November 18, 2002

You know it’s been a good weekend when $88 million for Harry Potter just doesn’t mean much to you…

What else do you call a weekend when you have a chance to talk to Terry Gilliam, Fernando Meirelles, Jim Cameron and Steven Soderbergh all in three days?  Add to that, two screenings that I can’t talk about, another screening of Solaris (if you missed Saturday’s review, it’s here), another screening of Lost in La Mancha, a meal with a great studio exec and a chance to hang out with a Fox publicity staff that is cautious, but really high on their new movie.

Love means never being allowed to say you’re tired. 

But let’s start at the beginning…

MEIRELLES – There are a handful of achievements I hold above all others these days. And they all seem to be converging lately.  City of God is one of those thrillers.  I don’t want to re-review the movie, but man, oh man, oh man…

Fernando Meirelles was waiting for me in the waiting area of the Broadway Deli.  I don’t know how I recognized him.  But I did.  We smiled and greeted me easily, even though he didn’t know me from Adam.  We sat and we chatted.

The story of making City of God is extraordinary in and of itself.  First, Meirelles and his writing partner, Braulio Mantovani, spent two years developing the screenplay from material in a non-fiction book written by Paulo Lins.  How would they take this thick book and turn it into a solid, fat-free study of life in the ghetto? 

While working on the script, Meirelles co-directed a feature called Maids, based on a stage play about domestic workers.  As he finished tha, he and his partners in City Of God, Katia Lund and producer Walter Salles set up an acting program that also served as a rehearsal process for the film since none of the actors would be “real” actors.  They would be real people plucked by Lund, who was more familiar with the ghetto than anyone else, from the City of God.  They spent six months with these folks, improvising, playing, learning what it was to be an actor. 

About then, one of Meirelles friends at a Brazilian TV network asked Fernando to make a short – one of a number of shorts – for TV.  Meirelles agreed, as long as his short could be about the subject on which he was working.  The result was Golden Gate or Palace II. 

After that, they spent another four months running their rehearsal/school.  And soon after, they started shooting City of God.

Production, as described by Meirelles, was fairly relaxed and efficient, after being with his newly formed actors for month after month after month.  Meirelles shot the film with all handheld cameras for style, to make it comfortable for his actors and to capture the improvisatory feel that they developed in the acting program.

The result was a three-hour film… which he knew wasn’t possible.  So he cut all of the “normal people” from the ghetto, the people who gave the film a little more balance.  But that still left him with a 150-minute movie.  But what to do?  He was still looking to cut about 20 minutes.  And that where some of the incredible style of City of God came from… necessity.  He crammed that 20 minutes into the film by doing split-screen, speeding some stuff up and generally, adding the kind of heat that can make a diamond.

Meirelles’ diamond has a lot of Hollywood types knocking at his door.  But Meirelles is not quite ready to sell his soul.  He’s not a kid.  He’s 47 years old.  And he knows that he can have a happy, successful life trying to build the Brazilian cinema.  But he’s also ready to come to America to make a film… if they let him make his film.  He doesn’t want a lot of money or any fancy toys.  He’d much rather take a cast and a small crew and head out on America’s highways to create whatever might be created.  Fortunately for him, industry execs are not the only people pursuing him.  High-profile actors who want to work with him as well are chasing him as well. 

Of course, the joy of meeting a guy like Meirelles is that also happens to be a good man.  There is that little hint of a director’s ego present.  But to meet a guy this talented before his ego is built into a living monument – which I hope won’t happen – is quite wonderful.  He is still really appreciating the ride, after this violent, smart film in Portuguese has been sold in 62 territories, including the United States, where Miramax leads the way.

GILLIAM – I didn’t really chat with Gilliam, who was in town to be part of a promotional screening of Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton’s Lost In La Mancha, followed by an IFC-bound chat with Elvis Mitchell. 

The movie, also reviewed here before, follows the sad history of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  Of course, Gilliam is still a movie God to me.  There are few directors working today with the dark, comic soul of Gilliam and fewer still who combine it with his remarkable visual skills behind the camera.  Fincher, Burton, Jeunet, Gilliam… that’s about the entire group. 

Like Welles and Coppola, Gilliam seems to run into more troubles in getting his visions to the screen than he deserves.  And that’s really our loss.  Great talents should be given a little latitude to do their work. 

I didn’t really chat with Gilliam because fighting for position at a cocktail party is just socially awkward enough to make sure that no one can ever have a real conversation of more than a few seconds.  But I really enjoyed seeing the film again and Gilliam was a delight in his post-game Q&A.

Ain’t It Cool reported earlier that Gilliam’s next is still up in the air.  And it is.  Gilliam is currently under an 8-week contract to develop The Brothers Grimm, hopefully making enough headway to actually move forward after this period.  But Gilliam has clearly learned to keep his heart covered from attack in a city of angry metaphorical Indians. 

CAMERON – Jim has kept a pretty low profile in the years since he became King of The World.  He seems more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him.  As he explains, when you make a movie that makes as much money as Titanic, you can do what you want to do.

What he wants to do these days, besides producing Solaris, is to develop a new theatrical 3-D technology with which he intends to eventually shoot a full feature.  Right now, he’s doing a series of documentaries with the technology, allowing him and the technology company to ramp up slowly.  He told us – at an oval roundtable – that he expects the eventual feature to be shown at special 3-D venues for a period, to be followed by wider release in 2-D and then video/DVD release, also in 2-D…. give America an “excuse to get off their butts and go to see movies in the theaters where they belong.”

SODERBERGH – The end of my weekend was spent with a spent Steven Soderbergh.  This was his first day of press for the film, following a cocktail party and post-film Q&A the night before and he has miles to go before he sleeps.  But he’s a game guy.  By the time I got to him, I was pretty exhausted too.  So we just kind of talked. 

But earlier in the day, at the oval roundtable, he had tossed off a few quotable quotes:

“Making a movie is like sex… sometimes you don’t know you are doing it wrong until you hear it from a third party.”

The planet Solaris is “a metaphor for anything that you don’t know for sure.”

“Can you surrender yourself to something that is unknown.”

There were also some details on the film.  It’s 93 minutes without credits.  The budget was $47 million.  Daniel Day Lewis was his first idea as a lead actor for this project. 

The message of Solaris is very much like the message of Soderbergh… keep pushing the envelope… keep searching… take those chances…

Soderbergh and Clooney - who are partners in production company Section Eight, which has another Oscar contender already in play this year in Far from Heaven - are kind of like a vaudeville team that we never really get to see together “on stage.”  Even apart, they both tell the same story in very different ways.  Clooney is the seemingly off-the-cuff charmer that you see in films.  His apparent humility is only matched by Soderbergh’s.  But they are both clearly having a ball.  You get a real sense that they know that they are leading the parade, not just coming along for the ride.  And both men are ready to keep pushing ahead, pleased, but unsatisfied by their success and freedom.

Soderbergh is one of the few filmmakers whose growth can really be traced from film to film to film.  Even the less successful films have value as opportunities for growth.  Hollywood is a place where people scramble for a certain level of success and then tend to tread water, watching their paychecks increase while their artistic interests fade.  Not so Soderbergh.

I wish I could tell you that there was something wrong with Soderbergh… a chink in the armor.  The press loves that stuff… build, build… kill, kill.  But Soderbergh is a race horse, blinders on an running hard, in the best sense of that metaphor.  Of course he knows what is going on around him.  But he and Clooney and the family they have built around them seems ready to keep pushing… keep taking the heat… to keep bringing passion to the work in a town that thinks is Quarterly Earning Statements. 

Meirelles… Gilliam… Cameron… Soderbergh… a movie making super race…. not a standard operating procedure in sight… four completely different styles… four hearts that are true… hell of a weekend.

READER OF THE DAY:  NOT CONNERY writes:  “As I was reading your column on Solaris, I could not help but notice how in love with this movie you are. This is what many other critics need to embrace. Instead of reviewing a movie and moving on they need to let a movie sit and repeat itself to full effect. You have made that happen. As a reader, I appreciate this because not only do you review the film on its merits, you show an emotional rawness towards films.

The reason I am sharing this is because I rented Princess and The Warrior this weekend and I am feeling the love that you had for Solaris. This movie was in my eyes a complete work of perfection. Frank Potente was brilliant and the movie has been with me every moment since it ended. It was powerful and deep, yet also it was distant and quiet, sort of like what you’re talking about with Solaris. I just wanted to share my experience because I believe it is one of the most powerful films on love and redemption that I have ever seen; certainly one that I will never forget.”

And this from THE NOT SO OLD SHU:  “Notice what connects SOLARIS and MOULIN ROUGE before it and CAST AWAY in  2000 and FIGHT CLUB and THE THIN RED LINE. It's 20th Century Fox. This studio has consistently stepped up to provide the most daring and unconventional studio product each year for the last four or five years.  Looks like they're not stopping. Interesting - more so for the fact that it has never been addressed to my knowledge. Can't wait for a better Soderbergh than FULL FRONTAL. But that's one of the great things about this filmmaker, the speed with which he puts out films.”

E ME:  Soderbergh pointed out that although the entire Fox family is there for Solaris, Co-CEO Jim Gianopulis deserves particular credit for getting behind Solaris, whereas Cast Away (for instance) is more associated with Co-CEO Tom Rothman.  Fight Club and The Thin Red Line were, of course, Bill Mechanic’s babies.  But as Soderbergh also said, if every studio took one risk like these every year, the entire industry could change for the better.  And one has to give some credit to Peter Chernin and Rupert Murdoch for allowing their people to have their heads with these annual journeys into a higher level of filmmaking.  Many feel that Mechanic paid for Fight Club with his job.  But the movie got made. 

Art and commerce have a hard time coexisting.  Sometimes they suffocate one another.  Sometimes art simply fails.  Sometimes commerce disappoints.  While we must never forget that any business that bets millions of dollars at a time will tend to play by business rules, we must also remember that art is not an indulgence, but a necessity.  Without the egg, no chicken…. without the chicken, no egg… and where it started is a chapter in a book of history.   To move forward, we must make choices and then more choices and then more choices… the answers will come… whether we like them or not.

Hell of a weekend.