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Jennifer Lopez in The Cell |
With cult classic The Cell getting an anniversary 4K re-release, Eye For Film recently had the chance to talk to director Tarsem Singh about the film and the new version.
In The Cell, Jennifer Lopez enters the mind of a captured serial killer to find clues to rescue his last victim. It's a high concept that walks a line between the sublime and the ridiculous, but it has a very particular charm. As does Tarsem Singh. Talking from his California home, the director was an enthusiastic interviewee. If there was any room for doubt that someone so intent on visual splendour in his work was not similarly effusive in conversation, let that be dispelled. Due to the rambling nature of our talk elements have been edited for clarity and some sequences have been re-ordered for context.
Subverting expectations, the first question was Tarsem's.
"Hello... Scotland. The rain, is it raining?"
It was. As we spoke, Storm Eowyn was rolling across the Central Belt, and this was in stark contrast to when we had last spoken briefly, 15 or so years ago, when The Fall was at Edinburgh International Film Festival.
"It's good now, because both The Fall and The Cell are coming out on 4K release."
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The Cell |
They are two films that I absolutely adore. I took the opportunity to offer a small confession, making clear that I was not seeking absolution. I'm delighted that the Cell is coming out in 4K so I can treat myself to a copy. Having seen the film in cinemas, and while trying to track it down in the early days of online shopping, one of my siblings taped it for me off Channel 4 and hand drew a little prison door on the VHS label.
"Send me a picture! [...] That's wonderful!"
I have checked and while I still have the tape the label is now completely faded. It had been drawn in felt tip and that's not exactly archival grade. We talked about how time has possibly changed perspective on The Cell. It may not have been that the audience wasn't there, but that they had trouble finding it, or perhaps weren't ready.
"The Cell, yeah, you're right. When we did those things that they do when they test the film for people, [they] were coming out and they were just saying 'Oh no, it's too hardcore,' 'It's too [much],' 'Blah blah blah,' and my take on it was that they said: 'J Lo looking for a serial killer, but we thought it'd be blue [collar].' They weren't ready for that. Then they said 'Because there's a lot of stuff in it that's unbelievable,' and I said 'Hey, I had given you J Lo as a shrink. If there's anything else that you need, I've got the license to do what I want. It is a fantasy.'"
We talked about how his work has always had tremendous visual moments, and there's a lot of technologies that are available to cinematographers, to filmmakers in general now that weren't then. We discussed what tool from the arsenal that's been developed over the last 25 years he would have liked to have had for The Cell.
"I was aware, at the speed that that technology was moving on, I was just thinking, like, this stuff, no matter what you do with it, how great it looks, it's going to date. So the more you go theatrical, or, you know, stuff that's in camera, that stuff is just it. It's retro out of the box.
"So when it comes out, when The Fall came up, you think, like, oh, it has a particular naïve quality to it. But you'll watch it 30, 40 years from now, and everything around it will date.
"And that thing that looked like that it's kind of pre-dated out of the box, it just tastes like that. I think Mamet's writing does that. You know, Kubrick's films did that.
"There's a particular kind of effectiveness of effect on the film that it's not really going for how you think natural realism goes in dialogue and props and things[...]. So with The Cell, originally I was going to do a whole bunch of action fighting, but then The Matrix came out, and everybody just said, 'Yes, yes, that's what we wanted.'
"No, no, no, no. Now, anybody with $2 in their pockets is doing that. I missed it [...] But it's very hard to pitch those ideas on that kind of technology. What The Matrix did before it came out, and when it did, everybody said, 'Yeah, we get it now. You can do it now.' Now I have no interest. It just will be like standing on the shoulders of that one."
We talked about the unfortunate timing, as he had mentioned The Matrix, and there's any number of really quite sophisticated films that have been hidden in the shadow cast by that. We talked about Alex Proyas' Dark City which has got, particularly with the hunt for a serial killer, some parallels with The Cell, but it's much more mannered.
"Exactly! and that usually means [...] my film might not be your thing, which is, it's a particular way [...] but if you want to compare apples to apples, wait for a decade or two. And then you will go like, 'Okay, what I was thinking of natural, or blah, blah will also affect it'. But that was the hip thing that time, and now it's not, or maybe it's been overdone, and then it goes like that."
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The Cell |
We talked about his cast. I observed that the performances in The Cell are mannered in a very particular way, and I think that gives them a certain quality. Tarsem interrupted to say:
"It's funny, you said that because it was true. I had that mind. And there was one actor, and he has a very small scene. He's now, really, he's massive now. He's a really big art house. Sarsgaard!"
That's Peter Sarsgaard, most recently of another Eye For Film favourite, Coup!
"He's there in it. He had a small role, and when he came in, he delivered it so naturally. And I'm like, 'Whoa, wonderful!'. But I swear everybody here is on an operatic level. And then I realised I couldn't really change it. I just said, 'Okay, I'll play it as a dialogue in the other room and go off earlier.' I love this acting. But it was just like it is hard for me to tell him. I always think when you make a film, you try to find a license on how people should talk and what is the realism of it, and as long as they stay consistent, it's okay. So if they speak like that, there's a manner in a particular way it goes. And he was the only guy that came in and did that. I'm like, [laughing] 'Oh! different movie!'"
Within the space of the last few months I've had the chance to see Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu with a live musical accompaniment, and Robert Egger's version with its fixed score. What I found fascinating was audience laughter. I vaguely recall experiencing that when seeing The Cell and so we talked about a level of nervousness that people react to with humour.
"I like that, that's a good one. I love [...] Coppola's Dracula. I told them that I didn't want to do things [conventionally], I want to do opera. They were like, 'Oh no no no, no, no no.' They just said, 'America does not like opera.' And they were basically putting that film forward as Dracula, which is one of my favourite films. I of course, used Eiko [Ishioka] for the costume."
Eiko Ishioka's work for that film won the Oscar for Best Costume Design. For The Cell she provided designs for the dream-like reality of Stargher's psyche, while April Napier's work was kept in 'the real world'.
"They just said, like, 'No, no,' because they [feared] what they call a 'wrong laugh'. That people are laughing at you, not with you. [However] nervous laughter that you mentioned, it's very good, but this one was the one that the studios are scared of, that they just don't love."
He continued talking about the studio and producers' fears.
"They pulled Coppola's Dracula as a thing [to worry about]. They would say, 'Remember, this film was the only film at that particular time who had come out making more than 30 million on the first weekend and did not make 100 million.' That means people wanted 'something like this, but not this.'"
Laughing, he continued:
"So what they've seen was 'It's gonna be vampires.' And then, like, this isn't looking [right], it's [too] upscale, it's not like Blade.
"I told them, like, you don't worry about that, because [in comparison to] The Cell that is a literary piece. I didn't say it, but I said 'It's a piece of shit serial killer crap that everybody's doing.' So now the only thing is, will the audience come in for this particular one?"
I'll note that The Cell might not have the literary ambitions of Coppola's Dracula, but it does have ambition. Roses need fertilised, and as directors like Russ Meyer demonstrate, there's often treasure in trash.
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The Cell |
"So when I knew that if Eiko was going to costume, they're going to be so 'gay' for that. You know, [for] lack of a better word for the Western culture, which I don't find that at all, but they associate a lot of that stuff going into that, and they just said, 'When it comes to that, they'll be taken out of it.'"
Among the costumes are several for 'King Stargher', florid and skirted pieces with lacings, piercings, and peacockery.
"I said, 'Well then, don't worry, because I would do something to make people not laugh at this guy in the third act.' And they went, 'What?' I said, 'I don't know.'
"All I would do is I would find some sort of shock factor up front that, you know, whatever happens, and then whatever happens in the third act, when he comes out, even if he's wearing a saree and a fucking tutu, they won't laugh at him.
"I'll make a list up. And then we went, like, 'Okay, he drowns girls. He suspends himself, he bleaches them, he masturbates on them, he does this thing and all that. And then they went, 'Oh,' so I made all of that. They were like, 'Whoa, you've got to pull it back!'"
He talked about audience reaction again:
"When they did the testing [...] people's reaction was quite like, 'Whoa. It's too much.' So then they said, 'Take that out!' I said, 'I can't, because that is the cooking that I'm doing so you don't laugh in the third act. You take that out. They will laugh in the third act.' And they said, 'Okay, well, let us try it.'
"But more power to them. They did [the cut], and it was horrific for me. They took out all the scenes up front and the number two change because people started laughing in the third act. But more power to them that they just said, 'Okay, if it's not really changing the numbers, we go the director's way.'
"I mean, thank God. But still, they went 'There's a fight on', 'Please can his hand not go towards his crotch?' [So for] that [I asked], 'Can you give me this?' They gave me that. So I did it like that. And then, of course, I took out scenes I wish I hadn't. I think they're back in, if it's the international version."
"[I also had to] cut down the prop front, which is enough for the Americans, but the Germans, of course, called and said 'Do you have any more of that shit?'"
"[I said] 'I'm done, please move on. [I] just wanted one film.'"
We talked about his leading man for The Cell, and that description tickled the director.
"Yes! [Excitedly] I'm glad you said leading man. Vincent D'Onofrio. I love D'Onofrio..."
He continued effusively:
"I love that man. I always say there's anything that comes [my way] I always go 'Can Vincent...?' I don't care if it's a role for a man, woman, animal, child, I just think 'It's Vincent.' He's just so unfearingly open and like, 'Hey, I'm in.'"
He talked about D'Onofrio's performance in The Cell and a potential influence.
"I would love for somebody to look at it, because whatever I do, you know, when you do that particular one, you always look like, 'Oh, this person copied that...'
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No Country For Old Men |
"One of my favorite films, No Country For Old Men the character of Javier Bardem [Anton Chighurh] [is] oh so similar to the way the mannerisms of D'Onofrio.
"I looked at that, and I said, 'They channel it,' so... there's a particular coyness to it. He has the same hair, he wears his clothes, and he moves like him. [Bardem] did a great job. Great job. You know, he put it together with that. And I've never seen anybody [say] they might have gotten taken that from that, because mine is a schlocky film, and that's a masterpiece."
With that potential borrowing raised, we then talked about drawing inspiration from other pieces of art from a variety of eras, including the 'new British' with Damien Hirst. The artistic influences are on the mindscape of D'Onofrio's serial killer, his perceptions of the world. How do you create the sensibilities and sensorium of a character like that?
"That was the one that they told me about. We're going to want to make those lists. When somebody said, 'How do we make this guy?' the best suggestion was, they said, 'Go Vegas with him.'
"When I went to those things, I had already gone too far to do operatic, but I would love to have done a really Vegas one [which would] probably have been more successful.
"When we went that route, the one person, they said, 'Don't go.' They said, 'He has an army of lawyers whose job is just to go after you. Don't go with the Damien Hirst.'
"Everybody had a different reason, because I would always find somebody's trigger point, and they'd go like, 'Oh, this is okay, but take that out.'
"The writer [Mark Protosevich] was the horse. I went to see him one time to talk to him, and of course, he lives on a farm with horses. And I went, 'Hey, you can't take that. That's a personal thing.'
"This particular one, Damien Hirst with the shark, I said 'It's done in the 1920s on a human and here is the person who did it.' And the lawyers saw that, and they said 'We would love for him to sue us,' because I [had] said, 'I can show you where he got it from. Is that good enough?'"
There might actually be even earlier precedent - Christian Wilhelm Braune was constructing lithographs of anatomical cross-sections by freezing bodies and cutting them with saws in the late Nineteenth Century...
"They are very aware, because [Hirst] was very particular on going after the people who went after his thing and [he] never went after it. Because I just wrote them the original source that he got it from, and I just said, 'If anybody's got a leg to stand on, it's this guy.' And they just said, 'No, no, it's fine.'
We talked about other places he did have to compromise as the defence wasn't as clear-cut.
"I had [the script] down to about 20 pages that [said] 'You go in, this is what happens, you go in, this is what happens.'"
"'I will make those things up so leave that to me,' and then the script was really tiny. One of them was actually when he goes to the third act, 'He says something really shocking to her, which shocks her out of it.'
"I said, 'that's enough.' So then I made a list of them. 'What are the trigger things?' And the shock goes out of it.
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The Cell 4K UHD |
"The line that I did give up on, because it was such a trigger for the Americans, the line that he was supposed to say when he is getting tortured and she's not waking up, he said 'When you were in college, you had an abortion,' and they were 'No, no, no.'"
Again, audience reaction played a role:
"It was there in the first cut, the women were like, 'What the fuck?' I said, 'Yes, but he's trying to shock her.' She's always been guilty about it.
"So I gave that one up and made it 'When you were small, you had a brother who was in an accident,' and that works for [American sensibilities], all right, so I put that in. I wish I did [leave it in], because that'll fucking wake you up, because he's dead and he just has to shake her out of it."
Talking of shake-ups, and also of Vegas and Tarsem's experience in music videos and in film, I asked if it was time for a stage musical of The Cell.
"You know what? If it had been big enough? Yes! But now it's a cult film, and that can allow it."
We talked of the existing sequel, and how its production echoed early versions of The Cell.
"I do remember they made a Cell Two. I think nobody's in it, but they gave the guy something like $20 and completely different people. That's what would have happened [to me] because originally, when they gave this to me, I just had an idea that it would be, I didn't want any of that stuff, which is my little Easter egg...that none of this happens. The guy goes in there, you just do drugs, and then you come back with information that you already knew. So I wanted it like that. So they let me keep that little Easter egg in.
"But I wanted it to be that they go down to, let's say Mexico, a place like that, where there's a particular drug people are doing with their friends, they are claiming to have a common hallucination. I wanted to do it like La Jetée, [they] just suspend themselves, they do these drugs and they come out of come out like, 'Hey, you know what I fucking saw. You won't believe it,' and that's it.
"So, because that's not FDA approved, they can't do the procedures, FBI fly the person, and they go down and they do it in the jungles."
Having established the approximate plot, it then became a question of production, including casting.
"They said 'And who do you want?' And I just said, 'Oh, Julianne Moore.' [They] talked to Julianne Moore; she loved it. And they said, 'Okay, Julianne Moore, and your budget's like, $30.'
"[And I said] 'I need to make something spectacular of this. What you're describing you need, like a Hindi movie. What you need is like a diva, like Jennifer Lopez.' They said, 'Yes'.
"I said, 'No, not Jennifer. Like Jennifer.' [They] just said, 'Yes.' I said 'It doesn't have to be [Jennifer].' 'No,' [they said], 'Jennifer Lopez.' I said, 'Okay.' Lopez, she loved it, and then that's what we got."
We talked again about La Jetée, and how that would probably have been Christopher Nolan's defence if Tarsem had embodied producers' fears of Damien Hirst and come after him for Inception.
"Well spotted! Because the truth of the matter is, that's the only time I've got [it] apart from a Mark Romanek video where he also did the La Jetée thing."
That's a video for David Bowie's track Jump They Say. As with Tarsem's films, conversation with him is peppered with references that invite later research.
"I was always obsessed with that film. Whenever people ask me my favourite film, I always say, 'Can I name one per decade?' And it starts with the Sixties, and that's it. Boom! And maybe I was born obsessed with that film. Still am. It just rocked my universe, and I wanted to do it so badly, but then Terry Gilliam did it [in Twelve Monkeys].
"The structure was quite similar, so I couldn't really go there, but I just thought, La Jetée is just it. So I just thought, you make it like that. They just go in there and mix it with the altered states. You know, they're going into this tank. And it came to have these experiences that can never be verified, because it's your personal experience, and the only people who you claim it's happening to are people in the coma who can never come and tell you it's 'fucking bullshit.'
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Inception |
"So I just said, 'That's what I want to keep.' Then they said, 'Okay,' but very few people comment on it, because she went in and saved the life. Nah, she's just going in there and doing drugs. Nobody remembers anything. Only you know, this guy goes in with a piece of knowledge that he already had."
That sense of opening the doors of perception does allow that the experience might have had value. On the subject of how the recent (and ongoing) LA fires affected him, Tarsem explained that he'd opened his doors.
Talking about his family, "They became evacuated into my place, and fire came here, and then left, and then my place got saved, but [their] place is burned down, and [they're] moving in here this weekend for the next two, three months to see what they want to now do.
"Our family is very close. We're just Indians. It's usually alone or living 18 people in the same house, and everybody makes it work."
Having fairly described himself as a people person, it made sense to ask about people ourselves. Of all the folk he's worked with, who would he love to work with again?
After a big thinking noise, we hastily agreed that he could have Vincent D'Onofrio, even if only as a table lamp in the corner. With that locked, in, who else?
"Lee Pace! I'd say Lee Pace, because he's quite evolved into a different thing right now, and he was still a child [when we worked on The Fall]. So I love Lee."
"Everybody that I've worked with, I just say "I'm a people's person." It's something that somebody like Fincher can never do. I can suffer fools. So when there's a problem, I just embrace it, and I go like, 'Oh, this is fun,' and I move on."
He talked about how his experiences were generally positive, though not always smooth. During the filming of The Cell, Jennifer Lopez was going through what Tarsem characterised as "a traumatic upheaval".
"But there's a lot of people that are a lot more, you know, like Mark Romanek, as we call him 'dark Mark', they're very particular. So for me I do the thing and if the experience is unpleasant I don't give a fuck if the thing is good. I just hate it. So that's the only thing. I just said, 'Don't make the experience unpleasant,' because I'm working all the time. This is my life."
He talked about his directorial approach:
"I'm not one of those artists that puts [actors] through hell and then they make a great piece. I want to have a good time. You can burn me in the next one."
His approach is focused on people, not technology. Beyond the benefits of in-camera effects, stylistic choices to avoid appearing dated, he did admit to struggles with technology.
"There's idiot proof, and then there's director proof. So just fucking put it through for me. I have no idea how technology works."
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The Cell UHD set |
I offered the saying that "If you make something idiot proof, they'll build a better idiot". He replied, laughing, "Then make them a director!"
We talked further about the process of interviewing. My flat doesn't allow me to frame my background anywhere as exotically as his own. In junkets there's often branded wallpaper or a blank screen but when talking to directors or cinematographers one is always conscious of presentation. I was very much aware of the electric kick, and then the three mirrors with California daylight, and then everything else beautifully framed.
He explained "It's an old house... and it was very classic, white and brown and all. It was no other colour. And then I went from minimalist to Liberace about five years ago. That's me. That's why, from La Jetée to The Cell, I'll go 'Don't give me comme ci comme ça.' I just like everything or nothing."
That's the operatic tendency at play, we observed. It's either silent or full throated. The Cell manages both, and the 4K UHD restoration from Arrow Video should do it justice.
The Cell is now available to buy on 4K UHD.