SANTA BARBARA -- "We're all struggling with that gray zone," observed Gavin Hood, director of the South African audience favorite "Tsotsi" in identifying the common ground occupied by the seven indie-minded filmmakers on the Santa Barbara Film Festival's "Directors on Directing" panel.
To the challenge to the group by moderator and
Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart to explain the broad success achieved by "Brokeback Mountain," Hood responded that, "I think what's exciting about it is that they were not afraid to explore the gray zone. Enough of stories just about good and evil."
Duncan Tucker, director of "Transamerica," elaborated that, "It's easy to create worlds fueled on dualism. We don't live in a red or blue country; we live in a purple-pixilated country. 'Brokeback Mountain' is an old-fashioned Shakespearean tragedy; it just doesn't have characters you've seen before."
To which "Crash" director Paul Haggis rejoined, "I think they created a new stereotype. Now people all over the world are going to look at them and say, 'Cowboys ... gay!"
Reacting to Bart's view that the public's enchantment with Hollywood formulas is diminishing, members of the panel, which also included Hany Abu-Assad ("Paradise Now"), Mike Binder ("The Upside of Anger"), Bennett Miller ("Capote") and Thomas Bezucha ("The Family Stone"), expressed general agreement with Bezucha's optimism that "the audience appetite is stronger for stories we're not familiar with."
"The pieces that have gotten people's attention this year are passion pieces," Haggis opined. "They're films that people would jump from a second-floor window to make." Turning to Miller, he queried, "How long did it take you to get your film made?" "A few weeks," Miller deadpanned, summoning up the collegiate and often humorous relationship that develops among competing filmmakers during the awards season traveling circus show that moves from banquet to panel to ceremony.
At $17 million, Bezucha's film was by some distance the most costly of any made by the panelists, and Binder chimed in that, "I think comedies benefit from leaner budgets. The money seems to kill them. I don't know how you can be funny with that much pressure."
Pressure of a very different kind has been felt by Palestinian filmmaker Abu-Assad, whose Oscar-nominated feature deals with suicide bombers. Asked if there had been a reaction by Hamas, he said, "Officially, they liked it. I think it's good news because a film that has both sides and makes people think is a good thing. Even Iran bought the film. Maybe this is the film that allows people to think."
Getting any indie film off the ground is easier with a name actor, a ploy taken by Haggis for his ensembler. "I started with Don Cheadle. I needed someone that other actors want to be with. I knew they didn't want to be with me!"
To reward the 11 leading actors who agreed to work for scale, the producers worked out a formula by which the thesps would equally receive "a cut of the pie in the sky, which they still haven't seen."
Generally, Haggis said, actors on such a film can defer or waive salaries, "and they both mean the same thing," quipped Binder.
All the panelists were asked to cite the films that most influenced them to become filmmakers. Bezucha mentioned "Jaws"; Miller said "A Clockwork Orange," "Walkabout" and "The Pawnbroker"; Haggis pointed to "State of Seige" and "Z"; Binder singled out "Annie Hall"; Tucker summoned up the work of Preston Sturges and Jean Renoir; while Hood recalled an unknown South African film he saw at age 9 called "El Lollipop," which showed him kids like himself onscreen for the first time.
But it was Abu-Assad who had the most evocative answer. "It was 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' especially the scene in which they weren't allowed to watch television. But I was in the cinema with someone I was madly in love with but she wasn't with me, so I thought if I would make movies, she would be in love with me."
Contact Todd McCarthy at
tmccarthy@reedbusiness.com