Film-maker profiles

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James Cameron
Lee Daniels
Jason Reitman
Kathryn Bigelow
Quentin Tarantino
Tom Ford
Jim Sheridan
Rob Marshall
Peter Jackson
Jane Campion

Few people don’t know that James Cameron is breaking new technological ground in Avatar, but in terms of the film’s subject matter, Cameron says he was trying to incorporate themes dear to his heart.

“I’m very focused on issues of the environment and energy,” he says. “It started with my need to be involved in ocean stewardship and ocean exploration, and using my film-making as a way to work with the science community. What I learned is that we need to appreciate nature and understand it scientifically before we destroy it.

“I felt that, while it’s fine to go and make documentaries, I could also incorporate these themes into a movie and still keep the movie entertaining,” he continues. “I don’t want to make a film that lectures or belittles the audience. I wanted to make a film that would be a great ride, a great adventure that was a strong visual and emotional experience. But I also wanted to give people the opportunity to think about their entertainment.”

So Cameron’s story follows a human colony on a distant planet called Pandora in the year 2154. The humans, driven by dwindling energy sources and environmental catastrophe on Earth, plan to mine the mineral resources of Pandora and will devastate the native populations and forests if they must.

“I think another thing philosophically in the film is the idea of understanding and accepting people who are different from you,” he muses. “What I’m concerned about is us getting along with each other and having that compassion for other people, looking at the world through their eyes. The film begins and ends with the main character’s eyes opening but it has a different significance in both places.”

Similarly the indigenous population of Pandora, the Na’vi, greet each other by saying, in their language, “I see you”. “They don’t literally mean I see you, they mean I see who you are, I see into you, I see things from your perspective,” says Cameron. “That’s a theme that runs through the movie.

“It’s a very simple theme, but one which we could all stand to take to heart. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having themes in a movie that are both constructive and critical. That has always been the role of science fiction.”

Mike Goodridge

“When I read the book [published in 1996], I thought it was just for me,” says Lee Daniels of the novel Push by Sapphire, on which his award-winning film Precious is based.

“I thought it gave hope to so many people. It wasn’t just for people that were abused. I think we all have Precious in us. I think we all feel inadequate, and I think this movie speaks to that.”

Daniels — a producer with credits such as Monster’s Ball and The Woodsman under his belt and director of Helen Mirren-starrer Shadowboxer — had been courting Sapphire for a number of years to buy the film rights to her best-selling novel about a young woman growing up amid shocking abuse, incest and violence.

“She said no, no, no,” he recalls. “She thought a film would diminish the book. But I kept on. I thought to myself that I must be a masochist because who really wants to see a movie about a 400lb black girl going through this kind of abuse? But I knew what I wanted to do. The book is very hard and I go in through fantasy. I try to make you laugh when I can. For me, what makes it work is that we’re laughing when we shouldn’t be laughing. We go from laughing to being horrified and sad in one emotion.”

The book, Daniels explains, is even tougher than the film. “The book is X-rated. I couldn’t tell the book as it is. I had to use fantasy sequences at the toughest moments.”

Daniels says he comes from a very poor background and personally understands the milieu in which Precious grows up. “Her world is my world,” he says. “I was lucky enough to run away from home when I was 17, because if I hadn’t, I would have been a statistic. I was going to end up selling drugs or working in McDonald’s. I would have gone to jail or died. Instead, I went to school.”

But Daniels is far from film-illiterate and cites Federico Fellini, Wong Kar Wai and Pedro Almodovar as influences. “African-American cinema is a very specific type of cinema, and I want to bring a sense of style, too, that’s not just urban but more European. It’s a little Euro and a little homo and a little ghetto.”

Mike Goodridge

Jason Reitman came across Walter Kirn’s novel Up In The Air at the famous Sunset Boulevard shop Book Soup. He had written his first screenplayThank You For Smoking, based on the novel by Christopher Buckley, but could not get it financed and was looking for new material. “I stumbled across Up In The Air and I literally judged the book by its cover, which I know you’re not supposed to do, but I loved the cover art,” he smiles. “There was also a quote from Chris Buckley on the cover, so I thought, ‘If Chris Buckley likes it, I’ll like it.’”

Reitman did indeed respond to the novel about corporate downsizing expert Ryan Bingham, who spends most of his existence on the road. “There was something very interesting to me about this man who fired people for a living, who collected airmiles and had a very unusual life philosophy which was to live alone from hub to hub with an empty life.”

Reitman started writing the screenplay six years ago, before he became one of Hollywood’s hottest film-makers with …Smoking and Juno. “Over the course of those years, two things happened. I changed and the world changed. I got married and now have a baby girl, and I started learning more about the responsibility of life. Then the economy completely changed. I started to realise the firing scenes weren’t funny and couldn’t be handled in a satirical way.”

“So I decided that I needed real voices in there. I wanted to put a face to the numbers of layoffs you would read about in The Wall Street Journal.”

Reitman recruited and filmed 60 real-life laid-off employees, and fired them again on camera. “As a director, I try to get honest performances from actors but these people, who had no acting or camera experience, would sit down and their body language would change. One girl broke into hives and it became astonishingly real. This happened very early on, and it helped set the tone for the kind of movie we ended up making.”

From the start, Reitman imagined the story as a vehicle for George Clooney. “It’s hard to read that character and not think of him. It’s tricky dialogue and a tricky character to pull off, and he has the charm to do it. There are so few men anymore. There is a dearth of great American male actors who are grown-ups, not boys, and he is the greatest of them all.”

Mike Goodridge

For many, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is one of the most tense cinematic experiences of the year, but Bigelow insists she is merely reflecting the real lives of the US bomb-disposal units in Baghdad.

“A day in the life of a bomb ‘tech’ in Baghdad, where bombs are at the epicentre of the conflict, is so inherently dramatic that I didn’t need to give it many cinematic flourishes. It doesn’t need it. Mark [Boal, the screenwriter and producer] and I wanted to keep the piece very reportorial, and let the story unfold, stand aside and not embellish it. The tension is inherent in the profession we are covering.”

At the same time, Bigelow says, she was careful to ensure the audience was well-placed within the geography of each location.

“Bomb disarmament protocols are about 30 metres containment, so the audience needs to know where the bomb tech is in relation to the bomb at all times. That’s why I had four cameras working all the time. I am constantly cutting back and forth from the wide shot, and I think that also contributes to the tension. You know where you are. You are never sure where you are with pounding music and frenetic cuts. It is trying to be very clear and graphic about where you are in relation to the two wires sticking out of the ground.”

That meant a lot of coverage, and Bigelow says she arrived back in the US with more than a million feet of film from her 44-day shoot. “Just to put that in perspective, my editor also cut Spider-Man and they didn’t have that amount of film on that, which shot for 200 days. I wanted to sit down in the cutting room and have the luxury of 10 options.”

For Bigelow, The Hurt Locker offered a chance to report on what she believes is an under-reported conflict. “For me, as a member of the general public, the conflict was very abstract and I was incredibly curious. I thought these characters were extremely provocative. They have the most dangerous jobs in the world, yet they have volunteered to do them. I thought this would make a very interesting film.

“It was an opportunity to humanise these men,” she continues, “and to look at the prospect of survival with a magnifying glass. Because we have a great script and great actors, these men really come alive for the audience and I think you really identify with them. You really come to care about them and believe in their wellbeing.”

Mike Goodridge

When he started writing Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino wanted to come up with a “bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission movie”. “It was a sub-genre of Second World War movies,” he says, “like The Guns Of Navarone. They hadn’t been made in a long time and I thought that would be a cool genre for me. Then when I started writing it, it became something else. The idea just came to me of a bunch of Jewish-American soldiers behind enemy lines doing an Apache resistance against the Nazis.”

“It’s not a straight-up fight,” he continues. “It’s not about being cool. They are hiding in trees and rocks, wiping out the Nazis, getting information from them and then desecrating their bodies so that other Nazis will come across them, see them and start telling their tale. And then they win a psychological war. I thought that was an exciting story that I hadn’t seen that I’d like to see.”

While obviously reference has been made to Enzo Castellari’s 1978 war picture The Inglorious Bastards from which he borrowed the title and The Dirty Dozen, Tarantino says that “no one movie was necessarily influential on this film. I wanted it to have more of a Spaghetti Western feel but using Second World War iconography.”

Basterds would become Tarantino’s biggest production to date, and he says he felt the pressure. “Kill Bill was a more enjoyable movie to make,” he says. “I loved shooting in Germany and a little bit in Paris, but there was a lot of pressure because we were really trying to keep to a clipped schedule. We would finish a big scene in three days, but we were back at it the next day, doing a scene in a week and a half that almost everyone else would do in two weeks. So it was like, ‘Until you’re done, you ain’t fucking done.’ It was a big weight.”

As to the flurry of rumours about the post-production period and supposed battles with The Weinstein Company and Universal, Tarantino reacts furiously. “There were rumours that they were trying to get me to take 20 minutes out of the movie,” he confirms, “but that was all bullshit. One, I am even offended that people think I can be bossed around like that. But the reality was that we tested it with an audience in Los Angeles after Cannes to see what worked and what didn’t work with a neutral audience. I didn’t consider Cannes a neutral audience. So we went back to the editing room after that. It was just the little nipping and pruning that goes on when you actually watch it with an audience.”

Tarantino admits to cutting scenes with Maggie Cheung and Cloris Leachman that did not contribute to the flow of the story, but those were decisions he made himself. “It’s just a normal thing that happens as you shoot some scenes that end up not being in the film,” he says.

 Mike Goodridge

Tom Ford decided in summer 2008 that if he could not get the external financing locked in for his debut feature film A Single Man, he would step in and bankroll it himself. “We had narrowed it down to sufficiently few financiers that I was prepared for it and I was already paying for pre-production. Then the Lehman Brothers collapse happened and two partners fell out, and so I paid for it all myself. All my agents told me not to do it, but a friend told me that if I believed in the film I should do it. I know not everyone has the ability to finance their own film, but honestly I enjoyed the process so much and am so proud of the movie, and that is what is important to me.”

Ford is now close to break-even on the film, which was budgeted at around $7m, with most territories now sold, including the US to The Weinstein Company after a strong reception at Venice and Toronto.

He had long been passionate about Christopher Isherwood’s book and had bought the rights — and an existing screenplay by David Scearce — from Isherwood’s real-life partner Don Bachardy.

The book — “a beautiful piece of prose”, he says — was about the inner world of the lead character, George, and Ford spent many months writing a new screenplay, using bits and pieces from Scearce’s very literal one.

“One night, I was having dinner with Don Bachardy and I told him I was struggling in my efforts to stay true to the book. Don told me to make it my
own, and that gave me the licence to free my mind and explore the story more. A book is a book, but a film is a film.”

So Ford devised a new plot line — that the film would take place on the last day of George’s life and that he was planning to commit suicide. “I also dropped scenes and created new ones,” he said. “Charlie [the character played by Julianne Moore in the film] is kind of unattractive in the book and doesn’t spend much time on her looks. I wrote her for Julianne and made her more stylish.”

Ford, one of today’s most celebrated fashion designers, says his script was loaded with visual detail, and he wrote visual images into the script.

“I remember having dinner with Erin Cressida Wilson [the screenwriter of Secretary and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus],” he says. “I had read the script for Fur and was struck by a line where she wrote that an eyelash lingered on the wash basin. She told me that, when she wrote, she always looked at the visual images. I realised that is how I put together a fashion collection, so I then applied that to the screenplay.”

Mike Goodridge

Jim Sheridan has coaxed some of the best performances from some of the finest actors in the business, so it is no surprise that he elicits career-best work from Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal in his US remake of Susanne Bier’s Brothers.

“I think one of the reasons I work well with actors is that I have been doing this since I was 17,” he muses. “My little brother died when I was 17. He had a tumour which slowed his motor functions and I became very attuned to his micro facial expressions.”

“I’m like that with my actors. I can see when facial expressions aren’t right. Even when someone is doing an accent from a different country, they bring with them facial expressions from their country. I can hear them talking from another room and know that it’s not right. I have to stop them acting.”

Sheridan adds that he loves his actors. “I love everything about them,” he says. “I want to protect them like I wanted to protect my little brother.

“I spend a lot of time talking to them and relentlessly going for deep character,” he says. “I’m always looking for the invisible. I’m never too worried about surface things like what hats the character should wear. Emotions are invisible, and when you’re trying to catch the invisible, the visible gets in the way.”

Brothers is set mainly in one house, with a few other locations and a subplot in Afghanistan, and Sheridan says he loves the intimacy of small spaces. “I used to do theatre, and I was never really good in a theatre with more than 1,000 seats. I remember when I worked with Richard Harris in theatre that I realised he was bigger-than-life and aristocratic. He would control crowds with the grand gesture and costumes. The democratisation of life has led to the close-up and more intimacy.”

As for the Danish original, he is somewhat baffled by how much his film is constantly compared to it. “Every day I do a remake,” he laughs. “I look at the scene and I remake it the next day. I’m always remaking what I have in my head. [Screenwriter] David Benioff moved this story really well into an American milieu, but families are the same everywhere.”

Mike Goodridge

“When you’re working on a film musical, you really have to make it work as a film,” says Rob Marshall, the Oscar-nominated director of Chicago, whose latest movie, Nine, is based on the 1982 Broadway musical hit. “Bob Fosse threw away two of the main characters in his film of Cabaret. Fortunately Maury Yeston gave me carte blanche on Nine. That’s not easy to do when you’ve created something that works on the stage.

“When I met him, he said he wanted me to think of him as dead. He told me to make this film ‘as if I weren’t there’, but that he was there if I wanted him to write new material.”

Nine was a fantasy on stage and featured a cast of one man and several women. “It had no sense of reality at all,” says Marshall. “On film, you can’t do that. You have to change it and make adjustments, so we needed to have reality there, surreality which would encompass Guido Contini’s fantasy life in musical numbers and memory of himself as a child.”

Marshall and his producing partner John DeLuca brought in Michael Tolkin to write the first draft and work out with them which songs they were going to use and where they were going to place them. “Then the writers’ strike happened and after that Anthony Minghella came in and brought the piece to life,” says Marshall. “Minghella was an Italian himself, a film-maker and he taught Fellini. He would really test every scene with us over and over. He was working on it right until he went into hospital.” Minghella sadly died before the film went into production.

Movies of musical stage hits do not always work, explains Marshall, pointing to the 1958 film of Damn Yankees! as one that felt stagebound. “On stage you have to earn a ballad with a couple of up numbers,” he says. “On film you have to earn a ballad double.”

When Marshall finally cast Nine, he essentially had assembled big-name actors new to musicals, from Daniel Day-Lewis as Contini to Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard and pop star Fergie, who was new to acting. “I love working with actors new to musicals,” he says. “It’s a bit like I’m Henry Higgins, but the rewards are great. We had two months of rehearsal and it was crazy. People were singing and learning to dance every day.”

Mike Goodridge

It was always going to be a risk for Peter Jackson to make a film of a novel as beloved as Alice Sebold’s 2003 classic The Lovely Bones.

“There is no such thing as a perfect movie. There is no perfect screenplay and there is certainly no perfect adaptation,” says Jackson, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film with his regular collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. “If you are adapting a novel, the book is the masterwork. The masterwork of The Lovely Bones is Sebold’s novel and it always will be. That’s the perfect way in which that story was told.

“The film,” he continues, “can’t be anything other than our interpretation of that book. We weren’t attempting to make a perfect adaptation of anything. We’re simply saying that the book affected us emotionally, we were really interested in a lot of the themes and the provocative way in which certain questions about life after death were put to the reader. And this is our response to that.”

One of the biggest challenges for Jackson was to create the afterlife for the lead character Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl raped and murdered in the first 20 minutes who then watches from a place she calls “the in-between” as her family tries to come to terms with her loss.

“We didn’t regard that as being a physical place,” says Jackson. “The way we figured it out, and we had to map it out in the script, is that when Susie dies, she has a life force that leaves her body and so in the film we are experiencing her in a dreamlike state of unconsciousness. What she sees and experiences is what her lifeforce is imagining in some form of subsconscious dreamlike state.”

Jackson said that, once he had settled on that interpretation, he felt able to use metaphor in those sequences, and that he, Walsh and Boyens spent timeresearching dream analysis and interpretation.

“We wanted to give ourselves ideas in the script for what we were going to show,” he explains. “So people say that when you dream of a house, it’s not really ahouse but a person, so the house she sees represents [her murderer] Mr Harvey. Similarly lighthouses in dreams represent death and so there is a lighthouse on top of the house. The flower represents Susie’s life.

“You’re not meant to understand all this stuff,” he smiles, “it’s just there to give people an impression, like in the best surreal art. But we needed to understand it to write the script.”

Mike Goodridge

Jane Campion fell in love with Andrew Motion’s biography of John Keats, and knew that to do justice to a cinematic rendering of the ailing Romantic poet’s chaste love affair with the headstrong, rebellious Fanny Brawne she would have to study hard. “I fell to my knees having read Motion’s biography,” Campion explains. “I was in awe of this story and the courage of these young people to go through what they do to face a certain end.”

Campion read and re-read Keats’ letters before embarking on a single draft of the screenplay, “grooming back and forth” as she went, as is her custom. Motion was generous, she says, with the result. “We were excited to be Keats’ lovers together.”

The cast of Bright Star is as impeccable as the crafts that lend the film its sense of immersive splendour. In casting Ben Whishaw as the 19th-century poet, Campion felt she had secured an actor and a man of uncommon qualities. “He has a lyrical masculinity, which the English like and isn’t an idea of masculinity that Americans are comfortable with. Ben’s a being — he breaks out of the mould.”

The central character of Brawne is played by Abbie Cornish, of whom Campion says: “That girl is scarily talented. We were talking about whether Fanny Brawne was a modern woman and we realised she was prepared to defy convention and follow her heart, but that’s not modern really — in fact it’s heroic.”

The writer-director is disarmingly low-key about her role in directing the actors, who include the “witty, bold and original” Paul Schneider as Keats’ combustible friend Charles Armitage Brown. “I’m providing the flat running course for them and I’m hoping they will get the speed up to leap every now and again. I’m never responsible for the great things they do; I’m like the janitor — I keep the stage clean and remind them it’s their stage. What can you do? You cannot be brilliant for them.”