SFFILM

THE LOST CITY OF Z: director James Gray

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James Gray photo courtesy of SFFILM
James Gray
photo courtesy of SFFILM

As I wrote on Friday, with The Lost City of Z, director James Gray revives the entire genre of the historical adventure epic. I saw The Lost City of Z earlier this month at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray, who took questions afterwards from SFFILM Director of Programming Rachel Rosen and the audience.

Gray joked that “You can’t really pitch a movie as ‘It’s like Indiana Jones, and then he gets eaten…'”  Gray said, “You you can’t beat a story told with elegance”, so you can have a subtext that is subversive. “Classical form allows the subtext to emerge.”

In one of those subtexts, Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of his protagonist Fawcett; not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. “It was very moving to be with the indigenous, and I filmed them doing what they do,”Gray said.  He resisted filming the jungle scenes in South Africa and other less expensive locations because he needed the real indigenous people in the movie.  Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film. Living so remotely, deep in the Amazon forest, the indigenous had little use for cash. One tribe asked to be paid in irrigation improvements. Another tribe negotiated for Lands End shorts.  Referring to the Battle of the Somme scene, he explained that the folly and barbarism of “WW I was the end of any idea that Europe was superior”.

“I was genetically designed to be an accountant in Minsk. There’s no reason for me to go to Amazonia to be eaten by mosquitoes”.  “Herzog has made three movies in the jungle. He is Superman. I’m not going back.”

Gray said that the real Fawcett is more complicated and less attractive than the screen version. As a man of his time, Fawcett was racist by our standards, and even thought that he would find more advanced “white Indians” responsible for his Lost City. The speech to the Royal Geographic Society was taken almost verbatim from Fawcett’s historical words. The actual location of Fawcett’s exploration “is no longer jungle because it has been cleared for soy bean fields”.

To shoot a film in 35 mm, Gray’s team had to train a film loader in 1970s camera equipment.  Each day, the day’s work went by crop duster to a local airport to Bogotá to Miami and, finally, to the lab in London. Each day the crew endured a nerve-wracking wait until getting a call by satellite phone to confirm the film’s arrival in London, Three days’ work didn’t make it and had to be shot over again.

Gray originally adapted the screenplay for Brad Pitt, who owned the movie rights to the book by David Grann, but, by the time they had raised the money, “then his big WW II movie came along”. Pitt’s producers pitched Benedict Cumberbatch for the lead, and Gray thought, “Wow, this guy looks very odd”, but then embraced that casting choice.
Two weeks before shooting, Cumberbatch backed out because his wife was pregnant and due during what would be the middle of the jungle shoot.

Pitt’s producers then pitched Charlie Hunnam for the lead. Gray’s wife had been binge-watching Sons of Anarchy, so Gray didn’t see the fit until he dined with Hunnam. Gray learned that Hunnam is a Brit from Newcastle and found him to be swashbuckler-handsome, charming, intelligent and driven – feeling underappreciated as a TV actor.  “I could mine that”. thought Gray.  Gray “understood the burden of having a father blow the family fortune” and was attracted to the character responding with an obsession to with become a famed success.

Gray also noted that Charlie Hunnam will play the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise and that Tom Holland, who plays Fawcett’s son, will be the new Spider Man.

As I wrote on Friday, movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. Gray’s The Lost Cuty of Z has all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film.

I highly recommend this brilliant interview of Gray by Peter Canavese on Groucho Reviews If you stay with it to the end, there’s a whopper of a Joaquin Phoenix anecdote.

Charlie Hunnam (right) in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
Charlie Hunnam (right) in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM

THE LOST CITY OF Z: the historical adventure epic revived

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Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM

In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.

The Lost City of Z opens tomorrow in Bay Area theaters. I saw The Lost City of Z at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray. I’ll be sharing some snippets from Gray’s Q & A on Sunday.

The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military, he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.

That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits – and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole) and Howard Carter (King Tut).

In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme.
That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.

No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z, Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.

Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness. Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.

As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough, performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British).  Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.

Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.

Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller 2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.

Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z, a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji. Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers, there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep in the jungle.

There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the indigenous people.

Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.

The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film.

[And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. The closing credits recognize the “animal weath coordinator” and the “data wrangler”.]

SFFILM: interview with DISCREET director Travis Mathews

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Travis Mathews photo courtesy of SFFILM
Travis Mathews
photo courtesy of SFFILM

Here’s an interview with San Francisco filmmaker Travis Mathews, the writer-director of Discreet.  Mathews has also directed Do I Look Fat?, I Want Your Love, Interior. Leather Bar. and the In Their Room documentary series.  The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) is hosting the U.S. premiere of Mathews’ newest film Discreet, which debuted at the Berlinale.

The Movie Gourmet:  SFFILM is giving your U.S. premiere the prime Saturday 9 PM slot at the Castro. Must be a good feeling.

Travis Mathews:  Two of my earlier films have been screened at the Castro in the Frameline Festival, but not at the San Francisco International Film Festival.  I can tell you that it’s pretty awesome. It’s my favorite theater in the world.

TMG:  Where did you find Bob Swaffar, and just how tall is he? [Bob Swaffer plays John, the child sexual abuser, in Discreet.]

Travis Mathews:  He’s really, really tall.  6′ 7″, I think.  At least 6′ 5″.  I found most of our cast at an open call in Austin – which is its own interesting experience.  Bob is a gentle, wise man who makes pottery.  I had already decided that his character would not speak.

TMG:  Did you see a menace in Bob?

Travis Mathews:  No.  I knew that menace would be created by the editing and sound design, and that the menace would be projected (on Bob) by the audience.  It’s like a Rorschach Test.

TMG:  And where did you find Joy Cunningham?  She’s great in a brief scene as Alex’ mom Sharon.

Travis Mathews: She’s a friend of mine, a lesbian married to a great woman with a couple of great kids.  At the time (of shooting Discreet), they were renting out the house where Sharon lives (in the movie).  Joy is a comedic actress.  She had never done drama, but I knew that she’d be great.  She and her wife Gretchen, they were invaluable when I was writing the film, giving me notes on the screenplay.

TMG:  You’ve made a revenge film where the final act of violence is off-camera.  It’s kind of anti-Peckinpah, with none of the customary splatter for the genre.  What informed this choice?

Travis Mathews:  In previous films, I’ve explored the opposite and showed more, especially raw emotion.  This time I wanted to play with withholding instead of showing.  That was part of the fun in making Discreet.  We did a lot of test screenings and the audiences told me, “yeah, I already knew that” or “this wasn’t clear”.  That helped with the editing choices of what to withhold.

Travis Mathews: I didn’t want to be so clear who was in the body (the body bag floating down the river) at the end. I have an idea, but it is elliptical.  I don’t want to be “I don’t know – who did YOU think it was?”.  But it (the ambiguity) strengthened the movie.

[Note:   If the body isn’t the most obvious character, as I’d thought, then it’s got to be…Holy Toledo! This movie would be even darker than I’d recognized!]

TMG: Why did you have your characters carry out clandestine acts next to a freeway, when we would expect you to have set them out in the woods where no one could see?

Travis Mathews: I was in Texas for a long time on another film project.  I was driving around the same van that Alex drives in Discreet.  I became fascinated by the freeway structure in Texas.  So many are built almost like roller coasters for reasons that seemed arbitrary.  It’s a like a Texas show of strength: We have the tallest freeways!  So I found it both absurd and fascinating.  I wanted them to be a man-made monster in the background.  A freeway is in the background of every setting except Joy/Sharon’s house.  It made sense.

TMG:  What’s the distribution plan for Discreet?

Travis Mathews:  It’s being released (theatrically) in the UK and Ireland.  We’re playing the festival circuit (here in the U.S.) as part of our strategy to get distribution.  It’s a tough movie.  I know that’s it’s not a commercial movie in several respects.  I hope that people see it – it is a film that lingers, as it did with you.

TMG: What is your next project?

Travis Mathews:  I will be a little coy here.  I’m working on two projects.  One is a remake of a 1970s film.  The other is an original with horror elements.  I want to do a horror movie, and Discreet is inching me toward the genre.

TMG: Will these be films that you both write and direct?

Travis Mathews: Yes.

TMG:  One last question – and it’s about Interior. Leather Bar.  Do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that Friedkin had to cut an entire FORTY minutes of gay sex from Cruising?

Travis Mathews: Maybe not all gay sex, but forty minutes of what someone found too sexual, too violent or too something.  Maybe 37 or 42, but about 40 minutes, yes.

On Sunday evening at 6 PM, Travis Mathews and author Karl Soehnlein will be speaking about art in the age of Trump, including Discreet, at Dog Eared Books, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco.

Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales
Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET
photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales

 

SFFILMFestival: DISCREET

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Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of SFFILM
Jonny Mars in DISCREET
photo courtesy of SFFILM

The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) presents the U.S. premiere of the psychological drama Discreet tomorrow, April 8 – and it should be the indie highlight of the festival.

Within a revenge tale, writer-director Travis Mathews has braided threads of social criticism and political comment.  Most of all, Discreet is a compelling portrait of one damaged, very unwell guy and a thoughtful exploration of the alienating aspects of the current American zeitgeist.

Discreet is centered on Alex (Jonny Mars), who has drifted back through his Texas hometown to find that his childhood sexual abuser has re-surfaced.   Alex is untethered either to home or sanity.   Away from home for a long time, Alex has been roaming the country, oddly stopping to shoot videos of freeway traffic.   The most hateful alt-right talk radio plays incessantly from the radio of his van.  And, in a creepy juxtaposition, he’s obsessed with a New Agey YouTube publisher (the comic Atsuko Okatsuka).

Alex sets out to find and confront his abuser (Bob Swaffer), and Discreet takes us on a moody and intense journey, filled with unexpected – and even flabbergasting – moments.  Only the ultimate vengeance seems inevitable – and even that act is handled with surprising subtlety.  The catharsis is intentionally understated, and there is none of the customary splatter.

Swaffer’s physicality, along with his character’s condition, makes him a monster unlike anything I’ve seen in a movie before – a unique blend of the bone-chilling and the vulnerable.

Discreet is only 80 minutes long; keeping it short was a great choice by Mathews, allowing the film to succeed with a deliberate, but never plodding, pace.  We’re continually wondering what Alex is going to do next, and the editing by Mathews and Don Swaynos keeps the audience on alert.  Cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos makes effective use of the static long shot and gives Discreet a singular look.  The idiosyncratic sound design, with its droning and its use of ambient noises, sets the mood.  It’s an effective package – and an impressive calling card for Travis Mathews.

Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales
Bob Swaffar (left) and Jonny Mars in DISCREET
photo courtesy of m-appeal World Sales

While he’s in town, Alex is on the lookout for secret – and sometimes very kinky – sex with other men.  It’s a comment on the repression in Flyover American culture that drives gay sexual expression underground. And furtiveness can make anything seem seamy.  Indeed, the movie’s title comes from the Craiglist euphemism for anonymous sexual hookups.

One critic referred to Discreet as “Travis Mathews’ latest queer experiment”.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s far too narrow a label.   True, Discreet definitely comes from the point of view of a gay filmmaker, and it addresses the repression of gay sexual expression. But this is a film, with its broader focus on alienation, that is important for and accessible to every adult audience.

Mathews previously collaborated with James Franco on Interior. Leather Bar., which is nothing at all like Discreet.   Interior. Leather Bar. is talky and centered on artistic process with a hint of sensationalism.  Discreet more resembles an experimental film such as Upstream Color.  Come to think of it, Discreet has more of the feel of a budget indie (and less languorous) version of Antonioni‘s The Passenger.

Jonny Mars is very effective as Alex, a character who is usually stone-faced, but whose intensity sometimes takes him completely off the rails.  In her one speaking scene as Alex’s mom, Joy Cunningham’s stuttering affect gives us a glimpse into both her past parental unreliability and her current clinging to sobriety by her fingernails.

But the heart of Discreet is Alex and his unpredictable path.  To what degree has Alex’s madness been formed by the childhood abuse?  To what extent has he been deranged by absorbing random and unhealthy bits of American popular culture?  Stylistically, Discreet is a near-masterpiece, and audiences that embrace the discomfort of the story will be rewarded with a satisfying, ever-surprising experience.

San Francisco International Film Festival: fest preview

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SFFILM60_LOCKUP_Vertical

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) – the 60th edition – opens on April 5 and runs through April 19. As always, it’s a Can’t Miss for Bay Area movie fans.  This year’s program is especially loaded.  Here are some enticing festival highlights:

  • The indie smash Patti Cake$, which rocked Sundance and SXSW.
  • A screening of Citizen Kane with William “Will” Randolph Hearst III discussing his family.
  • James Ivory (Remains of the Day, Howards End) will receive an award and present a 30th anniversary screening of his Maurice. (Ivory isn’t British, he was born in Berkeley – who knew?)
  • Noted film historian David Thomson will discuss what really frightens him in that San Francisco treat, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
  • Speaking of Hitchcock, there’s also the new documentary 78/52 on the 78 set ups and the 52 cuts in Psycho’s iconic shower scene.  Talk about a Deep Dive…
  • Ethan Hawke gets an award and presents his new film, Maudie.
  • Prolific writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave and a multitude of TV show) introduces his new miniseries Guerilla.
  • Amir Bar-Lev (the Tillman Story) will present his documentary on the Grateful Dead Long Strange Trip (but, just like a Dead concert, it’s four hours long).
  • That roguish 72-year-old sex symbol Sam Elliott will attend a screening of his new movie, The Hero.
  • A critical favorite, director James Gray (The Lovers, The Immigrant, The Yards) will attend the screening of his newest film, The Lost City of Z.
  • The new film from the Dardennes brothers (The Son, The Kid with a Bike, Two Days One Night), The Unknown Woman.
  • The world premiere of the experimental film Discreet from Bay Area writer-director Travis Mathews. I’ve seen it, and it’s strangely compelling.
  • The latest from Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, Miss Sharon Jones!) – This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous.
  • Sieranevada, the latest from Romanian director Cristi Puilu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu).
PATTI CAKE$ photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society
PATTI CAKE$
photo courtesy of SFFILM

 

The calendar of this year’s festival includes a rich program of indies, documentaries and foreign films. Among the foreign choices, I liked the little Irish self-discovery movie A Date for Mad Mary.

And, I don’t know anything about this film, but my favorite movie title in the fest is Donkeyote.

The 60th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) opens this Wednesday.  Here’s SFFILMFestival’s information on the program, the calendar and tickets and passes.

Throughout SFFILMFestival, I’ll be linking more festival coverage to my SFFILMFestival 2017 page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.

DISCREET photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society
DISCREET
photo courtesy of SFFILM

THE BANDIT: a buddy movie about a buddy movie

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Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham in THE BANDIT. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

Writer-director Jesse Moss describes The Bandit as “a buddy movie about a buddy movie”, and he’s right. The buddies are mega-star Burt Reynolds and his stuntman/friend/roommate Hal Needham, who directed the enormously successful Smokey and the Bandit franchise.

Needham, one of only two stuntmen with an Oscar, is arguably cinema’s greatest stunt performer and stunt coordinator. Reynolds did many of his own stunts, and we we see some hard, hard falls in The Bandit. But Burt did nothing to nothing to match Needham, whose FIRST career stunt was jumping off an airplane wing to tackle a rider off his horse. We see many instances where Needham became a LITERAL car crash test dummy.

One of The Bandit’s highlights is the Needham stunt that broke his back – jumping a car off a dock and onto a barge – and slamming into the barge a little short.

There’s rich source material here from Burt’s garage (Reynolds calls it “King Tut’s Tomb for documentarinans”), which stored tapes back to 1956.

For added color, Needham and Reynolds were epic partiers, who embraced and exemplified the Mad Men era. Needham was a vivid character and lived a helluva life. I strongly recommend Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Needham.

Hal’s widow told Bay Area filmmaker Jesse Moss that Needham hated documentaries because they were boring, so Moss aimed to make a documentary that Hal would enjoy. Indeed, The Bandit opens with the sly Reynolds, in maroon leisure suit with flared pant legs, mocking his own image outrageously. And, it’s a hoot throughout.

(Moss’ first movie was at San Francisco’s Castro Theater in 1979, when his dad took him a double feature of Erroll Morris’ Gates of Heaven and Hardware Wars, a documentarian born!)

I saw The Bandit at its premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It played on TV channel CMT, and now can be streamed on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.