(Originally published in Filmstar.)

You once said that your most horrendous acting experiences can turn out to be your best work. Does Antichrist fit the theory?

It was very happy. I was in good company and we had interesting things to do. I’m like a farm animal. I like to be used. This was a good situation. We had a fertile field to plough, you know? There are crazy stories about Lars being sadistic or odd with actors, but in my experience he’s anything but. He’s a very sincere and sweet guy.

Antichrist was made while Lars emerged from a period of depression. How did this affect the shoot?

It was touch and go whether we’d finish the film. There were points where he’d have serious bouts of anxiety and we’d have to stop for periods. But that was all part of it – this is a personal film and it’s a gift to work on something like this with him, so it makes you very patient. If he wasn’t feeling up to things, he had to go and lie down. Sometimes he’d have a bad idea like drinking beer or something and he’d sort of pass out and we’d just have to wait. But in the end, he functioned very well.

How did making an intense two-hander like Antichrist compare with Manderlay, Lars’s ensemble piece?

Entirely different. The shooting style was different, Lars was in a different place. Antichrist was a film that was serving a much different impulse. We all felt like actors on the set of Manderlay. On this we were so much there that we really became the story, bcame the landscape. Because there was nothing but the film for six or seven weeks.

There were no readings, no rehearsals. Did the lack of preparation scare you?

It’s very hard to convey how significant it is that you don’t rehearse. Any other film, I’d have a certain idea of where the scene is going to play, how it’s going to end. With Antichrist, Lars wouldn’t even tell us how we were dressed tell you how you’re dressed.

It sounds like you had the freedom of an early rehearsal for a play?

Not really. If you have a swing at it and he likes it then you move on. The thing about theatre is that you’re dealing with so much repetition and accumulation of association. With film, all the time, you’re trying to find the gesture. I mean the gesture in the big sense.

What techniques would Lars use on set?

He’s funny. He’s quite subtle in how he sets things up, but he also has some very funny shorthand. Sometimes he’ll literally say, ‘Willem 30% less, Charlotte, 20% more.’ Or at the end of the take he’ll simply use a universal gesture of intercourse and smile.

We reviewed Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) only a post ago and – schizophrenic shifting between history and allegory accounted for – it really is a film to seek out, a genuinely bruising account of civil conflict and certainly offering a deeper take on the attractions of war than The Hurt Locker (2009) could afford.

I’ve now disinterred my interview with the the film’s director, done last summer in London’s French Institute. Before Johnny Mad Dog, Sauvaire made a feature-length documentary, Carlos Medellin (2004), filmed in the Columbian slums. Doubtless it exercised the muscles he would later need to take a tiny crew to Monrovia and persuade war-scarred teenagers to re-enact the most devastating events of their lives.

This is not an obviously good idea, and I began by asking Sauvaire how he enlisted his largely non-professional cast, many of whom were veterans of the Second Liberian Civil War. To make an invidious comparison, Christophe Minie (who plays Johnny) has to do more brutal things than John Rambo might contemplate, and unlike a Stallone film, Johnny Mad Dog has nothing whatever to do with redemption.

Read more »

For Orson’s first interview, we’re publishing some email correspondence with musician and comedienne Charlyne Yi (who can claim, remarkably, and according to Wikipedia, Filipino, Spanish, Korean, Irish, German, French and Native American ancestry).

Ms Yi embarked on an unusual experiment in cinema last year with Paper Heart, out on DVD in February. The film follows a fictionalised version of Yi (plus close friend Michael Cera) as she attempts to divine what love might be. I don’t know who you’d ask for help with something like this; Yi plumps for Seth Rogen and Demetri Martin. She’s also performed some DIY enhancements on real life – Paper Heart’s dramatic reconstructions are done with puppets.

Read more »