Two of the international films in the Festival this year, Mad Bastards, from Australia and directed by Brendan Fletcher, and Knuckle, from Ireland and directed by Ian Palmer, deal with family violence. Mad Bastards follows the angry adult TJ, his estranged 13-year-old son, the possible legacy of domestic violence, and the transformation from a young boy to a man. Although it is a fiction film, it is based on real people, places, and events and uses some of the real people as actors. Knuckle is a documentary, chronicling the decades long rift between extended families and their use of bare knuckle fighting to solve their conflicts.

Filled with fascinating, vibrant characters and intense scenes of violence, both films explore the extreme nature of aggression and the effects on family in a smart way. As an audience, we are affected by the visceral content, but we learn the consequences of their actions and see the underlying need to stop the negative values and turn their lives into something more positive before the aggression is passed down to new generations. We sat down with the two directors for a conversation.

Insider: Ian, how did you become involved in this world of bare knuckle fighting?

Ian Palmer: In 1996, ’97, I came back from the States. I’d never really considered making documentaries up to that point. A friend was making community videos, and he had made one with one of these nuclear families in this big plant. I went over to meet them just out of curiosity, and they dug out a whole series of family albums which traced their family back 70 years, and I thought, that’s an unbelievable gold mine. I started talking to them about making a documentary using those photographs, and that’s where my connection with these people started. A couple months later one of the daughters, Jaclyn, was getting married and they asked me to video the wedding. She got married to a guy called Michael McDonaghs, 18 years old in the film. That’s how I met him, and the first footage you see in the film is the first time I met him. Around the corner at the reception his big brother James, 10 years older, was there, and he was the center of attention, obviously a charismatic figure among them. And that was it, I met the two of them, and I didn’t’ know anything about them.

A few weeks later I got a phone call from a third older brother called Curly Patty, saying James had a fight coming up and asking if I’d like to video tape for them. I said sure no problem. I didn’t even know they were talking about bare knuckle stuff. We went to the fight, met up in the morning, a huge crowd of men, women, and children to see their champion off. I followed as quickly I could in my car. Once we got there, a quiet country lane, the other guy was brought in–two big men. James was very fit, the other got not so good. The fight happened—five minutes, James beat the guy to pieces and won 20,000 pounds in a brown paper bag. James calls his dad on the phone whose waiting for him at the pub 10 miles away—families can’t attend their own fights, that’s not allowed. Only neutral people can attend the fights because if people go in a group you’re going to get a lot of anger between them and maybe a group fight.

Brendan Fletcher: There are lots of rules aren’t there?

Ian: No gloves, but you can wrap your knuckles if you’ve got weak knuckles, which James says in the film he has. No biting, no kicking, no butting. The referees can encourage a draw, and if you accept a draw that’s honorable. Back to the pub afterwards they were meeting up, and it was like the crowning of a king. I was hanging on in the middle of this crazy crowd, but he was in the back of the pub, and there was a light over his head, and it was like a halo over his head. And that was it, I was hooked. I’d stepped through a door into a world I had no idea of. And 12 years later I came out the other side.

Brendan: [My journey] was almost exactly the same. What I wanted to do was not come up with a story, I kind of wanted to start with the men and the place and do some workshops with those guys, and then kind of organically come out with the best people for performing in a movie—some people that had some talent and some discipline and some great stories. We got our first script development grant from the government in 2003. I didn’t want to write anything until I knew that the process was going to be effective, otherwise it’s wasting everybody’s time. We shot on 35 mm tests with our script development grant. That ended up being very useful footage. From 2003 to 2008 when we got fully financed, there were guys who were going to be our main dudes who were unfortunately in jail. So at times it was too real.

Insider: Did you find the same thing as Ian, that these guys were happy to be documented?

Brendan: Absolutely. For remote aboriginal Australia, to have someone actually listen and not just come up for a three-minute story for a show, that was just a very meaningful experience for them. So pretty quickly that bond was formed and reinforced. There was one moment when we got the 35mm film back. And I showed them and told them about the funding that we were pitching for, and the budget, and we were talking for hours about it, and they’re nodding and saying ‘yeah, yeah..’. And I said, “Have you got any questions or anything?” And the main guy goes, “Yeah, I’ve got one question. Are you fucking serious?” (laughs). This is a community where the nearest theatre is 500 km away.

Brendan: Were the fights about anything except money? Was there lineage involved?

Ian: It was really all about lineage. Occasionally money would come into a fight, but that was the exception rather than the rule. But when it was the exception it was big money. It’s really all to do about ancestry.

Brendan: Did you find that people would introduce themselves as “I am the daughter of such and such…”?

Ian: In the film there’s a statement made by Michael, the younger brother, as he wins a fight. He beats a man named Joyce, and he says at the end of the fight, “I’m Jimmy Quinn’s Michael.” His father is Jimmy Quinn McDonagh, and he’s Michael, the son of Jimmy Quinn. That’s the way it works. You’re the son or daughter of somebody.

Insider: Brendan, were the original subjects interested in how you were going to handle the violence?

Brendan: I think they were very proud of being perceived as the tough men that they were. But they were also adamant that there was a sense of cultural dimension or spirituality to the movie. They loved the fighting, they could have shot ten more fighting scenes. But in the fullness of the movie, there was kind of an unspoken agreement between us that it had to represent them as spiritual kind of people.

Insider: How much did that weigh down on you?

Brendan: I was totally with them. I didn’t want to make a movie about fighting either. I was captivated by these tough characters who were incredibly vulnerable men.

Insider: Ian, was it hard for you to get the humanism that we see in the doc? Did you have to start searching for it?

Ian: It was always my idea that I was going to try and make a film from inside of this world, not from the outside looking in. A lot of these fights would have ended up on the front page of tabloids with a bloody picture of someone spattered over all of the pages. But I wasn’t interested in doing a tabloid version of this. I was always looking to make a film about real people who happened to do this very strange thing. I set out to make a character study; however, I did get completely seduced by this tumultuous, attractive, visceral fighting world. I loved going to fights. I would go to any fights I could get to. At a certain point, I cut myself off. I wasn’t really making a film anymore, I was just falling into this life.

Insider: Brendan, after that initial thrill did you begin to feel the effects of filming the violence?

Brendan: Yeah, and a couple times I felt sick. I started to talk to the women as well, and the women started to talk to me, and culturally that took a long time. I kind of got the other side of the story. I already had the machismo, the pride.

Insider: Because your films are both so violent but delve into the humanism of the characters, is there something you’re interested in audience members taking away from it?

Ian: If people came to my film to see violence and see fights and they came away with being satisfied with their desire for violence, it would be a failure. That’s not what I’m about at all. It’s about seeing people living their lives, seeing these families and these men having to do what they do for honor and respect, and seeing the destruction that it brings to them and their world.

Brendan: For me, particularly as a man, experiencing these fighting men was a very compelling experience, it was a door I went in on, and I think it may be the same for an audience. But then it’s about what happens when you walk through that door. There would be no depth in my life and no depth in my film if it were just a lot of that door. And it’s what happens beneath that, what are the effects of that, and particularly in my movie, what do the younger generations pick up when they see that happening to their fathers and uncles and grandfathers. It’s not a fairy tale, it’s not a ‘happily ever after,’ it’s a very realistic depiction of a complex situation.



Source

There was a reason the film industry buzz humming through Park City seemed particularly insistent during this year’s Festival. Whether it’s because two of the critical stand-outs from last year’s Festival – Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone and Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right – fared well at the box office, or because the economy appears to be slowly recovering, nearly twice the 14 films sold to distributors during the 2010 Festival have been acquired this year, 27 as of now. Nine of 16 U.S. Dramatic Competition films were picked up by distributors (one of them, Terri, was sold pre-Festival; check out the latest tally of films that have sold so far). “This Sundance will go down in history as the one that pulled the independent film business out of the economic recession,” veteran film industry sales agent and producer Cassian Elwes, who’s brokered many distribution deals at the Festival over the years, tweeted on January 27.

“We are at a new crossroads – this crossroads between the power of distribution and money influencing creativity.” – Morgan Spurlock

In the midst of an active sales environment, the discussion of alternative forms of distribution was also notably prevalent in Park City this year. In fact, while filmmakers such as Lance Hammer (Ballast) and Marianna Palka (Good Dick) have recently pursued new ways of putting their work before audiences, the 2011 Festival put the self-distribution conversation on center stage. It’s no longer enough for indie filmmakers to be creative and know how to direct; now they need to be businesspeople who know how to get their films in front of audiences.

During the Festival, Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam announced a new initiative to provide the Institute’s film and theatre artists with access to top-tier creative funding and marketing, and the endorsement of the Sundance name. The initiative also aims to provide artists with access to a variety of leading distribution platforms to be announced later this spring. The changing distribution landscape is “a great opportunity for the Institute to expand support for our artists and to energize audiences around independent storytelling,” said Putnam.

On Monday, January 24, Festival favorite Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) premiered his funny examination of product placement in movies, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, in which he transparently sidles up to advertisers to get them to pay for the cost of making the documentary in exchange for advertising their products in his film. The next day, Kevin Smith premiered his dark, subversive splatterfest Red State to a sold-out crowd who listened to his alternately angry, hopeful, and wistful announcement that he and his producing partner Jon Gordon were going to bypass traditional distributors altogether and take the film on a Red State U.S.A. tour in March and hopefully release the movie nationwide on October 19, the date his iconic movie Clerks was released 17 years ago after its Festival premiere.

The two directors are on opposite ends of the distribution spectrum: Spurlock’s laugh-out-loud film arrived at the Festival with a multitude of marketing deals already brokered with various companies; Smith has created an unsettling movie some distributors would be hesitant or unable to find an audience for, but they’re both tinkering with the traditional distribution model and finding some hope in the process of connecting with filmgoers.

Curious about how product placement and branding function in mainstream Hollywood movies (and how the practice influences artistic integrity), Spurlock decided to ask any company that’s game to advertise their products in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Ultimately, 15 do, including JetBlue, POM Wonderful, Merrell shoes, and the island of Aruba.  In exchange for exposing his audience to the companies’ products, those companies agreed to promote the film. As the rollout for the film’s marketing begins, in every location of Sheetz, a mid-Atlantic convenience store chain, there will be cardboard cutouts of Spurlock and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold collector cups. JetBlue will air ads for the film, featuring Spurlock, on the TVs on their planes for six weeks before the film is released. “At Hyatt Hotels, it’s going to be me as you turn on the TV saying, ‘Welcome to the greatest hotel you’ll ever experience,’” Spurlock explained at his Festival premiere. The deals he makes in the film aren’t make-believe, so when Spurlock went knocking at distributors’ doors with a whole host of cinched-up marketing plans, he made the distributor’s work that much easier.

Spurlock’s model isn’t realistic for most – or any other – documentary makers, but Spurlock said the film “shows the possibilities of working with advertisers.” He stresses that he didn’t allow any of the companies in the film to have approval over final cut. “We really did have carte blanche to be as creative as we wanted,” he said, and some of his ideas were shot down by the companies (he wanted to give away a Mini Cooper car to someone who would name their newborn Mini Cooper). “There’s a real creative power when you empower an artist and I think that the more advertising brands that do that and step away from trying to have control will really create a revolution in film and television,” Spurlock said at the premiere.

It’s hard to imagine Kevin Smith getting cozy with advertisers, particularly after his charged announcement at the Red State premiere on January 23. Calling his plan to self-distribute Red State his “indie 2.0,” Smith said he was fed up with distributors who spend four to five times a movie’s budget to market a film and thus make it nearly impossible to recoup costs. Ads, publicity, marketing: Smith ranted at his premiere that most distributors don’t know how to spend money smartly and creatively in any of those arenas. He says he does – particularly at a moment when social media is a better use of marketing dollars than billboards or newspapers – and he’s going to do it himself. “We believe the state of film marketing has become ridiculously expensive and exclusionary to the average filmmaker longing simply to tell their story,” Smith and Gordon explain on the Red State website. “When the costs of marketing and releasing a movie are four times that film’s budget, it’s apparent the traditional distribution mechanism is woefully out of touch with not only the current global economy, but also the age of social media.”

Smith’s maneuver around traditional distribution isn’t ideal for every filmmaker – particularly those who don’t possess his genius for marshaling coverage – but the move, coming from a veteran filmmaker who’s worked in both indie and studio film, offers a little window of hope indie filmmakers can consider. Despite the extra perseverance self-distribution requires, and the threat that a self-distributing filmmaker would spend more time on the business of film than making new films, the flux the film industry is experiencing doesn’t have to spell doom for filmmakers. The revolution Spurlock referred to at his film’s premiere excites him. “It could be fun; it could be different,” he said. “We are at a new crossroads – this crossroads between the power of distribution and money influencing creativity.”

Source

Kelly Reichardt has a long relationship with Sundance, from her first feature River of Grass (1994) through the popular Old Joy (2006) and this year’s Meek’s Cutoff, the story of Western pioneers lost on the trail. Before River, Reichardt worked in the art department on many independent films, including seminal features by Hal Hartley and Todd Haynes’ Poison; she is still close friends with Haynes. “I worked on a lot of people’s first film,” Reichardt remembers. “Then I thought I could work this hard on my own film.”

Although she didn’t know how to make a film, she didn’t necessarily want to go to film school. She was motivated by place. “I had never seen the part of Miami I grew up with on film,” she says. “When I was working on these small crews on first films I thought maybe I could write something for Miami. If you watch River of Grass you’ll see I haven’t quite figured it out. I didn’t know about screenplay structure. I was just breaking down movies I liked on note cards and trying to figure out the rhyme or reason of it.” But it wasn’t an accident that River was a type of non-road movie, deconstructing the genre. “Not that I would have thought of any of those words at the time,” Reichardt says with a laugh.

Shooting still photography since she was 12, she started shooting sync sound super-8 film in a non-traditional sense. “I was always filming people telling stories,” she recalls. “I was always driving cross country and meeting people along the way and asking them to tell stories.” In the years in between River and Old Joy, she tried pure abstract filmmaking but always came back to wanting a story to latch onto.

“But I have a great appreciation for non-narrative films,” she says. “If I go see Peggy Ahwesh’s films or an installation by her and you watch for 20 minutes, you start making associations and putting together a puzzle in your mind. Or you watch a Peter Hutton film, you are looking at his footage and by the third reel you realize, ‘Oh, this is about everything in life. How did it get to be that? I was just watching a boat on the Black Sea.’ I’m very envious of that approach.” In an inspired decision, Reichardt has added short films by both of those filmmakers to a DVD of her own film, Old Joy, to help more audiences see their work.

Combining her love for non-linear narrative and her attachment to plotted story, she has found a fruitful collaboration with writer Jon Raymond. Old Joy was first a short story by Raymond, then Reichardt wrote the script. Space and the characters’ environment heavily affect the film’s tone. With Wendy and Lucy, they came up with the idea together, then Raymond wrote the story and she the script. Raymond wrote the Meek’s Cutoff script with Reichardt giving ideas and editing points.

“He has that skill – you’re reading one of his stories and you think it’s about two friends and this moment,” she says. “Then you realize, ‘Oh no, it’s about something much larger.’ It dawns on me slowly; it isn’t evident when you’re reading it.”

Reichardt spends a lot of time driving around America when she’s scouting locations for a shoot. “For Wendy and Lucy I think I scouted 39 states,” she says. “Then I shot in Portland – you can see that Walgreen’s outside Jon’s window. For Old Joy I went to every hot springs in America. We shot at the one he wrote the story at. But for every place, it informs you. When I’m driving around with my dog, it’s really a time to get to know the movie and its through-place.”

Although all of her films have been intense adventures for her, making a period piece in the West was a particularly massive undertaking, making Meek’s Cutoff her “biggest” film in scope. “It was physically hard. 110 degrees,” she recalls. “The production designer got heatstroke and then seven days later we took an actor to the hospital with hypothermia. The desert kicks your ass. Then you see the most insane sunset you’ve never seen before with all these people you’re working with and go have dinner. You can only get to that [experience] through the hardship of the day.”

An intense shoot takes on its own life and starts controlling the film, pulling away from the script. She says she’s constantly throwing lines from the script away during a shoot. “How can we get away just showing it? What can the camera do and how do you move people through a scene? That’s where the excitement of filmmaking is for me,” she says. “Then I’ll be in the editing room and it will come together and Jon’s story reveals itself to me again.”

To keep expectations under control, Reichardt shies away from calling Meek’s Cutoff a Western. Genre trappings are a useful resource for her, to make the locations and character set up the film in a recognizable way. Then she bends those familiar aspects to tell the story in her own style. The technique pays off.

“These are small moments of the journey. It’s not the journey. They are all a moment of it. And if you deal with a smaller time frame, you can really get more into the details,” she says. “It’s like being attracted to the B-side of the record. Get a little deeper.”

Source