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Oh, the ever tricky omnibus film. As Lauren detailed in her review of Tokyo!, three very different auteurs were ushered off to the Japanese capital to offer their takes on the city which bursts from the seams with post fire-bomb post-modernity. I had the chance this week to catch up with two of the three, the long dormant Leo Carax and  the irrepressible Michel Gondry, to talk about the inspiration for their shorts, the specific difficulties of translations and what really motivated Michel to tackle Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York.

Spout: What were some of the challenges of adapting a piece of literature for the first time?

Gondry: Well, what’s great is when you work with the author. You can ask what’s behind each character and there motivations. It’s a little bit like it was when I worked with Charlie Kaufman. He was there for me when I had a question. You feel you have to respect the piece. In this case it was a little different, with Charlie Kaufman I had to compress it, simplify it, with this one, it was so concentrated, I have to diluted it, extend it and we actually did that together, we wrote the script together.

Its interesting, its easier to go through the process of extending than compressing. With compressing, you have to say goodbye to a lot of parts, you may lose something that is important, but when you dilute you can go deeper on the parts that feels right. Its concentrated to start with so you can really spend the time to show things. When I did my first film Human Nature, I realized that all the parts I had to cut in the screenplay where the parts with the most life in them. So when all that ends up on the floor, I really felt that by conforming to the story, I had to kill everything that happened that was magical. So it makes me feel better to start with something short and then extend it.

Spout: Did making a film in which other directors would conceive and create their own distinct works change how you conceived of your own films?

Carax: Well, after agreeing to do the film, I had to write something to be shoot in Tokyo were it had to be written very fast and shot very soon and fast. I didn’t know anything about the other films. The only thing was to shoot in Tokyo. You’re actually not allowed to shoot in Tokyo unless there are very special circumstances, which I didn’t know at the time. But no, I didn’t know what the others were doing. Because I couldn’t make my own films I’d been working on, I hadn’t made a film for seven or eight years, I said yes.

Gondry: I didn’t know what everyone was working on either.

Spout: Michel, you had to transpose Gabrielle Bell’s source material from New York to Tokyo?

Gondry: Right. The sort of humor had to change. Translation between cultures and languages is interesting. Let’s say I’m going be upset at somebody. I’m going to talk very frankly because I want to have and impact. The translator will translate something that has nothing to do with what I said. It will be very polite and respectful and formal and I think we did that with the screenplay and really didn’t know it. It ended up to be very positive because we had to take every line and suddenly we realized that our translator had wiped out everything that seemed too provocative. The piece doesn’t contain many things that are provocative or rude or condescending, but for them, to start with, it was way too crazy.

I really like this process of translation because you have to question the roots of the word and what you need to express. Sometimes you have to combine two other words you express one word because it doesn’t translate one word to one word. We struggled a lot with the word “ambition”, but ambition was one of the key ideas of the story. That gave us a good opportunity to reflect on what we were trying to say in the story just by translating it. I thinks it’s a process we could use to write another movie for instance. Write a movie in one language, get it translated and then get it retranslated.

Its funny, I wrote a text for a project, I’m going to do a radio show, I booked myself to do a radio show, its based on a dream of this guy who tried to do a movie in a train, he has to make one joke happen, other than that the president of the country is financing the film is going to execute him. So they hire these two comics and they are completely so absurd they can’t make anything funny. They go into the train and they sit in front of the train and they talk so abstractly that its not funny at all. Anyway, I wrote a text that’s like one page or two pages and then I went to google translate and I translated it into Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and then back to English. It was so hilarious! You had no idea what it meant. You couldn’t make any sense of it. It was so disconnected. It was completely surreal. I kept some of the language. Anyways, that’s a long digression to say  that the process of translation is interesting.

Spout: Leos, you take to distinct French characters, albeit with a secret language all their own, who happen to be a lawyer and a murderous, subterranean monster, and transplant them to Tokyo.

Carax: The story was a vision I had in Paris that had nothing to do with Tokyo. I was walking in the city one day, on a big avenue and I imagined someone coming out of the sewers and killing everyone for no good reason. This image in my head, I worked on it. I imagined this monster not as Godzilla or something, but as a man from a lost civilization who had his own god, his own language and he was completely unable to communicate with anyone.

Taking this story to Japan, a place with no foreigners apparently, few tourists, very parochial, very conservative, racist society, to bring the ultimate alien into the city, who is this ultimate foreign person, who hates people, seemed interesting. When they ask him why he kills innocent people, he says, “I hate innocent people”. Its bringing the ultimate alien into this conservative, closed society. With what’s going on in the world, the terrorism, the fear, it speaks to that.

Spout: What initially drew you to Gabrielle’s story Cecil and Jordan in New York, Michel?

Gondry: I just wanted to have sex with her [Laughs]. I thought that her art was mediocre but I had to pretend all the way that she was talented.

Bell: I felt the same way about Michel actually!

Under discussion:

True Adolescents  (2008)

We have so many SXSW previews to get through in the next week leading up to the fesitival that some days, you just might get two. Today we’ll first take a look at Craig Johnson’s Narrative Competition entry True Adolescents, which is notable on paper for two reasons: it co-stars recently Oscar-nominated Melissa Leo, and it’s the film on which Mark Duplass and Lynn Shelton first discussed working on the film that would become Humpday. Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Johnson marvels at comparisons to Kelly Reichardt, makes a blow job joke about Joe Swanberg, and names the two films that make him want to die.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

True Adolescents is a coming-of-age story about a drifting Seattle rocker dude who takes a couple of teenagers on a fun but somewhat harrowing camping trip. It stars Mark Duplass (Humpday, The Puffy Chair), Bret Loehr, Carr Thompson and Melissa Leo. It’s funny and irreverent but hopefully a little moving by the end. Someone described it as “like You Can Count On Me but younger and edgier”–which is immensely flattering since I think You Can Count On Me is one the better films of the last decade. What’s weird is that people have likened it both to Kelly Reichardt’s work (Old Joy, Wendy & Lucy) and to School of Rock! So I guess if Kelly Reichardt directed “School of Rock”, it may have looked something like True Adolescents –if you believe that kind of hybrid could exist.

Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.

I have a number of different day jobs. I teach filmmaking to teenagers, edit short films and videos, edit photos–though I did not put any of my own personal finances towards the film. I’m in enough debt from film school as it is. I just had a tremendous producer, Thomas Woodrow, who managed to raise enough money so that we could do it the way we wanted to do it. But believe me, I was ready to run out with a video camera and a microphone and shoot it myself if I had to.

Have you been to SXSW before? If so, tell us about your funniest story from the experience. If not, what are you looking forward to re: the festival and/or the city of Austin?

I have never been to SXSW or Austin before and I’m super excited. I’m from the Seattle area and people tell me Austin is a lot like Seattle–with better weather and even mellower people. I think SXSW is a the absolute perfect place for True Adolescents. The film has a strong music component that jives with the festival’s spirit and it stars Mark Duplass who is a SXSW veteran. I’m really excited for people to see Mark’s performance in this film-it’s unlike anything he’s ever done before. I think people will be blown away by him.

Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature?

Yikes. That’s a creepy question. All I can think about is what I did to get my ass on death row. I’d probably start with something wonderful and life-affirming like “Mary Poppins,” one of my all time favs. But then I’d be overwhelmed by the beauty and goodness in humanity and would want to live, so I’d have to wipe that feeling clean with “Salo” or “Funny Games.” Then I’d want to die, for sure.

There’s been  some criticism that the only way to get into SXSW is by being a part of an “incestuous scene where everybody knows everybody.” So who did *you* have to sleep with to get in? (Metaphorically or literally: are there any SXSW filmmaker(s) past or present that you’re close with personally and/or professionally, and how have those relationships helped or hurt the process of producing your film and getting it seen?)

So I gave Joe Swanberg one little blow job, so what? A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.

Just kidding. I’ve never met Joe Swanberg. You know, I’ve heard that criticism and I just think it’s silly. I don’t personally know any of the SXSW programmers, past or present, I’ve never been to the festival before. I cast Mark Duplass because I rented The Puffy Chair from Netflix and thought he would be perfect for the film, not knowing he was a SXSW rock star. For any festival, there is a certain amount of “name recognition”-whether it be actors, or the director or producers– that may or may not cause programmers to give your film a closer look when making their decisions. But, ultimately, I think programmers choose films because they think they are interesting films, regardless of who made them. I’d certainly like to think my film got in on its own merits.

Under discussion:

La Frontiere de l'aube  (2009)

When Philippe Garrel’s most recent film premiered in competition at Cannes last year, it carried the French title La Frontière de l’aube; that was translated in English in the Cannes guide as Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. None of these titles give any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge. I named it as the best undistributed film of 2008; now, IFC is screening it theatrically in series at BAM in Brooklyn (starting tonight) and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (Saturday, March 14), before it premieres on VOD.

When I reviewed the film last May at the festival, after it had been roundly booed at its Cannes press screening, I wondered if those critics who gave a dismissive but hardly as cruel reception to James Gray’s Two Lovers earlier in the festival would bother to grapple with the similarities between that star-studded American production and Garrel’s infinitely cooler, warm-toned black-and-white capital-A work of Art. For the most part, they didn’t, even though on paper, they’re essentially the same film: a Jewish photographer falls for a difficult, substance-dependent blonde; even though that relationship is clearly doomed from the start, it haunts him and prevents him from happily settling into a domestic routine with a still-beautiful but less troubled and exciting brunette. The big difference, at least narratively speaking: in Gray’s film, as the director told Andrew O’Hehir, the protagonist ultimately “does choose life.” Spoiler alert! The resolution to Garrel’s story is the diametric opposite.

Movie star Carole (Laura Smet) is living half a world away from her filmmaker husband when she meets Francois (Louis Garrel, son of Phillipe, his eyes dark, as if eye-linered naturally), a photographer who comes to her hotel to take her picture. It’s not clear if Francois is a journalist or an artist or what, but the project seems to take him weeks to complete, and by the second photo shoot, Francois and Carole have fallen into bed. They pledge undying love, but the sharp violin/piano jazz-horror score alerts us right away that things aren’t going to work out. Gin-swilling serial suicide attempter Carole seems destined to go the way of Frances Farmer, and though she seems convinced that Francois can save her from herself, he can’t stop what’s coming for long.

After Carole’s husband comes home suddenly and just misses catching Francois in her bed, Francois leaves and, despite Carole’s pleas, stoically refuses to come back. Carole’s heartbreak leads to a swerve into Shock Corridor territory. Meanwhile, Francois takes up with the lovely but fairly normal (and thus comparatively boring) Eve. A year after Carole violently exits the picture, Eve becomes pregnant; just as Francois has accepted that he’s about to become a father, the spectre of Carole comes back to try and drag his happy home life into the grave.

Perhaps because there are more than a few members of the press corps who could be described as socially awkward Jewish males, there’s been a lot of attention paid to the fact that in Two Lovers, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character is able to push Joaquin Phoenix’s as far as she does because she embodies his bad girl shiksa fantasy. When in that film, the nice Jewish boy threatens to abandon his family and local community in order to run off with the dangerous blonde instead of settling for the sensible match of his same background and faith, it might be a mistake and it might be a disappointment to his parents, but it’s hardly a tragedy of biblical proportions.

Garrel’s film takes the mystical threat of the shiksa far more seriously, literally turning her into something out of a horror-movie as the film morphs from classical, almost slight romance to a serious meditation on love, faith and eternity. Garrel tells us twice that Francois is Jewish––once directly, once implicitly (Francois thinks talk of concentration camp survivors is fit for pillow talk; amazingly, Carole agrees). Taking place in Paris, far outside Two Lovers’ world of Brighton Beach second-and third-generation immigrants, this information only seems significant after the final scene. At the risk of giving away more than I’d like to, the film’s denouement requires its Jewish protagonist to believe in an afterlife.

When confessing his bind to a friend, the friend has no sympathy for Francois’ inability to concentrate on his impending nuptials and push Carole out of his head. “Bourgeois happiness,” says the friend, as snarkily as such an ultra-serious French film would allow. “Scary, isn’t it?” Apparently, it is. There are shots in this film’s second half that are spookier than anything I’ve seen in a horror film in recent years –– without the aid of any effect more special than a basic optical print –– and simultaneously, incredibly moving in their invocation of a love that won’t die. Or, at the very least, refuses to abide by traditional boundaries of love and death.

This review appeared in slightly different form during the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.