CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 9/02/05

Battle in Scotland:
The 59th Edinburgh International Film Festival

By francisco menendez

The latest Edinburgh International Film Festival had film lovers run the gamut from covered everything from demoted demons (Paul Schrader's version of the Exorcist sequel, before Renny Harlin reshot it) to part-time kidnappers (Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven).

Sporting a goatee and glasses, Paul Schrader stands quietly looking at a festival audience who has just screened Dominion. This is Schrader's directorial version of the Exorcist prequel, a $40 million film that Morgan Creek shelved only to remake the movie all over again with a different script using most of the cast and crew, but with a new director -- Renny Harlin.

Schrader (pictured below), best known for his screenplay Taxi Driver, pulled every favor in Hollywood to finish the film, and, in an unprecedented turn, production company Morgan Creek agreed to do a limited release of Dominion in the U.S. Now Schrader has taken the film to several festivals to share the journey and travails of this project.

Sharing the stage with Schrader is Shane Danielsen, Aussie import to Scotland and artistic director for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In his close-cropped hair, glasses, and dark suit (always a dark suit), Danielsen bemusedly leans over to Schrader, mic in hand, and asks:

"When did it all start to go wrong?"

The audience laughs, but then leans forward in their seats as Schrader explains about the sudden death of the film's original director, John Frankenheimer; how he, Schrader, was seduced to take the film assignment as the financing was all in place, and how he holds no ill will toward Harlin for taking the money to remake his version.

"Sometimes you have to just take the money," he surmises.

The festival audience gets more of Schrader at the Cineworld complex the next day. Danielsen takes the audience through Schrader's career as a critic, a screenwriter, and a director. Schrader shares with them his feelings, anxieties, and career challenges, and then gracefully takes question from the audience.

These encounters with filmmakers are part of the 59th Edinburgh International Film Festival "Reel Life" series, which peeks into the creative minds of a diverse group of filmmakers. Unlike Sundance's more market-driven ambiance, Edinburgh is a film lovers' festival. Deals aren't made here, but relationships may be formed over a casual pint at the pub. The audience is respectful, and the filmmakers are gracious.

This year the "Reel Life" series audiences saw Anthony Minghella talk about his transition to big films after Truly, Madly, Deeply, how he uses a different style for each screenplay he writes, and how he enjoys working with the same people repeatedly. Thelma Schoonmaker, on loan from The Departed (Martin Scorsese's remake of Infernal Affairs, an EIFF favorite two years ago), led a master class in editing by showing examples of her work with "Marty", and their shared inspiration from her late husband, Michael Powell. Sixteen of Powell's films were screened at this year's EIFF.

Production designer Ken Adam (Dr. Strangelove, many James Bond films) shared his process, and he was comically aided by his adoring wife from the front row of the theater. Ridley Scott's cinematographer John Mathieson showed clips of a short he is very proud of (Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon), but wouldn't dare to show Scott because of its daring subject matter and experimental techniques. Seasoned award-winning documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles taught the audience how he learned to love his subjects in his line of work, while the father of zombie cinema, George A. Romero, confessed that he was "let go" from directing the film Resident Evil because his screenplay followed the game too closely.

Over 100 films screened in 11 days, carefully curated by Danielsen with support by his staff. The EIFF is one of half-a-dozen different festivals that battle for audiences in Edinburgh every August. The festival has the honor of being the longest consecutively running festival in the world. Best of all, while the EIFF packs in crowds every year, tickets are usually available until the day of the show.

That is, unless you want to see Serenity or its creator Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. Whedon sold out immediately, and Serenity, the film version of Whedon's ill-fated cult show Firefly, sold out every additional screening.

"It sold out in three minutes when we put it out as 'Best of Fest' on the last day of the film festival," confessed Danielsen on a late night walk out from the FilmHouse and into a black cab.

Indeed Buffy, Angel, and Firefly fans flew in to listen to Whedon and watch Serenity. Whedon spoke at length about his need to create a new feminine hero (not heroine), and confessed to his love of musicals, actors, and Charlotte Church. His fans cheered him on. For screenwriters, The Script Factory (a London-based screenwriters' assistance group) sponsored a talk with Alex Rose, whose On a Clear Day is being hailed as this year's Full Monty (as is another EIFF film, Kinky Boots). But that comparison sells short this story of a recently fired middle-aged man's decision to swim the English Channel, and the film's strong characters and big heart already landed it a sale at Sundance this year.

Alex Rose, an ex-Script Factory member, shared his long road to getting a screenplay produced and his ability to compromise in an effort to get this comedy-drama to the screen at all costs. Case in point: the casting of Scot actor Peter Mullan as the lead and a change of setting from England to Glasgow.

Most of the stories shared at the EIFF were tales of great battles and tremendous compromise. All except one.

The biggest surprise at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival was writer/director Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven. Fresh from Cannes, where rumors had it narrowly missing the Palme d'Or, Battle in Heaven tells the story of Marcos (Marcos Hernández), the heavy-set chauffeur of Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), the daughter of a Mexican general. Ana is a disaffected rich girl bored with her existence to the point that she secretly prostitutes herself out of a "boutique" in a suburban neighborhood. Marcos also has a chilling part-time job, as he and his wife (Bertha Ruiz), an obese unremorseful woman, kidnap people within their own poor community and ransom them for small sums of cash.

The film begins with Marcos learning that a child that they kidnapped the day before has died under Marcos's wife's care. That morning, he picks up Ana at the airport, fresh from her international travels. The day moves on, with Reygadas refusing to play up the inherent melodrama of the story or their relationship, but instead focusing on the textures, bodies, and sexual interactions of his characters, effectively holding a mirror to the social reality of Mexico's historically stratified and modernly disconnected society. These themes are reminiscent of Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mama Tambien, but lack Cuarón's exploration of a sensual character triangle acted out by beautiful people.

Instead, Reygadas has chosen to design a film using entirely non-actors. Real people whose presence, under his construction, serve as powerful text, and whose journey, albeit slow-paced and fatefully violent, is under Reygadas's strict control.

An afternoon with Reygadas and his glamorous non-star Mushkadiz (pictured bottom) at another Script Factory event revealed Reygadas's idiosyncratic uncompromising process. He explained how he works off a non-traditional treatment, of three or four pages, sharing very little with his cast, who he refers to matter-of-factly as his "instruments."

Reygadas's non-actors are told about the activity they are going to be involved with that day (e.g., having sex, hitting each other), and then fed their lines at the moment that it is required for them to speak them.

"I refuse to give my actors any information regarding the 'inner lives' of their characters. I have chosen them for a reason, and they learn to trust me. Trust is very important."

His process is anathema to anything his audience has learned about the screenwriting process to date, and verges dangerously on exploitation if it weren't for Reygadas's sure hand.

"I hate those programs which format your script. They are useless," Reygadas goads the audience of would-be-screenwriters with a grin.

But the audience appears enthralled, following along as Reygadas describes how he refuses to shoot coverage. Instead, he precisely storyboards his visual sequences, and regards the key and cornerstone of his approach and process the theory posited by early 20th century Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. In the apocryphal experiment known as the "Kuleshov effect," Kuleshov used a single close-up of an actor's ambiguous reaction and edited it with varied "visual triggers" (a child with toy, a bowl of soup, a woman in coffin). The result was that three different images that preceded the close-up lead the audience to three different interpretations of what the character was thinking (affection, hunger, sadness.) In essence, Kuleshov proved that a filmmaker has the power to create meaning, non-verbally, through editing.

In an afternoon that would cause Robert McKee and Syd Field to commit ritual suicide, Reygadas candidly shares his unconventional means, and continues to outline how he uses controversial experimental techniques to carry out his rigorous intellectual approach: "My film exists in the landscape of cold cinema." When asked to explain he adds, "You are used to hot cinema, American film, which relies on audience identification, and fabricated emotional moments. These films you are meant to forget once you leave the theater. I want my film's images and its characters to stay with you beyond the movie theater. And the film to be better every time you see it."

His process is not new; it's part Bressonian, and similar to French filmmaker Bruno Dumont's. (To be frank, this approach usually produces unremarkable, interminable, and inaccessible films.) But while Reygadas's Battle in Heaven proves to be a challenging experience, it burns into the mind in the way Gaspar Noe's Irreversible got under the skin of this film festival audience three years prior.

A second viewing of the film proves fascinating, as what seemed slow-paced now speeds ahead towards the film's inevitable and shocking tragic end. There are other films at the EIFF this year, such as Robinson Devor's Police Beat, which attempts what Reygadas's film achieves, but, in the case of Devor's, this results in a miserable viewing experience. A few days later, as the festival wraps up, it is the imagery from Battle in Heaven that continues to attack the senses.

In a time when storytelling has been codified to work in a certain way, and where what was "edgy" in the 90s has become conventional in terms of the independent film, Reygadas's approach, execution, and vision soar above the commercial and independent film world without a care of identifying a demographic or prettying up a multi-layered experience.

However, reality endures. If an additional screening had been scheduled on Sunday during Best of Fest, it would never sell out in three minutes.

But then again, it was never meant to.

Francisco Menendez is the writer-director of the motion picture Primo. He is full professor who chairs the ever-growing film department at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas.

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