Director's Commentary - Three Kings (1999)

David O. Russell talking about his off-kilter Gulf War adventure Three Kings.

On how he was drawn to the project: 

I came to the project right after I finished 'Flirting With Disaster', I was invited to Warner Brothers and they opened up their logs of all the properties they had and there's a one line summary of each script. This line leapt out at me, 'a heist set in the aftermath of the Persian-Gulf'. I had lived in central America in the early eighties amid a lot of the political chaos that was there at the time. I saw a lot of the absurdity and strange combinations of things; American consumer goods with the contra war and Michael Jackson's music, and all these weird cocktails. My imagination was stirred by that, I basically took the premise from John Ridley's script and researched for wrote for 18 months myself on my own script. 

On the film's opening and setting the tone:

The tone of the film has being established, it will walk this line between upsetting or shocking information and absurd humour at a kind of rollicking pace. From that guy being shot to people partying, what kind of combination is this? Well, these two things were happening side-by-side. There was all this partying going on, it was like a big frat party for all these Americans soldiers, many of whom didn't see any action, many of whom watched the war on the TV like we did. Of course anyone who sits in the line of fire is a hero to some degree but I think it was baffling to a lot of them, the ones I met at least. Nora Dunn's character, the ubiquitous reporter of the film, and she's basically just covering a party which I think feels a little bit empty to her. The Lee Greenwood song that they're singing here was this huge anthem 'Proud To Be American' that was very popular at the time, it plays through this montage and I love this contrast; Iraqis are being killed or involved in a horrible uprising that's being crushed which was really a perverse irony and as a filmmaker I felt there was an incredible opportunity to be able to expose all of this. 

On creating a unique look for the film:

Tom Siegel and I tested a lot of different ways to shoot the film, this war was different from any other war and we wanted it to look different from any other war. Other war films tend to look khaki or olive coloured and there was nothing really khaki about this war, it was very bright almost blown out in the desert and you had big hits of colour which showed up in the newspapers for the first time in colour photographs, so we wanted that colour to live in the movie. We wanted to do bleach-bypass at the beginning and then when they get to the village it switches to Ektachrome which is a reversal stock that you use in a stills camera and the reason I liked it was that the colours pop in a very surreal way and it looks very exotic like the photographs in the L.A. Times. 

On preserving the life of the film from the page:

The script has this energy; it's it's fast and it's kinetic. Then you shoot all this footage and you cut it together and it feels dead and sluggish because you've fallen in love with pieces of the footage. For me, you cut away at all of that footage that isn't in the spirit or energy of the script and then the film breathes and is alive. This film in particular needs to move at a pretty big clip. Warner Brothers is famous for having a script department in which they format your script and tell you how many pages the script is and you say 'no this is only 130 on my computer' and they say 'well it's 160'. Then the budget department turns around and says 'that's too much money and too many days' so you've got to start dumping some scenes. You say 'no, no, no, let's reformat it' so you play this game where you do the dame material much more condensed, so you take this scene and you condense it way down and so you have something called the 'secret script' where we give the crew the official script and say this is the 'secret script' is the real script where everything is a little more elaborate. 

On the film's advertising around the time of release:

Interestingly enough, when the film was first being marketed it was all 'gold, gold, gold'. The posters and the campaign said '$23million worth of gold' and to me it's the MacGuffin, who cares? I don't care about that, that's not what's interesting about this movie. Oh wow, I've never seen a movie where guys steal gold, I've seen that movie 500 times so it's the least interesting part of the film for me. To me it's the combination of of chaotic action and emotional content that really makes the movie different. 

On what drove him to make the film:

[it] was the visual texture of that world, the desert, the American consumer goods there, from Bart Simpson to the Infinity convertible. Americans getting close to an ancient Arab culture in the third world country, based on my experiences in the third world and central America. The mixture of absurdity and pathos of all that, and the visual component of that. When I first decided to make the film I part of what grabbed me was that I thought there hadn't been a war film since 'Platoon'. I thought this would be amazing, that I get to play in this environment in a completely different way, then that next year I heard about Spielberg and Malick making these epic war films. So part of my heart sank but then I also thought I've still really got the only contemporary war film with much of the untold story about this war that will look and feel completely different from their films and will be funny and absurd in ways that their film are not. 

On bringing something new to action scenes:

The action that interests me is messed up action, you get a splinter in the middle of an action scene, how many times have you seen that? The guy stops and says damn I've got a splinter, half the time if i'm just going through my house and I bump my head that'll fuck me up for a while, so why does that never happen in an action scene? You never see somebody sprain their ankle, the guy gets a splinter, or George [Clooney] collides with a guy, its completely sloppy. Both are running their asses off and they smash into each other and then they're just scared of each other, they don't want to fight they just want to get away from each another. I think ultimately people do not want to fight and kill each other, they ultimately just want to stay safe, like what they say about a snake, a snake just wants to stay cool he's not looking to bite people, snake will slither away from you nine times out of ten. 

On what he feels was accomplished with Three Kings:

In some regards I took a basic action/adventure motor and put a completely different layer, upon layer, upon layer of textures on top of it; layers of satire, of political information,of digressions, of cross cultural interactions. It was an interesting experience for me but I think one of the things I learned from it is that expositional motor was kind of an albatross to me and I wouldn't want to do it again. I don't think I would likely again make a film that had, in some senses, a traditional adventure narrative. This was my foray into a format of a studio action picture and twisting it in a lot of provocative ways; to make it politically provocative and visual provocative. I learned a lot from the experience,as I said it was difficult to carry that kind of traditional template the whole way. I saw the opportunity to make the movie about this unexamined war, in that regard I think we pulled it off ad I hope it will last as a portrait of a very strange, morally compromised war.

Director's Commentary - The Yards (2000)

James Gray's commentary track for his film The Yards.

On the film's opening shot and his approach to introducing a story:

I'm a big fan of slow build-ups to a movie, and I find that the most treasured moments in films are when you have this black screen and the film hasn't begun yet means the possibilities are limitless to whether or not you'll like the film. It's one of the more magical moments for me about going to the movies, so i've always tried to build in a kind of overture to a movie; I always put in more black screen than perhaps you should, very slow opening credits slow credits, of course this is an indication to the fact that I like slow movies. This opening shot was not scripted, we put the camera on the front of the train and we were going through the tunnel and I started rolling a bit early and when I saw the shot in the dailies I thought wow that's kind of a wonderful opening shot, it seemed to suggest something cosmic. It also seemed to emphasise something I wanted to emphasise throughout the whole picture, which is a world view that was bigger than the characters, that the characters occupied a world that could control their fates.

On shooting Leo's homecoming party:

This opening party scene is interesting because it's a difficult thing to direct a scene, which is, people having a party but at the same time they're celebrating something rather tragic which is a guy coming home from jail so you have to walk a tightrope here. I had wanted this party scene, which is really more or less stolen from a film I really love called 'Rocco And His Brothers' directed by Luchino Visconti, an Italian movie, it's really great. I had wanted this party scene to emphasise all the aesthetic tenants that were about to unfold in the film as well as introduce you to all the characters and the world of the film. This was all meant to be very slow but a kind of tender introduction to all of the characters in the film, except for James Caan, who I always thought we had to leave him out, he's too important to introduce him right now, we have to save him, we have to create some narrative anticipation for him.

On the look of the film:

If you notice the photography as well, a series of browns, buttery yellows, yellow oaks, very much from the painters that I love; Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper, but also Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour, and a number of Renaissance-era painters. What we also did was we under-exposed the film quite a bit in order to give it a painterly look, that the blacks would never be truly black, truly snappy, also a tenant from painting, the first thing they tell you in painting is that you never use black paint directly out of the tube, that what you would is mix it with brown or a little bit of white to make it dark grey. This is because black doesn't actually exist in life, black is the absence of all light so the surfaces of the film were always meant to be very painterly, that the film would be almost elegant, that you would never move the camera unless you had to, that there would be a series of painterly stills that passed before your eyes. I wanted this to be unlike the style of most films today which seem preoccupied with snazzy-ness and fast camera movement. All of this was meant to extenuate a classical style of filmmaking.

On the ambitions of the film:

It's difficult to say this because politics are so clearly left out of American films, almost all the time. But one of the major ambitions of the film, I'm not sure if it's realised, but one of the major ambitions of the film was to give it an almost social realist slant, something that [Elia] Kazan may have done in the 50s. The idea that this person [Leo/Mark Whalberg] from working class means, from prison, would try to incorporate himself into the market economy and the tragedy that would unfold by his attempt to do so.

On his approach to storytelling:

It's one of the great challenges when you're making films in the year 2000 that since cinema is an art form that has now existed for 70 years in the sound-era, longer than that in silent, you are dealing really with the same story over and over again, or the same four stories, whatever way you want to characterize it. My friend likes to say they are only two stories; the stranger comes to town, the stranger leaves town. But the point is that you're always in a struggle to avoid cliché, however, it's very relevant to embrace archetype. If you look at a movie as a thrill-ride, people go to movies for different reasons, that doesn't mean the reason is worse or better, but some people go to movies for the thrill of the 'who-done-it' so the dramatic tension for them is the unfolding of events and the wanting to know what happens next, the whole joy of the event is the unpredictability of the story. I must say that this is not important to me which is probably obvious to the viewers of the film. I almost prefer the film to be inevitable, that the unfolding events in the film prove to be something that you could have predicted to happen, and in fact this view of cinema is born out of the entire history of storytelling because it enables you to get out of the way of the surprise. So, what do I mean? If you look at a story like 'Macbeth' for example, the witches more or less tell you in the beginning what will happen so that the pleasure of the experience becomes not what will happen but why it has happened. This never ceases to be interesting, one hopes, it never ceases to be about the lives within it. This really is the higher calling, for me, for any creative work.

On the approach to scoring the film:

The score emphasises a strategy which Howard Shore and I employed, which was to score it like a European film. The difference between European and American cinema is that, for example, a score like Jaws, which is brilliant, is very much scoring the moment. When a beat of action changes in the film the music underscores that change. Whereas European films tend to score the mood and overall atmosphere rather than each individual moment. We decided to employ that style because I felt it emphasised the contemplative and melancholy nature of the movie. I didn't feel the nature of the film was contour American, for better or for worse.

On the fight between Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix:

We so did not want this thing out of an action film, we didn't want it to seem stunt coordinated. It was much more important for us to emphasise the street violence element of it, the nastiness, the messiness of the fight. I had wanted to put on film the type of fight you see on the streets; there was a pub where I lived and there were fights all the time, they were more like wrestling. I got two takes and they [Wahlberg and Phoenix] beat each other so badly that I couldn't get any more. The fight is rather unconventional, the camera pulls back instead of cutting in. This is of course an attempt by me to imply that the world around them is bigger than they are, that these people are small inhabitants of a world that imposes its will on their lives. This violence between Mark and Joaquin had always been brewing, that this messiness and brutality could come out in a horrible way.

On the importance of setting the mood:

I like mood creation, perhaps really to my detriment. I feel that movies can express more than anything else is a sense of emotion and a sense of mood creation. You remember the story-lines of films I guess but more than story-lines you remember moods; If you think about something like 'Rosemary's Baby' it's not really about the story, Polanski does such a great job in putting the camera exactly where he should and of creating the mood that the story is really of secondary importance. In fact if you asked people to walk you through the beats of 'Raging Bull', story-wise, I'm betting you they couldn't. What they remember is the vivid black and white, the fight scenes with the spurting blood, or the terrible domestic violence that goes on in that household. You remember the vitality of the image and the creation of mood, so I really try to learn from that and to absorb the importance of mood.

On the difference between pace and interest:

I think that pace and what is boring are often confused; for me, the pace of a movie, if it's slow or fast, has nothing to do with whether a movie is boring. I have seen movies that have been paced like lightning that I'd really rather have a colonoscopy than watch. Then there are films that are really slow with a really meditative quality that are riveting. I just mentioned 'Rosemary's Baby', that's a slow movie but it's never less than riveting. So I don't think pace and what is considered boring or not boring have anything to do with one another.

On The Yards being a tragedy:

Some people said to me,“does the Charlize Theron character have to be threatened and eventually die?" My answer is yes because if she doesn't then what is the story? They say,“isn't that a cliché, letting the innocent person die?" Well yes, but it's not a cliché it's an archetype, it's what happens in classic tragedy. It wouldn't be very tragic if the 'bad guy' died, it wouldn't be tragic if nobody died, it wouldn’t be very interesting either. Really I think it's important when you want to make a film that speaks of a cultural ill that there is a price to be paid for peoples' cupidity and stupidity.

Director's Commentary - Chopper (2000)

Andrew Dominik's commentary track for his debut feature Chopper.

On people's objections to the film:

The film was a lot more difficult to get going than I anticipated, we met with quite a few moral objections. Many people felt it was wrong to make a film about Chopper because it in someway glorified him or held him up as a role-model, and I think the film does that but it does validate him which is kind of the point of the film, you don't make a film about someone that you despise. The other thing was that people were very uncomfortable with the film at script stage, that the film refused to judge him, which I think is it's great strength, it doesn't glorify or condemn him.

On Chopper's attack on Keithy George:

This character of Keithy George played by David Field is a fictionalised version of the person who Chopper actually tangled with in jail, this guy was a very heavy criminal but we don't set him up that way in the film. We didn't want to set Keithy George up as a bad guy because then Chopper becomes the lesser of two warring evils and we very much wanted Chopper to be responsible for his own actions so I didn't want to confuse the audience by sort of justifying Chopper's attack on Kiethy. What I'm really interested in with Chopper's attack on Keithy is the effect that it has on Chopper. Chopper actually did this, gave people advice on how to kill him and get off on self-defence, it's sort of a joke but it's true, Chopper really is hell bent on his own destruction, hell bent on creating an enemy for himself. This scene here is kind of the whole reason why I made the film, in his books Chopper portrays himself as unrepentant and proud, he's sort of proud of being this remorseless killer but there's contradictions throughout the books as well where he describes disturbing dreams where the faces of his victims come back to him, or he will apologize very directly to someone in print which suggested to me on initial reading that he had mixed feelings about the things he did. This is where the film gets really interesting for me, attack this guy in a fit of rage and then all of a sudden the fog clears and he's like a tourist in his own body, horrified by what he's done. These apologise of Chopper I think are sincere, often in these kind of pathologies in things like domestic violence where there's a cycle of abuse and remorse, very much it's the violence that's taken to be sincere and the remorse is taken to be phony but I think the two things go hand in hand. Perhaps Chopper is not feeling guilty here because he's attacked Keithy in order to feel guilt, trying to resolve some age old psychological problem for himself.

On Chopper not realising he's being stabbed by Jimmy:

I think what's being dramatised here is not so much that Chopper is invincible but that he's in a deep state of shock, which I think is realistic when something extreme like this happens to you, that the feelings follow a little bit behind. Talk to anyone who's broken a bone or had anything big psychically done to them and they'll tell you the pain doesn't happen immediately. I think what's also being dramatised here is Chopper's denial, denying the reality of what's occurring, this thing with putting his cigarette back in his pocket was something he said happened, "I'm being stabbed so I'll save my cigarette till later". He just can't accept the idea that Jimmy would betray him. This thing here with Chopper hugging Jimmy was an idea of Eric's which Simon wasn't expecting, a very strange thing to do in the middle of a stabbing, to embrace your attacker. Chopper is very philosophical about the stabbing and I think there's a couple of reasons for this, one is that he doesn't want to admit that Jimmy has betrayed him because for him to realise that makes him very much alone. The other thing is that Chopper does have a sense of sin or guilt and he knows he's done bad things so he's always expecting bad things to be done to him, some sort of retribution to come to him. He's constantly on guard for that retribution so when it finally does come he's kind of relieved, he no longer has to be frightened of being afraid of it.

On using the locations where Chopper's experiences actually happened:

We shot all these scenes in the actual locations where they occurred, which is a great thing when your shooting a scene like this, it can very easily become about camera moves and just about everything apart from what's going on in the scene. It was great when those moments happened to be able to remind everybody we were shooting this stabbing in the actual location where it took place 10 years before hand. That would always lend a certain gravity to the proceedings and snap people back to where they were supposed to be.

On Chopper driving Neville to the hospital after shooting him:

Chopper's point of view is kind of clarified in the relationship and now he's comfortable, it was the not knowing whether or not he had an enemy that he couldn't stand, now he's got his enemy and he knows what the deal is. This actually happened on two occasions that I know about where Chopper shot somebody and drove them to the hospital and then strenuously denied it. I don't think he's denying it to get away with it, he doesn't want to appear soft hearted, he wants to appear like the unrepentant killer, he's embarrassed that anyone should know about his empathy which he regards as a weakness. There's another reason that he takes Neville to the hospital, maybe below empathy, which is that he wants his enemy to survive. An enemy is necessary to his psychology in some way; since being released from jail he has all these unknown and unfocussed anxieties which if he has an enemy he can focus those anxieties on at least something he feels he can control.

The shooting of Sammy the Turk:

I think he's so wound up now there's a part of him that just wants to go back to jail. He's so overwhelmed by the world outside and the paranoia has built in him to such an extent, he hasn't been able to take it out on Jimmy because he doesn't want to so he's finding a substitute to release it on. Sammy just can't win in this conversation, even if he is innocent of setting Chopper up his innocence will just be read as lying. Like always he instantly regrets what he's done, the strange thing about Chopper is to me the character retains a kind of innocence all the way through the film because he's just not in control of himself. I think this behaviour is very childlike, this cycle of attack and regret, attack and remorse. An angry child would destroy the world if it could but you don't really hold that against them, I feel the same way about the character.

Chopper the myth:

What you see here instead of redemption for Chopper, is this kind of complete transcendence of reality where instead of facing himself he becomes his own favourite character in fiction, he rewrites history. Here we have Chopper's fan club, the people who admire him for the myth that he's reported about himself as apposed to the reality of the man. Mark himself talks about Chopper in the third person, he sees 'Chopper' as someone he's created for public consumption, something distinct from Mark the person. Now we come to Chopper revelling in his own mythology which I think is something the moral detractors of the film felt the film was going to do, that it would feed Chopper's need for attention and that this was a bad thing. I think you need to look at why a person like Chopper needs attention, attention is pretty much a fundamental human need and if it's not met in a fundamental way it doesn't just go away, I mean if you're hungry you don't get food you don't just suddenly stop being hungry. I think with Chopper maybe this need has become quite grotesque and distorted and come out in his hunger for publicity. He sort of gets public attention at the expense of any sort of private intimacy, I think the vain that he's got is for an image, for a circus performance called Chopper that has little to do with Mark the person which isolates him further, which is the great tragedy of the character. I was very obsessed with this last moment of the film, of Chopper by himself. The consequences of violence, I wanted to know what they were for the perpetrator and the answer I came up with in the process of making the film was that the consequences of violence is loneliness so it was very important to get this lonely feel at the end.