Now celebrating its fourth year, Qumra is a weeklong industry event run by the Doha Film Institute in Qatar. We’ll be bringing you coverage of the stellar lineup of Qumra 2018 Masterclasses, given by such luminaries as Tilda Swinton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andrey Zvyaginstev and Bennett Miller in the coming days.
Maybe because he’s only made four films — “The Cruise,” “Capote,” “Moneyball” and “Foxcatcher” — Bennett Miller, despite two director Oscar nominations, still feels like a relatively unheralded quantity. Maybe it’s because the gaps between those films have been several years long, so he seems to fall off the radar for large periods of time. Maybe it’s because the last one, the very brilliant “Foxcatcher” was in 2014 and since then, the first inkling we had of new movement from him was last year when it was reported that he was slated to direct a Tom Stoppard adaptation of Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol” (finally, someone’s decided to film this obscure story!). But here’s the theory we subscribe to most (and one I wrote a thing about back in 2014): Bennett Miller makes films that are built to last and as a result, they’re often not appreciated as fully as they deserve at the time.
This was certainly true for “Moneyball,” to date his only studio project and one he hopped on to only after it had been on the development carousel for years. And it’s especially true for “Foxcatcher” which, critically lauded though it was on release, deserves a rewatch today for its portrait of the dangerously delusional, egocentric and deeply warped psychology of a super-rich petty tyrant, and will, we firmly believe, become established as a new American classic in the coming years
So despite the relative brevity of his filmography, there was plenty to dive into during his Qumra 2018 Masterclass. And if a bad dose of hoarseness on Miller’s part and a somewhat eccentric moderator contributed to a rather fitful two-hour session, there were still plenty of insights to be gleaned about Miller’s approach to filmmaking and the story of his career to date. Here are the highlights.
Miller’s first film, feature documentary “The Cruise” came about only after he’d let go of wanting to make films altogether.
“I’d dropped out of school and I got a job working for a filmmaker, as an assistant. And I got fired and it hurt. Then I worked as a production assistant on a music video for two days, and I thought ‘Well, I’m never going to do this again.’ There was really only one job I wanted and that was to be making films.
“And so I spent seven years doing very lowly crappy work, anything at all: ‘I’ll make a video for you!’ Fundraising videos, corporate, industrial — depressing stuff — I did that for years. And I got to this point where it occurred to me that I was incredibly unhappy, and I was basically following the ambition of a 12-year-old. And I made a decision to stop. I was going to get out and work with homeless people, I had a whole other idea.
“And very quickly, maybe within a minute of retiring from film, I felt so much better. Just the relief of letting go of ambition. It’s such a misery, all of this wanting, the anxiety, the tension. It was such a relief to say, ‘I don’t have to do this.’ And then almost immediately when I let go of all that, I had this old familiar childlike feeling of just being in the mood to make something. And I had met this guy [Timothy Levitch, subject of ‘The Cruise’]. We shot the film, I edited it in my room, no producer. [wry smile] Life has gotten so much more complicated since then.”
If getting his debut made was unlikely, getting it seen was borderline miraculous.
“I finish it, I submit it to every festival and get rejected from every festival. Every festival. I mean, I started with Sundance, and then Berlin, and ding ding ding [makes bullet-point/list gesture] all the way down to the Hot Springs Arkansas Film Festival, who reject one film every five years, and they rejected my film.
“But a friend of a friend was a publicist and she watched the film and she had an emotional reaction and wanted to help. And she said, ‘I do the publicity at a very small film festival in LA called the LA Independent Film Festival.‘ This was the fourth year she was going to do it for free and she says to them, ‘My fee is that you have to put this film in the festival.’ And she told the director of the festival, showed it to him. He did not like it.
“But he gave it one screening on Saturday at 10.30 in the morning in a small theater. But she’d chosen it to be one of the three films to press screen, and it got a big reaction, so there was a line around the block. And I got to watch it with an audience and so long as I live there will not be a more gratifying experience.
“It can’t happen again, it was such a transcendent experience. And then it sold, it got invited to every festival. It went to Berlin that had rejected it, it won top prize at the international Forum, it got a theatrical release, HBO bought it, it won an Emmy.”
Hard to believe but his narrative debut, and only second film ever, was “Capote,” which won his old friend Philip Seymour Hoffman his only Oscar, was written by another friend, Dan Futterman, and was based on the same New Yorker story as rival project “Infamous,” which was in development at the same time.
“Turns out that someone else had read that article also! And now there were two movies that were about the same exact thing. My friend said, ‘maybe we could beat it, if you direct it.’ So I just kept trying to take one step and if I was successful in that first step, I’d take a second step. And so my first step was I called up Philip Seymour Hoffman, and asked him to read the script (we did a theater program together at 16, and were very good friends).”
With the Oscar win it seems like a no-brainer, but looking back on it, casting Hoffman as Capote was pretty strange.
“When I think back on it, I think it was totally insane. Capote was 5′ 2”, Phil was 5’10″1/2, he weighed about 240 lbs, and had a deep voice, thick wrists like a wrestler or a football player — like a jock. He did have the right color hair, though. But he was an amazing actor. And I said, ‘We could do things to make you look smaller.’ Everyone was put on boxes, we cast really big people, the costume designer made tight shoulders that squeezed him so his head looked bigger in proportion to his body.
“But the main thing is the character’s interior and without getting too deep into it, there are lots of parallels in Phil’s life. Which I knew and only became more evident with time. There was something about that character that he could own that nobody else could.”