AN INTERVIEW WITH KENT JONES

Kent Jones has an enviable career. He's the editor-at-large of Film Comment magazine, associate programmer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and occasionally makes movies with Martin Scorsese. He's obscenely intelligent, but has a gentle conversational style that makes even the most plebeian of interviewers feel welcome. We spoke recently about the 42nd New York Film Festival (which begins October 1st), the forthcoming presidential election and why he once got hissed by the festival audience.

Drink at Work: Is this the busiest time of year for you?

Kent Jones: This year it's not, because I made a film this year, and it was made in two months...I've never experienced anything like it. I never want to experience anything like it again. It turned out nicely, but it was just insane.

DAW: Did you write, direct, produce?

KJ: Well, before I worked here I worked for 7 years in Marty Scorsese's office, and I wrote his documentary on Italian cinema [My Voyage to Italy], and then he and I are going to do another thing pretty soon about Elia Kazan... But we made this thing about the Statue of Liberty [Lady By the Sea: The Statue of Liberty], that we co-directed and co-wrote earlier this year. And it was two months from the phone call saying, "Can you do this?" to the delivery date. It was hair-raising.

It was an interesting challenge, everything was very compressed. American Express called him, "Can you do this?" "Yes, but I'm not interested in flag-waving, can we do this?" "Yes," and then we started. We had to do all the financial stuff, all the production stuff, all the research stuff, all the writing, all the filming, all the editing, all at the same time.

DAW: That is insane.

KJ: Yeah, it was an insane undertaking but it turned out nicely. It's a good film. It was on the History Channel in January, and it was in Tribeca for about a week.

DAW: So that was the busiest time of your life...

KJ: That was the busiest time of my life, yeah, aside from when my sons were born. But here at work, yes, the film festival is definitely a very busy time of year.

DAW: Where does it start?

KJ: Richard [Peña, Programming Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center] and I basically go to a lot of festivals and serve on juries and things. And then in May, both of us and the rest of the selection committee go to Cannes and see as much as possible. There are two crunch moments, one is Cannes and the other one is two weeks during the summer that's around the last week of July, first week of August, which is basically sitting in a room downstairs just looking at movies nonstop for two weeks. And in the meantime Richard and I look at a lot of other stuff, too.

DAW: Do you all see all of the movies or is it divided up...if one person sees something they really love can they just bring it in...

KJ: Yeah, I mean mostly Richard determines what we're going to see. There are some films that come in that we'll see as a matter of course because they're by certain filmmakers, then there are other films that some of us have seen that we liked, etc. etc.

DAW: Do you ever get anything that's just completely out of the blue that makes it into the festival?

KJ: A couple of years ago there was a movie called The Woman Chaser...that was before I was on the committee. And there was a movie that we took two years ago called Love and Diane that I thought was an incredible documentary — really gutsy — by a filmmaker named Jennifer Dworkin. And that really came without any accolades or rep or anything like that, so, yeah, it definitely happens.

DAW: Do you get into heated arguments when you're really narrowing it down?

KJ: It depends on the nature of the group. I've been on three years so far and every year the configuration is different. It's a good group this year, but the group dynamic changes depending on the people, it changes depending on the weather, depending on the selection of films. I mean some years what's out there just happens to be stronger than other years. There are certain years where some directors haven't made films or they're completing work or something like that and other years where there's an abundance of stuff.

DAW: Does it generally work in a way that by the end of the process everyone is really happy with the selection, or do you walk away some years and think, "God, it just kind of sucks this year..."

KJ: I suppose it's different from year to year. This year I'd say we were pretty happy with the selections. You know, it's never 100%, five people are in complete agreement but that would be ridiculous if it were and deadly dull and kind of like going to the Republican Convention. But it's a very exciting process in that sense because it's a group...talking things through with people...the collaborative process of it is the nice part.

DAW: Do you see a movie one way and then get into discussing it and feel differently about it after that?

KJ: No, I wouldn't put it that way. I would say it's more like...well, there's a certain film this year, I can't say what film it is — it didn't get in — it's a film I felt very strongly about and one of the other committee members, when I really laid out the argument that I had for it, he said, "You know, I don't think I've changed my mind about the film but I think I have changed my mind about whether it should be included in the festival or not." I think that that's happened with me in the past too. I don't think anybody's opinion changes of the film; whether somebody likes a film or not, it's hard for that to change.

DAW: I was actually going to ask whether or not there was something you saw in the screening process that you loved but didn't make it in...

KJ: Oh, yeah...and then there are films that I don't particularly care for that did, but that's true of all of us.

DAW: How many films do you see in this process?

KJ: I don't know, maybe, a hundred. Cannes you go and see, I think it's roughly 40, 50, something like that. And then there are video tapes that come in all year round and then during the screening process in the summer there's a lot, so it adds up.

DAW: What would you say the character of the New York Film Festival is, if there really is one, as opposed to something like Cannes or Sundance or Tribeca?

KJ: Well, it's an interesting question because now that Tribeca exists the comparison comes up almost automatically. I think Tribeca reflects the direction festivals have gone in in the last few years, where it's like a big bazaar that you walk into and you grab this or that...and it's exciting for that reason. The New York Film Festival is exciting for a different reason because it's predicated on the idea that you're going to see a small number of films that have been carefully chosen by certain people who presumably everyone agrees have a reasonably good sense of what makes a good film, they have a good sense of what's going on in world cinema, and have very catholic tastes and knowledge of film history. That's not to say that Peter Scarlet doesn't have all of those things too, but the two entities are different. There are very good films in Tribeca, but it's about the size of it. And so that's part of the identity of what the New York Film Festival is, it's the idea of a selection. Ryan Werner from Wellspring articulated it very nicely in an interview. I probably couldn't improve upon what he said. He just said that Tribeca represents — I'm not sure if I would say it in quite this way — Tribeca represents the grab bag idea and New York represents the idea of film as an art...and selectivity...and I suppose there's a grain of truth in that.

DAW: You mentioned the Republican Convention before, does that aggravation that, obviously, many people are feeling, does that go into the screening room with the committee when you're making your choices...

KJ: Which aggravation, you mean the New York aggravation of having the Republican convention here or the George Bush aggravation in general?

DAW: Well, I mean, it seems that a lot of the frustration with the Bush Administration is it's tunnel vision. And one of the great things about the festival is it's so completely without tunnel vision, it casts its net wide when it comes to the countries it represents and issues it covers, and maybe that's just always how it would be...

KJ: Yeah, it is, but you're bringing up an interesting point. It is always how it would be, but we're here in New York and we're not in, you know, Kansas...that Thomas Frank book is sitting here somewhere [What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America]...you know we can sit here and watch Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman and be comfortable with subtitles, and you know the whole rap about New York being here and the rest of the country being over here, and then L.A.'s another kind of entity...but it's an interesting question that's actually come up recently.

This weekend I programmed a series of events around politics and cinema, and Michael Moore was there at the end, inevitably, I suppose. But I really wanted it to be a number of different perspectives. So there was one panel that was a group of filmmakers who I know very well, and all their films have appeared in the Human Rights Watch festival, and then I did an event with Jean-Pierre Gorin, who is Godard's old partner and he's a friend of mine, and I wanted him to come and speak to the issue. And on Friday night we showed The Battle of Algiers, and I deliberately put Jean-Pierre on the panel because I knew that he hated it, but he hated it for very compelling reasons, because he's a leftist... But he has a problem with these movies that do events that transpired 10 years before they were made in this kind of "you are there" style, and rousing political epics. And he voiced his problems with the film very eloquently. And there was an Africanist, Mahmood Mamdani, and the Director for Counter-Terrorism for the NYPD. So there are a lot of different ways you can slice into that movie — there are probably 8 more that I could have done — and it was really exciting, people were disagreeing...and there was a woman who was sitting in the audience and at a certain point she just started screaming. And she wasn't screaming at anyone in particular, she was just screaming about the fact that she felt confused, she felt paranoid. She said something like the CIA may have been responsible for 9/11 and I said, "That's a very paranoid point of view," and she said, "Well, I feel paranoid!"

And I realized, basically, she was embodying a kind of confusion a lot of people feel. I hesitate to use the word paralysis because it feels so shopworn, but then at the same time there's truth to it. It's paralysis in the sense that you don't really know how... Everybody knows they're stuck with Kerry. But we can't really wonder why. We can't really take the time to wonder why we're stuck with Kerry, that's still kind of mysterious to me. Why the fix was in and Howard Dean was suddenly... I can't believe it was just because he shouted once. You know, why is it that we're here in New York experiencing things one way, and people in Kansas are experiencing things another way? Why is it that people are dirt poor and they keep voting for Republicans? And a lot of it has to do with this question of how you look at things and how you get stuck in the way that the Bush administration frames the terms of the argument. It's actually an old Republican idea that really started with Lee Attwater and Ronald Reagan 20 years ago or more; once you frame the debate the other guy has to play catch up.

So to get back to your original question, what's it like when we're sitting in the screening room, of course it affects it. How could it not affect it? I think that every once in a while there will be a film that speaks to it with great eloquence. I would say that in this festival there are two. One of them is the Godard film [Notre Musique], because it's a very, very serene film about the least serene topic imaginable, which is war. And it really looks at it squarely. I don't think that Godard's other films that I've seen recently have been that well thought out. The last one I thought was ok, the one we showed here. It was beautiful, but I thought it was a little bit muddled in it's thinking. But this one is very clear. And then the Jia Zhangke film, The World, is a very eloquent movie about kind of feeling displaced and neither here nor there. It's about people who work in Beijing at this theme park that has scale versions of the Eiffel Tower and the Twin Towers and different landmarks around the world and the oddity of it. So, anyway, it's something that effects us but not consciously.

DAW: I remember when Dogma opened the festival a few years ago there were a lot of people who came out to protest it, but I haven't really seen anything like that since. Is there anything in this year's selection that you think might inspire a similar reaction?

KJ: There have been instances in the past...when Hail Mary by Godard was shown here there were huge protests. And there was whole drama with In the Realm of the Senses getting into the country in the late 70s to get into the festival. There was a film that we wound up not taking, and again, I won't say the name of it, but there was this scene where an animal was killed, gutted, taken apart and I was just watching it and thinking, "Oh boy, there's no way that they can put that 'no animals were harmed in the making of this film,'" at the end of it. But aside from that, I'm not sure.

Curiously enough, last year when we showed S21 [S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine], there was a guy who was complaining about it, and he went outside and he was still complaining to the filmmaker afterwards, because he felt that foreigners should be the ones who were put on the tribunal because the system in Cambodia was so corrupt there was no way that the Cambodians themselves could judge the Khmer Rouge fairly. The filmmaker insists that it has to be Cambodian people who do it, that it can't be outsiders, just not necessarily the Cambodians who this guy thinks would automatically get on the committee. That was interesting. But that was one guy, not the kind of uproar you're describing.

DAW: The audience at the film festival is pretty vocal. How do the directors react to that, do they like being challenged by the audience and having those arguments?

KJ: I think that they're vocal but they're not like they used to be. I remember sitting through Class Relations by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet 21 years ago when that was in the festival and people were just, by the time it was over they were hooting at the top of their lungs. You know, because it was a Straub film, the duration of the shots was much longer than they were used to. And then the worst thing I've ever seen I think was in 1982 there was a Godard film here called Passion, but before it started there was a rather lengthy short film, probably half an hour long maybe a little longer, by a filmmaker named Ericka Beckman, called You the Better, and I've never heard such hooting and hollering. I remember also during a Bresson film, L'Argent, which I actually wrote a book about, there was a lot of, "How many shots can this man show of belts, knees, legs..." that kind of thing. But You the Better, that was painful.

I don't see that so much anymore. During the Q&As people want to make their opinions known, and very often you'll hear something that becomes more of a comment than a question.

DAW: Is that tough for you being in the moderator role?

KJ: No. No, it's not, it's easy. [laughs] I mean not everyone likes you when you silence them. A couple of years ago when we showed The Magdalene Sisters there was a woman in the audience who had been through something similar, and she just took the microphone...and it was turning into, like, Oprah...you know, and I just, I had to say, "I'm sorry, we have to move on..." It's the nature of the event.

DAW: I actually heard you get hissed once.

KJ: I remember that, it was that screening as a matter of fact. I think people are primed to vocalize, you know, it's interesting. [pause] I was really struck by that, I remember it very well because I just came out and I said one word, I didn't even complete the sentence and somebody said, "SPEAK UP!" and I said, "Well, ok, is everybody having the same problem not hearing me or is it just you?" and then I heard the hissing and I thought, "Oh, they think I'm insulting them..." You know, it's a funny crowd.

DAW: Is there anything that stands out in your mind as the most rewarding moment in your time working with the festival?

KJ: Before I was on the committee, I was still doing introductions and stuff like that, and I think I was the first person to write about Olivier Assayas' films in English. And it was because of writing about his films that he and I became friends, and we're very close friends and we've only gotten closer as the years have gone by. And in '98 or '99 when Late August, Early September was in the festival, Richard asked me to do the Q&A with Olivier. And it's a nice memory, I mean, he acknowledged me, that was very nice. It often happens that when I'm doing a Q&A with a filmmaker, they really respond to the fact that they're in this festival and it means something to them, and some of them I know well, some of them I don't know as well, but you can see that there's a moment when they really are touched by it and moved by it.

DAW: That has to be pretty amazing to be a fan of an artist, then start writing about them and have that develop into a real friendship.

KJ: Well, you know, I went to Paris in '91 and I saw Paris at Dawn and I thought this guy is very interesting and then I saw another movie by him I thought was really interesting called A New Life. And I have a friend in Vienna who now runs the film museum there and I mentioned Olivier to him, and he said, "Well, I know Olivier, and you should write to him." So I did, and he wrote me back and he said, "I'm shocked that anybody on your side of the Atlantic would even think of my work." I mean, I think Désordre had been in New Directors/New Films but I think he just wasn't really thinking that his work was going to translate at that point, and this is before Irma Vep. And I talked to Gavin [Smith, Editor of Film Comment], it was the first thing I wrote for Film Comment, actually. And he and I started corresponding, and I would go to Paris every once in a while and have dinner, and whenever he came to New York we would get together, and so over the years we've gotten to be friends. Yeah, it's a nice friendship.

You know, he's one of the most adventurous people working now. He's got a different idea of cinema from what most people think his idea is, it gets misinterpreted a lot. But I also think that it's different from what almost everyone else in France is doing. I always felt when I first saw it that it was very in touch with what it feels like to be alive now, it felt very tuned into that, and I think he remains in that place as a filmmaker.

DAW: Do you ever pay $10.25 and go into the multiplex and see the same mainstream movies the rest of us see?

KJ: Oh yeah, I mean, I don't as much as I used to. I go to see movies with my kids, and I'm glad, I mean, I saw Thunderbirds and I thought it was great, it was really fun, and I saw Spider-Man twice with them. I gladly plunked down $10 twice to see Collateral, I thought that was tremendous.

He's a curious filmmaker [Michael Mann] he's interesting...I remember when I saw Heat I was really struck by the fact that whenever a character would open their mouth the movie went dead — almost always, not 100% but a lot of the time — because these cliches would pop out. I know he's a writer but I don't think he's always his own best writer. And these kind of cliched oppositions between the characters, you know, Deniro was the dissatisfied gangster, Pacino was the dissatisfied cop... But then, when people would close their mouths and just get to work, which is frequently during the movie, it's breathtaking if not visionary. And he's really alone in the way that he — Alan Rudolph used to get into it but he doesn't so much anymore — the way he films cities, well the city of Los Angeles not just cities, but the way that he films Los Angeles and urban life is really exciting. He gets the picturesque beauty of it and he also gets the — there's a quality that William Friedkin got in To Live and Die in L.A. — he gets the meanness of it, although I think Michael Mann is more oriented towards the pretty side of it. But it's a very dynamic thing.

I can't think of anyone else who would have done what he did with Collateral to get that look from High Definition video. And the look itself is exciting and carries the movie in moments when it goes into kind of standard areas, but its really good. It's too bad that we didn't get to look at a film like that, you know, but people are afraid of festivals when movies cost that much.

DAW: How did you end up writing the liner notes for The Royal Tenenbaums DVD?

KJ: I wrote a piece about it for Film Comment, and I know Wes [Anderson]. I've loved Wes' work since Bottle Rocket. And I was asking him to do something here at the theater, an event, which he eventually did via closed-circuit television, because he doesn't like to fly and he was editing Tenenbaums. It was actually a lot of fun, his brother came and Kumar [Pallana], the guy from his movies. He was kind of going back and forth about whether he was going to do that, then the issue of Film Comment came out with the piece in it and he called me up right away and he said, "Well, this is definitely my favorite issue of Film Comment ever..." And then when the Tenenbaums disk was coming out, he asked Criterion if they could just use my essay. But it was originally about defending him. It was articulated to the problems that people have with his movies and defending against them, so I kind of pulled away from that a little bit.

DAW: Do you have a favorite film in the festival this year?

KJ: I don't know, it's a really strong year...there are a lot of great movies by old masters. The Rohmer film [Triple Agent] is a very, very difficult — I use the term difficult guardedly, it's sort of a consumer term — it's a very dense movie. All the emotion in it happens eight layers below what you're seeing, because you're not sure who this guy is. It's his emotional life that's happening eight layers below and you have to guess at it and his wife has to guess at it, and I loved it. Also, I think the Godard film [Notre Musique]...Godard I think is a great filmmaker whose films are always great in relation to everything else that's happening around them, but I find very few of them great as objects on their own. But this one I think really is. It's tremendous. And I'm really excited that The Big Red One is in the festival. When it came out there probably wouldn't have been a chance for it to be in the festival, when it was in it's truncated form. But now...it's a very special film about war. You know, it's like all Sam Fuller movies it's very cornball, it's very crass, but it's also really impassioned, and there was one section of it that was in the original but it's even stronger now, where they liberate a camp. It's really something. The Argentine movie La Nina Santa (The Holy Girl) really blew me away when I saw it. And the Bergman movie [Saraband] is great. There are a lot of great films in the festival.

Previous Interviews:

Aziz Ansari

Mike Birbiglia