Cambridge Film Festival: Director’s interview: Peter Webber, Emperor

Emperor

Ella Walker speaks to the director Peter Webber (director of Girl With A Pearl Earring and Hannibal Rising), about working with Tommy Lee Jones and braving his critics.

Can you start by explaining what made this a story you just had to tell?

I’ve always been very interested in Japan and Japanese culture. I think it’s an interest that started when I discovered the films of Kurosawa and Ozu when I was a teenager. also the thing that made me really interested in this particular subject matter was that it seemed very metaphorical for what was going on today. It’s a way I could tell a story from the past that had some resonance in the present – it’s about regime change, the battle between justice and revenge. And I had always wanted to work with Japanese actors and do a film set in Japan; this seemed like a very good opportunity.

Considering the plot is based on true events, did you feel a responsibility to the real people portrayed?

Yes, but you also have to balance that against responsibility to the audience. You can be tugged in different directions. There’s obviously been an awful lot of films, not about this particular subject, – this is a post-war film rather than a war film – but about the Pacific War, and overwhelmingly they’ve put the American point of view. I felt it’d be interesting to tell a tale where you would hear what the Japanese had to say.

What made you pick Matthew Fox for the lead role?

I was looking for someone who was the modern day equivalent of Gary Cooper. Quite an old fashioned, strongly morally centred, very masculine kind of a figure, and it just seemed to me Matthew Fox was perfect for that. He has some of that 1950s leading man about him.

What was it like working with Tommy Lee Jones? Is he as intimidating as he comes across?

It’s scary to begin with, because he comes with a big reputation, he can be quite daunting but actually he’s great to work with. He’s super smart and underneath that rather gruff exterior, beats a heart of pure gold (Peter breaks off laughing). But it is a very gruff exterior.

Were there any tough days when you thought the film wasn’t going to work out?

Every day is a difficult moment on set because you never have quite enough money and you never have quite enough time. Stanley Kubrick said making a film is like trying to write War and Peace on a rollercoaster, so every day has its challenges.

Emperor has been considered a critical and commercial flop in America. What do you think of its reception so far?

I was particularly pleased with the way it’s gone down in Japan. It’s been very successful in Japan, I think it’s just passed the £12m box office mark, so that was important to me, that people went to see it over there. I got a couple of good reviews from my two favourite reviewers – Rex Reed and Roger Ebert. There’s obviously bad reviews out there as well, I’m choosing to ignore those.

What do you want people will take from the film?

I hope they enjoy it, I hope it makes them understand a bit about how enlightened American foreign policy used to be, I think it casts an interesting light, especially with current events. It’s very important to remember and understand history. But I hope really that they’ll be plunged into a strange, mysterious and fascinating world and really learn something about a period of history that hasn’t been told before.

ella.walker@cambridge-news.co.uk

First published by the Cambridge News.

Cambridge Film Festival: Director’s interview, Stephen Finnigan, HAWKING

HAWKING

Ahead of the launch of the 33rd Cambridge Film Festival with HAWKING – an autobiographical account of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s life – Ella Walker talks to documentary filmmaker and BAFTA award-nominee Stephen Finnigan about putting the Professor’s life to film

When did you first meet Professor Stephen Hawking?

The first time I met Stephen was actually the opening of the film when we film him going to give a lecture in America, in San Jose. We were filming his daily routine, preparing and giving the lecture, and so we dived straight into it really.

Was it a project you had always secretly wanted to work on?

To be honest it was out of the blue. I obviously knew about him, but I’d never read A Brief History of Time. I was a teenager then so it probably wasn’t on the top of my reading list. But I knew about him obviously and was very in awe of all that he had done, but I hadn’t tracked him all my life or anything like that. He was great to meet and he was great to film which was a real bonus for me.

Have you read his book now?

I have! I read as many of his books as I could for research. And I had to come clean with Stephen when we first started filming; I said look, I’ll be honest with you, maths and physics were my worst subjects at school, I got a CSE grade 3 in those, so I’m no mathematician or physicist. But the film is much more about his life anyway, so coming clean with him was quite a good thing to do I think.

What did you think prompted him to make the film – why now?

He’d just turned 70 so that’s a milestone for anybody but for Stephen especially it’s a huge milestone. When he was 21, 22, he was given probably two years to live, so I think he felt it was time to put his own life out there for people to understand more. He’s notoriously guarded about his personal life, as much as he can be, so I think he felt it was a time to give that side of his life a voice.

Was it daunting being given the responsibility to commit his life to film?

That’s a really good questions because – yes – is the answer. Interestingly when I was interviewing Benedict Cumberbatch, who’s in the film and portrayed Stephen for the BBC drama about his early life, we both said that this was the one thing you didn’t want to mess up, you didn’t want to get it wrong because he’s such an important person. Benedict felt that in portraying him, and I felt it certainly in trying to tell his life story. You’ve got to get it right and that meant, for me, gaining Stephen’s trust; to be able to film his daily life, and also to be able to open up his past life and the people that meant a lot to him – getting them to feel comfortable enough to tell me about it.

Was Stephen very involved in the editing process?

To be honest, no, he wasn’t, he trusted me with the editing. In terms of the script and the voiceover he narrates, he’s written a lot of essays, some of which are published, some of which are about to come out in his new book, so we combined those and I re-wrote them at times to make them more film friendly, rather than book friendly and together we wrote the in between bits in the film. So he wasn’t involved in terms of coming into the edit suite, but we emailed and had discussions about the script and how we could tweak and change that together.

How did Stephen react to the final edit?

Very warmly. The first time he saw the very first rough cut was just before Christmas last year and when we finished watching it I peered round to see how he was and there was a tear rolling down his cheek. It took him a while to write what he wanted to say, but he said he really liked it, but he wasn’t sure if anybody else would like it. It was a very humble reaction.

Are there any moments you are particular proud of in the finished film?

The thing with Stephen is that his ability to communicate has diminished as his illness has got worse so it can take him up to five or 10 minutes, maybe even longer, to write a simple sentence. I think you have to invest that time when you’re with Stephen to allow him to use his voice. There’s a scene where we film him listening to some music at home late at night and intercut it with him as a young man listening to music. Wagner has had a big role in Stephen’s life, he listened to it a lot when he was first diagnosed. I asked him, when we wanted to film him listening to music, what would you like to listen to? And he chose a piece by Wagner and he wanted to explain to me why. It actually took him over half an hour to write two sentences which I quickly scribbled down, and we put them straight into the film. So those moments, when you invest with Stephen and take time with him, you can get real gems from him. It’s giving him that space and that ability to be able to talk to you in his own way which I think is a really important thing.

What do you hope people will take from watching it?

I hope it’s a very inspirational film. I think it’s a great story of, against all the odds, somebody living a very, very full life, so I hope people get that from the film. And I hope they get to see a very different side to Stephen Hawking because, as I hope the film shows, he’s a very funny, very quick witted, very sharp man who is very interested in physics – it’s his life – but he has an awful lot more going on, and I also hope people take from this film that his life has been at times very hard, but he’s kept going.

ella.walker@cambridge-news.co.uk

First published by the Cambridge News.

Review: Now is Good

Now is Good

If you want your heart broken between sobbing your tear ducts dry and flurries of laughter, Now is Good is perfect viewing.

Dakota Fanning plays Tessa, a 17-year-old Brighton-ite dying from a form of leukaemia, who is desperate to lose her virginity, break the law and have her name written on the world. Writer and director Ol Parker’s script tracks her last months as she tumbles through her bucket list, making things up and worrying everyone as she goes along.

Olivia Williams takes an inspired turn as Tessa’s rather useless but charming mother and also nabs most of the best lines (“I know the smell of rubber is off-putting, but so is gonorreah,”) while Paddy Considine roams the film as Tessa’s overprotective and agonised father. You are advised to pack a family-sized box of tissues for his scenes alone.

But, as Tessa so bluntly puts it, her parents are not what she needs, so in swoop Zoey (Kaya Scodelario), Tessa’s shroom and shoplifting partner in crime and Adam, a pained looking Jeremy Irvine riding a sunset friendly motorbike.

The realities of dying from leukaemia – the hospital appointments, the exhaustion, the hurt and the inevitability – slink alongside the whirlwind of first love and the trials of trying to live life to the fullest.

A blur of salty beach trips and climbing escapades (up trees, through windows, over cliffs) pull Tessa and Adam together, showing off the melancholy beauty of Brighton in the process. The rickety, candy rock laden pier becomes almost as vital as the ethereal Dakota, complete with her fairly convincing English accent.

Bittersweet but funny with it (particularly thanks to Tessa’s adorably pragmatic little brother: “You can haunt me, I don’t mind”), Now is Good will yank on your heart strings but avoids being too saccharine and depressing. In fact, it is quite hopeful.

First published by Who’s Jack magazine.

P.S. I saw this at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse as part of the Cambridge Film Festival. My favourite cinema ever (although the Brixton Ritzy does give it a run for its money), think plush velvet seats and glasses of wine, Jeremy Irvine and producer Peter Czernin even stopped by for a Q&A after the screening. Film bliss.

Secret makeshift cinemas to pop-up on Grantchester Meadows

Vanishing Point

If you go down to the woods at Grantchester Meadows, you’re in for a mini eco movie-going surprise…

Artists Chris Dobrowolski and Leslie Hill are behind the project, Vanishing Point, which was commissioned by Live Art Collective East (LACE) to help celebrate The Cultural Olympiad.

It has already graced the trees of Latitude Festival and the Secret Garden Party, and will be setting up on Grantchester Meadows for the Cambridge Film Festival’s Movies on the Meadows event in August.

As Leslie is based in America, I caught up with her British co-conspirator.

Chris Dobrowolski is what you’d call a bit gruff. His patter swings from lengthy pauses to stretches of flowing enthusiasm – and it is oh so easy to imagine him holed up in a disintegrating shed building tiny mechanical cinemas and popping to the post office with boxed up matchbox cars.

This is the basis of Vanishing Point: a collection of mini cinemas made from found objects (think petrol and watering cans) hidden in rural spaces, with letterbox gaps for people to peer through while films, projected from toy cars, whir away inside.

“You know toy matchbox cars?” he asks rhetorically. “They were generally made in England, but they made a lot of American cars, so I collected some up, packed them up in little wooden boxes and sent them to the real America.

“The trick is, Leslie’s films are projected out of the cars with small little mirrors, out of the boot of the car or the window, onto the back of the wooden box they went to America in.”

Leslie creates the short films which focus on the journey of the cars, starting with the moment they escape the box they travelled across the pond in, and Chris develops the makeshift movie theatres.

The idea was triggered by a stint Chris spent working with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, looking at the real and unreal.

“The Antarctic is a bit like the moon. Boring objects that are used there come back and are considered ‘authentic Antarctic artefacts’. So I took pretend Antarctic things, like a plastic Penguin van and a toy snowmobile, and took photos of them at the Antarctic so they became ‘real pretend Antarctic items’,” Chris explains mischievously. “So that’s what I did by sending the pretend toy cars to the real US.”

It’s all about the cinema-going experience he tells me, underlined by an eco-vibe, hence the recycled cars and found objects.

“It’s a different way of looking at film. You usually go to a big cinema, or sit at home in front of the TV. I wanted to see how the context of the film affects the experience of it.”

Originally the films were going to be shown using solar powered Borrower-sized projectors but because most of the venues were trees it meant there wasn’t enough light. Car batteries were used instead. “It was disappointing,” Chris admits. “[The solar power] does work [but] trees have millions of years experience of absorbing all the light,” he laughs.

Despite the setback, the exhibition has lost none of its charm being something you will “stumble across in an unexpected place,” – it’s just a matter of tracking it down….

We think it’s definitely time to go hunting.

Find Vanishing Point (if you can) at Spring Lane Field, Grantchester Meadows on August 25 – 26, from 6pm – 8.30. To find out more about the project visit www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/live-art-collective-east.

First published by the Cambridge News.