ivansxtc. and the Future of Digital Filmmaking: An Interview With Bernard Rose By Peter Tonguette Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

With films as diverse as Paperhouse (1988), Candyman (1992), Immortal Beloved (1994), and Anna Karenina (1997) to his credit, director Bernard Rose has firmly established himself as one of the most challenging directors at work today. A bold stylist who has worked in a variety of different modes and genres, he challenges himself in an age when so many filmmakers find their niche and never stray from it. He challenges audiences by refusing to condescend to them, instead assuming they are up to the questions his work poses.

His latest film, ivansxtc. (2002), represents the director's first dance with the medium of digital video. An updating of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illyich," it finds the ideal contemporary setting for the story in present day Hollywood and the world of agents and superagents, insiders and outcasts.

But unlike many films set in or "about" Hollywood, the film eschews self-congratulatory humor for a mournful, even tragic portrait of ostracism and death in the city of dreams. The film simultaneously represents an extension of his previous work--the film he made right before ivansxtc. was a big budget adaptation of Anna Karenina--and a renunciation of many of the
large scale means through which mainstream narrative movies, including Rose's own, are made.

ivansxtc. is surely one of the finest DV features I've ever seen--gorgeously photographed, yet also possessing of an intimacy to the performers which is undoubtedly a result of the intimacy of the production. Rose, a veteran of major studio productions, shot ivansxtc. in 20 days for a budget of $500,000 with a crew which never exceeded 8 people. He believes DV has and will only continue to change the way movies will be made in the future, and for the better. In his advocacy of the form--and willingness to put his art where his mouth is--he has come to assume the role of a kind of cinematic prophet, a hat he put on several times during our conversation in March.

Peter Tonguette: First off, I wanted to say how much I loved the film. For my money, it's even more effective than something like Altman's The Player (1992) because, although it has satiric elements, what lingers in the mind is this tremendous sense of melancholy. It has this tragic filter through which you view this decadent town.

Bernard Rose: Well, you know, it's not exactly a happy little town. [Laughter] The truth is that I just was trying to be as honest as possible. The film was made quite simply and because we just made it on our own, it was made with an unusual amount of freedom. But it's just a big problem, that movie. [Laughter]

PT: But that's what struck me about it. So many movies about Hollywood sort of pretend to be biting, but are ultimately affectionate towards it...

BR: Yeah, I sometimes get the feeling that the films that you normally see about Hollywood are made by people who've never been here. Or, if they have, they don't really know the place very well. And, I must say, I never thought of the film as being an "anti-Hollywood" movie. Some people have said that it is, but I think that's them projecting onto it -- because the agent is the hero. In fact, the director is the total asshole in the movie. I think the trouble it caused with some people in L.A. was because they felt really kind of exposed by it.

PT: I read about that screening for your agency at the time...

BR: At CAA. That was kind of funny. [In 2000, CAA hosted a deluxe screening of the film--complete with $5,000 in catering--which has become nothing short of infamous. Appalled by the picture Rose drew of a Hollywood agency--and by parallels of the film's lead character (played by Danny Huston) to former CAA agent Jay Moloney, who committed suicide after being fired by tha agency due to his cocaine habit--they launched a tiny crusade against the film being picked up.]

PT: You've directed some major feature films--major in the sense of being high profile studio projects. What prompted the downsizing in scale and budget of ivansxtc. and the switch to digital video?

BR: Well, the subject matter more than anything. At the time I was preparing a big film at Universal and they got pissed off because I went into production and did this film on the quiet and they basically canned the production. But I think, to be honest, they were probably looking for an excuse to can the production anyway.

But the technology which is somewhat more commonly used now was very new when
we used it. We shot in '99. I got ahold of a prototype from Sony and they weren't commonly in use at all really before Attack of the Clones--and, in fact, the camera that Lucas used is a different camera. The camera that I had access to wasn't as good as the ones you can get now. Or even then. They're changing all the time, those cameras. They're really improving.

So it was a bit of an experiment just to see what we could get. I was still pretty amazed at what we did get. There was this guy called Larry Thorpe, who was kind of in charge of the project at Sony and I got talking to him. I found out certain things about the camera that weren't in the technical specs of it. There wasn't a manual that came with it anyway because they hadn't printed one. [Laughter] But in terms of low light capability, there are all sorts of very strange misinformation that Sony put out there in terms of what the technical specs were of the camera because they were afraid of union trouble when people became aware of how low light sensitive the cameras really were. That's still a very controversial issue, actually. A lot of people have actually swallowed the misinformation and don't actually look at the machines and look at what they actually do.

And, you know, it's all highly political because obviously there are people who didn't want to suddenly find that people who had warehouses full of lighting equipment didn't really need them anymore. And they had all that capital tied up in equipment that they were renting out. If you don't need large scale, heavy lighting equipment, you don't need all the people to handle it and load it on and off trucks and you don't somewhere for them all to go to the bathroom and you don't feed them. The implications are actually enormous.

PT: From an aesthetic point of view, what do you feel the film gained from being shot on DV? Personally, I felt it not only added a greater degree of naturalism and realism, but also gave it an intimate quality.

BR: That's right. There aren't 150 people hanging around--there was just me with the camera. I shot the film myself and I just pressed the red button on the camera--I didn't really fuss around with it that much, mostly because I didn't really know enough about the camera to mess around with it. Now if I was doing it, I would approach it differently. But whether I would do it better isn't necessarily the case because if you just use the factory settings on those things, they're not really any harder to use than your average mini-DV.

PT: What was the genesis of ivansxtc.? Did you ever try to get it made at a studio or was always going to be...

BR: Well, no I didn't, actually, because the money came together incredibly quickly after I wrote it with Lisa Enos [Rose's wife and chief collaborator on ivansxtc.]. And we just went out and did it. We were shooting the film within six weeks of finishing the script. So it was very, very, very fast. I showed the script to a couple of people and immediately they went, "Oh,
this is great central role. Why don't we send it to Woody Harrelson, this person, that person?" And I just went, "Nah, I'm just gonna do it." [Laughter] So we just did it.

I think that, from a commercial point of view, we'd have been smarter to have hired somebody who was more of a name. But, on the other hand, I think the film would have lost its authenticity.

PT: And this was coming right after you'd done a big budget Tolstoy film, Anna Karenina, which was taken out of your hands?

BR: Yeah, that was just totally re-cut. I don't just mean shortened a bit--although, in fact, the best version actually ran 3:15. But if we grant them some slack... I didn't really expect them to release it at 3 hours 15 minutes. There was a 2:45 version that was pretty good and then in fact there was even a 2:20 version that was still okay. It was a little rushed in places, but the film that was eventually released is 1:45. So it's not even just that it's shorn of major sequences, but they completely changed the plot of it when they re-cut it. In ways that I won't bore you with, it kind of subverts the book is actually trying to say and do. I think it's pretty
awful, actually.

PT: Do you think there's a chance that you'll be able to release your cut on DVD at some point?

BR: Well, there's always a chance. I know my cut exists because we tested it. It was screened a couple of times. In order to do that back then to mix it, there were 35mm dupes of it made. So, somewhere, somebody has it. But I don't even have a VHS of it, actually. And whether they still have it is another issue. And it's a little political because it's actually got
nothing to do with Warner Bros. But that's another story which I don't want to go into really because I might try to get it back and try to put it out there. And I don't want to piss off the person who actually does own it. Put it this way: if you actually look at the titles, you can probably guess who it was. It wasn't a Warner Bros. production--they were just distributing it.
I've always like blamed Warners because it's a nice amorphous thing, but it wasn't really much to do with Warner Bros. They could probably care less about that movie. It was just some film they'd picked up as a favor to somebody.

PT: Going back to ivansxtc., I really love Danny Huston's performance. How did you come to offer him the part, because, as you mentioned, bigger names were briefly bandied about?

BR: Because we wanted to do it quickly, it would make sense to hire people who we knew and were in our social circle. Danny was an old friend of mine. I've known him for years. Actually, I've known him since before I made Candyman because at the time he was married to Virginia Madsen. So I've known him since then. He was in Anna Karenina as well.

PT: Do you plan to continue to work with digital technology? Would you go back and forth between it and 35mm?

BR: Well, you know, I think that Hollywood is switching over now. When I first made ivansxtc., the film purists were all, "Oh no, film is our art!" [Laughter] All this kind of real tendentious nonsense would come out of them: "Oh, it's digital, it's horrible!" And now of course, they're all rushing to learn it because the studios don't want to use film anymore. It's time consuming, it's wasteful, it's unnecessary, it's less malleable, and even when they shoot the films on film these days, on half of the big movies they then CGI over them. So what the hell's the difference?

PT: And I think ivansxtc. is as well shot as any 35mm film I saw last year. It has beautiful cinematography.

BR: Well, thank you. I mean, that's the point. The people who don't like digital have probably seen some badly shot mini-DV which isn't really the same thing. You can shoot bad film too. [Laughter] You can shoot bad DV. You really can. It doesn't mean you have to start being any good at it. That's not ever the case. But it is easier to use, I will say that, mostly because it's a lot more light sensitive. In fact, it has the opposite problem to film, which is that if something whites out, there's no info there--it's just white. But if you stop down, conversely, it's almost impossible for it to record absolutely blank. So you'll always be able to pull detail out of the shadow areas. It's not a photochemical thing--you're not trying to burn an image in with the amount of light. The amount of light is irrelevant. The only thing it measures are the ifferentials of light. Whether they happen to be one candle or the sun, it's the same problem--what's the differential. So old style film cameramen who come in to use digital and they start putting up big lights are actually creating a problem for themselves. They don't have the right approach. So there's been so pretty poor work done in DV by DPs who have a very conservative view of how to do it.

PT: What was your opinion of the Soderbergh film which he shot partially in DV, Full Frontal (2002)?

BR: I didn't see it.

PT: I thought it was pretty interesting in that he was purposefully going for a very grainy, non-slick look. It's not nearly as good looking as ivansxtc. But that was intentional and you have to give him credit for playing with the form.

BR: Soderbergh's an interesting director, there's no question. I think that we're at the very, very beginnings of DV and, let's face it, it's only going to get better. They're now going to come out with chips that shoot 72P--72 frames per second. They're coming out with chips that are larger that go in cameras that are smaller. It's going to go on and on and on. I think very soon you're going to have perpetual sample rates without any kind of frame differentials that will break down, that will scan a picture faster than your eye can even absorb it. This will be very, very freaky, because the pictures will look to all intents and purposes real.

PT: Are you working on any specific projects right now?

BR: Well, not specifically, no. We've sort of had a long, hard road with ivansxtc. in trying to get it into distribution and the whole way that the movie business is in a kind of peculiar state at the moment. We've been trying to come up with new ways of getting movies out in the public. Because I think that really that the big revolution will be in distribution, not necessarily in production. I think things are changing very fast. There's going to be a fight for control of the international movie business over the next ten years. I don't necessarily think that the established system of the MPAA with the major distributors dominating the world market will continue. I really don't think it will necessarily go on like that.

PT: In what ways do you think that distribution is going to change significantly?

BR: Well, I think that we're on the verge now--and the only thing that's stopped it already is the MPAA arguing with Microsoft over the technology--of people being able to download HD streaming video into their TiVo boxes off of somebody's website, just using the same sort of account as they do with DirectTV. But it won't becoming through a satellite from one source.
Anyone will be able to upload their movie on a website and just accept customers from those kind of systems connected to people's televisions. And they'll pay a fee and get the movie, pumped down to them. That seems to me pretty obvious.

If you really ever want to know what the future is, there's a very sure way of finding it out. You know what it is? See what the porno business is doing. In history, they are always first because they're always looking for something new that's not regulated. And that's what they've been doing. You go on to the website, you put in a credit card, they pump you a movie down.That's what's going to happen. And it won't be that crude even--you won't be like surfing the net necessarily. I think it will just happen on people's televisions. They'll type in a title in the equivalent of Google and it'll send them to a website. We're not really very far from that.

End Note: Currently, ivansxtc. is unavailable in the United States on home video. But you can order an imported DVD of the film by e-mailing ivansxtc@hotmail.com or visiting the film's eclectic and information-packed website, www.ivansxtc.com

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002