Here's a Q&A I did this week with director Larry Charles about his new film Religulous for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton. If you've read my review of the film, you'll know I wasn't entirely on board with the film, but Charles was more than happy to address my concerns. I don't know if I found his responses entirely convincing, but it's interesting hearing the creative viewpoint of someone who's coming from a place that's completely outside the documentary tradition. As it happens, this is my second interview with Charles — I talked to him in 2003 about Masked and Anonymous, his Bob Dylan movie, a few months after its initial release. The film had gotten pretty badly beaten up by the critics, but he didn't seem too bitter about the whole experience, and took solace in Dylan's prediction on the set that reaction would be hostile toward the film at first, but that its reputation would improve as the years went on. He's a good guy, as far as I can tell, and with three films under his belt, he's quietly turning into one of the more unpredictable, adventurous directors in Hollywood. His next film is apparently an adaptation of Tommy Lee's Mötley Crüe book The Dirt, which definitely provides him with no end of awesome source material.
Here's our conversation:
* * * * *
“If you want to make God laugh,” the old proverb goes, “tell Him your plans.” To which director Larry Charles might add, if you want to make an atheist laugh, show him Religulous.
In Religulous, Charles follows comedian Bill Maher as he travels around the world, from the Holy Land theme park in Orlando, Florida to a bar for gay Muslims in Amsterdam, as he talks to a wide assortment of Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, both leaders and followers, as well as a few people who follow fringe faiths of their own wobbly design. Maher, whose mother was Jewish but who was brought up Catholic and now lives in a state of contented atheism, spars energetically with everyone he meets, trying to understand how so many intelligent people — many of them government officials of powerful countries — can possibly believe in an invisible, all-powerful person living in the sky or that the genealogy of all of mankind can be traced back to a garden inhabited by a talking snake.
Larry Charles’ career genealogy is equally improbable. He started out as a TV comedy writer, turning out dozens of episodes of shows like Seinfeld, Mad About You, The Tick, and Entourage before cutting his directing teeth on Larry David’s semi-improvised series Curb Your Enthusiasm. His first feature film as a director — 2003’s Masked and Anonymous, an underrated musical allegory starring and co-written by Bob Dylan — was savaged by critics, but Charles bounced back in a big way three years later with Borat, the one-of-a-kind Molotov cocktail of satire, road-trip documentary, and performance-art provocation that became one of the breakthrough pop cultural events of 2006.
Religulous is being marketed as a companion piece to Borat — get ready for another outrageous, taboo-smashing trip across America! — but it’s a much different animal. Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat, Bill Maher is playing himself, and except for a couple of moments where Maher’s subjects threaten to walk out on the interview, there’s much less of a sense of anything-can-happen danger to Religulous. And where Borat was an agent of chaos, Maher is a staunch advocate of reason: he likes science, he likes logic, and he wishes that the 15 per cent of Americans who identify themselves as belonging to no religious faith would get organized and push back against the fundamentalists who he believes are ruining his country.
Charles is an admirably clear thinker as well when it comes to his unique brand of comic documentaries. He spoke to me — and addressed some of my misgivings about Religulous — earlier this week over the phone from his office in Los Angeles.
Q: What was the mandate that you began with for Religulous? Did you go in with a specifically atheist agenda?
Larry Charles: There was definitely no atheist agenda. The hypothesis behind the movie was basically to make a Saturday night date movie, a rollicking, rock ’n’ roll rollercoaster ride through religion. We wanted to make a romp about religion. We wanted it to be a very funny movie about this very volatile, controversial subject that might shift the paradigm in some way.
Q: The movie has some of the flavour of Borat to it, but this one lacks that "prank" element that Borat had. I don’t know if that’s the word you would use —
LC: I wouldn’t, actually. With Borat, we created an alternate reality and the people in the film accepted that reality and operated within it as their own reality. Within that reality, they behaved absolutely honestly. It’s a lot more interesting conceptually than a prank, I would say.
Q: Fair enough. But did you learn anything, either technically or tactically, while making Borat that came in handy with Religulous?
LC: Yes. On Borat, we developed a filmmaking style that was very simple, very stripped-down, a very small-footprint style that was something I applied to Religulous as well.
Q: By “small footprint,” do you just mean a small crew?
LC: Yeah, our crew on Religulous was everybody that could fit in a van. There were no chairs, no crafts services, no glitter or glitz. Everybody had to get in the van, jump out, start filming, jump back in, and drive away. And that enabled us to get into places that we ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to — and to be in places where we didn’t belong, because we were so inconspicuous.
Q: What is your role on a film like this as a director? Are you guiding Bill Maher’s “performance” to any extent?
LC: The way I look at it is that Bill and I are making a film together, and that’s the feel that the movie should have. We’re driving along, I’m talking to him in the van, we’re hanging out, we’re talking to people, we’re laughing. My role in Borat and on this movie is to do whatever’s necessary to get the movie made. And that encompasses a lot of things between choosing angles. There’s a lot of X-factors on a movie like this that you can’t predict until you actually do it.
Q: One thing about the film that I did have misgivings about was that technique you employ of interpolating old movie clips and subtitles into the interviews to undercut what the people are saying. Could you talk a bit about what’s behind those choices?
LC: Well, I shot about 400 hours of film, and I have about 14.5 hours cut. So in the editing room, when we started to make choices about what to use, we decided to use those techniques when we thought they were somehow illuminating. And we thought they had to be earned. I could go through each of those moments and tell you why they exist, but I’ll give you an example. Take the interview with Jeremiah Cummings, who’s the African-American preacher who couldn’t quote the Bible properly.
Q: This is the guy who was in Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes?
LC: That’s the one. Now, here’s a man who’s a minister, who’s speaking before large congregations every Sunday, and who’s obviously some kind of charlatan or scam artist. And when the time comes for him to quote one of the most important passages from the Bible, he screws it up and manages to completely subvert its meaning. And I think that’s worth mocking and pointing out — that’s where the edgy, dark satire is. I want the audience to know that this guy is basically full of shit. I don’t think we pick on people in the movie at all, but I think when they’re being incredibly hypocritical or scary, it seems worthwhile to talk to the audience directly, in a sense.
Q: It seems as though, when you were picking out people to put in the movie, there are a lot of fringe figures and crackpots in there—
LC: Well, I would disagree with that. We’ve got Francis Collins, who’s one of the highest-level scientists in the country, we have two high-level Vatican priests, we have a senator, leaders of the Islamic church. There are numerous examples of people who are legitimate, valid, rational, normal members of society. I don’t think there’s a large percentage of crackpots. They may stand out more, because they’re so out there, but there’s not the preponderance that it might seem.
Q: Did you really try to interview the pope?
LC: Of course! We made inquiries to everybody — knowing, of course, that it was unlikely we’d get an audience. But you never know.
Q: Who is the core audience for this film? Is it that 15 per cent silent minority of atheists and non-believers?LC: I suppose that’s the core audience, but to me, what will make this movie successful is if people who would normally be aghast and offended by its subject matter find themselves at the mall on a Sunday night, they’ve seen The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, so they go see Religulous and they find themselves laughing in spite of themselves. That would be the greatest goal of the movie: to reach those people and have them go, “Yeah, religion is a little silly, isn’t it?” and shift the paradigm just a little bit.
Q: There’s a striking moment in that closing sermon where Bill Maher addresses what you might call the “soft believers,” the non-fundamentalists, and kind of calls on them to recognize the harmful effects of religion on the world and sort of lay off it, the way you might make a vow to stop eating fast food hamburgers.
LC: I think that’s a good assessment of what he’s saying. And that’s one of the things I most respect and admire about Bill — that he’s willing to talk to the people who would normally agree with him and risk alienating them for the sake of being honest with them and say what he believes is the truth. It’s a controversial part of the movie, because it attacks the people who would naturally its fans.
Q: I don’t know if it’s too early in the game for any controversies to have erupted yet, but are there any parts of the film that you think people might target, that you think are particularly incendiary?
LC: It’s interesting that you ask that — I’ve never been asked that. The only answer I can give is that you can never predict what people will seize upon. I know from screenings at Toronto and whatever which characters people tend to gravitate to, but I don’t know what scenes or ideas people are most offended by. There are many choices, obviously!
0 Yorumlar