehab meetings and meets a steady Native American named Dean Walker (Danny Trejo) who remembers Sherry from her topless dancer days as a teenager. Enduring a sexually abusive relationship with her father (Sam Bottoms) and unable to reach her daughter, Sherry relapses into heroin use. A surprise visit from Hernandez compels Sherry to ask him for help; the p.o. offers her the choice of getting clean at an in-patient rehab facility or getting clean in prison. With her life falling apart, Sherry convinces Bobby to let her spend the day with her daughter. Sherry breaks parole, crossing the New Jersey-Delaware border with Alexis for destinations unknown.

Who Made It?
Laurie Collyer grew up in the suburban idyll of New Jersey. Graduating from Oberlin College with the ambition of translating German literature for a living, she moved to San Francisco instead and went to work at a residential treatment center for disturbed children. Social work burned Collyer out within six years, but her love of filmmaking brought her to a film production class, where an assignment to make a 3-minute short about a chair turned into a 25-minute film about a girl confined to a wheelchair. Titled Thanh, Collyer’s short was enthusiastically received when screened at the annual benefit concert for the Bay Area’s non-profit Bridge School. She enrolled in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her thesis film Nuyorican Dream chronicled the life of a Puerto Rican family in New York. The documentary would compete at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.

Nuyorican Dream won Collyer an invitation to the 2001 Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. Assisted by research she’d conducted with both ex-cons and the social workers in charge of them, Collyer wrote SherryBaby. Using her Sundance connections, Collyer got the script to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’d just broken out in the cult hit Secretary (2002). With Gyllenhaal attached, producer Lemore Syvan of New York based Elevation Filmworks got involved. After a year and a half, Syvan finally snared financing in producer Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner of Big Beach Films, who agreed to bankroll SherryBaby at a budget of roughly $2 million. Shot in Collyer’s old stomping grounds of Mountainside, NJ in the summer of 2005, her narrative feature film debut would be acquired by Netflix and garner critical accolades when released a year later.

How’d They Do It?
Laurie Collyer recalled the origins of SherryBaby by stating, “I grew up in New Jersey in this very sort of sleepy, suburban town where there wasn’t much going on, and when I was in late elementary school, I met this girl who I thought was just the coolest thing ever, and she was really smart and used big words like ‘premonition’ and ‘tribulation.’ But she could also really throw down in the schoolyard with the boys. She was pretty tough so I really admired her and we got to be close and my life became much more interesting, but then as time went on, the partying got more intense and I switched to a private school and she just became more intensely into partying and drugs and stuff like that. So when I went to college, she was pretty much on the path to doing time in prison.”

After her NYU thesis documentary Nuyorican Dream (1999) was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, Collyer was invited back to Park City the following year to participate in the prestigious Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. She began workshopping a 30-page short script that she’d drafted as early as 1994 titled Shall Not Want. Like Nuyorican Dream, the material drew heavily on Collyer’s interest in people living on the margins of society. “I had a mentor early in the process of writing Sherrybaby, a gentleman named Richard Stratton, who is a producer and a writer but also spent 10 years in a penitentiary. He introduced me to a lot of ex-convicts and people working with ex-convicts in New York and helped me get the realness of the script by introducing me to this world. I just interviewed a ton of people — but it was through Richard opening that door for me.”

A friend of Collyer’s would inform the character of Sherry. “Some of the language, actually, from letters he wrote to me. When she talks to the women in the halfway house, she’s sort of talking street. I just sort of picked that up from the way he talked. But it was more of a temperament. The combination of the self-destruction with the — I don’t want to say narcissism but self-absorbed combined with the self-destruction. That whole thing. You know, when you’ve been on drugs since you were 14 or 16 years old and then in prison or on the streets on or off the rest of the time, you haven’t really lived as an adult, so there’s a certain amount of childhood you carry into your adulthood. It’s like you stopped living, you know? So Sherry in a lot of ways is like a 16 year old.”

Collyer began the odyssey of securing the financing to turn her script SherryBaby into a film. She revealed, “I knew and I was told, I was advised a lot at the Sundance Lab actually by my wonderful advisors and consultants there to get an actor attached first before trying to raise the money. They told me also at the lab that it was the sort of a part that actors love to play so that it wouldn’t be that hard but you know at the same time, I was very picky. There are all these TV shows that have young women actors on them but I didn’t really want a TV actress.” One of Collyer’s advisors at the Sundance Lab was screenwriter Naomi Foner, whose daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal was attracting notice opposite James Spader in the edgy Secretary (2002).

With Maggie Gyllenhaal interested, SherryBaby appeared on the radar of producer Lemore Syvan. Collyer recalled,“It was hard to find the money. Lemore Syvan came on as producer, but it took about a year-and-a half to find the financing. In the meantime she made a couple of movies and I wrote a couple of other scripts. Another challenge is trusting your collaborators. If you are new at the game, you are not used to giving your creative work over for others to translate and/or modify.” Syvan ultimately locked a financial backer in Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner — with Jeb Brody and Peter Saraf — of New York based Big Beach Films. Turtletaub agreed to finance SherryBaby at roughly $2 million.

With a 25-day shooting schedule kicking off in May 2005, SherryBaby was filmed entirely in suburban New Jersey. Collyer stated, “It all takes place in a very middle-class milieu. That was actually very important to me, to place the story in a suburban context. I wanted to explore more what happens to the family that leads people to make these sort of choices.” The filmmaker’s old neighborhood of Mountainside was the site of Sherry’s brother and sister-in-law’s home. Collyer mused, “I always had a love-hate relationship about having grown up in such a white-bread sort of environment. The thing about shooting where I grew up, I think it was my way to make peace with it once and for all.”

Coming less peacefully for Collyer would be getting along with Maggie Gyllenhaal. “We would have differences of opinion quite a bit. Sometimes she would pick on me so I would make her mad on purpose, too. It sounds so premeditated, but we did have differences of opinion about the work sometimes and sometimes she would win and sometimes I would. There was a lot of battling over the little girl that plays Sherry’s daughter. She didn’t want me to direct her; she knew best, everything about the girl. But that was her being Sherry in the most classic form, because that’s Sherry’s conflict. She’s the child’s mother and nobody else should tell the child what to do.” Collyer added, “I think all directors and actors, when there’s material that’s dramatic, maybe even with comedies, if you’re taking your job seriously, there’s going to be conflict. I think it’s natural. It’s sort of built into the relationship.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal later admitted, “When you’re the lead in a movie, when you’re in every moment of the movie, it’s hard not to live it. We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work. I do better in that kind of work.” She added, “So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn’t experience them that way. Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t really let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished filming. And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.”

Critics posted rave reviews. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “What screenwriters call the arc of the story is visible from the outset, and some of the scenes in Sherrybaby have a familiar look and feel. But what distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing — which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats — and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “There’s a schematic, workshopped quality to Collyer’s script, detailing the intertwined setbacks and small triumphs in one woman’s struggle to recover a life for herself. Yet the film works. It doesn’t go soft or inspirational in its later stages, when most films would. It doesn’t pump up the redemption or the melodrama.” Dennis Harvey, Variety: “Gyllenhaal, in her most substantial role since Secretary, does a fine, unshowy job of lining Sherry’s faults without alienating the viewer or pleading for sympathy.”

In January 2006, SherryBaby screened at the Sundance Film Festival. In May, it was announced that Netflix had acquired North American distribution rights under their Red Envelope Entertainment banner. The Silicon Valley based distributor has picked up a number of low budget films on the bet that one — like Capturing the Friedmans (2003) — will hit with audiences. SherryBaby would not be one of those sleepers. Opening September 2006 in the United States, it grossed only $199,176 domestically and $423,630 overseas. But Laurie Collyer summed up the experience by admitting, “I really didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t expect that it would get bought. It was just a lot of hope: I hoped that it would make the producer’s money back; I hoped that people would like it; and I hoped that Maggie would feel good about having done it. All those hopes have been realized, and then some.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Director Shows You Can Go Home Again” By Anita Gates. The New York Times, 27 August 2006

“indieWIRE Interview: Laurie Collyer, director of Sherrybaby” By Brian Brooks. indieWIRE, 7 September 2006

“Hollywood Loves You, Baby” By Daniel Robert Epstein. Film Stew, 19 January 2007

“Second Chances” By Jason Guerrasio. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

“Interview: Laurie Collyer” By Ric Gentry. Post Script, Fall 2007

“Maggie Gyllenhaal” By Tim Blanks. Interview, May 2008

“Interview Laurie Collyer, Director SherryBaby” By Sheila Roberts, MoviesOnline

The Savages (2007)
Written by Tamara Jenkins
Directed by Tamara Jenkins
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Ad Hominem/ Cooper’s Town Productions/ Lone Star Film Group/ Fox Searchlight
MPAA rating: “R for some sexuality and language”
Running time: 113 minutes

Should I Care?
In Slums of Beverly Hills — the feature film writing and directing debut of Tamara Jenkins — Marisa Tomei’s character is introduced wandering down a road late at night, naked, as someone who’d sprung herself from a mental facility might do. In The Savages, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) has an even more disturbing introduction, or for anyone who came in late, one of the characters later exclaims that “death is gaseous and gruesome and it’s filled with shit and piss and rotten stink!” Jenkins’ second feature — a sad but inherently funny film — veers into some hard truths about aging parents and their legacy: the relationship between their equally dysfunctional offspring. It’s carried off imperfectly and is not an always easy film to watch, but is as nuanced and profound a statement about aging as your likely to see made today.

Like Slums of Beverly Hills, The Savages is uncompromising. Its view of family dysfunction — with little regard for the comfort level of the audience — knocked me out of the truck a few times. The shock value wears off on a second viewing, when the performances and the humanity of Jenkins’ writing reveal themselves with greater clarity. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character seems to loiter through much of the story, but where the film really takes off is with Laura Linney, given her most beautifully fucked up and neurotic character since You Can Count On Me (2000). Childless and barely able to take care of a ficus, a dying father provides her character with the excuse to pull herself together. The script is edgy, surgical in its cutting insight and has the balls to deal out loud with its subject matter: we Americans are not going to live forever.

So, What’s This About?
Living in the retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) crudely rebels against the caregiver (David Zayas) hired by the family of Lenny’s live-in girlfriend the only way he has left. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a New York City temp seeking a grant to finish her latest play, “inspired by the work of Jean Genet, the cartoons of Lynda Barry and the family dramas of Eugene O’Neill”. She gets the call relaying her father’s erratic behavior. Referring to the incident as an “alarm” rather than a “crisis” is Wendy’s brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a PH.d who’s teaching drama in Buffalo and working on a book about Bertholt Brecht. When Lenny’s girlfriend dies, the siblings fly to Arizona to be notified that their father has no legal right to remain in the house.

Uncomfortable at first with the proposition of putting their father in a nursing home, Wendy is left with Lenny — combative, disoriented and unable to take care of himself — while Jon secures him a bed at a hospice in Buffalo. Under the impression he’s been taken to a hotel, Lenny does not react well to the news that he’s actually in a nursing home. Wendy sets her sights on upgrading Lenny to a senior living facility, but Jon accuses his sister of caring more about absolving her own guilt than helping their dad. Working through some depression and a breakup with his Polish professor girlfriend (Cara Seymour), Jon invites Wendy to stay with him Buffalo until their father gets settled. Helping her adjust is Jimmy (Gbenga Akinnagbe), a Nigerian orderly with acute observations about life and death.

Who Made It?
Tamara Jenkins grew up in Philadelphia. Her father would receive custody of Jenkins and her three brothers and move them around the low rent areas of Beverly Hills, an experience that the filmmaker would chronicle in her feature writing and directing debut. Jenkins ended up in New York’s East Village to pursue a career in performance art. Transitioning into film, she enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Her black & white short Fugitive Love (1991) was so well received that it screened at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Independent TV Service commissioned a black & white short from Jenkins; titled Family Remains (1993) it won a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Short Filmmaking at Sundance in 1994. This earned Jenkins an invitation to the Sundance Institute, where she developed Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) with the support of Robert Redford. Alan Arkin and Natasha Lyonne starred in the dysfunctional family comedy.

Producer Ted Hope — co-founder of New York indie film company Good Machine — signed Jenkins to a blind deal. Under conditions her script be contemporary and be considered a comedy, Jenkins took some elements from her life — a father suffering dementia, a nursing home in the East Village — and wrote The Savages. She arrived on Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the leads, but when Good Machine was sold to Universal and rebranded Focus Features, the studio felt that neither Linney or Hoffman were big enough names. Hope agreed to develop The Savages at This Is That Productions, the company he’d built with former Good Machine execs Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman. Fred and Erica Westheimer of Lone Star Film Group agreed to split the roughly $8 million budget with Fox Searchlight and Jenkins’ sophomore feature went on to become one the most critically acclaimed films of 2007.

How’d They Do It?
After spending at least two years adapting Diane Arbus: A Biography — a project that was scuttled when the Arbus estate refused to license the artist’s photographs for a movie — Tamara Jenkins went into business with the prestigious Ted Hope. His batting record as a film producer featured 23 entries in the Sundance Film Festival, including The Wedding Banquet (1993), The Brothers McMullen (1995), Walking and Talking (1996), In the Bedroom (2001) and American Splendor (2003). In 2002, Hope sold the company — Good Machine — that had co-produced most of those films to Universal Pictures, where it was renamed Focus Features. Former Good Machine executives Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman would later join Hope to launch This Is That Productions in New York. Their first two movies were the critically acclaimed 21 Grams (2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

Jenkins recalled of Hope, “He created this environment where I had this blind deal through some discretionary money that he had via Focus Features, and a blind deal means that you don’t have to tell the financier what you’re writing about. It’s blind, essentially, but the person who gave us the deal, the people at Focus, said, ‘There’s only two stipulations: one, that it’s a contemporary story, so it can’t be a period piece, and two, that it’s funny.’ Then I said, ‘Oh, you mean like it’s a comedy?’ and he said, ‘No, it doesn’t have to be a straight comedy but there has to be humor in it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Phew!’ I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. I knew the material that I was approaching, but I was grateful that it wasn’t a comedy with a capital C.”

As with Slums of Beverly Hills, Jenkins’ personal life began to inform her script. “I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person.” She continued, “And then around me, around my friends, it’s starting to happen — we’re all in our mid-40s, in some cases older, and they’re starting to deal with their parents becoming less well, and elder-care things. So all those things were just percolating, and they all just started pushing me in this direction. And I was very interested in writing about grown-up siblings, so it just started mushing into this idea.”

Once Jenkins struck the idea for her sophomore feature film, she invited Ted Hope to hear her perform in a spoken word series at The Moth, a theater in Gramercy Park. Hope remembered, “At the performance, Tamara told the story of taking her dad who was suffering from dementia on an airplane cross-country. She had the audience in hysterics. It was incredibly moving and heartfelt, and it had these real characters that were unique and fascinating to watch.” Anne Carey added, “Tamara is somebody who always finds either the funny sadness or the sad funniness in situations. In this story, you feel like you’re parting the curtains and getting an incredibly intimate look into a private world. It’s a heartbreaking world, yet the movie is also incredibly funny and hopeful. It’s about two people who didn’t even think they really had a family coming to understand the importance of family.”

Jenkins met with Philip Seymour Hoffman in New York and flew to Colorado — where Laura Linney was living — to get their commitment to play the Savages, but couldn’t get Focus Features CEO James Schamus to sign off the casting. Jenkins recalled, “And when I finally hunkered down and said, ‘I think these guys are great,’ then I met Laura individually and I met Phil, and I went back, and after other discussions about other actors, and meetings, and going through the chain of the process, I at one point just came back and said, ‘These guys are great.’ And they said, ‘Well, if that’s the decision, then we should let you go.’ But they were kind enough to let me go with the material. They didn’t put it in a vault and say ‘Too bad!’” She added, “Their foreign sales were a factor, meaning stars have to have a certain price on their head in European territories, or something? But really, I don’t know. It was mysterious to me.”

“So then I went knocking on other people’s doors for money, and it did not come easily. It’s not a movie that you can pitch well, frankly. Financiers are risk-averse. They’re scared, and the film was dealing with a subject matter that people don’t want to deal with anyway.” One person open to dealing with The Savages was producer Fred Westheimer, who’d spent 35 years as an agent at William Morris, representing John Travolta and Candice Bergen for a time before heading WMA’s motion picture talent for the last six years of his tenure. Westheimer departed the talent agency in 2005 to form Lone Star Film Group, an independent film financier funded by private equity and based in Beverly Hills. To head production, he turned to his 32-year-old daughter Erica Westheimer, who’d spent ten years working in the New York film industry, first as a costumer, later as Laura Linney’s personal assistant.

Jenkins was in touch with producer Jim Burke, her husband Jim Taylor’s & Alexander Payne’s business partner in Ad Hominem. A fan of the script, Burke kept Jenkins’ spirits up via email while she and Ted Hope & Anne Carey struggled to get The Savages financed. Of Burke, Taylor & Payne, Jenkins mused, “I felt like they were my male back-up singers. They were my guardian angels, they were just this formidable group of men that were standing behind it. Granted, one of them happened to be my husband, but hopefully, people would take their support seriously despite the nepotistic set-up. They kind of came on board that way, and obviously watched various cuts of the movie and threw in their two cents and stuff, but it was kind of guardianship.” With Taylor, Payne & Burke involved, Lone Star agreed to finance half of the roughly $8 million budget. In January 2006, Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice agreed to put up the other half.

Explaining what attracted her to The Savages, Laura Linney stated, “What I like about it is its very odd, eccentric sense of humor, and the fact that it’s these three people in this situation. Subject matter like this could be very sentimentalized and not be good material to be told cinematically. But I loved the script. I know it’s always a good barometer if I’m reading a script and I start working on it as I go along, subconsciously connections are made, ideas are coming. A lot of times scripts don’t give you that and you really have to work hard to create something. This just sort of lifted right off the page.” She added, “I think if you scratch the surface on all good drama it’s either about family, sex or religion. Any one you scratch it’s going to be about one of those three topics. They’re sort of intertwined, you can’t really get away from any of them. I think we’re all a little self-obsessed at the moment, everybody’s looking inward at who we are and why we are, and that tends to lead back to the family.”

Joining Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be stage, TV and film veteran Philip Bosco. Jenkins revealed, “My casting director, Jeanne McCarthy, said, ‘What about Phil Bosco?’ and I said, ‘Oh, he’s that guy who does all that pshaw and he always plays these well-heeled patriarchs and lawyers and stuff. He’s too fancy!’ That was my fear and directors can be really stupid and literal and forget the people are actually actors and just because he plays well-heeled judges, that doesn’t mean that’s all he’s able to do, so we actually auditioned him. He came into the room and read. I was very anxious because it was very important to me that whoever played the part, that the character was not sentimentalized, that there wasn’t that, I kept saying, ‘I don’t want the old bastard with the twinkle in his eye. I don’t want the twinkle.’ I’m saying this to my casting director Jeannie and being anxious that I don’t want him to turn into that cliché of the old codger with that twinkle thing.”

Three months after being greenlit by Fox Searchlight, a 30-day shooting schedule was underway in New York. Jenkins exclaimed, “We were very lucky — it snowed in April in front of the nursing home in Buffalo! So we managed to have a winter movie in April and it worked out okay. The 30-day aspect of it wasn’t fun. Five more days would have made life easier. But the adrenaline can be kind of great.” She added, “As much as I can complain and wish I had more time, there’s something about that capturing of life, and that’s the most important thing — that sort of lived-in feeling among these characters, a messy, imperfect aliveness. Just having it feel alive.”  The Hudson Senior Residence in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Westchester Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing in Mount Vernon and the Concord Division of Staten Island University hospital and the St Agnes Hospital in White Plains were used as locations.

The Savages would screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 and fests in Toronto and Austin in the fall before opening November 2007 in the United States. Critics framed it with the best films of the year. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “For a tender, uncommonly perceptive look at sibling relationships and a profound meditation on death and the meaning we draw from experience, The Savages is singularly funny and seriously moving.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Jenkins’ superlative work proves her first film was no fluke; let’s hope it doesn’t take another nine years to hear from her again.” Ella Taylor, The Village Voice: “Jenkins is no sentimentalist, and she won’t patronize her benighted losers or her audience with epiphanies, apologies, or blinding insights. Yet the movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo’s liberation.”

A wash at the box office with $6.6 million in the United States and $4 million overseas, The Savages would be nominated for two Academy Awards, Laura Linney (Best Actress) and Tamara Jenkins (Best Original Screenplay). While its heavy subject matter had challenged financiers, for Jenkins, the film was about the broken dynamic between Wendy and Jon. “A friend of mine remarked that you just don’t see male-female intimacy that isn’t sexualized. But I was really interested in sibling relationships. I have three brothers in real life. It’s a strange thing to be siblings, to grow up under the exact same circumstances and adapt in completely opposite ways. Wendy is so emotive and reactive, and Jon is this brutal rationalist. It’s like some strange, humanist buddy picture, but it’s brother and sister, and they’re dealing with putting their father in a nursing home, instead of robbing a bank.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Lone Star makes a leap” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 21 November 2005

The Savages — Production Notes

“Unblinking Look at Death Without Nobility” By Dennis Lim. The New York Times, 4 November 2007

“Exclusive Interview: The Savages’ Tamara Jenkins” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 26 November 2007

“Tamara Jenkins” By Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club, 29 November 2007

“Family Matters” By Katrina Onstad. CBC News, 20 December 2007

“Senior Moments” By Ray Pride. FilmMaker, 8 February 2008

“Giving The Savages a touch of class” By Amber Wilkinson. Eye For Film

2 Days in Paris (2007)
Written by Julie Delpy
Directed by Julie Delpy
Produced by Tempête Sous un Crâne/ Polaris Films/ 3L Filmproduktion/ Rezo Films
MPAA rating: “R for sexual content, some nudity and language”
Running time: 96 minutes

Should I Care?
As someone who vaguely admires the walking and talking travelogues Julie Delpy starred in with Ethan Hawke for director Richard Linklater — Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) — it took me weeks to get around to watching Delpy’s feature film directing debut 2 Days in Paris, which on appearance, looked like a fairly flaccid copy. But what Delpy divines from a somewhat used and abused premise not only kept me entertained, but impressed the hell out of me. Unlike the Before films — or Linklater’s oeuvre following Dazed and Confused — Delpy’s relationship comedy not only maintains a coherent point of view throughout, but introduces a filmmaker with both a funny bone and balls, firing some hilarious flak at both her motherland and her adopted country in the twilight of the Bush Years.

2 Days in Paris bears one mark of a terrific movie: Delpy makes it all look easy. Plugging friends and family into roles and shooting largely at her parent’s home in Paris, there’s a handmade, organic texture that was mandated by the budget, but in a welcome surprise, the movie is also a laugh riot. Delpy has a terrific ear for the way heated conversations play out, beginning innocuously, then growing more contentious, until your taxi driver is calling you a cunt. Goldberg & Delpy have chemistry that would have been palpable in Iowa, but in Paris, their relationship is stuffed in a pressure cooker. Shot in digital high-def, 2 Days in Paris doesn’t look a penny more than it cost, but that home movie vibe enhances the edginess and unadulterated passion Delpy seems to have been after. Bravo.

So, What’s This About?
A New York couple returns from a Venetian getaway to pick up the woman’s cat and visit her family and friends in Paris before flying home. Marion (Julie Delpy) is a photographer, gutsy and open minded, qualities that have enabled her to co-exist with Jack (Adam Goldberg), an interior designer with neuroses about everything from food to mold to public transit. Barely able to comprehend French, he’s introduced to Marion’s family. Her dramatic mother (Marie Pillet) has overfed Marion’s cat, prompting fears the airline will deny the beloved pet passage in the cabin. Marion’s father (Albert Delpy) takes pleasure in keying cars that park too close to the sidewalk and uses his ribald sense of humor to make Jack uncomfortable.

Marion’s sister (Alexia Landeau) is a special education teacher who hates kids; she sides with Jack in disgust over Marion sharing nude photos of her boyfriend with the family. Jack expresses a desire to visit the Catacombs — which end up being closed — and Jim Morrison’s gravesite, even though he doesn’t really like The Doors. Whether on the sidewalk or at a party, the morose Jack endures being introduced to one amorous ex-boyfriend of Marion’s after another. Bewildered by French customs and language, he grows suspicious of his girlfriend’s fidelity. Meanwhile, Marion begins to realize how little she knows about her boyfriend of two years and questions whether she can continue to put up with his act.

Who Made It?
Julie Delpy — the only child of actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet — grew up in Paris, where she made her acting debut at the age of 5. She was 14 when cast in a movie (Jean-Luc Godard’s Detective) and received a César nomination for her work in Bertrand Tavernier’s Béatrice at age 18. Delpy moved to the United States in 1989 to study film and screenwriting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She won wide acclaim for her role as a Nazi teenager in Europa Europa (1990) and went on to star in White (1994) and Before Sunrise (1995). After graduating college in 1993, Delpy moved to Los Angeles and between acting jobs, wrote and directed three short films over the next decade. She earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing Before Sunset (2004) with Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke.

Delpy dubbed her production company Tempête Sous un Crâne, wrote several unproduced scripts over the years and had ideas for many more. One was about a French/American couple and their 48-hour nightmare visit to Paris. A producer named Christophe Mazodier — who Delpy was working with on a movie that never came together — liked the idea. With his French based Polaris Films supporting her, Delpy was finally able to land financing from Germany’s 3L Filmproduktion and France’s Rezo Films, who agreed to split the roughly $2.5 million budget for Delpy to make her feature film directing debut. Family and friends comprised much of the cast and 2 Days in Paris was such a crowd pleaser at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2007 that it quickly sold to exhibitors in over 40 territories.

How’d They Do It?
Julie Delpy hit upon the idea for what became her feature film directing debut some time before she helped author Before Sunset. “I thought about it for the first time in 2001, and I thought it would be funny to have a movie about a relationship over 48 hours in Paris that falls apart. An American guy with a lot of neuroses, and a fearless French woman who doesn’t have any neuroses. I actually originally started writing a short story or a novel, but I can’t write novels, I’m not capable of doing it. It always ends up that I start doing the dialogue, and as it goes along I transfer it from Word to Final Draft and it turns into a screenplay. Then Richard Linklater called me for writing Before Sunset, so I was like, ‘OK, forget that one! Why don’t we set Before Sunset in Paris?’ They were like, ‘OK, let’s do that.’”

Five years later, the actress mentioned the idea to producer Christophe Mazodier, who was working with Delpy on another project. The founder of Polaris Film Production (with Thierry Potok and Hubert Toint) recalled, “She talked to me about the story of 2 Days in Paris, which attracted my interest right away. In January 2006, she asked me to help her find a team for a challenging shoot with a very small budget, but I thought it a pity to make the film in this way and I suggested to her that I’d take care of it. We barely had 20 pages of dialogue, but Julie wrote the rest very quickly, even if there were still gaps. The aim was to leave enough room for improvisation on the set and especially to go very quickly while keeping our editorial freedom, not having to look at all costs for television backing.”

Mazodier and Delpy arrived on a sum of €1.7 million (roughly $2.5 million USD) needed to produce the film they had in mind. The producer revealed, “2 Days in Paris was based on a clear and very personal idea of Julie’s. So we needed to develop trust in its ability to attract audiences. The Anglo-Saxon, German or European audiences had no problem in imagining that, probably because they’re more receptive to films like Before Sunset and Before Sunrise. But the French still see Julie as the young 16 year-old actress of Tavernier and investors traditionally like very written scripts, where every comma is thought out, very far from Julie’s conceptual approach. Our approach is certainly a little unsettling for the French market because we said we would shoot the film in June 2006 with or without backing.”

Adam Goldberg — the energetic character actor best known as Mellish from Saving Private Ryan — had been approached by Delpy years ago with the prospect of playing Jack. “I used to read scripts of hers, and it always seemed nuts to me that she wasn’t directing. I thought we had a very strange and funny dynamic, and I definitely liked the idea of at least attempting to put that on film.” Delpy enthused, “I knew him for a long time and I always thought he’d be great as a lead — an offbeat romantic lead. But he’d never had that chance because maybe he’s a different kind of personality that people didn’t dare to hire him to play a whole film.” She added, “The sadder and more angry he looks, the funnier he is. There were times he didn’t even want to be funny but he just had that quality.”

In February 2006, Germany’s 3L Filmproduktion and France’s Rezo Films stepped up to finance 2 Days in Paris. Delpy admitted, “The biggest stress was not getting the money we thought we were going to get. The producer thought we were going to get money from the French government; and then he thought we were going to get money from Paris, because Paris gives people money when they shoot in the city; then we thought we were going to get money from a French-German fund, but we didn’t get it because some director didn’t like the screenplay and fought against it, like, violently — and gave the money to his best friend! So we got no help whatsoever, and we made the film with very little money.” With filming already delayed one week while Adam Goldberg wrapped a role in Deja Vu, cameras rolled in June 2006 only 12 hours after the actor landed in Paris.

Working with French cinematographer Lubomir Bakchev and shooting in digital high definition using the Sony HDW-750 camera, Delpy’s visual palette was dictated by a 20-day schedule. “I think the fact that we didn’t have too much money to do those wonderful shots of Paris — we were shooting in HD and wide shots don’t look that great in HD. Daytime in Paris is not that pretty in HD.” She added, “It was a choice but it was also because I had no choice. I would have loved to have been able to do a few shots in 35mm but we didn’t have the money to do that. We limited it but I think it works for the film in the way that I played with it — your limitations can be a strength, in a way. I like that look. One of my favorite movies is Fat City, which is all done with long lenses. I love those long-lens things where things are blurry in the background and only the people are in focus.”

With no one to compose a musical score, Delpy — who wrote and produced a well received, self-titled folk/pop album in 2003 — considered not using any music. “My boyfriend is a composer, Marc Streitenfeld, and he was watching the film with me and I asked if he thought it was missing music and he thought it was, so I went to my room and I have an entire file in my computer of film music that I wrote. It’s themes and other little odd bits that I wrote for fun. So I picked one and it worked, I rearranged another and wrote something new for the ‘Jealously Theme’. I think the music actually adds comedy to the film, which I think is great.” She added, “It helped a lot that I was editing the film in my house, so I could just go to my room and write it out, then put it into the film. Some worked and some didn’t. But the processes felt quite organic.”

Christophe Mazodier stated, “We never doubted that the film would interest the whole world, but we very quickly got confirmation of that at Cannes 2006 when the title was pre-sold to Japan. The script had the potential to do really well abroad because it had, with a lot of humor and without taking itself seriously, everything that foreigners think about the French. And it wasn’t only one-sided because the Americans aren’t spared either. It’s a fake romantic comedy.” A screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2007 was so well received that Rezo Films successfully sold 2 Days in Paris to exhibitors in 40 territories. Delpy mused, “Maybe the appeal is the dysfunction of it. Maybe every family is dysfunctional and that’s the only thing in common throughout the world.”

Opening May 2007 in Germany and Austria, August 2007 in the United States, the U.K. and Canada, the fake romantic comedy was well reviewed by critics. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “2 Days in Paris is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early ’90s, she’s revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Delpy in fact has made a smart film with an edge to it; her Jack and Marion reveal things about themselves they never thought they’d tell anybody, and we wonder why they ever went out on a second date.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “2 Days in Paris provides a smart and funny respite from most of what passes for romantic comedy these days.”

Delpy’s directorial debut quietly grossed $4.4 million in the United States and $15.2 million overseas. The actress/ writer/ producer/ director/ composer set 2 Days in Paris apart from her other work by revealing, “A friend of mine suggested that I should try to make something that might seem from afar to be like Before Sunset since I had just had some success with that, and then do something totally different in tone and style. Apart from Paris and a French-American couple, there is nothing in it that resembles that film. It is more of a comedy than a romantic movie while Before Sunset was more of a romantic movie — it is light but it is not a comedy. This one is more of a straightforward comedy. I love Before Sunset, don’t get me wrong, but it is just a different film. I think it turns out to be kind of a romantic film in the end but throughout the film, it is more harsh and funny with a twisted side.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Christophe Mazodier: Producer” By Fabien Lemercier. CineEuropa, 9 July 2007

“A French Actress’s Life on Screen. Kind Of” By Kristin Hohenadel. The New York Times, 5 August 2007

“Interview: Julie Delpy” By Benjamin Crossley-Marra. IonCinema.com, 6 August 2007

“2 Days In Paris Director Julie Delpy” By Erica Abel. indieWIRE, 9 August 2007

“Julie Delpy, 2 Days In Paris” By Nick Dawson. FilmMaker Magazine, 10 August 2007

“Interview: 20 Minutes In Julie Delpy’s Head” By Peter Sobczynski. efilmcritic.com, 29 August 2007

“Two Days In Paris: Julie Delpy Interview” By Ron Carnevale. indieLondon

Coraline (2009)
Screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Henry Selick
Produced by Pandemonium/ Laika Entertainment
Running time: 100 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) relocates from Pontiac, Michigan to the overcast Ashland, Oregon. While her parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman) write a gardening catalog, Coraline sets out to explore the Pink Palace Apartments, a 150-year old mansion that’s been rented out to three tenants. These include retired vaudevillians Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French) and a Russian acrobat named Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane). Coraline also meets the landlord’s grandson, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) whose great aunt disappeared in the house years ago. Wybie gives Coraline a doll that looks eerily like her.

Wakened at night by Mr. Bobinsky’s performing mice, Coraline follows them through a door to an alternate reality, where her “Other Mother” (Teri Hatcher again) offers Coraline everything she could possibly want: delicious food, nice clothes, a lavish room, wondrous gardens. She discovers a mangy black cat (Keith David) from home has the power of speech in this reality. Coraline’s Other Mother invites her to stay in this perfect world forever, if she’ll permit buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Trapped in a mirror when she refuses, Coraline meets the souls of other lost children and learns that her Other Mother is actually a creature who abducts and once she grows bored with them, devours children.

Who Made It?
Neil Gaiman — celebrated author of the DC Comics epic The Sandman and the novel Stardust – had his daughter to thank for planting the seeds of Coraline, written over a decade and published to great acclaim as a novella in 2002. Gaiman was a fan of Henry Selick, the stop-motion maestro behind The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and sent Selick a manuscript as early as 2000. Optioning the film rights for Selick was Bill Mechanic, former chairman of Fox and founder of the production company Pandemonium. Contractually prohibited from producing animated films by Disney — the studio where Mechanic had a deal — Coraline was initially developed as a live action feature, to no avail.

In May 2004, Selick accepted a job as supervising director with Vinton Studios, a Portland based animation company which found Coraline a little too dark for its tastes. But months later, Nike co-founder Phil Knight would move from an investor in Vinton Studios to buying the company outright and rebranding it as Laika Entertainment. Looking to make a move into feature films, Knight rolled the dice on Selick and Coraline with a production budget of between $60 and $70 million. The first stop-motion animated film shot in 3D, Coraline spent 18 months being meticulously filmed on 52 sets at Laika’s studio in Portland before opening to wide acclaim in February 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Neil Gaiman traced the origins of Coraline back to the unusual demand of a key demographic: his daughter. “It began in about 1989, 1990, somewhere around there. My daughter, Holly, would come home from kindergarten — she’d be about four or five years old — and she would climb on my lap because I would be sitting in my office writing and she would dictate stories and they were terrifying. They’d be about little girls coming home and finding out the evil witches were now impersonating their mothers. Normally the girls would then get locked in cellars and they would have to escape and try and find their real mother with the witches coming after them.”

Gaiman continued, “I thought I’ll go and find her some stories like this to read to her and nobody seemed to be writing any. I couldn’t find any so I thought, ‘I’ll write her one. I’ll write a story that Holly would like.’ And that was where it began. That really was the genesis. I sat down and I started writing Coraline, which was a name that I think I took from a typo. I’d been writing a letter to a friend called Caroline and I transposed.” Gaiman found additional inspiration from Victorian Era author Lucy Clifford, whose 1882 short story The New Mother concerned two misbehaving children whose mother is replaced by one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.

Gaiman revealed, “I finished the first draft nine years ago in 2000 and I gave it to my agent and said: ‘Please give this to Henry Selick,’ because I had seen The Nightmare Before Christmas and even though it was called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas I was smart enough to understand that the main man was Henry Selick. I then saw James and the Giant Peach and thought Henry had something really interesting. Especially as a stop-motion director he was just beyond compare. He’s the best there is. I loved the fact that he seemed to understand that sometimes you can show sometimes bravery shines best in dark places.”

Published in 2002, Coraline was awarded that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Selick took the property to producer Bill Mechanic, who’d founded Pandemonium after being forced out as chairman of 20th Century Fox, where Mechanic had championed Fight Club, X-Men and Ice Age. Working on an adaptation, Selick resisted developing the material as a live action film, feeling there had been too many talking critter movies and that bringing Gaiman’s dark faerie tale to life through animation might make it less disturbing for younger audiences. But Mechanic’s deal with Disney prohibited him from making animated features.

Selick recalled, “And Bill liked it, but for about two years we had to pretend it was a live action film. I even met with Michelle Pfeiffer, to be possibly in the role of the Mothers, but she didn’t really want to have any buttons on her eyes. And I said, ‘But that’s, kinda the point of the … ‘ Anyway, that was the early days. We kinda hit a dead end. We weren’t going to get to make the film. A scary film for children — it wasn’t going to happen.” Selick moved on to animate sea creatures for the Wes Anderson comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and in May 2004, accepted an offer from Vinton Studios, the Portland based animation unit behind the California Raisins ad campaign and the Fox series The PJs.

Founded by stop-animation pioneer Will Vinton — who’d coined the term Claymation and supervised the stop-motion effects in Return To Oz (1985) — the studio was looking to land financing for animated features that might compete with Pixar. “They were growing, transforming. They had an idea for a short film, Moongirl, and they asked if I’d direct it, and flesh it out. And I said that I was only going to move up there from California if I could bring Coraline with me. And they said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I moved up there, did this short for them, Moongirl, and then said, ‘Well, it’s time to do Coraline.’ And at that time, the guy in charge said, ‘Well, actually, it’s much too dark’, and what changed was, Travis Knight.”

Travis Knight is son of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike. After a short-lived career as “Chilly Tee”, a Portland rapper in the early 1990s, Travis Knight found his niche as a stop-motion animator at Vinton Studios. After The PJs was canceled and advertising jobs dried up, his father invested in the studio. In September 2003, Phil Knight bought the company, naming Nike executive Dave Wahl CEO and hiring Selick as supervising animation director. Renaming the operation Laika Entertainment, Knight shifted the studio’s primary focus from commercials to feature films. One year later, it was announced that Laika would bankroll Coraline, with Henry Selick adapting a script and directing. Focus Features — the specialty film division of Universal Pictures — acquired worldwide distribution rights.

In adapting Gaiman’s novella, Selick revealed, “I added a character, this neighbor kid Wybie. I set it in the U.S., because I wasn’t as comfortable with British dialogue. And then, over the years that it took to get this thing off the ground, other elements of the story took on a life of their own. I guess the main thing is there’s a delicacy, a subtlety, that Neil can really exploit with his beautiful writing that can’t all get on the screen. You can go and describe the Other Mother and say that her teeth were just a tiny bit longer, her nails a tiny bit more red, but I had to go bigger and broader at times. I also had to dial back the darkness. I didn’t want to go to the darkest tones of the novel quite so soon. I wanted to go lighter and then descend into it.”

One concept that was floated was to open Coraline with computer-generated animation and transition into stop-motion when the story shifted into the parallel universe. Selick recalled, “It was a nice theory, we actually did a test, but putting the two side by side, it just didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have much to say, you know, crucial time we’re on the razor’s edge: which way do we go, CG or stop-motion? Travis Knight, who’s one of the lead animators, weighed in with his important vote and said, well, if he’s going to animate on one feature, he wanted to do stop-motion, so I owe him a huge debt. We went the right way. Travis had a lot to do with that.” Coraline commenced what became an 18-month shoot May 2006 at the Laika studio in Portland.

According to Selick, 90 percent of the film was done practical, without using CG imagery. “Coraline is about seven inches tall as a puppet. There’s an invisible line in her face that we’ve painted out, between her upper face and lower face. The animation of her face is done through replacement animation, just like Jack Skellington, Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach, the old Pillsbury Doughboy. Martin Meunier — very talented artist/ fabrication person I’ve worked with — came up with a new system using rapid proto machines to build on handmade sculpts of her face and give her an ever greater range of expressiveness. Georgina Hayns — or George as we call her — head of puppet fabrication builds these puppets. The armature underneath metal skeleton was by Merri Cheney, who I’ve worked with for over 20 years.”

Critics generally loved the film. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline’s dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Coraline may not be for all tastes and it’s certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick’s animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.”

Opening February 2009 in the United States, Coraline earned $75.2 million domestically and added $46.3 million in theaters overseas. It also won the enthusiastic support of Neil Gaiman. “It’s what I hoped Henry would make, which is Henry’s film. It’s very much a film of my book and it hits all the beats of the book and it expands a little bit because it’s not a very big book. But he instilled it with Henry’s wonderful imagination and he doesn’t stop anything.” Gaiman added, “It’s so strange because I think adults have a lot more problems with this kind of story than children do. It’s true for the book. It’s always adults that say to me that they finish reading the book at three o’clock in the morning and go around the house turning on all the lights. I never get that from the kids.”

Should I Care?
Selick is an animation connoisseur and seems to understand that the state of the art only moves as far as animators are willing to challenge their audience. Earlier in his career, Selick was a storyboard artist for Disney and worked on Return To Oz, a dark, exquisitely made fable that critics disparaged for being too scary for kids(!) This as if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty — to name a few — were a trip to McDonald’s. With Neil Gaiman’s novella as a road map, Henry Selick has crafted his finest work yet. Less amusing than The Nightmare Before Christmas, the absence of musical numbers allows Selick and his team to descend into the imagination and angst of a child more vividly than any American animated film I can recall with the exception of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland.

Gaiman’s source material — liberally reworked by Selick — is a handsomely crafted narrative; there’s not a single dopey character or glib reference to be found here. The script doesn’t call for any cheap scares, but like Return To Oz, is a perilous and potent trip to the dark side. I don’t have any funny glasses and can’t comment about the film’s 3D attributes, but there’s no question that the handcrafted, slightly wonky effect of stop-motion animation — whether used in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or Corpse Bride (2005) — is a shot into the nerve center of the brain. Bruno Coulais composed a delightfully spooky score, while alt rock kings They Might Be Giants — who composed four demos, only one of which Selick ended up being able to use — contribute a cool song.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Neil Gaiman Exclusive Interview — Coraline” By Matt Goldberg. Collider.com, 26 January 2009

“Coraline director Henry Selick on how not to mess up Neil Gaiman” By Ian Spelling. SciFi Wire, 26 January 2009

“Laika hangs dreams on Coraline” By Amy Reifenrath. Oregon Live, 4 February 2009

“Director Henry Selick on Coraline” By Debra Kaufman. Studio Daily, 6 February 2009

“Nike father-son duo lace up Coraline” By Peter Debruge. Variety, 6 February 2009

“Exclusive: Henry Selick on Coraline” By Michael Leader. Den of Geek, 7 May 2009

“Neil Gaiman Interview, Coraline” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

Coraline. DVD audio commentary featuring Henry Selick & Bruno Coulais. Universal Home Entertainment (2009)