Michelle Trachtenberg

London Festival Diary: Day Eight

I start the day over coffee with Gregg Araki, whose best film to date, Mysterious Skin, is amongst the strong US indie contingent here at the Festival. As Araki says himself, with films such as Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere he’s become known as an arch purveyor of ’unadulterated fun and mayhem’. Mysterious Skin, on the other hand, is a serious and sensitive film about child abuse. Araki fans in particular will be doing some double-takes.

The story, adapted by the director from Scott Heim’s novel, involves two teenage Kansas boys, one a gay hustler, the other troubled by his belief that as an eight-year-old he was abducted by aliens; over the course of the film the pair gravitate slowly towards each other, learning that they have a disturbing shared history. ’I read the book in 1995 and found it emotionally devastating,’ says Araki. ’And I wanted to replicate, cinematically, what the book does in its use of language and metaphor. It is so elegantly told.’

Rather than deter him, the fact that child abuse is such a taboo subject actively prompted the Californian to make the film. ’That’s exactly why we felt it was so important. The statistics of child abuse are staggering, and yet people are so unwilling to acknowledge it: our story sheds light on this dark secret that nobody wants to talk about.

’We’ve only screened it at film festivals so far, but already people in the audience have really responded. In Toronto this old gentleman came up and said, ’this happened to me and I have never told anyone about it’. So in a way it’s been a liberating experience for a lot of people.’

So what happened to the mayhem, I wonder? ’In a way this is a radical departure for me. I have never really done a serious movie before - my films have always had a satirical, self-conscious edge to them. At the same time, I think there is a through line from Mysterious Skin to those earlier films, which is that they all deal with outsiders. So this isn’t so different. I haven’t suddenly made a Disney movie.’

On which note, I head over to the NFT to see the masterclass by Brad Bird, whose Disney/Pixar CGI animation The Incredibles is tonight’s Family Gala. Aided and abetted by the larger than life Phil Jupitus, Bird talks us through his background - from a precocious child inspired by The Jungle Book who persuaded his mother to buy him an animation camera, to making his first animated movie on his own, joining The Simpsons team for eight episodes (drawing ’yellow people with googly eyes’), making the hugely popular 2-D The Iron Giant, to directing The Incredibles, the 3-D tale of a superhero family that comes out of retirement.

Bird admits that even he found it bewildering when first entering the world of CGI animation. ’I’d look at a screen that had half a torso with a big blue ball behind it. And the animator would say to me ’Ignore the big blue ball. Ignore the fact that the characters is being impaled by a naked version of himself. Just concentrate on the feet.’

He seems to have found his own feet. The audience is treated to a crash course in the art of CGI, Bird showing examples of the process from storyboarding through to simulation, as well as some hilarious outtakes, their own bloopers and blunders from The Incredibles.

The film is something of a landmark, being the first to animate a cast predominantly made up of people. "It is very easy for computer animators to do a spectacular effects like blowing up buildings,’ says Bird. ’But if you want a characters to touch another character’s hair, or clothes, they practically have seizures, because it’s incredibly difficult stuff to do. So the terrible part of it all is that if you do your job well nobody notices. No-one says ’Hey, that was a great HAIR TOUCHING SCENE’.’

Nip back across the river to see The Edukators, Hans Weingartner’s comedy drama about a pair of young German radicals whose form of protest is to break into affluent homes and rearrange the furniture (porcelain soldiers in the loo, stereo in the fridge). All pretty harmless stuff until a raid goes wrong and they are forced to kidnap a wealthy homeowner who claims to be an old hippy with ideals such as theirs. It’s a constantly surprising film that makes a virtue of a sort of idealist naiveté.

Now it’s time to regress for a couple of hours: sweets, ice-cream, perch myself next to a toddler and launch into The Incredibles; which is, indeed, incredible. As with all of Pixar’s movies the script is sharp and funny, and the special effects almost beyond belief. I particularly like Edna, the dwarfish fashion designer (voiced by Bird himself), who provides the fireproof, scratchproof, bulletproof costumes for the heroes. ’This one is machine washable,’ she declares. ’It’s a new feature.’

From the uproarious laughter of the Odeon to a hushed auditorium at the Curzon Soho for a Script Factory talk, where director Mike Figgis is speaking about three films that he has found inspirational: Incident at Owl Creek, Robert Enrico’s 1962 short film about a civil war soldier due to be executed; Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde; and Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious (Yellow).

It’s always a treat listening to directors speak about other people’s films, and Figgis makes an incisive and enthusiastic commentator. But his talk also involves plenty of anecdotes from his own working life, stories involving the likes of Faye Dunaway and James Gandolfini (’trying to cut the mustard with the Soprano boys’) as well as the most simple and effective piece of advise for the would-be film-makers in the audience. ’When you start a film you have a script, but when you’re on the set and you have the actors together, you never know what it’s going to throw up. So you have something, but you should always be looking for something else.’