Kevin
Queen of Jotos
Joined: 28 Sep 2007
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Location: the closet...i'll come out one day...
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 Posted: Sep Saturday, 2008 4:36 pm Post subject: Southland Tales Decoded/Production Notes |
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Southland Tales Decoded
[Note: If you have yet to watch Southland Tales and don't wish to ruin it for yourself, click alt and the left arrow now]
"We ask the creator of the apocalyptic brain-bender to explain himself... "It's definately a film where you need to have a cup of coffee behorehand. But Southland Tales is designed so you can watch it over and over again and discover all the little details."
Q: What are all of those tattoos on the body of Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson)?
Richard Kelly: They're representations of every major religion on Earth. If you read the graphic novel, you'll find the legend which is spoken by Bai Ling's character Serpentine. She says 'The religion that is the winner of the contest will bleed...'
Q: Is Boxer some kind of a messiah?
Kelly: The irony is, he's sort of the decoy messiah, and it ends up that Seann William Scott is the true one. Boxer diverts the attention away from the real messiah, who almost gets killed.
Q: Why does Boxer keep twiddling his fingers?
Kelly: Whenever Boxer becomes scared or agitated or paranoid, as a defence mechanism, Jericho Kane, the character he is playing (in the film he is making), takes over. It's a schizophrenic break. It's a sign that he is at the edge of uncertainty as to who he is.
Q: Is Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) based on anyone?
Kelly: She was designed as a sort of Arianna Huffington meets Jenna Jameson. Y'know, the way porn stars are exploited is not that far off from the way actors are exploited. It's just more physical.
Q: Is 'Fluid Karma' real?
Kelly: The idea of wireless electricity and tides being a source of energy, and there being a potentially world-altering energy source under the ocean, is based on real scientific theory. Many people think wireless electricity is the thing that could rescue us from our dilemma as we reach the end of the petroleum area.
Q: What's up with Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn)?
Kelly: He's the snake-oil salesman who shows up in Santa Monica with the elixir of God. He has the solution to the energy crisis and becomes the most powerful man on earth. And, of course, gets corrupted and goes mad.
Q: What's the bag of thumbs for?
Kelly: Thumbprint identificiation is becoming much more prominent. Ultimately, we may have to vote with our thumbs at some point. The idea with the severed thumbs is that the Neo-Marxists have figured out a way to create a free-floating voter who can vote several time.
Q: What's Justin Timberlake doing in all of this?
Kelly: He is the doomsday prophet, the witness of everything. He's the best friend of Seann William Scott's character (Roland Taverner), so he's witness to the resurrection. His musical dream sequence, which is actually a drug-induced telepathic thing, is the emotional centre of the whole piece, because he was accidentally disfigured by his friend. The idea of a disgraced war veteran becoming the messiah is an interesting concept to me.
Q: And what's this, 'I'm a pimp and pimps don't commit suicide' business?
Kelly: If Roland Taverner pulls the trigger and kills himself, the ice-cream truck will fall and the gateway it opens will close, and it's that gateway that may be humankind's salvation, so suicide represents surrendering to defeat. And pimp? Pimp is American slang for badass. A cool guy. So it's trying to say that our veterans are the biggest badasses that we have."
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot
The conclusion of T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem "The Hollow Men" has been altered for satirical effect in SOUTHLAND TALES, a comedic spin on the apocalypse, as it should occur in the great city of Los Angeles. Trust me on this one… if the end is indeed upon us (apparently 59% of fundamentalist Christians believe that it is), it is going to happen in Los Angeles first.
I have always been obsessed with this whole apocalypse thing… and trying to decipher the encrypted symbolism in the book of Revelations is enough to give anyone a headache. A friend once remarked that there is a legitimate debate among religious scholars that the book of Revelations was written while the Apostle John was under the influence of hallucinatory mushrooms. Go figure.
Another friend sent me a very disturbing link to a story about something called "American Hiroshima". Apparently this is one of many planned terrorist attacks that Al-Quaeda has in the works. This is the one where they smuggle nuclear weapons (purchased by Osama bin Laden from the Russian mafia) over the Mexican border into Texas with the aid of Mexican guerrillas. They detonate the nukes in mid-size cities where there is little domestic counter-terrorism surveillance.
Sounds like the apocalypse to me. Where would we go from here?
These are the sordid tales of what happens next… how it all comes crashing down. In the alternate future of SOUTHLAND TALES, the war machine is running out of gas, and there is no alternative. Alternative fuel, that is.
Global warming may indeed be the "whimper" that T.S. Eliot foretold. Perhaps our destiny is to slowly drown ourselves into oblivion.
Southland Tales will take you down that other road. The one that ends with a "bang". What if there is a path to end all suffering, and hidden somewhere along the way there exists a primer? A primer that could help us extinguish this great big mess of a planet once and for all. Quick and painless.
There is no alternative. Alternative fuel, that is.
Until one day… when a mysterious German corporation arrives in the Southland with a kick-ass new formula. A cure for our sickness…
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
"It's a comedy about the end of the world," states writer/director Richard Kelly. But summing up SOUTHLAND TALES as merely a comedy is a bit of a simplification. Like Kelly's debut feature, the critically acclaimed 2001 cult favorite DONNIE DARKO, the film defies categorization. SOUTHLAND TALES might be part comedy, part action satire, part thriller, part drama and even part musical, but it is definitely all one thing: the singular vision of Richard Kelly. "It's a Richard Kelly film. I think that's the best way to describe it," explains Seann William Scott, who plays twins Ronald and Roland Taverner in the film. "With DONNIE DARKO, I think everyone has their own interpretation of what it's about. And I think the same will go for this movie."
The origins of SOUTHLAND TALES
Kelly first began writing this apocalyptic ensemble piece, set against the backdrop of a 2008 Fourth of July celebration in LA, in 2001, shortly after DONNIE DARKO premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and had left without a domestic distributor (Newmarket Films would eventually release the film that fall). "We were re-cutting and going through this struggle and pressure and I was really frustrated and angry. And I felt like my career was probably over, or ending, or in the process of ending because our movie didn't get picked up and it didn't seem like it was going to," recalls Kelly. "And I wanted to write something about Los Angeles and my frustration with Los Angeles, even though it's a town that I really love and continue to love."
Kelly wrote the initial draft of SOUTHLAND TALES in about three weeks before showing it to his producing partner Sean McKittrick. "I gave it to Sean and he immediately called me and said, 'We have to go get drunk,'" remembers Kelly. "And we went and got drunk at Hinano, this bar in Venice Beach, and he said, 'We have to make this. This is like, my favorite thing you've ever written.' And it was basically the shell of the story that exists four years later."
The original draft of the script featured several characters who would make it into the final incarnation, including Boxer Santoros, the action star stricken with amnesia played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson; Ronald and Roland, a cop and his twin brother, played by Scott; and Zora Carmichaels, the steroid-induced neo-marxist played by Cheri Oteri. What began as a futuristic satire of Los Angeles, however, soon took on a more political bent.
"In subsequent years, 9/11 happened and then the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. I started embedding all these sort of layers of political subtext into [the script], and took on more of the influences of Phillip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Andy Warhol and film noir," explains Kelly. "So, it evolved over four years into something more significant and meaningful."
New characters were added to the ensemble including the key role of Krysta Now, an adult film star developing her own reality project. Sarah Michelle Gellar was cast, against type, as Krysta, and believes that the film ultimately became "a love letter and a hate letter to Los Angeles." It was in this spirit that Kelly turned to a variety of cinematic influences. "Certainly, you look at something like THE BIG LEBOWSKI, which is an influence on this film in terms of looking at some of the bottom feeder elements of Los Angeles culture," he says.
"But I think that any movie about L.A., any film noir that takes this town to heart is gonna be filled with some kind of decadent underbelly." The screenplay actually features a scene from one beloved noir, Robert Aldrich's 1955 KISS ME DEADLY, in which Ralph Meeker's character encounters numerous shady characters on his way to discovering a box that triggers the apocalypse. "There's something about those kinds of L.A. stories being just a means to kind of weave your way through the underbelly of Los Angeles, to arrive at some grand revelation. And this is designed in that kind of style and is a tribute, I guess, to those kinds of films."
Production of the film
While LEBOWSKI and DEADLY took place in the present, however, SOUTHLAND TALES needed to create a futuristic world on an independent budget. "I always hoped that this would be in the league of something like BRAZIL or BLADE RUNNER, not that it's as futuristic as BLADE RUNNER or as design-heavy as BRAZIL, in the attention to detail, and what, I hope, is a really great visual accomplishment in terms of the production design and cinematography," says Kelly. "But, to do all that stuff with 30 days and not too much money is a real challenge."
To face the challenge, Kelly assembled a skilled below-the-line team including cinematographer Steven Poster, costume designer April Ferry, and production designer Alexander Hammond, all of whom the director worked with on DONNIE DARKO. To compose the film's score, Kelly turned to award-winning contemporary music artist Moby.
Despite the month-long shooting schedule and budgetary constraints, Gellar believes there was a genuine camaraderie on set. "Everyone was so enthused to be here," the actress believes. "Obviously people were not, including crew members, making what they're used to making. It was a very, very tight schedule. But we had some of the best people in the business. All of these people were here because they loved it." One of the real challenges for the SOUTHLAND TALES crew and cast was that many of the scenes and visual concepts imagined by Kelly weren't necessarily in the script. "I hope that visually and with the editing and the music, when audiences see the film all put together, that it will make a lot more sense on screen than it does on the page. Because of some of the ways in which we've had to physically make this film, the script got pared down to 90 pages. But the movie we made is not 90 pages long."
The editing of the script and Kelly's desire to re-insert scenes during shooting was often a daunting experience for the actors. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson jokes that he even began to give up on fully comprehending the final product. "I've been close to this project now and close to Richard for over a year, and I stopped trying to completely understand everything that's happening in the movie because there's so many stories that are taking place, all which, by the way, wind up being connected. So I thought the best thing for me to do is to completely understand and have my interpretation of Boxer Santaros—where he comes from, where he wants to go, what he believes in and things like that. Because there are a lot of things that only Richard Kelly could tell you." "I think that it is probably overwhelming," Kelly agrees, "in the sense that the script, to the actors, is probably a little confusing and, what is it all about in the end? I think it's about where our country is going, our current dilemma when you're talking about alternative fuel, terrorism, our civil liberties being taken away from us, and the potential effects of environmental degradation on human behavior, neurological responses, global warming. You know, there's a lot going on here."
Casting SOUTHLAND TALES
For a movie that deals with so many current, hot-button issues, it might seem surprising that Kelly has cast the film with actors known primarily for their roles in television and film comedies, and the lighter side of pop culture in general. In addition to Johnson and Scott, who previously starred together in the 2002 action comedy THE RUNDOWN, Kelly also cast pop superstar Justin Timberlake, actress/singer Mandy Moore, "Night Court" star John Larroquette, CLERKS director Kevin Smith, and well-known "Saturday Night Live" alumni Cheri Oteri, Jon Lovitz, Amy Poehler and Nora Dunn in pivotal roles.
"It just so happens that 'Saturday Night Live' has cultivated, in my opinion, some of the funniest people ever in the entertainment business. And I think if you can do improv and sketch comedy, and you can do it really, really well, I'm convinced you can do anything else. I think if you have that ability, you can be an extraordinary dramatic actor."
"Richard's a free-thinker who thinks outside the box," says Gellar. "And I think, unfortunately now, Hollywood and movie-making has become incredibly formulaic. Richard does the exact opposite. Whether it's casting or story ideas or camera shots, it's about doing something that's different. And I think, as an actor, what's enticing and why he can always get such amazing casts of people is because of the excitement of the unknown, of doing something that hasn't been done."
"I feel like there's a real pop art value to what we're doing in the sense that we've cast a lot of actors who are usually associated with pop culture," explains Kelly. "With 'The Rock' and Sarah and Seann and a lot of the supporting cast coming from either 'Saturday Night Live' or sketch comedy or improv, and having started in action films or teen comedies or horror films, we have people who have muscles that they haven't flexed yet and maybe haven't had the opportunities to really show what extraordinary actors they are. It's great for me to take people from that environment and put them into a new one, and yet I get the benefit of their charisma and their pop value. This is a very big, dense tapestry of ideas. And it's a very political film, I think. And these are all tremendous actors."
The Shit Hits the Fan
The variety of acting backgrounds and techniques that Kelly employs in SOUTHLAND TALES might be unconventional but is ultimately appropriate for a film commenting on the unnerving political mood of a current and futuristic United States. The director ultimately believes that what he's made is a movie that moviegoers from everywhere will find accessible: "I think this film kind of comes from the left, but it arrives somewhere in the middle, in a way that's trying to, you know, find comedy in our sort-of big cultural divide right now as a country—in how divided we are, and speculate into sort-of the final shit hitting the fan."
And that, Kelly says with a smile, is the best way to sum up this Richard Kelly vision that just about no one else involved with the film can seem to sum up: "It's about the shit hitting the fan on the Fourth of July weekend."
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