“Bernie”, which hits theatres today, made its premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival April, where I caught up with Director Richard Linklater during his visit. Though he had a full and rigorous day of interviews scheduled, Linklater remained laid back, friendly, and open, sporting a Criterion collection t-shirt and jeans. Although he is most loved for his early Gen X films like “Dazed and Confused” and “Slacker” and even more so for his heady, intellectual films, like “Before Sunrise”, “Waking Life”, and “Before Sunset”, Linklater has lately been making more mainstream-targeted films and “Bernie” is no exception.

“Bernie” tells the true story of Bernie Tiede, a mortician in Carthage, Texas, who murdered the meanest lady in town, Marjorie, and nearly got away with it. Linklater got interested in Bernie’s story way back when his trial for murder was happening. “This was a magazine article I read and kind of pursued and attended the trial. The magazine article ended inconclusively… you think Bernie is going to get off kind of lightly, that’s where I got on the bandwagon, and I went to the trial.”

Linklater co-wrote the film with journalist Skip Hollandsworth who wrote the original magazine article about Bernie’s trial. He explains that “everything really happened. There are really no elements of the movie that are fictitious. It was like a journalistic piece. We really stuck to the public record and we were going off a really thick file from the trial, evidence, and interviews”.

As an East Texas native, Linklater says he “has a lot of affection for these people. I’m a homeboy. These are my people. Southerners are sensitive to being portrayed in the national media as a bunch of backwards thinking rednecks, which they certainly are, but what they always miss is the humanity and the friendliness. There’s a really wonderful side to it that’s often not part of the equation when they’re portrayed. When I was making the film, I was trying to assure people that, you know, I’m from here. I will portray it how I will but I get it. This is a film from the land time forgot. It feels like a period film even though Bernie has an iPhone but it could be the 1970s. It’s one of those regions that’s solidly behind the rest of the world in a lot of ways.”

Although the film is very funny, Linklater insists it’s not a satire: the humour comes from “the irony of it all”.  Linklater explains that “It’s a weird contradiction. Here’s a law and order town in Texas and Texas is a pretty tough place, with a huge prison population. It’s like guilty, throw away the key kind of thing. But in this case they didn’t want this guy prosecuted because they liked him. There’s something kind of human about that.”

“Bernie” is a mockumentary, full of interviews with town gossips. “Oh almost all those people in the kind of southern gossip circle chorus, the majority of those are from Carthage or that area, little towns around there. There were a few professional actors but mostly they were non-actors, people I found funny or interesting. I mean the test was here’s all these interesting people and then I gave them lines.  Some people were struggling to memorize the lines but others were really internalizing them and so we thought ‘OK you can be maybe effective in the movie.’ ”

Interestingly, none of the lines for the gossip circle were written with any particular character in mind, and that’s generally how Linklater works for ensemble pieces, from “Dazed and Confused” to “Bernie”. He says, “I really just had all those lines written and then I knew it would be personalized to the cast. It was like here you have the text but then lines would be assigned after casting. It’s what I’ve always done with ensembles. I get the same note on every script for an ensemble piece: ‘they [the characters] all kind of sound the same’. But you cast really unique people with really unique characteristics and it will be differentiated on film. You have to cast your ensemble very carefully for different personalities. If two are too similar, maybe that’s not a good idea. It’s like an orchestra. So that’s the fun part really: finding the personality. Because to me, in movie making, that’s the magical moment where this lines, this text, meet the person, the actor. The lines manifest themselves through the actor’s personality, quirks, and characteristics.”

When asked how he came up with the aesthetic for the film, Linklater mused that “you feel your way through the story and the locations show you how to shoot it. You have to keep thinking of the pace and the editing, too. I certainly didn’t want these interviews to be handheld or have that loose documentary feel. It was much more formal. Because I wanted the whole tone for the movie to be about Bernie: you know, his view of the world and the world’s view of him, which is pretty proper, pretty formal. He’s a very mannered southern gentlemen kind of guy and even in the issues of his sexuality, the film is ambiguous the way he is. I wanted the film to feel kind of formal, not too rough around the edges. I often do that on a movie. I remember shooting “Dazed and Confused” in the 1990s and thinking ‘If I had had the filmmaking skills that I have now in my early 30s, as a 17-year-old, what would I think would be cool? How would I shoot the movie? I try to go back into the character’s mind and try to adapt the look to the characters”.

And finally, the doorknob question: will we be seeing Jesse and Celine from “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” again? So from the horse’s mouth: “Who knows!? It has been about the same amount of time as between the previous two films. Julie and Ethan are now in their early 40s: life piles up and things change. It’s in the air a bit but nothing’s set. It certainly would be fun to work with them again. We don’t want to just do it unless we really have something to express, especially as time goes by. But I kind of feel like we’re getting there, actually.”

 A shortened version of this article was published in the Stanford Daily here.

One of the most exciting and avant garde events at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) this year was the live documentary presentation of Director Sam Green’s “The Love Song for R. Buckminster Fuller”. It screened twice at the SFMOMA on May 1st, a presentation facilitated in tandem with the SFMOMA and its current exhibit on Buckminster Fuller in the Bay Area.  Sam Green was present to provide live voice-over commentary for the film and indie rock band Yo La Tengo performed their film score live. In this setting, the film became a hybrid of cinema and theatre, where the images on screen were more like a visual aid to a live performance than a standalone piece.Buckminster Fuller was the quintessential renaissance man: a designer, thinker, architect, innovator, writer, and lecturer, decades ahead of his time. Although perhaps most widely known for his thick black glasses and geodesic domes, Fuller’s legacy extends far beyond that. He was a strong proponent of big picture thinking and was in many ways a champion of design thinking. Although some of his ideas can be easily dismissed as far-fetched, the point wasn’t always to build everything he proposed but to expand people’s horizons on how they think about the world and making things work.As we learn in the film, Fuller kept an archive of all of his activities – including every receipt, every memo, and every television appearance – in what is now known as the Dymaxion Chronofile. It is the most extensive archive of any single person’s activities, owned by and housed at Stanford University’s libraries, and was the primary source material for the film and the exhibit. There are excerpts in the film of Buckminster Fuller meeting the hippies on hippie hill in Golden Gate Park as well as some of his television appearances. The film is essentially a montage of photographs and archival footage of Fuller and his work with a few present-day interviews with scholars of the Chronofile. Green did not interview anyone for his documentary that actually knew or worked with Fuller personally, despite the fact that many of them are still alive and active.

The problem with both the SFMOMA exhibit and Green’s film is that by choosing to focus on Fuller in the Bay Area, they have also chosen to ignore the greater context of his work. Without this context, it becomes far too easy to dismiss him and some of his far-fetched ideas as the products of a crackpot rather than an innovator trying to challenge the status quo.

Because, for example, the World Games workshops Fuller ran – where motivated people came together to hear him speak, get inspired, and worked to solve the world’s biggest problems from food security to sustainable development – weren’t in the Bay Area, they are altogether ignored. Because Fuller’s concept of “Spaceship Earth”, a place that we all have to share, with limited resources that we need to preserve, was not a Bay Area specific idea, it too is ignored. Yet these are two of Fuller’s key legacies and proof that he was a leading edge thinker.

The reference to T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock”, a poem about a lovable but pathetic man, in the film’s title is no coincidence. It’s sadly an apt metaphor for Green’s view of Fuller: it’s affectionate but somewhat unimpressed. Perhaps the film would have done better to draw its inspiration from the Beatles’ song r “Fool on the Hill”, a much less ignorantly critical ode to Fuller without ignoring his controversial idiosyncrasies.

A shortened version of this article was published in the Stanford Daily here.

Every year, the San Francisco International Film Festival chooses a great director to honour with the Founder’s Directing Award and this year that honour was bestowed upon the great actor-director Kenneth Branagh. He is in good company. Past winners include Clint Eastwood, Akira Kurosawa, Werner Herzog, and Mike Leigh. Branagh came to SF this week for the festival to accept the award and to participate in a special “on stage” event at the Castro Theatre on Friday with a screening of his second film, “Dead Again”.

Kenneth Branagh has often been called the next Laurence Olivier, in praise of his fantastic film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, both as a director and an actor. When he was just twenty-eight, he made his directorial debut with “Henry V”, in which he also played the title role and was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Director Academy Awards. In his interview on Friday, he revealed that he was actually in San Francisco when “Henry V” was beginning to get significant critical acclaim and cited reading the glowing New York Times review of it while here as a life-changing moment. His brilliant “Much Ado About Nothing” is a masterpiece and the definitive version of the play; he playing Benedick to Emma Thomson’s Beatrice, alongside an impressive supporting cast including Denzel Washington and Kate Beckinsale.

In 1996, Branagh, not Sir Branagh – he declined the offer of knighthood – filmed a full-length rendition of “Hamlet”, in which he also played the title role quite brilliantly, alongside Kate Winslet’s Ophelia. When he found out that he had been nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for “Hamlet”, he thought it was some kind of cruel joke. Yes, he had radically interpreted the play as a director but he had kept the entire script intact. Eventually, he and a writer friend concluded that this was really a nomination for Mr William Shakespeare, 400 years late, and a nod of approval from other writers for leaving Shakespeare’s play alone.

Although his adaptations of the bard’s “Love’s Labour Lost” as a Hollywood musical and “As You Like It”, were both flops and failures, as Branagh puts it, only the great can fail spectacularly. The good can be good all the time without ever being terrible or great. But you have to take risks to be great.

His oeuvre is not, however, limited to Shakespeare. He successfully dallied in noir with “Dead Again”, made a film of “Frankenstein”, remade “Sleuth” with a script by Harold Pinter, and most recently tanked with “Thor”. It’s also a little known fact that his film “Peter’s Friends”, which starred his real-life friends Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Imelda Staunton and then-wife Emma Thompson, was the first time Hugh Laurie’s singing and piano playing were captured on film for the big screen.

The evening opened with an interview with Branagh by CalShakes artistic director Jonathan Moscone. Branagh was, of course, charming, witty, and incredibly articulate and humble. When the floor was opened up for audience questions, there was a general well-deserved outpouring of gratitude for Branagh’s work to make Shakespeare accessible to the masses, and yet he still remained sincerely humble. We were reminded of his beginnings as a boy from a working-class family in Northern Ireland, who moved to England at age nine, where he adopted an English accent as a means to ensure he was understood and fend off bullies.

As a young actor and director, he was known to mouth off a fair bit about ‘wankers’ who claimed what Shakespeare was or how Shakespeare should be performed. He had the misfortune of having some of these youthful phrases, now circulating on the internet, quoted back to him, like “I’m just a foul-mouthed Brit”.

Branagh and Moscone got into some very exciting in-depth discussion about his directorial choices for his Shakespearean films. He chose to set “Hamlet” in bright, expansive spaces, because after performing the play multiple times, he felt that these sets were just as arguably appropriate as the gloomy environs “Hamlet” is so often confined to. It was also done to help draw attention to the fact that there were many joyous happenings in Elsinore from, his mother’s happy new marriage to Claudius’s competent ruling of the country, and that Hamlet’s gloominess was very much a character trait. Of course, Branagh humorously summarizes the play as basically being about how the map of Europe could change just because a man couldn’t have a proper conversation alone with his mother after his father’s death. He does, of course, acknowledge that it’s brilliant in many ways.

They also discussed the iconic opening scene of “Henry V” when Derek Jacobi speaks his soliloquy while walking through the backstage of a film studio, and upon finishing, opens a door, revealing a small sliver of light, and the play begins. While earlier adaptations of “Henry V”, like Olivier’s, favoured a romantic interpretation, Branagh aimed to look at the play as being about what happens in hushed conversations behind closed doors. The frequent use of close-ups in the film, he said, was part of setting up this idea.

After the interview and a brief intermission, the audience was treated to a screening of “Dead Again”, in which he also stars alongside Emma Thompson. “Dead Again” is an impressively crafted film which embraces and even acknowledges and mocks all the conventions of film noir and puts them in a modern setting. When Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh) is called into the orphanage where he grew up to help Grace, a woman who has lost her memory (Emma Thompson), everything starts to get screwy for him. Through a series of hilarious events, they wind up visiting a quirky hypnotist who helps Grace regain some memories. But her memories are not from the recent past but rather involve a married couple from the 1940s that look exactly like our heroes but are, in fact, Margaret and Roman Strauss, famous for the fact that Roman was sentenced to death for Margaret’s murder.

Of course, it’s absurd and we have to suspend our disbelief just as much as our heroes do. Here is where the film gets very, very clever. Branagh lays on the noir thick from the suspicious camera angles to the genre-like dialogue, and Mike’s own disbelief about all the events happening to him. And it is very, very funny, both from one-liners and the intended irony of the situations. Branagh manages to build up so much suspense, so much dramatic tension, and so much enthralling action, with earned plot twist after earned plot twist, that by the end, you actually have to catch your breath. The suspense is really heightened when watching this on the big screen with big sound because it’s completely absorbing. Here Branagh proves that he’s not just a master at putting theatre on film but in filmmaking itself, mastering film noir just as deftly as he did Shakespeare.

It has now been a few years since Branagh has brought a Shakespeare play to the big screen, though other Shakespearean adaptations have been made, from Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest” to Ralph Fiennes’s “Coriolanus”. When asked if Branagh will be returning to Shakespeare again soon he said he has plans to make a film of a play whose name cannot be uttered in the current venue. “The Scottish Play”, that is. And after a few more comments about superstition he asked us if he had made himself absolutely clear yet. The unnamed play is, of course, “Macbeth”. He also stated that he would like to make another noir film set in San Francisco, a city so rich with film noir history.

Among the weekend’s most popular films were Norway’s “Oslo, August 31st” (reviewed in a previous Intermission) and Italy’s “Terraforma,” which had a series of sold-out screenings and eager, last-minute planners in the rush lines. Don’t despair if you missed them, though, as they are both scheduled for theatrical releases this year.