Elephant King mentioned in LA Times

Ellen Burstyn was interviewed last week for an article in the LA Times, and she took the opportunity to mention The Elephant King. I've been very grateful to Ellen for the way she's managed to promote our little movie while doing press for W. You can find the article here.

The Politics of The Elephant King

Last Saturday, I went down to Crenshaw Blvd in south Los Angeles to work the phones for a few hours on behalf of the Barack Obama campaign. The race is close in Nevada, and I was calling registered Democrats in the Las Vegas region, as well as a handful of Independents, Non-partisans, and left-leaning Republicans, to encourage them to participate in Early Voting, and to volunteer for the campaign. I made similar phone calls for John Kerry four years ago, on behalf of the United Auto Workers (teaching assistants were union-proud at NYU) -- but this year I'm far more optimistic. It's funny, because even with The Elephant King coming to theaters in just a couple of weeks, I find myself almost as excited by this year's political prospects as I am by my own movie premiere.

The reason is because my primary political concern, since well before I watched the planes hit the towers from Chinatown on Sept 11, has been integrating the United States into a global culture. The only way humanity will survive both climate change and the violent hiccups that characterize our transition through the nationalist phase is if we're united through a common global culture that transcends religious, ethnic, and the other superficial tribal distinctions that demagogues exploit to maintain power. Barack Obama seems to be the most capable politician around for the job of making America part of the world again. (This also happens to be the great fear of the right wing -- that America will lose its superpowers through integration into a global government.)

That's also the political subtext of The Elephant King. In one interpretation, the two brothers, Jake and Oliver, represent the two salient aspects of recent American foreign policy -- greed and naivety. The elephant -- the national symbol of Thailand -- represents foreign culture. The brothers try to save "the foreign" without first trying to understand it. (Of course, this is one interpretation. I hope the film lends itself to a few.)

Only about 20 percent of Americans own passports. Most Americans have never traveled overseas. (Some for financial reasons, but many out of fear or a lack of curiosity.) That means that the vast majority of Americans have never experienced the sense of "being a foreigner." It's a valuable learning experience, this sense of being a stranger in a strange land. Not only does it teach tolerance for U.S. immigrants, but it teaches that the American perspective isn't unique. In addition to American national chauvinism, there's French national chauvinism, Russian national chauvinism, Thai national chauvinism. Most country's citizens tend to think of their nation as the center of the world in one way or another, though few with our enthusiasm.

One of the main reasons I wrote The Elephant King was because after I spent some time living, working, and traveling in southeast Asia, I wanted to communicate the heady, exhilarating, lonely fluctuations of life as a "farang" -- a foreigner, an American outside of his national ethical context. I hope that in some way that experience comes through.

I wish I could have bought all of you trips to Chiang Mai. It really is still a beautiful city, at least some parts of it.

ELEPHANT KING IN THEATERS

October 17: Angelika, New York
October 24: Laemmle Sunset 5, Los Angeles
October 24: Westmark 8, Irvine CA

This is exciting stuff. Our publicity team is starting to put up new posters all over the East Village. My friend Todd Zelin sent this one to me yesterday (mine's the one on the left):


I'll be at the premieres and at screenings all week to answer questions and to meet new friends. Looking forward to seeing you there!

German Theatrical Release

The Elephant King will premiere June 5 in theaters across Germany. The official German Web site is here.

Check back soon for information regarding the Austrian, Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg release.

I did a quick Google search for German reviews of the movie and turned up an interesting review that seems to suggest that I cribbed the film's plot from two Michel Houellebecq novels, The Elementary Particles and Platform. While I've read both books, I'm not sure that Platform was even published when I shot Elephant King. Actually, I read a few great books while I was in Thailand making this film, including Vollman's Butterfly Stories, probably the best book written on modern Western sex tourism in Southeast Asia, and Orwell's Burmese Days, a classic on ex-pat life.

I can't tell if this is a good or a bad review -- cf. ambiguously translated sentences such as, "In order for the last time compared to the effort so we must also form the cuts will clear the large-Grossman Houellebecq contest on the side of Grossman. Nicht dass es dem Werk völlig an Struktur mangelt, ist es vielmehr so, dass mit „The Elephant King“ ein erstaunlich konventionell erzählter Film vorliegt, der eigentlich nur wegen seines unspektakulären Endes ein wenig enttäuscht."

Any German-speakers feel free to weigh in.

Cinematography

When people praise The Elephant King, they often start with the film's look. I was lucky to work with Director of Photography Diego Quemada Diez, whom I'd met on the set of NYU classmate Zeina Durra's thesis film, The Seventh Dog. Diego's patience and work ethic impressed me, and his work as camera operator and B-unit DP on films from 21 Grams to the Constant Gardener demonstrated a keen instinct for hand-held work and an eagerness for adventure.

The Elephant King was Diego's first feature film as Director of Photography. Soon after we decided to work together, we went to New York's MOMA with Production Designer Lee Yaniv to look at paintings and photographs and ensure that we had a common vocabulary, and also to steal good ideas. We all found ourselves drawn to the color palette of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings, as well as the compositions and use of light in Nan Goldin's photographs. (One shot in the film is an "homage" to the cover photo of Goldin's "Ballad of Sexual Dependency.")

Diego writes of his experience on the film: "In regards to the camera work and lighting, we wanted to flow with the actors, make them feel free to go wherever they wanted to. Seth, the actors, Lee, the production designer and I had a great collaboration."

Diego also happens to be a good-looking guy, and his presence proved distracting for many of the women and a few of the men on set. I'll never forget the producer's Bangkok nanny confiding, when Diego came to Thailand for color correction, that she couldn't be in the same room with him because his eyes would melt her.

Ellen Burstyn

Working with Ellen Burstyn was one of the best parts of directing The Elephant King. I first became aware of Ellen when I saw Requiem for a Dream, and I was astounded by her performance. Even as I wrote the script for Elephant King, she was always my first choice to play Diana Hunt, the mother whose role, though not the main role, formed the moral core of the story. She represents domestic morality, which Jake and then Oliver escape in their flight to Thailand, and to which they ultimately must return, as mother's morality remains indestructibly within them despite their libertine peregrinations.

In fact, we were already shooting the movie in Chiang Mai while we were trying to get Ellen onboard the project. I remember one night I had to wake up at 3 am to call her, and we had a long conversation about the script and about the character. Ellen seemed to understand "Diana Hunt" better than I did. At the end of our conversation, she asked if I had any questions for her. "So will you be in the movie?" I asked. "Sure," she answered. I was so excited I couldn't get back to sleep. I felt like I'd won the lottery. I would get to work with Ellen Burstyn!

My first meeting with Ellen took place in her house in upstate New York, a big beautiful house on the water, full of art and various items of religious iconography (and an Oscar in the bathroom.) I went with Tate Ellington, who plays her son, and Karen Yan, the costume designer. For a few hours, we read through some scenes and talked them over. At one point, Tate was petting Ellen's male Persian cat and her female dog jumped up on his lap and began humping the cat. Ellen was okay with it. She accepted that sometimes love knows no
gender and species boundaries.

As I read Ellen's memoirs, Lessons in Becoming Myself, my admiration for her and all that she's been through grew exponentially. I highly recommend this book for anyone who chooses a career in the arts. Ellen remains for me an example of someone who lives her life as a deliberate search for meaning, both in the world's spiritual traditions (she is a Sufi) and through psychoanalysis, and who integrates the search for meaning into her chosen profession, acting.

I'm working on a new script now, and I hope I'll be able to work with Ellen again. Below is a little video I cut together, by way of homage.

Welcome

Over the next few months, as we prepare for the theatrical premiere and DVD release of "The Elephant King," I'll be blogging periodically to introduce you to this film and the people who made it. Because this is a small, independently financed film, we don't have the enormous advertising budget that the big studio films (with which we'll be competing on opening weekend) use to lure you to the theater. In fact, we don't have any advertising budget. What you're reading right now is our advertising. How can we possibly get people to see this movie?

I don't know. Can you help?

"The Elephant King" is a good movie. It's won three film festivals and its score and acting have won awards at two others. We shot the movie in Thailand in six weeks, and in the New York area in a week. Unison Films, which produced the movie, has a unique approach to filmmaking. The company allows first-time filmmakers to make the films they want to make: personal stories that don't shy from complexity and ambiguity the way some Hollywood films do.

I hope that if you visit this site, and get to know the people who made this film, you (and your entire social network) will come see it on opening weekend. I'll periodically post behind-the-scenes footage from the movie, and we'll have some guest posts from the cast and crew. As we get closer to the premiere date, I'll let you know when and where you can see it, and how you can get the DVD.

Until then, I'll leave you with this video, by way of my own personal introduction:

The behind-the-scenes videos online here are shot primarily by Jittama (Jayme) Brabbs, our 2nd AD in Thailand.