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Elephant and Shattered Glass focus on the truth
BY GERALD PEARY
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This week, Boston gets two of the more thought-provoking American independent films of 2003, both of them aiming to make sense of crazy, true-life happenings. Elephant reimagines the Columbine massacre at a liberal, suburban high school in the American Northwest. Shattered Glass revisits reporter Stephen Glass’s egregious violations of journalistic ethics at the New Republic. It took some serious globetrotting to get the stories behind these movies. Last May, I attended the press conference for Elephant filmmaker Gus Van Sant at Cannes, following the world-premiere screening; I interviewed the personable Oregonian several months later, at September’s Toronto International Film Festival. The world premiere of Shattered Glass, over Labor Day weekend, found me at the Telluride Festival in Colorado. On a bench outside the movie theater, I sat down with Charles "Chuck" Lane, the New Republic editor (he’s now a Washington Post reporter) who blew the whistle on Stephen Glass’s fabricating of magazine essays. At Cannes, flanked by the head of HBO Films, Colin Callender, Van Sant had this to say: "The origin of the project was way back, when Columbine was happening. I had an idea to do a mainstream TV program, a more traditional, straight-ahead drama about the real kids, get their problems and put them on the air. Harmony Korine was going to write a screenplay. I pitched it around LA, but nobody could entertain doing a movie because of sanctions against violence. Until Colin Callender told me we could do Elephant for HBO Films." Callender added, "It’s not that we couldn’t do Columbine, but I thought just showing the events straight might not do it. Why not something more exploratory?" Back to Van Sant: "I wasn’t thinking of playing to an audience of TV viewers, to someone switching from HBO to West Wing. I treated Elephant as a film. But we don’t usually in film get to work in 1:33, the television format, and also that of 16mm films projected in schools. Harris [Savides, the cinematographer] and I were very excited about that. "I decided to continue with the way Gerry was put together: a film that didn’t have a hard script and could change every day. We started out using a very wide 8mm lens like Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, but that didn’t work. It was too distorted an image. Following all these characters with a camera [in long, long takes] is something that evolved that we liked, but we don’t know why. One of my favorite shots is holding on the back of [teenager] Alex Frost’s head while he plays the piano. We were going to hire a Seattle jazz musician to compose music. But one day during the shoot, Alex was playing piano in the high-school cafeteria. Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata was one piece he’d learned, so we used that for the film. "We’d watched Bowling for Columbine before shooting. It’s brilliant. I’m a big Michael Moore fan, glad we have him. Lots of incidents in my film come from information about what actually happened at Columbine. When Alex drinks from a cup in the cafeteria, that’s from a Columbine surveillance film.’ A European critic asked whether Van Sant wanted the audience to feel emotionally for his high-schoolers. "It’s not that I don’t want you involved in the characters, but I want you involved by watching them, an observation, the way documentarian Frederick Wiseman sits back and lets things occur. We could have invented a more traditional psychological narrative. I have my ideas why Columbine happened, but that’s not this film. I wanted a poetic impression rather than dictating an answer. I wanted to include the audience’s thoughts." I asked whether Elephant was shaped, as Gerry had been, by the cinema of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr? "He continues to be an influence," Van Sant said. "The overlapping of moments, the repeats in Tarr’s Satan’s Tango, inform part of this film. His long pieces of film are still inspirations, but also the works of [Andrei] Tarkovsky, [Miklós] Jancsó, and [Aleksandr] Sokurov." But what did Elephant get from popular culture? When I talked with Van Sant at the Toronto Fest, he admitted to one major influence that he hadn’t mentioned at Cannes: Video games. "I didn’t know anything about them, but people kept saying, ‘It’s those games that cause violence,’ so I started watching them. And playing them. I played Tomb Raider until I was obsessed with it. It calls for an interactive imagination, and there are some intellectual sides to some other games. When we were making Gerry, I showed Tomb Raider to Harris. What I wanted to do technically was almost impossible without a huge budget like The Matrix. Among other things, I’d have the camera behind a character and it suddenly flips in front. But I was afraid to reference the video game in front of my actors. My sound man said to me on the set, ‘I played a couple of rounds of Tomb Raider,’ but I didn’t answer him, keeping quiet around Casey [Affleck] and Matt [Damon]." So, do video games cause violence? Especially ultra-violent ones like Doom? "If you obsessively do anything, like playing solitaire for solid weeks, that might influence your behavior, make you anti-social. If you play Doom, you are meeting people on the Internet, you dodge bullets, shoot them. The person you just shot might be a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota. If you do that for a long time, you start to fantasize. You might say, ‘Let’s get back at people we don’t like.’ In Elephant, one of the killers is briefly playing a video game. We couldn’t get rights to Doom, so we designed one ourselves that resembles Gerry, with two guys walking in a desert." Perhaps the bulk of Elephant is a reality-based, slo-mo video game? The high-schoolers walk and walk and walk prior to the climactic shootings, when many of these walkers become human targets. "Hollywood busies itself with ultra-scene changing, getting quickly in and out of places. But a lot of stories happen in our lives when we park six blocks away and walk. If we can show walking slowly to a mailbox and back, it can be a brilliant, brilliant film." AND STEPHEN GLASS — how did he get away with all those made-up stories at the New Republic? Good question. "When I first saw Shattered Glass, I sat next to my dad," said Chuck Lane, who served as an adviser to the movie. "And my dad said, ‘How come you didn’t catch him?’ " The former New Republic editor, who’s played with fierce, steely command by Peter Sarsgaard on screen (the great performance of 2003?), explained the detective-work failures of the New Republic to his Telluride audience: "The New Yorker has 30 fact checkers; we could hire only two people. Plainly, we had too much reliance on author’s notes. And Steve actually did some real reporting. His stories would have one chapter that’s real, one chapter made up. In one story, he mentioned the town clerk of Turnip Seed, South Carolina. I was sure it was a lie. I checked, and he’d actually called her." A young man in the Telluride audience admitted that he kind of admired Glass because of the youthful reporter’s astonishing chutzpah. Lane found that comment disturbing. "The thing you don’t see is the trail of personal destruction. He was very close to the young staff people. At least one person was thinking of quitting because of the firing of Stephen. They woke up one day to see he’d been hurting them big-time. We all love a rogue in America, a confidence artist, But if you were in the thick of it, you wouldn’t have appreciated it. It was a systematic con, such an abuse of friends and colleagues. Those on staff he was closest to? None have spoken to him in five years, and they don’t want to." When we talked one-on-one, I asked Lane how Glass, an editor of the school newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, got to the New Republic anyway. "He came on in 1995, as Andrew Sullivan’s intern. Steve ran errands for him. There was an interregnum in early 1996. That’s when Steve started writing. He got a toehold when no one was in charge, before Michael Kelly." A big dramatic moment in the movie comes when publisher Martin Peretz fires Kelly, the popular editor, and makes Lane the new editor, over the vocal objections of much of the staff. According to Lane, Stephen Glass recognized a glad-handing opportunity. "He knocked on my door, asked how I was doing. It was the same day I was appointed, a Friday. We talked for 20 minutes. He was very cooperative, comforting, do I need any help? He was the only staff to do it." How did Peter Sarsgaard do such a smashing job being Chuck Lane? "We talked on the phone several times, maybe for an hour and a half, and later I came up to the set in Montreal. He wanted me to tell my story, what had gone through my mind. He wanted to hear my voice, but he was pretty much on his own. His approach was that he’s not doing an impression of Chuck Lane, that he can’t get into the business of copying me. "But me seeing the movie? It’s an out-of-body experience. There are points where it’s eerie how close the film comes to reality, like the telephone calls Peter makes, editor to editor. But when he’s giving Chloë Sevigny a lecture, I never did that. Her character, Caitlin, is a composite who stands in for the sentiment of a lot of the staff." Is Lane embarrassed by being the hero of the movie, catching and then firing Glass? "A little embarrassed, but I’ll take it. When it all happened in reality, I didn’t feel like a hero. I felt very defensive. I never guessed people would say, ‘He took action.’ I was so wrapped up in my failure, my responsibility to the New Republic." Was he ultimately applauded by the staff, as happens in the movie? "As I remember, they did clap. If it’s not true, I’ll feel really silly having said it’s true." I allowed, "I hate movies that have people applauding the hero." Lane retorted: "I hate those movies too, except this one.’ Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.sd.com
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