ASHITA in Japan

Well I am back from my month in Japan. While there I had the pleasant news that a Kitakyushu theatrical company known as BeniShoga will mount my play FALLEN LEAVES in August 2009. More on that in the coming weeks.

One of my intentions during my trip to the land of the rising sun was to show the 30 minute preview DVD to as many people as possible. As you loyal readers know, I was a little apprehensive about what impressions the homeland Japanese would get from this Canada-jin making a movie in their language. The few that saw it received it well. Someone even commented that it was better than Kill Bill. The common reaction Ashita gave was that the characters said many "un-Japanese" things--which is very true. As the film is not intended to be about Japanese people, it is about people in general. It was shot in Toronto and at the outside most, some of the characters are Japanese living in a foreign land. Living in a city like Torono would certainly affect anybody's personality... I am rather pleased with the response Ashita garnished and it has renewed an excitement in me for the film to complete in 2009.

My second week there, the family got sick so we were unable to travel to Tokyo to see our friends there. I was looking forward to meeting Don Matsuo, singer for the rock band The Zoobombs, as it had been about a year since I had seen my friend and his family when they came on tour in Canada. I know that Don had been excited about seeing his music being used in Ashita. As well, my lovely wife Izumi was in Tokyo earlier on and stayed with Sayaka, the singer of Super Girl' Juice, Izumi was even lucky enough to catch them live--unfortunately it was all before I arrived. I wanted to show Sayaka the footage as well, as we shot part of the film while she was visiting Toronto. Oh well, my friends in Tokyo will just have to wait for the premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

I did get a chance to see Maki, our hair stylist. She was nice enough to come to Kyushu to see us. We met in Kokura and I was able to show her the 30 minutes on a portable DVD player siting outside of Kokura Castle (so far that is my favorite place to screen a movie, sitting outside an ancient Samurai castle built in 1602 while drinking a couple of Asahi beers).

I got the chance as well, to visit the Akira Kurosawa Museum, which inspired me--I will write an entry on that at a later point.

I have much stress about this little experiment known as Ashita. It may all just work out.

The Auteur and The Filmmaker

Wong Kar-Wai is a true auteur. He makes his movies, completely on his terms. His films are deeply poetic and visually stunning. Larry Gross of Sight & Sound magazine says: "The first time you see Wong Kar-Wai’s movies, you feel you are watching the work of a delicious visual mannerist indifferent to narrative structure....The sheer hedonistic absorption in architectural surfaces, in light sources, in decor of every possible fabric and material, and the absence of overtly literary seriousness in the plots, make you feel trapped in the world of a super-talented hack. Then you go back and take another look, and the movies change, more drastically than any I know of. They seem richer, more intricately organized, more serious...”

Much like Leonard Cohen’s work I first experience Wong Kar-Wai in my mid-teens when I first decided to go into filmmaking. In my time at CUTV, working on my first ever production, a puppet show known as Paradites, I had met a man by the name of King, he was of Hong Kong origin, he was quite knowledge about cinema and he is the one who first introduced me to Hong Kong cinema. This was in the early and mid-1990s before the names John Woo, Jackie Chan and Jet Li were household names in the white people world. I was ravaged through all the HK films he lent me, often watching three or four films in a row. I went to film school with movies like John Woo’s The Killer and Hard Boiled burnt into my brain, highly stylized yet melodramatic at the same time. Nothing in American “action” movies had come close to these masterworks. Around that same time, the Fantasia Film Festival was launched in Montreal. The festival would feature predominantly Asian action films and Japanese anime. Finally I could prove to my chums in film school that I was not crazy, that these films belong on their own plateau. I attended many films that first festival year with King. One day he brought me a VHS copy of Chungking Express. I was expecting another action movie, however what I got was a super stylized melodrama. It blew my mind. It was incredible. It was like nothing else I’d ever seen. I re-watched the movie two more times in a row. To me, it was an almost perfect poem on screen. The camera work and aesthetics of the film were the true work of a master, I had no seen color used like that since Hitchcock or Kubrick. The truth is, in film school you learn (at least when I was there) that a good film never lets the audience be aware of the
camera, which is a theory that is thrown out the window with a lot of work from Hong Kong. John Woo stylized action cinema, Wong Kar-Wai re-stylized cinema. Wong Kar-Wai humbly describes his style: “People are always very curious about the visual effects in my works. The not so romantic truth is that lots of those effects are in reality the results of circumstantial consideration: if there is not enough space for camera maneuvering, replace the regular lens with a wide-angle lens; when candid camera shooting in the streets does not allow lighting, adjust the speed of the camera according to the amount of light available; if the continuity of different shots does not link up right for a sequence, try jump cuts; to solve the problem of color incontinuity, cover it up by developing the film in B/W… Tricks like that go on forever.” Even his use of voiceover, which had been portrayed as the anchor of a weak story, is used in such a way that it adds to the grace and beauty of his films. They lend to the story as well as the music. His work is stylized, but not empty.

The way Wong Kar-Wai tackles romance and love on screen is much like Cohen tackles it in his work. In Wong’s work, the possibility of love is as beautiful as it is problematic. Its almost like his characters want to be in love, they just happen to fall in love at an inconvenient time. He explores themes that state that people, even though in very close physical proximity, can be so far apart. His ability to isolate his characters and present them as social outsiders. His imagery of large urban centers as alienating, lonely places are really what attract me to his work. Ashita is a film about people in city. Lonely, depressed, desperate people. Can I paint the picture like Wong the auteur. Probably not. But I can hope to.

Thank you Mr. Wong.

The Poet and The Filmmaker

Every artist has an influence or a number of influences. I’ve always felt that I have a poetic spirit—maybe its my romantic Italian roots, but with experience I see my art going in the direction of the understanding of the soul and the meaning of humanity. So its no surprise that two artists I greatly admire are Leonard Cohen and Wong Kar-Wai.

I will write two entries one dedicated to the world’s best known poet, Leonard Cohen and one dedicated to cinema’s best know poet Wong Kar-Wai.

Maybe I feel a special connection to Leonard Cohen because he is a fellow Montreal native. Maybe its because, deep down, his words, both in songs and on paper, bring such vivid imagery to mind. I first discovered Leonard Cohen in my mid-teens just as he was releasing his album The Future. I has known of Cohen, but never experienced his work first hand until I bought the album. I was blown away by every aspect of The Future. When I entered college, there was a plaque commemorating Cohen. I had a number of professors who had known Cohen—at the time they had lost touch with him because he had gone into seclusion to become a Zen Buddhist monk.

Cohen’s work is marked by themes of love, sex, religion, psychological depression. Most music, of course, is about these things. But the way Cohen writes and presents them is much deeper and more complex. He is a story teller as much as a poet. He, like all writers, writes about what he knows and what he has experienced. He knows heartbreak, from his many relationships and affairs—including one with Janice Joplin. He knows about depression—true psychological and unsentimental depression. He suffers from chronic depression, though less so in his old age. His early work is marred with references to suicide and loneliness—his later work is less depressed, however has many references to social justice to the chaos that fills life of most American and North American cities.

I can relate to a lot of his references, almost six years ago while in post production of my second film Truant Café I suffered through a depression. While recovering, I was commissioned to produce a TV pilot for LIFE Network. While making the pilot, I almost slipped back into my depression because I was under an enormous amount of pressure and severely tight deadline. Humanity was slipping away and I did not like the person I had become. Worst of all, I was no longer having fun with my productions—I think the fun stopped when I was working on Truant Café, I was obsessed with success. Like Leonard Cohen said: “Life got a whole lot easier when I no longer expected to win.” His comment, full of joy and lamentation, which can only come from him, can best describe where I am now in my life. I want to explore the human soul. I want to explore the things that made me depressed and the things that remove joy from people’s lives. I want to explore the dark places people hide their worst thoughts. Why do people hurt each other when they know what pain does? Why do people lie when they know it is futile? Are humans foolish or innocent? Why are we frightened to admit we’re lost? My hope, is that Ashita explores some these questions and provides its own unique perspective on them.

Thank you Mr. Cohen.

The Big CITY

My movie Ashita is about loneliness, its also about life in the city. Living in a big city breaks you more often than it makes you. I’ve been living in Canada’s biggest city for just over 6 years and it gets shockingly more disturbing every day. I can’t read the paper or look at the news without seeing a random act of insanity—I know what you’re thinking, bad news sells. This may be true on some morbid level, however there’s bad news and then there’s sheer madness. I can accept that in any given city there is crime and violence. But what shocks me is the volume of random violence, teenagers killing the school mates for fun or a man who beats a stranger he’s never met to death with a brick. Teenaged parents leaving their unwanted newborn baby in shopping mall parking lot in the dead of winter. These are signs of an ill city. Signs of, maybe, what the city does to people. Maybe deep down, I am fed up with the city, fed up with the constant feeling of depravity and frustration. Maybe I want out.

The way I create a project is through observation. And in a city like Toronto, there is a lot of observation to be done. I look at people and try to guess what’s in their mind and in their life and from there, the story grows. Sometimes I get depressed doing this, so many sad faces in the crowd, so many complex souls. The question that still drives my creative juices is: Why? Why, with all the opportunities, with all the advantages, with all the culture, with all the options available in big cities do people remain frustrated, stoic and frightened? Do the lies, corruption and general nihilistic sense outweigh the good of the city. Maybe it’s the uncertainty of the city that bites at people. Maybe it’s the sheer size of the unknown in the city’s façade that causes undue rest.

I’ve never pictured myself living anywhere but a big city, stating that the quiet of rural suburbia frightened me. That’s beginning to change, maybe its age, maybe it’s the fact that I am now a father or maybe its both. I often toy with the idea of living somewhere quiet and exploring my secret passion—cooking. I doubt I will ever stop creating, maybe I will make more films, maybe I will write a novel or write poetry. All I know is that not only did I make a movie about what the big can do to people, maybe I am beginning to understand living in a big city. Maybe understanding the city means its time to leave the city.

The Good, The Bad, The Leone

When you think about influential filmmakers names like Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Fellini, Welles, Kubrick and Ford, pop up. But rarely is the name Leone ever included with these greats. Maybe because he made only 6 movies or the fact that his movies were categorized as Action Westerns (with the exception of his final film Once Upon a Time in America). The truth is, Leone has had a major influence on cinema and many great directors including: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorcsese, Quentin Tarantino, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah and even Stanley Kubrick (for Barry Lyndon).

Leone remains one of my personal favorites, the Man With No Name trilogy (especially The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) and Once Upon in the West stand out as two of my favorite movies of all time. When Leone’s work first came out, much like many great filmmakers, his work was misunderstood and misrepresented. Thanks to a lot of young filmmakers who took an interest in his visual style and character representations he slowly grew to legendary status. Leone pioneered a lot of things in cinema like his use of extreme close-ups, ultra fast zooms (known as the Italian Zoom), the “Mexican Standoff” (this is where three men point a gun at each other) as well as his use of Ennio Morricone’s score (Composer Ennio Morricone once said that Leone asked him to compose a film's music before the start of principal photography, which of course, is contrary to normal practice. He would then play the music to the actors during takes to enhance their performance).

During his childhood, growing up in Mussolini’s Rome, Leone was obsessed with American popular culture and American movie stars. He describes his first encounter with an American (a soldier during WWII): “In my childhood, America was like a religion…Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life – in jeeps – and upset all my dreams…I found them very energetic, but also very deceptive. They were no longer the Americans of the West. They were soldiers like any others…materialists, possessive, keen on pleasures and earthly goods.” This may explain the unique aspects of his films. His movies are rich in historical detail, however, his vision of the less than pure hero was uncommon in Hollywood and America. His cowboys, who urinated in public, spat, raped and seemed as interested in other’s opinions as they were interested in their own personal hygiene. Until Sergio Leone came around, Hollywood Westerns had always invoked a dream of freedom and adventure always with a happy ending. In Leone’s view, the West was a violent and mythical landscape where a man could determine his place in the world with the skills he had in operating his gun or ticking his enemy. What is most interesting about Leone’s Westerns is that they carry certain essential truths about the American foundation in a way that no American film can. Author Christopher Frayling best describes it: “Leone's films contain no universal moral messages (as many Hollywood Westerns have claimed to), and his heroes are not intended to set an example for today.” Instead Leone showed us ugly and violent acts with a wonderful, unglamorous simplicity.

I love his work. I’ve always been influenced by his style of cinematography and his ability to move a story forward with no use of words. While making my film Ashita, I watched his Man with No Name trilogy to try and harness some of his energy in my work. In one of the early opening scenes of the film, I use an Italian Zoom as a homage to his work, and I use an abundance of Extreme Close Ups as well. And like Leone, I hope to explore society and humanity from the perspective of an outsider looking in.

Politics and Art

A couple of days ago I was over at Andy’s place for a meeting with our new post production team on TV was the Democratic National Convention. Of course there aren’t many people who don’t know Barack Obama, and there are a lot of people who would like to see him become the next President of the Unites States.
The next day, we Canadians were informed that we would be voting for our country’s leader this coming autumn as well. Unfortunately, we don’t have any interesting or electrifying candidate like Obama running in our election. Oh-oh he’s talking politics, quick let’s leave the blog. Wait, don’t go! Seriously, I’m leading into something on film.
I was never into politics, I never really understood it and it never really affected me. And to be honest, I voted only once in my life. I always thought that no matter what joker was in power my life would ultimately remain the same as the quality of life went down and the cost of living went up. Recently though, (here’s the stuff on film—see I didn’t lie) our wonderful politicians in Ottawa began introducing wild ideas like Bill C-10 which made me start paying attention to who runs my country. The Bill is best described in the words of CBC as “an omnibus bill amending the Income Tax Act and contains a series of amendments affecting a variety of different industries, funds and individuals… The issue that concerns Canada’s film and television community is Section 120, which would allow the Heritage Minister (currently Josée Verner) to withdraw tax credits from productions determined to be ‘contrary to public policy.’” If you’re thinking that this sounds like censorship, well you’re thinking like a lot of film and TV people in Canada. Basically, the Heritage Minister would create a set of guidelines (the guidelines are yet to be established—because its always better to pass a Bill while it still hasn’t been fully thought out) to be monitored by committees within the heritage and justice departments. These guidelines would surely cover such things as violence, hatred, drug usage, racism and sexual content. So I guess we can’t make any after school specials in Canada. Of course the minister said: “Bill C-10 has nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with the integrity of the tax system. The goal is to ensure public trust in how tax dollars are spent.”
My opinion is a simple, either tax dollars go to art or they don’t. You can’t pick and choose what gets it and not, artists have a hard enough with that from the private sector with corporate sponsors who don’t want to damage their image by be associated with a specific type of artistic message. If the government does that any unique voices in the Canadian film industry will be destroyed. Besides, a truly insane person (and there are one or two of those in this country) will take offense to almost anything—in fact a quick Google search will give you interesting results who find such Canadian milestone children’s shows like Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant as offensive and not suitable for children. So, with this wonderful melting pot that is my country how can a government committee decide what goes against the entire public’s interest? An Afghani news show on cable that depends on grants to survive may be found offensive by a little old conservative racist white lady out west or an internationally acclaimed movie like C.R.A.Z.Y. from Quebec, which deals with drug use and homosexuality, may be offensive to a housewife somewhere in the Maritimes. But you know what? Canada is all of this. Like it our not, Canada is Muslim as it Jewish, Christian and everything else. Canada is gay as it is straight. The idea that the government can decide what kind art and ergo what type of thinking our tax dollars finance is false. No other country has such silly ideas where the government tells its people what is best for them… oh wait, China does that… as do Cuba and North Korea.

Maybe I will pay quite a lot of attention to this next election.

Its a Mad Mad World

Recently I discovered Mad Men, I bought the box set thanks to a gift card I received from my friend Kirsty—and I literally bought it blind. I had no idea what the show was about, or I fit was any good. I was impressed, very impressed. It is an incredible show with all the subtleties of the era in which is takes place. Watching Mad Men is a lot like watching an old movie from the 1960s the pacing, the cinematography all reminiscent of the era. The thing about Mad Men, they don’t hold anything back from the shovenist era. Much like one of my favorite films, Chinatown (1974 directed by Roman Polanski starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway) everybody in the show smokes and drinks. Men smack women, women use men and everybody has a dirty little secret. Funny, that sounds a lot like Ashita. Mad Men is yet another affirmation that I am not insane (and me looking forward to the padded cells and the three square meals a day of the funny farm). I was a little weary when making Ashita, I had been getting a lot of comments about the level of alcohol and tobacco consumption seen in the film. Literally, every character smokes and drinks in the film. Andy, the editor, and I were joking about how we will go down as the worst influence on young minds in cinema history (cool). Of course, most of my characters are women with a contemporary setting, so I can’t hide behind the “it was the 60s that what everyone did” banner. Instead I will hide behind the “they’re Japanese that’s what they do” banner.
When I was in Japan a few years ago, everywhere I went 80% of people smoked and more than that drank actively. Simply put, it’s a way of life for the Japanese. Maybe they’re not as “health enlightened” as us North Americans or maybe they just don’t care. So when making a movie about Japanese I needed to incorporate their character traits. And besides most people who are troubled or lonely tend to smoke and drink anyway. Don’t get me wrong I smoke cigars on occasion and I am a social drinker (long live the Irish Car Bomb) but I, honestly, take offence when someone comments that my film will promote smoking and drinking. If the message a view gets when the see someone smoke or drink on the screen is that smoking and drinking is cool, well then they’re in the wrong part of the ball park (unless you’re watching things like Pineapple Express or Cheech and Chong, which are movies about casual self medication). My hope is that when you see Ashita and see my characters, their cigarettes and booze will fit in naturally with their characters. These are lonely, sad and depressed characters it is natural for them to seek some kind of dependence (oddly enough the one who doesn’t smoke has become dependant on adultery).
My point is simple, as a filmmaker I would never glorify anything or put anything in my film simply because it looks cool, that is for the young and foolish. It is progresses the story, enhances the character or makes a statement about the character then it should be used. Much like violence, I would never put in a violent scene just to put one in. For example in one of Ashita’s stories “The Gift” the Toshio character violently smacks his wife. I’ve seen the edited scene a number of times now and Andy and I have the same view, the smack needs to be brutal and, believe me, it is. The reason it has to be brutal is because it needs to show people the sheer destructive nature of domestic violence. There is nothing pretty about that scene, nor is there anything pretty about a man who hits his wife. Like Roman Polanski once said: “You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.”
It’s the same with smoking, drinking or sex. These are all things that may intrude on people’s sensitivities, but if they say something in art, then the artist should not be afraid to hide them. Filmmaking is art. Art is interpretive. No matter what it is, art always risks offending and always risks being disliked. That’s the nature of the beast.