During the Miami International Film Festival, I had an opportunity to sit down with actor/director John Turturro. I was told I had 12 minutes to discuss his new film, Fading Gigolo, with him. Somehow we lost track of time and carried on for double that time, but it was a great conversation, touching on specifics in both his filmmaking and his acting style, directing Woody Allen the actor, his vision to hire Vanessa Paradis, a model/singer/actress better known in France for all her talents and best known in the U.S. as Johnny Depp’s ex. We also touched on his memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who only recently passed, and who we did love so much here at Independent Ethos.
It was a long chat that had to be spread across two articles in the Miami New Times. This first one appeared in print in and was written as a feature story and touched on not only the movie but Allen and that controversy that hung a bit too close over the film’s premiere in Miami. It also features his comments on Hoffman. Read it by jumping through the Miami New Times logo below:
There were many details left out of that piece for the sake of space, which one has to be very conscious of when writing for print. We spoke much more about Allen and how it was working with him, but we also spoke about Paradis’ talents and, on a more important scale, the presence of a film like Fading Gigolo in a major movie production industry more concerned with adapting YA stories and comic books. Where does a film about more complicated adult love fit into such an industry? We get into all that and more in the expanded Q&A I provided for Miami New Times’ art and culture blog Cultist. You can read that part of our chat by jumping through the Cultist logo below:
Finally, there is what is left of our chat, which was no less compelling. Turturro was certainly gracious about his award, which he received at a packed concert hall in Downtown Miami a couple of months ago, at the 2014 Miami International Film Festival (A re-cap of a hectic half-attended, still impressive Miami International Film Festival 31). However, there’s something of a feeling of achieving a peak with such awards, and it can do things to your creativity and career … We start there, talk about color and film, shooting in 35mm (which Turturro has not given up on), and love stories for mature people. Here’s part three of our talk, exclusive to Independent Ethos:
Hans Morgenstern: So what was it like getting your big career achievement Award?
John Turturro: You know, I take those things with a grain of salt. People obviously like what you do. But I wouldn’t like to be doing it, because I’m not announcing my retirement. You know, I got one of those things when I first started out in Sundance. They gave me this Actor Piper-Heidseick Award. I think I was the first person to ever get one, and I was just starting out. It was like 1990 or 1991 or something like that. I remember I didn’t even have a proper suit jacket to wear. I guess because I do a variety of things, oh, look at this, look at that. I’m always appreciative, but I’m more appreciative of being able to do the things I want. That’s what I want to do. People can win an Academy Award, and it may not help them get another job. Things like that have happened many times, and my important thing is being able to do things I like to do. That’s it. That’s what I care about. I can’t sit and stare at the walls and say I got all these awards. It’s nice, but I don’t think about it too much.
They also showed your new movie, Fading Gigolo. One of the things I noticed about the film was the range of colors you used.
Oh, yeah, very carefully selected. We used the Saul Leiter photographs. He was a fashion photographer who did all these great street pictures and reflections in windows. Maybe they were staged, some of them. I’m not sure some of them weren’t, but they were like Kodachrome. There was a certain dye transfer that he did. Then I used the Italian painter, [Giorgio] Morandi, a still life painter, for a lot of the colors of Fiorvante’s apartment. So those were the two visual sources. Everything was selected very carefully, stripes that the Hasidic community used and the stripes that my character had, and even getting Woody in dark pants was a big thing. I told him, no khaki pants. I didn’t tell him, but I gently nudged him, and as you see, he’s got dark pants on, and that’s very unusual for Woody, and he even has a purple, kind of, colored corduroy hat. He’s even got a black jacket at some point, and he never dresses that way.
I even noticed the white of his hair more in this movie.
Well, he hasn’t really been in that many movies for a long time. Anyway, yeah, cause color is emotional, and the way it’s lit, we shot it on film. We didn’t shoot digital. We used 8 millimeter for the credits and it’s 35 millimeter, and [director of photography] Marco Pontecorvo, he’s great with the light. We used a lot of shadow, a lot of chiaroscuro.
Have you always shot in 35mm?
Only Passione I did with the Red [digital camera]. But this we tested, and we thought it was a lot softer on the women, and it’s a film about New York or any city that’s kind of changing and fading a little bit. I thought that would just be—it’s more voluptuous, soft.
Well, fading is a key word to your film.
Yeah, of course.
So what motivated you to do this film about a man far along in his prime, let’s say? Because when you are dealing with Hollywood and this complex idea of love, it’s so much easier to focus on the youth.
Well, youth is part of life, but it’s not all of life, and sometimes you can see a film like Blue Is the Warmest Color, and it’s fantastic. The girl is unbelievable because you’re seeing someone budding. I thought her performance was brilliant, but most of the time you see it, and their reference is very young, and life goes on, and people start life again at 40. They get divorced. They lose someone. They never find the right person, and though, well, here’s a guy who’s in the middle of his life and lives in a room, and I know people like that, who are really comfortable with women, who likes women, but he never really commits, but he’s a guy who is very good, physically. I have friends that can fix their engines, they have a plumbing problem, they have an electrical problem, and it’s very attractive to be around a person like that, cause you’re like, wow. These people express themselves in that way, and they may not be ambitious, and I was thinking about that. So many people want to be famous instead of doing what they do. I think love and needing to be loved, to be touched, to connect, it’s a universal thing. It never ends. You’re livin’ by yourself, and you’re 70 years old, you know, loneliness can kill a person. So I thought that could be an interesting thing to explore. Obviously, you have to be in good enough shape to do it, and I thought when Woody makes the suggestion to me, the guy is resistant. I’m too old. I’m not a gorgeous looking guy, but he’s not insecure that way at all. He’s like, well, I know who I am.
And that helps with the ladies.
Yeah, that’s right. It could help a lot. Especially if you know how to listen and you know how to behave, you know how to pick up what’s going on in the moment.
Your character has a great name: Fiorvante. Where’s that from?
A lot of the names I took— my father was a builder— right out of his phone book. He’s no longer alive and Dan Bongo, I took right out of his phone book. He was a plasterer. Fiorvante, I think [his last name was] Boccio, he was a painter. I just took the names right out of it. Not all of the names, but those names I did. Virgil Howard was a name I took right out of a phone book. So sometimes you’re superstitious. You think, well, maybe if I take something from my parents, it’ll bring you good fortune. It’s a way of communicating with them or something.
Fading Gigolo opens Friday, May 2, in the Miami area at Coral Gables Art Cinema, Regal South Beach Stadium 18, and AMC Aventura 24. On opening night, at the 7 p.m. screening at the Coral Gables Art Cinema there will be a live video-link Q&A with Turturro. For screening dates in other cities, visit the film’s official website.
Film review: ‘A Late Quartet’ offers intimate look at musicians and their relationships
November 12, 2012
A Late Quartet captures the tension between life and music for the members of a quartet who are going on playing together for nearly 25 years to global acclaim. The quartet’s signature piece, Beethoven’s Opus 131 is not incidental. Early in the film cellist Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken) introduces the piece to his class of students with the opening lines of TS Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton.” A highlight being the other-dimensional opening lines Eliot was so great at composing: “Time present and time past are both present in time future.” Peter also emphasizes the complexity of the piece and how it contains not a single pause. Indeed, a lack of pause and consideration for others in life is the fault of the very quartet that plays the piece. They spend more energy trying to continue to play together, despite Peter’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the failing marriage between second violin player Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and viola player Juliette Gelbart (Catherine Keener), who still has feelings for first violin player Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir) than tending to their issues. And that does not cover half the quartet’s problems. A sexy Flamenco dancer (Liraz Charhi) offers Robert more moral support for his ambitions that his own wife. The Gelberts’ daughter, 
Alexandra (Imogen Poots) is following in her parents’ footsteps as a talented violinist, but she is also the embodiment of childhood neglect to her parents’ career. “You think I had fun … taking a back seat to a violin and a viola?” she yells at her mother when tensions truly begin to spill over toward the end of the movie.
At one point, Peter reminds Daniel of their motto, “What happened to, ‘No compromise. Quality above all’?” Well it may have made them the successful musicians they are now, but at what price to their own humanity? The film explores that with a tragic sort of delight, as the musicians’ worlds seem to dissolve around them on the eve of the quartet’s 25th anniversary. This is not a condemnation the artists’ dedication, but emphasizes the complexity of an artistic life, and why no one, no matter where the devotion lie, should ever forget the impact it has around those nearest and dearest to them. The most special artist is the one who can still raise a happy family and succeed in his or her career. Those stories are even fewer than that of this fictional, world-famous quartet. Even Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who married in 1984, and kept their band afloat for nearly 30 years recently divorced. Though David Bowie raised a happy, creative film director as a single father, he quietly retired from music to play a father to his daughter with his second wife of nearly 20 years, Iman. Even to legends like Sonic Youth and Bowie, something must be compromised.
The drama of A Late Quartet is a subtle thing to grasp, and though the acting is superb— as can be expected with a cast led by Walken, Hoffman and Keener— the film takes some time to grab the viewer’s attention. 
The characters’ privileged Manhattan living in the upper echelon of the classical music world might be hard to relate with for some. When things start falling apart and Robert wonders aloud whether Peter’s Parkinson’s will finally give him a chance to play first violin, one wonders if these selfish people deserve pity or spite. Though it takes awhile, pathos does arrive in no small part to the heart the actors have invested in presenting their portraits of these artists on the verge of self-destruction. There’s a beautiful moment of music and personality construction when Peter is once again with his class demonstrating how he once played for Pablo Casals. The tension of his diagnosis weighs heavy in the air as the drama of his anecdote unfolds, and he demonstrates on his cello.
The directing by Yaron Zilberman is rudimentary and works for the service of the drama in the script written by Zilberman and Seth Grossman as well as the relationships among these characters. The details some might nitpick are too small to fuss over. But the film works as a tense character portrait of the complexities and faults of the musician’s personality. 
The actors dive in extraordinarily. When Robert walks out on stage at the start of the film, Hoffman exhibits a graceless waddle as he grips his instrument’s neck, capturing the irony of the musician’s lack of grace in contrast to his enchanting playing, a physical manifestation of his clumsiness in life versus that in his music. Walken is also superb, capturing the tension in his diagnosis and his desire to not just play his cello, but play it with the justice the piece requires.
I acknowledge that I often go into spoilers in my reviews with little warning, but if it helps in the pleasure of enjoying a good movie, I’d rather have some extra insight to offer for the viewer’s pleasure. But, without going into to much detail, I know some might feel let down by the film’s ending, which seems too neat a compromise for these characters.
However, keep in mind that these are musicians. It makes sense that they should seem to make amends on stage. The music transcends their need for earthly reconciliation as illustrated by the actions leading up to the performance. Who knows how much longer it will last after they step off stage, and the film’s end credits have rolled on? But that’s a testament to the detail both the director, writer and actors have infused into this film with, as its pleasure lies in understanding the distinct differences in this human world of interacting through music versus the daily grind of living one’s life.
A Late Quartet is Rated R (language and sex) and runs 105 minutes. It opened this Friday in the Miami are at the following theaters: the AMC Aventura Mall 24 in Aventura, the AMC Sunset Place 24 and Miami’s Tower Theater. It opens in several other venues in West Palm Beach this coming Friday. To see where it is playing or going to play in your part of the states, visit the film’s homepage above and enter your zip code.
‘The Master’ harnesses cinema’s power to maximal effect – a film review
September 21, 2012
Before I get into the aesthetic beauty of the Master, including the film’s music, cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène and—most of all— the acting, allow me to present you with a test. Watch these two teaser trailers the film’s director Paul Thomas Anderson put together to build anticipation for the film. The first one, released earlier this year, featured Joaquin Phoenix:
Then there arrived one featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman:
Now, if those two clips excited you about what you will see acting-wise when these two extremely different characters meet in the film, you should love the Master. If you expect anything else, you may be just a tad disappointed.
Though the chatter of buzz surrounding this film has been around Anderson’s take on the birth of Scientology, his preoccupation seems more focused on the two men at the film’s heart. Beyond their dynamic, the cult created by Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd only serves to magnify the intense relationship of these two men. Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is sucked into the world of “The Cause” only by the interest Lancaster shows in Freddie. Freddie, a rapscallion before he meets Lancaster, easily falls in line with calling him Master, as the followers of the Cause do. Anderson stays so in tuned with Freddie and the Master that the film becomes more about the cult of personality than the cult of any pseudo religion.
The film first sets up the rootless Freddie as a sailor in the Pacific during World War II who seems to have missed most of the fighting. 
He and his mates kill time jerking off on the shoreline and making sand sculptures of female figures in the wet sand. As a radio transmission announces VJ Day and the end of combat, Freddie crawls around artillery shells in his ship’s armory, making a drink from whatever chemicals he can find: an alcoholic beyond alcohol.
After the war, he receives a psychological exam via a Rorschach test where all he sees is “pussy” and “cock.” After his discharge, he floats from one job to another. They both end in violent confrontations. Freddie is one lost, primal soul. Phoenix plays him brilliantly, speaking out of only the left side of his mouth. Even his left eye stays wider open than his right. He laughs whenever someone asks him to share what he thinks or feels. He walks hunched over and stands crooked with one arm twisted backward, the heel of his hand resting on his hip. He looks like a 70-year-old man with osteoporosis.
After being chased off a farm at his last job, Freddie stows on to a cruise ship departing a harbor. He springs over the railing just as the vessel pulls away with a zest unseen until that moment. Again at sea, Freddie seems to have rediscovered his verve. This is where he meets the Master.
There Will Be Blood (2007), Anderson’s previous film, featured no dialogue for the first half-hour. In the Master, a similar thing occurs, as Freddie never seems to connect with anyone in a true give and take conversation until he meets Lancaster. During their first conversation, it is revealed they had met on board sometime off-screen on the night the ship had set sail. However, Freddie seems to have been too drunk to remember. “I don’t have any problems,” Freddie says and squeezes out a laugh/sigh. “I don’t know what I told you.”
“You’re aberrated,” the Master tells him, and Freddie laughs again with his crooked uncomfortable smile. 
This marks the first dynamic conversation on-screen— a true exchange— and the start of bonding between these two men. These two may have not only met earlier but may have met in another life. It will soon turn out past lives are a part of Dodd’s doctrine.
But Lancaster is not the only one with power here. Just as the Master has created his own culture, history and rules of living, Freddie too is an inventor. He has brewed up a drink of household chemicals that can possibly kill. “You have to know how to drink it,” he tells the Master. Lancaster is charmed and fascinated by this concoction. The only reason he seems to allow Freddie aboard the chartered cruise ship wedding of his daughter seems to be for the stowaway’s ability to concoct this cocktail. But Freddie also offers honesty unparalleled by any of the followers of the Master’s Cause. While everyone else, including Lancaster’s wife (Amy Adams playing cold and distant), 
seem like sycophants who follow the Master in order to be like him, Freddie offers something better. He is Lancaster’s best friend, and I mean best friend with the devotion of a dog. Freddie enjoys the teachings for what they are: games to play for the Master’s love.
One of the more intense moments of the film occurs early in Freddie and Lancaster’s relationship, on board the ship, when Lancaster offers Freddie “processing” (a reference to Scientology). This indoctrination involves a ritual in the form on an interview that is recorded. The Master asks Freddie a series of yes or no questions about his personality. When the Master asks Freddie whether he is unpredictable, Freddie responds with a fart. “Silly animal,” the Master tells him.
When Lancaster declares Freddie has finished his first round of processing, Freddie asks for more like an eager child. The Master agrees, but only if Freddie promises not to blink during the next series of questions. If he does blink, he will have to start over from the first question. During this second level of processing, the questions and answers prove stomach-churning, probing even deeper into Freddie’s personal life (“Have you ever had sex with a member of your family?”). 
Not only does Freddie not blink, but he sheds tears from holding his eyes open. For what some will consider trauma, to Freddie it’s about complying to the rules of a game. The fact that he “cries” as part of the game and not the trauma, heightens the character. It’s a powerful moment for Phoenix. I have only seen that done once before: in one of Andy Warhol’s screen tests when Ann Buchanan, a Bohemian follower of the art scene that thrived among the Beat generation, resists blinking for the entire 4-and-a-half-minutes of the reel of 16mm film that comprised these series of “screen tests.” It offers an interesting dichotomy with response to a true-life figure with the cult of personality.
Freddie’s primal mannerisms are further highlighted later in the film when he sits in the corner of a home where Lancaster has paid a visit in order to share his teachings. As the room erupts in song, Freddie sits there like a resting beast… staring. If one thinks Freddie has seriously bought into the Master’s preaching, watch as all the women suddenly appear naked as the singing and dancing continues. They do not react to their own nudity, as this clearly represents what Freddie is “seeing.”
When police take Lancaster away from the home in handcuffs on a warrant for malpractice, the Master yells about the preposterous idea that police of this city would dare think they have jurisdiction over his body (his belief is that his soul has lived trillions of years, after all). Freddie lashes out to defend the Master, and the police need four to five men to hold him down and cuff him. Meanwhile, the Master yells, “Freddie, stop!”
The paradox of these two men is further on display when they are thrown into two neighboring jail cells. Freddie continues his rampage at the cell’s furnishings while the Master leans against one cot with one arm. “Your fear of capture and imprisonment is an implant from millions of years ago,” he yells at Freddie, “implanted with a push-pull mechanism.”
There is no belief system going on with a devout follower. This is a scary representation of programmed fundamentalism, one of the scariest aspects of our society. There are Christian movements whose members will murder abortion doctors to save theoretical lives, as there are Muslims who blow themselves up for their own cause. But these are news stories, things on paper or things that pass in 20-second soundbites. What more powerful way to shake up the film-going, escapism-searching audience than through two intense character sketches on the big screen?
The director achieves this masterfully, if you will pardon the pun. Not only is The Master about a love affair between these two but a third man: the director himself. Everything he does in the film serves to magnify these two great actors’ performances. He did the same for Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, Tom Cruise in Magnolia (1999), Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love (2002) and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. All of those films and performances served to enhance their careers as actors.
The dialogue in the Master (Anderson also wrote the original script) is never more efficient than in that “processing” session described earlier. Phoenix does much when he spits out one-word answers to the Master’s terse, biting questions. The film may sound long at two hours and 15 minutes, but I can appreciate a film that earns a long runtime, and the Master does this, even if it is only about the dynamic of two men in a relationship. The film has a hypnotic quality. The camera is allowed to linger in order to activate the viewer’s own imagination and knowledge of history of the times, as the film is filled with subtle postwar trauma. 
Anderson does wonders not only in these moments that linger, recalling Kubrick and Malick, but he does something miraculous and rare with placement of a camera and the scenery it captures. He catches almost tactile moments of the time. The viewer will notice transporting details when the camera pans over part of a car, allowing a moment for the viewer to notice the gap between the door and the quarter panel, the dust on the paint, the sheen on the glass, the design of the side-view mirror. Early in the film, as sailors back from the war climb a circular staircase, the grime in the corner of the stairwell and the echo of footsteps says more about the era than the uniforms alone. It’s a refined moment of attention to detail unparalleled in any earlier film by Anderson. He has attained another level of mastery of mise-en-scène.
Clearly tempting the director and his cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., in some indulgence in imagery is the fact they shot on 65mm film stock. This makes the film perfect for the big screen, especially if you can find a theater screening the movie in 70mm. However, as an intimate drama, it sounds counter-intuitive to have bothered with such film for such a presentation. It is not. These are some large personalities that inform the film, and what better testament to such grandiose figures than large format film. Their occasional juxtaposition to the open sea and vast desert landscapes translate to not only breathtaking imagery but as a metaphor for these people who indeed believe they have souls older than the earth.
Another grand element of the film is its score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who also worked with Anderson on There Will Be Blood. The clunk in the music’s soundtrack that introduces Freddie and his fellow seaman is the same sound of Freddie squeezing the lost drops of his drink from a flask later in the film. From the creepy clarinet that provides the score to Freddie’s “mixology” in the photo lab at the store where he is first seen working to the sweeping strings that augment the open sea, Anderson does not waste a single note of the score. Meanwhile, Greenwood seems to channel Ligeti in the mix of beauty and cacophony of the ever-shifting music.
The director also uses popular music of the era with enthralling results. Just as Anderson used Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” to ominous effect in Boogie Nights (1997), he re-contextualizes Ella Fitzgerald singing “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” early in the Master. Though it does not feel nearly as stressful as the botched drug deal in Boogie Nights, the song is just as effectively utilized, as the placement of the lyrics and images are not left to haphazard atmospherics. Anderson’s framing flows as musically as Fitzgerald’s patient, silky voice. Edits are placed at the right moments as the camera glides along, always watching Freddie, as he flirts with a female co-worker.
But the real love affair is that between Freddie and the Master, and it is an epic thing to watch unfold. Like any fiery love affair, it does burn itself out by film’s end. When it does, Anderson presents a pair of enlightening moments that seem to reveal an unseen depth to Freddie, best served for the audience to discover. The Master will beguile those starved for a powerful character drama, and, once again, Anderson does not let down, as he continues to grow into one of the handful of great original directors who can maintain a vision and pull it off within the high-profile world of the Hollywood system.
One more trailer:
The Master is Rated R and runs 137 min. It opens in wide release today. If you want to know where to catch the Master in 70mm, jump over to this great Paul Thomas Anderson fan site. Annapurna Pictures hosted a preview screening for the purpose of this review.
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