I’m going to turn 35 in January, which feels old enough to consider myself a man, inexperienced enough to still feel irresponsible; halfway to still being younger than Warren Beatty, alive enough to reflect on what really matters.  And what really matters?  Friendship.  If, as my amazing friend John O’Donohue often said, our identities are dependent on our memories, and how we interpret them, then who I am is inextricably linked to my memories of things I have done with friends.  Strange to think that we’ve been doing The Film Talk for nearly one tenth of my life.  Of course, if Operation Save The Film Talk is the resounding success we all hope it will be, perhaps it will outlast even me (and hey – if you haven’t signed up to support the show and site yet, please do click the link here and consider us – we have some gorgeous gifts on offer this week).  But for now, one tenth of my life still seems like a lot.

Which – in one of my patented not-all-that-subtle segues – brings me to Mike and Rosemary Riddell, writer & film-maker, former Baptist pastor and current family court judge, wearer of the most amazing hats and stylised gin afficianado (in appropriate does), a man who considers his dog a spiritual director, a woman who combines sass and spirit in measures I had never seen anywhere else before I met her, friends beyond my previous imagining of what friends could be; and people about whom you’ll be hearing a fair amount in the next year, because they are making a film whose script mingles the sensitivity of ‘Paris, Texas‘ with the humour of ‘Whale Rider‘, and hangs on the most unusual narrative hook this side of ‘Cold Souls‘: Arthur, a middle-aged homeless Maori fella with schizophrenia in Ponsonby, near Auckland, and believes that he is called to impregnate an unhappily married woman named Margaret with a view to her giving birth to the second incarnation of Jesus.  Simple enough.  He looks at the moon a lot – he made it, you see.  He thinks about life.  He gives good gifts to broken people.  Meanwhile, a cynical television reporter, doubting preacher, and friendly boarding-house owner dance their own way into a deeper appreciation of meaning.

Rosemary Riddell and Tom Burstyn on set

‘The Insatiable Moon‘ is the second best novel I’ve ever read; the script needs no such qualifier: I’ve been excited about this movie since I read the book 12 years ago.  Which means I’ve known Mike and Rose for over a third of my life.  They’re making the film at the moment, with the mighty actor Rawiri Paratene (Koro the grandfather in ‘Whale Rider’) starring as Arthur, and cinematography by Tom Burstyn, while Rosemary directs and Mike watches his words come alive.  The journey to production has been long and tortuous, with funders in and out, some well-known cast members withdrawing after the budget was cut, and only a few weeks ago a step-back-from-the-brink decision not to cancel the film altogether.

Mike Riddell, Tom Burstyn, Rawiri Paratene on set

Mike’s blogging the production here – there’s a delightful sense of a film being born; entirely appropriate, given the novel’s themes of birth and re-birth.  (You can become a fan on Facebook here too.)  The book’s been out of print for a while, but that will surely correct itself when the film is released.  So I’m sending good wishes from ‘The Film Talk’ – we know how hard it is to make a film; we’re always thrilled when people put their heart and souls into cinema; if ‘The Insatiable Moon’ ends up being half the film it could be, the invention of Arthur in the mid-1990s will have been a gift to the world.

[The video above was made a couple of years ago to promote the fundraising for the film - but it gives a taste of things to come.]

You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you’ve been in the The Film Talk neighbourhood for any length of time, you’ll also know that we often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it’s a pleasant surprise to see ‘Turning Green’, your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what’s wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

I’ve spent a monumentally pleasurable afternoon in the presence of Satan; in the form of the ridiculous and wonderful performance that Walter Huston (above) gives in ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, a film about American history and the mythopoetics of the Yankee soul that deserves to be compared with ‘Citizen Kane’ (and not just because they were both edited by Robert Wise and released by RKO within a month of each other).  It’s an astonishing movie, of the kind that evokes an utterly romanticised vision of pastoral, political and religious life but manages to appear even more realistic for it.  (Story hook?  Poor farmer sells soul to the Devil in exchange for money and crops.  Doesn’t make him happy.)

There’s a hell of a lot more to it than the soul-selling plot point, and I’m writing something more extensive about the whole film, but for now I thought I’d post about what the movie devil looks like.  (I’m also honored to be currently involved in a project with Walter Wink, a theologian and writer who has done more than anyone I can think of to develop an understanding of the concept of Satan as a projection of human evil that is both psychologically healthy and intellectually rigorous, and avoids not only the neurosis that some religious practices can reinforce but also the societal resignation that results when people don’t think clearly about evil.  The fruits of that project should be published in the next year or so; I’ll post details then.  In the meantime, some of you may be interested in Wink’s incredible book ‘Engaging the Powers’, which describes the way in which story/myth is manifested in real-world violence, and how ending the cycle of oppression depends partly on finding a new way to tell stories, and responding to violence with its opposite, rather than pouring gasoline on a fire; this book will, I believe, be read, and its themes practised, for generations to come.)

Walter might enjoy his namesake, Mr Huston’s performance in ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, partly because it’s played for dark laughs, and partly because it reveals the structure of all human temptation to selfishness: looking up from a sense of scarcity to find an easily-imitated set of behavior played out by someone who seems to offer jealous reward.  You have it, so I want it.  Given that ‘Daniel Webster’ is a myth, it has a moralistic climax – in which the victim is defended on the grounds of national pride; but the film has the maturity to end not on a note of triumph, but a warning: it could happen to you too.  Movie Satan is usually a source of fear; but while fear can teach you something,  for now, I thought I’d write about some of what I have learned from Satan in the movies.  Lessons 5-8 may be the most valuable psychological idea I’ve ever heard; although watching Film Number 8 may make you feel like you’re in Hell.

Tarkovsky’s  ‘Andrei Rublev’, anointed weekly by Jett as the ‘best film ever made’ seems to me to be one of the few films guaranteed to be watched centuries from now, if the art form that captured my heart (and so often betrays it – which means that movies are, in the end, very much like us.  Humans, I mean, not Jett and I per se) lasts past the point when our brains will have been made half synthetic by the friends of Ray Kurzweil.  (To those who may now be complaining at how long that first sentence was, all I can say is, wait til you see ‘Andrei Rublev’.) I finally got to see the film at the weekend; I wanted to wait to see it in a cinema, cued by my old friend the wonderful film critic and art historian Mike Catto who says that watching movies on television is like going to the British Museum to see a mummy rather than visiting the pyramids.  I’m grateful for DVD letting me see films that otherwise would only be evocative titles in my head, but when opportunity arises to get into a theatre, I take it.

And so, ‘Andrei Rublev’.

It’s a film about resurrection – the central character (who certainly isn’t a protagonist in the traditional sense – he responds to circumstances, but doesn’t exactly drive the story) is acted upon by the tragic and awful events that can occur when political power and religious law get too tightly bound together; he changes his mind about some things; he loses the comfort to paint the icons that the world knows him for; he fails to intervene to save someone beautiful; he tries to save someone beautiful; he seems ultimately resigned to the world being broken, and to the medieval Russian church being utterly corrupt, but he eventually finds faith that there is a way to let his gift use him.  And, five hundred years later, in the film’s coda, it does.

And so we turn to the news on a Monday morning: Things are going just fine in the world of dumbed down culture – I just heard a story on NPR suggesting that the writers of Jay Leno’s new TV show might struggle to deal with the fact that they’re on just before the news.  Not because of ratings, but because it is assumed that the audience won’t be able to cope with the shift in tone.  Which leads me inexorably to evolutionary biology, one of the most interesting British film producers working over the past thirty years, and why I rarely go to the movies for pleasure anymore.  Three thoughts follow.

Fact #1: So there’s this guy called Jeremy Thomas.  If you’re into film, you know him; if you’ve seen ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’, or anything Bernardo Bertolucci made since ‘The Last Emperor’, or Cronenberg’s ‘Naked Lunch’, or Jonathan Glazer’s amazing film about love and regret ‘Sexy Beast’, or Wim Wenders’ fascinating little experiment ‘Don’t Come Knocking’, then you know his work.  You know that he is serious about producing movies that both entertain, and say something about the world.  His latest production, directed by Jon Amiel, is called ‘Creation’, and is apparently not really a biopic of Lucifer God Charles Darwin.  It’s the first non-Canadian film in many a year to open the Toronto Film Festival, the gala screening happening just last week.  It looks like it might be a beautiful movie, that watching it might lead me to learn a few things about Darwin, and, given its producer’s habits of cutting through the tendency of some British film exponents to focus on getting people to visit on National Trust properties rather than telling a story about the human heart and what ails it, ‘Creation’ could turn out to be smart too.  (It also has one of the most gorgeous film-pub websites I’ve seen).

We’ve all had times when we knew, or thought we knew what we were doing was doomed to fail.  And we kept going.  Maybe we look back on these occasions as learning experiences, maybe they’re embarrassing, maybe we ended up proving our pessimism wrong and actually won when it seemed that the likelihood of success was on a par with de Niro’s hopes of getting to his island retirement at the end of ‘Heat’.

Saw a fascinating little documentary last night, with one of the most unusual premises: Pastor Richard Grasowsky, the protagonist of ‘Audience of One’ saw his first movie at 40 years old, believes he then received a vision from God telling him to make the greatest film ever made – magnificently described as ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘The Ten Commandments’ – and so he tried to make it. His church appears to be put to the service of the movie, they go to Italy to shoot some of it, they rent an enormous studio, they hire actors who don’t appear to know how to act, they pray and dance, they raise some of the money, they get sued by the city council, they pray some more, they behave without guile, they complete two shots of the movie (which show up in the DVD’s deleted scenes and aren’t too bad at all), and the further adventures of Moses Skywalker remains unfinished.

What’s surprising about this film is the tenderness with which it treats the people on screen – it has become fashionable lately to only make fun of religious believers, but while ‘Audience of One’ has a good share of Christians making us laugh, it never mocks. The production company that Pastor Grasowsky set up is called ‘What You See is What You Get’ – and the documentary’s director Mike Jacobs has taken this to heart: the church members are never portrayed as anything other than sincere, kind, good people; misguided, of course, and perhaps not harmless, but no less so than any other ideologically-driven movement that undervalues reason.  (In which category I include the New Atheists as well as fundamentalist religious believers; because both groups deny the evidence of alternative experience.  Sorry.  To TFT listeners who enjoy debating the merits of my religious adherence: I’m looking forward to discussing this movie with you.)

It’s ultimately a sweet film, and the only one in which you’re likely to hear an artist describe his vision for a particular film set as ‘I want an ancient cappuccino shop/futuristic-ancient Starbucks deal’.

There’s nothing like the passion that charismatic Christians can muster; but there may also be nothing like the apparent religious neurosis (that some might call arrogance) that takes over when people aren’t able to subject their personal feelings to what Film Talk listeners know as the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’ (faith, tradition, reason and experience balanced against and with each other).   ‘Audience of One’ doesn’t look particularly deeply into the phenomenon of religious practices that allow Westerners to express their emotions in a manner reminiscent of fire-centered dances in National Geographic documentaries; but it raises the question: when we live in a world that tells us that the best thing a human being can do is to dream big dreams, what should we do when a friend’s dream seems completely absurd?