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Tag: Film careers

  • The remarkable Malcom McDowell on why Anthony Burgess came up with the title A Clockwork Orange

    Christopher Jackson hears from Malcom McDowell about his career in film

    Malcolm McDowell is talking to me from what looks like a spacious octagonal attic, the dark at the window behind him shows no stars. He is wearing splendid Ronnie Barker specs and a black hoodie, his white hair tufted behind a domed forehead.

    It’s not that far in the scheme of things from Christmas and he is immediately humorous about the predicament. “My God, I’ve seen enough of those. Here we go again!” Then he lets a pause go by which wouldn’t be out of place in a Harold Pinter play. “But the kids love it, don’t they?”

    Here’s happy to discuss his work, and understanding when A Clockwork Orange (1971) immediately comes up: ”I am thrilled to talk to fans – about anything really, but especially that film which I suppose you might say is the jewel in the crown of my career.” He says this without a trace of pomposity, even somewhat humorously: he seems to be one of those rare actors who doesn’t necessarily consider himself the centre of the universe.

    In the same vein he continues sincerely: “Without the fans, I wouldn’t have a career: neither would any of us. The fans are very important and I always have time to say hello to fans.”

    His list of notable credits, of course, is far greater than just A Clockwork Orange and includes Caligula (1979), Cat People (1982), Star Trek Generations (1992), and The Artist (2011).

    But it’s A Clockwork Orange which has most endured, partly due to its sheer quality, and also because it’s the work of what we might call mid-period Stanley Kubrick, at a time when his films become scarcer and therefore more precious.

    McDowell is exceptionally forthcoming and relaxed about talking about something which he will have been asked about numerous times. He will be no stranger to being asked about the scene where Alex and the droogs kicks the poor tramp. It is the film’s anarchic streak which has endured: its author, the polymathic Anthony Burgess, intuited that the brakes on traditional morality would been an outpouring of violence, which we see on our screens now day in day out.

    But did McDowell ever meet Burgess? “After we shot the movie and it opened, I went during the first week of the opening to New York. That was when I met for the first time with Anthony Burgess who wrote the book.”

    So he hadn’t ever met him set. McDowell says: “I’d never met him before – I wasn’t allowed to meet him. I guess Stanley didn’t want me to be influenced by the writer. Writers on film are really just complications we could do without.”

    This is a lovely detail about Kubrick, who was famously meticulous in the compilation of his movies. What can certainly imagine that a literary titan on set might be one titan too many. It is a window to the hierarchy of the movies which may look topsy-turvy for Burgess fans.

    Then McDowell launches into an astonishing anecdote: “I asked burgess in New York about the phrase ‘a clockwork orange’ and he came upon the title.”

    I am craned forward, faintly astonished to be hearing this little piece of literary history unbidden. McDowell continues: “He told me he was in an East End pub in London and he was sitting next to a friend of his and they were chatting. Suddenly the door opened and this strange-looking guy comes in and his friend looked at him and said: “He’s as queer as a clockwork orange.’”

    Many people think authors should look up in a deep trance from their desks to find inspiration, and perhaps that is sometimes the case. But McDowell’s anecdote reminds us they should also go down the pub.” Burgess said : ‘I just loved the sound of that phrase and I thought it would make a good title for a book some time.’  Which indeed it did.”

    That’s some understatement but McDowell isn’t finished yet. He finishes: “So I said to Burgess: ‘Yeah but what does it mean? He said: “I don’t know. I think it just means look at this guy, he’s really strange and odd – as queer as a clockwork orange.”

    Having changed my understanding of a small but important nook of 210th century literary history, McDowell finishes. “So there you are, you have it from the chief orange himself.”

    It was Henry James who said a writer should be the sort of person who notices things. This can be the case. But young writers should know that what you really need to do is be able to identify a certain charge which useful things have – sometimes things will leap up and say they want to be a name in your novel, a setting, a scene – or perhaps a title to the book you may just get around to writing one day.

  • Henry Boston Crayfourd on his remarkable journey in film: “I always knew it was what I wanted to do”

    Henry Boston Crayfourd

    I think it was probably the fun of bursting a balloon full of water over my Dad’s head and filming it in slow motion on my 9th birthday that really got me hooked on film. Or possibly that my Mum let me use my underwater camera to swim after, and film, reef sharks aged 10.

    Whatever it was, I have had an obsession with film direction and production for as long as I can remember. I used to spend weekends making films with my friends (hilarious to watch now as the acting skills left a lot to be desired). There was no doubt though that I always knew it was what I wanted to do.

    Travel grew my love as I had such wonderful things to record on video. My parents invested heavily in taking me on far-flung trips to remote places like Papua New Guinea, Sulawesi and Ecuador. Places well off the beaten track, full of incredible wildlife, giant clams, pistol shrimps and marine iguanas. It was amazing. By the age of 15, I was heavily into freediving and have since been able to hold my breath underwater for 6 minutes.

    This underwater odyssey led to a second hobby of marine fish and coral keeping and it was the reason I started a marine biology degree. There just wasn’t enough camera work in it for me though… so after a year, I switched to film production and the rest is history as they say.

    Now I channel my love of film into Boss Content: a content creation company that specialises in brand aware advertising. I love what I do and I love it when I meet like-minded, passionate people who understand the power of video.

    As blogger Seth Godin says, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but the stories you tell.”

    I am a storyteller but I tell stories in short bite-sized clips because that is how the world is today. It’s the new advertising. However, just like the old advertising, it is originality and relevance that count. That is how you differentiate yourself and how people differentiate you.

    I go to extremes to get the right shots when I am shooting live. I recently spent about two hours lying on the floor to film an advertisement for Paw Patrol. We had the dogs running round the corner time and time again. It turned out brilliantly though. We even managed to get the main pooch to put his paw on the card swipe machine.

    This year I also went to Spain to film a 1000 year old kiln. It was incredible and took 36 hours to fire up. It did mean staying up for 36 hours though but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

    Most jobs are far more straightforward. I produce content for top restaurants, banks, retail clients and more specialist people such as fine art lighting companies and sculptors. I’ve also been lucky enough to film some interviews with people like Dame Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons and I feel fortunate to have heard some great stories first hand.

    Of course, I have to mention the new big word, AI. People keep asking me if AI is going to do me out of job? Honestly, I don’t think we need to fear it. AI doesn’t think like advertising creatives do. It doesn’t dig to find the emotion of what makes consumers’ hearts beat … and then turn it into a campaign or story that connects. It’s not as human. Not yet anyway.  AI is amazing though and I use it to enhance production values. Give me your product and I can transport it to sunnier climates or frozen landscapes without ever leaving my office. What AI does do is bring down the cost of business, meaning that medium-sized companies can afford campaigns as good as the corporates. In that way, it’s a game-changer.

    How important is video? It’s critical. Done right, as Forbes says, “marketers who use video grow their revenue 49 per cent faster than non-video users”.

    Video is memorable and it’s vital for business growth and customer loyalty. How else today do people discover your brand, services and products? It’s the new norm. “86 per cent of businesses use video as a marketing tool.” Whether you are a one-person band, a hairdresser, engineering company or are promoting your personal brand, make sure you are one of them.

    A successful content campaign is the result of many inputs, but it is the relationship between client and videographer that can really make the results zing! When I met Ronel, the Chief Executive of Finito Education, it was a meeting of minds.

    I love it when I meet like-minded, passionate people who understand the power of video. And how original thinking and creativity combined with quality production can really excite your audience. Originality and relevance is how you differentiate yourself and how people differentiate you.

    Finito was fast on the uptake with this, and they are bold with their creative approach, believing fortune favours the brave. And it does.

    At Boss Content, we produce short advertising videos that provoke an emotional response because that is what leads to rationale action. We work with both direct clients and agencies – in other words we can create or execute.

    We are also always happy to help clients plan. After all social media and content are just buzzwords unless you have a plan of how to use them. We have a deep understanding of social and how to use it. Undoubtedly the more you plan, the more success you will achieve.

     

    For more information go to http://www.bosscontent.co.uk

  • Review of Asteroid City: “a film with nothing to say about employability – or anything else”

    Christopher Jackson

    How would you feel, I wonder, if you were a Hollywood star and not in the new Wes Anderson movie? Given the sheer number of stars in this film, it would feel like a grim sidelining. Asteroid City, like his previous movies, boasts an ensemble cast to the point where you can’t quite consider the characters as characters but as the next example of apparently stratospheric celebrity who is seemingly prepared to rush to Mexico, where the film was shot, upending all else, to speak one or two lines of gratuitous whimsy.

    What strange creature, I began to wonder, holds this sort of power over Hollywood’s leading actors? But the film’s director Wes Anderson seems unprepossessing enough. One suspects mysterious forces are in play.

    Asteroid City stars, for instance, Adrian Brodie, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Edward Norton, Rupert Friend, and Margot Robbie.

    But does this, I wonder, represent a slight dip in Anderson’s ability to pull in stars? The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) starred: Danny Glover, Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and Owen Wilson.

    This sort of casting matters because it makes story secondary to celebrity and art subordinate to fame. As a result, this is a film which tells us more about making films than it does about life. All Anderson’s films are about celebrity if only because every frame of them is populated by famous people: that makes them meta narratives about our obsessions. As such, they’re a pretty good yardstick of how we live now – and that can be both good and bad.

    Whimsy, my dictionary tells me, is a 17th century coinage emerging out of the now-forgotten word ‘whim-wham’. It feeds into the idea of caprice, a word which emanates from the Italian ‘capriccio’ – a work of art where a mixture of real and imaginary elements are in play.

    It is Anderson’s achievement to have come up with a cinematic language of whimsy which keeps large numbers of people engaged. This form of story-telling – now that he has come up with it – can seem easy to do. First, find a location, and make the set as unsettling as a Magritte painting. Then assemble a cast of characters whose inner life is mysterious but hinted at in tics or oddities. After that, not much needs to happen – and in fact, it would be hard to identify any real dramatic arc in any of his films. Really, they lack meaning.

    This used to be considered a sign of artistic failure but in our times it passes as seriousness. Whimsy obviates the communication of shared human problems since it is too restless to concentrate on anything which matters. This is one of the reasons why Wes Anderson’s films have nothing to say about employability, or indeed anything else. It is art for art’s sake taken to the nth degree.

    How does he get away with it? Firstly, he speaks to the contemporary moment. These films do reflect us back at ourselves in all our disjointedness and uncertainty. Secondly, the films work very well aesthetically – they are beautifully wrought.

    Asteroid City takes place in the middle of the desert where the Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention is taking place; the year is 1955. The usual case of misfits assemble. Scarlett Johansson plays an actress Midge Campbell of the Hollywood Golden Age who is nevertheless non-specifically adrift. In fact, everyone is non-specifically adrift. Jason Schwartzman is also in attendance playing war photojournalist Augie Steenbeck. Augie is travelling with his three daughters but their car breaks down. It is typical of these movies that the car mechanic – a walk-on part – needs to be played by a household name in the shape of Matt Dillon.

    He calls his father-in-law, Stanley, who quite naturally needs to be played by Tom Hanks. Since it doesn’t matter what happens in a Wes Anderson movie because we don’t care at all about the characters, the film might perhaps have continued in this vein. Instead, the stargazing is interrupted by an alien visiting. The government is alerted and a lockdown ensues.

    It is remarkable just how undramatic the alien moment is – in fact, the arrival of an alien doesn’t seem concerning or particularly strange in the context of the broader Anderson method. Nor would it seem odd if an apricot began talking and if Scarlett Johansson fell in love with it. This is the licence of caprice – you can do anything.

    But these films bump up in the end against reality. We must concede that apricots don’t talk, and Scarlett Johansson tends not to fall in love with apricots. More broadly, people don’t think, behave, or talk as they do in Wes Anderson movies. These movies are therefore false – and not the less so because they are good light entertainment.

    Why are they so popular? It is that the modern world makes us long to escape into fantasy. But in doing that we don’t really escape – we are looking at ourselves. In that sense – and in that sense only – Anderson has created a sort of realist mirror: he reflects our restlessness and our confusion back at us.

  • Film editor Meredith Taylor on Dan Rather

    Meredith Taylor 

    The draw of a career in broadcasting necessitates watching this new documentary which offers a straightforward snapshot of Texan journalist, news anchor and commentator Dan Rather who became a revered household name with his spirited and engaging presence on American TV networks during the turbulent years of the 1960’s and beyond.

    Daniel Irvin Rather (1931-) has covered virtually every major event in the world for the past 60 years but is also known for ushering in the era of fake news that led to his downfall at the respected CBS network. Rather is also credited at being the first journalist to announce the news of John F Kennedy’s death in 1963 by running with the rumour, ‘based on his instincts’ before it was fully confirmed.

    Amongst many other achievements Rather stood out with his impactful style of reporting that bridged the gap between what was really happening on the ground during the Vietnam war, and the sentiment presented back home. The film outlines his fall from grace for airing documents, during a CBS broadcast in the run up to the 2004 presidential election, suggesting that George W Bush had a sketchy military record during the 1970s. The issue is still mired in controversy to this day.

    Coming across as a serious man of integrity as he faces the camera, at 91,  an engaging raconteur without guile or glibness, the film pictures him from all perspectives: dutiful son, dogged marine recruit, devoted husband, deeply religious Texan. And this rounded impression is echoed by his daughter Robin who offers her admiration for a loving father deeply committed to his cause. Talking heads-wise we also hear from Susan Zirinsky, his longtime colleague at CBS News, who sees him from a career angle, and not always in glowing terms.

     

    Brimming with spectacular archive footage, news bulletins and interviews, the film darts around chronologically charting a career that began on Texas radio and graduated to TV News slots, where Rather made a name for himself covering Hurricane Carla, the Civil Rights Movement, the J F Kennedy Assassination, Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wars in Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan saw him on the battlefield dodging the bullets, and sending serial postcards back home to his family with the simple, repetitive message: “War is Hell”. At CBS on the 60 Minutes programme he was a steady but spirited anchor and is now prolific on Twitter appealing to a younger generation with his recalcitrant outbursts and on his own website News and Guts.

    “Can you still make a difference as a journalist” Rather said at the Texas-based Moody College of Communication in 2009. “Yes, if you don’t quit”. This is a clear-eyed, informative film that refuses to dig the dirt on Dan. That’s for another documentary.

     

    TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL | NEW YORK 7-18 JUNE 2023

    Dir: Frank Marshall | US Doc 96 minutes

  • Review of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans: ‘a film which tells us our best can be more than enough’

    Photo credit: By Screenshot from the film’s trailer., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71734123

     

    Christopher Jackson

     

    The Fabelmans is plainly the capstone in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable career. It is many things: a cautionary warning about the effects of divorce; a celebration of family; a memoir of what life used to be like in 1950s suburbia. But above all it is a film about vocation and what it means to know what it is you want to do in life from an early age.

    That’s because Sammy Fabelman, who we trace in this film from early adolescence to early maturity is to all intents and purposes Spielberg himself – it is as close to an autobiography as we’ll get from him, to the extent that we don’t need one now.

    The film shows quite clearly that cinema hit Spielberg early on with unusual force – as it must have done almost everyone who encountered this new art form which would so come to alter the world. We first meet Fabelman, played by Gabriel LaBelle, in 1952 about to attend a performance of The Greatest Show on Earth by Cecil B. De Mille. He is nervous about entering the cinema, and then watching in astonishment as the film unfolds. Actually at this time, the film industry was already being impacted negatively by the invention of television: the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that weekly attendance dropped from 80 million in 1940 and 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950 and 40 million in 1960.

    Yet something happens of lasting significance to Spielberg/Fabelman at the performance; the scene with the train accident takes hold of him, and later on, he tries to replicate it at home using his father’s 8mm camera. A film director is born. One of the insights in the film is that the first steps required an interest in the technology: the young Fabelman isn’t shown reading books about story-telling, but fiddling with film, and learning to operate the equipment. It’s a reminder that some form of technical knowledge often precedes true creativity.

    Fabelman is growing up in a talented home. His mother Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams, is a brilliant concert pianist who has failed to pursue her dreams due to the 1950s norm of staying at home to raise a family. Meanwhile, Fabelman’s father Burt is a high-flying electrical engineer in the world of computers, and a genius. It feels as though Spielberg himself is composed of a mixture of his mother’s musical sensibility and his father’s natural aptitude for technology.

    Like so many parents faced with creative children,  Burt views Sammy’s film-making as a hobby, no doubt worried – as a parents usually are with good reason – about Steven Spielberg’s financial future. A brief glance at Spielberg’s current net worth shows he needn’t have worried – but then he couldn’t have known that his son was destined to be the most successful filmmaker of all time.

    But this tees up the best scene in the film when Fabelman’s uncle Boris comes to stay. Sammy’s mother is ultimately too depressed – and caught up in an extramarital affair with Seth Rogen’s Bobby, an employee of her husband – to really have enough mental space to understand what ambitions are burning in Sammy. His father meanwhile doesn’t understand that play is really the ultimate seriousness if it can be made to alter hearts.

    But Boris, fresh from the circus, turns out to have Sammy’s number rightaway. He sees the situation clear. For instance, he observes the similarity between Sammy’s nascent gifts, and Mitzi’s thwarted potential: “He could have been that concert piano player. What’s she got in her heart is what you got.” Marching around the room in a stringy vest looking remarkably elastic and even powerful for an octogenarian, Uncle Boris also speaks the movie’s most memorable lines: “Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out and leave you lonely. You’ll be a shanda for your loved ones. An exile in the desert. A gypsy. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion’s mouth. It’ll bite your head off.”

    Art is indeed a game played at high stakes, but work generally is too – it is especially so for Burt whose computing genius cuts him off from humanity just as much as Sammy’s skills as a filmmaker. It’s this which ultimately distances him from his wife: it’s not easy to love geniuses since their thought patterns tend to land everywhere except their marriage.

    Watching the film, you are conscious that Spielberg all along had a great sadness in his life, but for the majority of his career – really until this film – he hasn’t tended to make art of high seriousness. His films, as Terry Gilliam has pointed out, tend towards the schmaltzy and the straightforward: he isn’t an auteur in the line of Stanley Kubrick. He is slicker than that – to the benefit of his bank account but probably to the detriment of art. This film shows that all along there was a serious filmmaker waiting to get out. But he chose to entertain instead, and this has given people much joy. Spielberg is an escapist, and we now see what it was he was escaping from.

    The film culminates in a marvellous scene where the young Spielberg writes to filmmakers looking for a job as a runner. His letter lands with Bernard Fein. Job-seekers will often find that life is changed by the generosity unique to people who actually reply to letters: many a career is begun by the fluke of finding them, and stymied by the lack of them.

    Fein mentions that the greatest living filmmaker is working across the corridor and this turns out to be John Ford. What follows is a marvellously cantankerous mentor-mentee scene, where Fabelman is asked to discuss some pictures on the wall.

    The takeaway is that pictures will be interesting if the horizon is slow, or if it’s high – but never interesting in between. It’s as good a piece of advice as any, but I think is offered with more than a small dose of: “You’re on your own.”

    We all are to some extent, but we take what advice we can and we do the best we can. This is a film which tells us that sometimes our best turns out to be much more than enough – and insodoing makes us optimistic about beginning again.

     

     

     

     

  • Film roundup: Why it’s a good year for female film directors at Cannes

    Meredith Taylor

     

    Talk to any young person seeking a career in the arts, television or film and the creative industries, the one place that they want to attend is the Cannes Film Festival that takes place each year on France’s Cote d’Azur.

    The 76th Festival, 16th – 27th May, is set for a legendary year with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and an out-of-competition world premiere of Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny from James Mangold.

    Some of the best names in cinema will be crowding the Croisette in May – in fact, it’s hard to think which stars won’t be on the famous Red Carpet for this year’s epic celebration announced by General Delegate Thierry Fremaux.

    The 2023 competition line-up includes new films from Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Todd Haynes, Nanni Moretti and Aki Kaurismäki. The programme also includes the latest from cinema greats Wim Wenders, Takeshi Kitano, Victor Erice and Catherine Breillat. Seven female directors – one making her feature debut – will compete for the coveted main prize: the Palme d’Or.

    Palme d’Or hopefuls include Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won in 2018 with Shoplifters and is now back in Cannes competition with Monster, and Nanni Moretti with Il Sol Dell’Avvenire after winning the main prize with The Son’s Room in 2001. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, won the Palme in 2014 with Winter Sleep, and comes back with About Dry Grasses, a family story set between Istanbul and small town Anatolia, billed as his most ambitious to date and running at over three hours.

    Wes Anderson’s latest Asteroid City promises to be as quirky as ever and stars Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell and Tilda Swindon. Todd Haynes’ May December features Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore in another emotional rollercoaster. But humour will undoubtedly come from Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki and Dead Leaves, his first film in six years.

    Veteran Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas) makes a reappearance in Cannes with his Japan-set drama Perfect Days, together with a documentary Anselm, a portrait of German painter Anselm Kiefer, one of two films about artists, the second being Martin Provost’s Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe exploring the love story between the renowned French painters Pierre Bonnard and his wife Marthe. With love in the air, one time partners Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche team up again for La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, a 19th century romance between a gourmet and his cook, from Vietnam-born French director Tran Anh Hung.

    Jessica Hausner is one of seven female directors in the main competition this year, with Club Zero. She joins Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who directs her sister Alba, Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini in La Chimera. French filmmaker Justine Triet will present her thriller Anatomy of a Fall. Catherine Breillat, another seasoned French director, will be there with Last Summer starring Léa Drucker and Olivier Rabourdin; Catherine Corsini with her latest Le Retour ; Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) is coming with Four Daughters. A feature debut for Senegalese-French director Ramata-Toulaye Sy with Banel & Adamawill premiere in competition this year.

    It takes a Brazilian/Algerian director (Karim Ainouz) to make a film about Henry the VIII, but forget Hilary Mantel, Firebrand, billed as a ‘history horror story’, has a British writing team behind it: Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth, best known for the BAFTA-winning series Killing Eve. The stars are Alicia Vikander, Eddie Marsan, Jude Law and Simon Russell Beale.

    One of this year’s most anticipated films vying for the Palme d’Or is from English auteur Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin): The Zone of Interest is an Auschwitz-set love story inspired by a novel of the same name by Martin Amis. British Oscar winner Steve McQueen brings Occupied City, a documentary that looks back at Amsterdam under Nazi-occupation. Also from England comes Molly Manning Walker, a graduate of the NFTS, with her debut feature that goes by the buzzworthy title of How to Have Sex. Let’s just hope that this and all the others live up to expectations.

     

    Meredith Taylor is the film editor at Finito World

     

    Photo caption: Catherine Deneuve, on the set of La Chamade, Cote d’Azur, June 1, 1968. Copyright Jack Garofalo/Paris Match/Scoop