James Marsh’s High Wire Act

After "Man on Wire," director James Marsh chases down the big bad wolf in "The Red Riding Trilogy."

Absolutely, it’s beautiful. Between you and me, yours was my favorite of the three films.

You don’t need a “between you and me.” [laughs] It’s interesting in that it was never a pissing contest. I actually really like the other two, and I say this not as a P.R. exercise. When I watched them all together for the first time ever, I enjoyed my own film because I could see it as part of a bigger work. I think there is something about the weight of the three films as an experience that works. There was definitely a response: if you really like the first one, you’ll probably find mine a little bit conventional. But if you think the first one’s a little bit overcooked, then you might respond to the narrative clarity of the middle one. So it’s horses for courses.

I really like the first film. The screenplay was fantastic, and Julian made an amazing job of evoking this feverish world. The last one has the burden of tying things together, but Anand [Tucker] shoots it the way he shoots films and makes it lyrical. To some extent, it’s slightly more forgiving than the two previous films, which may be what people need to enjoy them. [laughs]

This film and “Man on Wire” show your love for procedurals. Do you have any genre favorites, maybe something below the mainstream radar?

Yeah, but unfortunately, everyone always tosses out the 1970s American films because they are so monumental. You discover them as you discover films. “The Long Goodbye,” the Robert Altman movie, is fantastic. There’s definitely an influence of a British director called Alan Clarke, who made the best post-war films as a coherent body of work, but they’re all made for television. “Red Riding” almost emerges from the same culture of authored independent television drama. You’ve maybe seen his film “Elephant,” which is about the troubles in Northern Ireland.

Sure, and I especially like Clarke’s “Scum” and “Made in Britain.”

There you go. So you’re aware of what an extraordinary visual filmmaker he is. That was a very clear and useful reference point for us because he made cinematic films in England, which are hard to do as you can see from the history of British filmmaking. I don’t know why this is. You can do it in France and America, but in England, it’s hard to make cinematic language that feels organic to that time and place. Clarke did that on television, and yet if you see them on DVD or projected, they’re amazingly good films.

I used the same DP on “Man on Wire,” Igor Martinovic, who is a Croatian by upbringing, but now lives in New York. Bringing him to Yorkshire allowed him to cast his [outsider's] eye upon these bleak surroundings. Plus, I’d been away from England for 14 years, and actually never made a film in England. So I was coming at it with a fairly fresh eye, as well.

One of your first directorial efforts was a short 1990 documentary called “The Animator of Prague,” a portrait of stop-motion artist Jan Švankmajer. Was that a passion project?

It was something I initiated — he’s an extraordinary filmmaker. The BBC was doing a series of films about the [Eastern Bloc], when everything had collapsed and was being reinvented. My idea was to make a film about Švankmajer, who at that point, was making “The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia,” which was about what had just happened in Czechoslovakia, which wasn’t yet the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So I went and spent time with him as he made that film, and saw the techniques he was using and the ideological ideas he was working out. He’s a very, very weird guy. He’s a total surrealist.

He didn’t like the look of me one little bit. The day I showed up, he was animating some offal, which he [received] from an abattoir. Animals get slaughtered, he gets delivered the guts, the brains, whatever he wanted in a bucket, which he takes back in a plastic bag. He just stuck his hand in the bucket and then offered to shake my hand as if by way of a welcome. After a few days hanging around, he got used to the idea of me being there, and it all ended up as a nice little film.

You’re here in the U.S. to work on another documentary. Can you dish about it?

I can give you a broad outline. You probably know the Bresson film “Au hasard Balthazar,” which is the story of a donkey, a sort of mute witness to human drama and folly. We’ve got a real-life story about a chimpanzee who goes on a picaresque journey in human society. He starts off somewhere, ends up a million miles from where he started, along the way, [it's about] the extraordinary characters he witnesses and events he indeed initiates. It has something in common with “Grizzly Man.” It’s about how animals actually are, as opposed to what we project upon them, and maybe about what we actually are, too. Each species holds up a mirror to the other.

The Oscar nominees were just announced. What’s the greatest perk you’ve experienced since winning that little bald statue?

My wife got the best one. She managed to fly first class. She was taking it back to Europe, and it just so happened that someone behind her in the security gate also had an Oscar in their bag. The screener couldn’t believe it — he saw one and then two! So she got upgraded.

“The Red Riding Trilogy” opens in New York on February 5th, will open in Los Angeles on February 12th before expanding into limited release on February 19th.

[Additional photo: "Man on Wire," Magnolia, 2008]

Pages: 1 2