Reconsidering Lives

I spoke early Wednesday evening with Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director of the gripping, pulverizing German-language thriller The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classics), which is all but a dead lock for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination.

Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck at the Beverly Wilshire hotel — Wednesday, 11.8.06, 6:05 pm.

A huge favorite at the Telluride Film festival and the biggest hit of the Toronto Film festival after Borat, The Lives of Others won’t open in a conventional commercial sense until 2.9.07. L.A. audiences will get an early peek in December, however, when it opens here for a one-week qualifying run. The idea is to qualify it for nom- inations in other categories, as Pedro Almodovar‘s Talk to Her and Roberto Begnini‘s Life is Beautiful managed a few years ago.
The Lives of Others is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — but it’s also a riveting drama about political terror.
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I always tell people Lives has four selling points: (a) it’s a first-rate political thriller and a well-sculptured drama, (b) the story isn’t predictable, and it delivers strong arresting emotion at pretty much every turn, (c) it’s sexy as all get out (largely due to costar Martina Gedek, best known on these shores for her Mostly Martha role) and (d) it runs 2 hours and 17 minutes with credits, and yet it feels like maybe 100, 110 minutes at the most.
It’s a gray and dispiriting film now and then, but with a touching “up” element at the finale. It’s a political thriller with real compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness needn’t rule.

Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedek

It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who’s first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
“It’s so easy to make a cynical film,” Henckel-Donnersmarck said early in our chat. “To write or play an unlikable part is easier still. But to write or play someone postive…a positive character…is much harder. Any kind of film with a message of hope, to convey that emotion…to deliver that is a real challenge.
“A film that empowers you is very important to me. Even if it’s painting a positive image just be painting a shadow. if ‘what’s next’ question dies in a viewer’s head …that makes a film drag. People always have to be asking “what’s next?”..you have to keep people awake in that respect, and that means you always have to keep surprising them.”
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”

Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his actress wife, Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck).
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
Others won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.

Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others

Here’s the shorter first portion of our conversation and the longer second portion. It includes questions and comments from producer and longtime friend Victoria Wisdom, who’d met Henckel-Donnersmarck the night before.
Florian is definitely the tallest first-rate director I’ve ever spoken to — he’s 6’9″. He said he’s looking to direct a U.S.-funded film next, although he’s a ways from deciding what that will be. He’ll be in Los Angeles for the next few days. He said something about returning for the one-week December opening and then again in January to promote the early February opening.

Agents are beefing to L.A. Times reporter John Horn about not being allowed to vote in the Oscar competition. Agents are not all Ari Gold types. They do a lot of creative facilitating, of course, and that’s definitely an important part of the process. But there’s been continued stiff resistance to allowing them access to the ballot box. Right now the academy’s position is that “membership is extended to people who make the art,” says an Academy spokesperson, “[but] not people who provide services, however valuable, to the people who make the art.”

Revised due to reader input: The only somewhat younger, new-to-the-game persons in Mark Olsen‘s L.A. Times/The Envelope piece who have any hope of generating any kind of Oscar heat is Dreamgirls supporting actress hopeful Jennifer Hudson and The Queen‘s Michael Sheen, a best supporting actor contender. That’s it…the list goes no further.

N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) listens to director-screenwriter Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) expound during an American Film Market panel. in Santa Monica. “It’s difficult out there, but it always has been,” Ray comments. “If your goal is to write or direct for a living and make a contribution to the culture, you are choosing something tough. If I could be happy doing something else, I would.”
I presume Ray isn’t delighted with the status of 102 Minutes, a script adaptation of Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn‘s 9/11 book that Ray wrote for Mike DeLuca ‘s Sony-based production company. I was told today that it’s an “active project” (i.e., a studio term that doesn’t mean anything) under the aegis of Alissa Phillips, but the truth is that it’s taken forever to get rolling. I read it last year. It’s a tough thing to weave together several stories and several characters who, in this case, happened to be working inside the WTC towers that day, so I can’t really call it a home run. But it’s reasonably well done…
At one point in the AFM panel discussion, Carr writes, Ray recounted how he had been asked by a producer to do a script based on Doom: “I said, `What’s the story?,’ and he said, ‘What’s the difference?'” That‘s the AFM in the nutshell.

Say what you will about Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17), but it seems to have tapped into something fairly strong with the over-50 set. Or it did last night, anyway, when it screened at Pete Hammond‘s KCET class out at the TV Academy in North Hollywood. It was election night, of course, and perhaps people were reflecting back on those old Bobby Kennedy highs. Or maybe the movie just got to them. The crowd, in any event, really responded when the lights came up and Hammond introduced Estevez.

“It was the longest and strongest applause I’ve ever seen happen at this class,” Hammond told me earlier today. “When people greet a guest the applause usually goes 30, 40 seconds…usually less than a minute. This went on and on and on, and then everyone started to stand up. Very unusual. These are all upscale movielovers. I asked how many had voted and they all raised their hands.”
I never know to what extent a reaction like this is may be about things other than the film iself, but I remember what an exceptionally positive reaction Crash got when I showed it an older, well-heeled crowd at the UCLA Sneak Previews in the spring of ’05, and we all know where that one led. And we all know that a typical Academy member tends to fit the same profile — 50-plus, liberal, etc. So maybe this means something. Or not.

Something head-scratchy this way comes: (a) earlier today Movie City News put up a link to the Golden Trailer Awards (which MCN has listed on its own page under the title “Notepad: What’s Happening now”), and linked to a trailer for Patrick Reade Johnson‘s 5-25-77, a black-hole movie (shot eons ago but still no distributor) about a geeky Illinois teenager (based on Johnson himself) whose life is changed by the influence of mid ’70s Steven Spielberg movies and particularly by the debut of Star Wars in May of ’77 (hence the title); (b) I went to the Golden Trailer Awards site and particularly to the page for the most recent listing of winners, and it says that the winners — the exact same ones listed on the MCN page — were announced on 6.1.06, or over five months ago…what the fuck?; (c) I then watched the 5-25-77 trailer — definitely an engaging, well-cut thing, but this film has been in post-production for a long time (I had a brief phone chat with Johnson in March ’05 when I was visiting Illinois and the movie was way delayed back then even) so obviously there’s something wrong. There should be a statute of limitations on films like this. I read the script six or seven years ago; it may have been even farther back than that. Johnson should grim up and do the compassion- ate thing and put it out of its misery. Four-wall it, release it on DVD…something.

Digital remixes of old hits are generally irksome — they tend to make original cuts sounds cheap in a clubber/house-music sort of way — and I hate the idea of any musical show that launched in Las Vegas of all places — still the #1 Middle American mecca for plastic, get-drunk-and- jump-off-the-roof-of-the-casino Sodom & Gomorrah wallowings — but I’m feeling a little differently about some of these Beatles tracks.

This Strawberry Fields one in particular. (Here’s a Real Audio link.) Everybody read last June about original Beatles producer George Martin and son Giles remixing a lot of the old tracks for a Cirque du Soleil show, etc. They actually did a half- decent job. The album is out on 11.21, but my God…the CD jacket cover is disgusting. It was obviously designed by some synth-head who totally doesn’t get what the Beatles were ‘up about” when they really mattered.

In the wake of the Democratics winning a solid majority in the House and (too soon to tell but odds are favoring) a bare majority in the Senate, Donald Rumsfeld has just announced he’s stepping down as Secretary of Defense. Feels like a one-two punch to me…clearly a sign of cracks in the resolve of the Iraq War-supporting Bush cabal. This has to be the best pop-the-champagne day for Bush-loathing lefties in a long while. Where are the glasses?

Nine and a half weeks remain before the polls will close on Academy nominations — the drop-dead hour being 5 pm on Saturday, 1.13.07. In other words, three or four weeks from now (figuratively speaking) and the whole nommie-nommie Phase 1 thing will be over and done with.
Nomination ballots are being mailed out 12.26.06. The locked-down nominations will be announced on Tuesday, 1.23 — ten and a half weeks hence. And then Phase 2 kicks in for a mere four weeks (literally) with the final polls closing at 5 pm on Tuesday, 2.20.07 . The Oscar telecast — i.e., the vaguely underwhelming letdown at the end of the road — will happen on Tuesday, 2.25 starting at 5 pm Pacific.
No slam against comedian Ellen DeGeneres, but the producers should have hired the great Sarah Silverman for the job, especially after her killer performance at last March’s IFP Spirit Awards. She’s brilliant — she gets everything as it is right now.

The only interesting part of this Rebecca Winters Keegan Time story about the Britney Spears-Kevin Federline divorce is the final-graph observation that Spears has now joined “a growing group of powerful celebrity women who have recently split from their less successful husbands, including Reese Witherspoon (from Ryan Phillippe) and Hilary Swank (from Chad Lowe).”
That’s the principal thing of it — the emotional-psychological inability of most wannabe alpha males to play second violin in a marriage, not to mention the corresponding discomfort often felt by their stronger, richer, better connected (and in many cases, more mature) wives. Marriages between alpha-female breadwinners and Mr. Mom house-husbands have obviously been a flourishing part of the domestic culture for the last 20 or 25 years, but the deep-seated need that most guys have to “be the man” in a relationship always seems to lead to problems.
That said, most marriages tend to fray a bit when (a) the natural myriad priorities of taking care of newly-arrived babies push aside and/or temporarily suffocate the romantic stuff (been there, seen it happen), and (b) when the wife evolves from a svelte pistol-hot babe into someone chubby or even borderline fat. Is there a gentle, sensitive way of saying that Spears has had the appearance of a cow for the last year, year and a half…? I’m searching for that phraseology as we speak.

“You cannot make a daring, unusual, completely risky film about amazing, outrageous subject matter, and not expect people to be polarized. When I made Secretary, there were people who thought it was a dirty movie. And there were people who were very moved by it. Those are the only kinds of films I’m going to make anyway. I know the game I’m in, [and] I’m not capable of — nor am I interested in — making a film that is attempting to appeal to everyone. That would be ridiculous.

“I mean [that] I’m interested in making the most personal films I can. My own internal life has enough complexity to it — and I’m in touch with it enough — that I’m going to put people off. And I’m also going to attract people. To me, those are the most interesting kinds of films. What’s the point in trying to make a movie that is trying to be all things to all people?” — Fur director Steven Shainberg to The Reeler‘s Stu VanAirsdale, in response to a brutal pan of his film by Time critic Richard Schickel, posted on 11.3