In this year of soggy weather patterns, it’s no wonder that the Grey Lady 30 miles out to sea, a.k.a. Nantucket, lived up to her sobriquet during the four days in June at the Nantucket Film Festival. The usual sun and blue skies didn’t materialize, save for one day, and festival-goers spent a lot of time in slickers and under umbrellas slogging from venue to venue. Still, films and filmmaking were the orders of the days, and NFF8 continued its reputation of revering the screenwriter and the craft of screenwriting.
It was not without irony that the festival was book-ended with entries from beyond US shores. Russian writer/director Alexander Rogozhkin’s CUCKOO garnered special billing as the Opening Night Film while Danny Boyle’s 28 DAYS LATER claimed a jump on national distribution as the Closing Night Film. Each cast different viewpoints, CUCKOO looking backwards to the final days of World War Two in Finland and 28 DAYS LATER to a future time during an Armageddon showdown with a raging virus in London. The Russian film had no live representation; screenwriter Alex Garland, meanwhile, spoke before the screening and at a “Morning Coffee With…” chat session.
Rogozhkin cleverly entwines the lives of two enemy soldiers and a country widow in his tale of clashing cultures, language barriers, and miscommunication, set in the primal Finnish landscapes. He includes a romantic triangle, adding another layer of meaning about the sexes, and ends on an ironic upbeat in the final scene.
Introducing his film, 28 DAYS LATER, screenwriter Alex Garland told the packed-house Dreamland audience that the film is a “sub-genre of science fiction.” He characterized it in part as “a rip-off of the DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS” and said he drew inspiration from George Romero’s NIGHT, DAWN, and DAY OF THE LIVING DEAD. “What the film is, is a paranoid genre film about viruses, rage, and violence.” Looking restive, he deferred to the film and exited the theater for follow-up questions outside.
Part of the fun at film festivals, and something which boosts the learning curve about filmmaking, is the interaction with the creative artists. The “Morning Coffee With…” provides a forum to hear inside scoops about films and the filmmaking process. Founded by Jonathan Burkhart and developed by Jace Alexander, the discussions played to standing-room-only audiences at Cap’n Tobey’s on Straight Wharf. After a two-year absence, Alexander returned not only as host but as director of his first theatrical release, CARRY ME HOME, though he humbly referenced it only once in three sessions.
In Friday’s coffee session, farmer/filmmaker John O’Brien (NOSEY PARKER) labeled his film an “anthropolgist comedy,” describing his rural tale of clashing cultures at his home turf in Tunbridge, Vermont. Fellow panelist Eliot Greenebaum (ASSISTED LIVING) decried filmmaking’s uncertainties. “I don’t think filmmakers have any control over what happens in their film. It’s a long and fluid process. It’s kind of arrogant of them to hold on to their visions.” Meanwhile, Scott Saunders (THE TECHNICAL WRITER) places faith in the process. “Let the process guide you,” he said. “Ride the process out in a small film. Take advantage of the good things that happen. Stay out of traps.” And he added later, “Cast people you know.”
Riding the wave of renewed interest in documentary film, NFF8 offered an informative panel, “To Tell the Truth: The Art of Storytelling in Documentary Film” on Friday at noon. Liz Garbus, co-founder of Moxie Firecracker Films of New York City, whose entry GIRLHOOD tied for the Audience Award for Best Feature-Length Film with THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, said of her genre, “Documentary filmmakers are all shaping their own stories. You hone reality to make a story.” She added “I don’t stay objective to some degree, and I do get involved to a degree. I’m asked to get involved in situations.” She followed two troubled adolescents for three years to film their struggle as they cope with their crimes and their untoward pasts.
Cambridge-based Robb Moss (THE SAME RIVER TWICE see IMAGINE cover story February 2003) said, “It’s a complicated business when you show real lives on the screen.” His film, which was shown at the Dudley House Forum at Harvard in the spring and at Sundance, is a follow-up to his 1978 documentary RIVERDOGS, which followed latter-day ‘60s-style free-spirits on a white-water river adventure. Moss gathered his ensemble 25 years later and combined earlier footage with new to shape a fresh look of how we grow up and out of our pasts. Moss showed the film to all participants “not for approval, but just to show them.”
Showtime hosted the Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting ceremony on Thursday at the Wauwanet Inn. The competition received over 300 scripts. Chase Palmer won the top seat for BURIED ABOVE GROUND, a heroless film noir set in the 1950s. Palmer extensively researched the subject but knocked out a first draft in five months. What’s even “curiouser,” as the stymied Cheshire Cat would say, are the runners-up, both written by the same writer, Fred Catalfo, of Dover, New Hampshire. Since the scripts are read anonymously, authorship is unknown until the winners are chosen. Catalfo’s AMERICAN FUGITIVE (co-written with Louis Morneau) and MALL COP won second and third place respectively. Catalfo, a trial attorney by profession, is also a short film director, member of the Screen Actors Guild, and singer-songwriter. AMERICAN FUGITIVE, “a lighter PULP FICTION” says Catalfo, is a thriller involving a down-and-out actor whose mistaken idenity for a real fugitive on a hit TV show and unlucky missteps sends him packing from La-La-Land only to be pursued by assorted crazies, including his avenging wife who’s after his SAG card. Meanwhile, MALL COP tests the fate of Art Stover, a mall security guard, who gets wrapped up in a foiled jewelry store robbery/ hostage-taking that combines “a little Dirty Harry and a lot of Barney Fife” in its hero, according to Catalfo. As he sums up the script, “this time they’ve messed with the wrong quasi-law enforcement professional.”
Of course the centerpiece of the festival is the screenwriter’s tribute at the Sconset Casino hosted by NBC, which honored Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In one sense, it was expanded to include James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, part of the astonishing cinematic triumvirate that gave us such films as HEAT AND DUST, HOWARD’S END, A ROOM WITH A VIEW, and MR. AND MRS. BRIDGE. Ivory and Merchant were on hand to celebrate Jhabvala’s recognition. “I attribute the success of the Merchant/Ivory films to a wonderful writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,” Ivory said. Both Ivory and Merchant praised Jhabvala for respecting the word in her scripts while not being enslaved by it. The soft-spoken, diminutive Jhabvala said she “thought film festivals and awards were for stars and starlets” but was thrilled to be honored by the ceremony. Chairman and CEO of NBC Bob Wright presented Jhabvala with the traditional gift for winners, a quarterboard with her name on it.
At the next day’s follow-up panel, “In Their Shoes: A Conversation with Jhabvala, Ivory, and Merchant,” they discussed their dynamic partnership over four decades. Of their early relationship, Merchant said he told Ivory “about my passion to work in India to make English language films for an international audience. I had never directed or produced a film, and he had never directed a feature. It was like three holy rivers meeting to do something together.”
Of their early collaboration, Jhabvala said that the two men approached her in Delhi about the possibility of adapting her novel, The Householder , for the screen. At that point Jhabvala considered herself a short story writer and novelist. She responded by saying that “she hadn’t seen many films.” They asked her to try, saying, “We haven’t made a feature film before.” She accepted the challenge and adapted the novel for the screen.
At first they worked on different continents, exchanging letters and scripts. By the mid-1970s, Jhabvala moved to New York City and into the same building where the director and producer lived. The collaboration became easier.
Ivory believes their staying power is due to respect for the other’s talents and noninterference. “Though we’d like to interfere in another person’s sphere, we tend not to. That’s one of the reasons we go on and on. We don’t interfere.” For possible adaptations, Ivory will take a copy of the work and read it, noting scenes and dialogue he thinks are important. Then he hands it to Jhabvala who does the same, and they discuss the work. They omit scenes or create new ones, or sometimes add characters. But the adaptation must be respectful.
When they pitched A ROOM WITH A VIEW to Hollywood, the executive they met with said he liked the script but he raised conditions for acceptance. Lucy Honeychurch, Merchant recalls the executive saying, should be played by an American actress, and the two Emersons (father and son) should be made into one character. “Nobody is interested in old people,” the executive said. “Concentrate on the young people.”
“The mentality of Hollywood people,” Merchant believes, “is that they never think beyond a limited thinking. They wanted to make A ROOM WITH A VIEW popular with American audiences so they could identify with Lucy Honeychurch as an American. They underestimate the audience to such a degree that they don’t even know who their audience is. But we know who our audience is. They are civilized people who are intelligent.” He nodded toward the audience, “Thank you for being an intelligent audience.”
Over the years, Hollywood lost touch with intelligent filmgoers, thus an alternative to the big studios surfaced and Merchant/Ivory helped lay the foundation. “The word ‘independence’ started with Merchant/Ivory,” Merchant said. “We were the first 41 years ago. We followed the same philosophy: to make films with a story and characters that would excite and would lift your spirits up.”
The biggest draw at NFF8, however, was not a film. Rather, it was a staged reading of a script in development, THE CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, based on John Kennedy Toole’s picaresque, Pulitzer prize-winning novel published in 1980. Fourteen actors including Will Ferrell, Anne Meara, Paul Rudd, Mos Def, Rosie Perez, Alan Cumming, and Olympia Dukakis, wowed a packed Nantucket Community School auditorium of over 800 to hear a read-through of the script, which will start production in New Orleans in autumn. According to producer Scott Kramer, who spoke at Sunday’s morning coffee, the film has been in development for twenty-four years and lost impetus until Steven Soderbergh got involved. Kramer said, “Because of the reading we will make changes to the screenplay.” As yet, casting of DUNCES is still up in the air. David Gordon Green (GEORGE WASHINGTON and ALL THE REAL GIRLS) will direct. At the coffee, Kramer and Green verbally sparred over the number of shooting days, the producer insisting on 42 while Green pushed for at least 50. Mos Def says he thinks it’s a done deal that he’ll get the role of Burma, which he read on stage.
Before NFF8 wound down, the shorts produced by Nantucket High School students at a workshop during the festival were screened at the Dreamland before 28 DAYS LATER. As an outreach to the community, the Festival created the workshop, dubbed Teen’s Eyeview, to allow students hands-on experience to write, shoot, and edit their films using digital video cameras and iMac computers. In addition, the films are airing on “Noggin’s The N” on Nickelodeon this summer.