SALON

Jeff Stark

Tuesday, Jul 6, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Russell Simmons

The founder of Def Jam Records brought hip-hop culture into the American mainstream, and his empire is growing.

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Russell Simmons didn’t invent rap, but he is, perhaps more than any other
individual, responsible for the music’s astonishing success. As a young
man, he heard a thriving, vibrant music in battered ghettos and solid
middle-class black neighborhoods like his own and turned it up loud enough
to blast suburban multiplexes and small-town burger joints. If Simmons
hadn’t mainstreamed rap, someone else certainly would have — the music was
too potent, too necessary, too relevant to smoke without ever catching
fire. The point is that Simmons lit the match.

Like rock ‘n’ roll itself, rap was supposed to be a fad. And just like
rock, it turned out to be much more. At this point, almost 20 years after
the first commercial rap song hit the Top 40 — the Sugarhill Gang’s
“Rapper’s Delight” — the genre represents the single most significant
development in pop culture in the past two decades. Its cultural
pervasiveness extends from McDonald’s commercials to href="/news/feature/1999/06/22/hill/index.html">Lauryn Hill’s picture
on the cover of Time, from designer Tommy Hilfiger (Simmons’ friend) to href="/ent/movies/review/1999/06/30/wild_west/index.html">“Wild Wild
West,” starring Fresh Prince Will Smith (one of Simmons’ old acts).
Last year, according to Soundscan, 81 million rap albums were sold, 9
million more units than country, making the genre the largest and fastest
growing in the business.

In 1985, before Russell Simmons, now 41, had even a single gold record on
his wall, he and his partner, Rick Rubin, who together owned the fabled Def
Jam record label, signed a production deal with CBS Records for $600,000.
That kind of money is pocket lint to Simmons now. This year, he’ll most
likely sell the label that he built — the flagship of a modest media
empire — for $100 million. The deal will make Simmons even richer, as it
threatens to separate him from hip-hop, a culture and a music that he
understands as well as anyone, and understands how to extract money from
better than anyone.

The same year that Simmons, who is nicknamed Rush, signed the deal with
CBS, the budding rap impresario produced a goofy Hollywood movie called
“Krush Groove,” modeled loosely on the Def Jam creation myth. Simmons hated
the final picture, which starred rap group Run-D.M.C., Rick Rubin and the
handsome Blair Underwood in Simmons’ place. But a close look at the
movie today reveals a few signal characteristics within the nearly plotless
hour and a half of rock videos by the Beastie Boys, L.L. Cool J and the Fat
Boys. First, Simmons stayed behind the scenes and had an actor play him in
the lead, even though all the other characters in the film played
themselves. (Simmons took a small cameo role.) Second, even before Def Jam
became a huge success, Simmons was diversifying his business, making forays
into new media and cross-promoting his artists. Third, the $3 million movie
returned $20 million, even though it received universally terrible reviews
from critics. And fourth, in a small piece of dialogue, the character based
on Simmons’ father ridicules him for betting on street artists. “Here comes
Berry Gordy,” sneers the old man when Simmons stops by to scare up some
money.

That last thought — just a tossed-off line in a silly movie — might be
the most telling of all the moments, or at least the most important
signifier of just how far Simmons exceeded what was expected of him.
Indeed, sarcastically at first but with growing confidence, others have
declared Simmons an inheritor of the famous Motown Records mogul’s empire.
The amazing thing is that Simmons — at the helm of Rush Communications, a
conglomerate that includes a record label (Def Jam), a management company
(Rush Artist Management), a clothier (Phat Farm), a movie production house
(Def Pictures), television shows (“Def Comedy Jam” and “Russell Simmons’
Oneworld Music Beat”), a magazine (Oneworld) and an advertising agency
(Rush Media Co.) — is even more successful than Gordy.

Last year, Def Jam alone took in almost $200 million in receipts. Motown
had an astonishing hold on the pop charts (75 No. 1 hits in 27 years), but
Gordy couldn’t hold on after he busted on a couple of Hollywood movies. He
sold out to MCA before going under for $61 million in 1988. Even
considering inflation, Simmons’ Def Jam, valued at approximately $250
million (he owns 40 percent), is impressive. Moreover, Def Jam is
approaching even hallowed Motown in terms of cultural significance.
Granted, Motown artists leaped taller racial hurdles, but they succeeded on
the charts in a time when the pop audience was far less balkanized. Also,
most of the hip-hop audience, which is mainly white, isn’t yet old enough
to give the music serious nostalgia cachet. If Run-D.M.C., De La Soul,
Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and Method Man — all either Def Jam acts or
groups managed by Simmons — don’t seem like national treasures or the
appropriate soundtrack for some “Big Chill” rip-off, just wait 20 years.

Hip-hop and rap are among the most openly referential and historically
deferential of all pop music genres. Simmons was there at the beginning, which
gave him an advantage over head-in-the-sand corporate record execs. The identity of
the first rapper, much like that of the first rock ‘n’ roller, is still a
contested piece of history; most give props to rapper Kool Herc, a Jamaican
who started throwing block parties in 1973, although some like to link back
to Black Power rhymers like the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. By the late
’70s, underground rap music was thriving. In 1978, Simmons, while working
on a sociology degree at City College in Harlem, began promoting parties in
Harlem and in Queens with his friend Curtis Walker. Rappers came together with DJs, graffiti artists and break dancers,
fomenting the elements of hip-hop as culture. The following year, Walker
became rapper Kurtis Blow, and he and Simmons co-wrote a minor hit called
“Christmas Rappin’.”

After a small success with Blow — 50,000 records — Simmons started
managing a few other groups and, most notably, his younger brother, Joey,
who went by the name of Run. He put his brother together with MC Darryl
McDaniels and DJ Jason Mizell and christened the group Run-D.M.C, dressing
them in black leather suits and telling them what to record. On a street
level, the group’s first two records were almost immediately successful. It
would take a smart, canny business move to make them really blow up.

In 1983, Simmons met Rick Rubin, a wealthy, white punk-rock veteran at NYU
who was in love with rap. With a few thousand dollars each, they created
the tiny Def Jam records, in order to release music that no major labels
would look at. Their first single was “I Need a Beat,” by L.L. Cool J, who
was 16 at the time. Rubin was a production genius who loved loud,
rebellious music. Simmons was relentlessly enthusiastic, a smart
businessman; he’d grown up selling pot on the streets, which had taught him
business basics: cash flow, client relations, networking. The combination
of personalities and talents earned immediate success — almost half a
million records, enough to attract the healthy investment from CBS — but
Def Jam and Run-D.M.C. were primarily making black music for black people.

The label’s next two major moves were strokes of brilliance. First, after
experimenting with electric guitar samples on “Rock Box” and “King of
Rock,” Def Jam paired Run-D.M.C. with Aerosmith for a cover of the rock
band’s “Walk This Way.” The song was a smash and landed Run-D.M.C. on the
lily-white MTV, which was still sidelining rap. With a new white audience,
attracted to the electric guitars and the spare, forceful Run-D.M.C.
delivery, Run-D.M.C. and Simmons found themselves with a No. 4 Billboard
hit — the first rap song to break the Top 5. The single helped the band’s
third album, “Raising Hell,” sell 2.5 million copies. Second, Def Jam
signed the first all-white rap act, the Beastie Boys. The bratty lyrics and
the Led Zeppelin riffs appealed to all kinds of white kids, without
compromising the essence of rap. The album sold 4.8 million copies, and
still pops up on occasion on the Billboard Top 200 chart. Rubin left Def Jam in 1998 to start his own label, but with crossover
successes and key releases like the first three Public Enemy albums –
perhaps Def Jam’s finest musical hour — every record the label released
through 1990 went gold.

As he’d done with “Krush Groove” when Def Jam was getting started, Simmons
took every opportunity to market hip-hop to a wider audience.
Significantly, experience with Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy taught him that
he didn’t need to dilute the core experience to be successful. (Def Jam had
a strong run with hard-core gangsta acts — from Slick Rick to Onyx to
Redman — that continues today.) That doesn’t mean Simmons won’t leap at an
opportunity to make money, even if it doesn’t do much for hip-hop. His
greatest movie success to date is “The Nutty Professor,” with Eddie Murphy reprising the Jerry Lewis role.

At the center of his life now is Phat Farm, the clothing label that Simmons
believes can mint banks of money. It was Simmons who told Tommy Hilfiger
that hip-hop fashion could sell and introduced him to the rap stars and
models who helped him create a billion-dollar empire. Now he’s trying to do
the same for himself, partnering with fashion distributors and backers who
can help his clothing line explode. Last year, Phat Farm sold $17 million
worth of T-shirts and preppy urban wear. With even more distribution deals
and partnerships, Simmons projects a $50 million 1999.

Phat Farm illustrates another aspect of what makes Simmons successful.
Unlike Berry Gordy, who tried to contain his empire, Simmons is constantly
on the lookout for mentors and partners who can help him grow. He
understands that others are more qualified to run a certain part of his
business than he is. “I know garbage men that got more ego than Russell,”
his brother Joey has said of him.

And although Simmons is clearly an ace talent scout and an efficient
manager, his greatest genius is his keen sense of promotion. Back when the
record industry was still looking for one-hit disco wonders, Simmons looked
for artists who could have a career. Then he promoted them and his label at
the same time. Artists reinforced his label’s identity, and the label gave
established cred to newer artists. Simmons was branding back when everyone
else was still marketing. As the label took off, he looked for other places
to use his name and his company’s name to sell a new product.

It might be disconcerting to equate cultural significance with gold records
or bank accounts, but it’s worth noting that rap itself doesn’t have a
problem with the equation. Revisiting the comparison with the early days of
rock, it was only in retrospect, sometime after the hippies appropriated
the folk ethos, that Elvis looked like a sellout for driving Cadillacs and
making bad movies. At the time, it just made him look more like a star.
Financial success was a way for blacks and poor hillbillies — the soul of
early rock — to prove their worth to a culture that had long shunned both.

Hip-hop is as brazen about its money as a junk bonds trader in the ’80s. In
“The Show,” a 1995 rap documentary produced by Simmons, the late Notorious
B.I.G. speaks baldly about cash and Simmons’ ability to mint it. “He be
droppin’ a lot of knowledge to his artists,” says B.I.G. “Russell knows how
to make money. That’s what I want to do, is to sit down and ask questions:
How can I make money? Let me know everything I can do to make a million,
Russ, because I know you know what to do.”

For Simmons, who grew up comfortable to lower-middle class in Queens, N.Y., money probably doesn’t represent the escape hatch that it might to guys
like B.I.G. — who, ironically, made his lode off posthumous royalties –
but Simmons clearly sees a connection. “I’m not broke, so I don’t got to
throw no guns in nobody’s faces. I got a Rolls Royce,” he says in “The
Show,” resting his head against the car’s soft leather back seat. “I don’t
want nobody near me with no type of drama. The only drama I want is Naomi
Campbell.”

Simmons ended a decade-plus of philandering with models by marrying
6-foot-tall runway walker Kimora Lee on St. Barthelemy six months ago. His
brother, now a born-again Reverend Run, officiated at the ceremony.
Celebrity rag In Style put Simmons at the altar in Phat Farm casual wear
and a pair of Adidas. Several days’ worth of gossip-column regulars — from
Martha Stewart to Arista Records mogul Clive Davis — attended the
multiple-yacht receptions. The New York tabloids are now hinting that the
two are pregnant and expecting a baby in October.

Simmons is about to close the biggest deal of his life, one that will
probably end Def Jam as we, and Simmons, know it. Bluntly, the man is
selling out, getting paid. Universal, the massive music conglomerate that
currently owns 60 percent of Def Jam, is buying the remaining 40 percent
for a reported $100 million. Simmons has said that he’ll stay on as
chairman, but he’ll have no ownership, which would probably limit his
hours. The presumption is that Simmons will take the check and funnel it
into his other holdings, principally film projects and Phat Farm, the wing
that he’s convinced will make him rich — not just rich, but really rich.
“I don’t want the money,” he told New York magazine. “I want the
money.”

Among other black-owned entertainment companies, Simmons is king; Rush is
second only to BET Holdings. But Simmons will need the kind of money that
Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger knock down to take his business to the next
level, far beyond the kind of expanded niche world that Berry Gordy owned
at Motown and that Simmons owns at Def Jam. “In comparison to my white
counterparts, competitors, peers, my company isn’t even significant,”
Simmons told Interview in 1995. “I’m not saying that to make myself
smaller. I know my role in influencing pop culture is bigger than most of
the people I compete with.”

The thing is, there’s every indication that Simmons can still create an
expansionistic, diversified conglomerate like the famed Geffen, or Virgin.
Hip-hop is no longer black culture or urban culture: It’s American culture.
And that’s partly because of Simmons. Hip-hop is strong enough to withstand
it’s faddish origins, strong enough to withstand the deaths of two of its
most vital performers, strong enough to withstand McDonald’s, or, for that
matter, Vanilla Ice. Simmons knows this, and this will make him rich.
Richer. “With my first act in ’79, people said hip-hop was dead,” Simmons
has said. “Now look, 20 years later, the culture is so strong we’re doing
underwear.”

Friday, Apr 4, 2003 9:00 PM UTC

“A Man Apart”

Yes, Vin Diesel still rocks. But you wouldn't know it from this dreary, predictable sub-"Traffic" action flick.

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Action movies can be stupid, boneheaded, and absurdly impossible, but they should never be boring. That’s hardly the only problem with Vin Diesel’s newest vehicle, a busted old Firebird with too much primer on the fenders called “A Man Apart.” It’s also absurdly unlikely, mawkishly sentimental and almost incoherent at times. But who cares? The bottom line is that right in the middle of the movie’s big gun battle, I found myself looking at my watch. Would I get out of this thing before the burger place closed?

“A Man Apart” is basically a revenge tale set somewhere on the backlot of the “Traffic” set. Diesel plays a DEA agent who uses streetwise tactics to fight the drug war along the Mexico-California border. We learn immediately that he’s not the kind of guy who plays by the rules. (Are they ever?) He and his partner, Larenz Tate, are working with Mexican cops to bust a kingpin they’ve been tracking for seven years. When the bust finally goes down in Tijuana they, as Americans, are not allowed to have assault rifles like the rest of the Mexican cops. Diesel works his way around the prohibition with a little 9-millimeter friend. And of course he’s the guy who nabs the baddie.

Then we’re off to Diesel’s beachside home in San Diego (I guess they pay DEA cops buckets of money, you know, so they’re not tempted by the millions in cash they could get from scumbag runners for looking the other way). The next few scenes exist simply to establish that Diesel genuinely loves his attractive wife (Jacqueline Obradors), so much so that he kisses her under a beach sunset with the seagulls in the background. Even though you’ll be trying to decide if you’ve ever seen a more clichéd representation of what love or marriage means, you still know that something’s going to go horribly wrong.

And of course it does. That means that Vin Diesel has to figure out who did the bad thing. His thirst for revenge leads him to an unlikely alliance with the kingpin he busted at the start of the film, plus some old friends who work outside the law on special projects like this. All signs point to Diablo, a person or team or evil presence that is trying to take over the border’s coke pipeline.

Look, I like Vin Diesel. He’s a good, maybe great, action star. He’s tough, cool and he gives off this impossible sense that he would have no problem kicking your ass, but he’d rather go snowboarding with you and grab a couple of microbrews, brah. As a straight guy, you don’t even mind the idea of him busting out of his shirt. It’s hot with all that fire and explosion and gunplay, you know, and it was in the way.

There’s a chance that Diesel thought that he was going to get serious in “A Man Apart.” He certainly doesn’t have to say as anything as absurd as “I live my life a quarter-mile at a time” — one of the many howlers from “The Fast and the Furious.” But he never gets to do anything as cool as ride a zipline from a parachute to a remote-controlled speedboat with a nuclear bomb on board, either, like he did in “XXX.”

To be fair, Diesel isn’t bad in “A Man Apart.” He’s always forceful, and he manages to communicate a sense of dazed anger, a mien to match his scruffy facial hair. It’s just that the script is never really there for him. He has to go outside the law? Well, isn’t that what drug-cop action stars like him always have to do? There’s a double-, maybe triple-cross betrayal among dealers? We weren’t supposed to believe them, were we?

Diesel never takes off his shirt in “A Man Apart.” He bitch-slaps a Porsche-driving playboy called Hollywood Jack (who’s probably gay), he handles an array of weaponry and he fucks up some scumbags, but there’s not a single moment when you wonder what might happen next or when the spectacle simply leaps off the screen. You’ve seen it all before.

Me too, but “A Man Apart” wasn’t a complete loss. The burger place was still open, and the fries were delicious.

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Friday, Mar 14, 2003 9:00 PM UTC

“Spun”

Hot clothes, hot music, hot stars (John Leguizamo, Mena Suvari, Brittany Murphy) -- but this tale of Southern California speed freaks works too hard for its high.

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I hate “Spun.” And one of the things that I hate about it is that I liked it so much. It looks horribly great, it has cool stars, and the vaguely indie-rock soundtrack is pretty good. The dizzying sensation of the movie is something like watching an hour and a half’s worth of music videos on fast forward. It’s a fun movie in a disorienting way, especially if you like hot clothes and can laugh at awful things.

But it’s really a low, low movie, the kind of thing that makes you feel bad for liking it. It’s moralistic about drug use, but at the same time weirdly glamorizes it by working so hard to make the movie itself so hip. (This is the kind of picture where even the buffoonish cops wear vintage Levi Sta-Prest jeans.) “Spun’s” meta-message — if there is such a thing — is that drugs are bad, but you probably want to do a lot of them for a while so you can make some cool art or something. In fact, just say “crystal” and the dopest actors in Hollywood will run toward you.

“Spun” is about speed — methamphetamine. The plot is fairly thin, happening over three days in one of those washed-out places in Southern California. Ross (Jason Schwartzman from “Rushmore,” who will always be from “Rushmore”) meets the Cook (Mickey Rourke, who apparently will never be Mickey Rourke again) through stripper Nikki (Brittany Murphy). In return for little bags of speed, Ross runs errands — picking up ephedrine, buying porn — and chauffeurs the Cook, who is mad-sciencing a new batch of meth out of a sweaty motel room.

There’s also Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), a low-level dealer, and his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari). They live and deal out of a trashed ranch house where kids like Frisbee (Patrick Fugit) come over to buy drugs, get high, and play video games. (Which are — sound the hip alarm — homemade and totally retro; you’ll probably see a feature on them in Vice magazine next month.)

The story, inasmuch as there is one, wonders whether Ross will get back together with his girlfriend, who has left him and moved to Los Angeles, and whether Nikki will leave the Cook. There’s also a subplot involving two bumbling cops who are speed freaks themselves (like everyone else in the film), and a recurring bit involving a stripper whom Ross fucks — yes, fucks — until he hallucinates dirty cartoons (the hip alarm is still ringing, right? Look for the cartoonist in a Japanese fashion magazine) and ties naked to his bed before leaving the apartment.

All this is to say that “Spun” is one of those episodic pictures. It apparently derives from the exploits of one of its co-writers, Will De Los Santos, a speed freak from Eugene, Ore. (The beginning of the film, which is co-written by Creighton Vero, announces “based on the truth … and lies.”) And it is real life in the sense that it’s more of a vibe or a grind or something than a movie. The whole thing is stitched together with coherent production design and masterful editing.

In a way, “Spun” is editing. Its filmmaker, the Swedish music video and commercial director Jonas Akerlund, is known principally for Prodigy’s jittery “Smack My Bitch Up” and Madonna’s stop-start “Ray of Light.” According to the film’s production notes, the debut feature project started off with a 1,000-page storyboard comic book, every single shot of which was captured on high-speed 16-mm film once production started. The finished product includes 4,500 edits, or almost a cut every second.

And there certainly is some nice technique. One trick makes every object appear to us as the sum of its component parts. So when Schwartzman gets in his crappy-ass brown Volvo, we see the wheels turning, the pistons pumping, the fan belt whirring. The technique communicates that speedy sense of everythingallatonce. It’s a style that bites “Requiem for a Dream” — in particular the little impressionistic bits that recurred every time the characters shot up — and makes no particular improvement.

As there was in “Requiem for a Dream” — a vastly superior film — a fairly conventional morality is at work in “Spun.” Drug dealers get busted, rats get shot, and guys who fuck with women get beaten down. No bad deed goes unpunished. And in one sense, with all the brown teeth, groaning constipation, and Leguizamo jerking off in a sock, there’s nothing sexy about the loser pageant. In all its bleached-out shots and hyper-quick editing, “Spun” is an anti-drug film.

Sort of. Because these guys still get to wear Diesel and look like John Leguizamo in a pair of low-rider leather pants. Or be a bad-ass cowboy like Mickey Rourke (playing his best role in years), and fuck Brittany Murphy. (Yes, fuck. In one of the film’s most hilarious scenes Rourke delivers a “Patton”-like tribute to pussy, with an American flag waving in the background.)

The biggest problem with “Spun” is that it’s really just about speed (and editing). And speed, like most other drugs, is in and of itself boring. (Have you ever had one of those three-hour conversations about pot? Stoned? It feels like time dying.) Further, the young-and-beautiful drug movie is finished — at least until someone makes a genre tribute in 20 years. I can’t imagine a picture saying anything that hasn’t already been said better by “Drugstore Cowboy,” the abject “Kids” and even “Trainspotting.”

At this point, the only interesting drug movies are the ones that start with drugs and work outward, like, again, “Requiem” (about addiction and the death of the American dream), or “Jesus’ Son” (about redemption and Billy Crudup). (It’s worth noting that both evolved from novels.)

“Spun” is ultimately a nasty movie. It’s the kind of film that mocks overweight people who work at gas stations and makes parody out of people who live in trailers. It tries desperately for its edge, achieving it occasionally (maybe with former Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford working the counter at the porn store), but never really gets past the same kind of one-dimensional jokes about speed freaks that Jay Leno makes in “Tonight Show” monologues. I laughed, but I didn’t feel good about it.

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Friday, Mar 7, 2003 9:00 PM UTC

What’s the opposite of denial?

"Laurel Canyon" director Lisa Cholodenko on casting the "awesome" Frances McDormand, the influence of D.H. Lawrence (whom she hasn't read) and the sexuality of her interviewer.

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Lisa Cholodenko’s second movie takes place in the hippie-historic Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, but the filmmaker is firmly from the suburban San Fernando Valley. You can hear it in her “likes,” her “totallys” and her “awesome.”

“Laurel Canyon” is a movie about seduction and temptation and lust, but at its center it’s an intricate character drama about what it means to be emotionally responsible. Frances McDormand plays Jane, a record producer trying to get a hit out of an English band in her home studio. Jane is in her 40s, smokes pot and sleeps with the much younger lead singer of the band (Alessandro Nivola).

Jane’s son, Sam (Christian Bale), is an uptight psychiatrist who has rejected Jane’s cocktails-in-the-pool California lifestyle for an East Coast education and prim fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale). When Sam and Alex move back to California with their twin rolling suitcases, they end up in Jane’s house with the band. Piece by piece, Alex finds herself drawn to the band, its music and its libertine frontman. Meanwhile, Sam starts to fall for an Israeli doctor at his hospital (Natascha McElhone).

One of the best things about “Laurel Canyon” is that it just feels right; every piece of it has a rare honesty, from its characters’ decisions to the crates and crates of vinyl stacked against the wall at Jane’s house. I’ve never seen a better movie about recording music, and by extension about the often banal process of making art.

I spoke with Cholodenko, who also directed Ally Sheedy in “High Art,” another dense, subtle film about seduction, over the phone last week. She was in Colorado, doing press for “Laurel Canyon,” while I was in New York, recovering from a blizzard. The director’s California mien extended beyond her casual slang, as I found out toward the end of our conversation, when Cholodenko asked me a personal question with all the loose confidence of one of her Left Coast protagonists. It’s not that she was being nosy; she was just being open.

Were you interested in the music business before this movie, or was that just where these characters happened to find themselves?

I mean, I think the answer is a little bit of both. I was curious enough to want to spend a few years with the music business because that’s what it takes as a writer. So I was interested in how it works and how it doesn’t work, and how it’s oddly similar to the film business in a way.

What do you mean?

You know, the way that I dramatize it within the film is as these commercial demands that are going on outside. Then there are people on deadline to do something spectacular when all they really want to do something in a different direction or something more personal. Which is reminiscent of something I struggle with as a filmmaker. That said, I think the music-business aspect of this film came less as this overdetermined idea to set a film in that world than out of the character, Jane. As I fleshed her out, this world got created around her. It came from within, rather than from the outside.

Was she modeled on a particular music business figure?

Not really. Because as I discovered later after writing the first draft of it, there really wasn’t anybody of her age group, of her generation, any women who were record producers.

What about Ian’s band? Is his band modeled on a particular group?

I started writing this in 1998, right around the time that Radiohead’s “OK Computer” was all the rage. And I really liked that record, and became aware of bands following in that tradition, like Travis or Coldplay, mid-tempo, balladeering rock-pop music. So in that tradition.

How much did Folk Implosion, the indie rock group that plays Ian’s band, bring to the film? Did you learn about band behavior from them?

No, not really. They sort of came in at the last minute and saved my ass. I was really having a hard time casting actors to play a band. It seemed like a recipe for disaster to do that. I think what they helped was for Fran McDormand and Alessandro Nivola to get a general sort of energy, if you will. And while this band isn’t modeled on the Folk Implosion, those guys have been in the music business for a long time so there’s just a general demeanor …

They look exactly like a band sitting around a table smoking pot.

Yeah, well, that’s exactly what they were supposed to be. They didn’t have huge personalities. They just were there making a record. And their frontman is the charisma guy.

I wanted to get into this idea about emotional responsibility, which is this phrase that I’ve read you use. I wanted to ask what that meant to you.

Oh, man, that’s like a huge question!

OK.

Do you want to ask it about a specific character? Did you see the film?

Yeah, absolutely. My question is kind of vague, but I was so drawn to that idea. One of my favorite scenes, and one of the best sex scenes I’ve ever seen, was when Christian Bale and Natascha McElhone are in the car.

Yeah.

They’re basically having this emotionally irresponsible affair. There’s no actual sex involved, but he’s cheating on his fiancée in a bad way. So he is sort of betraying an emotional fidelity. But I think the idea of emotional responsibility is something bigger in the film …

In a kind of crass shorthand way, I would say that emotional responsibility in this film means copping to your fuck-ups, which doesn’t mean that you have to be honest about everything that you do and think. It’s like the opposite of denial. It’s about admitting where your boundaries are and are not. I think it’s a portrait of this couple that is in extreme denial about who they are. So while they have this self-righteous opinion of themselves, while it’s unspoken, it’s emotionally irresponsible of them in a certain sense that they’re so vulnerable to being set off course, if you will.

Do they love each other?

Yeah, I think they love each other in that kind of repressed, “Do I love you or are you my Barbie doll? I don’t know ’cause I haven’t gone to the other side to figure it out” sort of way.

So they might not really even know what love is?

I think that’s a great way of saying it. I think the film is kind of a funny meditation on that. Kind of like, you got to go to know.

You have to what?

You got to go to know.

You got to know … gotcha.

Gotta go.

Gotta go to know.

Yeah. You don’t necessarily have to act on every desire, but you have to be open to your doubts and your darker sides to really understand what you’re about, what makes you tick and what love is.

Jane has gone all the way, and she’s coming back. Is that what emotional responsibility is?

Yeah, totally.

So how do you go about doing this all of this in a way that doesn’t come off moralistic? Because that is one of the real achievements of the film, that it doesn’t seem preachy.

Well, thanks, I appreciate that. I don’t know. It took me a long time to write it. I kind of saw the whole thing as a funny math problem. You know, I got all these people on a chessboard, and if I move so-and-so a little too much that way, this character seems like a victim and that character seems like an asshole. You know, then it sort of becomes a morality question. It was a constant balancing act with all of these characters. You know, they move in these incremental ways that affect the other person. But you try to keep them all in a place where their move seems not only affected by the other person’s move, but reasonable given where they are coming from, and where we as an audience feel that to be better or more truthful people, they need to go.

D.H. Lawrence. Were you reading D.H. Lawrence when you were writing this?

No, but I should. Like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or something?

In particular.

You know, I’ve never read that book.

Really? There’s the greatest line in the film that I thought was a direct nod to it.

What is it?

The exchange between Christian Bale and Natascha McElhone that goes, “Are you having a sexuality crisis?” Answered by, “I’m not having any crisis.”

Really?

“Crisis” is Lady Chatterley’s term for orgasm.

Oh … that’s genius.

That’s what I’m saying …

I love that. I’m going to take that on the road. That’s coming into every interview I do from here on out.

You can take it.

I haven’t read that book, but I’ve been meaning to for 20 years.

OK, I’m going to change the subject. What did Frances McDormand bring to Jane?

God, she really kind of brought everything to Jane. She was this person who was in my imagination and she really made her 3-D in a way. You know, I invented this character who was sexy and saucy and smart and shrewd and flawed and hedonistic and tender and all these different things. And when I went to cast her, I thought, “I just screwed myself. This is impossible. I’m never going to get all these qualities in one actor.” And she walked in looking like she does, and being like she is, and it was, you know … Directing is a pretty rigorous thing to do with yourself, but there are moments that make it worth your time.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

It’s just that directing’s real hard, and there’s a lot of downside to it, a lot of anxiety and disappointment. But when something like that happens, when you’ve written this character where you thought, “I’m going to sink my own ship,” and Fran McDormand walks in and she is that character, it’s like a really awesome, transcendent moment that makes everything else seem reasonable.

I love the scene with the old man, when Alex, Jane’s daughter-in-law, goes apartment hunting and looks at his house. I love the economy of it. It’s showing that Alex really isn’t working hard to find a way out of Jane’s house, and it’s also about another type of relationship between a parent and a child. I admire the way that every scene is trying to do more than one thing at once. Is this something that you try to achieve in your writing?

I appreciate that. That’s a nice thing to say. I really care about the way that I write, and I think that way. I think that’s the kind of stuff that gets lost in the translation if you’re not sensitive to it, or not interested in that. I appreciate it. Yeah, that’s what I enjoy when I go to see films. I really enjoy these layered, carefully inscribed character studies that have larger subtexts going on with them. So it’s the kind of stuff that I try to write.

What about the production design? Did you have a lot to do with the way … the house is so perfect to me. It’s sort of the dream, the idyllic California …

Can I ask you a question?

Yeah, sure.

Are you gay?

No. I’m straight.

Excellent.

[Laughs.] Why?

‘Cause I just thought … I was going to ask you if gay men were going to like this movie better than straight men.

I really couldn’t say.

I’m glad to hear that you’re straight.

I’ve never been asked that in an interview before.

Well, now you’re not a virgin anymore. Yeah, well, it’s a great house. A bitchin’ house. My producer …

No. It’s more than the house. It’s what’s in the house. It’s the racks of records, and all the flyers — you have flyers from the old punk band Crime on the wall. Who’s responsible for Crime flyers on the wall?

You know who did it? My production designer is this woman Catherine Hardwicke, who six months after doing my film went on to direct her own film, which just got bought at Sundance. She’s got a film coming out called “13.” [Hardwicke also did spectacular work in David O. Russell's "Three Kings."] And I wanted that house to feel like … I don’t want to spend a lot of expository time talking about Jane’s past. I just want to walk in the house and go, “OK, I get it.” It was filmed in this span of time, these are the people she hangs out with, she’s got a lot of money, she’s really cool, she’s doing her own thing, she’s got a huge collection of vinyl.

So, wait — do you think gay men are going to like this movie more than straight men?

I don’t know, because the other night we had a premiere … I don’t know. I just like that you’re straight and that you’re a detail-oriented guy. That’s good. It’s a quality that’s a little more common in gay men. But then again, you’re a culture guy, and it’s your job. I hope you’re not offended by that.

No, why would I be offended?

I don’t know, maybe you have some trauma from the past.

Look, you have a total straight male fantasy at the center of your film. You’ve got a rock star who gets to have a three-way with Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale.

Yeah, that’s good, huh?

It’s really straight. It’s so straight.

OK, good.

Well that’s more than 20 minutes, and I only had 20 minutes of questions, so I should …

Well, I appreciate talking to you. You’re very astute.

Good luck with the film.

All right. Stay warm. [Laughs.]

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Friday, Feb 21, 2003 9:00 PM UTC

“Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony”

An extraordinary new documentary traces the South African freedom struggle through its joyous, defiant music.

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There’s a moment in every documentary about the American civil rights movement that sets you shaking. You see a montage of black-and-white footage. Marchers. Lunch counter strikes. Police dogs. And then Martin Luther King Jr. stands in front of that massive crowd. And the portentous music drops away from the score, and you hear just his voice, its cadence, its tenor, its message. You would do anything that man asked, not just because of the way he said it, but because he was right.

“Amandla!” extends that tingly Martin Luther King moment for an hour and a half. Lee Hirsch’s documentary about the role music and especially freedom songs played in the 50-year struggle against South African apartheid takes on a massive subject. The central point of the film is that you can’t separate the songs from the movement, and that through the songs you can uncover the story of the struggle. It’s a beautiful movie about the power of music, about the power of being right. In a way, you shouldn’t even read about this movie. It has to be heard.

There are, of course, stunning images as well. (The film is currently playing in New York; it opens in Los Angeles next week and in several other cities in March.) Hirsch captures some great stuff — he spent nine years making the movie, shooting mostly on video — but the most powerful images in his film were selected from archived footage: Blacks shuttled off to the Meadowlands township in the late ’40s, guerrillas moving through the bush in the ’70s, massive crowds bobbing up and down, dancing the ferocious toyi-toyi in front of riot police in the 1980s.

The soul of the film, in some ways, is singer Vuyisile Mini, a songwriter and anti-apartheid leader who was hanged in 1964. “Amandla!” (it’s the Xhosa word for “power”) begins with his family and admirers exhuming his bones from a mass grave and giving them the respect of a proper burial in a state memorial. It’s a potent metaphor for what the film does. Like Mini’s family, the movie gets into the dirt, touches the bones, cries, sings and dances.

Using a number of narrators, including activists, political prisoners and exiled musicians like Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim, the film moves through the history of the struggle. I’m no expert on South Africa, nor apartheid. I was a kid when it was a celebrity cause and college students were living in campus shantytowns and calling for Coca-Cola to divest. No matter. The film quickly sets up the conditions and continues to limn the high — and low — points of the long revolution. The white National Party sends blacks into townships, then restricts their movements. There is resistance, then blacks are massacred at protests, then leaders like Nelson Mandela and Vuyisile Mini are sent to prison. There are uprisings, a guerrilla movement, a slow repeal of the vicious apartheid laws and finally democratic elections. This takes 50 years, and freedom always seems just around the corner.

All of that comes out in song, but also in stories. Thandi Modise, who went on to be a member of South Africa’s National Assembly, was imprisoned for nine years and tortured while she was pregnant. She considered suicide, she says, but found her way back by singing. Three white policemen admit to being scared by dancing blacks. Radio Freedom, the illegal radio station of the African National Congress, begins and ends with a song.

“Amandla!” is never cloying or hippie-ish. It doesn’t drone on about oppression. It doesn’t feel sorry for anyone, and its subjects do not feel sorry for themselves. The people in the film sing on their way to the gallows and dance at funerals. You get the sense that some of that comes from facing so many horrible things, witnessing so much injustice. From that, you learn how the music worked, why a joyful, happy song had the lyrics “the dogs must die.” As Modise puts it, when a comrade dies, you don’t cry, you sing.

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Wednesday, Feb 19, 2003 9:00 PM UTC

“It’s a game between the director and the spectator”

Laetitia Colombani, the 27-year-old French filmmaker behind the new erotic thriller "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not," on madness, manipulation and movies.

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Laetitia Colombani got lucky. The 27-year-old French director wrote a screenplay as a thesis assignment at her university. Like any ambitious student, she entered the script in a contest and sent it to a famous producer, not expecting much.

The script went over better than she could have possibly imagined. Six months later, Colombani began shooting “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” with Audrey Tautou, the pixie-faced charmer who starred in “Amélie.”

Colombani’s love-drunk thriller plays with Hollywood conventions. From its start, it seems like a sunny romance, centered on an affair between art student Angélique and Loïc, a married cardiologist who is expecting a baby with his wife. But halfway through, the movie flips and reverses, like “Rashomon” or “Run Lola Run,” going back in time and showing a much darker version of each event. Angélique, it seems, suffers from erotomania, or a delusional obsession with a man who doesn’t actually know she exists.

I met Colombani in the lobby of an over-designed New York hotel. She was cheery and excited on a rainy morning, eager to talk about the research that led to her script, why she likes manipulating an audience and the fine points of distinction between an erotomaniac and a stalker.

Can you tell me what you learned about erotomania? Was that the genesis of the film, or did you come upon that later?

Actually, I was writing a thesis in my school about madness and movies, and I was supposed to write a screenplay about madness. And so I wondered what madness should I choose. And one night, on a TV show, I heard somebody talking about erotomania. And I didn’t know anything about this disease, but what this person told was amazing.

What did this person say?

She was a woman, and she was in a wheelchair. She had been the victim of her neighbor, and he had fired her with two bullets. He was in love with her, and he was an erotomaniac. Her story was extraordinary, and so I decided to search in books: What exactly was erotomania? I discovered that it was fascinating and absolutely not famous. I didn’t see other films dealing with the same subject. And so I thought it would be great for my thesis and for my work and for my screenplay to deal with erotomania.

What is the difference between an erotomaniac and a stalker?

The difference is that in erotomania the mad person is convinced that she is loved in return. She is absolutely convinced. In erotomania there is nothing real. For example, in “Fatal Attraction,” Glenn Close and Michael Douglas had an affair, and when they broke up she could not bear it. But that is not erotomania, because there was something real. Naturally, in erotomania, there is absolutely nothing real, but the person is convinced that she is loved by somebody who is, in most cases, inaccessible. Loïc is a doctor, is married and is going to have a baby. It’s only in the person’s mind. But the person interprets every act as a loving act. The interpretation is the most important thing in erotomania.

You wrote the screenplay in school, and then you won a contest, right? Did they just say, “OK, now you get to make your movie”?

Yeah, well, actually it was a nice prize, but I had met my producer one month before. Everything went together. I met my producer in January, I won the prize in March and I started to shoot the movie in July. So everything was very fast.

Now, it usually doesn’t happen like that in the States. I’m assuming it’s not like that in Europe either.

I was very lucky. When I finished my screenplay I decided to send it to a famous producer [Dominique Brunner]. I was hoping he would give advice; I didn’t think he would produce it. But he read the script in one week and decided to produce it immediately. He called me and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s shoot it.” After that everything went very fast. Because he is very famous he could get the money fast. We cast it fast. Everything was very easy for me. It was like in a fairy tale. It was amazing.

I read that you originally wrote the lead for yourself.

Yeah, I am an actress too, and I really like acting, and when I was writing the script I thought I could be Angélique and act in my own movie. But when I started to prepare it I just realized it was so huge, the work of doing my first feature, that it would be better if I only direct because it’s too much work.

So I decided on Audrey Tautou. I was thinking that she would be perfect from the part because she was far away from the mad girl. You can’t imagine that she would be mad. I am still an actress, but I am sure that I do not want to act in my own movies.

Why is that?

It must be very hard to be in the same time in front of a camera and behind. I think that an actor is really better when he is being directed by someone else.

What directors would you like to work with?

As an actress?

Yes.

Well, my three idols, you know. Roman Polanski, Jane Campion and Tim Burton are my three favorite directors. And I would die to work with them.

I keep reading these reviews of your film, and they say it’s “Fatal Attraction” meets “Amélie.” But I think that your movie goes deeper than that.

Actually, I didn’t see “Amélie” before I wrote my screenplay, or before I cast Audrey. I don’t think people would think of “Amélie” if Audrey Tautou was not in it. I don’t think there are many common points between the two movies.

“Fatal Attraction,” yeah, there are more common points. In the first draft of the screenplay the film was like “Fatal Attraction” because it was very linear. And then I decided to cut the film into two parts. So I think it’s a little bit different, with two points of view. It was very important for me to try a different structure, to try things in my first movie. It was kind of dangerous, but I was very excited to try it.

What about this story made you decide to use this structure?

Well, I first wrote the story very linear, but after that I said it would be more fun for me as a screenwriter to try to deal with a strange structure. It was like a game, you know, writing a thriller. To link the two parts with small details was like a game, and I really had a lot of pleasure to write it. But on top of that I thought that the structure would really help the subject. Because it is about madness, and I wanted to the spectator to identify with the mad character in the first part. A kind of manipulation.

You know the film “Psycho”? It’s one of my favorite movies, because you are manipulated all the time, and at the end there is a twist and you want to see everything again to see how you have been manipulated. It’s kind of a game between the director and the spectator. And I really enjoy that.

Why does Angélique go crazy?

It’s a huge question. I read a lot of books about erotomania, and the causes of the disease are very complicated to explain in a movie. It’s something that happens in the very early years of a child. I thought it would be too psychiatric, too complicated to explain in my movie. But for me, she’s very, very lonely all the time. She was lonely since she was a child. She finds in her fantasy what she cannot find in her reality. It’s my own version of the facts; a psychiatrist would say something more complicated. That’s why I wanted her to be an artist: She’s living in the world of art, of fantasy, of imagination. At one point, her imagination overtakes the place of everything in her mind and she has no contact with reality any more.

Talk to me about color and lighting. The first half of the film has bright, saturated colors. It’s a bright, ideal place.

I wanted the two parts of the movie to be very different. I wanted the first part to be very bright, very romantic, passionate, in even in a teenage way. Like in a very immature girl. She can imagine a wonderful love story with lots of hearts, lots of flowers. It reveals, for me, her own world. She’s living in a world of fantasy.

For the second part, it was important to have something more realistic, more scientific, more normal. It’s more usual life. Loïc is a doctor. For me Angélique is living in a fantasy and Loïc is living in reality. And so I wanted the second part to be in blue shades, with not so much camera movement. The light should not be so bright, but quieter, calmer, more normal.

And the music changes a lot. In the beginning, it’s loopy, with chimes, and it becomes darker.

It was also a part of the manipulation.

So you are really about manipulating an audience.

Yes, but not in a bad sense. It’s manipulating like in a game, playing. Not in, you know, a dark way, a perverse way. I really like Alfred Hitchcock’s movies because I have a feeling that he plays with us all the time. I enjoy this relationship, between me and this movie. And it was also the case with movies like “The Sixth Sense,” or “The Usual Suspects.” It’s really stimulating for me, as a spectator, to be manipulated like that. I really enjoy to be manipulated in a way where I think I have understood something, but actually it’s this other thing.

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