Meet the Film Composer: Matthew Carefully

This Sunday, April 1, the Saratoga Film Forum will screen the documentary Brunswick. Joining us will be both director Nate Simms, as well as Matthew Carefully, a local multi-instrumentalist who composed the music for the film. He will be playing selections from the soundtrack on Sunday. The Film Forum spoke with Mr. Carefully via e-mail about his participation in the film.

What is your background? Have you scored other films?

Music has been my main focus my entire life. The creation of, the listening to, the complete immersion in, the dependence on music. I’ve done everything from touring Russia playing drums in a jazz band to sleeping on couches across the U.S. as a mandolinist with The Kamikaze Hearts. Brunswick is my first full-movie soundtrack, though I have made music for trailers, Web series, and more. I had a great time making this soundtrack, am very proud of it and look forward to making more music for film in the future.

What are some of your other projects?

Currently, I’m working on a debut album for this instrumental acoustic guitar duo with Hunter Sagehorn (from the band Alta Mira) called Rosary Beard. This album should be out in early May and I am very excited about it. We’ve been working on the music for a few years now and are happy to finally be sharing our songs in recorded form.

I’m also working on recordings and some possible live performances with David Greenberger. He’s the wily gent behind the Duplex Planet zine and culture series over the past few decades. Our project is a band called “David Greenberger & A Strong Dog” which features local musicians Kevin Maul on guitars and Mitch Throop on guitars as well. I’m playing a floor tom and a garage sale Casio keyboard. Our first local performance will be at the Saratoga Arts Fest this June.

How would you describe your music?

I call my music “bedroom pop” primarily because most of my recording occurs in what could be used as a bedroom. There are more layers to that—many of my best ideas come from that half-asleep/half-awake time before and after drifting off; “pop” used as a reference to memorable, repeatable sections of music.

How did you get involved with Nate Simms and the film?

Nate and I found each other five years ago; he was already engaged with this movie project and I was eager to work on a project like this. Even just a one sentence description of the project was enough to get me signed up. The subject matter and the imagery easily evoked sounds and music for me—a great match. The editing and finishing of the film took quite a long time, so as it went, I’d share bits of music I was working on as Nate would show me sections of cuts he had been working on. I think we worked well together and I look forward to seeing where this project flies off to.

The theme of the film is that Brunswick is trying to balance economic development with retaining its essential rural character. Is there anything you’d add to that?

I’d add a dose of community/family drama to the mix as the issues you mention are illustrated in the movie by the story of farmer Sanford Bonesteel and the fate of his farmland in Brunswick. I think the movie begs you to ask these exact questions to yourself and your community members and families. What kind of growth is “healthy”? What is the best use for the land around us? Do we need another parking garage? These kinds of questions need to be asked and answered by everyone in every city.

Is Brunswick the only town you know of that is dealing with these issues?

It feels like there’s no way Brunswick could  be the only town dealing with issues like these! This is what’s most important about the movie to me; we need to be aware that a very large generation of farmers are beginning to pass on and while it is tempting to want to put something there in its place, perhaps there should be more talk of sustaining that land and nurturing that land to remain something vital and sustainable for future generations instead of locked in some failed development project idea.

What would you like viewers to come away with after watching Brunswick?

I would hope that viewers will be inspired to talk to their neighbors, go to their town board meetings, be involved in community government and simply be available to know more about what kind of decisions are being made about their surroundings. These decisions should be made by everyone in a community, not just a select few. 

Iron-y

There is a danger in producing biopics about political figures, especially political figures that remain in the public memory, and especially especially political figures who were polarizing and controversial to begin with. Many of the same mixed comments and reviews that were made about Oliver Stone’s 2008 film W. are again being made about this year’s The Iron Lady, which the Saratoga Film Forum will be screening this evening (Thursday, March 29) and tomorrow (Friday, March 30) at 7:30 p.m., and on Sunday at 3 p.m.

The makers of such docudramas likely go into these projects knowing that they just can’t win: half the audience will think it’s celebrating the ideology of the subject of the biopic, and the other half will think it’s a snide satire. As for the third half...well, perhaps they’re the only ones who go in with an open mind.

Still, audiences inevitably bring their own remembrances and political leanings to these types of films, something that normally does not happen if someone were to make a biopic about, say, President Martin Van Buren.

All of which serves to distract attention away from the film as a film and the story as a story. Meryl Streep of course won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Maggie, and as part of her research for the role, she attended Prime Minister’s Questions at the British Parliament, watching current PM David Cameron spar with Labour leader Ed Miliband. She also obviously studied every frame of archival footage of Thatcher, because she gets every nuance dead accurate. 

At heart, the movie is not about adoring or reviling Thatcher, but is rather more interested in looking at how she transcended race and class to become one of the leading figures on the world stage. Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter, a fairly humble origin, and in her early years addressing the House of Commons, you can feel the male condescension. Visually, in the film, she stands out as the lone female in a sea of blue suits, the only pair of high heeled shoes amongst the wingtips.

With a screenplay by Abi Morgan (who also wrote Shame, starring Michael Fassbender, a, um, slightly different movie...) and drawing on John Campbell’s definitive biography, The Iron Lady careens back and forth in time to show how Thatcher crashed the Old Boys’ Club.

Meet the Filmmaker: Nate Simms

This Sunday, April 1, at 7:30 p.m., the Saratoga Film Forum welcomes local photographer and filmmaker Nate Simms to screen and discuss his documentary Brunswick. The Film Forum spoke with Mr. Simms via e-mail about the film.

What is your background as a filmmaker?

I was an amateur still photographer for a few years, but always with the goal of trying to do something useful with the images. Those thoughts just shifted over into video when I first started working on this project [Brunswick], but I never had any formal training at all. This was really just a “figure it out as you go” type of thing. I guess the first time I ever filmed anything was the first day of working on this.

Tell us about the film and the issues it deals with.

To me it’s a few different stories being told at once. There is a personal story of a farmer and his relationship to his land and to another family he had known his whole life, but there is also a larger cultural and political story of how and why we collectively do things in America. That sounds pretty grandiose, but basically the root issues and topics to me would be things like farming, development, local politics, connection to place and land, trust, betrayal, and so forth.

As I understand it, the theme of the film is that Brunswick is trying to balance economic development with retaining its essential rural character. What are the tradeoffs? What are the challenges? Are there any solutions?

Well, that could be a really long answer, but any talk of economic growth assumes that we believe we should be living in an economy where “growth,” as it is commonly understood, is the goal. I guess I don’t buy into that entirely, so I am starting from a different place in that discussion. Despite the fact that towns like Brunswick talk a lot about how they value their rural character, it seems to me that they are not exactly being proactive in figuring out ways to actually help farmers make a better living (or to make a living, period), or encourage smarter building practices, or whatever. Although “solutions” is not a word I would want to use, I think the first step in progressing away from the current mess is to reject a few commonly held ideas (like what an economy should look like, or what constitutes success, etc.). That, of course, might not be possible.

Is Brunswick the only town you know of that is dealing with these issues?

I would guess that most towns are dealing with these issues everyday. Conflicts of interest in local government, farmers or land-owners facing tough decisions about what to do with their land, etc...Brunswick is just an example in my mind of what’s happening everywhere and a lot of people who have seen the film have said that their town was experiencing the same or similar problems.

What would you like viewers to come away with after watching Brunswick?

It would be great if people who maybe didn’t know what was going on in their town checked into it a little. When I started filming this, I knew nothing at all about what was happening in the area on that level and it was interesting to watch things unfold. Ultimately, even if someone doesn’t like the film, they might find themselves in a discussion about the issues raised and that would be cool.

A Tolkein of His Esteem

The perennial challenge for anyone attempting to adapt a novel to the screen is to get all the important plot aspects in and have it all make sense—all without losing a lot of the details that made a novel worth adapting in the first place, or having the movie end up being eight hours long. Such was the challenge of adapting the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and such was the challenge of adapting the author who could perhaps be considered the Tolkein of espionage fiction: John le Carré. (It is also the challenge of the movie blogger to succinctly summarize an author’s rather eventful early life.)

Born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931, he went to school at Oxford and it was during this time that he started working undercover for the MI5, the British Security Service, spying on lefty organizations (or organisations, if you prefer) and searching for possible Soviet agents (this was the 1950s, after all). He became an MI5 officer in 1958, and two years later transferred to MI6, the foreign intelligence service. It was at this time that he began writing novels. An MI6 rule at the time barred Cornwall from publishing stories and novels under his own name, so he was required to adopt a pseudonym: John le Carré (French for “John the Square,” apparently). It took a few tries, but the third novel was the charm: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) was his international breakthrough. Just as well, too: he had to leave the service in 1964 (he could work full-time as a novelist by then) after his cover was blown to the KGB by a double agent. If this sounds like a plot from one of le Carré’s books, it kind of is: the British double agent who outed him—Kim Philby—inspired the character who turns out to be the mole George Smiley pursues in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. (Like Cornwall, Smiley was forced into retirement prior to the events of the novel.)

The book was published in 1974 and was a bestseller, and was volume one of what would become known as le Carré’s “Karla Trilogy” (back to a Tolkein comparison), the subsequent volumes being The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979).

The current movie tie-in paperback edition of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy runs to 400 pages, and fairly dense pages at that, so you can see the challenge for a screenwriter. The BBC solved this problem when it first adapted the book in 1979—they did it as a seven-part miniseries (starring Alec Guinness as Smiley).

The latest adaptation, which the Saratoga Film Forum is screening this weekend—Thursday and Friday, March 22nd and 23rd at 7:30, and Sunday, March 25th at 3:00—is a “mere” 127 minutes. Look for a cameo by Cornwall/le Carré himself as an extra during one of the flashback “Christmas party” scenes.

And at 80, le Carré is still writing. His most recent novel, Our Kind of Traitor, was published in 2010. And it’s only 320 pages.

Note that the Saratoga Film Forum will also be screening the 1965 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (starring Richard Burton) on Monday, March 26th, at 7:30 p.m. at the Spring Street Gallery at 110 Spring Street in Saratoga.

Imagine There's No Kevin...

Lionel Shriver’s 2003 book We Need To Talk About Kevin is a somewhat unconventional thriller, in that it’s an epistolary novel, or written as a series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian, the titular Kevin’s mother, to her estranged husband Franklin. (I’ve always wanted to write an epistolary novel but I could never afford the postage.) The book, Shriver’s seventh, was adapted for radio by the BBC in 2008, and ran as a series of 10 15-minute episodes that ran every day as part of the Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour drama series. (For those wondering, Lionel Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver.)

BBC Films acquired the rights to a film adaptation as long ago as 2005, but various financing snafus and development staved off the start of actual production until 2010. Autor Shriver was offered a consultative role, but declined, stating that she “had it up to [her] eyeballs with that book.”

The Saratoga Film Forum is showing We Need to Talk About Kevin this weekend, with screenings last night (sorry for the late post; it’s been “one of those weeks”...), tonight at 7:30, and Sunday at 3:00.

Without giving away too much—no “spoiler alerts” here—I suspect bits of this film will be rough viewing in light of certain recent events, and the film will likely stimulate no small amount of discussion (which we like; that’s what we’re here for!). An interesting review I came across on Busted Halo, “an online magazine for spiritual seekers,” written by Jake Martin, a Jesuit priest and movie critic, said:

Kevin is a story of hope for a new millennium, an It’s a Wonderful Life in the age of school shootings and planes crashing into buildings — a world-weary world that has been bombarded by nihilistic themes in their narratives for the better part of a century. It is a world where any attempts to offer a message of mercy, conversion and redemption must be done deftly and authentically, because at the end of the day, sometimes the community won’t rally around you and more often than not Mr. Potter carries the day.

The reviewer concludes:

We Need to Talk about Kevin in fact needs to be talked about, as what it is attempting to do by marrying the darkest, most nihilistic components of contemporary cinema with a redemptive message is groundbreaking.

It bears mentioning that, despite the title, the film is not about Kevin so much as it is about Eva and her deteriorating state of mind.