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An Eye For Art
We caught up with Christine Kunewa Walker who worked as producer on Howl and Life During Wartime, both of which recently screened at the Sydney Film Festival
What is it about producers? They can seem so unobtrusive and yet you know that, behind the scenes, they have had to drive the whole production, director and all. Thus Christine Kunewa Walker - academic turned producer - who takes time out of her schedule as a festival guest, has clearly been busy behind the scenes. She is over from America for the Sydney Film Festival where she has not one but two major films playing. Fortunately both of them are set to get a release in Australian cinemas.
We could take either film first but we start with Howl, a small film about censorship and artistic expression in 1950's America. It got rave reviews at the recent Sundance Festival. The title is also the title of a now famous American poem written by the beat poet and anti-establishment literary figure Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg's stream of consciousness poem is part confession of love for a rent boy and part rant against the values of America at the time. Ironically the poem is now part of the canon and Christine Walker remembers being taught it in high school.
"I am not sure my teachers really understood it. Or at least there were some things in it that they were frankly embarrassed about," she recalls. The poem retains its power to shock, something one feels Ginsberg would have been both proud of and yet angry about.
The film has a great support cast who shine especially in the courtroom sequences (the poem became a legal test case for artistic freedom; like America's Lady Chatterley trial). David Strathairn (Goodnight and Good Luck (2005)) was always in Walker's sights. Strathairn is a thinking actor and he came with lots of ideas about how to play his character. "He wanted to play it very straight. This guy (who was prosecuting the poem) was really in the Eisenhower, pre-Vietnam era, he was someone for whom those old values really still meant something." Walker also tells a beautiful little story about the apparently ego-less craftsman. She tells of how he came down from seeing his hotel room and said to the desk ‘I don't need a room as big as that, please downgrade me and we will save some money for the film.' It is the sort of story that you hope to hear about an actor with such on-screen integrity. Sometimes people don't disappoint.
Walker says that the film was one of the easiest to cast that she has worked on. All the actors she wanted read the script and couldn't believe some of the things that were actually said in the trial. "They said ‘I want to say those lines!'" Getting James Franco (the cult star of Milk and Pineapple Express) took almost a year but she feels he was easily worth it. When you think of the old shaggy bearded Ginsberg it is hard to see much of a likeness but Walker feels differently. "The young Ginsberg was actually rather attractive. People who knew him have told James that he is uncannily like him then." She recalls that they had to have little prosthetics that made Franco's ears stick out to complete the illusion. Getting these made was yet another one of those crazy small details that producers have to be across.
Walker likes to choose films about artists (she produced the memorably off beat comic book film American Splendour (2003)). And she likes films that a little less mainstream which serve to challenge audiences more.
Walker describes herself as a very ‘hands on' producer. She is on the set most of the time and she likes to look down the camera and assess the set ups. That sounds like she might end up poaching on the director's role. She is completely dismissive of that boundary-crossing. "Not at all. You can't direct a movie from the producer's chair," she affirms. But she finds it helps her to know what is important. Furthermore a lot of creative and budgetary decisions are linked and the best way of turning out a good film on a low budget (she regularly turns out films for about one million dollars) is to be available to think of a simpler way of achieving the same look. Walker has done a good job in similar circumstances, previously having turned out films of real quality for a fraction of the budgets Hollywood normally consumes. She feels that lots of pre-planning is also an important part of keeping budgets on track. "Hollywood wastes a lot of money. You don't always need 50 million plus. If you go into shoot and you are not fully ready that is when you end up wasting time and money."
Her other film is equally out there but a film of a very different pedigree. Although she did not produce the first one, she is on board to help Todd Solondz realise his sort of prequel to Happiness, Life During Wartime. Walker describes how Solondz always believed in the title and the project. However, it was nearly 8 years between the projects. Walker gives the impression that Solondz had a bit of work to do after his challenging but slightly indecipherable Palindromes (2004).
Life During Wartime has the same relentless focus of the dark side -the incestuous or pedophilic aspects of some family relations - but all played with a matter of fact, even comically surreal sweetness. Walker herself had to bring Solondz the man back into focus. "I know you'd think he would be weird himself but he is so gentle and so kind. When he flew his family out to Venice (where Wartime played at the film festival), there were all just like that. I kept thinking they are so nice and so normal!"
Apparently Solondz is mildly obsessive about his vision. Even though the material can be tough to act, he totally believes in it. "He won't let them change his word, he is proud of what he has written and he can make them do it again and again." At the time the actors feel worn down by this but Walker (and the cast) really believes in Todd and his vision. They know that what will come out won't be like anything else in contemporary American cinema. "He really is an artist. He says not what he thinks audiences want to hear but what he wants to actually say." Walker gives the impression that one such film is worth a hundred blockbusters. She has worked with bigger budgets but, for now, the small films are more likely to hit that note of artistic truth.