Reel Thoughts Interview: Could It Happen Here?

When you listen to the vile rhetoric of Christian Conservatives like Michelle Bachmann and her “therapist” husband Marcus, who call LGBT people “barbarians” who are “linked to Satan”, it isn’t hard to sympathize with the foreign-born French Jews in Sarah’s Key, Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s heart-breaking drama based on the best-selling novel by Tatiana De Rosnay. Could such a witch-hunt happen again, this time to the LGBT community, the Mexican immigrant population or the Muslim community?

Director Paquet-Brenner pondered the question of whether such inhumanity as occurs in his film could happen again to another scapegoat minority when we spoke recently at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. “I don’t see gay people as different people, so I think everyone will appreciate the story. I am more in a political or religious perspective with Sarah’s Key, but I see where you are going,” Paquet-Brenner replied. “What is very important to me is that the film is universal, and so of course, you can include other minorities such as the gay community. I can see how someone especially in, how you say Deep America (Middle America), I understand how you can feel excluded or attacked, so you can definitely relate to these people. That is very interesting.”

Sarah’s Key interweaves two stories set almost seventy years apart in Paris. In 1942, ten year-old Sarah (the amazing Mélusine Mayance) is a Jew living in the Marais section of Paris when the police suddenly show up door-to-door to arrest all foreign Jews. Instinctively knowing that something terrible will happen to her family, she locks her young brother in a closet, assuring him that she will return. She is sure that her father, hiding in the basement, would come upstairs and free him, but he is found also and there is no one to save the boy as the family is taken to an indoor sports rink called the Vel’ D’Hiv.

In 2009, American journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) is investigating the infamous round up, where 13,000 French Jews were locked into the hot arena without food, water or bathrooms for three days, leading to conditions much worse than the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Those who survived were taken to concentration camps, including Sarah’s family. In her research, Julia discovers shocking connections to Sarah through her French husband’s family, and she is determined to uncover the truth of what happened to the little girl and her brother, who escaped internment in the camps.

“I often say that the story isn’t about a Jewish family, it’s about a family. The same thing could have happened in Rwanda during the genocide,” Paquet-Brenner explained. “It could happen to a gay couple living in Iran or Uganda.” He also knows that Scott Thomas’ following in the gay community holds appeal. “She’s an icon, right? I can see it because she is a very strong woman.”

The film is very faithful to the book. “I chose to work very hard on the screenplay, because if you try to fix it in the editing room, you’re dead. It has to work as a reading experience, and then it translates straight to the screen.” He did expand on what happened to Sarah, which turns out to be one of the film’s most touching parts. He split the filming in two to accommodate Scott Thomas’ schedule and to allow him to give the 1942 scenes the raw, hand-held camera technique that puts you right in the terrifying action.

“The thing with the round-up is that it’s not like the authorities were brutal on purpose with the Vel D’Hiv, it’s just that they were totally unprepared. In the police, you had people who were against it, and people who supported it. It was a very, very difficult time in France, society was totally torn apart. You had this Vichy Government who was collaborating with the Germans. My grandfather was a German Jew from Berlin and he was arrested by the French. It was very complicated. I like when Kristin says to the young journalist (who asks why no one objected to the round up), “What would you have done? You have no idea what you would do in that situation. Some people want to simplify it; I don’t.”

Paquet-Brenner has already received acclaim and French awards for his first film, Pretty Things, in which future Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard played twin sisters, one who assumes the other’s identity when she is murdered. The handsome director shows such mastery with Sarah’s Key, he deserves Oscar attention as well.

Sarah’s Key Review:

As terrible as it sounds, some films about the Holocaust and its aftermath leave you feeling unmoved, well-made though they may be. Schindler’s List was the most searing and gut-wrenching experience on the subject, and Sarah’s Key possesses a more modulated but similar power to devastate you.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays a part close to her life as Julia, an American married to a French man and living in Paris. Julia is a passionate journalist who wants to shed light on a shameful period in France’s history, when they aided the Nazis in persecuting the Jews. Like in Arizona today, however, it was the foreign-born who were singled out for arrest and who found themselves demonized by the politicians.

Julia discovers the story of one little girl who escaped in order to save her brother who’d been left behind in their Paris apartment, but she has no clue how close to home the story will hit. Gilles Paquet-Brenner does an incredible job putting you into Sarah’s life, and seamlessly layering it with Julia’s journey of discovery and heartache. The film leaves you feeling uplifted by the end, much like the experience of reading a perfect novel.

The performances, especially by young Mélusine Mayance as Sarah and Scott Thomas, will leave you catching your breath with their honest power. The story itself will reduce you to tears many times, but Paquet-Brenner is a compassionate director who cuts back and forth in time perfectly, saving you from dissolving into uncontrollable sobbing from the brutality of the 1942 atrocities.

Sarah’s Key is a mystery well worth unlocking, and you will find one of the best films of the year.

Interview and review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reverend's Interview: Meet Harmony Santana

Gun Hill Road has been winning rave reviews from critics and audiences since its premiere in competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Since then, the film — about a recently-released convict who returns home to discover his teenage son is living as a woman — scored the prestigious opening night slot at Outfest and a theatrical distribution deal. It will open throughout California and the US beginning tomorrow.

I had the opportunity to speak privately with Harmony Santana, who plays the movie's central trans character of Michael/Vanessa, as well as writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green during their recent visit to Los Angles. Currently undergoing her real-life transition from male to female, the 20-year old Santana is stunningly beautiful both on- and off-screen. She was just beginning the process when Green cast her in Gun Hill Road.

"I was looking for the genuine article," Green said. "I was looking for a real transgender person to play this transgender teen role, which was really hard." It took Green two months of searching through New York City nightclubs, GLBT community centers and drag shows before he was referred to Santana during NYC's Pride events. Santana was working an HIV prevention booth. Green described the part of Michael/Vanessa and asked Santana to audition even though she had no acting experience apart from a high school play.

Of her first professional acting experience, Santana glowingly recalls "It was like I was living a dream; I loved going to set, and the makeup and hair, everything." She said she found great support during the three-month shoot from her much more experienced co-stars Esai Morales (La Bamba, Caprica) and Judy Reyes (Scrubs), who play her parents. Santana gives an outstanding performance, and has already followed it up with what she describes as "a bitchy role" in not one but two entries in the Eating Out comedy series. "This is the start of my career," Santana says of her plan to become a successful actress and ultimately play non-transgender roles.

I asked her how she is both like and unlike the trans character she plays in Gun Hill Road. "We have the same boy problems; I think all transgender people do," Santana said in terms of the similarities. That being said, she had a boyfriend of two months at the time of my interview and reported things were going well. Of the differences, Santana noted her relationship with her father is much more estranged than that shown in the film between Michael/Vanessa and her father. "I haven't spoken to my dad in like four or five years," she said. Fortunately, Santana's family ties with her mother and 15 siblings are much stronger and they have been very supportive of her personal transformation. "I also didn't go through the physical stuff." Santana says in comparison to the abuse that Michael/Vanessa endures from her father and others.

Family isn't only the dominant theme in Gun Hill Road but was, according to Green, the inspiration behind his screenplay. "Someone very close to me in my life went through something similar, where he had a child in transition," Green shared. "I watched their family deteriorate over the course of a few years because of his inability to accept his child's transition, but at the same time he loved his child so much and I saw a child without her father." In the wake of this experience, Green decided he "wanted to make a piece of art that didn't necessarily give all the answers but at least pointed them in the right direction."

Audience response to the finished film (both nationally and internationally) has been tremendous, according to both Green and Santana. "People's eyes are being opened to a world they thought they knew but now they are getting to see another side of it," Green said. Santana has experienced viewers "coming up to me and hugging me and crying and saying how much the film means to them." She appreciates in particular a group of lesbians who came up to her and told her how much she is inspiring them, as well as Facebook messages she regularly receives saying the same.

As a trans person herself, I asked Santana about when she first began realizing she was different from other boys. "I was in the second grade," she replied. "I had gone into the bathroom at school and another boy followed me into the bathroom. We started making out and that was my first kiss ever. It all went from there." The three of us laughed as Santana debated whether her personal and romantic experiences have gone uphill or downhill after that early start.

Santana offered the following advice to other trans people: "Be yourself, be happy, and have hope in your family; they might not be supportive now but it takes time." Even if things don't work out, she spoke encouragingly of finding "family in other places, especially among your friends."

For more information on Gun Hill Road, visit the film's official website.

Interview by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.

Reverend's Interview: Alan Brown Gives Shakespeare a Gay Twist with Private Romeo

There have been contemporary adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's tragic saga of star-crossed young lovers from feuding families, notably Baz Luhrmann's 1995 movie version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. There has even been a prior all-male stage version, the off-Broadway hit R & J. But Alan Brown's Private Romeo is the first film to combine a contemporary setting of the play with an all-male cast.  The film will screen this Friday as part of this year's Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

In a recent phone conversation with the New York-based director, I asked Brown what were his sources of inspiration. "I lived in Japan for 8 years and taught my last two years there at a university using Franco Zeffirelli's (1968 film) Romeo and Juliet," Brown replied. "The Japanese love Shakespeare, but I also used the AIDS drama Longtime Companion and would have my students write plays based on those two movies. That's when I first made the connection between Romeo and Juliet and gay issues."

Brown had also seen R & J during its New York run, and was approached by the producers who held the rights to direct a film adaptation of it. That project failed to materialize, and Brown had moved on to studying soldiers' issues during the Iraq War. He met openly gay serviceman Daniel Choi and was inspired by the many stories he heard from GLBT troops. They served as fodder for Brown's 2007 film, Superheroes.

Growing calls for the repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy as well as increasing incidents of bullying of GLBT young people ultimately led Brown to make Private Romeo. "I will feel good about the repeal of DADT when they implement it," the filmmaker says. "When Bush was re-elected in 2004, I felt like a lot of people I knew were depressed and felt we were powerless."

Brown continued, "I asked myself 'How can I contribute as a filmmaker to this issue?' I felt like what I learned then was 'Tend to your own garden,' so I made Superheroes and now Private Romeo." Most of Brown's new film was shot at the Maritime College of SUNI in the Bronx. Interestingly, some of it was filmed at a Catholic boys' high school on Long Island, which welcomed the production after a nearby public school withdrew their permission to shoot on campus due to a football hazing incident there.

Apart from his childhood years in Scranton, Pennsylvania ("I grew up Jewish in a very Catholic city," he said) and the time he spent in Japan, Brown is a longtime New Yorker. He started out as a journalist before deciding to pursue filmmaking full time. Brown has been partnered for 20 years with a Japanese man who works in the art world.

Brown had been planning to return to Japan to make what was supposed to be his next movie, Audrey Hepburn's Neck, based on his novel. Production has been postponed in the wake of the recent earthquake and tsunami that has devastated the country. "The story is set in Japan and is about cross-cultural, heterosexual sexual obsession," according to Brown, "but (the main male character's) best friend is a gay American in Japan who only dates Japanese men."

In the meantime, Brown has developed a music film, The Park. It will feature a large cast of diverse characters, some of them gay, who converge for a music festival in New York's Prospect Park. "It is Altman-esque, with overlapping stories all taking place in one day," Brown says. Shooting is to begin in October.

As one of a growing number of filmmakers dedicated to telling GLBTQ stories, Alan Brown and his Private Romeo represent Outfest at its best.

UPDATE: The US distribution rights for Private Romeo have been acquired by Wolfe Video. The film will be released theatrically this Fall in partnership with The Film Collaborative and debut on DVD/VOD in 2012.

Interview by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.

Reel Thoughts Interview: Cole Burden Takes the Watch

Hailing from Rome, Georgia, Cole Burden is a long way from Paris, but he still finds himself climbing a barricade and fighting for French independence eight times a week. As Courfeyrac in the hit musical Les Misérables, which has launched its 25th Anniversary tour, he is part of a band of idealistic students who rise up against the oppressive government. Given the current climate of union-busting and stripping rights from public employees, Les Misérables couldn’t be more timely.

Set in the early nineteenth century, Les Misérables is Victor Hugo’s epic story of love, revolution and redemption, centering on Jean Valjean, a former prisoner, who spends his life trying to help others, but is pursued by Inspector Javert, who vows to bring Valjean down no matter how long it takes. A love triangle develops between Cosette, Valjean’s adopted daughter, Marius, an idealistic student, and Eponine, the daughter of the cruel couple who raised Cosette before Valjean rescued her. The show’s staying power has always been its gorgeous score, featuring songs like “I Dreamed a Dream”, “On My Own”, “Bring Him Home” and the comedic “Master of the House.”

“It’s nice to stay on the go. I like that lifestyle,” Burden explained. The handsome twenty-seven year old actor gave up plans to sing opera when he realized that he would be relegated to doing the same few roles due to his vocal range. “I’ve always been drawn to acting, in film or on stage. I just happen to be able to sing.” Musical theater fulfills him more. He has been in workshops of Yank!, the musical about gay soldiers in love during World War II, and played Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother, in the new musical Bonnie and Clyde by Hunter Foster of Urinetown fame.

“I think I’m the only actor in musical theater who had never seen Les Miz,” Burden laughed. “It’s such a rewarding show to do because I do a lot of workshops of new musicals and you’re trying to get a feel for what the audience thinks. With Les Miz, it’s so great because it’s such a ‘sure thing’ every night. The audience is singing the finale with us every night. I think every actor needs to experience what it’s like to do such a hit, because that’s not always the case. It’s nice to do something that everybody loves.”

Being in the ensemble means that Burden is working non-stop. “I think I have fifteen costume changes,” he explained. “It’s a lot of fun. I get to be a little bit of everything. I’m a sailor, I’m one of the poor at the beginning of the show, and I’m Courfeyrac, one of the students, who’s told, “Courfeyrac, you take the watch”. I’ve started a blog on my website called “Taking the Watch” where I let people know what’s going on on the tour. I also understudy Bamatabois, who’s one of the fops. I get to put on a lot of make-up and beat up on (downtrodden heroine) Fantine, so that’s a lot of fun.” Burden’s blog gives a rare look behind the scenes at an actor’s life on the road, including one incident where the infamous iPhone Daylight Savings glitch made him late to a performance. “I just want to talk to people about life within Les Miz. Nothing personal, but there are so many fans of the show that I think they’d love to hear stuff that goes on. It’s such an epic production, I think that there are lots of interesting stories that one can tell.”

Burden devotes a lot of his time to raising money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. “It’s so important as an actor to stay abreast of what’s going on, for lack of a better term, ‘in the real world’.” He is committed to making sure that people continue to fight the spread of HIV, and is proud that they as a cast have already raised more than $75,000. “Just the difference (in attitudes about AIDS) as a gay man between being twenty-seven and twenty-three... it’s like there’s a complacency about unprotected sex. I just don’t understand where that comes from. I guess we’re just getting away from an understanding of how it all originated. It’s very scary, actually.”

He’s glad that Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, a play about the early days of the AIDS crisis, is back on stage in New York. “I draw a correlation between that play and what happens to the students in Les Miz. It’s about standing up and fighting, literally going into the streets and fighting for a cause that you believe in. In Les Miz, it’s about children and education and the decline of Paris and we have to take control and get it back together because the government is not going to. I relate more to seeing a film like Milk and seeing what Harvey Milk really did for the gay community. That’s something as a person that I can relate to, that I’m passionate about.” Burden hopes that people of all generations can take the message from Les Misérables that you have to stand up and be willing to fight against those who want to keep you down.”

Interview by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reverend's Interview: Mike Mills Memorializes His Gay Dad in Beginners

No one was more surprised than graphic artist turned filmmaker Mike Mills when his father came out as a gay man shortly after the death of Mills' mother. Mills has parlayed his unusual experience into the alternately funny and dramatic new movie Beginners, which opens June 3 in Los Angeles and will expand throughout California and the nation next month. I had the opportunity to watch the movie in advance and speak with Mills about it.

"I have so much at stake with this project: My memories of my dad and my career as a filmmaker," the sensitive, soft-spoken screenwriter/director said. "I feel more like a sharer than an author." Beginners is only Mills' third cinematic outing, following the 2005 film festival favorite Thumbsucker and the 2007 documentary Does Your Soul Have a Cold? "This script was developed with the belief that something this personal can become universal."

Mills' father was 75 years old when he came out and had been married to his mother for 45 years. When his parents married in the 1950's, conservatism and homophobia were the norm in the United States. Mills' father told his wife-to-be he was gay prior to their marriage. She was Jewish, and faced as much difficulty fitting into post-war America as he did. Subsequently, Mills says, "My mom took off her Jewish badge and he took off his gay badge."

Following his mother's death and dad's revelation, their son watched with equal parts surprise, confusion and admiration as his father became heavily involved in Southern California gay life and began a relationship with a younger man. "He just started living this explosive new life," marveled Mills. "He became more emotionally alive than I'd ever seen him." Just five years later, however, the elder Mills was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away. His father's death served as the true catalyst for what would become Beginners.

Mills was fortunate to secure the participation of two fine actors in the roles based on his father and himself: Christopher Plummer (The Sound of Music and an Oscar nominee for 2009's The Last Station) and gay favorite Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge!, Star Wars Episodes 1-3). The filmmaker wrote them both very personal, impassioned letters asking them to be in his movie. While both actors were initially hesitant to play characters so close to Mills, they eventually agreed based on the strength of Mills' screenplay and his reassurance that they could make the parts their own. They deliver excellent performances, as do fellow cast members Mary Page Keller (as Mills' mother), Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) and ER's Goran Visnjic, who plays Mills' father's late-in-life boyfriend. An impressive Jack Russell terrier also plays a pivotal role.

"The experience I'm most trying to communicate with Beginners is that of an adventure, the feeling of something breaking open," Mills shared. "While this film has illness and death, it's about beginnings, change, and how deeply funny life can be in its most serious moments." It is a touching movie with truly universal appeal. As Mills has learned via feedback from audience members at early screenings, his father's long-closeted homosexuality wasn't as unique as the filmmaker originally thought.

Beginners is composed of both autobiographical and fictional elements. "I wanted to root around between the way things really happened and the way we choose to remember them," Mills says. In the film, Mills goes back and forth between events in 1955, when his parents married, and 2003, when his father died. The historical sequences include a powerful gay rights montage set to words about "becoming real" taken from the classic children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit.

"The film is hopefully asking, 'What is real, anyway?' Are these memories real, or did I get them wrong?" according to Mills. "I lived with a man whose biography was somewhat fictionalized, a performance of sorts. He had to hide deep, personal, intimate things."

While Beginners tells a broader story than just a gay-themed one, there is considerable gay interest in it. "To be honest, the gay community is the audience I am most concerned about," Mills told me. "My dad's gayness taught me so much as a straight man, but it's definitely a film by a straight man curious about his gay dad and I'm not sure how that will resonate." I assured Mills I didn't think he has anything to worry about; between Plummer's liberated performance and the overall humanity of the film, Beginners will move gay and straight viewers alike.

"I do think my father would have loved coming out to the world through Beginners," Mills concluded. "He would have seen it as keeping the party going — but with a larger invite list."

Interview by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.