Sidebar:
an interview with Time Code director, Mike Figgit
Time
Code
Rated
R
Opens
Friday, May 12
Other actors
fleshing out the movie are Holly Hunter
as a production-company employee and Richard Edson (Down
by Law) as an unctuous indie director.
Andy Warhol's
1966 film Chelsea Girls and Norman Jewison's 1968
version of The Thomas Crown Affair both employed
split-screen storytelling.
No stranger to
experimentation, Mike Figgis shot his 1995 Leaving Las
Vegas entirely on 16-millimeter film stock.
Director Mike Figgis' Time Code is not the first
film to use the split screen, a technique that allows multiple
stories to be told onscreen at the same time. But Time
Code, shot with small, digital videocams, stands to
make history as the first picture to use digital technology
in conjunction with continuous split-screen storytelling.
The result is not a deeply important film but still an engaging
experience, as quadrants intertwine and intersect during
unedited, improvised 93-minute takes. Filled with talented
actors and a Hollywood theme, the picture feels like a cross
between Robert Altman's The Player and Short Cuts,
but with a lighter satirical touch and a quicker, more experimental
pace. The film tells four stories--all taking place in one
afternoon within a small area of West Hollywood--simultaneously
on a screen split into four panels, with some characters'
appearances overlapping into other squares. Working within
the nonscripted story line, the actors had to hit certain
marks and were shot in unedited takes, six or seven times.
Figgis chose the strongest take for each quadrant.
The four main characters are Emma (Saffron Burrows), a
deeply sad Hollywood wife who's in therapy, mostly over
her relationship with husband Alex (Stellan Skarsgård).
A philanderer, drug addict and founder of a film studio
called Red Mullet, Alex is, like Nicolas Cage's character
in Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas, nearing critical
mass. He's always late to meetings, sick of the business
and cynical about the crap his company churns out. Aspiring
actress Rose (Salma Hayek), who is having an affair with
Alex, shares a square with her girlfriend, the wealthy Lauren
(Jeanne Tripplehorn). Not all squares are equally intriguing:
The perpetually depressed Emma and her desperate date with
a ditzy actress (Leslie Mann) rarely catch one's attention,
while the action at Red Mullet--complete with a cheerful
coked-out security guard (Danny Huston), a wandering massage
therapist (a hilarious Julian Sands) and an inflated, arty
young director (Mía Maestro)--is rife with humor
and some pathos.
But the film is stolen by Tripplehorn, who rarely does
anything except, like a silent-screen actress, react. As
she listens in on Rose's infidelities, her square becomes
a simple close-up of hatred, love and heartbreak--a testament
both to the actress' mostly unappreciated talent and to
the film itself, for it is the actors, not the technology,
that drive the film. Still, Figgis has made a fascinating
character study that is, despite a tritely facile dark ending,
indelible--and not only for the four frames your eyes will
still, inevitably, attempt to scan while adjusting to the
outside world. Stealthily and surprisingly, this picture
gets under your skin and sticks with you. The experiment
was worth it.
The Revolution Will Be Digitized
BY DAVID WALKER
dwalker@wweek.com
Filmmaker Mike Figgis earned critical acclaim for his Academy
Award-winning film Leaving Las Vegas. Figgis is now
poised on the forefront of digital filmmaking, with his
new film, Time Code, earning accolades for its technical
innovations. Shot entirely on digital camcorders, without
any editing, Time Code tells four individual stories
in real time and presented simultaneously on a split screen.
Willamette Week: Time Code is an experimental
film on several levels. Was there any one aspect of the
film that was more important than another?
Mike Figgis: It was more the absence of any cutting and
the parallel storytelling, and the realization that the
technology could service that. That's always been something
that I've been very interested in, because there are certain
possibilities if you run parallel stories, and if you delete
the cutting techniques, you don't interrupt the flow. You
throw a bit more [of the interpretation] into the audience.
It's quite a delicious thing sometimes to be in the audience,
and you have to work a little bit harder, but there are
all kinds of ironies that will compound themselves through
those kind of techniques. First and foremost, that was the
thing that intrigued me.
What was the initial reaction of people when you approached
them with your idea?
They were polite. They didn't say to my face, "You crazy
motherfucker." But I could see by the absence of enthusiasm,
on certain levels, a discernible degree of skepticism. People
like [producer] John Calley, he 100 percent got it, and
100 percent endorsed the experimental nature of it. He let
me go off and spend some money, and I didn't have any studio
presence on the set. He let me just get on with it, because
he knew that the only way for this to work would be to let
the experiment pass through its own stages.
Digital filmmaking is very exciting. The possibilities
seem endless.
Huge strides have been made in the last five years in terms
of picture quality, size and low cost. You suddenly throw
in all these very high-class, high-quality tools into the
hands of a very wide range of filmmakers--people who 10
years ago would not have got a look into the film world.
That's already happening now.
What is the future of digital filmmaking?
The future is going to be very interesting as [digital]
filmmakers emerge and then obviously come up against the
problems that all filmmakers have now, which are that there
is a saturated market and there's a bit of a monopoly on
the distribution system. I think of the future more in terms
of psychological change in terms of filmmaking--the technological
change is already there. It's just now being incorporated
into more and more people's awareness and capabilities.
I'm intrigued to see what happens to the structure of the
film business.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published May 10,
2000
|
