By: James Rocchi

(With American Teen opening nationwide this week, we at Cinematical are re-running our Sundance 2008 interview with director Nanette Burstein.)

One of the biggest word-of-mouth buzz hits of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nanette Burstein's American Teen follows a handful of high school students in Indiana for 10 months; the resulting documentary somehow has the look and feel of a Hollywood-manufactured piece of teen fiction, with stylish and surreal animated sequences -- and still offers a touching, bold, you-are-there window into the state of adolescence in America. Paramount Vantage purchased the documentary's rights only a few days ago, but when the director met Cinematical, it looked as if her schedule hadn't gotten any less harried. Asked if she has a future project in mind, Burstein laughs ruefully: "The next thing I'd like to do is sleep for a really long time." Burstein spoke with Cinematical about how she came to be in Indiana, the media-savvy minds of today's kids, the sequences she had to lose from her original "8 hour cut," and much more.


This interview, like all of Cinematical's podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you'd like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:

(With American Teen opening in theaters today, we at Cinematical are re-running our review from Sundance.)

Nanette Burstein's documentary American Teen opens not far from John Hughes country, both geographically and artistically: we're introduced, in quick order, to four students at the high school in Warsaw, Indiana, on the first day of class. But while the camera work and voice-over has the glossy fizz of fiction, it's nonetheless a real school, and while the kids we meet all correlate roughly to the archetypal teens of fiction, they're real too. We meet Hannah, the plucky, artsy outsider; Colin, the star athlete with a heart of gold; Megan, the prom queen whose school-spirit high-fives hide an iron fist; and smart, insecure, dorky Jake, all in quick succession. And while part of your mind reels at the clichés -- we're just one Judd Nelson-type away from a straight flush, for heaven's sake -- as Burstein's film unfolds, we realize that if there ever was a place cliché's were true, it's high school.

Nanette Burstein's documentary American Teen opens not far from John Hughes country, both geographically and artistically: we're introduced, in quick order, to four students at the high school in Warsaw, Indiana, on the first day of class. But while the camera work and voice-over has the glossy fizz of fiction, it's nonetheless a real school, and while the kids we meet all correlate roughly to the archetypal teens of fiction, they're real too. We meet Hannah, the plucky, artsy outsider; Colin, the star athlete with a heart of gold; Megan, the prom queen whose school-spirit high-fives hide an iron fist; and smart, insecure, dorky Jake, all in quick succession. And while part of your mind reels at the clichés -- we're just one Judd Nelson-type away from a straight flush, for heaven's sake -- as Burstein's film unfolds, we realize that if there ever was a place cliché's were true, it's high school.

And even then there are curve balls, large and small, thrown our way. For example, the montage of Megan's cluttered calendar of extracurricular activities gives way to scenes of her firing off a nine-millimeter pistol at a firing range; I don't recall Molly Ringwald busting caps. Colin turns out to be a surprisingly funny kid, just like his dad, but there's tension under the laughter. Hannah lives with her grandmother, as her depressive mom can't seem to cope and her dad had to move to Ohio for work. And Jake's self-confessed nerdiness is actually just camouflage over a slightly wounded soul; he's self-aware in a way that makes his life tougher, not easier. And as the kids talk about their lives, days become weeks become months, and the immensity of Burstein's achievement comes into focus; Warsaw Community High School may not be the place to find a perfect statistically average high school that represents America (as if any such school really exists) -- it's mostly White, impressively well-appointed, and looks fairly new -- but it's where Burstein shot, every day, for 10 months. And you get drawn into these kid's lives -- their struggles, their challenges, their triumphs -- so fiercely that you cannot help but be enthralled.

One of the biggest word-of-mouth buzz hits of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nanette Burstein's American Teen follows a handful of high school students in Indiana for 10 months; the resulting documentary somehow has the look and feel of a Hollywood-manufactured piece of teen fiction, with stylish and surreal animated sequences -- and still offers a touching, bold, you-are-there window into the state of adolescence in America. Paramount Vantage purchased the documentary's rights only a few days ago, but when the director met Cinematical, it looked as if her schedule hadn't gotten any less harried. Asked if she has a future project in mind, Burstein laughs ruefully: "The next thing I'd like to do is sleep for a really long time." Burstein spoke with Cinematical about how she came to be in Indiana, the media-savvy of today's kids, the sequences she had to lose from her original "8 hour cut," and much more.


This interview, like all of Cinematical's podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you'd like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:

Americans have always been, and always will be, fascinated with epics. I think it's a scale thing; it's in our very history, our very being, to do things in a big way. Thus many critics have been impressed by Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, using big words to describe it: "bold," "magnificent," "saga," "titanic," "grandeur." Comparisons have been slung around not with anything recent, but with the likes of Citizen Kane, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and, appropriately, Giant. I have to admit, I was impressed too, but not excited. Though Anderson's pure filmmaking skill, his sense of movement, rhythm, timing, light and dark, places him among the greats of our time, I feel that There Will Be Blood is a step back into the all-too conventional, and the least of his five films.

Let's start with his source material, Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, which was published in 1927. Sinclair was more of a political writer than a creative writer; he apparently sent copies of some of his books to members of Congress, and his views helped establish certain laws. Because of this condescending, soapbox quality, his work has inevitably fallen out of fashion, and out of print; the new movie tie-in is the only way one can buy the book today. Why dust off this creaky source material in 2007? Anderson undoubtedly found something resonant about it, which must invariably be political rather than personal. Perhaps he saw a connection between Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), scooping up all the oil in the Midwest and swindling anyone who gets in his way, and a lot of the suspicious oil activity that still goes on today.

Born in Afghanistan in 1965, Khaled Hosseini left in 1976 as his family was relocated to Paris as part of his father's work for the diplomatic service. It was fortunate timing; while preparing to return to Kabul in 1980, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan plunged the nation into decades of chaos some would suggest it has yet to emerge from. Gaining political asylum in America, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California; after attending medical school, Hosseini worked as doctor in Los Angeles -- and wrote his first novel. Not only was The Kite Runner published, but it was on the New York Times best-seller list for over two years, and eventually printed in over 42 languages. Now, after years of development and no small share of controversy, The Kite Runner has come to the silver screen; after screening the film for the closing night of the 30th annual Mill Valley Film Festival, Hosseini spoke with a roundtable of journalists in San Francisco about the challenges of adaptation, the genesis and possible fallout of the film's controversial scene of sexual assault and his own memories of Afghanistan. Cinematical's questions are indicated.

Cinematical: What did you learn about the process of movie making going through this experience?

I underestimated the sheer amount of labor it takes to shoot the seemingly simplest scene, just the amount of work that goes just into setting up a scene and how each member of the team has to do their job exactly right, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. It's very labor intensive. It's also very monotonous. It's exciting in a way, but -- you're doing the same thing over and over and over again. So there's a sense of monotony. I underestimated how exhausting it was. The hours are very long and physically it's very demanding. I don't know how some of these guys do it for 10, 20, 30 years, especially the crew. It's a lot of hard work.

How involved were you in the process?

I was kind of a cultural consultant, a story consultant. Maybe the best way to illustrate it is with an example; I went to L.A. and sat in an office with the producers and we looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures that a scout had taken around the world. And they wanted me to kind of chime in and say if there was any locale that could be used to as stand in for 1970s Kabul. And we looked at Turkey and Tunisia, Morocco and India, Pakistan, but western China, the minute those pictures started coming up, I said, 'This place.' So they went out there and the Afghans who have seen the film are startled at the resemblance.

So that kind of thing – questions about dress, about food, about the way a home is decorated, a variety of things of that nature. But I didn't write the screenplay. Obviously, David (Benioff) did. I read the screenplay and we all kind of chimed in our ideas and David wrote another draft, but really it's his creation.

How do you feel the film captures Amir's betrayal of Hassan, the scene where the boy is attacked? From the work you had do creating that scene, how do you feel about seeing it on screen?

I think the scene was shot tastefully. I think in other hands, it could have really been exploitative, kind of graphic, and I don't think there's any need for that. When the boy walks out of the alley and you see the droplets of blood in the snow, I always feel this incredible moment in the audience where they go, 'Oh!' Suddenly, it elevates the film to another level. The stakes are raised at that moment. It's really a devastating moment.

Before viewing (or reviewing) The Kite Runner, the big screen adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, try a brief word-association test. Here's the key phrase:

Afghanistan.

What was the first thing that came to your mind? War? Opium? The Taliban? Terrorism? Perhaps, and there's no fault in that. However, if you're one of the many who've read Hosseini's book -- and kept it on The New York Times Best-Seller list for over two years -- you may have had a different set of associations: Families. Tragedies. People. And that is why Marc Forster's adaptation of The Kite Runner is worthy of at least a little praise, not only as a sensitively and beautifully made film but also as a deliberate attempt to reclaim Afghanistan -- and the Afghan people -- from an image that we in the West have crafted mostly from brief news reports of trouble or newspaper articles explaining a broken nation's shattered past.

Amir (Khalid Abdalla) is a writer; he lives with his father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi) in California, and they find some sense of belonging in the Bay Area's exile Afghan community, trying to move forward while respecting the past. Amir's written his first book -- his father wants him to take up something sensible -- and is married to Soraya (Aossa Leoni). And then there's a phone call. It's an old friend of the family, Rahim (Shaun Toub); he wants, he needs Amir to come back home. Amir left when he was a boy, during the Soviet invasion; his life is in America now. But Rahim explains why Amir has to come home, and finally convinces Amir with one simple phrase: "There is a way to be good again." Flashing back, we see Amir's boyhood in Afghanistan: His father is a hard-working member of the secular upper-class; his best friend is Hassan (Amad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the house servant -- and young Amir (Zerekia Ebrahimi), motherless but not unloved, wants to be the best kite-fighter in Kabul. Meanwhile, Baba's faced with Afghanistan's challenges: "The fanatics want to save our souls, and the communists tell us we don't have any. ..." It's a glib line muttered over a drink for Baba; it's about to get a lot less funny.

In an Esquire piece celebrating "The Casting Mistake of the Year," Joel and Ethan Coen explained how Josh Brolin wound up cast in one of No Country for Old Men's lead roles: "Our movie version of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men had Tommy Lee Jones in place -- no mistake there -- as a crusty west-Texas sheriff on the trail of a bad man to be played by four-time-Goya-winning Spanish sex symbol Javier Bardem. And to round out the cast we hired -- we thought -- rugged everyman Jim Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, the aging Vietnam vet caught in the middle. Well, there were some red faces on the set the first day of shooting when Jim Brolin's son Josh showed up to play the part ..." This, of course, is a joke, but Brolin's not hurt; in fact, as he explained to Cinematical, he helped the Coens write the very piece that mocked him. Brolin can afford to laugh; with 2007 roles in films like American Gangster, Planet Terror, In the Valley of Elah and No Country for Old Men, the veteran actor's proven it's his year to shine. Brolin spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco about how he really got the part that's made him an Oscar contender, working with the Coens, his admiration for Cormac McCarthy's original novel, and much more. You can download the entire podcast right here; those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

The Toronto International Film Festival is over, we have a couple months respite before Sundance, so naturally thoughts turn to the Oscar race. While I'm as curious as anyone else which films will end up garnering the big nod (and I will be really surprised if Juno doesn't get a few noms, especially for screenwriting), as an indie girl I'm most interested in the docs and foreigns. I'm a documentary dork, and one of the things I most look forward to covering at any given film fest is the doc slate -- which, as both David Poland and Anne Thompson have noted in post-Toronto columns, have been weak this year relative to the past couple years. No one really seems to be sure why this is, exactly, although the surprising success of March of the Penguins in 2005 fueled an interest in documentaries that led, perhaps, to a bit of a glut.

The trouble with documentaries is that, penguin love aside, docs are not something your average person is going to go out of their way to shell out ten bucks to see at a theater. Rent from the video store or add to your Netflix queue, perhaps, but when you're looking for a film to see on date night, the depressing topics that tend to make up much of the available documentary fare are not really the first thing that comes to mind. When's the last time you said, "Hey, honey, I know what to do tonight -- let's get dinner at that place over in Little Italy we like, and then let's go see that new Iraq war doc!" Given a choice between a bummer doc and, say, Superbad, most folks are going to opt for the laughs over the conscience-pricking dose of reality.

I first saw Babel at Telluride last year, and I remember how nervous director Alejandro González Iñnáritu was as he introduced the film for one of its first (it may have even been the first) screenings. He talked in his intro about how he set out with Babel to make a film about the ways in which we are different, and ended up making a film about the ways in which we are alike, and how the borders that separate us are less about physical borders between countries, and more about the borders we create within.

Babel's Paramount Vantage 2-Disc Collector's edition comes out today, so if you missed seeing what all the fuss was about during the film's theatrical run (it was nominated for a bevy of Oscars as well), now's your chance to see the film in the comfort of your own home. Babel follows four stories tied loosely together through the common thread of a woman shot by a sniper on a bus in a remote part of Morocco. The woman, Susan (Cate Blanchett) and her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt) are in Morocco taking a trip together in an attempt to heal their marriage, which has fallen apart in the wake of the death of their infant son. They've left their two young children, Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Elle Fanning) back home in California in the care of their loving Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barazza).

Amelia is wholly devoted to her young charges, and has made many personal sacrifices for the sake of the family she works for, but when Susan is shot and their return home is delayed, Amelia faces a wrenching choice: She cannot leave Mike and Debbie, but her only son is getting married in Mexico and she wants to go to his wedding. When Richard's back-up plan for Susan's sister to come and relieve Amelia doesn't pan out, Richard, distraught over his wife's life-threatening injury, commands Amelia to miss her son's wedding and stay with his children. Faced with having to miss the wedding, Amelia makes a decision that will have profound consequences: She takes the children with her into Mexico to attend her son's wedding.