Documentary: Playground
October 27, 2008 by admin
Filed under General Articles
While traveling to the Philippines in 2001, filmmaker Libby Spears gained first hand knowledge of the horrific practice of trafficking human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation. She examined a little deeper, and discovered that most of these victims were young children.
Facing death threats to be “knocked off” for only $10, Libby went undercover to infiltrate brothels in South Korea and Thailand. She held first-hand interviews with victims, their pimps, and their abusers. She mapped the trafficking routes of the sex tourism industry, and charted the commerce fueled by the purchase and sale of minors—she was disheartened to find that virtually the entire globe was involved and affected by this growing industry.
What she was astonished to find, however, was the involvement of the United States and the degree to which they were influencing the global demand and growth of the sex trafficking industry.
Previously, she had mistakenly believed that sex trafficking was primarily an “international” occurrence in countries like Philippines and Cambodia. But a meeting with Ernie Allen, President of the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, confirmed to Libby what her research was beginning to uncover: that the trafficking of children for commercial sexual exploitation is every bit as real in North America.
This is where Playground begins.
Appalled by modern day sex slavery, filmmaker Libby Spears began a covert investigation to document the worldwide child sex trafficking problem, and to see how and if it led back to the United States. What she was astonished to find, however, was the involvement of the United States and the degree to which they were influencing the global demand and growth of the sex trafficking industry.
At the heart of the story is Michelle, whose first encounter with sexual abuse began at five. Having run away from a foster care system that left Michelle vulnerable and at risk, the film opens with the filmmaker’s search for her. Over a five year period, Spears unravels the gut-wrenching atrocities suffered by Michelle and other children like her, who are victims of the American sex trafficking industry.
By gracefully weaving in interviews with vice officers and social workers — and sometimes even the pimps or johns themselves — Spears constructs an insightful, resonant, and nuanced narrative that details just how complex and massive this problem is.
Playground examines our legal and social systems, and their inability to deal with this crisis. Neither dogmatic nor sensationalist, Playground offers no clear-cut answers, but instead, compels us to begin asking questions… the right questions:
Why do we treat children as victims in cases of sexual abuse, but as soon as money is exchanged, we deem these sexually abused children as “criminals?” Why does our legal system view foreign children who are trafficked from other countries as “victims,” but treats American children who are trafficked domestically as criminals? Why is there such an overwhelming demand for sex with a child? Are we adequately teaching our children sexual respect? What message do we send as a society when we normalize Justin Timberlake’s ripping off a woman’s shirt in public, but demonize Janet Jackson for her exposed breast?
The problem is monumental: The U.S. Department of Justice claims that the commercial sexual exploitation of children is the world’s fastest growing form of organized crime. Within the next decade, the prostitution of children worldwide will net more profit than the sale of illegal drugs. In the United States alone, child sex trafficking is a multi-million dollar industry with an estimated 300,000 children annually at risk. Wherever you can buy drugs in this country, you can buy children – American children – for sex. Playground makes compellingly clear that if we’re not seeing the problem, it’s only because we’re not looking.
To offer emotional relief of the heavy subject matter, animated characters appear throughout the film as quiet punctuations. Playground employs a hand-crafted animation style that hearkens back to the early days of animation as an art form. With original illustrations created by Yoshitomo Nara, the animation allows Spears to suggest, rather than literally depict, some of the horrors of sex trafficking, and does an effective job at conveying the psychological and emotional climate suffered by the victims.
From filmmaker Libby Spears and Producers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Steven Soderbergh, comes a beautifully-wrought, astonishing portrait of our country’s most alarming and insidious secret — the child sex trafficking in America.
Music by: Bjork, Radiohead, Chris Martin, Blonde Redhead, Cat Power, Sigur Rós, CocoRosie, Basement Jaxx, DJ Shadow, Kazu Makino
Official Site: http://www.playgroundproject.com/
Donations: http://www.playgroundproject.com/contribute/
Clooney and Soderbergh Q&A Comparison
December 19, 2006 by admin
Filed under Family, Friends and Co-Stars, News
MOVIES — George Clooney has trust issues
By HOWIE RUMBERG
When Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney started a production company together in 2000 called Section Eight, they seemed like an odd pair, to say the least.
On the one hand, there’s Soderbergh: a heady director famous for jump-starting the U.S. independent film scene in 1989 with “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” Until he directed Clooney in the 1998 hit “Out of Sight,” Soderbergh was known for smaller intellectual fare such as “Schizopolis” and “Kafka.”
And then there’s Clooney: at the time he was on track to be the next hunky TV star who couldn’t make the leap to the big screen. Clooney’s best work off the set of “ER” might have been as Sparky the Dog on “South Park” had he not made the stellar script for “Out of Sight” sparkle. His pre-Soderbergh filmography: “The Peacemaker,” “One Fine Day” and “Batman and Robin.”
“Out of Sight” came along at the right time for both of them, but if every successful director-actor tandem opened their own shop, you’d see a lot of failed companies. Soderbergh and Clooney made their company a force in the biz. Section Eight has produced one of the most diverse slates of films and television shows in the new century — a testament to the pair’s shared devotion to telling stories in original ways. “Syriana,” “Far From Heaven,” “K Street” “Good Night, and Good Luck” all made it to the screen with some form of Soderbergh-Clooney participation. Even the “Ocean’s” series — “Ocean’s Thirteen” opens next year — is more satisfying than most big action movies.
Their latest, and one of their last as producing partners — Section Eight is closing shop — is made in the style of the 1940s studio system. “The Good German” is yet another example of the duo’s commitment to telling compelling tales using unique techniques. Who else could get the greenlight on a black and white murder mystery-political thriller that mostly takes place in Berlin during the postwar Potsdam Peace Conference? (Shameless self-promotion: Clooney plays a former AP Berlin bureau chief in the film.)
asap wanted to see how much the partners really were in sync, as they both have insisted they are, so we asked each the same questions in separate interviews.
asap: What did you learn from working with (Steven/George)?
Clooney: There’s a bunch of jokes in there, but the truth is that everything I do from writing to directing to producing to acting for that matter have been informed by things I’ve learned from Steven. (laughing) I mean learned or stolen. One of the two. I mean he’s — he and Joel and Ethan (Coen) have been the biggest influence on my career creatively. I watch how they do it and what they do and try and pick things that I can do and use a lot of the same methods they use. But Steven, especially because he’s a good friend, he’s a big part of my life and has been a great influence on everything.
Soderbergh: Well it’s tempting to say nothing because we’re so similar in our attitudes about work, and so similar in terms of our likes that I don’t know that we learned anything so much as had certain ideas confirmed about how to do things. We both have a certain belief in how you should conduct yourself and what kind of things you should do creatively if you’re given the opportunity and the freedom. And part of the reason it was such a good partnership was that we were in sync about that kind of stuff. I think what we learned is that we had solid idea about how to navigate our careers.
asap: What was the turning point in your career, where you went from struggling to having the ability to green light projects?
Clooney: After “Batman and Robin” I figured if I am going to get beat up, it’s going to be on my say. So I waited for a while until I found the script for “Out of Sight” and when that came around I really fought to get it and Steven fought to get it. Steven was coming off the “Underneath” so it wasn’t his best time, and from that point on — and that film was nominated for best screenplay and it’s a really good film and it might easily be the best film I’ve been in — that movie all the way through the decision has been we’ll base it on screenplay first.
Soderbergh: There’s always a line. “Out of Sight” made it possible for me to get access to things that I couldn’t get access to before and to be considered for things that I wouldn’t be considered for prior. But probably in terms of having as many opportunities as you can, not imagine, but to feel like the playing field was really large, the peak had to be after the first “Ocean’s.” You know, Coming off “Erin (Brockovich),” “Traffic” and “Ocean’s (Eleven),” at that point I was in a terrific position and there are days when I think I should have just quit right after “Ocean’s”: I made 11 movies and it’s all down from here.
asap: What’s it like working in the old style?
Clooney: It’s hard…the trust issues that are required to go in and say we’re going to drop any sort of internal work as an actor and everything is going to be external and everything is going to be out front. You’re going to see everything at sort of a heightened reality is so beyond both Kate and my comfort zone that we’d finish a take and Steven would go, ‘That’s the right place to be, that’s how high it should be because this what the music’s going to be like and this is what the …’ And when he would say that and we’d finish a take, we’d so many times sit there with our head in our hands, rubbing our head going, ‘God, are you sure?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m telling you it has to be up like this.’ So it required a huge amount of trust, which is not something I give away easily.
Soderbergh: It was fun. It was really fun. I would’ve been very happy back then. Going to work. Making a couple of different movies a year. Working with the best technicians. I love shooting on the lot. I would’ve functioned very, very well as a director under that system. That would’ve been great with me. But it’s different now. Except if I got sick then, I would want to be teleported into future. Medicine in the ’40s? No. Getting an operation? No. (Austin360)
Steven Soderbergh Talks about George, TGG and O13
December 11, 2006 by admin
Filed under General Articles, Movies
Steven Soderbergh Interview
source: joblo.com
Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh has become one of the most powerful and eminent directors in Hollywood . With an impressive resume consisting of noteworthy films and a long list of A-list actors at his disposal, he has put on his directing cap once again for his forthcoming film, The Good German.
No. That came later. There were a couple of different ways to go. I think the assumption initially was that it would be normal. Color, we’ll go to Germany and we’ll do it like a regular movie. And then that started to seem less interesting to me and also expensive, like more expensive than I thought. It should be strangely enough, but the way we ended up doing the film was one of the more economical ways to do the film. Then this idea from being able to use archival footage in some way or footage from other films that were made from that period became appealing and that started and then that started to dictate the black and white.
Did you decide to leave modern aspects like language, sex scenes out because they couldn’t be done in that era?
If you’re just literally imitating that aesthetic in every particular including the way people speak and the fact that those filmmakers were working under the haze code, then to me it really is just a pastiche, and you’re not pushing the ball forward or sideways or anywhere, you’re just literally making a copy of something. So again, like for instance Far From Heaven or like The Last Picture Show, we thought the most interesting version of the movie is, this aesthetic from sixty years ago with…… when we say it’s modern, people were saying f*ck in 1945 and they were feeling each other up and there were moral issues that were difficult and ugly.
The problem is again; people making movies in this country were censored. So that combined with a desire to have attention between those two things, attention between this aesthetic that’s very glamorous, very romantic inherently and an approach to narrative and characters, that is the antithesis of that which is interesting to me. I wanted that battle to be played out through the song because I thought that would be interesting, that would be interesting to watch. It would not be a passive experience to watch a movie in which that battle’s taking place.
Honestly, until we get into these situations, it’s not something I’ve ever articulated to anybody involved in the movie or would have. That’s the result of thousands of hours of work and conversations about “how do you want it, or how do we want to do it or how should people talk.” And you have to remember, our sense of how people behaved sixty years ago is largely shaped by the movies that were made sixty years ago.
Can you talk about the archival material and how tricky it was in using it?
We got some of it from here, we got some of it from Germany but we got most of it from Russia strangely enough. There was a Russian archive that had an enormous amount of material from Berlin from the summer of 1945. It was a real find for us and the trick was organizing it and filing it, and then trying to fit it into the script, identify the areas where I needed it. It was very laborious but we had so many different people working on that for years. It was a very elaborate system of what the shot was, what time of day, what part of the city, were there cars in it, were there people in it. It was really boring.
Can you talk about your collaboration with George [Clooney]? Are there things that you’re still learning about him and what did you learn from him in this particular film?
I want to say he’s getting better and better but it makes it seem like he wasn’t good when we started and that’s obviously not the case. I just think he’s getting better and better. I always thought he was…I was one of the people when I saw him on ER and went, that guy is a movie star. That was just my gut reaction when I saw him on that show, like that guy is a movie star. And you know when Out Of Sight came up, and that was a movie I had to pursue, part of it was my belief that this guy’s ready to pop and I felt like Out Of Sight was, you know I really wanted to do it and I really wanted to do it with him.
I just felt like I want to get on this train. And so like I said I just think he’s getting (better)…. and you look at the choices he’s made since Out Of Sight, it’s a pretty incredible range of material to go from Out Of Site, Three Kings, O Brother, to Solaris, to Syriana, that’s a pretty impressive array of performances you know. And I think people… he gets this rap like you know “George is always George,” but I don’t think that’s true at all.
Do you feel that you have to convince him to do low budget movies like this or is he just as excited to go into them because of your relationship?
Oh no, no. He does that anyway. When he does a movie for the Coen brothers or when he did Three Kings or doing movies like Syriana, he’s not making a lot. He doesn’t care about that. I mean I’m sure he feels very pragmatic about it. He’s like, I have money, what I want is a series of titles on the shelf of movies that I made that I can look back on and feel good about.
What does it take to get you to say yes to a project?
It starts with the story. It starts with the content. That’s how this started. I just thought, ‘This is a good story, an interesting story, one I really hadn’t seen before.’ (It’s) the exoneration of Nazi scientists by the Americans. This was not something I’d really read about and so I was really interested. By the way, there’s a great, great documentary that PBS did a year ago, a little over a year ago. We watched it a year and a half ago, about this subject. I think it’s called In Search of Nazi Scientists. Anyway, if you can find it, and I’m sure it’s available, it’s great. So that’s how this started.
In essence, this is a story about torturers getting away with it, about Americans bringing scientists who did evil elsewhere onto American shores…
I just think there were no good options here. There was no good choice. There really wasn’t. This is what happens in a post-war environment. I think the Americans in this case didn’t have a choice. I suppose you could have gone to the American public and said, ‘Hey, look, we want to bring these people over to build these rockets because if we don’t they’re going to go to Russia . But there’s this thing – a lot of them ran slave camps. How do we all feel about that?’ But we don’t live in that world. We just don’t. There was an operation, and it was called ‘Overcast’ in its initial incarnation, and then it got called ‘Paperclip.’ It was a mandate to do exactly this, to find these people, clean up their past, get them to Utica and ‘Let’s start building stuff.’ Like I said, I don’t know what other options there were.
How does the collaboration between you and George work?
We are alike in ways that are helpful to getting work done and we’re not alike in ways that are helpful to making the work better. So it’s a good mix. We both have a similar attitude about how you do your work and we both like to work a lot. Creatively, we’re very much in sync and the ways we’re not perfectly in sync are helpful; you know what I mean? He’s less pretentious.
Going back to how you choose projects is there something thematically; stylistically you keep going back to that we’re not seeing?
Well, I try not to look back. That’s ultimately… I don’t know that I’d ever think about it. It’s certainly something I wouldn’t think about until I stopped because I think this is not an intellectual medium. There are a couple of examples and I won’t state them, but I think for the most part intellectuals don’t make very good movies. It’s an emotional medium and I think you can really outsmart yourself. So, analysis of that kind is just something I think can be dangerous. It’s a business in which a great number of people have managed to move bag and baggage into the third person. You have to watch out for that. Part of that process is thinking about, ‘Well, what is my career like and how do people think about me?’ That’s just something I don’t want to get into.
How’s Ocean’s 13 going?
Horribly (sarcastically) .
You’ve been quoted as saying it’s a return to the first film, but you’re not known for stepping back. So how do you pull off both: return to the first, but not repeat yourself?
They’re very risky. I’m really happy with it. It was sad, near the end of it, to basically go, ‘this is the last time I’m going to see these people in a room.’ I really like them all and they all like each other, and there was a very strong sense of ‘We were really lucky that these movies came about and that we got to do them and this is it.’ At the end of it there was a real sense of passage and wondering, for me, ‘Wow, I wonder if I’ll ever find another commercial movie to make.’ But also, just these people; I won’t be hanging out with those people anymore.
Why two Che Guevara projects (The Argentine and Guerrilla) back to back?
Well, Kill Bill. Those were two movies. What’s the quickest thing I can say? I think the reason for it being two films will be apparent to anyone who sees them. I think the biggest issue is going to be how far apart to put them out. I would like them to go out a week apart. That specific thing hasn’t been done yet. The Clint Eastwood movie just got moved up, but I don’t know that anybody has ever made two movies that were released a week apart. I think that would be really cool, but we’ll see.
Are you incorporating The Motorcycle Diaries stuff or is all that after?
It’s after.
Ocean’s 13 doesn’t have to be the last one…
Yeah, it does.
The Good Partnership
December 10, 2006 by admin
Filed under General Articles, Movies
They are both Oscar winners and best pals: Meet Hollywood’s biggest power couple
By JIM SLOTEK, TORONTO SUN (Via Ottawa Sun)
NEW YORK — Eclectic director Steven Soderbergh — whose latest film is the noir-murder-thriller The Good German — plays coy when asked about his actor-of-choice, production partner and friend George Clooney.
“Well, what did he say about me?” he asks, Clooney having just left the room.
“He says he loves you,” Soderbergh is told drily.
“Well, I wish he’d prove it,” the director quips, deadpan.
The proof is in the production list. Arguably, not since the ’40s have a movie star and a famous director of similar wattage been as inextricably linked careerwise.
You’d have to go back to Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, who did seven films together (including The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen). Or there’s Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra, of It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and You Can’t Take It With You fame.
The “golden age” comparisons resonate as Clooney and Soderbergh release The Good German, an almost achingly-retro homage to films such as The Third Man and Casablanca. Their sixth film together (counting the upcoming Ocean’s 13), The Good German is shot in black-and-white, almost entirely on a studio set with rear-screen projection backgrounds, mono boom-mikes and brutally stark lighting.
It’s a $32-million film geek’s experiment, the kind of thing you can get away with when your first two Ocean’s films alone have grossed about a half-billion dollars worldwide. (For the record, their other actor-director films together are Out Of Sight and Solaris. And that’s not counting things they’ve produced together such as Rumor Has It and the TV series K Street and Clooney’s own directorial debut Good Night And Good Luck, which Soderbergh exec-produced).
“Any chance I get to work with Steven, I take,” says Clooney. “It’s fun to work on these things. We don’t do them thinking they’re going to be giant box-office hits. We do them because we think we might be able to spend this time we have getting films we think are interesting made. It’s a chance to aim a little higher than the low bar.”
“If you’ve ever been on one of Steven’s sets, we’ve never had a time that wasn’t fun and easy. It’s a crew I’ve worked with on films I’ve loved. Nobody gives you a hard time. It’s really not a dark, imposing thing.”
Set in Berlin weeks after the fall of the Third Reich and just before the Potsdam Conference in which the Allies divided the spoils, The Good German is loosely based on the novel by Joseph Kanon. It follows an American journalist (Clooney) as he investigates the murder of his secretly corrupt military driver (Tobey Maguire) and reconnects with a mysterious fraulein ex-girlfriend from before the war named Lena (Cate Blanchett, accessing her inner Marlene Dietrich). It gets progressively darker as its plot about war-criminal German rocket scientists evading the Nuremberg trials unfolds. And a happy ending is definitely not a given.
For Clooney and Soderbergh, the movie has been a four-year project that overlapped with several others. “Steven would be researching (wartime) stock footage and I was reading the drafts (from scriptwriter Paul Attanasio) and it was getting better and better. And then there was the horrible day when we had to sit (Warners boss) Alan Horn down and tell him we wanted to shoot it in black-and-white. That was fun as you can imagine.” The Good German, in fact, violates two unwritten laws of Hollywood for keeping young theatre-goers away from your movie — it’s in black-and-white, and it has subtitles.
Clooney is, of course, one of Hollywood’s most visible political activists. But though it would seem a likely launching pad for a political allegory or two, he says The Good German is not a political movie. “We didn’t set out to make a message movie. I remember thinking when we started it that it depends on where we are politically when it comes out, in terms of whether it’ll be about how to screw up an occupation,” he says wryly.
“It’s more a love story, murder-thriller like Chinatown, set inside a real world that we thought was sort of fascinating. I remember we watched this documentary where we saw all the German scientists basically trying to surrender to the Americans and not the Russians ’cause there was a much nicer two-car garage that you got at the end. It’s really fascinating subject matter. And watching (ex-Nazi-turned-American rocket pioneer Werner) von Braun getting the Medal Of Honor is always sort of fascinating.”
And then, “Steven gave us films to look at to get in the rhythm. I watched Humoresque, because John Garfield is an interesting actor that people don’t talk about much when they talk about that era. I watched Out Of The Past with (Robert) Mitchum — films like that just to get a sense of that kind of guy. I really like those characters.”
In fact, the press, the adoring female segment in particular (Clooney was recently renamed People’s Sexiest Man Alive) seemed to see some Clark Gable in Clooney’s persona. He’s gotten that before. “They did it on O Brother Where Art Thou because I was doing a bad Clark Gable impression. I think that just happens if you’re doing period pieces, people see you in that context.
“And,” he quips modestly, “I think Clark Gable, just literally, just now, turned over in his grave.”
What he recalls of the shooting was fun, including a Casablanca homage in the film’s final act. “It’s never fun to be shooting at night in the rain, but the plane and Cate, the whole thing, it was one of those kind of nights you drive home and the sun’s coming up and you think about how you don’t get to do something like that very often in your life.”
After that, however, it becomes a blur. “In fact, I was really swamped through the whole shoot. Good Night And Good Luck was coming out. Syriana was coming out (again exec-produced by Soderbergh). I was doing all the press for that at the same time. So I was up to my neck in work and didn’t get a lot of chance to screw around. It was seven days a week.”
That was, of course, Clooney’s Oscar year — two nominations for Good Night, and a best supporting actor win for Syriana — a source of pride for Soderbergh.
“George and I met each other at just the right time,” he says. “We were both viewed as people who had potential but hadn’t really put it together. I really believe in him, I thought he was a movie star from the first time I saw him on ER. We just found each other at the right time and believed in each other. And when that happens you just know. You have a bond in a business as strange as this one and you hang on to that.”
Already wrapped: Ocean’s 13, which Soderbergh is editing now. Just another buddy experience for Clooney. “I love those guys,” he says of his all-star castmates. “They’re sweet and funny and all having great years — Brad (Pitt) with Babel and Matt (Damon) with The Departed. Ellen Barkin’s in Ocean’s, she and Al Pacino work together and she and Matt have a very funny sequence”
And then? Don’t expect Ocean’s 14, 15 or 16 soon. “I think we’ll stop after this one,” Clooney says. “We had a good reason for making it. We felt 12 didn’t quite catch it. It was two-thirds of a good film that came up short in a few places. Then we came up with an idea for a good film, which was revenge.
“But there’s no telling, 10, 15 years down the road we might come back to it.”
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