Author: rakemag

Straight talk
VINCENT GALLO

Since its infamous debut at the last Cannes Film Festival, director and actor Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny has become the year’s most controversial movie, as much for its deliberately slow pacing as for the final scene, in which Gallo and Chloë Sevigny engage in an explicit, unsimulated sex act. Gallo chatted with us recently about the film, his philosophy of art, and getting hassled by Minnesota state troopers after making out with a 1970s-era supermodel at a roadside rest area.

THE RAKE: What would you say to skeptical filmgoers to convince them this is a film they should see?

GALLO: If someone is skeptical, this is a very difficult film. If you have a sense that my intentions are questionable, it’s going to be very hard to follow the multidimensional first half of the film, which on the skeptical surface is where nothing happens. I’d rather a skeptical person not go to see the film. It doesn’t play to win people over. It’s not Lost in Translation.

Your scene with Cheryl Tiegs was filmed here in Minnesota. Any interesting stories to relate about that?

We went out on I-35, no more than ten miles out of town, and shot that sequence at a roadside rest stop. The rest-stop employees called the police. The police came and I said, “I don’t understand. People walk around with their video cameras and you don’t arrest them. There’s three people here; this can’t qualify as a production. I know my rights, and good day, sir.” He asked us all for a license. They always seem to handcuff me. The cop said something extremely mean to Cheryl, and I was taken aback by it—he looked at Cheryl’s license and said “Oh, Cheryl Tiegs—you were a model, huh? Wow, you got old. Fifty-four!” She was so cool and polite. She just said “Yeah.” And then he left. I’ll never forget that. It was just so bizarre.

The Chloë Sevigny sex scene has become notorious. But how important is that scene to the film aesthetically?

There’s no film without that. Sexually graphic images are not an accessory or a selling feature or a luxury. The whole point of the film was to bring insight into pathological behavior in loss of love. To remove those graphic images would severely diminish the disturbing nature of that scene. It would be fraudulent. I am not an eroticist or a pornographer. I’ve been working for twenty-five years, and I’ve never used exhibitionism or voyeurism in any of my work. I’m not interested in those things. I’m interested in emotional hangups and how they translate into the behavior.

You have an offbeat approach to cinematography, especially when shooting yourself—often we see only the back of your head, or you’re only visible on the extreme edge of the frame.

I have a very specific aesthetic point of view and a sense of composition. When I was shooting this film, I was always looking at myself in a monitor. There’s never a scene, not even in the shower—certainly not the sex scene, where there’s ten monitors and I’m watching the whole thing—there’s never a moment where I’m not watching what I’m filming. So I can play to the camera in a way no one has ever been able to do before in cinema, because the photographer is in charge of capturing the performer but the performer is unaware of what’s going on compositionally. However, if the photographer is the performer, I can do very extreme things. Unfortunately, I hate to see myself, especially my face. I can’t bear being captured on film. That’s a problem, because I’m a filmmaker and I choose to include myself in the performance of the film. That’s why the accusations of narcissism were so painful to me. I don’t care if people say I’m a jerk, I don’t care if they say I’m ugly. I’m really controlling and bold when it comes to concepts and aesthetics, and incredibly un-self-protective when it comes to me. I’m comfortable being hated for what I am. I just don’t like being hated for what I’m not.

The Brown Bunny opens October 1 at the Uptown Theatre.

A friend recently pointed out the hypocrisy in how I love bloody, mobbed-out films where people get whacked with a ball point pen in the jugular—and yet nearly have a nervous breakdown when I see a squirrel smashed in the street.
I don’t know if this requires serious examination on my part but it is true. Even though I can watch Scar Face without flinching, I have to turn away when they feature animals on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Throw a dude in a wood chipper, fine. But don’t show me a cat with his head stuck in a drinking glass.

I imagine this is hereditary, as I’ve repeatedly heard the story of my mom, out for a stroll one summer day, finding a stray dog who she claimed was “dying of thirst.” She promptly went up to someone’s house, filled her shoe with water from their hose spigot, allowed the mutt to wet his whistle from her sensible navy pump, and was on her way without a second thought.

This is also the woman who toasts bread for the birds in winter. Kind-hearted or insane? Maybe both.

Whenever some grisly story hits the news about a psychopath who has bludgeoned his wife with a ball-peen hammer and run off with the babysitter, the first thing my oldest sister will say is, “Oh no, that’s terrible—I hope he made provisions for someone to look after their dog!” Somehow she believes that a man capable of cold-blooded murder surely also he had the good sense to find a responsible caretaker for “Winky.”
Same goes for the occasional circus-elephant-rampage story. My family will undoubtedly rationalize that “Jumbo,” in a moment of elephant clarity, looked down at the tutu and roller skates he was wearing and thought “The hell with this!” So what if he snapped and mauled a family of four? Did his sadistic trainer really have to swat him with a stick during the act?

I know to some this sounds rife with contradiction. How can a self-professed animal lover be so cold and indifferent to people? I don’t have an answer, but I’d bet my Sopranos DVD collection and a lifetime’s supply of Pounce that there are people who feel the same way I do.

E-mail Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

Fear is Elias Merhige’s business, as you’ll know from his earlier films like the avant-garde creeper Begotten and the 2000 arthouse hit Shadow of the Vampire, with its witty premise that the villain in the great 1922 silent film Nosferatu had been played by a real vampire. His new film Suspect Zero stars Aaron Eckhart and Carrie-Anne Moss as FBI detectives on the trail of a killer (Ben Kingsley, in another of the great performances he’s been turning in lately) who appears to have psychic powers. Merhige talked to us recently about the film.

RAKE: Before you got on board as director, Zero was a more traditional cop thriller, and you rewrote the script to make it stranger and more psychologically driven. Tell us about that.

MERHIGE: The story needed to be taken out of the police procedural into the subjective. The stories that interest me the most are the ones that are psychological. There’s nothing more terrifying than the mind. When you want to get into investigating true fear and true horror, the mind is a great playground.

It was more like Seven in the early drafts, right?

Yes and no. But it was different enough from Seven, because I’d never want to do another film that’s already been done. So I told the producers that I would want to take this thing down a very different path. I realized that in order to make this a truly significant work, stories can no longer be told where you have this dualistic idea of good and evil. There’s just a big fat grey area right now where good and evil commingle with one another, and walk hand in hand with one another. We see it now in the war against terrorism, in our attempt to bring in “the bad guys.” Another thing I wanted to express in this film is how the ordinary world is terrorizing us. Airplanes, trains, and trucks—even something as innocent as opening your mail has consequences. The idea in Suspect Zero is that this serial killer is someone who’s just ordinary, and that true evil is completely ordinary.

What attracts you to making movies about violence and fear?

It’s the role of art to explore darkness. The darkness within us, the darkness at the void of the universe. It’s the only way to understand the light and what true redemption is. By understanding the darkness, it no longer becomes monstrous.

Do you see yourself as a genre filmmaker?

Not at all. Genres eat directors. I like challenges. I like to stand beneath the mountain and wait for the avalanche, and then try to outrun it. That’s what excites me about a genre, is to turn it on its head and take it off-road in a completely different direction. I don’t think Suspect Zero is a genre film. It’s several different kinds of storytelling and several different genres. There’s a science-fiction element. It’s more a psychological thriller than a serial-killer film. There is a serial killer, but that’s not really what the movie’s about. It’s about contemplating the nature of justice and redemption in our post-9/11 world.

Shadow of the Vampire had a strong streak of black comedy, but Suspect Zero is much more serious, even somber.

There’s a great deal of humor in Shadow. Somebody as deadly serious as [John Malkovich’s character] Murnau, someone who is obsessed, is very funny. I think there’s great humor in deep seriousness. But in Suspect Zero I didn’t want to be funny because there are so many delicate, important issues that are raised. I didn’t want it to feel exploitative or insensitive. I think the sadness and the melancholy in Suspect Zero is something we all feel as a country. I just felt that was the right and truthful note to end the film on.

“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the past twenty-five years, keeper at the Minnesota Zoo. Taylor is one of the folks responsible for the animals on the Northern Trail—that’d be buffalo, Przewalski’s horses, moose, and of course the endangered Amur (Siberian) tigers. Lately he’s been especially busy with some new arrivals—a pair of female tiger cubs born in May. Visitors have been able to watch the cubs in their den via closed-circuit TV, but starting September 18, the youngsters will be on view romping around the main tiger enclosure. When we enlisted Taylor for our desert-island game, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that, unique among all our previous interviewees, he’s actually been stranded on a real desert island: specifically, Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, during his two years with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. “The minimum temperature the whole time was seventy-one degrees,” he says. Here’s what Taylor would take along for another stint in the South Pacific:

1) “A machete, because you can’t drink one of those big coconuts without them. You can use it for building huts, or just about anything you can think of.”

2) “A refrigerator. Boy, do you miss ice when you don’t have it for two years. Solar-powered, and stocked with supplies to make the perfect Hawaiian Sunset—rum, a
little pineapple juice.”

3) “Several blank canvases and painting supplies for capturing the island sunsets. I mostly paint with acrylics, because they’re so easy to handle. Recently, I’ve been painting animal-related portraits—tigers, actually.”

4) “A jar of mayonnaise, for when a palm tree falls down and you cut out the heart for a heart-of-palm salad. If you haven’t had salad for a year, it’s pretty much beyond description.”

5) “Two cats, to keep the rodent population down, which is a problem on a desert isle. Two cats because you can amuse yourself watching their interactions.” But Taylor would probably leave the tiger cubs at home—referring to the book The Life of Pi, he notes that on a desert island it’s probably best not to live next to a predator that weighs three times as much as you do. “I’d stick with domestic cats,” he says.

Mary’s watching: “Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of British Pop”

I settled into my comfy chair and with every good bed-wetting liberal intention tried to watch the Democratic National Convention on TV. I felt like a big dumb demographic cliché. With one eye on John Edwards’ shiny hopeful face, my hopelessly Gen-X other eye drifted to the Vanity Fair in my lap. Mr. Sincere and Shiny, try as he might, could not compete with the pretty magazine and its photos of people who party with Paris Hilton.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Here’s where Mary begins berating herself for her shallowness and political apathy.” Oh, how little you know me…

First, if most of my friends were honest, they would reveal that their true interest in Kerry amounts to little more than good hair, time spent in a garage band, and kite surfing.

So what? People say, “Vote for the candidate you can most relate to.” I’m happy to say I can’t “relate” to any of them. Can you?

I wasn’t born into money. I’ve never taken advice from my father. I’ve never been drawn to people who desperately seek the approval of strangers. I hate being told what to do. I think it would be creepy to know that there’s a good chance that I’m sleeping in a room that Ronald Reagan has had sex in (although Reagan was a SAG member and he regularly colored his hair, so I have more in common with him than any other president).

Sometimes the trifling, immoral details of a candidate’s life, the very things the spin doctors want to keep hidden, are the things most of us could relate to. Between blowing the sax on late-night TV and blowing the chronic, Clinton sealed the deal with a huge demo of voters. Bottom line, vote from your heart, vote from your ass. Just vote.

Now if only Nader smoked crack.

E-mail Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

In film after film, John Sayles is one of the only directors out there unafraid to take a hard look at the negative influence of money and power on American society. At times that leads to heavy-handed didacticism, as with the disappointing Sunshine State, but we’ve got a good feeling about Silver City, which reunites Sayles with Chris Cooper and Kris Kristofferson, both of whom teamed with Sayles in his best film, the terrific thinking-man’s cop thriller Lone Star. Here, Cooper plays Dicky Pilager, a deeply conservative, tumble-tongued candidate for Colorado governor, who dredges up a mess of trouble when he reels in a corpse during a routine fly-fishing photo-op. 651-649-4416; www.landmarktheaters.com

If moviespeak shorthand abbreviates “romantic comedy” as “romcom,” then this is a “romzom”—a romantic comedy set amid the zombie plague of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg, who also wrote the movie, first worked together on a British sitcom called Spaced, and it’s obvious they have great creative chemistry. They’ve created an instant cult classic in the vein (and we use that word advisedly) of Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive, and provided the biggest laughs we’ve had in a theater all year. It’s not merely parody à la Scream, though these guys really know and love their zombie movies, but smart, character-driven humor that American audiences will find most familiar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you like the genre, Shaun comes highly recommended.

Director Takashi Miike’s reputation rests on his bizarre visual imagery and his mindbogglingly prolific career—though Gozu only came out in Japan last year, the Japanese gonzo has already finished seven other films. So it might be too much to ask that everything that happens in this movie makes logical sense. Nominally a cross between an atmospheric horror film like The Ring and a gangster thriller, Gozu follows Minami, a hapless, low-level yakuza who’s been assigned to kill his insane mentor and manages to lose the corpse in the very weird criminal underground of the city of Nagoya. Further plot explanation would be fruitless, but we’ll tell you that it does involve a minotaur-like demon named Gozu (Japanese for “cow head”). Like the work of Eugène Ionesco, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch—like dreams, in other words—there is a strange and disturbing art here that can’t be denied even if it can’t be understood. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org