Cannes 2007 (Day Two)

Day Two. It's Thursday, in Cannes, and the highlight of our day today is what we came to Cannes for: the Film Masterclass with Martin Scorsese.

Scheduling didn't work out great -- one of the films I had been dying to see at the festival was The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, directed by notorious asshole painter Julian Schnabel, but also produced by Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy who, other than being amongst the best producers in America (and most definitely the best inside the studio system), also happen to be Steven Spielberg's producers, and producers of Indiana Jones 4 (and so people I've been keeping track of for a while now). In any case, that film's last screening took place in the same time as the Masterclass, which we could definitely not skip, so I missed out on seeing it. But the Masterclass more than more than MORE than made up for any disappointment I might've greedily had.

The Cannes filmmaker Masterclasses started, I think, sixteen or seventeen years ago, as one of the events of the fortnight -- a 2hr "class" in which a great filmmaker would teach about his career and what he learned going through it, sharing his thoughts and experiences with (in this year's case) 1,200 various film students and professionals. Previous hosts of the Cinema Masterclass have included Stephen Frears, Wong Kar Wai, Nanni Morretti and Sydney Pollack. To see any of these give a class on filmmaking would be an amazing experience, but Scorsese, to me, was more than that -- it's like a dream. My two favorite directors, in my opinion the two best directors of their time, are Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. They are artists, in the sense that they have vision, they have daring, they have a very strong personality that shows through every second of their work -- but also entertainers, aware and respectful of their audience, always trying to push the envelope of what new lands you can take viewers to. Because of the cursing and the violence in Scorsese's films, I didn't really get to see any growing up, but my dad would speak about him, and I remembered his then-funny sounding name when I got around to seeing more "grown-up" films. And so after growing up on things like Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Back To The Future, E.T., or Star Wars, suddenly I was watching things like Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull. Stuff of such intensity and virtuosity and that had such a certain specific taste (there's a way DeNiro, Pesci and Keitel spoke, and moved, and the rhythms of the editing and the cuts in those movies that's just unique), and that I think no one has emulated since. In terms of sheer filmmaking, I think Raging Bull, in the history of film, is the 2nd best film ever, second only to The Godfather. Both are so perfect, so gorgeously acted, so well-designed that every shot could be framed and put in a museum. And when I grew up, I realized that not only had Scorsese had the most consistently amazing career of any filmmaker I could think of, but also that he had made such different movies (from Mean Streets to a small comedy like After Hours to a period piece like The Age Of Innocence to a musical like New York, New York). Spielberg and Scorsese, to me, are the epitome of what a director should be, and part of the reason I now want to produce -- because I want to make movies like theirs, and know I could never direct them.

A bit more than a year ago, I had the chance to see a night of shooting on The Departed in Brooklyn. I went with my then-neighbor Lauren, who was hoping to see Leo or Matt or Markie Mark. What we did see is a small crew, Scorsese there, shooting an insert something like 27 times. Lauren left after fifteen minutes -- I stayed for two hours. I watched the crew work, how silent and efficient they were (apparently a staple of a Scorsese crew), and I caught a few glimpses of Scorsese himself, which at the time (and still today, would) made my day.

To now see him and listen to him as he taught a class -- that was, to call things what they are, a fucking dream. To make things even more incredible, Richard not only wrangled us entry to the masterclass, but got us VIP tickets -- meaning we were the first to enter into the auditorium, and got to sit at aisle seats three rows from the stage. Which means that, when Scorsese entered, he walked by inches from us -- inches -- and then we could hear him speak from such a close distance it was like being in a small room with him.

The Masterclass was the event of the 2nd week -- amongst the crowd in the auditorium, just a few rows behind us, were Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright (director of and Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz), Claude Lanzmann (director of the acclaimed, and life-changing, documentary Shoah, amongst other things) and the now familiar face of Brett Ratner. These guys provided Maz and I with a show even before Scorsese ever entered the room -- and with our little people-watching hobby, we had a ball of a time. We noticed Ratner before anyone else did (to be fair, no one really did). He was sitting next to this pretty-ish girl, and he was all over her, leaning one arm over the back of the seat in front of him, the other one touching, stroking, and grabbing away at her. She was looking away, definitely not very taken (although if she wasn't, how did she end up next to him? Did they get reserved seats, or did they just end up right next to one another out of pure chance, or did he pick his seat because of her, and if he did, why did he, considering she was pretty but by no means a model, his prey of choice?). At some point, Ratner leaned over and tried to grab what was either her arm, or her boob, and she exasperatedly smacked his arm away, kind of pushed him back, and resumed looking away. Now Ratner joined her, looking away too, the expression on his face that of a fat, spoiled kid after being refused his 7th slice of chocolate cake. Or that of a bully who's been called out on being a prick by the one girl he claims is his girlfriend. Just angry, slightly shamed, frustrated.

And things were only about to get worse. This is about the time when Quentin Tarantino, along with puppy dog Edgar Wright (and I call him "puppy dog" because Wright followed Tarantino everywhere throughout the festival, the expression on his face that of a child begging for approval, his clean-shaven cheeks a little chubby and self-satisfied -- another, in my opinion, blatant case of geeky insecurity suddenly magnified by relative fame, praise and success). Everyone in the room noticed Tarantino -- either turning around from their seats in the first rows, or leaning down from the balcony, to take a look at him -- and three or four dozen people actually got up to take pictures of him. It was interesting to watch Tarantino (a man with legendary ego-issues himself) and the way he reacted to an amount of attention you can tell he now considers normal, well-deserved, and customary -- but it was even more interesting to watch Brett Ratner's reaction, and the jealousy that so obviously started pouring through his veins the second the hubbub started. He began by ignoring the commotion -- apparently hoping it would just die off -- and when it became painfully clear that it wouldn't (and when his pout got so tight I think it gave him lip cramps), Ratner then made an emphatic show of getting up, yelling out Tarantino's name, and waving at him like they were old buddies. He also tried to start a bit of a conversation -- but Tarantino (who obviously knew Ratner, but not that well), eager to get back to all the hero worship, soon politely cut the chat short, sat back down and went back to grinning and thumbs-uping people he never even met before in his life. Defeated, Ratner gave one more go at getting attention, by bitching at a couple of film buffs who had stepped in front of his seat to get a good shot of Tarantino on their cameras -- complaining, best of all, that their flashes were blinding him so close to his face, when the flashes, how to say, were so obviously directed in another direction altogether -- and then resumed his quest to win the World Pouting Championships.

(Also please notice on the picture above how, while everyone else at the Masterclass was urged to come dressed in "formal wear" and pretty much turned away at the door if they hadn't, QT showed up at his reserved seat dressed in, well...shorts and a Batman logo wife-beater. Ah, formal wear ain't what it used to be...)

Then came the man everyone had really come to see -- Martin Scorsese. The man was amazingly graceful, funny, and, as you can tell from any interview or press conference he's ever given, absolutely obsessed with and dedicated to film. Not a second of the Masterclass Q&A (hosted by film critic and close friend of the late Stanley Kubrick, Michel Ciment) was dedicated to red carpets, celebrities, egoes, or money -- it was all pure, down-and-out filmmaking, the art and craft, the passion, the love for it in itself and nothing else. Scorsese, at core, is a film geek, a film buff -- if he ever became a filmmaker, it was to make films, period. No fortune and glory, no superstar fantasies -- just making movies. And after spending so much time with people whose only ambition is to be in the spotlight, and still dare call themselves actors; or people whose only ambition is to have power over people, and still dare call themselves directors; or people whose only goal is to make money, and still dare call themselves producers; it was, to put it mildly, fucking orgasmic to see someone to whom those thoughts would never even occur unless brought up by someone else.

A few highlights of the Class (the majority of which could be found as a podcast online last week -- not sure if that's still up on the festival's website):

-- Scorsese is aware he's never really shot any sex scenes (not since Mean Streets, in any case), and he admits that it's because he wouldn't know how to film them. He does say he "would like to, someday. Maybe." In terms of how he shoots violence, he did point out that very often, when there is violence on the screen is the one time he'll deliberately move the camera very slowly, or not at all, and let the violence itself hit the audience, creating contrast with his usual, free-wheeling moving camera style. He also said he doesn't believe there is such a thing as "senseless" or gratuitous violence, and that it always, when shown, expresses a point of view, a reality.

-- Scorsese, famously, got into movies because his family were working class and never read books, films becoming his literature: "My parents were (...) not in the habit of reading books, so they only thing they could do with me was take me to the movie theater. Ultimately, the connection to cinema and movies was made emotionally, through my parents, through the movies they watched. That's the driving obsession, the emotional connection to film for me."

-- Scorsese mentioned a few of the films that impressed him when he grew up -- mentioning, of course, On The Waterfront as the first film that gave him a consciousness that film could be about him, and his friends, and their daily lives. He also dropped that "East Of Eden became almost a religious obsession with me."

-- He talked a bit about how he started realizing the power of film as a medium: "I began to wonder why I was feeling a certain way at a certain point in that film. And then I noticed a camera position or an actor. An example from Bonnie & Clyde: There’s a scene where Gene Hackman gets shot in the eye. And I imagined that as a close-up. I went to see the film again; it’s a medium shot. Why did I see it so close in my head? Sound effects, editing, position of the gun in the frame, all these things made me understand that you can actually construct images that tell a story. I became conscious of camera movement when I began to realize how certain scenes are made and why I was affected certain ways. But I really think it was through American musicals and the use of camera movement by Fellini, and the freedom of the camera in the French New Wave. I think it has more to do with choreography."

-- About what it takes to be a filmmaker: "You don’t really need to go to film school to learn how to watch a film. You can learn everything you need to know with your eyes. The only way you really learn is to make a film. You have to have an obsessive nature, I think. You have to want to make the film more than anything else in life, I’m sorry to say."

-- On what he learned making Mean Streets: "For (that) it took me three years. Harvey Keitel was a court stenographer at the time. After three weeks we ran out of money. I’d call him again 6 months later. He would complain: ‘I have a life, I have a job.’ What I learned is that at least we got through the process. And any film that you do is a marathon."

-- On what he learned working for Roger Corman (on Boxcar Bertha): "I learned discipline. Going there, doing your work, even when you don’t feel like it. What he did, is he taught me how to make a picture in 24 days."

-- On how he was introduced to Robert DeNiro (Scorsese has often said that, even though DeNiro hung out as a kid just a few blocks from him, they never really met, as just a few blocks downtown at that time was a whole different world): "It was at a Christmas dinner. He talked about all these people he knew. He used to hang out in a different group, but I remembered him. He was 16 and so was I back then. He knew the people that I made Who's That Knocking at My Door about. And he knew the people I wanted to make Mean Streets about. I didn’t know until many years later that his father was a painter, that we were not from the same class."

-- He also talked about improv, and how whenever he does improv, what he means is "improvisational dialogue" -- as in, he'll let the actors improv the lines, but not the whole scene, their objective remaining the same as was written in the script. He also says that improv he'll never shoot in a closeup -- that the whole idea of improv is to get people's reactions, the freshness and the realness that they suddenly have when they don't know what the other actor is going to do. Scorsese especially mentioned the "Funny how?" scene in Goodfellas, saying that the whole idea of letting Joe Pesci riff in that context was to create that genuine atmosphere of mixed camaraderie and menace, or fear, and that was achieved because everyone at that table, including Ray Liotta and Pesci himself, had no clue what Pesci was going to next -- when he was going to reveal the joke and how, and how far he would go before he did. As a result, the scene gets an energy it would never have had otherwise -- and if you look at the scene as it is in the film, you'll notice both shots (both the one on Pesci and the one on Liotta) are wide enough to include all the other actors, and their laughs, reactions, and interventions are what make the scene as funny, tense, and captivating as it is.

-- Scorsese also said that, more than just artistic reasons (although there were some), in the first place he started considering shooting Raging Bull in black and white because a) at that time he started realizing that color film faded more rapidly than B&W film, and he wanted his film to last, and b) four other boxing films (including Rocky 2 and The Champ) were coming out that year, all very colorful and mainstream, and he wanted his film to stand out.

-- He also said that several of his most-acclaimed projects (from the aforementioned Raging Bull to After Hours to The King Of Comedy to Cape Fear to The Departed) were projects he originally didn't want to do, but upon reading the script he found that one very little scene or one little theme would fascinate him and obsess him, and he would then be driven to develop it, make it the focus of the film, and that is what would push him to make the film.
Those are highlights, obviously, as the class lasted an information-packed 2 hours, but these are the ones that I took notes on, or that come to mind as I type this.

Our only other stop that day (other than the customary Film Market and Village stops) was a late night Directors' Fortnight of comedy Smiley Face, starring Anna Faris. Smiley Face had been one of the film we had wanted to see at Sundance, and missed because of scheduling issues, so when we learned that it was playing in Cannes, we made sure to catch it -- especially considering several reviews, in several countries, had gotten the habit of calling it "the best stoner comedy ever made".

What it was, to be honest, was a massive disappointment, and one of the unfunniest, stupidest, most poorly made films I have seen in my life (and Maz agreed). Directed by Gregg Araki, one of the indie world's favorite directors (and who, despite being in his mid-40s, sounds and acts like a freshman girl from USC), the film was also his first comedy, and it showed. The script showed glimpses of potential, but the dreadfully poor directing killed off any ideas it might've had. The plot, as in all stoner movies, was expectedly weak (girl gets massively stoned, goes on weird adventures), and so a lot relies on how the gags are set up and executed, and it was obvious Araki had put no thought whatsoever into that. Everything was shot exactly as written, with no rhythm, no variety, no invention, no visual ideas, and a dreadful, dreadful choice of music (how does loud, crappy techno-metal fit either comedy or being massively stoned?).

The acting was just as bad -- Anna Faris (whom I otherwise love) is in every shot, and wears the exact same standard-stoned expression in every single one of them. The rest of the cast (Adam Brody in a sad, sad cameo; John Krasinski in a "hey, I gotta pay the rent" cameo; and Danny Masterson in a "what the fuck were you THINKING?" cameo) is equally stiff, bored, and uninvolved. The film itself is a painful experience -- if you took someone off death row and made them watch Smiley Face, they'd probably ask to be put back on death row. And then executed early. The rest of the audience, reassuringly, didn't seem to enjoy the film either -- the first 20 minutes or so were welcomed with hysterical laughter, the next 20 minutes saw a couple chuckles, and after that the cinema was as silent as a yet-to-be-discovered Egyptian tomb. Dead dead dead dead dead.

And that was our second day in Cannes -- now re-dubbed, in my mind, the really cool place where you get to learn, over and over and over again, how many dreadful movies are made (and somehow, celebrated) in the world...