Thursday - October 02, 2008
An interview with director James Kerwin
MIN: Do you believe that the only way to get an original idea made into a film any more is to form your own production company outside the umbrella of a major studio?
JK: The short answer is "yes." If you're a more powerful writer/director it's different. But often even established directors -- Lucas, Rodriguez -- will work outside the "system" some or all of the time, because it really is the only way to bring an unadulterated, uncompromised vision to the screen. Whether that vision ultimately "works" or not is up to individual tastes, obviously, but at least it's your vision and you take responsibility for how it plays to people. My favorite director, Stanley Kubrick, literally exiled himself from Hollywood and all the b.s. that comes with "the business."
Filmmaking is a collaborative medium in the organizational sense, but I believe it is very much an auteur-based medium in the artistic sense. It's important to surround yourself with loyal people who have great artistic sensibilities themselves. You always listen to what they have to say, but ultimately you have to make your directorial choices yourself. Some people mistake that for an ego thing, but it's not; it's an efficiency thing.
MIN: You were recognized for your theatre directing two years in a row by Back Stage Magazine critic Paul Birchall.
JK: It's nice to be recognized critically, of course, because it means my work has resonated with someone. As for why it resonates… Who can say? All I know is that I'm an unapologetic perfectionist, down to every detail of every beat. It can be annoying to the crew and cast, but hopefully they realize that's what sets a given project apart. I take my time and don't churn out a lot of material -- I'll wait years between projects sometimes -- and I think that "pondering" about a project, as Terrence Malick calls it, is where a lot of the real directorial magic happens. Ultimately, I direct films and plays that I would want to watch myself. Scorsese says a film's director is simply its first audience member, and he's right, of course.
I do see certain patterns in the material I've chosen over the past few years. In theatre, I've been drawn to scripts that may seem difficult or dense to stage. People rarely choose to mount, for example, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, or the untitled play which Hamilton believed is his lost Cardenio. They have reputations as being "lesser" pieces. But they really aren't -- Cardenio, for example, is beautiful and haunting and rich but it's misunderstood. So I try to take a piece like that and get to its essence. Tell it in an original way that maybe nobody's thought of before, but in a way that most directly and fully gets to the marrow of the material. A script is an eggshell, and it's the director's job to crack it and get to the good stuff inside. It's different, of course, when you direct a film you've written yourself, like YESTERDAY WAS A LIE. Then your challenge is to retain objectivity and insure that the story communicates universally, which is where many up-and-coming writer/directors tend to stumble.
MIN: What do you think is unique about your style that separates you from the rest of the field?
JK: I would say that if my work resonates with an audience, it's because it deals with universal themes that are timeless and timely. I try to tackle projects that are strong character pieces, yet which also pose greater, fundamental questions about the nature of reality and existence -- things that border on the metaphysical. My stories rarely have storybook endings, and I think that touches people. Who hasn't been in pain at one point or another?
Joseph Campbell once said that one's psyche is easily torn apart in this day and age because the modern world has lost contact, psychologically and spiritually, with the symbols of our collective unconscious. And that's not just new-age mumbo-jumbo. Anyone who has truly studied quantum mechanics, probability, causality, nonlocal entanglement -- all these wonderful innovations in modern science, such as the work being done by Dr. Dean Radin in the field of consciousness -- cannot fail to be struck by the inherent complexity and beauty of creation. But you have the secular humanist movement hell-bent on convincing people that there is nothing to believe in. You have quasi-scientific "skeptical" groups who actually aren't scientists at all. They're just fronts for atheists -- guys like Randi, Hitchens, and Dawkins... idealogues devoted to labeling as a "fraud" anything they can't explain with their obsolete ideas of what science is supposed to be. Most of these organizations aren't even accredited, because they don't practice legitimate science -- they reason backwards from their conclusions. And they tear people's souls out.
If I could go off on a little bit of a tangent... I'll bring it back around to the film in a moment. In my view, materialism -- the whole anti-spiritual movement -- is junk science. Jung called it "fashionable stupidity." It's actually fascinating to me. There have been dozens of scientific studies published in accredited, peer-reviewed scientific journals which demonstrate the statistical likeliness that there's something "spiritual" or "parapsychological" at work in our universe. Decades ago, Sir Fred Hoyle calculated that the odds of there not being an outside intelligence are 1 in 10-to-the-40,000th-power. I'm not a gambling man, but if I were, I wouldn't take those odds! His opponents call that "Hoyle's Fallacy," but that strikes me as an underhanded attack because I'm not convinced there's any fallacy involved from a statistical point of view. Lee Smolin's done similar work in which he's calculated that the chance of the universe randomly developing the way it has is about 1 in 10^229. Which means that, mathematically, it is basically statistically impossible that there's no higher power. Schrödinger, the discoverer of quantum mechanics, figured out almost 100 years ago that the materialist worldview is simply ridiculous from a mathematical perspective! Yet atheists continue to push their one-sided agenda, in the disguise of "science." Randi issued a challenge years ago, saying he'd pay a cash prize to any scientist who could statistically demonstrate the existence of supernatural phenomena in a scientific journal. Well that's happened dozens of times, but he always finds an excuse not to award the prize. And Dawkins, for example, is often touted as an authority because he was Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. But if you dig a little bit you'll find that his position was a pre-condition of an endowment given to the university by Microsoft billionaire and fellow atheist Charles Simonyi! I recommend Davies' The Mind of God, Radin's The Conscious Universe, Robert Wilson's The New Inquisition, Alister E. McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion, or Dr. Francis Collins' The Language of God for more information on this.
It's sad, really -- and this is the ultimate puzzle for me. Why are there people -- otherwise educated people -- who continue to believe in the fairy tale of materialism despite the mountain of statistical evidence to the contrary? I think the average guy just thinks he's being "smart" by being anti-spiritual -- he probably doesn't know the real research, because the secular humanist movement has done a damn good job of suppressing it. But guys like Dawkins, Randi, and Hitchens... These are educated guys. Do they honestly not realize they're wrong? Yet they continue to persist. My theory is that they do it because, if they accepted what modern science has revealed to us, they would have to surrender at least a part of themselves to something greater in the universe, which they are deathly afraid of doing because it means they are not in control.
In YESTERDAY WAS A LIE, the character of Hoyle is going through just that -- refusal to acknowledge the interconnectedness of consciousness, even when she comes face to face with it in the shape of the Singer, because it means she's not in charge -- it means she can't make choices without consequences. It's one of the things that causes her depression.
So in conclusion, I think the stories I tell fill a certain void for audiences left by an increasingly anti-spiritual society -- a certain hunger for material that asks and honors transcendent questions.
MIN: You have been both a successful director and a college instructor. How rewarding is it to be able to pass your experiences on to the next generation of filmmakers?
JK: I've really only taught a little bit. I did some cinematography lab instruction at T.C.U., which is where I went to film school, and I've done a couple lectures elsewhere. Whenever I hear that one of my films or theatre adaptations is being studied in a drama or literature course somewhere, that's always very flattering and I'm glad that people are getting intellectual stimulation from my work. The most important thing, for me, is not just to create "entertainment," but to create pieces which are intelligent and spark discussion, debate, analysis, etc. Those are the films that are truly lasting. Kubrick had a quote (about 2001) which has always resonated with me: "I have tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content, just as music does. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning." For me, making movies like that is the best way to pass on your experiences.
MIN: YESTERDAY WAS A LIE is an interesting combination of detective drama and science fiction. What inspired you to write this type of film?
JK: I went through a couple of rather painful romantic break-ups with which I had a difficult time coming to terms; a difficult time understanding "why." That's the most basic, fundamental premise of this film, but that's really oversimplifying it. YESTERDAY WAS A LIE is very hard to describe because it crosses a lot of genres -- character drama, thriller, detective mystery, film noir, science fiction. And at the same time, it's not really any of those.
It started with an image in my mind. It was of Bacall playing Bogart's role -- a female noir detective, lonely, wandering the streets. I honestly have no idea where it came from -- the Jungian "collective," I suppose! Which is pretty appropriate considering the fact that the various lead characters are all representative of Jungian archetypes. It gives the story a universality -- a weight and a timelessness. The film is set in a nebulous reality where people use cell phones and computers but sometimes dress and talk like they're in the 30s or 40s. It's a world where Hoyle and Dudas are stuck in their pasts, unable to get over their feelings of pain and guilt, so everything surrounding them is a manifestation -- a projection -- of that.
Ever since I was little, I've had a fascination with science fiction. Not cheesy, B-movie science fiction, but the intellectual kind. So I've naturally been drawn to that genre as a director. It's funny, because sci-fi has this bizarre reputation among some "serious" critics as being a red-headed stepchild or something. In reality, it's the most creative genre there is, and the best for storytelling because it posits the hypothetical. The most successful directors are often sci-fi directors, at least for significant portions of their careers. And something like 17 of the top 20 grossing films of all time are sci-fi. So it's not just a genre; it's the genre. Maybe everything else is the red-headed stepchild!
MIN: When someone produces a film like this one hours of research is required to achieve the proper feel and timing. Did you lock yourself away for months watching old movies or do you feel you already had a working knowledge of exactly what you wanted to do in this film?
JK: I actually had relatively scant knowledge of noir, and I was still, late in pre-production, locked away watching old movies! I became a huge noir fan. One thing I realized is that we have an idealized concept of what noir films looked like back in the 40s, but that doesn't always jibe with reality. Recent neo-noir movies like Shadows and Fog, The Man Who Wasn't There, and Sin City are crisp and stylized, but much of that "look" simply wasn't achievable back then with the film stocks. So while my cinematographer (Jason Cochard) and I made the conscious decision to pay homage to noir classics like The Big Combo, Out of the Past, and The Big Sleep, stylistically we went for a look that's a bit more romanticized. Panavision contributed a fully Panavised Sony F900 to the effort -- the camera used in Sin City -- and the footage looks beautiful.
What I find fascinating is how much of the noir look can be achieved with relatively few resources. Much of the visual language of noir came about as a result of D.P.s -- particularly John Alton -- having small budgets and few lights. No matter how limited your resources, you always have the tool of shot composition to paint a truly beautiful picture, if you just take the time and care to do it properly.