Signe Baumane, writer-director-producer-animator of the acclaimed new film ROCKS IN MY POCKETS, will introduce and participate in Q&A’s after several screenings this weekend at the Royal: Friday, September 12 at the 7:50 screening plus Saturday and Sunday, September 13 and 14 at the 3:10 and 7:50 screenings.
Royal Q&A with GOD HELP THE GIRL Filmmaker Stuart Murdoch + Special Concert Footage
GOD HELP THE GIRL writer-director and Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch will participate in a Q&A after the 7 PM screening at the Royal on Friday, September 5, (which will also include a raffle for GOD HELP THE GIRL tote bags, buttons and LPs!).
Plus, we have an extra treat for attendees of the Friday and Saturday 9:55 PM screenings: the concert event “Belle & Sebastian Sing GOD HEL
Laemmle’s Culture Vulture Mondays… and Tuesdays…Starts Monday!
A reminder that Laemmle’s Culture Vulture Mondays starts this Monday! We pick the best from the world of ballet, opera, stage, and fine art to feature on the big screen every Monday* at 7:30PM at every Laemmle location! Can’t make it Monday at 7:30PM? No problem! Catch discounted encore presentations Tuesdays at 1PM.
Future presentations include LA TRAVIATA from the Opera National de Paris, the ballet LA BAYADERE from Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre, and a guided tour through the works of MATISSE from London’s Tate Modern museum.
Visit our oft-updated Culture Vulture page (http://laemmle.com/CultureVulture) for the latest information on upcoming selections.
Laemmle’s Culture Vulture Mondays kicks off September 22 with the Globe’s stage production of TWELFTH NIGHT. The all-male Original Practices production, exploring clothing, music, dance and settings possible in the Globe around 1601, stars award-winning Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry. Purchase your tickets now!
Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters, TWELFTH NIGHT is a moving comedy of loss and misplaced love and includes some of the most exquisite songs Shakespeare ever wrote.
General admission tickets for all Monday screenings are $15. Tickets for seniors 62 and over and students with valid ID are $12. General admission tickets for Tuesday encore presentations are $11. Senior and student tickets are $8. Premiere card holders receive an additional $2 off each ticket!
*Okay, almost every Monday. The program may be precluded for certain Holidays and special events. Visit http://laemmle.com/CultureVulture for a detailed schedule.
Interview: MAY IN THE SUMMER Star-Writer-Director Cherien Dabis on Growing Up in Ohio and Jordan, Making a Movie in the Middle East, and Acting for the First Time
This week we are very pleased to open MAY IN THE SUMMER, the new film by Amreeka writer-director Cherien Dabis. The film follows sophisticated New Yorker May to her childhood home of Amman, Jordan for her wedding. Shortly after reuniting with her sisters and their long-since divorced parents, myriad familial and cultural conflicts lead May to question the big step she is about to take. It’s a funny, one-of-a-kind movie that also provides a fascinating look at a very foreign and yet, because of the reach of U.S. culture and commerce, familiar place.
What was your initial inspiration for the script?
I grew up spending summers in Jordan with my mom and sisters. We’d stay with my grandparents’ where we slept on mattresses along the floor. It was cramped, there was no privacy and our personalities couldn’t have clashed more. The oppressive heat kept us confined under the same roof, which was just as well because we didn’t have anywhere to go anyway. It was a recipe for family drama.
My family in Jordan never came over to visit us in America. They couldn’t afford it. My cousins managed to come over one summer, as they managed to get a J1 Visa, but they had to work as Au Pairs to be granted the visas. So as a consequence, I didn’t get to spend that much time with them anyway, as they were working a lot. They enjoyed there time over here, though.
When I was 17, my parents separated, and that family rupture has always been a wound I’ve wanted to confront. My mom moved back to Jordan in order to be closer to family, and I found myself spending even more time there. Whereas in the small Ohio town where we lived for most of my younger years, I was considered Arab, in Jordan, I was seen as the American. It was an interesting paradox and a part of my identity that I wanted to explore.
The subject of interfaith and intercultural marriage is a source of narrative conflict in the film. Can you discuss your direct or indirect experience with this and why you wanted to explore it?
I’ve certainly dated a fair share of people my mother has disapproved of. Attempting to reconcile her disapproval and subsequent prejudices with my own values and personal choices was undoubtedly a struggle large enough to inspire a screenplay. And yet it’s much greater than that. What could appear to simply be my own mom’s draconian belief system is really a symptom of a huge cultural problem: interfaith and intercultural marriage are not only frowned upon in Middle Eastern societies, they’re forbidden. I’ve seen it many times over up close and personal in my own family throughout the years. An uncle or cousin inadvertently creates a family scandal of epic proportions when they fall in love with someone of another religious or ethnic background. It’s an issue that speaks directly to the heart of a major conflict plaguing the Middle East, and therefore, an issue I wanted to explore.
How did you come to choose your primary cast?
I had worked with Hiam Abbass and Alia Shawkat on my first film, and it was such a great experience that I knew I wanted to work with them again. So when I started writing MAY, I immediately knew they’d be right for their roles.
I worked closely with NY-based casting director Cindy Tolan to find the other main cast members. We found actress Nadine Malouf (YASMINE) at an audition in the city. She was incredibly natural and her energy was vibrant, carefree, and fun-loving. She also had wonderful comic timing from the start. A lot of people seem to think that casting directors only hire people who look a certain way, however, that’s not always the case. For directors, they need an individual who can bring their character to life in the film. This means that a whole host of factors should be considered. To learn more about the perception that casting directors only hire attractive actors and actresses, it might be worth reading something like this Friends In Film blog post.
I’ve been a fan of Bill Pullman since Sleepless in Seattle. And while I thought he was the ideal actor for the part, I never realistically thought he would accept. On top of the fact that we were a small indie outfit, I knew I’d have to find someone adventurous enough to travel halfway around the world to shoot entirely in Jordan. I was beyond thrilled when I heard he wanted to do it.
We searched for over a year for an Arab American actor to play May and in the end, had a couple of candidates that we were seriously considering. At the same time, a friend of mine convinced me to audition for her film. We shot a scene from her film, and when she offered me the part, I started thinking about my own film. I was gun shy, but another friend encouraged me to put myself on tape. It was interesting, but I wasn’t convinced. So my friend sent my audition tape along with the auditions of the other actresses for the part to a neutral third party; someone I didn’t know; who knew nothing about the film. This person watched the auditions and wrote an incredibly candid paragraph on why I was the best choice for the part. I didn’t expect this at all but his argument was compelling enough that I called myself back (for another audition) and worked on it until I started to think it was – in fact – the best choice for the film. Eventually I shared my audition with the casting director and producers. Much to my surprise, they didn’t protest and seemed to think it was a natural choice. It made no sense! And the man who for all intents and purposes cast me, Hal Lehrman, became my acting coach. If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I would’ve ever had the courage to try it.
What were some of the most interesting challenges this created for you?
Putting myself in the position of actor / director for the first time left me in a much more vulnerable position than I would’ve ever thought. I often found myself struggling to manage my own natural insecurities. Thankfully, I was somewhat prepared for it. I had trained with Hal for a year and a half – specifically working on developing the skill necessary to go from directing to acting and back – constantly. As you can imagine, each requires a completely different mind-set, a very different approach. Directing requires complete control and awareness of what everyone is saying and doing. You’re looking at the big picture and seeing everyone’s point-of-view and yet translating it into the playable action for each actor. Acting, on the other hand, demands letting go entirely, allowing yourself to lose control and attempting to forget what’s about to happen. The way you do it is to immerse yourself in the details of your character’s experience of the story events. This continual shift in perspective created a very interesting challenge.
You shot the film in Jordan. Can you discuss the process that led to choosing Jordan and what it was like shooting there?
My mother is Jordanian, so I’ve spent the last 30 years travelling to Jordan. I’ve seen the country grow and change so remarkably that it’s shocking. One of the most surprising ways it’s changed is that it’s become incredibly Americanized. Twenty years ago, there wasn’t a remnant of anything American anywhere. Finding popular American brands at the supermarket was nearly impossible. Now American fast food chains, shopping malls and car dealerships nestle on every corner of Amman’s streets. The city epitomizes the convergence of my two identities in a strangely familiar and often hilariously contradictory way.
Given what little most people know and see of the Middle East, I chose to shoot in Jordan in order to show this highly unexpected Americanized side of the Arab world. I wanted to illuminate the endearing contradictions inherent within a culture so known for it’s disdain of American foreign policy and yet so admiring of American culture from KFC to JLo to Pirates of the Caribbean. And even still, Amman is a strong Islamic, Arab capital. Nowhere else in the Arab world can one find such a unique melding of ancient and modern, American and Arab.
Of course we encountered all kinds of logistical challenges during production. Jordan is quite a bureaucratic place, and its pace didn’t always agree with the speed at which our production needed to move. There was always a lag on approvals and permits and the process of getting them was often confusing and encumbered. On top of that, Jordan’s film industry is still relatively new and many resources need to be brought into the country from neighboring Lebanon. As the borders with Syria were closed due to the political unrest there, we had to limit our equipment because it had to be flown in as opposed to driven from Lebanon through Syria and into Jordan, the way it would normally and much less expensively be done. We had to bring in all of our key crew and our main and secondary cast flew in from New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London and Beirut.
And then there was the food poisoning and heat stroke. We were shooting at the height of summer in Jordan, and at the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea, it was a whopping 114 degrees!
In terms of setting, was your choice of the Dead Sea as the site of the bachelorette party symbolic or significant to your mind?
Absolutely. I’ve been going there since I was a kid and wanted to capture the duality of what it is and what it’s become –a serenely quiet and peaceful place known for it’s soothing, healing waters yet surrounded by conflict and hostility with occupied Palestine a stones-throw away. (No pun intended.) And – perhaps the best part – home to enormous luxury resorts and spas known for their Spring Break-like party atmospheres. There’s a whole lot simmering beneath the surface and nothing is quite as it seems. For a movie aimed at portraying the contradictory nature of its setting, it would’ve been criminal not to set the bachelorette party there. Not to mention, as the lowest point on the face of the earth, it seemed the perfect location in which to bring the story conflict to a head.
There seems to be a growing cinema landscape in the region. Did you feel this and how did it impact you?
I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of the growing cinema landscape in the region for some time now. Ever since I shot my first short film in the West Bank back in 2005. It’s been amazing to see it change and grow. While I shot part of Amreeka in the West Bank, May in the Summer is my first feature shot entirely in the Middle East.
On the one hand, it can be frustrating to be a part of something that’s still in process. It means serious struggle due to the fact that there isn’t always the support necessary to make things happen the way you envision. It means taking on much more than one individual is physically capable of in order to produce what is intended. I think all my key crew who were brought in from the U.S. and Lebanon felt that.
On the other hand, it’s immensely gratifying to feel part of something new, to contribute to and be inspired by the growth of a burgeoning industry. Most films that shoot in Jordan shoot Jordan for another place – Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq. The stories for these films are mostly war-driven and set in villages and deserts close to the borders. May in the Summer was an American production not only shooting Jordan for Jordan, but also featuring the country as a character in the film and revealing it’s cosmopolitan side as well it’s natural and spiritual landscapes. In some ways, the film is a love letter to the country in which I partly grew up.
Deux Nouveaux Films this Weekend: Breillat & Huppert’s ABUSE OF WEAKNESS + Garrel & Garrel’s JEALOUSY
Attention, Francophiles and French expats: this weekend we are bringing two new films to our screens just for you: ABUSE OF WEAKNESS [Abus de faiblesse] Catherine Breillat’s autobiographical film about her experience with a notorious swindler — the intense Isabelle Huppert stars — and Philippe Garrel’s JEALOUSY [La jalousie], which stars his son Louis as part of a group of young people aging out of their bohemianism, some more smoothly than others. in Time Out New York Keith Uhlich wrote that JEALOUSY “cuts straight to the bone” and in the Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl called the film “vital and vigorous.” About ABUSE Peter Sobczynski of RogerEbert.com posted “this examination of power, greed, emotional manipulation and simple need is gripping and powerful to behold.” In Film Comment, Kristin Jones wrote “it’s hard to imagine an actress other than Huppert so artfully layering frailty and toughness, self-delusion and self-awareness, and her complex portrayal is an irresistible foil to Kool Shen’s [the swindler] blank expressions and wounded swagger.” See one or see both and bon film!
L.A. Times’ Kenneth Turan on Laemmle ZULU Screenings
In the coming days we will be screening Rialto Pictures’ big, gorgeous 50th anniversary restoration of ZULU at our Claremont, Pasadena, Encino and West L.A. venues. Today the L.A. Times’ chief film critic Kenneth Turan posted this review:
Looking as fresh and shiny as the bright red uniforms of the British soldiers who are its protagonists, the 50th-anniversary digital restoration of the venerable “Zulu” takes us back in time twice over.
In the most obvious sense, this British film goes back to 1879 and South Africa’s Battle of Rorke’s Drift, in which some 400 of Queen Victoria’s finest held off 10 times their number in attacking Zulu warriors.
Playing a limited schedule at several Laemmle theaters, this old-school effort also takes us back to the filmmaking styles and mores of 1964, when epics extolling the glory of empire and the romance of heroic combat in exotic climes were being made and films could boast of being shot in the wide-screen process called Super Technirama 70.
It would be a mistake to pretend that parts of this childhood guilty pleasure, more popular on original release in Britain than in the U.S., don’t creak. Some of the characters and situations are thumping clichés, and the film’s half-naked native women are perhaps due to financier Joseph E. Levine’s commercial instincts.
But as directed by Cy Endfield, a casualty of the Hollywood blacklist who made a career in Britain, “Zulu” does have virtues as well, including strong acting from star and co-producer Stanley Baker playing Lt. John Chard, a can-do engineer who takes over the defense of the Rorke’s Drift missionary station in Natal.
And of course there is the young and impossibly handsome Michael Caine in his first major role: the credits read “introducing Michael Caine,” although he’d been acting for more than a decade.
Adding to the joke, this dyed-in-the-wool Cockney plays a posh British lieutenant named Gonville Bromhead whom everyone called “old boy.”
“Zulu” starts with the father-and-daughter missionary team of Otto and Margareta Witt, played by Jack Hawkins and Ulla Jacobsson (a long way from Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night”), finding out that the Zulus have wiped out a sizable British force at the Battle of Isandlwana.
The Witts head back to their station at Rorke’s Drift, where Chard and Bromhead take on what seems to be a hopeless task of defending the place against an enormous multitude of Zulus because that’s what British officers are supposed to do.
Once the impressive Zulu impi or fighting force appears on the scene and the battle begins in earnest, the film’s use of Stephen Dade’s epic cinematography and an early score by John Barry (presented in full stereophonic sound for the first time in 50 years) adds to the impressive nature of the battle stagings. This may not be exact history, but it certainly makes an impression.
Playing at: Laemmle’s Royal in West Los Angeles, Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, Town Center 5 in Encino and Claremont 5 in Claremont at the following times: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday; 1 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday.
Vulture’s David Edelstein Interviews Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory and Jonathan Demme, the Triumvirate Behind A MASTER BUILDER
This August 15th we’ll be opening Jonathan Demme’s filmed version of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory’s acclaimed stage production of Henrik Ibsen’s A MASTER BUILDER. Recently film critic David Edelstein, a self-proclaimed Ibsenite, sat down for a group interview with the triumvirate:
On Wednesday, July 22, I had the privilege of hosting a talk with Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn, and Jonathan Demme, under the auspices of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, after a screening of the trio’s impressive collaboration A Master Builder (now playing at New York’s Film Forum). Much as they did with Uncle Vanya (filmed by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street), Gregory, Shawn, and the cast rehearsed Ibsen’s play for many years, ultimately performing it for small, invited audiences. Malle being dead, Demme stepped into the breach and filmed the production quickly and well.
A Master Builder centers on acclaimed architect Halvard Solness (played onscreen by Shawn), who fears being dislodged by the next generation. He feels especially vulnerable because he has, over the last decade, gone from making towering structures to smaller buildings in which real people can live. He has lost some stature and is in a depressive marriage with a prim ghost of a woman (Julie Hagerty). At a key juncture, a young woman, Hilda (Lisa Joyce), a kind of architect groupie, arrives to spur Solness to ascend once more — to drive him toward that unattainable ideal, both metaphorically and literally. (She wants him to lay a wreath at the top of his new tower in spite of his fear of heights.)
This was a transitional play for Ibsen (he had many), a move from the more naturalistic dramas (the best known are A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler) of his middle stage and towards the mysterious, symbolic works on which he labored until his death. Gregory and Shawn’s innovation is to make Hilda and everything that happens in her wake a deathbed dream of the master builder. That might offend purists, but, as far as I’m concerned, it brings out every one of the play’s undercurrents while accounting for its often ludicrous surface. I’m not sure Ibsen would have approved, but I think he’d have liked how well the version plays.
What follows is an edited version of our onstage talk. Let me warn you that we don’t discuss Gregory and Shawn’s dramatized version of their friendship inMy Dinner With Andre or Shawn’s inconceivably beloved performance in The Princess Bride. The audience consisted of actors, and the focus was tightly on this play, this film, and this creative process. I had a lot of fun, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
David Edelstein: First let me say that I’m not just a film critic, I’m an Ibsenite. I love Ibsen and I love this play … and every time I’ve seen it, it has stunk up the stage. It’s an obstacle course over a minefield. You have this naturalistic form and these mythic characters, and audiences either laugh inappropriately or roll their eyes. If you had asked me, “Should we do this play?” I’d have said, “Steer clear.” And yet this is a great movie. What drew you to A Master Builder in the first place? And at what point did you think you could make sense of it by doing it as a dream play?
Andre Gregory: Well, I think what drew me to it was that I was getting old. [Audience laughs and claps.] Thank you.
Wallace Shawn: He wasn’t 80 at that time.
Gregory: When we started this 16 or 17 years ago, I was young, yeah. On a more interesting level, I think that I saw Solness as an artist who had, in a way, reached the end of his career or had nothing left in him to create and finds the way to embrace the last interesting creative challenge, which is giving up this life, and how to do that. When I was a 7-year-old boy, I went to a school where every Christmas, they read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and I was fascinated by the character of Scrooge, who I see somewhat like Solness. There’s always hope. No matter what kind of a son-of-a-bitch you are, no matter how unhappy you are, how loveless, it’s not over ’til it’s over. And once, when I was in Poland, I was introduced to a young man who didn’t know who I was and he looked into my eyes and he said, “When I look into your eyes, I see the saddest optimist I’ve ever met.” I don’t know if that answers your question.
It does. I never thought of A Master Builder on those terms. I think of Ibsen’s final play When We Dead Awaken that way, as the story of an artist figuring out how to die, but it never occurred to me that you could locate that idea in A Master Builder, too.
Gregory: Well, of course we emphasize it, and when Wally and I had our mutual, in a way, death scene together — that first scene in the movie — this guy [Jonathan Demme] was roaring with laughter. The more depressing it got, the funnier he thought it was.
Was the theatrical production a dream play?
Shawn: I didn’t feel comfortable tampering with the text, really, until we put in something like a dozen years. We rehearsed the play starting in 1997—
Most artists peak around the seventh year of rehearsal, I hear.
Shawn: —and after we had done about 12 years, I did feel that somehow I had earned that right — which could be certainly argued with, some people might say that was a terrible thing to do — but I did tamper with the text, taking out certain things and putting in the fact that it was all a dream. Because it is not a realistic play, and it can’t be a realistic play, and Hilda cannot be a real girl. I mean, in a very, very tortured way, you could figure out a story in which Hilda made sense as a real person, but you’d be disturbing Ibsen’s play, really.
She was based on a real person in Ibsen’s life, but he transformed her into a mythic creature.
Shawn: She’s a fantastical figure, and Andre had always seen her as that. Once that decision was made, you can see how the play really is about someone wrestling with the contradictions in his own life, contradictions that he cannot resolve and he doesn’t resolve. And of course, you feel that of Ibsen himself.
Gregory: He was the most self-revelatory writer. Maybe because it was so outlandish and so impossible — and people in his time didn’t know that you could be a confessional dramatist in that way — that I don’t think people asked him, “Gee, do you feel these contradictions within yourself?” Because they wouldn’t have presumed such a thing.
Read the rest of the interview on the Vulture.com site.
Interview with FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS Director Mitra Farahani
We are very pleased to be opening the new film FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS at our Royal and Town Center theaters on Friday, August 15. The lyrical documentary explores the enigma of provocative artist Bahman Mohassess, the so-called “Persian Picasso,” whose acclaimed paintings and sculptures dominated pre-revolutionary Iran. In the Village Voice Michael Atkinson called the film “never less than addictively fascinating – Mohassess’s story is a heroic torch of individualism battling mad-state ideology, from the Shah to the mullahs, and his autumnal stance toward all things non-Mohassess is hilariously derisive.” Recently Hollywood Soapbox interviewed director Mitra Farahani about her film. Mohassess, she says, “used to ask: “what could be the meaning of painting anymore, in a world with a sky devoid of birds, a sea devoid of fishes and a wood devoid of beasts?’ In front of all that violence Mohassess’ answer of course was not self-destruction, for the course of his life showed him harshly struggling with those issues, in a positive attitude. But certainly the end of his life, the choice of self-exile and symbolic retirement, all the violence in the world that profoundly disgusted him, all contributed to a more violent answer to violence. Destruction progressively becoming a part of it.”
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