Interview with Ryan Eslinger

Alton, Illinois native Ryan Eslinger made his first feature film, Madness and Genius, between his sophomore and junior years at New York University. The film went on to premiere at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival, and garnered attention for Eslinger as an emerging talent. His second feature, When a Man Falls in the Forest, boasted the sort of star power that independent sophomore efforts can rarely claim, with a cast that included Dylan Baker, Sharon Stone, and Timothy Hutton. Developed at the Sundance Institute's workshops, the film went on to be nominated for a Golden Bear at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. Eslinger's latest film, Daniel and Abraham, is a micro-budget feature that utilizes just two actors and a snowbound forest. It was screened at the St. Louis Filmmaker's Showcase in July, and is headed to the St. Louis International Film Festival this November. As a follow-up to my piece on the film at Look/Listen, I spoke with Ryan about his approach to film-making, and what's going on beneath Daniel and Abraham's frosty surface.

GC: In some respects, Daniel and Abraham represents a fairly significant shift from your previous film, When a Man Falls in the Forest, particularly in terms of the scale of the production. Was that reactive in response to your experience making When a Man Falls in the Forest, or has the sort of micro-budget, total-control approach utilized in Daniel and Abraham been a long-gestating interest?

RE: I did not film Daniel and Abraham as a reaction to my experience making When a Man Falls in the Forest.  Aside from the fact that I think a gritty micro-budget best serves the story of Daniel and Abraham, I was also trying to find new ways to challenge myself. Daniel and Abraham was definitely not a project on which I had total control. When you shoot out in the woods in the middle of winter, you don't have control over much of anything, including the weather and your ability to hold your hands steady. The one thing you do have control over is your inner drive to keep pushing forward and put one foot in front of the other. It is an almost meditative experience. I had hoped this would be the case, and I wanted to experience working in these conditions.

GC: The screenplay is what really captured my attention about Daniel and Abraham. It contains straightforward thriller elements, but also strong allegorical currents. The conflict between the titular characters almost comprises a dialog on abstract concepts like gratitude, duty, and humility. Can you talk a bit about the genesis for this story, and how you and your co-writers developed the film's distinctive tone?

RE: I originally wrote Daniel and Abraham as a completely different script that had eight or nine characters. However, the story was not working, so I threw out most of it and kept only two of the characters. I had a couple passages of dialogue that I gave to [co-writers and actors] Gary [Lamadore] and David [Williams], and we all sat down together and they read through the material. They began to improvise scenes, and I recorded and transcribed portions of those scenes. I used their improvisations to write twenty pages, then I brought this back to them, and they rewrote the new material to fit their own voices and improvise more. This process was repeated until we had a completed script.

GC: The winter setting is one of the keys to the aura of menace that pervades the film. The link between the savagery of nature and savagery of man is one of the hoariest tropes in fiction, but Daniel and Abraham establishes it very unobtrusively, and the effect is quite potent. Was the winter environment always a part of the story as you originally envisioned it?

RE: It was fairly early on that I decided I wanted to shoot in the winter. No matter how many layers of clothing we wore in the woods, the cold always found its way in. You would get so cold that your bones hurt. In a similar sense, Abraham finds his way into the deepest levels of Daniel's subconscious, so much so that, as the film moves along, you begin to question whether Abraham is real or a projection of Daniel's mind. I think I prefer that symbolism to a savagery of nature/man symbolism.

GC: Gary Lamadore is astonishing in the film, but in many ways David Williams has the more difficult task as an actor. The film follows Daniel's perspective, and we're inclined to be sympathetic to him. Yet the film is in a sense about his rapid moral slide into selfishness and aggression, or perhaps just about the sort of situation that reveals his true character. Was developing the character of Daniel a difficult task for you and David?

RE: Personally, I think both Gary and David have equally difficult parts. David slips into selfishness and aggression, as you said, but Gary's character also transforms. At the beginning, he seems threatening and conniving, but as the story moves along, we begin to think that maybe he really does know what he is talking about. After all, if Daniel had listened to him at key points instead of cutting him off, Abraham might have helped him properly clean his wound, et cetera. That is the ambiguity we tried to instill in both characters. Whenever David and Gary would be reading a scene and something would seem too one-dimensionally good or bad, we would try to add layers and additional motivations to their actions.

GC: In a sense, both When a Man Falls in the Forest and Daniel and Abraham are films about failure and stasis. Where the former is steeped in the ennui of middle age, the latter brackets this in a way, touching on both the aimlessness of the young and the regrets of older individuals. Do you see introspective characters as essential to the kind of stories you want to tell?

RE: I wouldn't say it is essential to the stories I want to tell. I'm always willing to throw out everything and tackle a different style and subject altogether.

GC: Given those environmental challenges you faced during the production of Daniel and Abraham, does the notion of "art from adversity" have any resonance for you? That is, do challenges (anticipated and otherwise) help a work becomes something better than it would have been otherwise? Would that apply to Daniel and Abraham specifically, or to film-making in general, or is that too sweeping a statement?

RE: I definitely think that challenges can stimulate creativity, but I also think it depends on the person. I thrive on pressure. I played basketball for many years, and, in one game, I experienced a somewhat clichéd moment when my team was down by one point, there were only a few seconds left on the clock, and I had to make two free throws in order for us to win. Intense pressure like that makes you realize that you are in control of your life. You control the outcome of the game, whether it's the last few seconds or first few seconds on the clock. Some people probably don't like being reminded that they are in control of their life, but I do.

GC: Taking a another step back, it sounds like your greatly value filmmaking as a personal challenge for yourself. Is that a fair assessment? For you, does a film's value as a personal accomplishment have more, less, or equal weight than its function for the audience: conveying a message, providing entertainment, evoking a mood?

RE: I do value the personal challenge, because what is the point of doing something you know you can do? Records would never be broken, technology would never be invented, et cetera. Regarding an audience's reaction: my favorite films tend to be those that can be interpreted a hundred different ways by a hundred different people. Their meaning can change over time, too. The films almost feel like living organisms. I strive to create these types of films, so in that respect, their function for the audience is extremely important. It is equally important as the personal challenge factor.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy

2009 // France // Jan Kounen // April 14, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

B - Jan Kounen's speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love. Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow. The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say "kindred spirits," the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair. British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots—and inevitable implosion—that can occur when two like-minded souls collide. Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5's creation underline the film's fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration. These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love. In Kounen's expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion's poetic ruminations on emotional states.

The Kids Are All Right

2010 // USA // Lisa Cholodenko // August 11, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

B - It's too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules' (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story's conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it. However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules' teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement. There's nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko's approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation. Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire. It is Cholodenko's talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat. It's enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film's narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.

Miami Vice (Unrated Director's Edition)

2006 // USA // Michael Mann // August 9, 2010 // Blu-ray - Universal (2008)

The film's relatively recent vintage notwithstanding, the dreaded consensus seems to have already decreed that Miami Vice belongs in the lower tiers of Michael Mann's oeuvre. However, the film has its lonely and dogged boosters, among them Slant luminaries Ed Gonzalez and Nick Schager, as well as Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies blogger Kevin J. Olson. Truth be told, it was Kevin's recent appreciation for the film that provoked me to finally visit Mann's contemporized vision of Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs' neon-drenched world. While I can't share the aforementioned writers' assessment that it is a great work, there is far more roiling beneath Miami Vice's slick surface than might be immediately apparent.

The film's design lustily embraces the faint air of the ridiculous that permeated its namesake television series, at least when it comes to the fashions, cars, and architecture. The world of Miami Vice is one where undercover narcotics officers drive Ferraris, dwell in dazzling condos, and pilot speedboats in their off hours. The cops and crooks alike possess flawless Caribbean fashion sense, sip mojitos behind velvet ropes, and have access to an unlimited supply of firepower, gadgets, and vehicles. Yet Mann presents this world without a wink or a titter, with absolute conviction. It is as though the goal is to submerge us in kitsch to the point where we can no longer detect that it is kitsch. The effect is undeniably heady, particularly when paired with the film's lurid, domineering aesthetic. (The sky itself essentially becomes a canvas for Mann to paint with some truly astonishing hues.) Miami Vice is an aggressively cool film, but it never seems to be striking a pose. It just happens to have been filmed in an aggressively cool alternate universe.

Mann, who also wrote the screenplay, has a focused and elegant conception of what Miami Vice should be, and he is scrupulous about keeping it on track. There are action sequences, but it's not really an action film. The chases and gunplay primarily serve as jittery releases of dramatic tension, rather than delivery devices for drama. It's a story about cops, but it's not really a police procedural. Mann fetishizes the visual language of law enforcement rather than its logistical minutiae. Given that the film maintains the director's preference for emotional chilliness (or at least a forlornness that precludes flamboyant emotional clashes), it can't really be regarded as a character study.

So what is Miami Vice? Ultimately, I think it proves to be a surprisingly simple tale of moral vexation, where the triumph of righteousness—and the tears that result—was never in doubt. While Mann has long exhibited an absorption with male honor codes, his focus has always been on the proximate consequences of such codes. Here he takes a much more melancholy, even meditative approach, particularly in his presentation of the male-female dyads of Sonny-Isabella and, to a lesser degree, Rico-Trudy. Rarely have characters in a Mann joint smelled their unhappy fates on the wind with as much precision as these four, and yet they are still willing to luxuriate in fleeting moments of pleasure, joy, and human intimacy. Whatever the film's flaws or self-imposed restraints, its tone is an undeniable achievement: Mann evokes decadence and moral peril without the aura of doom. Miami Vice is ripe with the sensation that this fallen world cannot accommodate compromises or hesitation, and will never forgive us our bad choices.

The Damned United

2009 // UK // Tom Hooper // August 9, 2010 // DVD - Sony (2010)

This prickly tale of the rise and fall (and subsequent humbling) of notoriously sharp-tongued football manager Brian Clough provides an array of unexpected pleasures. To be sure, the film boasts a worthy pedigree. It was adapted by Frost/Nixon and The Queen writer Peter Morgan from a novel by David Peace, who also penned the Red Riding quartet, which was itself adapted into one of the finest British films of the past decade. However, director Tom Hooper was not known to me, save by reputation as the helmsman of all seven episodes of HBO's lauded John Adams. Accordingly, it's rewarding to witness Hooper's adroit handling of The Damned United's twin timelines (a structure that echoes, among other works, Sean Penn's Into the Wild), as well as his determination to tweak sports movie conventions. There are plenty of histrionic confrontations and tearful reunions, all of them entirely unsurprising, but for a film about football, it boasts remarkably little gameplay footage. Hooper and Morgan keep the focus on Clough's personality: his unflagging ambition, unfortunate taste for conflict, and self-destructive hubris. It's a daring thing to make a sports film about the limits of personal achievement, even if the subject is a manager rather than an athlete. The Damned United's full-throated commitment to its themes is impressive, and that commitment drips from every frame and performance. Cinematographer Ben Smithard's striking recreation of 1970s England is exquisite, from moldering Leeds to sun-kissed Brighton. And while Michael Sheen doesn't quite seem to inhabit the same world as his fellow performers, his portrayal of Clough—the startling blend of priggishness, throbbing ego, and lip-curling desperation—is mesmerizing stuff.

Inception

2010 // USA // Chistopher Nolan // July 27, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

My second descent into Christopher Nolan's breathless heist-of-the-mind proved to be a far richer experience than I had anticipated. I settled into my seat prepared to engage in a little due diligence: putting to rest some lingering questions vis-à -vis the mechanics of the film's "shared dreaming" conceit, as well as resolving my creeping suspicions that Inception's aspirations of thematic profundity would prove to be hollow in the cold light of another viewing. On this second point, I was pleased to be proved wrong.

While the film's labyrinthine plot has been subject to endless online parsing—see Sam Adams' essential, exhaustive summary and exegesis at Salon, if you're still sorting it out—all the crunchy specifics quickly receded into the background on a second viewing. A pre-existing familiarity with the story's stacked levels of consciousness and elaborate science-fiction rules (thin on the science end though they might be) allowed me to engage with the film's other facets, which proved to be deeper than I remembered.

With hindsight, it's apparent that Cobb is not only not the hero of this story, but may actually be the villain, albeit one that is more negligent and selfish than actively malicious. His obsessive attachment to Mal and his determination to be re-united with his children (and who can fault him for the latter?) results in a horrendous lack of judgment, setting up the story's most perilous conflicts. For the other team members, there's not that much as stake in the inception of Robert Fischer. If their mission fails, all that's lost is a share of their reward from Saito. Cobb's deceptions—he conceals both his problems with Mal and the risks associated with Yusuf's custom sedative—put them all in danger, including Saito himself, who's bank-rolling the whole endeavor. Almost as quickly as she is introduced, Ariadne steps into the role of Cobb's conscience: she's having none of his taciturn, lone wolf posturing, in light of the peril he's placing them in. These aspects stand out much more starkly the second time down the rabbit hole, almost to the point where the heady action—which is so intrinsic to the film's initial wallop—becomes its least interesting aspect to dwell on.

Admittedly, there's not much spark between DiCaprio and Cotillard, and Nolan isn't willing to do the heavy lifting to justify his leads' glistening tears and howls of anguish. Still, Cobb's reluctance to let go of his wife's memory is the dynamo that generates Inception's dark energy, and on my second go-around, I was much more taken with the story of the man's profoundly damaged psyche. In this, the film shares much with Nolan's Memento, as both feature protagonists who exude confidence and street-smarts, and yet dwell inside bubbles of fantasy and denial. At least in poor Leonard's case, his delusion is entwined with his short-term memory loss; Cobb, meanwhile, has no excuses for his behavior, other than his apparent belief that his skill at extraction makes him exceptional, and therefore above his own rules. If the story of Fischer Senior and Junior is somewhat lacking in emotional vigor, it's nonetheless fascinating to witness all the ways in which Cobb's journey parallels that of the young billionaire. The film's heist is, of course, as much about Cobb's catharsis as Fischer's. While I'm not convinced that Cobb is "really" the subject of the inception, or the more baroque theory that Araidne is actually his therapist, the contours of Nolan's script suggest that Cobb's tale is the one that matters here. Everything else in the story comments upon and adds texture to that fundamental drama of one man's stubborn refusal to move on.

While my own reaction to the film has been quite positive, some of the criticisms aimed at the film are nonetheless observant and ably articulated. Dennis Cozzalio's take, particularly his trenchant pinpointing of some of Nolan's questionable storytelling choices, comes closest to the reaction of my own Dark Side, a bitter imp that hates everything brash, everything self-important, and especially everything brashly self-important (which Inception most certainly is). That said, talking about criticism itself (or, horrors, talking about criticism about criticism) makes me a little queasy, so for now I'll just point you in the direction of some of the usual suspects, some of whom are much less sanguine than I about the film's merits: Glenn Kenny, the Film Doctor, Jason Bellamy, J.D. at Radiator Heaven, and, naturally, Jim Emerson, whose antipathy for Nolan's films is well-known and always impressively elucidated.