Father Geek here with two killer interviews you'll find NOWHERE else. While at the Rotterdam Film Fest our good Dr. SOTHA managed to get one on one with FUKASAKU KINJI the director of the controversal BATTLE ROYALE and at the very end of that talk the director let slip why he would undertake such a violent flick, buuuuuut Father Geek is happiest with SOTHA's long personal talk with Producer John Stodel about ORSON WELLES and other directors he has worked with over the years. Like alot of movie professionals Stodel has worn many hats in his film career. He started as a driver, then slaved as a PA, moved up to Art Director, then Asst. Director, Production Manager, and finally Producer. He worked on BLOW UP and HOWLING 4, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and KILLER FORCE, ZORBA THE GREEK and BOESMAN AND LENA among many others. If you love film... You must read this interview... It is wonderful stuff... The stuff of dreams...
INTERNATIONAL ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL
After splitting DNA strands in my hotel room (a combination of plucked hairs from Mamet and Cronenberg, which resulted in a fast talking, disfigured fly reasoning with my moral mettle), I, Dr. SOTHA hitched another taxi ride to the center of Rotterdam. The taxis driver said to me "this weatheerrr iss nooo goood", I fired a quick response, "Look I don't know anything about any covert operation to intellectualize a fly, I don't know where you got your information, but you're dead wrong". I quickly paid him, and got out before he could get any more information, and headed for the Doele. And so it was that I walked into Fukasaku Kinji, the director of Battle Royale, his translator was there, so I thought as long as he knows nothing about the fly project, it wouldn't harm to ask him a few questions.
Director FUKASAKU KINJI AND BATTLE ROYALE
DR.SOTHA: Fukasaku, I've just seen Battle Royale, I wonder if I could have a
word.
The translator nods to me
TRANSLATOR: Just a moment because he's got another interview in a few minutes.
DR.SOTHA: Yeah, ofcourse. What prompted to make such a violent film.
TRANSLATOR/FUKASAKU: Basically to turn the argument on its head, to desensitize violence, which is comical, like a video game, you can't take it seriously.
DR.SOTHA: How did you come across the material?
TRANSLATOR/FUKASAKU: My 19 year old son wrote it, and I directed.
DR.SOTHA: Do you think the Japanese youth will understand it? The violence I mean.
TRANSLATOR/FUKASAKU: Yes, they understand the boundaries between film and reality. In a screening in Japan, the screening was filled with youngsters who completely understood the message.
DR.SOTHA: Do you think you've stayed in touch with the evolution of film in Japan.
TRANSLATOR/FUKASAKU: Well its already a hit in Japan, so I think so.
DR.SOTHA: What draws you to violence?
TRANSLATOR/FUKASAKU: I'm not drawn to it, it's a way of confronting my past. At the age of 15 I was confronted with the death of most of my classmates during a bombing raid.
TRANSLATOR: Rap it up, he's gotta be off.
DR.SOTHA: Right, well good luck, hopefully I can interview more in depth at a later stage.
FUKASAKU nods his head.
Okay so it wasn't anything groundbreaking, but two things struck me about
him, first he obviously knew nothing about PROJECT FLY, and second was that
he carries himself with an air of grace and fluidity, waltzing across the
room like an agile Yakuza. As it turns out I never got the chance to
interview him more in depth (though I suspect that somebody tipped him off
about Project Fly). Anyway, there was more to do, and the first thing had to
be to track down International film producer John Stodel. For everyone who
doesn't know who is.John Stodel comes from South Africa, and has worked with
some of the great filmmakers of the past, Michael Antonioni, Michael
Cacoyannis, Norman Jewison etc. His most recent effort was the South
African/French co-production of Athol Fugard's play 'Boesman and Lena' with
Danny Glover and Angela Basset, which he co-produced with Jeremy Nathan
(also interviewed before this.) John Stodel does one of the most startling
Orson Welles' (not that he's aware of it) impressions I have ever known. He
is very much an enigma, and with that commanding voice he beckoned me over
to his table, 'So you want do this then?' he said. 'Yes and thank you' I
gushed.
If you're a film zealot, you'll want to read this.
THE REAL ORSON WELLES BY JOHN STODEL
THE REAL ORSON WELLES BY JOHN STODEL
JOHN: You gotta do question and answer, right?
DR.SOTHA: Right, I want to know about your working relationship with some of the greats in the 60's
JOHN: Ahhh
DR.SOTHA: You mentioned Michael Antonioni?
JOHN: I mentioned Antonioni, I was a nobody, I was less then a driver, I was like part of the props department, sweeping and painting Hampstead Heath a better colour of green. A deeper and more irridescent color that Antonioni wanted to paint the film in.
DR.SOTHA: What was the name of the film?
JOHN: It was for a film called 'Blow Up' with David Hemmings, and there was a wonderful German model in it called Verishca, or Czechoslovakian, quite a controversial film at the time, and he wanted this thing to be sort of surreal in a sense that yes it is reality, but it's more reality because the film is about a murder.and the Mcguffin of the story is the photographer sees the body, or did he? So it was interesting, it was the time, London, it was the swinging 60's.
DR.SOTHA: And it had that subtext of art imitating life.
JOHN: Yes it's a very intense film by a focused director, very inspirational. I was very young at the time, I was 19/20, and just soaking every frame of celluloid that there was available to be looked at, to be participated in.
DR.SOTHA: Is there any encounter with Antonioni that really stuck out with you?
JOHN: I had a couple of conversations.
DR.SOTHA: How did he strike you? What director would you say he was?
JOHN: He was a little bit elusive. The problem being, I guess, the ability to communicate freely in English, he's Italian afterall. Not meaningful conversations about film or art or anything like that, but I knew this guy was very special. Everybody who was involved in the picture from the lowest bottom feeders of which I was part of, knew already that this film was going to be extraordinary.
DR.SOTHA: And so it was. If I could shift the conversation for a moment. If you could recount your Orson Welles story, which just seems to add to the mythology of the great man.
JOHN: The real Orson Welles?
DR.SOTHA: The real Orson Welles. You were traveling through Europe.
JOHN: This is John Stodel in search of Orson Welles. I'd seen all of Welles' films, and I had met a girl who had worked with him in Yugoslavia, and I was just totally fascinated by Welles's genius, but also in a sense of his 'against all odds' trying to make films in Europe after he had been rejected by Hollywood, being a persona, being larger than his most Obese self. So I traveled to Spain via nefarious means and got to Seville where there was a Fiera in progress which happens annually. It's a kind of a wine festival, cherry festival, I'm not sure. Where people dress up in traditional garb. The Alfonso 13 hotel where it was like a baroque upside down cake, and in my jeans and tattered shirt, I went to the concierge and I said 'I have come from London with a very important message for Orson Welles'
DR.SOTHA: And how did you know he was there? Had you heard?
JOHN: I had heard, the rumor mill was in overdrive, Welles was there and everybody knew it, like a worst kept secret. It's like finding Andy Warhol at the Pierre hotel in New York. You just knew. The buzz was swarming through the city.
DR.SOTHA: And ofcourse he was legendary for living in hotels for most of his life, after Citizen Kane.
JOHN: Yah, in later years you begin to understand the sense of desperation of not having enough money, but still having a personality and selling that for whatever value you can get in the market place, but that's not about this story. What is about this story is I got to the concierge and I said I have a very important message for Mr. Welles. I have come from London especially to do this, and the concierge being a very wise person said 'Please give me the message I will give it to him personally', and I said no I'm terribly sorry this is for Mr. Welles's own private information, and I'm not at liberty to divulge this to anyone but him and I'm very sorry. And with that across the lobby, surrounded in a kind of special effects smoke and an enormous fucking Cuban cigar. Welles very obese, levitated across the room.
DR.SOTHA: What year is it John?
JOHN: This mid-60's my memories full of clouds. 62/63 somewhere around then, I can't remember exactly and what I had learnt from my friend about Welles is that his financial situation was.
DR.SOTHA: Bleak?
JOHN: Weak. He would get up from restaurants ostensively to go to the toilet and disappear without paying the bill, pull the emergency lever. Somewhere in Yugoslavia the train would stop.
DR.SOTHA: Which ofcourse is classic Welles. He was notorious for not giving a shit about where the money came from and how he spent it.
JOHN: Most definitely, I mean he was an absolute artist. He would get off at an obscure station in Yugoslavia and be seen walking in to the mist, because he didn't have a train ticket. He'd accomplished half the journey. Besides that, so I said to Welles as he was accompanied by the most beautiful Spanish girl, much younger than him ofcourse, and I said 'Mr. Welles excuse me I have come all the way from London to meet you' and he looked at me quizzically and said 'where are you from', and I said I am from South Africa. And he said 'yes', and I said 'well I've seen all your films and I admire them more than you know, and If there was some kind of a way that I could work for you in any capacity, and absolutely for no money', and he pondered for a moment, and he said 'Yes, Why not?'
DR.SOTHA: In that deep baritoned voice of his.
JOHN: An unbelievable and overpowering voice. He then said, 'is there any money for films in South Africa?' and being very young I didn't know until there wasn't. Then I said well I'm not sure but I could find out for you. His attention was then distracted, and he wafted forward towards this gigantic Mercedes Benz Limo circa 1953, looking like something out of the Vermacht you know, and he got inside, and then casually beckoned to me, and he said 'when you find out if there's any money in South Africa, please give me a call' and they drove off, and that was my Orson Welles story. I didn't think he was an asshole for talking to me in that way at all.
DR.SOTHA: That's Welles, he spoke to everyone like that.
JOHN: That was Welles. Many years later, I worked with John Berry who is/was a part of the Hollywood ten, but his career prior to coming to Hollywood to be a film director was that he was part of the Mercury theatre.
DR.SOTHA: Berry worked for the Mercury Theatre?
JOHN: Yah, he was Welles's assistant.
DR.SOTHA: No shit?
JOHN: Yah, and I spoke to him about that incident quite fondly, and John and I would tell each other true lies, because the stories were greater then fiction, but in actual fact truth. So when he would tell a story about Welles I knew it to be true, and If he would tell a story about John Huston and his girlfriend I would also know that it would be true. So those are the early years of my career.
DR.SOTHA: But there is that kind of romanticized version of what Welles was like in the flesh?
JOHN: Yes, I think that his genius is self evident in his work, and therefore however he related to people, however abusive or manipulative or the bad side of Welles, which I never saw, but I am told that it was there, is one to forgive people for their greatness and their demi-god status that is greater than or less than us mere mortals. I don't know I can't answer that, because I was never subjected to that. But what I can say about Welles and Antonioni or any of the filmmakers with that great depth of story-telling or that great-depth of imagination. Like Norman Jewinson who I've worked with, they are larger than life, and their work lives, they're timeless.
DR.SOTHA: Fill us in on the films that you've worked on as a producer.
JOHN: I've worked on a lot of bad films.
DR.SOTHA: Give us the good ones.
JOHN: They're very very few and far between, but there were some pearls. I loved working with Jewison on 'Jesus Christ Superstar', and I have enormous regard for Norman as a filmmaker. He's a very precise person about himself, but he's a person of great insight and humanity, and I think has done some superlative pieces of work 'In The Heat of the Night', 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'. I have a kind of sense, I'm not sure, in this day and age whether we match that kind of depth in our story telling, and I think part of it is due to technology, and the pace in which we are able to absorb information. Films of those great people are really total experiences, and there just seems to be a little bit less depth, we seem to be more shallow, although there are some great films still around. I don't want to sound like some old man on his deathbed. I worked with Michael Cacoyannis on 'Zorba the Greek' with Anthony Quinn. A man of great imagination and great flamboyance. Not only in and around his persona, but in the theatricality, and the way in which he would orchestrate his mise-en-scene, and in a way that really gave it the dimension. And just as a small example, I worked on a film with a biblical subtext made for ABC at the time in North America, and he suddenly was inspired on the set, because we were on an exterior location where a very intimate and quiet dialogue was happening between people. He insisted immediately that five extras get dressed up in white shrouds, and they were placed on a hill, which was about half a kilometer away, and he wanted a wind machine to blow their clothes and robes in a certain direction, and for them just to mime words. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on, it had nothing to do with the script or dialogue, and every now and again the camera would be set up in an angle where it would feature these people on the hill. Well in the final editing of the film, these five people enact the part of a Greek chorus, which is so essential to classical theater and the tapestry of the film, and he laid the voice of God through their mouths, whilst this dialogue was going on. It was very inspiring, my heart was missing beats.
DR.SOTHA: What was the name of the film?
JOHN: It was a television movie for ABC called 'Jakob and Joseph' done on such a grand scale. We had top notch American actors in leads. Colleen Dewhurst played the mother, Harry Andrews, Alan bates narrated, Keith Michell and Tony Lo Bianco playing the 2 leads. A film telling the Biblical stories of the last of the Hebrew Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis.
DR.SOTHA: What else have you done?
JOHN: I worked on the Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone Indian Jones-esque King Solomon's Mines, which was great fun, and most recently on the adaptation of Athol Fugard's play 'Boesman and Lena' which I co-produced with Jeremy Nathan who I enormously respect. Right now I've got a project called 'Gents' based on the Warrick Collins best selling book. Warrick has adapted his own book. It's about 3 unlikely working class lads who get a job in a London loo. And they are each in their own way horrified to discover that this 'Gents' as it is called Gentleman's Toilet is the place of rendesvouz for casual sex for men. Each one of them in their own way react to this out of the convention of the background that they come out of good Church going people etc. etc. The council impose upon them this ultimatum, that they have to clean up the toilet (get rid of the homosexual element) or they'll close them down, and through hi-jinx and inventiveness they clean it up. Then the argument is turned around when the council tell them the revenue has dropped as a result of this cleaning up. And so now they have to encourage gay men to use the urinals once again. It's a strange and affecting film, that I think has cross-over potential anywhere, really.I have to go, but we'll finish this.
