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Newton Filmmakers Talk Inspiration and Election


Amit Masurkar

“I’m not here to seek your votes.” A fat man festooned in bright orange garlands proclaims to the crowd gathered bellow the carnival-float podium he rode in on. He’s just there to stand up for the people, and to take care of the children, he says. All he wants is to make the lives of working people better, if only it wasn’t for all the other politicians, with goals not as pure as his, who stand in his way. This speech has been heard before, in many languages, and the scene, although set in rural India, is globally familiar. Thus begins “Newton,” a Tribeca International Narrative selected film, which is both a pointed satire of the election process and a love letter to all the people whose lives are affected by its outcome. On this pancontinental resonance of his film, director Amit Masurkar says:

“Film [in general] relates to what you are familiar with. So automatically you start seeing connections with things that you care about or you feel are unjust in your world. The German audiences related it to what’s happening there, in Hong Kong they were asking a lot of questions about Maoism and relating it to what is happening in China with government corruption. So people see a lot of similarities: even in North Korea there are elections. Saddam Hussein was democratically elected, so was Trump.”

At this, the interviewer and her subjects burst into knowing laughter, strangers no longer. And just like that, Masurkar and Tewari do it again: take a heavy subject lacking in easy answers, defuse it through an interaction between humans equal parts warm, awkward and immediate, and with the resultant laughter chip away a little bit of that heaviness, giving hope that even if not just yet, an answer will come. Each scene in the film achieves this feat, a testament to the pair’s background in writing for both sketch comedy and Bollywood. From that point on, the conversation flows fast:

Camila Gibran: What prompted you to center the film around an election?

Amit Masurkar: I was reading the preamble to the constitution. It’s such a beautiful piece of writing and a there is so much hope: the founding fathers thought that [India] was finally free and we could create our own destiny. The constitution is full of beautiful ideas… If you look at the constitution of any country today, I would say it would be beautiful, but then there’s a huge gap between what is written and what is practiced. So in order to do something about that, I thought to make a film about the physical process of electioneering.

CG: In your own words, please give me a brief synopsis of Newton.

AM: Newton is set over a day during an election in a conflict area. The election workers are supported by the police force in order to conduct “free and fair” elections in an area where the voters are not really free. So it’s ironic, the whole idea of the election there is a farce. The people there are disenfranchised, their rights aren’t really taken seriously, but when it comes to voting, they’re part of the statistic.

CG: There’s that gap again, that you spoke about, between the official record and the day to day reality. Does this apply to elections as well?

Mayank Tewari (screenwriter):  All over the world elections legitimize democracy while also being used as a tool for people to further their own agenda. The agenda is never set by people who have a stake. Policies are made about populations and the populations don’t have a say in what’s going on. If you’re able to show that a certain place had “free and fair” elections, a lot of things about that place are forgiven. If they have a democratically elected government, the feeling is “oh, they are plugged into the shared dream” so everything must be ok.


Mayank Tewarti

CG: Yet in the film, there’s hope. The main character keeps going for it, keeps believing in the process, in the importance of elections. Is there more than naiveté to the belief that one small person can change things?

MT: One thing, as a writer, I felt I accomplished, is the protagonist in the film not being a cynical person. Through his journey in the film, he starts sincere and he remains sincere, and I think that sincerity is what’s in need of here. Everybody seems to be wrapped in cynicism, being genuine and attentive is becoming a rare quality.

AM: You need patience for anything to happen, battles are being fought every day, but change take time. For example, in a country like say the U.S., women started voting much later. Turkish women were voting before American women were. And segregation was here until so late… It takes time for a society, generations for people to become aware of what they were doing and correct the historical wrongs of their forefathers.

CG: What is the role of art, and film specifically, in the process of bringing  about political change?

AM: We try our best, look at some if the singers from the sixties, so many of their songs are still being sung and they inspire people. One of art’s agendas is to make people learn about something new, discover something, question things, introspect. Film must also entertain at the same time, not make it into a serous topic that turns people off but make it accessible to everyone, and funny. Our intention was for people to find out more.

MT: An artist also has a political action. The fact that you are trying to draw humor from something which is not conventionally a source of humor is a political action, I feel, because art also creates a type of a context. If films like these are able to move you and to stay with you…

CG: We’ll be singing the songs of the sixties and watching films like Newton forever?

MT: That is my hope.

Interview by Camila Gibran

Photography by Leslie Hassler

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Culture Movies

Eliza Taylor in Thumper: A Portrait of an Actress

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival: A look through the lens of films to see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves.

“It’s a little bit painful to watch at times, in the best way possible. It’s very gritty and raw”, Eliza Taylor tells me of her new movie that just premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, Thumper, a very real portrait of lower class America by Jordan Ross in which she plays an outsider who gets involved in a high school meth ring.

Cozily sitting in front of me, wearing all black, she is tired; her face is flawless but her eyes are sleepy. As she talks about the film and her acting, sentences encompass extremes–hard to watch/best way possible, rough/wonderful–but not for a second is she scattered. She seems to know her place in the world, ingrained in a path in which every challenge to her craft is as rough as it is a wonderful opportunity.
Camila Gibran: Thumper is “hard to watch sometimes”. Why did you decide to take this role?

Eliza Taylor: Because the way the script is written you get a real glimpse into these people lives. The lives of people who in a lot of ways feel like they’ve been forgotten about and left behind by society. And as an actress, for the first time in my life, I got to play a character like Kat/Meredith, a character playing a character and it was a wonderful challenge to separate the two.

CG: You do a lot of television. Can you tell what film means to you as a visual art form?

ET: Film has been a life long love affair. For me personally, it’s about taking people away. I remember being at the cinema and watching really powerful movies and forgetting I was sitting in the theater.

It’s about being able to have a glimpse into different people’s lives around the world that we wouldn’t necessarily have a glimpse into.

If we get to pull that off successfully for an hour and a half, you take people out of their daily lives into a completely different world.

CG: No commercial breaks …

ET: Yes, No commercial breaks (laughs)


CG: Can you tell me about the world of Thumper?

ET: The movie is about kids who get caught up in the world of making and selling methamphetamines. But one thing about it is that you can really empathize with every single character, none of them are black and white, you can see that they are doing the best they can in a situation they are in.

CG: It feels very real. How was the shooting process?

ET: It was fascinating. We filmed in people’s homes that are in these areas that aren’t necessarily the wealthiest and their quality of life isn’t perfect. They were all really good people and very welcoming. But the sad thing was, we would wrap and finish shooting in their houses for the day and they went back to their lives. It was humbling and quite touching.

CG: What city was it set in?

ET: We didn’t want the movie to be specific to an area in America. We wanted it to be very American but we didn’t want everyone to automatically assume that it was in one certain area, one place. We shot it in San Pedro in Los Angeles, but yah… we kinda wanted it to have a hot sticky industrial vibe.

CG: You said that if a movie pulls it off, it can take us away and give us a glimpse into a different world. How do you feel after immersing yourself in this particular world? 

ET: I didn’t know myself by the end of this movie… I was like “ Who am I
again?”

It was rough; it was a really intense shoot. I did a lot of research and learned a lot about methamphetamines and the effect it’s having on modern society, it’s quite incredible, even in Australia it’s an epidemic. I came out of it feeling quite overwhelmed by that.

It was a real experience and it wasn’t easy, which was great.

And just like that she gives me yet another glimpse into her world, the path she is on and the kind of actress she is.

Photography by Leslie Hassler

Categories
Culture Events Movies

Russell Peters Shines in The Clapper

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival: A look through the lens of films to see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves with Russell Peters.


Russell Peters generously breaks the ice by mimicking farting sounds as he settles into an armchair, simultaneously setting the joke bar within an easy reach for me. It’s a comfortable place to begin when interviewing one of the world’s top comics whose career spans decades. He also designed his wife’s engagement ring to feature four lobster claws–or so the internet tells me.


Svetlana Chirkova: What is the world of The Clapper, in your own words?

Russell Peters: The film is about a guy, Eddie Krumble, who moves to Los Angeles and makes his money as a professional audience member. All he’s trying to do is make a living, he’s not trying to become “Hollywood”, he’s not trying to become a celebrity, he just wants to live a very simple life, and do a very simple job, then along comes this late-night talk show host, Jayme Stillerman, played by myself…

SC: You look great in a pink suit, by the way.

RP: Thank you, it may have been my own suit, actually… Anyway, my character, while doing his monologue and trying to make people laugh, unwittingly exposes Eddie as he thinks it’ll be a really funny ‘bit’ to try to find him, which in turn destroys Eddie’s life. So it’s a situation where one guy is trying to do the right thing, and the other guy, while thinking he’s doing something funny, wrecks it all.

SC: So there’s real gap in perspectives between these two as to what’s of value in life?

RP: Yeah, Stillerman is a TV cornball host, it’s his whole existence, so he really just can’t imagine how TV exposure could be bad for anybody. Eddie, on the other hand, is just trying to make his $100 dollars and the fact that his job ends up on TV is irrelevant to him. So there’s a failure to understand a very blue collar business by someone coming from the shiny, “glitzy lights” business, thinking that exposure is only going to lead to bigger and better things.

SC: This lack of mutual understanding between the so called ‘blue collar’ and the ‘glitzy lights’ classes has become a much debated topic following the election and the events since.

RP: There is no finger pointing, we are all the problem. Ultimately we all have to take credit for the problem.

SC: The world has become such a different place compared to a year ago, when this film was being made. Does the story of these characters take on a different meaning against the current backdrop?

RP: Isn’t it weird that a year ago seems like a much different time? Even 10 months ago was. We had a different president, we had a different mood, and now here we are with all this uncertainty about the future. There are so many threatening things in the world now, so many different things coming at us we don’t know what to dodge. It’s such a bizarre time. So I guess the thing that this film can offer is a glimpse back to a time when things were simpler – you know, 10 months ago.


SC: Ha. So apart from this time capsule property, what else can film offer above other forms of story telling?

RP: Film takes you into that world of escapism that we all desperately need, especially in these times. I think fewer people are going to movies nowadays, because the thought process is ‘Well, I can rent it on iTunes’, or wait to get it on Netflix, or just get a bootleg somewhere. We are detaching ourselves from tangible things which is a very bizarre thing to me. Going to the movies gives you something: to sit in a seat, to hold a ticket, to eat your popcorn and have a soda, to look at the person beside you and cheer, to be in the room full of strangers. Now we curate everything from the TV shows we watch to the music we listen to, we create a tailor made bubble. It’s hard to get that collective feeling anymore, because when you do find yourself in a group of people they too have been curated and are all in fact the same person. We are homogenizing ourselves individually. But what we forget is, back in the day, when these bubbles didn’t exit; we all talked, we had common ground, we had common things to talk about. We all just co-existed quite well with each other.

To further demonstrate his fondness for embracing the necessary discomfort of the true collective experience, the farting sounds got an encore as Russell distributed his goodbye hugs on the way out.

Photography by Leslie Hassler

Categories
Culture Entertainment Movies

Pablo Schreiber Cooks Meth in Thumper

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival: A look through the lens of films to see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves with Pablo Schreiber.

I am sitting on a stoop having a coffee and a croissant when a very tall Pablo Schreiber crosses the street in my direction. I’m here to interview him about his role in the new movie Thumper. When I say I’m waiting for the lights to be set up in the studio upstairs, without missing a beat he sits down beside me.

We start talking about LA weather–his new home–being immigrants–he is Canadian–him being a father and how through films we may be able to see the “other”. For a while we are two New Yorkers, coffee in hand having the easiest of conversations on a stoop in Chelsea.

On the way up the easiness takes a pause when the elevator door closes but it doesn’t move. Panic crosses his face. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s really hard being this tall in a very small space” he says.

Seconds later we start to move and we are back at ease again. Upstairs, coffee still in hand but now on comfortable chairs.


Camila Gibran: I saw Thumper last night it’s raw and heartbreaking. In your own words how would you define it?

Pablo Schreiber: It’s the journey of a young woman who gets involved in a meth ring, but swirling in all of it is this idea of an America that has been left behind; people who have to do things that they didn’t originally want to do, making choices that they didn’t necessarily need to. How do you make a life when you don’t have many opportunities? This is the lot that enveloped all of these young kids, and that’s the real tragedy of this movie.

CG: What compelled you to take this role?

PS: It was interesting to hear you say the ‘other’ downstairs, because that’s definitely something that I look for in my work. I’m really interested in the extremes, not just the extremes of society but also the extremes of human behavior. So Wyatt, to me, was a guy who was operating in the extremes of human behavior, in the sense of, you know, cooking meth and giving it to children to sell, not really behavior that I would condone or practice, and so whenever I see someone who’s doing something that’s so far from my experience, I want to know why they do it. There is a scene where he goes into some of the reasons why he does what he does and where this country is, in his opinion, and how immigrants and the workforce shrinking have made things so difficult for him. I was compelled by that really different voice.

CG: We are in a time in this country, and in the world in general, that’s very different to where we were a year ago. How do you feel Thumper to be relevant today?

PS: We shot it last year in March and April, long before the election, and long before this country, as some people say, s**t the bed, but now we’re sleeping in it. We’re rolling around in it, and it’s taken on a whole other weight, since the election, of that voice of the angry white man.

When we were making this movie, none of that was really around, there was some of it blowing in the air, but you couldn’t tell that this was coming. Living in New York, or living in LA, you couldn’t see that blowing in the wind, and the election was such a huge slap in the face for costal livers, and for anyone who was living in a major metropolitan area… So this movie has taken on a whole new significance in the after-math of the election, and only gone further to kind of humanizing in a way a lot of the sentiments that are in the air… that’s not to judge it as good or bad, it’s just trying to understand a little more about where a lot of these feelings are coming from.

How do you see the role of film, and visual storytelling in people’s lives?

PS: As an actor I deal with film and TV. I see it on all fronts. There’s just so much content, as consumers we are so lucky, especially in the market of television right now, but we are bombarded by choices. We are so spoiled, which brings up another problem: When do you watch it all?

I’m a bit embarrassed to say, but as a dad, I mostly watch movies on airplanes because I travel so much. The other day I was taking a flight and I finally just watched Moonlight, after however long it’s been.

So, once you find a little time to watch a story being told either in the form of television or film, what would you choose and why?

PS: You really have to choose something that’s going to make an impact on you. Art is here to influence us in some way or another, to make us re-evaluate or look at our life in new and interesting ways. So if you’re going to commit that amount of time to something you have to be sure that it’s something that’s going to affect you profoundly in some way.

So last question, as an artist and as a consumer of those art forms, do you think they can bridge the gap in understanding what creates ‘the other’?

PS: That’s the next thing, and I never want to take that leap, because to me, how to bridge the gap, I don’t know. The only thing we can do is start conversations. And we can also look into what makes other people tick and try to empathize with them. Through understanding, and looking deeply into circumstances and trying to understand how somebody feels about something is the only way to then … behave in a way that’s more empathetic towards them. So I guess that’s a form of bridging the gap – knowledge and information.

As we are hugging goodbye I am reminded of how tall he is. When the elevator door opens I smile as to assure him that it will go down just fine. The door closes and the easiness is still there.

Photography by Leslie Hassler