Lisa Cholodenko on her newly restored HIGH ART: “I wanted it to be deep and real and as dangerous as it should be.”
Beautifully restored by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with the Sundance Institute, Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 lesbian romantic drama High Art is now considered a queer classic, and it is ten times more potent on the big screen. The protagonist is Syd (Radha Mitchell), whose life changes after a chance meeting with her upstairs neighbor, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy). Lucy, a once-celebrated photographer, lives an enthralling life with her drug-addicted German girlfriend, (Patricia Clarkson), that draws Syd in. Before she can catch her breath, Syd discovers dark truths of life on the edge, is forced to confront the price of her professional ambition. We are proud to open the film April 18 at the NoHo.
Cholodenko recently sat for an interview with Gay City News:
Q: The magazine in High Art is called “Frame,” and what I admire about your film is how you frame your characters and your scenes.
A: I was amused by “Frame” as the title for a magazine — the double entendre of the obvious connection to a photography and she is “framing” Lucy and is being “framed” by the artworld.
Q: But you immerse viewers in their world, which frames them. Your gaze frames the characters — shots of Syd in the bathtub, or Lucy behind her camera.
A: In my mind, what was interesting was that it was sexy, and the allure of coming into this world that was forbidden and kind of dangerous but sort of elite. At that time, that heroin chic moment was really glamorized in art and fashion photography. Selling things was commodified. I wanted it to feel you were walking in there and there was something sexy about it.
Q: There is a line in the film when Syd and Lucy are driving upstate — the light “lures you, then it’s gone.” Syd is lured by the bright light that is Lucy. Can you talk about creating the dynamic between these characters?
A: I always like the magic hour, that moment when it is really liminal and in-between. You are right there, and it’s going to go in an instant. I like that reference to the light, and as a filmmaker, that’s kind of obvious. I saw Lucy as someone who is intense and detached, and that is partly because of who she is and the power dynamic between them. She’s unattainable, and she talks about that in her career — that she slipped out and couldn’t go the distance. She went underground. Drug addicts and particularly heroin addicts are like that — intense and they slip out.
Q: Syd is empowered by her relationship with Lucy. Can you discuss that aspect of the film?
A: I see sexuality as fluid, so who one is attracted to can be affected by who you are connecting to intellectually or emotionally or by a power dynamic of what are you going to do for me, or what am I going to do for you? Or you are enamored by that human. It can be unexpected. I never saw Syd’s sexuality as definitive. I didn’t see it as a coming out story. Here is this charismatic, mysterious, talented, sexy, dangerous woman [Lucy] who is fixated on her and that was alluring to Syd. In terms of the contrast with her boyfriend, James, Gabriel Mann is sweet and has effete qualities, and Ally has swagger—I wouldn’t call her butch. But it was who is wearing the pants in a way.
Q: Your films feature themes of a stranger infiltrating a group and finding their identity through interactions and power struggles with others. Why does that cuckoo-in-the-nest theme resonate with you?
A: The disrupter story — isn’t that the fun comedy of manners? I think there is something about the allure of people you don’t know and what you can project onto them. As you get older you probably see more clearly who they are, but people can have a magic when you don’t know them, and they are projecting onto you what you want to see. There’s a dynamic — not necessarily the real deal — but it moves us towards something else we need to be responsive to.
Q: What can you say about the emphasis on and depiction of female pleasure in High Art in particular and your work in general? There were so few films that depicted female pleasure so I’m glad High Art did.
A: It was something I wrote. It was in my mind and own experiences. I wasn’t consciously comparing it to or thinking about where I placed in the chronology of lesbian films. I wanted it to be deep and real and as dangerous as it should be. There weren’t that many films depicting lesbian sex and relationships, and they seemed dated, and were about queerness and coming out. I am not telling that story, per se. I wanted to go into a world that I understand and that I am attracted to.
Q: High Art is a queer classic. What observations do you have about your film being so beloved?
A: It is interesting to watch it. I can see where the culture changed. There is so much cigarette smoking, which is unbelievable to me! We screened a few years ago at Sundance, and during the Q&A, younger women said it doesn’t feel dated to us, but it feels relevant to our lives now. I like that. Whatever it was in the design, acting, casting, or subject that it has a transcendent quality. I worked really hard. It holds up as a human story, and that is what I am most proud of. And if it is a gay classic, that is awesome!
Q: What reflections do you have about the film after all these years? Do you see flaws you want to fix, or marvel at how you got it made?
A: I was joyful to make the film. It was really hard. Were we going to be able to do it at the final hour because of the money? We pulled it together. There are very few scenes that look like we didn’t have enough time, or money, or lighting equipment. That’s not to pat myself on the back. It was restricted what we could do in a low-budget film. Looking at it now, I like how it is scrappy or flawed — that I used non-actors, or the ashtrays were overflowing. I was a student when I made that film. Tami [the cinematographer] could put the camera on her shoulder and we could run down into subway and steal a shot. It was a really different time.
Q: How do you think this film’s critical and commercial success helped your career as a filmmaker?
A: Obviously, you make a film, and it gets distribution and notice, then people notice you. When people asked would I do episodic TV, I raised my hand. I did episodes of “Homicide” and “Six Feet Under.” Meanwhile, Jeff, one of the producers on High Art paid me to keep writing. He produced “Laurel Canyon.” I read [other people’s] scripts, but nothing was compelling. I had it in my head to write my own thing. I was writing it for myself; what do I want to watch? If there is something I want to say, I’d rather do that and write my own script than try to make something fit that is coming my way.
Oscars 2025: The ANORA director advocates for movie theaters, and the Academy honors Robert Laemmle. Plus: Oscar Contest winners.
SECOND PLACE: Joel with 18 correct answers.
TIE for THIRD PLACE: Kelly & Cole with 17 correct answers (plus closest run-time to actual runtime broadcast).
“With a small crew, we were able to work within the ebb and flow of the Camino. We became invisible and nimble, and that allowed us to film the real Camino.” THE WAY, MY WAY opens March 7.
The Way, My Way, which we open March 7 at our Claremont, Santa Monica, and Encino theaters, is the charming and captivating true story of a stubborn, self-centered Australian man who decides to walk the 800 kilometer-long Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route through Spain. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it… but one step at a time, it will change him and his outlook on life forever. Based on Bill Bennett’s best-selling memoir of the same name.
Bennett penned the following about The Way, My Way:
“I really didn’t want to make this film. I didn’t want to make a film about myself; about my failings and vulnerabilities, and hardships which took me right to the brink. Finally I decided to give it a shot – but then I was faced with the question: how do I make a film on the Camino and make it real?
“I decided the only way to tell my story truthfully was to shoot with a very small crew and use the actual pilgrims I’d walked with ten years earlier. Of the twenty speaking parts in the film, only four are professional actors. The rest are pilgrims.
“They proved to be stellar. They set the standard. They held the truth, the authenticity. The professional actors had to step up to the pilgrims’ benchmark. In fact, we all had to, even those of us behind the cameras.
“And with a small crew, we were able to work within the ebb and flow of the Camino. We became invisible and nimble, and that allowed us to film the real Camino.
“The decision to cast the real pilgrims dictated so many other major creative decisions for me as a director. The shooting style, the editing style, the tone of the movie, the staging and blocking of scenes – even what film gear we should use.
“It all had to point towards the authenticity of the Camino experience.
“Now having almost completed post-production, I feel I’ve achieved what I set out to do – to make a truthful film about a man who ultimately undergoes a fundamental shift in character and outlook, through walking the Camino.”
VERMIGLIO filmmaker Maura Delpero on Inside the Arthouse.
The Inside the Arthouse duo Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge recently interviewed Vermiglio filmmaker Maura Delpero. The conversation begins with her description of the movie’s inspiration — a dream and a nighttime visitation from her late father. A prize winner at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, the Hollywood Foreign Press has nominated Vermiglio for Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe, and the Academy shortlisted it for their Best International Feature prize. We are proud to open the film this Friday at the Royal.
Paul Schrader’s moving OH, CANADA, starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Jacob Elordi, opens Friday.
In Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada, which we open Friday at the Monica Film Center, NoHo, and Town Center, Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi play a man at opposite ends of his life, deciding how to live it. Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and Victoria Hill co-star.
Schrader said this about his film:
“When friend and author Russell Banks (Affliction) took ill I was weighing other story possibilities. I realized that mortality should be the subject. Russell had researched and written a book about dying when he was healthy titled, Foregone. He’d wanted to call it Oh, Canada (there was a conflict with Richard Ford’s Canada), and asked if I would use his original title. So Foregone became Oh, Canada.
“Leonard Fife became a successful documentary filmmaker after fleeing to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. Sick and dying in Montreal, he is interviewed by his former students. ‘I made a career out of getting people to tell me the truth,’ he says, ‘Now it’s my turn.'”
“Paul Schrader and Richard Gere, reunited for the first time since 1980’s American Gigolo, are at the peak of their powers.” – Chuck Bowen, Slant
“Energized by the reunion of its director, Paul Schrader, and its star, Richard Gere, in their first collaboration since American Gigolo.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Richard Gere gives his best performance in years.” – Hannah Strong, Little White Lies
“Takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning… to sincerely moving effect.” – Justin Chang, The New Yorker
“My recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.” The New York Times’s Melissa Kirsch on moviegoing in general and ANORA in particular.
“It’s the season when many festival darlings, the films that critics saw and loved in Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto, finally arrive in theaters, and this year, it feels different. More exciting? More like the old days? I’ve been making a concerted effort to actually go and see movies in the movie theater instead of waiting for them to arrive on streaming platforms, and it’s been paying off gloriously.
“The movies I’ve seen recently — “Didi,” “Megalopolis,” “Anora,” “Saturday Night” — have felt urgent and exciting: complicated stories with complicated characters, not a superhero franchise among them. I didn’t love all of these movies equally, but I loved seeing them, loved being in the dark drinking up their writers’ and directors’ idiosyncratic visions. And I loved the intention that led to the experience: I made a decision to see a movie, went to an establishment expressly built for that purpose, sat and paid attention for the length of the film and then, only then, returned to nonmovie life. Contrast that experience with the half-attention I so often pay a movie on a streaming platform, watching it in installments over several nights, maybe on an iPad, maybe while I’m brushing my teeth.
“Each movie I saw in the theater, I talked about afterward, with the friends accompanying me, with colleagues the next day. Some of the movies I’ve streamed — some abandoned before completion — I’ve discussed with no one. As the Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in his wonderful essay “Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?”: “Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation.” I’m willing to wager that no filmmaker ever made a movie hoping or expecting that it would end up beyond the reach of conversation.
“Not every movie you watch has to be a means of connecting with other people, but it could be. Walking out of “Anora” the other night, chatting with friends, comparing the film with the director’s previous ones, I realized how rare the experience of seeing a movie with a group had become for me. Once, it was commonplace, a weekly tradition. Every Sunday evening when I was 14 and 15, my friends Justin and Tracy and I would go with one of our moms (we couldn’t yet drive ourselves) to the SoNo Cinema, an art-house theater in South Norwalk, Conn., where we saw films that would never be shown in our suburb’s mainstream theaters. We saw Hugh Grant in Ken Russell’s horror movie “The Lair of the White Worm.” We saw “Babette’s Feast,” the first Danish film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” After, we’d go out to dinner and discuss what we’d just watched.
“Searching for information about the theater, I found stories about its struggles to stay open over the years, its various fund-raising efforts. “I’m convinced that a lot of the young people we used to draw are raising families now and watching video rental films at home,” the owner told The Times in 1987, the same year we went to SoNo to see the British film “White Mischief,” about the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya. It closed not long after.
“I’ve over-romanticized those early adventures in theatergoing (I’m not the only one — “the movie house equivalent of ‘The Secret Garden,’” Tracy called it when I asked her recently). But the truth is, my friends and I still discuss the movies we saw at SoNo, how they informed our ideas of what life after high school might be like. And while I’m not going to argue that we’re as impressionable in middle age as we were when we’d been alive for barely more than a decade, my recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.”
We are proud to open Anora this Friday at the Glendale, Monica Film Center, and NoHo and November 8 at the Claremont. It is fantastic and even better in a theater.
FOOD AND COUNTRY Director Laura Gabbert: “Ruth [Reichl] and I set out to follow the unfolding stories of innovators in every corner of America experimenting to transcend a broken food system.”
Ruth Reichl—trailblazing New York Times food critic, groundbreaking Gourmet Magazine editor, best-selling memoirist, and, for decades, one of the most influential figures shaping American food culture—grows concerned about the fate of small farmers, ranchers, and chefs as they wrestle with both immediate and systemic challenges as the pandemic takes hold.
In Food and Country, Reichl reaches across political and social divides to discover innovators who are risking it all to survive on the front lines. As one person leads her to the next, she follows the unfolding stories of ranchers in Kansas and Georgia; farmers in Nebraska, Ohio, and the Bronx; a New England fisherman; and maverick chefs on both coasts. As she witnesses them navigate intractable circumstances, Reichl shares pieces of her own life, and, in doing so, begins to take stock of the path she has traveled and the ideals she left behind. Through her eyes, we get to know the humanity and struggle behind the food we eat. As Reichl says: “How we grow and make our food shows us our values– as a nation and as human beings.
Food and Country filmmaker Laura Gabbert will participate in Q&As after the 10/9 and 10/10 screenings at the Laemmle Monica Film Center and Glendale. The regular engagement at the Royal begins on October 11.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
“What drives me as a filmmaker is finding ways to put us inside, to humanize someone else’s experience; in short to connect us. My own instincts lead me back to food stories again and again because they’re a rich prism through which to understand culture and our relationships to each other. Food is a conduit, a vehicle that connects people to people, and people to culture.
“My 2015 documentary, City of Gold, is about the late Jonathan Gold, the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Jonathan’s writing gave me a way to understand and love Los Angeles. He wrote about restaurants and food as the gateway to connection and empathy across perceived boundaries in a city bursting with multiple cultures and ethnicities. In my next culinary film, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, decadent cakes became an expression and critique of contemporary excess, and laid bare our longing for community in a world of inequity and exclusion. Food and Country, my third food foray, was prompted by Covid, but it’s not actually about Covid; it’s about the people behind our food. Transcending blue state/red state politics, their resilience and ingenuity are the heart of this film.
“In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, I saw that independent restaurants were the canary in the coalmine and began to worry about the restaurant owners, chefs, and workers with whom I had grown close while making City of Gold. Knowing so many people in the food world with urgent, compelling stories that needed to be told, I felt I had to document their plight. How they would adapt to survive. I wondered how the potential loss of these businesses would change the fabric of our communities and cities.
“Just as I was preparing to film struggling Los Angeles restaurants, storied food writer Ruth Reichl reached out to me and said, “I hear we’re working on something similar. Let’s talk.” Ruth was taking a bigger picture approach to the crisis — grasping right away the devastating impact the pandemic could have on the entire food chain. Ruth and I quickly decided to join forces and began reaching out to pivotal players in food through video calls. Ruth’s stellar reputation as chronicler and voice of American food culture for the last four decades opened doors, but everywhere we turned, it was Ruth’s authenticity, curiosity, and warmth that inspired trust and elicited truth telling. People across the front lines of the food chain and political divides — from the most celebrated chefs, to food equity activists, to farmers and ranchers— wanted to talk with her. And, we would soon learn, they also wanted to open up and confide in her, and even seek solace. But the connection between Ruth and our characters is a two-way street. Just as they rely on Ruth, so too does Ruth lean on them for insight and closeness.
“Ruth and I set out to follow the unfolding stories of innovators in every corner of America experimenting to transcend a broken food system. Collectively their story is the story of all independent businesses fighting to survive an ever-consolidating industry. Their stories also hold up a mirror. How we make and grow our food tells us who we are as a country, who we are as human beings.” — Laura Gabbert
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