Meet the Directors

Gerald Peary’s book Mavericks, which came out earlier this year, is a useful collection of interviews with some global filmmakers who don’t necessarily get the attention they deserve outside of serious cinephile circles. The conversations can’t help but make you feel a little envious of a time when film critics could get such open access to filmmakers, having dinner or long meetings in hotel rooms, and then enjoy the column inches necessary to discuss and debate new movies every week.

Ousmane Sembene, who directed the classic Black Girl and some noteworthy films examining the experience of postcolonial Senegal, is one of the first people Peary interviewed. He’s an interesting case of an acclaimed Marxist novelist who thought about making the switch to films and by doing so helped to put African cinema on the map. We toss around the word “provocateur” a lot, but when he says that “we produce films in a country where there is only one party” you get a sense that he knows whereof he speaks. “True art,” he explains, “remains in the villages and rural communities, preserved in the ceremony and religion. It is from believing in this communal art that we can be saved.”

Bernando Bertolucci made some monumental works like The Conformist and The Last Emperor but he also made the despairingly horny Last Tango in Paris where a sullen, flabby Marlon Brando literally tries to fuck his pain away with mixed results. His epic, exasperating four-hour film 1900 combines both elements, and a “voluble, loose” Bertolucci explains “with a jovial smile” that “I wanted to end as a fairy story. It’s very funny. I can’t even explain the poetic license.” Which seems fair if you’ve seen the film, and might add to the intrigue if you haven’t, to say nothing of the apparent fact that in the late 70s, 1900 was the most successful movie in Italy, second only to ‘Jaws.’

Peary notices the small gestures and movements of the people he talks to. The great Hal Ashby, who made classics like Harold and Maude and The Last Detail, opines about his new film Coming Home after kicking off his shoes “with his bare feet crisscrossed on a chair in the way of high holy types.” People at the time complained when Jon Voight’s paraplegic Vietnam veteran performs oral sex on Jane Fonda’s nurse, which I guess makes sense if you’re either a prude or couldn’t stomach the anti-war activism of “Hanoi Jane.” Ashby offers some unpretentious wisdom in response: “the vets in the hospitals, that’s all they talk about. When 40 or 50 vets get together, 90 percent of the time the talk is about sex.”

Peary’s sit down with Mel Brooks at the Russian Tea Room in New York City, which would be a highlight of anyone’s day, went well. The maestro behind Blazing Saddles and History of the World Part One free associates about whether it’s a good idea to go all the way to Halifax to get lox right off the boat, how his Lower East Side grandfather pushed a fish cart and spoke fluent Norwegian, some weird invention another relative patented, how he’s actually a shy and private person, and pronounces that he feels good about this interview “because I wiped up my food with bread. If I’m uncomfortable, I won’t do that.”

What’s Indie, Anyway?

“Indie” is a term that we often misuse. Instead of referring to someone who makes movies independently or raises their own money, we often tack the label on to someone whose aesthetics tend to go a little off the beaten track. Jim Jarmusch scoffs at the label: “I have a hard time looking at myself in this ‘independent’ context. I thought it means having control over the cutting and creativity. Now, John Cassavetes, he was independent.” He goes on to opine that “you can learn about filmmaking from poetry, literature, and also watching the way people flip a pancake. From everything!”

Gus Van Sant makes a similar point when he talks about the inspiration to deploy lengthy takes in his film Elephant, a fictional take on a high-school shooting. He heard people blaming video games for shootings and so he learned about them by playing Tomb Raider “until I was obsessed with it. It calls for an interactive imagination…I’d have the camera behind a character and it suddenly flips in front.” He doesn’t think video games are the ultimate reason for mass shootings, to be clear, but it’s interesting to see how a talented, literate director took inspiration from an unusual source.

And you can’t help but love it when John Waters explains that his devoted fans ask him to autograph a number of extremely odd items. “The Pope of Trash” has added his imprimatur to “dicks, asses, parole cards (that’s my favorite), a colostomy bag while it was pumping. A couple of years ago, I signed a bloody Tampax. That’s one you don’t forget. I’m not asking for someone to top that!”

The most impressive of Peary’s journalistic scores is getting to be a part of a press conference with none other than Akira Kurosawa, fresh off the 1985 world premiere of his Shakespearean opus Ran. Peary is among the “two busloads of foreign journalists diverted for a two-and-a-half-hour pilgrimage to the countryside near Mt. Fuji…held at the Hakone Prince, a palatial hotel on a placid lake where, nearby, Kurosawa summers.” Interestingly the man they called “The Emperor” banned all Japanese journalists and his interpreter informed everyone ahead of time that Kurosawa doesn’t like abstract philosophical questions or probing about a film’s greater significance, but instead “he likes to talk about horses.”

One of the fun benefits of a book like this, even though the chapters are sometimes a little frustrating in their brevity, is that the reader can find out about titles they’d never heard of. I didn’t know much about the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, for example. But now I know about her 1990’s breakthrough hit ‘Europa Europa.’ Peary describes it as “a movie for practically everybody. A thrilling, fabulist, based-on-fact World War II survival tale with twists galore.” Such as?  “The hero is a young Polish Jew, Solly, who escaped the death camps by swimming into Russia and joining the Communists, then eluded the Nazis again by literally becoming one! He was mistaken for an Aryan and sent to an elite school for Hitler Youth. After the war, a Jew again, he embarked for Israel.” The film is currently available on three different platforms.

Don’t you want to know what happened next?