Interview: Jia Zhang-ke on Ash Is Purest White and the Evolution of China

Unshowy yet unshakably self-assured, sincere but with glimpses of a sly sense of humor, and unhesitatingly frank even about touchy topics like the Chinese government’s censorship of his work, Jia Zhang-ke comes off in person just as a fan of his films might expect. Ever since his 1997 feature debut, The Pickpocket, and 2000’s Platform, in which young people struggle to adapt to China’s increasing Westernization, Jia has been creating a kind of unofficial history of his homeland, quietly defying his government’s determination to erase its tracks as it barrels along by doing things like rewiring the economy, rewriting the social contract, and depopulating whole cities and erecting new ones in a matter of months.

Jia’s films operate in metaphorical deep focus, surfacing the ways that these sweeping societal changes affect individual lives and relationships by zeroing in on sensitively detailed portrayals of two lovers, or of a group or pair of friends, while just as clearly portraying the socioeconomic backdrops to their stories. And often at the center of his films is Zhao Tao, his wife and longtime muse. In Jia’s latest, Ash Is Purest White, Zhao reprises the role she played in 2002’s Unknown Pleasures: Qiao Qiao, a strong-willed woman from Jia’s hometown of Fenyang, this time over a span of 17 years that starts when she’s the young lover of a gangster and ends with her in charge of the gambling den he once ran.

In a conversation before Ash Is Purest White’s debut at the New York Film Festival, Jia explained what he likes about digital video, how Zhao Tao helped bring her role to life, and how he deals with his government’s suppression of his work.

Interview: Asghar Farhadi on Everybody Knows

A beautifully acted ensemble piece, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows starts with a hyper-realistic introduction to a cozy world—a bath of golden light, goblets of wine, warm hugs, and festive music as Laura’s (Penélope Cruz) large, loving family gathers for a wedding. But the film’s focus on this family’s day-to-day interactions takes a sharp turn when a crisis puts the main characters, including Paco (Javier Bardem), Laura’s old and dear friend, to the test, throwing everything about their lives into question.

Two years ago, on what turned out to be his last trip to the United States, I spoke with Farhadi in person about The Salesman. (The filmmaker, who has a green card, has stayed away since then, in protest of President Donald Trump’s travel ban.) Earlier this week, we spoke over the phone about Everybody Knows and the subject of the universal human instinct to distrust outsiders, the persistence of the past, and the strong similarities between Spanish and Iranian culture that make Farhadi feel at home in Spain.

There’s a subplot in Everybody Knows about the anti-immigrant prejudice in Spain, which makes people point fingers at foreign grape-pickers the moment something goes wrong. Were you trying to say something about how that kind of poisonous thinking seems to be spreading around the world?
My point I’m making is more general. It was this very universal reflex that we have that when there’s something wrong, suspicion is first directed against not just immigrants but the stranger, the outsider. Whereas problems may actually come from people around us—relatives, friends—and that is the case in this film.

Best TV Shows of 2018

For me, contributing to Slant Magazine's list of the year's best TV shows is as much about the process as the result: It's the motivation I need to catch up on candidates I missed earlier in the year, and to watch end-of-year debuts that sound interesting. There's so much great TV now, on network and cable and streaming services like Amazon and Hulu and Netflix, that it's not humanly possible to see it all, but I've seen probably more than was healthy. Here are my top 10 picks and my honorable mentions.

Top 10
The Handmaid's Tale (my interview with Ann Dowd about The Handmaid's Tale, among other things)
The Americans
Homeland (my review of Season 4)
Atlanta
Bojack Horseman
Fauda
Better Call Saul
The Terror
Killing Eve
Random Acts of Flyness

Honorable Mentions
Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas, Silicon Valley (my recaps of Season 4). The End of the F**cking World, Big Mouth, Jane the Virgin, Ozark (my review of Season 1), Pose, Claws, Dear White People, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (my review of Season 4), Wild Wild Country, The Good Place (my review of Season 2), Barry, Happy!, The Baroness Von Sketch Show, Salt Fat Acid Heat

Interview: Pawel Pawlikowski on Cold War

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, like his Oscar-winning Ida, highlights a traumatic period in Poland’s recent history, and how a brutal political reality warps people’s lives. In the film, Poland’s totalitarian government and the iron curtain that separates the country from the West is hardly the only thing that keeps doomed lovers Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) apart, but it’s certainly the main one. It also interferes with their ability to do good work. Wiktor is the co-founder a troupe that performs Polish folk music and dances. Zula is the star of the troupe, whose initially artistic performances become steadily more maudlin and nationalistic under the heavy hand of Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), the communist bureaucrat who runs the company.

After the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Pawlikowski talked to me about the echoes of modern politics that Polish audiences detect in Cold War, how the film eluded the grasp of the propagandists who maligned Ida, and why he doesn’t stick too closely to his scripts.

I’ve seen two of your earliest movies, My Summer of Love and your first documentary, about Russian writer and dissident Benedict Yerofeyev. Ida and Cold War felt to me like they’re operating on a whole different, much deeper level. Did they feel different to you too?

It’s age. Age and experience. A mixture of, you know, calming down, maturing, craft. I never went to film school, so I did all my learning on the job. A lot of these early films are just rescue jobs—a good idea, and they generally work, because there’s something about them. I was usually just gripped by a story. Benedict was a writer I really loved, so I had to make a film about him. He was dying, and there was nothing to film. I had to invent a whole film around his book, so I pieced it together any old how, as poetically as possible.

Random Acts of Flyness

In the first episode of his Afrofuturist-ish HBO sketch show, creator, director, and star Terence Nance says Random Acts of Flyness is “about the beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life.” That broad frame allows Nance to download a multiverse of thoughts and ideas, from pointed observations about casual misogyny to a satiric skewering of “white thoughts.” Building on his work in films like An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Nance invents his own kaleidoscopic audiovisual language. Images switch frequently between realistic and surrealistic live action, obscure archival footage, and various styles of animation. Words blossom in myriad forms: as near-subliminal messages, as text exchanges that break into the action to comment on it, as fast-talking monologues or probing conversations.

The Terror

Based on the true story of a failed British expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the mid-19th century, The Terror explores the toxic combination of arrogance and bravery that fuels the exploratory missions launched by great colonial powers. After getting stuck for a year and a half in Artic ice, the men, weakened by lead poisoning and fighting the elements, set off on foot in search of salvation. The Terror brings those awful facts vividly alive—and then goes further, creating a full-blown horror story by introducing a monster called the Tuunbaq, which looks something like a giant polar bear with a human face. The men divide into two factions, battling one another as well as the monster while dying in increasingly baroque ways.

Fauda

Unlike Homeland, which is based on another Israeli TV series, Fauda makes no attempt to cover the political debates or social context behind its constant action. Instead, like its main characters, it keeps its head down and its focus tight. The series follows the fictional members of an elite undercover unit of the Israeli army and whichever Palestinian freedom fighter/terrorist that Doron (Lior Raz), a rogue member of the unit, is obsessed with that season, while occasionally checking in with a handful of other Israelis and Palestinians—-family members, lovers, or commanding officers—-who either affect or are affected by the main characters’ actions. Fauda (Arabic for “chaos”) is particularly good at showing how war, especially one with no end in sight, poisons the lives of everyone—-even civilians.

Pose

This soulful soap operatic drama pays tribute to New York City’s ball culture of the 1980s. Painting in broad, dramatic strokes, the script highlights the factors—racism, homophobia, transphobia, AIDS, and the wealth gap—that inspired these men and women to create their own world and faux families, where they could show one another the love and respect that they couldn’t find anywhere else.

Interview: Andrew Bujalski on Support the Girls

The finely tuned bullshit detector that keeps writer-director Andrew Bujalski's ego in check, nudging him to sprinkle his conversations with self-deprecating demurrals and constant reminders of his own blind spots and vulnerabilities, is part of what makes him such an excellent chronicler of our inner lives and times. The New York Times's A.O. Scott called Bujalski's first feature, Funny Ha Ha, “one of the most influential films of the '00s.” Each of his subsequent films has been very different from the others—and from nearly every film imaginable. His work seems to exist outside genre and screenwriting dogmas, featuring characters who feel like people you'd encounter only in life, and plots so subtle they barely register as such.

Bujalski's films also share a slyly comic humanism that finds both pathos and humor—often at once—in everything from the most banal of conversation to the profoundest of emotions. His latest, Support the Girls, is about a Hooters-like sports bar called Double Whammies and the women who work there. And at the center of the film is Regina Hall as Lisa, the harried, insanely competent, and warmly caring manager who protects and defends the waitresses whose prominently showcased breasts are the sports bar's main attraction by making sure it lives up to its promise of being “a family place.” I talked to Bujalski about what places like Double Whammies tell us about American culture, finding the essence of the film in the editing room, and filmmaking as a balancing act between order and chaos.

Interview: Debra Granik on Leave No Trace and tuning into people on the margins

Debra Granik's social-realist films, which are concerned with people living on the margins of mainstream American culture, are full of engrossing and enlightening details. And like her 2014 documentary Stray Dog, about a burly Vietnam vet, Ron Hall, who's all about creating nurturing communities, Granik's three narrative features to date focus on individuals leading hardscrabble lives. The first two, Down to the Bone and Winter's Bone, catapulted Vera Farmiga and Jennifer Lawrence to stardom. Her latest, Leave No Trace, which centers around another veteran, Ben Foster's Will, may just do the same for Thomasin McKenzie

The 17-year-old New Zealand actress plays Tom, the severely traumatized Will's teenage daughter. Both live off the grid outside Portland, Oregon, until authorities arrest Will for squatting illegally in a public park and attempt to re-acclimate him and his daughter to “normal” society.

Last week, I talked with Granik at her publicist's office in New York. Animated, sincere, and intensely committed to her every word, she spoke of the importance of kindness, why her films tend to launch female actors into stardom, and what she, a liberal Northeastern artist, has learned from her work about how to connect with likely Trump voters in America's heartland.

We just accept that films like yours will play at festivals and art houses and won't garner big audiences even when they get great reviews, but sometimes I wonder why. Do you think it's because most people don't want to watch stories about people who are living in poverty or on the margins of society?

I think so. One of the things that's hard to argue with, and I think about this all the time, is that the main way we see the word “movies” is as entertainment, right? If one is going for escape or time out or relaxation, to see social realism is—if you're living it, or even if you're from a very different sort of social class and you've just never felt at ease with the way the economic culture is structured, on top of everything else you deal with, it can be hard to go seek that. It's not really entertainment any more.

Interview: Jodie Foster on Hotel Artemis

Though she's a two-time Academy Award winner (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs), Jodie Foster has always been a bit of an outlier in Hollywood. As a child actor, her precocious self-assurance, intelligence, and self-described “gruff” voice made her something of an anomaly when she played bright young things in family-friendly TV shows like My Three Sons and films like Napoleon and Samantha. Then, in a run of emotionally complex roles in darker fare, most notably as a 13-year-old prostitute with a riveting mixture of childish innocence and world-weariness in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the actress's knowing gravitas found a worthy showcase.

That pattern has more or less held throughout Foster's career, as she has alternated between intelligently crafted TV shows and films like Spike Lee's Inside Man and lush melodramas or slick genre movies in which her nuanced, stubbornly realistic performances stood out like an elegant dive into a kiddie pool. Foster is now at the core of an ensemble cast in writer-director Drew Pearce's Hotel Artemis, a dystopian fantasy set in L.A. in a not-too-distant future in which the hotel of the title serves as a secret, members-only hospital reserved for criminals who pay an annual membership fee.

Last week I spoke with Foster, who plays the nurse who tends to the troublesome group of tenants, about Hotel Artemis and other things, including the time she was attacked by a lion, the memorable afternoon she spent with Toni Morrison, and the alternate lives she kicks herself for not having led.

You're quoted on IMDb as having said that you're better suited for independent films as a director and producer, and that you think you're best in mainstream films as an actress because your style of acting is too “linear” for indie films. First of all, did you actually say that?
I think I did, but I'm always cursing myself for the stupid things that I say in print. I don't think it's wrong, but I do think that indies are different now. The theatrical world and our viewing habits have changed so much that, increasingly, real story and narrative is found on cable and streaming.

Interview: Andrew Haigh on Lean on Pete and the Appeal of Passive Characters

Yorkshire-born writer-director Andrew Haigh specializes in stories about ordinary people experiencing emotional tsunamis that upend their sense of self. His latest, Lean on Pete, is about a lonely 15-year-old, Charley (Charlie Plummer), who sets out on an impulsive road trip after what's left of his already precarious family life evaporates, leaving him alone except for the quarter horse he bonded with while working in a D-level racing circuit. I met with Haigh at the offices of the film's distributor, A24, where we talked about why he prefers passive main characters, the importance of being melancholy, and how Lean on Pete finds a new way of exploring a theme that runs through all of the director's work: our struggle to feel less alone.

Your work is usually about people finding themselves through relationships with other people, but Charley finds himself by relating to a horse. What was it about this story that compelled you to film it?

I think even [in my films about] people finding themselves through other people, it's about people essentially feeling very alone in the world, and they're desperately trying to find a way to not feel alone. If it's in the case of Weekend or 45 Years, it's through relationships, I suppose. But this was dealing with a similar thing, just in a different way. We all exist in a state of aloneness, and we find ways to not be like that, but they can very easily fall apart and we can fall back into aloneness again.

Interview: Laurent Cantet on The Workshop

A latter-day neorealist working in the tradition of Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson, writer-director Laurent Cantet mixes professional actors with nonprofessionals to explore forces like class, race, and gender through fictional narratives. His latest, The Workshop, is set in La Ciotat, a seaside town in southern France whose once-thriving shipyard closed a generation ago, after years of struggle between the owners and the workers. The film gets its title from one of its main activities: a multicultural group of young people from the area, including the angry and alienated Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), participate in a novel-writing workshop taught by a Parisian writer named Olivia (Marina Foïs). As the class progresses and we learn more about the nationalistic, anti-immigrant propaganda Antoine is soaking up online, the violence the students are working into their story threatens to spill over into their lives.

Although he won the 2008 Palme d’Or for The Class, there’s no hint of egotism or self-importance in Cantet, who started our interview by pouring me a cup of coffee. Despite the filmmaker’s frequent frustration at being unable to find the exact word he was searching for in English, he was urgently articulate about his work, which he clearly does as much to educate himself as to encourage his audience to question their own beliefs.

I love the way your films explore social issues through fictional narratives.
I’m always interested in showing the complexity of our world. What’s always difficult is making a film that deals with reality without being too…dialectique?

Interview: Andy Goldsworthy on Leaning Into the Wind

Director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who documented some of English artist Andy Goldsworthy's work with naturally occurring materials in 2001's Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, explores an even wider range of Goldsworthy's works in Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy. Some are as ephemeral as the “rain shadows” that Goldsworthy often makes, lying down as a light rain starts and then getting up, leaving a crime scene-like shape of a body on the sidewalk—which the rain then fills in. Others are as lasting as the monumental project Sleeping Stones that Goldsworthy created by having huge slabs of stone fitted together and then having an oblong depression just wide enough to hold a human body hollowed out in the middle of the block.

As he pointed out in our interview, Goldsworthy's art crystallizes the intense exploration of the world that artists have always done, taking as its subject something that's usually part of the process. On the phone from his home in Scotland, Goldsworthy spoke easily and generously about Leaning Into the Wind and his work, often laughing or expressing enthusiastic wonder as he talked about the role photography plays in his art, pissing off the security guards at Fox News, and the sculptural nature of farming.

Interview: Oscar-Nominated Editor Tatiana S. Riegel on I, Tonya

In her 30 years as a film editor, Tatiana S. Riegel has cut five films for director Craig Gillespie, starting with 2007's Lars and the Real Girl. Her work on Gillespie's latest feature, I, Tonya, has earned her an Oscar nomination for best achievement in film editing. Reigel talked to me by phone from Berlin, where she's working on the early footage of director Fede Alvarez's The Girl in the Spider's Web as it's being filmed. 

In a conversation studded with references to intuition and instinct, Reigel talked about how editing a film is like attending a dinner party, what she learned from her years as an assistant to Quentin Tarantino's longtime editor, Sally Menke, and why it's not easy for women to find a place at the editing console.

Interview: Lee Unkrich talks Coco and Dia de Muertos

His 2018 Oscar nomination for Coco, which is up for best animated feature, is far from Lee Unkrich's first time at the awards rodeo. Unkrich joined Pixar more than two decades ago, as the company was transitioning from making just shorts and TV commercials to features. He co-edited Toy Story and went on, as Pixar employees do, to work in various capacities on many more films, including directing Toy Story 3. In Coco, Unkrich roots the story of a young musician whose family hates music in the visually sumptuous and intellectually rich soil of Mexico during a Día de Muertos holiday, creating the most emotionally resonant Pixar film since Toy Story 3. The film incorporates the gorgeous colors of Mexican treasures like Oaxacan alabrijes, the hillside houses of Guanajuato, and the strings of papel picado that festoon so many of the nation's walls and streets. The film also animates resonant Mexican concepts like the belief that we all die three deaths: the first when our hearts stop beating, the second when we are buried or cremated, and the third when there's nobody left on Earth who remembers us.

In a phone interview last week, Unkrich talked about how studying the Día de Muertos helped him deal with the death of his father, the challenges of making a film about Mexico when you're “a white guy from Ohio,” and the tension between family ties and individual freedom.

Interview: Glenn Close and Max Irons on Crooked House

As Edith, the head of a dysfunctional household that almost certainly includes a murderer, Glenn Close twinkles with steadfast self-confidence and mischievous perception in Gilles Paquet-Brenner's Crooked House. In contrast, Max Irons plays it straight as the private detective hired to ferret out the killer, giving each member of an ensemble cast of colorful characters a chance to commandeer the spotlight as he conducts interviews and studies family dynamics. 

I met with Close and Irons (and Close's dog, Pip, who never strayed far from Close's feet) at the Crosby Street Hotel for an occasionally raucous conversation often punctuated by Close's merry laugh and by teasing banter or quick bursts of dialogue between the two actors, who have known each other since Max was an infant. (Max is the son of Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for Reversal of Fortune, which also starred Close.) 

We talked about Close's artistic family, how women have been treated in Hollywood and how that's changing, and how it felt for the old family friends to work together in two films in a row (Björn Runge's The Wife is coming out next year).

My sister-in-law, who lives in Wilson, Wyoming, has art by your sister.
Glenn Close: Tina! That's where Tina lives. Oh, how cool. She's really talented.

Is everyone in your family artistic?
Close: Yes, they are. My other sister is a writer, and my brother is an artist with metal. He has a metal shop. He can make anything happen. I love his brain! He lives in Belgrade, Montana, and he says: “I'm like what the blacksmith used to be.” People come in with parts that they can't find any more and he'll make something to replace what they lost, or he'll invent something. He's gotten people out of big trouble by just inventing things.

Best Movies of the Year

Here's Slant's list of the best films of 2017, which I contributed to.

And here are my top 10 picks and honorable mentions.

My Top 10 
Get Out
Graduation
The Phantom Thread
A Quiet Passion
Faces Places
I Am Not Your Negro
Dunkirk
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Lady Bird (my interview with Laurie Metcalf)
4 Days in France

My Honorable Mentions
For Ahkeem, Tempestad, BPM, Harmonium, Whose Streets?, The Florida Project, Intent to Destroy, Rat Film, Donald Cried, Get Me Roger Stone

Best TV Shows of 2017

Here's Slant Magazine's list of the year's top 25 TV shows, which I contributed to. And here's my 10 top list, plus a bunch of honorable mentions--lots, since there were so many good ones again this year.

My Top 10
The Leftovers (my interview with Ann Dowd)
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Big Little Lies
One Mississippi
The Good Place
Homeland
The Americans (my review of Season 4)
Master of None
The Handmaid's Tale  (my interview with Ann Dowd)
Chewing Gum

My Honorable Mentions
Bojack Horseman, Narcos, Blackish, People of Earth, Rick and Morty, The Black Mirror, Alias Grace, Insecure, Episodes, Veep, Ozark, Better Things, Girls, Jane the Virgin, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mindhunter, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Silicon Valley, You’re the Worst, Crashing

Get Out

Get Out's central conceit, about a Stepford Wives-ish plot by blithely entitled suburban whites to colonize black people's bodies, is a trenchant metaphor for white supremacy. The timing, character development, and gift for social satire that writer-director Jordan Peele honed as a sketch comedian all translate effortlessly to horror, allowing the first-time filmmaker to entrance his audience as deftly as Catherine Keener's Missy mesmerizes Daniel Kaluuya's Chris with that tapping teaspoon. The Sunken Place where Missy maroons Chris is the film's most indelible image, a stomach-churning representation of how it feels to be stripped of your autonomy and personhood by a dominant culture that remains cruelly blind and deaf to your plight. In a world where almost no one is what they initially appear to be, Get Out anatomizes the evil lurking in the relatively benign-seeming prejudice that plays out as fetishization or envy, a form of racism that doesn't see itself as racist at all. Written for Slant Magazine