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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Todd Solondz explains why moviemaking is a nightmare. Plus: The sex Americans are not allowed to see in his new film, "Storytelling."
Jan 30, 2002 | No one said life was fair -- especially not Todd Solondz. The unsparing social critic broke though a post-film-school funk in the mid-'90s with "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness," love-'em-or-hate-'em satires bursting with cruelty, hypocrisy and the kind of middle-class suburban dysfunctionality that has since matured into the cinematic shorthand used in films like Sam Mendes' "American Beauty." Laid bare, Solondz's themes -- rape, pedophilia, murder -- are so repulsive to some that with neither explicit intercourse nor violence, "Happiness" received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA.
Solondz's newest film, "Storytelling," is more chilling than humanistic. Structurally, the film is cleft into two autonomous parts: "Fiction" and "Nonfiction." In the first, the shorter "Fiction," Vi (Selma Blair) plays a graduate student headed for the imminent collapse of her craven, reflexively p.c. world. Her boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick) has cerebral palsy, and together they are taking a creative writing class taught by the sole celebrity of their white, second-tier liberal arts campus: black, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom). After a breakup with Marcus, Vi runs into Mr. Scott in a college bar, and allows him to seduce and then sodomize her. In order to get an "R" rating, Solondz agreed to visually censor the sodomy scene. Consequently, the images of Vi and Mr. Scott are covered by a prominent red box.
In "Nonfiction," Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti) plays a novice filmmaker. While combing a local high school for a documentary about the pressures of college admissions, he meets fame-hungry student Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber). The Livingston family, under the impression that being on TV is a good thing, overlook Toby's lack of experience and welcome his camera into their home. The Livingstons' upper-middle-class dysfunctionality makes for subplots richer than Scooby's deadbeat ambitions. And the relationship between 11-year-old Mikey (Jonathan Osser) and the family maid, Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros), provides startling insight into the willful callousness of privilege. "Storytelling" is currently in limited release, and will open in most of the country on Feb. 8. I spoke with Solondz in his Park City, Utah, hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival.
I understand the making of "Happiness" was quite stressful for you in the aftermath. How was the shooting of "Storytelling"? Does it get any easier as you go along?
No, the process is always assaultive and nightmarish and horrible. If I'm going to make another movie, I just have to make sure it's worth putting myself through this.
What's the most stressful part?
The shoot, the actual production, is really the most stressful period for me. This shoot lasted two months; it's always assaultive and physically draining and fraught with all sorts of compromises that are part and parcel of the job. Some people have a directorial character. As for me, I don't think I was cut out to be a director. I'm not a director because I want to be. It's more that I don't want someone else to direct my stuff; if someone's going to screw it up, I'd rather screw it up myself.
Some people get excited from all the power they imagine they have being a director on the set. It gives me no pleasure -- I just don't have the personality for it. I'm completely absorbed in the process as it's taking place, but very little of your time is spent with actors directing them; most of my time is spent figuring out all sorts of logistics, such as which location we're going to use the next day and how the economic reality bears down on what you want to do artistically. I'm not the ideal director, but I haven't yet found an alternative.
How did you decide to split "Storytelling" into two parts?
You always want to do something different -- find a fresh structure, a fresh form and a different way of tackling what may be identical geographical material. Initially, I thought I'd do a college movie; I was thinking of "Carnal Knowledge," and then I thought actually of "Full Metal Jacket," also, but only in terms of structure, in the sense that there was a short prologue followed by a longer sequel. What I found after writing my first part, the fiction part, was that I didn't want to do a sequel. I had no interest in that.
I wanted instead to come from some of the same ideas and themes, but from a different angle, different story, characters and so forth, and so at the end of the day, they would represent two panels of a painting. For some, the connections might be somewhat oblique, but for me, it's very much one movie.
