An Interview with Jon Foy, director of “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles”

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“Resurrect Dead” played at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Foy won the award for Best Director.

Flick Pick Monster: How did you conceive of this project and why did you choose this to be your first film?

Jon Foy: I think that for me a lot of this stuff happens on a gut level, so it’s really hard to know exactly why. I wanted to do something that seemed kind of fantastical, like magical realism, but this is all a documentary, it’s all true. And so I sensed that I could kind of present it is being this fantastical thing—that’s the mode of delivery, but it’s all real information and real events. That really appealed to me on that level. I’ve seen this kind of trend in Hollywood of doing films that are presented as found footage—stuff like “Blair Witch” or “Cloverfield” or things like that--- and that’s pretty cool, but to me it seemed interesting to me to go in the opposite direction, to take something as real and present it as unreal as possible [laughs].

FPM: I understand you composed the music and also edited the movie. How was that and do you like controlling all the aspects of the movie?

JF: Well, I self-funded the movie as a house cleaner. I spent 5 and half years working odd jobs. And the whole time I did clean houses. I did some other stuff: I did drug studies, I stocked shelves at a local food store. I did all sorts of crazy stuff. I was able to do everything myself because there was nobody that was controlling the money that was able to say, you’re crazy, directors don’t get to write their own scores.

I taught myself how to score specifically so that I could score this project. The score’s pretty key to the movie. I would say that goes back to what I said before about this being like a cinematic delivery: I wanted it to feel unreal, I wanted it to feel cinematic, like you’re actually seeing something that’s fictional. But again, it’s all very true-we’re not literally making anything up, it’s just that there’s this fantastical, whimsical music, and mysterious music going underneath that sort of elevates the mood of it.

I did compose the score, I edited, I shot it, I funded it, I directed it. I also did other smaller things, like the sound design and the sound mixing and the color. Pretty much everything, although I had a lot of helping as far as like dealing with concepts from Colin Smith, who also was producing the film. He would do a lot of quality control, of watching the film and letting me know, this part goes on too long, things like that, and he worked on the pacing…

FPM: What films and directors have influenced you? When I heard of this documentary, I was thinking it sounds kind of like Banksy [and his "Exit Through the Gift Shop"].

JF: We loved that movie. Well, that movie came out late in the game, in the last year or so, when our movie was being more or less wrapped up. But, yeah, certainly: we were so happy when we heard that movie came out that we actually went to the theater and saw it as soon as we could because we thought, oh my god another movie that’s kind of like ours [laughs].

I would say my influences were around the time that I was growing up—maybe around like 10 years old, I was seeing all these wonderful films that a lot of us probably grew up with. The Spielberg stuff, the early Tim Burton stuff, Star Wars-- all these wonderful escapist Hollywood films. That was the stuff that really planted the seed for me to want to be a filmmaker.

And then what happened was I got into punk rock, and that shaped my understanding of this raw approach to art and feeling as if you can do things yourself, you don’t need to hire professionals. You can just do things, and if they’re a little rough, then whatever, they’ll come across as being more honest anyway.

It is a very lo-fi film. I pretty much learned how to do everything as I went [laughs]. Not a whole lot of training or anything. So I would say a mix of those two things: those wonderful, fantastical films, and then, as viewed through the lens of someone who cobbles together things very raw and immediate, through the lens of punk rock, that’s how you end up with stuff like this [laughs].

FPM: Without spoiling anything, do you feel like you’ve found a satisfying answer to the mystery of the tiles in the making of this documentary?

JF: Well, the answer is yes and no. We leave people to decide what they think, but we present our evidence, we’re satisfied with what we discovered, and where the story took us. We felt like it was an adventure, and we shared that on film. We hope that people will enjoy it as well. And I guess people can make up their own minds, because a lot of it is conjecture, a lot of it is guesswork; we bring together things from the past… And so I guess it’s kind of interesting: we leave people to debate it afterwards and leave them to decide what they think of what we found. But hopefully it’ll be entertaining, regardless of what people come up with.

An Interview with Lucy Walker, documentarian and director of "Waste Land" and "Countdown to Zero"

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"Waste Land" won the World Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, was on the 2010 Academy Awards shortlist for Best Documentary, and is now playing across the country. Edit (January 26, 2011): the film is nominated for the 2010 Best Documentary Feature Oscar. "Countdown to Zero" premiered at Sundance, played at Cannes in a Special Screening, and had a theatrical run this summer.

Flick Pick Monster: First off, how did “Waste Land” come into being? Was it developed at the same time as “Countdown to Zero”?

Lucy Walker: It was developed before and how it came into being was [with a] very organic conversation between myself and Vik Muniz, the artist in the movie. We were just both really interested in each other’s work and we had a conversation about, if we were to make a movie together, what might that movie be. It was very open and in a way I didn’t really think it was going to go anywhere; in hindsight, of course, it was perfect, but at the time I didn’t know if it was really going anywhere. I was trying to think how to make a film about an artist and really show his process and I thought it would be really interesting to follow one project.

I also knew that Vik did these social projects; he really enjoyed working with people outside the art world. He was at this sort of mid-life crisis point in a way where he wasn’t sure what art meant or he was feeling quite constrained by the art world. Talking to him I really picked up on that and I thought that would be really interesting, to see him do a social project, maybe a social project that was so challenging that it might fail or might be really dramatic or he’d meet some really interesting people from the edges of society. I thought that that would be really wonderful.

And I guess I was also thinking about my movie “Blindsight,” because in a funny way it has a very similar structure to “Waste Land” in terms of this one, [privileged, successful] guy who goes on an adventure in collaboration with people who really had some rough luck. In the case of “Blindsight,” that was blind mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer collaborating with the blind students in Tibet and in the case of this it’s obviously Vik collaborating with the Catadores. But I sort of knew that that was maybe a good structure for a documentary and I was looking for really challenging project and I knew that that would make the most interesting film. And in the course of just [these] conversations with Vik, both in the UK and in New York, we realized we both were obsessed with garbage and I said, “Have you ever thought about working in a land fill, with all the garbage which you could work with as your materials?” and he said yes, that he actually wanted to do a project but he thought it would be too dangerous. And I said that would be really interesting; that would be a film.

I liked that project because I knew that waste and recycling were really, really important topics and that a landfill was a really fantastic location and that the Catadores would be really interesting people to meet. So as soon as we sort of had this idea, I just knew it was the one, and I insisted that if anything when we film it, if anything happens on this project, we should just film the whole thing from start to finish and that’s exactly what we did.

FPM: Your documentaries are so varied in subject matter, from nuclear weapons in “Countdown to Zero” to the Amish community in “Devil’s Playground”, to blind mountain climbers in “Blindsight.” What would you say is the “connecting thread” throughout your films, if there indeed is one?

LW: I could get more complicated but on a simple level, it’s exactly what I’m interested in in the world. It’s people I want to meet and places I want to go and subjects I want to think about, whether that’s Tibet or blindness or wealth and poverty and where the arts transform life or the work of Vik Muniz or going to Brazil or going to Amish country and [what it’s] like to grow up Amish, [or] nuclear weapons… These are just really interesting subjects that I like to think about and I found stories that were sort of [excuses] to sort of really challenge myself to immerse myself and really figure out what I think. [To] make a film is the sort of ultimate figuring out and expressing what is going on. And so I sort of feel like, on a deep level, [that] a very selfish way of answering that question would be these are just projects that I most of all have burning questions about and the films are sort of the answers to the questions that I’m most excited about thinking about.

FPM: “Countdown to Zero” is somewhat of an “activism doc,” in that it was created to bring awareness (like “The Cove,” “Food Inc.,” “An Inconvenient Truth”, and to a lesser extent “The Art of the Steal”). “Waste Land” and your other documentaries seem to be more in the interest bringing the audience’s attention to an interesting happening that doesn’t have a direct effect on their lives. Are you more interested in more prescient material, or do you find yourself more drawn to more off-the-beaten-track stories?

LW: I think in a way “Waste Land” is like my first two films. It really follows a group of people on a journey in an interesting world with a beginning, middle, and end, whether that’s Amish young people turning 16 and having to make the decision whether to go back or not, going through a grown-up period, or in the case of “Blindsight,” it’s about these blind people climbing a mountain which has a very clear narrative arc of, you know, here’s a mountain climber, beginning, middle, and end, do they get to the top?; it’s got a very clear structure and you meet some really amazing people in a really fascinating place which is Everest in Tibet.

And then with “Waste Land,” the same thing: you’ve got Vik and the Catadores [going] on a journey with both the art project and meeting each other, collaborating, going on this amazing journey, and through all this you get to know them. Whereas “Countdown” winds up being much more about the issue and the topic. I did actually try to shoot more people in “Countdown” and it really just became really hard, [as] there were no stories or journeys in a way that we could get access to, as it was such a sensitive subject and everything was so classified and even when we did try to film things it didn’t really work. So I could find a journey to follow in the same way apart from just really understanding the issue. So that wound up being a little bit of a different film.

I love them all and I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I’ve got some different projects that fit different templates- some of them aren’t even documentaries, some are fiction films. I think of it [as] challenging to make a film about a topic. It is challenging to get people’s attention and I think, when you’ve got a 90-minute film, it makes it a lot easier when you’ve got a story to follow.

FPM: Are you interested in experimenting with the “form” of the documentary (as has been said of Banksy’s “Exit Through the Gift Shop” or, a film that conceptually “Waste Land” reminds me of, Varda’s “The Gleaners and I”), or do you prefer “documentary-style” documentary filmmaking? Or both?

LW: I love “The Gleaners and I”; it was a film I thought about a lot. I sort of think of myself a filmmaker first and foremost and, for me, a filmmaker is someone who really uses all the possibilities of the craft. I don’t think that I’m like a journalist with a camera. I like to think of myself as really trying to find different ways.

Sometimes you can do small things- I really liked how with my film “Blindsight” I opened the film on an empty black screen with sound effects. I thought that was an interesting way of getting people to figure out what it was like not to see, to sort of color out the images. With “Waste Land,” there’s time lapse and different ways of using the montage and the editing—different ways you’re trying to tell the story using the different possibilities—great music, great cinematography.

I love the more experimental structures and experiments that people are bringing to documentaries like “The Gleaners and I” and I hope that with each project I can find the most interesting way of telling each story. Experimenting as much as possible with the form I think would be fantastic.

FPM: How was working with Moby on "Waste Land"?

LW: It was fantastic. He’s as generous as he is genius. I’m very fortunate that he’s been like a big brother to me—I’ve known him for 15 years--- and just a incredibly kind friend. I actually originally was going to use music on “Countdown” and the producers didn’t want that [laughs]. So, I suddenly, crazily thought about using it for “Waste Land” where I’d wanted to use Brazilian music but I couldn’t find any Brazilian music that seemed right. And then, when we weren’t using Moby’s music for “Countdown,” I was upset about that, but then I suddenly had the idea we could use it for “Waste Land.” That’s exactly how that happened and it turned out to be absolutely perfect. I found out that was really the perfect thing.

I think it universalizes the story because it’s set in Brazil but it’s not just about Brazil, it’s really about human nature, I think: it’s about art, it’s about spirit, and all kinds of things. It’s not really about just Brazil or Brazilians specifically. I just couldn’t find the right stuff. I really, really liked Moby’s music and I think it works really, really well as it’s really beautiful and emotional. Lots of people watching the film get really emotional and cry and have a sort of real heart-opening workout. (Moby even talks about the film as being a sort of heart-opening exercise.) I really like that and so I think that his music since it’s so beautiful and so emotional enables the audience to go there emotionally. That’s why I like it so much.

FPM: Who (and what films) has an influence on your filmmaking?

LW: There are so many. Agnes Varda is a good example, specifically with this film. Obviously I was lucky enough to be taught by Barbara Kopple, who I think is just such a powerhouse and just brilliant. She taught me so much about integrity---everything from integrity to sound recording [laughs]. She really taught me everything. I also, especially with my first film, and ever since, have been really inspired by a couple of films.

One is “Streetwise,” which is a 1984 film about Seattle street kids and it was made by Martin Bell and his wife who is an amazing documentary photographer. I just couldn’t believe the access. Martin managed to be in the room with some incredibly intimate scenes between these people and I couldn’t believe how he’d managed to pull that off. That was really inspiring to me [in that] he could get honest moments which were so incredibly compelling.

Another film was “Hoop Dreams.” I just think Steve James is a genius. His patience and persistence and sort of perceptiveness meant that he found these sort of twists and turns in ordinary life that just were amazing.

An Interview with Kornél Mundruczó, director of "Tender Son - The Frankenstein Project"

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"Tender Son - The Frankenstein Project" was In Competition at Cannes, and played at Toronto and Philadelphia. My review of the film is here.

Flick Pick Monster: Would you say that the character of The Director (who you play in “Tender Son”) is autobiographical? Do you believe as a director that “the camera must make the actor act,” as the director does in the film?

Kornél Mundruczó: The character I play obviously carries a lot of characteristics of the problems and challenges I see in this film but, at the same time, I wanted to introduce a film director almost in a documentary way, in the same way I use my characters. That’s why it had to be a film director playing the part.

Then I came to the conclusion that if it was not an actor playing the part, the only honest solution would be my playing it and that I could not bring anyone into a situation where he would observe my ego with critical eyes. Is it my ego anyway? If there is such a transformation, I have to face all the problems, which is very hard. Then of course, the character should become neither someone full of longing nor a terrible bully but someone in-between these two, a man in the real situation of being on a quest. And it was important that he should be played within these boundaries all the time. But I think – and this is the important transformation – that I am not this figure, I am not this film director, the one whose part I play. If you accept and understand this, you get closer to the film.

So in that sense, it is not a secret diary in which I would write. The same construction and the same art of drama build the film like any other of my films but here I should give the keys to the film.

There are thousands of such examples in the cinema. Naturally, if I may use this formidable example, it is a sort of Chaplinesque act – who’s who: Chaplin being Chaplin or Chaplin not being Chaplin? Who’s Chaplin in real life? Of course these are figures and play. It was never intended for me. The most difficult decision took place during the preparation, that I must say. At first I had thought of some actors, as this movie has a theatre version in which it is an actor who plays the character. Then I thought how it had to be a filmmaker, so we made up a list of many names and reflected upon how they each made it onto the list, etc.

Then somehow I crossed out the list completely and said that I couldn’t do that to anyone and that I myself had to do it because it would be the most accurate, the most difficult, the most composed, in other words, the best answer. I enjoyed the challenge quite a lot, but it was awfully tough to place these two things together in my head.

In conclusion, I would really enjoy acting in a film at any time for any director but I wouldn’t like to be an actor again in one of my own films for a while because it was so complicated to put the two things together.

FPM: There seemed to be references to Michael Haneke (with the jagged blood stain), Gus Van Sant (the opening shot of the car reminded me of “Gerry”), and Andrei Tarkovsky (the film had the feeling of “The Sacrifice”). Did you create homages to these filmmakers or any others?

KM: I don’t think that homage would be the right word but I do respect indeed the work of Bresson, Fassbinder and Ozu. I wouldn‘t like to follow their way, but the coherence of their film language and philosophy inspires me.

FPM: Have you cut the film since it played at Cannes and Toronto? I say this because there are production shots that I’ve seen (notably a white-haired man being struck in the neck with a can and Rudolf putting a stethoscope on his own chest) that were absent from the film when it was screened for me at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

KM: No, we haven’t cut the film since Cannes. The production shot you saw was from the theater play, where the stepfather is played by János Derzsi.

FPM: I understand that “Tender Son” was a play before it was a film. How did you change “Tender Son” from drama to cinema?

KM: I changed almost everything apart from the person playing the main character, Rudolf Frecska. We made a new structure, but we did it in order to save the contents of the material. If we had only recorded the theatre production, it wouldn’t have worked. I have only seen terrible examples in that regard. Although I myself had a go at it when we did a theatre-film or film-theatre version of the theatre production of “The Nibelung Residency;” with it I precisely wanted to prove that recorded theatre does not exist or if it does, it is a completely different genre.

But if the question of theatre came up: there are a lot of differences between the theatre version and the film, not only the actor playing the film director.

The content hasn’t changed but its workings have. It’s like translating a poem into a different language. If you want to render the truth of the original material, you usually have to use different words, because the same words usually don’t mean exactly the same thing in a different language. So a film cannot render the content of a theatre production in the same language. You have to change the language in order for the content not to suffer.

FPM: How did you originally conceive of the idea for the play and the film?

KM: With "The Nibelung Residency" the recording of the production was commissioned, with "Tender Son-The Frankenstein Project" whether or not [we were] making a movie wasn’t even a question: only the ground idea was similar to the theatre play. That is the reason why we changed the title as well. This is in every respect a different material, in spite of dealing with almost the same problem as the play. The play is very ironic, with lots of humor, while the film is a lot dryer, more documentary-like and tries to operate more subordinately with regard to the genre. We also would have liked to play a little with elements of the horror and thriller genres in our own way, so that was also a challenge generated by the making of the film.

FPM: How did you expect people were going to react to this film?

KM: This is a very difficult question as I don‘t know how people will react. I would just like to find a way to reach out to their attention and soul. I do hope that in my stories we can drive people toward catharsis and the story stays with them for a long time. Some feedback fortunately confirms this.

FPM: Do you have anything in the works?

KM: I am working on my new film’s script at the moment. In January there will be a documentary shooting and from February I will start rehearsal for a new theatre production in Hamburg.

(Note: I also asked a question about the film's mise-en-scene, but it was either cut off or not answered.)

An Interview with Ariel Schulman, co-director of "Catfish"

Schulman (second from left) (src)

"Catfish" opened in New York City on September 17 and it will expand to more cities.

Flick Pick Monster: What is the significance of the title “Catfish”?

Ariel Schulman: The reason for the title becomes clear at the end of the movie. I don't want to give it away here, but I will say it's significance to the story came as a total surprise to me. I’ve never heard the word catfish used in this way.

FPM: What was it about Nev’s and Megan’s communications that made you want to make this film?

AS: It was actually Nev’s relationship with Megan’s little sister Abby that made me want to start filming. She was 8 and totally inspired by his photography, inspired enough to paint from his photos every night and send them to him. And the paintings were good[;] that's plenty of reasoning to start making what I thought would be a short film.

FPM: What would you say to those who say that the film was made-up?

AS: We’re not smart enough to make all this up.

FPM: Reader Cristina Acuna asks: Why film any of it to begin with? Why is nothing private anymore?

AS: It's my brothers life and he is my muse, I love watching him and filming him. I'd tell Cristina Acuna that there is in fact plenty of private footage she will never see.

FPM: Was the reason that you collaborated with Henry Joost that you were his art director? Describe this partnership.

AS: I was Henry’s art director on “New York Export: Opus Jazz.” We trade off roles depending on the project. We’re like ham and eggs, perfect together. But sometimes you just want two helpings of eggs.

FPM: What was “Jerry Ruis, Shall We Do This?,” your short film with Joshua Safdie? You were also his art director on “Daddy Longlegs” and on others of his films, as well as an actor in “The Adventures of Slaters’s Friend.” Do you think you will make another film with him?

AS: “Jerry Ruis” is a crazy short Safdie and I made in my mom’s apartment. He's my oldest friend in the world. We used to direct a lot of shorts together when I was a member of Red Bucket Films, before Henry and I started Supermarché. Safdie and I are writing a sequel called "John Gotti's Maserati.”

FPM: Do you prefer being a director or an art director?

AS: Being a director takes a lot of guts. Being an art director allows me to work creatively on other peoples movies. And to buy cool props that I get to keep.

FPM: Who are the biggest influences on your filmmaking?

AS: Woody Allen, Werner Herzog, Roman Polanski, and Josh Safdie.

FPM: What do you think your next project will be? Are you open to doing another documentary?

AS: Truth is stranger than fiction; I'll make documentaries for the rest of my life. But for my next feature film, Joost and I are writing a narrative thriller. I'm also working on publishing a book of the Catfish correspondence.

An Interview with Anurag Kashyap, director of "That Girl in Yellow Boots"

[src] courtesy of: Mayank.hc

“That Girl in Yellow Boots” makes its world premiere out-of-competition at the Venice Film Festival before playing in the Special Presentations section at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Flick Pick Monster: What inspired you to make “That Girl in Yellow Boots”?

Anurag Kashyap: A story in a newspaper about a German girl who came to India looking for her father...she is still looking, though. And yet another story that I can't talk about or it would reveal the film, which dominated the front pages of the Mumbai Mirror for sometime. The two stories affected me and kept playing in my head and I narrated them to Kalki [Koechlin], I said “I want to do this with you, but I want a woman's POV so will you write it?” and she did.

FPM: What is the significance of the yellow boots, if there indeed is any beyond being a distinguishing characteristic?

AK: The title is such because it has a connotation of a gossip. It’s not the girl in yellow boots but "That Girl…" as in when someone talks, "You know that girl who wears yellow boots, you know what she does, blah blah blah[….]” It’s at the very core of Indian morality that we can't talk about things openly and sometimes a strong individual woman, who happens to be beautiful and white, gets scrutinized a lot. It's a story of one such girl[;] yellow boots are her only distinct identity.

FPM: I’ve read that the technique of Snorricam (something I much enjoy) is given screen time in “Dev. D” and your other films. Given that the same cinematographer, Rajeev Ravi, worked on “That Girl With Yellow Boots” as well as “Dev D.,” is there any of it to be expected in the new film?

AK: No, there are no [snorricams] used in TGIYB. We have shot 10 % of it on 7D, though.

FPM: It is always interesting when the director of a film works on the screenplay with an actor of the film. Such examples include Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Richard Linklater on “Before Sunset,” to an extent Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman on the "Kill Bill" films (though they really just came up with the character together), and you and Kalki Koechlin with your new film. How was this experience?

AK: Oh, it was tough. She is not just the actor, she is also my live-in partner and she has strong [points of view]. For her to be both writer and actor and me to be the director using her and her material and [to be] the boyfriend was very intense. After [the] shoot we both needed our space. We couldn't go back to bed together after the shoot each day. It was very intense but it showed on screen.

FPM: What do you have lined up for after “That Girl in Yellow Boots”?

AK: I am next doing a tribal gangster film [entitled “Gangs of Wasseypur”] set in the state of Bihar around the coal mines. It’s a revenge story set across six decades and three generations.

An Interview with George Hickenlooper, director of the Jack Abramoff biopic "Casino Jack"

Hickenlooper (right) with "Casino Jack" star Kevin Spacey

"Casino Jack” premieres at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival in the Galas section.

Flick Pick Monster: You seem drawn to outcasts: Francis Ford Coppola and his cast with “Hearts of Darkness,” Monty Hellman in your documentary about him, Andy Warhol in “Factory Girl,” Rodney Bingenheimer in “Mayor of Sunset Strip,” and now Jack Abramoff in “Casino Jack.” Would you say this is, as they say, your trademark?

George Hickenlooper: [I'm] not sure if I’m into trademarks because in general I'm against the commodification of any art form, particularly when it comes to the cinema. This trend in the last 30 years has had a very corrosive and infantilizing [effect] on filmmaking. In the independent film world in the United States, it’s this type of framing device that has created a kind of "Pottery Barn Cinema," [as] I like to call it -- where filmmakers and critics both feel a need to pigeon hole work with a kind of label or sheen that makes it more palatable for the consumer. Critics and fanboys alike love it when they can salivate over certain styles or fashions or trends which ultimately feed on themselves and the filmmakers, leading to a generation of work that might look nice next to your potpourri but at [its] heart has no real or timeless qualities that [are] demanded by meaningful storytelling. Less I digress, allow me to answer your question—I am interested in characters who are outsiders or who are in some way in a deteriorating frame of mind. My other pictures 'The Low Life', 'Dogtown,' and ‘The Big Brass Ring,' also explore this idea. For 'The Big Brass Ring', F.X. Feeney and I adapted the original screenplay by Orson Welles about a political candidate who is recovering from the loss of a major election. In our adaptation we kept that same idea of loss but made it more intimate, creating the story of a politician who suffers from the loss and guilt of a brother killed in Vietnam. It’s this sadness and tragedy of life that fascinates me to no end. I believe that characters like this are true to life and in a way they are appropriate metaphors for how life decays. We are all beautiful rockets that eventually burn out, and I like to shine my attention on those last few sparks, those last few moments of glory. Finality is what gives life its beauty. Without finality we would all be trees falling in a massive forest for no one to see.

FPM: Was the film influenced by Alex Gibney’s “Casino Jack and the United States of Money”? If not, how did this project come into being?

GH: I wasn’t aware of the relevance of [the] Gibney documentary until he started accusing me of stealing his title. Considering the fact that Jack’s universal nickname in Washington was ‘Casino Jack,’ I felt it was a bit presumptuous of him to assume ownership of the name, especially when we had announced our title first. Regardless, Gibney’s film had no influence on me. It was actually Billy Moyers’ PBS documentary ‘Capitol Crimes’ which got me interested in the story. It was so gothic and operatic in its scope, I immediately though this would make a great film. And not a political film, but a film about hubris, greed and corruption on a stage that could rival the world of Mario Puzo. It was fresh and interesting and smart and so I found the writer, Norman Snider, who is a former journalist and a Canadian, and I thought together we could come up with an interesting perspective on Jack Abramoff.

FPM: It’s interesting to see Kevin Spacey play both Ron Klain and Jack Abramoff in a span of only a couple of years. Any comment on this?

GH: I actually never saw 'Recount’ nor did I take it into consideration when I was casting ‘Casino Jack.’ I felt Kevin had a certain bravado and charm that would nicely accentuate the personality of Abramoff. I met with Jack five times where he was incarcerated in Cumberland, Maryland, so I got to know Abramoff a bit and I just felt his charisma and charm was something that might be suited to Kevin Spacey.

FPM: I appreciate the fact that you took the approach of making a biopic/dramatization, not a fictionalization. A recently example of this was Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” which was about Valerie Plame and referred to her by name versus Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth,” which was implicitly about Plame but was sort of a concealed satire. I use this comparison because your film is similarly political and similarly about a controversy. Would you say your choice to direct a dramatization comes out of your documentarian bent.

GH: Well, for me a good story is a good story whether inspired by facts or not. Does my background as a documentarian make me more inclined to tell these kinds of stories? Not really. It just worked out that way on my last two pictures. And with respect to whether you’re Lurie or Liman, I think by virtue of the fact that we’re all telling narratives that are written by writers and ultimately played by actors, we are bound to blur the lines between fiction and reality at some point. Whether you say it’s “a true story or “inspired” by a true story, it is ultimately subject to the filmmaker’s perception and discretion, so I think your question about Lurie vs. Liman may be splitting hairs a bit. Both are very good films, and both deal with the subject of betrayal and rights of privacy in very intelligent and profound ways. You don’t necessarily have to call her character “Valerie Plame” to underscore the issues and relevance that her experience brought to our collective social mores. I felt the same way when I told the Edie Sedgwick story in ‘Factory Girl.’ I felt that I didn’t have to be slavish to the minutia of her life because her overall life experience in Andy Warhol’s factory, and her insatiable desire to achieve fame, was something completely relevant to our culture today --- loss, abandonment, and that desire to fill that deficiency with love. Consequently as a narrative filmmaker, I am not opposed to sometimes taking liberty with fact for the sake of making the story as a film work as a whole. Narrative filmmaking is always narrative storytelling and it should never pretend to be documentary unless you’re Orson Welles doing ‘War of the Worlds’ for CBS Radio. Or worse case scenario Oliver Stone making ‘JFK,’ which profoundly convinced me that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone gunman.

FPM: Has the film [“Casino Jack”] been seen by anyone who is portrayed in it? If so, how did they feel about it? If not, what do you anticipate their feelings will be?

GH: Well, Jack told me in prison that he hated the movie just based on his reading of the script, which we had to smuggled into him disguised as an attorney’s document. Of course, his hating the script was part of his charm and a testament to his being an [effective] lobbyist by doing his best to convince me to take on another project instead. What he may not have realized at the time was the hours he spent talking to me and telling me stories in his effort to tell me that his story really wasn’t that interesting were stories that ultimately made it into the movie. So in a way, yes, I had my documentary cap on and art was imitating life here. Things Jack told me in prison started going directly into the movie. In fact, the very end of the film is based on a favor Jack asked me to do for him. So in an odd way, like a documentarian, I found myself a participant in my own narrative film. At moments it was surreal.

FPM: You’ve now tried biopic, narrative, and documentary. Which of them you most prefer to do?

GH: I love all three. Documentaries are pure cinema in the sense that you are using raw film to create your narrative. There’s something exciting about finding your story in the chaos of that footage. At the same time I love the elegance of narrative filmmaking and working with other great talents to create a truly magnetic narrative experience.

FPM: Which filmmakers have an influence on your work?

GH: Wow, that’s a tough question. When young film students ask me who to watch I usually suggest the following: Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Robert Wise, John Schlessinger, Hal Ashby, Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, Vittorio de Sica, Carol Reed, William Wyler, Peter Bogdanovich, King Vidor, Monte Hellman, Ernest Lubitsch, Roman Polanski… [just] to name a few…. I guess all these guys are a part of me.