(For the purposes of this article, the President of The United States will be referred to as ____ because his name manages to get around without my help. Also, many thanks to Laura Jumel and Elizabeth Izzo for setting up this phone call.)
Sunday, 17 March 2019
4 p.m. at The Earl Cameron Theatre, City Hall
Dir.: Guy Nattiv
Country: USA
Runtime: 20:00
Guy Nattiv’s short film (a feature-length version is also playing at festivals) Skin is a meditation on family, politics, fatherhood, race, faith, the USA, art, and children. It baffled the BIFF pre-screeners, myself included. But this is why it now sits in the BIFF Programmer's Choice selection. It also won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. Thought I should mention that.
I was in Cornwall this morning. I’ve been on the train all day and I smell like grapefruits.
I’m in London now. The Norwegian woman I’m staying with has gone out to see a Norwegian play. Ibsen. Guess it has to be Ibsen if it’s a Norwegian play. Don’t see a lot of Ibsen these days. It’s a boring gig being dead.
It’s also late. Right now it’s 11.04 p.m. It’s raining. I thought the power went out three hours ago, but then I realized it hadn’t.
It’s 3.04 p.m. in Los Angeles. This is where Guy lives. There’s no rain except what you find in movies. Nine minutes later, he gets a FaceTime call from me.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Where are you?’
‘I am currently in an apartment in London. I am calling you on FaceTime.’ I sound like I’m talking to my ex-wife.
‘You’re in the UK? I didn’t know that,’ clanking his house keys on a counter, ‘can you call me on a real phone?’
‘I don’t have, well, I have a British phone, so…’ I think about how much money I have on my phone. £26.40. We have a problem.
‘Can you call back in, like, five minutes?’ he says, ‘I just got home.’
‘Yea, sure—’ and we hang up on each other.
I stagger through the living room. I sit in an armchair and listen to the rain falling on the glass roof. My neighbor told me—two hours ago, over a steaming box of roasted duck fried noodles—that life is more enjoyable when you’re in charge of your workplace. Thanks, Andrew.
I call Guy back and the connection’s bad. Really bad. I hang up and try again. By 11.40 p.m., I get through.
Skin was filmed in 4 days. Locations. Guns. Special FX. Drone shots. ‘It’s insane,’ he says. I ask him if he works better under pressure. God knows I have to. ‘I’m good with it,’ he replies, ‘and sometimes it forces you to be better. I’d also like to make films with more patience and more time to prepare correctly, you know? Hopefully I could do it now.’
I’m hoping there’s a relationship between quality and being under pressure. He notes, gravely, ‘Not necessarily…’ Bugger. ‘Not always…’ Christ. ‘Sometimes it forces you to do only what’s necessary.’
Skin is economical. That’s why it works. Much like Jonathan Tucker’s tortured skinhead, there is no fat on the film. It is a lean, well-organized piece of work.
Reactions to the film have been strong. Shock, mostly. But also an understanding of the message. Not to mention, enjoying the revenge aspect of the movie involving an African-American gang, a skinhead, and a tattoo parlour. I’ll leave you to either watch the film, or use your imagination. It’s brilliant. But Guy Nattiv (along with co-writer Sharon Maymon and producer Jaime Ray Newman) never fails to humanize the vile character played by Jonathan Tucker. Yes. He’s a skinhead. But he has a wife (Danielle Macdonald) and son (Jackson Robert Scott) who he loves.
‘It makes it even worse when they’re human,’ Guy explains, ‘I’m not doing the cliché of the racist monster. It doesn’t exist in my books.’
Then I ask him if he’s a provocateur. Like Lars Von Trier, or God. ‘I’m not a provocateur filmmaker. Just to make provocative stuff. Just to make noise. I only do it if the content demands that. You know what I mean? I am dealing with challenging subjects that have a statement and a message. And I deliver it in a very raw and real way,’ he’s eating a cookie, ‘I don’t believe in provocation just for provocation. In Get Out (Peele, 2017), there’s a lot of provocation. But it’s tasteful. Because it’s coming from a reason; there’s a reason for everything.’
Guy moved to America from Israel five years ago. By his own admission, Los Angeles is a bubble. If you drive two hours out of the city, into the backyard of America, you see confederate flags. He couldn’t figure this out. It was weird. Inspired by an article about Bryon Widner: an ex-Skinhead who wanted to remove his tattoos and reform himself (as chronicled in Bill Brummel’s documentary Erasing Hate [2011]), he started to research material for Skin. But no one wanted to produce a film about Skinheads. They’re a small group, they said. It’s not a real thing.
Then ____ got elected. And everyone wanted to produce films about Skinheads. They’re a huge group, they were saying. It’s a real thing. Needless to say, this is, effectively, how Skin came to be made. “I told my father in law he’s (____) gonna get elected. And he said, ‘Ah, what do you know? You’re Israeli, you’re just a newbie here!’ And BOOM. He got elected. And I knew he was gonna get elected because of my research.”
Ultimately, I argue, this turbulent time in the world will result in an ungodly amount of art. America. Britain. Poland. Hungary. France. Greece. There’s gonna be a lot of artists coming to terms with their reality. Guy agrees with this. ‘Art comes from suffering,’ he begins, ‘and the best art comes from suffering. I’m going to the cinema to suffer, not to enjoy.’
He describes the Oscar nominees for Best Live Action Short. How they’re all (including his) utterly depressing. Even the least depressing one (Marguerite [dir. Marianne Farley, 2017]) is still pretty depressing.
‘This,' referring to the Oscar nominees, 'is a pure expression of what we’re going through in this world right now. That’s art. I told them, you see The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978), Coming Home (Ashby, 1978) and Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) after the Vietnam War. It’s the same thing. Artists are expressing their fear and statements over what they see and it’s coming back to their creation.’
Go with it. Think about it. Negotiate it. But go with it.
Guy directed a film called The Flood (a.k.a. Mabul) in 2010. The leading actress in the film was Ronit Elkabetz, who died in April 2016. They were filming a scene where Elkabetz had to walk out of a school, when, suddenly, it started to rain. Really rain. “I was like, ‘Fuck!’” Guy remembers, “‘what the fuck, Jesus Christ, like now? Just as I start…?'"
Elkabetz turned to her director and said, ‘Embrace it. Let’s shoot it. Let’s shoot it. Let’s shoot me in the rain. It’s a blessing. This rain is a blessing. It will be amazing in the film. And I’ll be soaking wet. That’s fine. And with my tears. So don’t worry. Go with it. Go with everything you have. Just take problems, take obstacles and make them into your benefit.’”
I can hear Guy smiling over the phone. ‘And I did,’ he continues, ‘and it’s one of the best scenes in the movie. A lot of her state of mind, her improvisation, I took from her. She taught me a lot about filmmaking. How to be real. And not fight weather. Go with it. Go with it…’
Ronit Elkabetz (1964 – 2016)
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