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The reeducation of Lauryn Hill
The hip-hop songstress says she wrote and produced her multiplatinum album. A lawsuit contends that's not the whole truth. Behind the case is a bigger question: What is a pop song, anyway?
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[05/10/00]

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The book on film
Director Martin Scorsese presents a new series of books about film, starring James Agee, Vachel Lindsay, David Selznick and "2001."
By Sarah Vowell
[05/10/00]

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Olympian heroes
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By Jeff Stark and Stephanie Zacharek
[05/09/00]

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The gay, the bad and the hottie
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By Joyce Millman
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Movie Review
"Up at the Villa"
The new film from the folks who gave us "Angels and Insects" is strictly "Minor Piece Theatre."
By Michael Sragow
[05/05/00]

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Until the last couple of days of shooting, this movie didn't have that symmetry. So much energy and creative energy had gone into making it work. One was in danger of being so pleased with the idea that it was working that one kind of neglected other things, like, well, what's the audience going to think? You don't want to create something that simply has its own secret language and its own internal jokes, which audiences are denied. Sometimes when I watch smart films, I think there's so much going on here that the audience is not privy to that I feel slightly insulted.

Each time I was shooting, I was shooting four movies that had to be linked together, so four times 15 [the number of times Figgis and his crew shot the entire film] is 60. And each film had to work on its own, so you're shooting the equivalent of four films a day. And as it got more heated, we were doing eight films a day. So you're sending eight units out to shoot the film, then putting it together. Of course, you can only choose one version, you are inexorably stuck to one take, you can't chop and change any take because the timings vary and the play varies.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

So which version are we seeing?

Number 15. I would say each version pretty much got better than the version before, in a consummated learning curve. The techniques became more honed; the story line increased, moved on, in each outing; and then the improvisational techniques became more subtle and more understated. You get those sublime moments of accidents happening which lead to wonderful performances. It just restored my faith in actors' ability to be self-governing.

I learned you could say to them, "We've got a non-negotiable situation here. We've got no script but we've got a tight structure. And there's no make-up, no transport, no catering; there are no dressing rooms, no trailers. And there are no personal assistants. There are no artists' chairs with your name on it. There is no favoritism at all."

Once you take away envy and a sort of "point system," it's as if you're in a lifeboat together, and it doesn't matter if you're rich -- what matters is, How strong can you swim? There's a wonderful thing that happens, when you make everybody temporarily equal. When you put unknown actors in with Holly Hunter, and she has to do a scene, there's no problem with that. And everyone has the right to jump in on everybody else's lines. Just because you're famous doesn't mean you're better.

For people used to having multiple screens open on their computer, this won't seem novel at all.

I think that anybody under 25 will find nothing unusual about the structure of this, I really don't. At the same time, I don't think they have any advantage, except that their surface assessment will be less extreme. My experience is that it takes audiences maybe five or 10 minutes to become comfortable, and then it just plays. And I think that although the under-25, or under-20, computer-savvy generation are used to multimedia imaging, with them it tends to be rather random, based on the culture of nervous remote-control usage and channel-hopping and MTV-style editing, where no image lingers for very long.

The thing about "Time Code" is that the four screens are very related to each other and you have to concentrate, otherwise the story is not going to function for you. You are being very politely asked to participate in the understanding of the film. And there was not a single interpretation that would be identical to anyone else's, because there will be minute variances in what you watch at any given time, precisely because you have four choices. You still come out with the same story. But the way it comes out is a reflection of the way it is in life when you put 10 people on a street corner -- a crime takes place and the police start taking notes, and the police will get a completely different account from each witness of what they saw, what the emphasis was, and everything.

Of course, on the part of the filmmaker, choices have to be made, and then you have to live with them. For example, in America, I'm doing four special events. The film is projected in a digital format and all of the sound tracks of the four separate films, including the music and all of the effects, are contained on separate tracks of a multitrack recorder, and I do a live mix of the film. So these four screenings will be entirely different from each other and I'm going to have to make decisions literally, on the moment, in front of 500 people, about what could be interesting. The fact is, it's never the same. When I did the so-called film mix, I had to make certain decisions intellectually: OK, I feel for an audience this is the most important bit of dialogue to put across this point, so I have to feature this. That was tough, it was one of the toughest mixes I've had to do in my life.

Wouldn't you be concerned about playing farce in one panel and melodrama in another?

One of the bad things, one of the dull things that is happening in cinema is that the house style of mainstream filmmaking has become very fixed. The word "genre" has become the most abused word in cinema language. People are always asking, what is the genre? Is it romantic comedy? Is it broad comedy? Is it a sci-fi comedy? A sci-fi thriller? And so on. So few films you see go from one to the other. And certainly not [as in "Time Code"] at the same moment, where you're being invited to feel, My God, this is tragic, and at the same time there's this broad comedy taking place on another screen.

I've always been fascinated by that in all -- genres. [Laughter.] One of my favorite artists is America's genius, Charles Ives, a man who completely played around with the expectation of what music should do. He was one of the most serious composers of all time, one of the greats. He wrote some of the most sublimely spiritual pieces of music, but at the same time he would employ what are thought of as broad comedic devices within a symphony, with instruments playing in different keys, four different marching bands going at the same time. But I find it very moving when he does that, as well as funny, and I don't think humor is a bad thing.

My gut feeling was that underneath you found nearly everything funny -- I mean, when the agony-ridden executive played by Stellan Skarsgård talks about shucking it all, he dreams of escaping to Tuscany, a howling romantic cliché.

Of the four screenings I attended, the one I enjoyed the most was one in New York. For reasons of mass-audience psychology an audience may go this way or that way, and that night the audience elected within two or three minutes to see the broad comedic possibilities of the film. The entire film then played through as a good mix of comedy and tragedy and all the rest of it. The element of happy laughter was very strong in the screening and I loved that.

To get an idea of how you want the film to work, let me admit one of my confusions: When Saffron Burrows' character meets up with Leslie Mann's in a ladies room, and Leslie Mann says hello to her, I didn't think they shared a prior history.

There is a prior history, and unfortunately one of the sacrifices made in that particular mix is at the expense of them as characters -- the dialogue does [say], "My God, I haven't seen you in ages, you know ..." And later, "I thought you dropped me as a friend," "No, I didn't drop you, but your boyfriend freaked me out." But also from my perverse point of view, I like going to a movie where you drop in on the dialogue and you know there's a back story, but no one ever alludes to it.

Next page | "Certain sacrifices had to be made"