January 21, 2003
Emily Mortimer
Janusz Kaminiski
Menno Meyjes

MAXIMUM FEROCITY

He burst onto the Hollywood scene when he was just 30 years old, taking on the duel responsibility of using his words to protect both the award-winning novelist Alice Walker’s vision and Steven Spielberg’s reputation, as he traveled for the first time towards making more serious films.  11 Academy Award nominations later, Menno Meyjes was a part of the Hollywood firmament.

But Meyjes, even then, was not one of “them.”   Born in the Netherlands, he’s lived all over the globe, landing now in the English countryside, where he lives a writerly life with his wife and his kids and his dogs. 

Except when he’s stirring the pot of ideas and provoking thought (and some rage) in his first shot as a writer director with Max. 

There is something cool and comfortable and almost arrogant about Meyjes.  Until he zeros in on something that excites him, and then he’s like a football coach, pushing his team of ideas to a higher degree of idealism in a world that he clearly knows is trudging around in the mud.  His enthusiasm is infectious and once you get a dose of it, you don’t want to disappoint him. 

He tells the story of preparing the movie and saying to John Cusack, “You know, nobody’s waiting around to see this film.”  And he was right.  And he was wrong.  Max is the story of an artist, raised in wealth, disfigured by war and holding up the banner for the art that symbolizes his pain.  Another young man in pain come sin to his life.  He’s not much of an artist – certainly not by Max’s standards – but he feels the shared pain and appreciates his ambition. 

The young man is Adolph Hitler.

Meyjes is a writer-director… a writer first.  So it’s no surprise that the words end up overpowering everything else, literally and figuratively.  But words are the most demanding part of filmmaking, inherently a medium of size and image.  Many viewers tend to linger on the “What if?” issues of the film, but we are still living in the power of speech as the media becomes unavoidable and buzz words and catch phrases become as familiar as our immediate family, until they are replaced by the next buzz word and catch phrase.  

So is Menno Meyjes really Max?  Is Meyjes really represented by the innocence and thirst for acceptance of young Hitler?

NAH!

Meyjes has a certain directorial distance from the identities of the men he brings together. There is nothing of the rodent-like, self-loathing Hitler in him, although one gets the feeling that he understands rage and evolution.  Max shows a degree of fear and reticence behind the bravado, where Meyjes seems to be clear in his focus and confidence.

He was confident enough to make his movie like a painter, his primary location being a giant empty warehouse where Max displays art.  Menno and his D.P., Lajos Koltai, determined how to use the space, finding their way through scene after scene, allowing the actors to collaborate in the process. 

Most directors would be quite intimidated by that kind of space and that kind of freedom.  But not Menno Meyjes. 

It’s not clear when he’ll be back with his next film, but don’t expect him to waffle or fret about what’s next.  When he is ready, he will come and he will get the money and he will make his movie.  You can be sure of one thing… it will be rich with ideas and it won’t make any excuses for itself.    And neither will its writer-director. 

SPEED KILLS

He’s quick to explain why he has shot the last seven films from the world’s most popular movie director, Steven Spielberg.  Speed.  Janusz Kaminiski is clearly proud of the pace he and his crew can maintain when wrestling with the massive visions of Spielberg.  But he is quick to add, “No one else can do what I can do as quick as I can do it.”

What can he do?  The black and white of Schindler’s List.  The lush greens that mimicked Dean Cundey’s original images, but brought his own flurries of light to The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  The sepia browns of Amistad.  And in the last 25 months, three films in shades of blue, A.I., Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. 

By all accounts, Catch Me If You Can, the most naturalistic of the 2001/2002 trio, was the hardest to shoot because of the huge number of locations.  In fact, the number of CG shots in each film got smaller each time out.  A.I. had a lot of digital assistance, while the future of Minority Report, with the exception of the freeway sequence, was created with mostly real effects on real sets. 

Kaminski works the set of a TV commercial, demanding precision at every turn when he is behind the camera, but with the relaxation of a frat boy (and Kinka Usher’s set has everything but a keg on it) when his crew prepares for the next subtle shot.  He’s only 43, but he carries a certain weight.  Perhaps it is native to the Polish who leave their homeland.  But it brings with it a certain confidence in every question he answers, ever comment he makes.

Kaminski is a little worn.  He did three pictures in less than 2 years for Spielberg and separated from his wife in the midst of it all.  He doesn’t discuss his personal life in any detail, but he makes it clear that living life is becoming a higher priority.  Still, here he is, shooting a soda commercial in a cold warehouse in Culver City, running to London the next day, back a few days later,  scheduled to start work on the next, still percolating, Spielberg picture this summer, which will be followed, apparently, by the fourth Indiana Jones picture.  (My assumption is that Janusz will fill in for Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy pix, as Slocombe celebrates his 90^th birthday on February 10.)

Talking to Janusz about the achievement of Minority Report, probably Hollywood’s most densely visual tale since The Matrix, he makes it sound like another day at the office.  But that’s his job… to make it seem easy.  Conrad Hall’s well-deserved legend was built on a remarkable feel for landscape, even when the terrain was someone’s face.  Kaminski’s style continues to adapt to Spielberg’s interests, finding a visual voice for each film. 

If there is any single stand-out element of Kaminiski’s bag of tricks, it his ability to make movie stars look like movie stars, even as so much seems to be going on in Spielberg’s rich frames.  Whether it is the dark chocolate of Steve Harris or the shear white skin of Samantha Morton or the wild unwrangled look of Jason Antoon, people are lit just right.  (Forget Cruise… that’s too easy.) 

And he does it fast.

AWAKE AT THE SWITCH

17 days married, she still looks like the girl who turns heads as she walks the Upper West Side on a perfect summer day.  Emily Mortimer is series of softly clashing angles.  She’s best known for her Oscar-buzz role in Lovely & Amazing, as an L.A. actress body surfing an ocean of emotional confusion, but she speaks with a soft English accent that somehow feels less foreign than some regional American twangs.  She is as thin as a rail, yet leads with feminine curves that seem nearly impossible.  She is a rising star whose first steps to real greatness started with a decision not to keep chasing stardom.

She first broke through my “another pretty girl” meter when I saw her in Love’s Labours Lost, one of my most hated movies of 2000.  But, like the rest of the cast, she was game and the film was surprisingly balanced between the characters.  Just a few weeks later, she was in a small hit, playing “The Girl” in Disney’s The Kid.  The next time she was seen on a big screen was in Lovely & Amazing. 

The film opens with Mortimer living her metaphor for the entire film.  She is glamorized on a photo shoot, in elegant black.  But as almost a passing thought, she is asked to expose herself, which she willingly does, desperate to deliver what “they” expect of her. 

Perhaps this was once the story of Emily Mortimer, graduate of Oxford, daughter of a famous British writer, fluent in Russian, an accidental actress.  Her career started on the steps on her home, where she performed commercials for her parents.  A single role in high school and a part of the drama scene at Oxford, but she never owned the choice.  She went for the ride.  Her beauty and her sweetness drew a crowd.  But it was always a bit of a lark.  She penned a column for The Telegraph, which was looking for an answer to Bridget Jones’ Diary and got something a little more raw.  She turned up in The Ghost & The Darkness and The Saint and Elizabeth and Notting Hill before she got a role in the iconic Scream series… unfortunately, it was Scream 3. 

Then she took a breath and decided to reassess what she was doing and why she was doing it.  And she stopped… and breathed… and, in owning her art for the first time, a world opened up to her.

She found herself weeping on the street when she blew her audition for Lovely & Amazing.  But she hadn’t blown it at all. 

The Scene that everyone talks about begins in the bed she has fallen into with “movie star” Kevin McCabe.  He’s seduced her simply by trying to seduce her.  And she asks him to assess her body.  She stands naked before this self-involved critic and in the very midst of this simple study of her parts, she seems to find comfort in the shallowness of her judge. 

From then on, she is transformed.  She asserts herself and starts making small demands for herself.  Even after her effort to help a stray dog backfires into a badly cut lip, she seems to maintain her strength, no longer simply satisfied to take what she can, but ready to take what she needs.

The scene itself is one of the most powerful in all of film this year.  It is tough but eccentric. A moment that crystallizes women’s greatest fears and needs in a moment.  In the absurdity of obsessive body imaging, the notion of Elizabeth’s body requiring reshaping in a “perfect world” seems to bring her a sweet, gentle pity for what she had envied just moments before. 

Since Mortimer made L&A, she’s made three films.  One, A Foreign Affair, debuts at Sundance tonight.  Mortimer plays a documentarian, examining the lives of men who come to Russia, looking for women.  She actually went out to shoot footage of real men and women in that process, straddling the line between actress and journalist.  She made a thriller with Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan.  And she’s part of a grand ensemble in Stephen Fry’s directorial debut, Bright Young Things.

Mortimer certainly qualifies as a bright young thing.  She’s been acting for a long time, but she is now an actress.  She isn’t afraid of Hollywood but, more importantly, she isn’t afraid to say “no” to Hollywood.  Her eyes light up when she’s talking about the work… any work… anyone’s work that matters… and she smiles and she steps gently out onto the stage… loving and amazed and ready for whatever comes next.