In 2000, the United Nations established eight Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets designed to tackle poverty, hunger and the spread of HIV/AIDS. The world’s countries and development agencies agreed to meet these goals by 2015. We’re almost half-way there, and throughout continental Africa, things are no better.

I’ve said it a thousand times on here and in other media. We ignore Africa. We ignore it at our peril, but we ignore it and it is our greatest shame. One man who has not ignored it is Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy to Africa for HIV and AIDS. Truly one of the greatest and most decent men on the planet — father in law of Naomi Klein and father of Avi Lewis (with whom I spoke last year regard his film The Take, an interview I will post someday soon), former Canadian ambassador to the UN, Canadian of the year and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, there are few people as qualified to speak on the west’s failings in Africa as he. He has recently published a book, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-ravaged Africa, which examines the complicity of the United Nations and the G8 in Africa’s plight, and surveys the situation from his meetings with Rwandan orphans to his frustrations at the highest levels of global bureaucracy. Promises? The West has those by the sackful. But we’ve been making and breaking them for far too long.

There’s a tendency to think of Africa as hopelessly, endemically sick, moribund almost, and there’s often an assumption that this is purely a legacy of colonialism and everything that’s happened since. This is not an interview focussing on the worst ravages of corruption that tear Africa apart. If you want that, I recommend the first part of Allan Little’s extraordinary Faultlines series for the BBC World Service. Lewis is a man who, despite all he has seen since his early visits in his youth, insists on searching for the hope in the continent.

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In your book you talk of the visits to Africa in your youth, your real romance with the continent. It was a very, very different place then…

I was in Africa in the immediate post-colonial period when there were very high expectations, enormous enthusiasm, great excitement. You break through the basis of slavery and all of the neo-colonial angry, nasty, manipulative, controlling impulses and suddenly you’re out into the light of day with all of the possibilities stretching out before you. The place was alive with music and enthusiasm and hope, and it was pretty depressing to see the decline of the continent over the subsequent number of years.

Simple question, then. What happened?

A combination of things. I think that the colonial powers continued unexpectedly to manipulate Africa from a distance, to use African leaders as their pawns. There’s no questions that Africa got caught in the cold war and sawed off between east and west, as it was availed by the communist bloc on the one hand and the western bloc on the other. I think that the international financial institutions — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — engaged in an imposition of constraints on the African economies, they imposed conditions, they made it very difficult, particularly in the social sectors. All in all, it was rough for Africa, and as a result, in this manipulative orgy, you had a number of African leaders who themselves became corrupt and totalitarian, and that made things even worse.

So now you have a continent that’s being simultaneously ravaged by AIDS on the one hand and criminal governance on the other. They’re interlinked problems. It seems that you have a continent that is dying.

I don’t agree with the analysis. I don’t think AIDS and criminality are intertwined. I think what is intertwined is AIDS and poverty. Terrible and desperate and almost incomprehensible poverty. The relative aspects of corruption, there are countries which are obviously corrupt, but there are 53 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the great majority of them are increasingly re-elected in democratic traditions and they’re working very, very hard to quell corruption.

My god, I’m on a continent where in the United States, corruption is dealt with before grand juries almost on a daily basis. In my own country of Canada, the last election was fought on an issue of corruption and the government was defeated on an issue of corruption. One shouldn’t be too smug and self-righteous about it. Africa is a continent which is desperately poor, which has a lot of disease, it has incidental conflict, not unlike other continents, but it also has, at the grassroots level, a tremendous resilience and generosity of spirit and sophistication and if Africa had the resources which are constantly promised it and forever betrayed in the delivery, Africa could break the back of the AIDS pandemic and Africa could come out of the economic doldrums.

Continue reading "Stephen Lewis: Beyond AIDS and genocide, the search for hope in Africa" »

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:03 PM | Permalink

When Scott Ritter, the United Nation’s Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, resigned in 1998, minor shockwaves rippled through the international community. A man who had been at the center of much controversy in the country, and whom the Iraqis claimed at the time was behind obstructive and intimidating tactics at the behest of the American government, had resigned in frustration at American interference in the United Nations process, claiming that UNSCOM was being used by the CIA as a front for invasion plans.

In the desert sands of Iraq, Ritter saw corruption on both sides, and an inevitable explosion of that corruption in the future. In the ensuing years, he has published a book, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein and released a film, In Shifting Sands, which then UN chair of UNSCOM Richard Butler denounced as “propaganda”. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of the war in Iraq, and one of the most uniquely placed, as an American once deeply entrenched in the United Nations, to comment on the fundamental decline of that body in recent years.

His moral standpoint since 1998 is not without controversy, and his Wikipedia entry certainly outlines some mucky conspiracy theories that explain the shift in stance from military hawk to outspoken activist — it is not for this blog to repeat those, but one must always question the motivations for those who speak from positions of authority, even if you agree with what they say. In the context of a 15 minute radio interview, I did not do nearly enough of that here, but Ritter’s fight is generally a brave and respectable one. Ritter has often done a good enough job of answering his critics when called unamerican, as the media and political machines of the state turned against him and worked to discredit his views. In these most interesting times, when dissenting voices are dealt with through fear and paranoia, Ritter has remained steadfast. Sure, he may have sold a few books in doing so, but I have no doubt he was on a decent salary before his decision to resign.
In person, the former Marine is an intimidating presence with a booming voice and a precise, well-worn line in anger. It’s a long way from the deserts of Iraq to a community radio studio on the far side of Australia, but Ritter’s rage has not simmered.

You were a weapons inspector in Iraq for several years, at some point there was a turning point when you decided things weren’t as they ought to be.

It’s not that there was a turning point per se, as a weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998, I was fully cogniscent of not only the difficulty of our task but also the inherent contradiction in the policy of certain nations, namely the United States, when it came to supporting our tasks. Our job was a job of disarmament, getting rid of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in accordance with Security Council mandate.

The United States is a member of the Security Council. They voted in favour of this mandate, and yet the United States had a policy that embraced regime change as opposed to disarmament, so there was always this conflict taking place between the weapons inspection process and the policy of the United States. I rode it out, so to speak, for seven years, in belief that if we could accomplish our mission, we could trump America’s policy imperatives. By 1998, it became obvious that the United States would not allow the weapons inspection process to proceed with its full integrity, void of the corruption of American influence, and so I resigned.

Continue reading "The Anger of a Desert Storm: Scott Ritter and the myth of WMD" »

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 5:18 PM | Permalink

Originally published in The West Australian

Since the release of Shane Meadows’ debut TwentyFourSeven in 1997, when the director was a mere 24 years old, British critics have anointed him as the natural successor to Mike Leigh. The harsh black and white tale of misspent youth and boxing clubs in Nottinghamshire, told with a wicked sense of humour, had him earmarked for greatness.

The film’s complete commercial failure, soul destroying for any other director, now sees Meadows edging his way back onto cinema screens two years on with A Room for Romeo Brass, a glorious and hilarious paean to the simplicity of youth and the bond shared with best mates.

“At the time that it happens, you’re walking around with a dark cloud over your head wondering why people won’t watch a black and white film,” Meadows says. “But what actually came out of the other side is that I never would have made Romeo Brass had it succeeded enormously.

“It would have sent me over the edge mentally, I probably would have ended up growing my hair out, dying it blonde and calling myself Shane Warhol,” he laughs.
Meadows and co-writer Paul Fraser stumbled upon Romeo Brass almost by accident, after toying with some more novel ideas to follow TwentyFourSeven.
“I went away to write a Western about group of guys from the Midlands who went over to the Wild West in the Gold Rush — people from Derby and Stoke on Trent,” he says.

“Paul Fraser and I, with the critical acclaim that we got from TwentyFourSeven, had a bit of a free reign to go away and write a new film. We were sat there one night trying to write this Western idea, and just talking about our childhood and how amazing it was that these two kids who had lived next door to each other and grown up together ended up working in the film business.”

Romeo Brass emerged as a largely autobiographical tale of the two writers’ childhood friendship, and the cruel things that kids do in the name of friendship, played out by the thinly veiled characters of Romeo (Andrew Shim) and Knocks (Ben Marshall).

“One day Paul had a friend back from school,” Meadows says, recalling one of the pair’s more surreal misadventures. “When your mate brings home somebody else, suddenly they don’t want to hang around with you, because they’ve got their new friend. They were playing badminton in their front garden, and wouldn’t let me join in.

“I went in the house and I watched The Outlaw Josey Wales, because me and my dad always had loads of Westerns on the shelf that we’d recorded off telly. When I saw the plight that Josey Wales had been through when the American rebels had burned his house down, I decided that I’d been treated in the same way. I got my air rifle, went outside and said eif you don’t let me play, I’m going to shoot you’. He said ewell go on then, I bet you daren’t’, and I shot him straight in the stomach.”

Having been banned from seeing Fraser for almost a year by his irate mother, Meadows eventually fell in with the wrong crowd (represented in the film through Paddy Considine’s deliciously surreal and menacing Morell) and felt a painful shove into adulthood. It was Fraser’s unquestioning decision to forgive Meadows for all he had done wrong that inspired the film.

“When you grow older, you forget, and you lose the mentality that you have at that age. We realised that if we didn’t tell a story about this now, it would probably pass off, and if we ever made a film about childhood, it would be the kind of ‘golden haze’ movie that I didn’t want anything to do with,” he says.

“I wanted to tell a story of truth, because childhood is painful and difficult, and it’s funny. It’s a very organic process being a kid.”

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 1:15 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Scoop Magazine

The early films of director Phillip Noyce, such as ‘Newsfront’ and ‘Heatwave’, have left an indelible mark on Australia’s cultural landscape. After the success of 1989 thriller ‘Dead Calm’ propelled him into the Hollywood stratosphere, the past decade has seen him remodelled as an established blockbuster man with such behemoths as ‘Patriot Games’ and ‘The Bone Collector’ to his name.

A decade is a long time away from home in the belly of the machine, however. 2002 sees Noyce return to his homeland to tell a story of the stolen generation and, in the sweeping outback brushstrokes of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, create what may just be one of the most important Australian films in decades.

“I was contracted to make a $220 million adaptation of Tom Clancy’s ‘The Sum of All Fears’, which was to star Harrison Ford,” recalls an exhausted Noyce, putting the finishing touches to the film just a week before its first screening. “It was to be the third in the series of Clancy novels, and Harrison was having doubts about doing another one. I was holed up in a New York hotel working with a writer and trying to convince Harrison to commit.

“The ridiculousness of the situation finally got to meoI woke up one morning and thought I’m in the wrong country, I’m in the wrong city, I should go back to Australia and make ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’. The daunting nature of the blockbuster, where in many ways you are directing traffic as much as directing, just got me downothis film was an antidote to the Hollywood machine.”

‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ tells the true story of Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi), a young Aboriginal girl stolen from her family in Jigalong, Western Australia, in 1931. Sent to the Moore River settlement by the white authorities, “for their own good”, the girls were early victims of a government policy which the nation still struggles to come to terms with to this day. Along with her younger sister and cousin (Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan), she escapes the settlement and sets off on a 1500-mile journey, pursued by the authorities, knowing little except that if they follow the rabbit-proof fence, which separates the East of Australia from the West, they will find their way home again.

After dragging renowned Australian cinematographer and ex-Merchant Mariner Christopher Doyle from “under a barstool”, the greatest challenge Noyce would face in the production of the film was finding and preparing three young Aboriginal girls to carry the film, and to draw natural emotions from their performances.

“Pretty early on in the casting process, we realised that we were going to need to look in the hinterlands for kids that were more in contact with traditional lifestyle,” he recalls. “They were cast because they were natural performers, but I could never hope for them to absorb all of the technical needs of film acting in just two weeks of preparation and seven weeks of shooting. Each of them was typecast according to their natural similarities to the characters that they were playing.

“Everlyn Sampi, who plays Molly, the eldest and the leader of the group, is herself very proud and singular minded and she is a determined young woman who doesn’t like being told what to do. She brings all of those characteristics to her portrayal of Molly without even being told what to do.”

“Everlyn was a bit of a bitch here and there,” laughs actress Ningali Lawford, her on-screen mother, “but she was fantastic. Everlyn is in the middle, between a teenager and a little girl, so there’s all that stuff she has to go through, it’s a nasty age.”

Sampi is the spiritual and emotional centre of the film, a radiant screen presence seemingly nonplussed by the gravity of starring alongside such screen legends as David Gulpilil (eWalkabout’, ‘Crocodile Dundee’) and Kenneth Branagh. Off-screen, however, it was a different story.

“She left the set many times,” Noyce admits, “but that was okay because she was playing the part of a kid who didn’t want to be locked up and told what to do. The more that she related to me as a de facto A.O. Neville [the infamous chief eprotector’ of Aborigines] the better. I was the authority figure in her life who was telling her that she had to do things because they were for her own good, and sometimes she was willing to believe me and often not. That was fine, because she used that to fuel her performance.”

The most confronting scene in ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ is the harrowing abduction of the children from the Jigalong settlement, which was, for Noyce, an outpouring of rage, fear and shock that strikes at the very core of our nation’s history.

“Two of the children and all of the indigenous adult performers had family members who had been taken,” he says. “They have grown up with these stories in their memories and it was almost like all the pain of 200-plus years of contact and confrontation between two very different cultures came out in the re-enactment of that scene. It was like it was all vomited up.”

Lawford, perhaps best known to Western Australians as the face of the Water Corporation and for her work with the Yirra Yaakin theatre company, confronted deeply personal emotions as she found her character fighting with the authorities, searching for some comprehension of an incomprehensible action.

“My father was taken away, along with his brothers, and I was just putting myself in my grandmother’s position,” she recalls. “I was there, it didn’t become a set for me, it became reality. My mum was there as welloit was really sad for her. We all cried, everybody on set cried.”

Despite the inherently Australian nature of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, and its great significance as a long-overdue look at a dark chapter of Australian history, Noyce believes it has a reach far beyond our shores.

“The story has a special significance to Australians,” he says, “but the storyOeis a universal one, and I’m sure the film will play on an emotional level everywhere that it is shown. All of the political issues are embodied in what is a very, very simple, emotion-driven storyothree girls get taken from their families and incarcerated, they escape, and they struggle to get home.”

Beyond the performances of its actors, and the power of its story, perhaps the greatest thing to take from ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, as Lawford testifies, is simply that the time has come when its story can be told.

“I’m lucky that it’s not a policy now in my time, with my children,” she says.

“It is a story, and a warning, but it is real. It will put light into that part of our dark history.”

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:57 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Low, a band for whom the word ‘slowcore’ had to be invented, sound like nothing else you’ve ever heard. The lingering tempo and mournful lyrics of husband and wife duo Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker paint a sweeping emotional canvas where the real heartbreak is found in the moments between notes, where the empty spaces swallow you whole. After a week of missed calls to their hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, Hype tracked down Sparhawk in Melbourne via the mobile phone of their ex-Perth labelmates Sodastream, and asked him where Low’s unique sound originated.

“We were fairly young when we started the band, and there were certain influences that we were pulling from, but it became evident right away that this was a new thing that not a lot of people had done before,” he explains. “There were some elements going on that hadn’t been explored very much — mostly it was the spiritual, transcendent thing that can happen when you explore minimalism and repetition, quietness or subtleness.

“A slow pace rips a song open and opens it up to a bit more, I don’t want to say drama, but it seems like a lot of we do is stripping things down to a very simple language in the hope that in doing so, whatever you’re trying to say will be a little bit more powerful.

“At the same time, you’re taking a risky road in that most people in passing are just going to hear something quiet and think that there’s nothing going on here, I’m not going to listen and invest my mind. But we try to make something there for people who do listen.”

Low’s last two albums, ‘Secret Name’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’, have been produced by the legendary Steve Albini, a man known more for his mastery of fuzz than for Low’s brand of sparse minimalism.

“Steve seems to work at the same pace and ethic as we do, which is usually pretty fast,” explains Sparhawk. “The Auteurs record he did was very lush. He is just really good at capturing sound, that’s why a lot of those harder records have such an edge. If that amp is screaming, he’s going to pick that sound up and get it on tape. There’s an art to that.”

Their last long-player opens with Sparhawk and Parker in duet, crying “when they found your body, giant X’s on your eyes”, and from there delves into a sombre, dark lyrical world perfectly in tune with the sprawl of the music. Sparhawk claims that the band’s reputation for serious, dark songwriting stems from a desire for honesty.

“It’s kind of a personal thing and I’m pretty picky about what I’ll let myself say. We’ve always felt that whatever is said is going to have to be something you really mean, because you are going to have to get up in front of people and say it. I don’t think our lyrics are terribly negative, but they are serious.”

On Low’s first visit to Australia, Sparhawk admits to being tentative about the size of their audiences on the other side of the world.

“We get correspondence once in a while, but it is always hard to tell until you come and do a show and people show up,” he says. “We always expect twenty people to show up, so it’s nice when everything goes well. Once in a while, maybe thirty people will come.”

Their gig at the Watershed on February 14 gives Low an opportunity to play in a small-scale music festival, but Sparhawk is openly relieved that they aren’t faced with a mega-festival situation.

“If we’re thrown on the bill of a huge music festival, we don’t go so well,” he laughs. “It’s Huey Lewis and the News, and now here’s Low! Well that was fun, bring on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers!”

As serious and slow as their reputation claims them to be, Low have, of late, begun to rock out a little more. On their wonderful ‘Christmas’ EP, one could have almost accused them of being, well, jaunty.

“The Christmas EP has some shiny moments,” Sparhawk concedes. “The more we do this, the more we are open to letting go and thinking that if a song happens to be somewhat positive, let’s let that be, let’s not stifle that, obviously that’s something we’re feeling.

“There’s some rock business going on the last album. We’ve got a couple of new songs that may be construed as a little more rock, but it’s just something we step into a little bit once in a while, to mixed success as far as our own feelings about it, but it depends on the night. Sometimes playing the loud songs feels a little wrong.”

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

After 31 years at the frontier of heavy metal, Judas Priest have been through countless highs and lows. On the eve of their first ever visit to Australia and the release of new album ‘Demolition’, Hype caught up with Ian Hill (bass), a part of the band’s legendary full-frontal rhythm assault since 1969.

The nineties were a relatively quiet decade for the Priest musically, after the departure in controversial circumstances of legendary vocalist Rob Halford in 1992 and the general downturn in the classic metal scene. After their sonically brutal 1997 comeback effort ‘Jugulator’, the band needed a new approach. Four years later, the release of ‘Demolition’ sees the band expressing themselves in new ways, with near-ballads such as ‘Close To You’ nestled alongside more traditional extreme metal fare such as ‘Bloodsuckers’, ‘Metal Messiah’ and ‘Devil Digger’.

“It goes back to ‘Jugulator’,” Hill says. “When Rob left, the band didn’t do anything really. There were seven years between ‘Painkiller’ and ‘Jugulator’, and because of the steps forward we keep trying to make between every album, there were at least two albums missing in that period.

“We had to decide where we would be if those two albums had been there,’ he continues, eand with “Painkiller” being such a heavy, brutal album as it was, the logical step was to ‘Jugulator’, which was a very, very hard album. But if there was one thing missing on that album, it was the subtle passages and ballads which we’ve also been known for over the years, so we decided to rectify that with ‘Demolition’.”

Judas Priest were not the only metal band to have a hard time in the 1990s, as the whirlwind that was Nirvana washed the decks of the old guard, fundamentally altering the alternative musical landscape and killing off some of the more excessive excesses of the 1980s. Heavy metal, one the great 1980s icons, found the new landscape tough going.

“A lot of other bands didn’t do a great deal either,” Hill explains. “[Iron] Maiden went their separate ways, and all the standard classic bands all stopped playing for some reason. This left the door open for the new wave of metallers coming through, and I think metal’s better for it as well. These new bands have a lot to offer — if you take the make-up and the bullshit away, you’ve got a damn good heavy metal band underneath it all,” he laughs.

The story of Judas Priest in the last seven years has been the story of Ripper Owens, the man plucked from the obscurity of a Judas Priest etribute’ band to replace his hero, Rob Halford, as the frontman to carry the band into the next millennium. Owens only got the job when the band chanced upon a video of an Ohio man with a Judas Priest tattoo, and it blew them away.

“He was a great find when we found him,” Hill says. “When Rob left, it knocked the wind out of our sails. I don’t think there were any of us who didn’t think at some stage that it was about time to hang our hats up.

“When we found Ripper and discovered his capabilities, he gave everybody the drive and incentive to carry on. It was very much a fresh start for us.”

According to Hill, ‘Demolition’ reflects Ripper’s growing stature, as the band’s Halford-tinged history is finally consigned to the past.

“eJugulator’ was written for a vocalist, any vocalist, because we didn’t know who was going to end up singing on it,” he says. “But with ‘Demolition’, we knew his capabilities so we could write material accordingly. I think it shows, there’s a lot more confidence coming from Ripper.”

If Ripper’s story sounds familiar, you have probably been reading reviews of the Mark Wahlberg film ‘Rock Star’. While both sides have played down the Priest element to the film, the links are obvious to the neutral observer. Any similarity to any persons, living or deadOe

“It started out as a story about Ripper joining the band, from a New York Times piece,” Hill explains. “The production company bought the rights to the story, and next thing you know, all over the internet, it says these people are putting out the story of Judas Priest and Ripper joining them!

“Our management thought that if they were going to do a film about Priest, it might be a good idea for them to talk to us, and find out what the characters are like — if somebody’s portraying you on film, you want to have at least a little bit of control over it.

“They were contacted but they didn’t want to know,’ he continues. ‘They wanted total artistic freedom and all this business. So we said that if they were going to do that, they couldn’t use the name Judas Priest. The story’s basically the same, with somebody playing in a cover band who gets to play with their favourite rock stars that they’ve been following ever since adolescence. That’s as far as it goes, but any similarities end there.”

Thirty years on, Hill sees no end in sight for a rejuvenated Priest with Ripper at the helm, and only opportunity in the future.

“It gets to the point where you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else,” he says. “Some of the songs we play on the stage are 20-odd years old, but when you see the reaction to them, if we dropped any, we’d probably get lynched. It’s that reaction that gives us the incentive to carry on playing.”

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:42 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

In a desolate desert landscape, winged Victa mowers hover around a decaying Hills Hoist, the last bastion of civilisation before you reach Uluru, far in the distance. The boys from TISM are back, and if the Roger Dean-esque Yes-stylings of the cover of their latest album ‘De Rigeurmortis’ are to be believed, they’ve gone a little prog-rock. Hype put the question to TISM frontmen Ron Hitler Barassi and Humphrey B. Flaubert — have you been listening to too many Osibisa albums?

‘The Roger Dean album cover came about because Festival Mushroom Records bowdlerised our original concept which was a triple album,’ Barassi explains. ‘Do you know that young people these days don’t even know about triple albums? They don’t understand what it was like opening Yes songs with the huge gatefold cover opening to reveal the El Greco-like vista that was Roger Dean’s work.’

‘Our album was in fact a triple album called Finger album — a dedication to the great Finger bands of rock,’ Flaubert elaborates. ‘Badfinger, Snakefinger and Powderfinger. The album was tentatively titled “Give Your Mates A Sniff. TISM: The Finger Album”, however FMR decided not to go with that.

‘In fact, what you get in ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is merely the ghostly remains of that great masterwork.’

Ghostly remains or not, ‘De Rigeurmortis’, TISM’s first album in three years, is as loaded as ever with their trademark savage wit, angry rants and cheesy beats. From the anti-dance music tirades of ‘Come Back DJ, Your Record is Scratched’ and ‘Fat Boy Slim Dusty’ to the more general tirades of ‘If You’re Not Famous at Fourteen, You’re Finished’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not Britney Spear’, TISM fans have more than enough to satisfy them until the band get pissed off enough for another release. But the real standout is saved for the bonus disc of the connoisseur’s edition — a disc devoted solely to the sprawling 40-minute rock opera e2Pot Screama’.

‘Were you aware that Britney’s actually got a novel out?’ Flaubert asks. ‘It’s co-written with her mum. I’ve always felt that when you get to the stage of being able to write a novel, you’ve transcended the sort of one-dimensional rubbish that they’re peddling.

‘This is why I feel that Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately put out a pop album,’ Barassi suggests. ‘For too long, Cormac McCarthy has been satisfied with merely being the most innovative and deeply serious novelist working in the American literary scene. That can’t satisfy him for very long and I think Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately rush out there and record a pop album with his mumnMrs McCarthynto really try and beat Britney at her own game.’

TISM’s last album, 1998’s ewww.tism.wanker.com’, met with infamy through its lead single, a track which even Triple J would not play: ‘I Might Be A Cunt, But I’m Not A Fucking Cunt’. The C word sent such powerful shockwaves through the country that they even received an irate letter from Bruce Ruxton. But that was back in their days on Shock Records, and their new label have something of a different outlook, the boys claim:

‘We’ve really toned it down because we are aware that Festival Mushroom are funding a number of right-wing military juntas in South America,’ Flaubert says. ‘The sort of damage they could do to our kneecaps if we encountered the ire of the conservative right in this country cannot be overestimated.’

Humphrey B. Flaubert wonders how people could possibly be interested in questions about their music, or themselves.

‘It isn’t beer and skittles what we do, in fact it’s very unglamorous,’ he points out. ‘What we wanted was to get attention from good-looking girls. That really hasn’t eventuated, so everything after that is a disappointment. Being in a rock band would be great, but unfortunately we’re not in one!’

For a band so unashamedly non-rock, TISM take great pride in the production quality of their recordings. For ‘De Rigeurmortis’, they drew on the legendary production talents of Paul McKercher and Phillip McKellar to knock the album into shape.

‘Oh yes, they’re very rock,’ Flaubert says. ‘They were rock people but we had to communicate with them through an interpreter. Neither of us understood each other’s language.’

‘They’re not very nice men,’ Barassi points out. ‘Phil and Paul take themselves very seriously — we had to explain to them that if they didn’t drop their pretty boy rock and roll attitude straight away and get down slumming it with the dorky guys from TISM, they’d be out that door.

‘As they made their way towards their door, we begged them to come back.’

Serendipity arranges it so that ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is released just as bullshit is circulating at its 3 year-high on the electoral cycle — as perfect a time as any for TISM’s spleen to be vented.

‘There was a little while there when we were a bit afraid the fires were burning out,’ Barassi says, ebut all you have to do is hear the voice of Phillip Ruddock and you think yep, the hatred is as strong as ever. That sort of pompous, disaffected, soulless inability to empathise with anyone else and to persecute people less well off for your own base self-interest, I think that’s what it’s all about.

‘If Phillip Ruddock ran a record company, we’d join.’

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:17 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

When the lights go down on the streets of America’s big cities, a thousand subcultures come out to play. But amongst all of them, none are bigger, louder, or faster than those who spend their nights drag-racing customised muscle cars through urban centres, stockpiling nitro-boosters and computer-controlled fuel management systems to see who can fit the most under the hood.

‘The Fast and the Furious’ infiltrates the shady drag-racing underworld through the eyes of young undercover cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker — ‘The Skulls’), who in true ‘21 Jump Street’ tradition, has been assigned to befriend the racers and find out who is behind a series of truck-jackings. The high stakes, ultra-high octane world depicted so frenetically in the movie, as big and loud as any you’ll likely see, is not as much of a fantasy as it seems, Walker argues.

‘Apart from the semi-truck jackings, this stuff really does happen,’ he says. ‘The after-market industry for these import Japanese cars has gone up 30 or 40 per cent, at least in California, since the release of this film.

‘I’ve contacted guys involved in that market, because we had a lot of them working as technical consultants, and they called me up dozens of times to say “man, because of your movie, we’re making so much money”.’

Walker and the film’s other young stars (Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez) needed to do a lot of their own driving in this film, as director Rob Cohen attempted to make a genuinely new car movie.

‘I’m a gearhead and I love cars,’ Walker says. ‘I had to do a bit of research with the Japanese cars, but cars are really one and the same. My grandfather actually raced stock cars for Ford, and ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated with them. I did a lot of my own driving — I had my own stunt driver, naturally, who made me look really cool.

‘A big part of the reason Rob decided to do this movie was that he had a vision of a lot of shots that were never really captured before on film,’ he continues. ‘When you think how many car films with great sequences have been shot over the years, such as Ronin or Bullitt, and you think that just about everything’s been done, Rob realised the only way he could do something original or different was to just have the actors behind the wheel.’

Walker worked with Cohen on ‘The Skulls’, and has formed a close relationship with the producer-turned-director (eDragonheart’, ‘Daylight’) and a strong desire to work closely with him.

‘He’s an asshole,’ Walker laughs. ‘I was really reluctant to sign on and do the movie, because I don’t really have a lot of experience yet, and just knowing that I was going to have second billing, I was really quite nervous. I actually told him at one point that I didn’t think I wanted to do it. Rob has a fatherly approach that I really appreciate and like. He’ll come up and put his arm around you and pull you aside and talk you through things.’

Of a slightly less harmonious nature was Walker’s relationship with co-star Vin Diesel (eSaving Private Ryan’, ‘Pitch Black’), as egos from opposite sides of the country collided.

‘It took us a while to feel each other out,’ he admits. ‘He’s pretty intense and he takes his job very seriously. Initially I really didn’t know how to take him, and I was a bit concerned going in because it was a “hot cast”.

‘But Vin and I are getting along really well, and I think the reason it took a while is because he’s unlike anybody I ever grew up with. I’m extreme West Coast, and he’s extreme East Coast. The only guys I ever knew like him were the guys I saw in the movies.’

As well as competing with the egos of the other stars on ‘The Fast and the Furious’, Walker also had to compete with the real stars of the movie — the imported supercars flying around the set like rockets. For the race scenes, the producers needed to call on the help of the fanatics who were more than eager to show off their customised rods.

‘The principal cars were actually modelled after real cars,’ Walker says. ‘Those other cars were owned by the general public — they did a lot of research and advertised the filming of this import car movie in all of the import car magazines. It said to come and meet us on the Universal lot, and we’ll interview you and take a look at your car. Kids turned out in their droves, and they turned away so many. They had the pick of the litter.’

Paul Walker has found himself with a lead billing only a few films into his career, which seems to be speeding faster than a souped-up Ducatti with nitro injections, and ‘The Fast and the Furious’ is big, loud, and exhilarating in a way that other recent car chase movies (like ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’) have utterly failed to be.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:25 PM | Permalink

‘He Died With A Felafel In His Hand’, John Birmingham’s cult diary of a terminal share-house hopper, is one of those books that entered into legend entirely through word of mouth. Richard Lowenstein, director of ‘Dogs in Space’, another legendary exploration of the flipside of destitute share-house living, immediately saw a kindred spirit when he picked up Birmingham’s book, and after enlisting his mate Noah Taylor to play the lead role, took on the challenge of bringing ‘Felafel’ to the screen.

‘It struck me as a quite endearing look at some different characters and scenarios,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t too aware of its reputation. I didn’t actually realise until just recently what sort of fan club the book has, especially up in Brisbane.

In adapting the book, Lowenstein had the challenge of creating a story and a group of consistent characters from the countless faces and anecdotes that make up Birmingham’s book. Using a few of the choice moments from the story as a base, he created a lead character, Danny who, he explains, was ea Frankenstein’s monster of a character that was a mish-mash of John, Noah Taylor and myself.’

Taylor’s involvement with ‘Felafel’ was so critical that the film was delayed by several months to allow the increasingly star-bound actor to work on an overseas production. As the book has no real dialogue, Lowenstein needed to do some serious research on share-house living to put words in the characters’ mouths.

‘I was living above a flat full of film school students and out of work actors,’ he explains. ‘Noah arrived with a couple of friends to be in one of their films and ended up there for two or three months. Being around them and either going out with them or going to the pub brought me in the loop to a lot of share-house style dialogue.

‘Noah himself is an extremely funny guy, and he’d just broken up with a girlfriend, so a lot of the dialogue would come from these group discussions. I would be scribbling on the butcher’s paper in the cafE, ripping off a corner and stuffing it in my pocket,’ he laughs.

‘The big rave that Flip gives to Danny at the end, talking about going to the rehab clinic, actually came from a friend ringing me up from the clinic and talking to me. I had the conversation and I realised afterwards how incredibly powerful it was, so I just wrote it down and used it in the film.’

Lowenstein’s adaptation has drawn a lot of criticism for its loose treatment of the source material, but he defends his choice to amalgamate characters and introduce a love interest as a natural evolution for the story.

‘It’s my own story but, in a way that I hope the fans appreciate, it’s actually John’s story that’s not in the book as well,’ he explains. ‘John would just splurge out storiesohe’s a great raconteur and he would just talk about things that hadn’t made it to the book. One in particular was this female best friend he had going between all the different houses and only lately, at the time we were sitting down writing, he’d become romantically involved with her after ten years of shared housing.

‘That struck me as an emotional throughlineothat’s really a John Birmingham story.’

Being Australian, and having lived through a rather erock and roll’ life, Lowenstein has his own sizable collection of share-house anecdotes.

‘Unfortunately I’d used most of my sharehouse experiences in “Dogs in Space”,’ he laughs.

‘One time, the first punks in Melbourne decided that they needed to visit the only 7-Eleven in the country, which was in Ballarat, to get flavoured milk at four in the morning. On the way home, they stopped in a paddock, saw this little baby lamb, bundled it into the car and drove back, then promptly got home and collapsed in heaps on the floor. The little baby lamb was walking around amongst this desolate pile of drugged punk rockers on the floor when I woke up.’

There’s a school of thought that says you have never truly lived until you have woken up in your kitchen at five in the morning to find three housemates and six strangers channelling spirits from the dishesoshare-house living is a universal Coming Of Age process, designed specifically to supply you with enough anecdotes to get you through the rest of your life. Nothing has captured its essence quite so eloquently as ‘Felafel’, and even if Lowenstein’s film is not identical to the book from which it gets its title, it will also endure as a testament to the glory of living with strangers.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:29 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

When a film has been put through the rigours of government funding and large budgets, passing through multiple levels of bureaucracy and having part of its soul stripped at every point, there is sometimes no room for the honest, small stories that work so well on the stage. Daniel Keene’s ‘Silent Partner’, a dark but ravishingly funny tragicomedy custom made for a two-handed stage performance is just the kind of simple stage story that should not translate to the broader scale of cinema.

But Alkinos Tsilimidos, who burst onto the film scene with ‘EverynightOeEverynight’ in 1994, was still looking for a follow-up film seven years later. With only $13,000 and seven days, he turned ‘Silent Partner’, that edifficult second movie’, into an exercise in guerrilla filmmaking.

‘The first time I ever walked into a greyhound track and went into the bookie ring, to me it felt like a Fellini movie,’ says Tsilimidos. ‘The cast of characters that existed just at this one meeting, for me it was a place where I thought I really would love to go some day and explore in film.’

‘Silent Partner’ is the story of two no-hopers, the kind everybody knows who fall for every moneymaking scam, Bill (Syd Brisbane) and John (David Field). When John runs into racing kingpin Alex Silver at the greyhound track, he somehow agrees to covertly race his dog, while he and his best mate look after and train him — it’s a no-lose situation and John is too desperate to ask questions. Silver is an eerie, unseen presence in the film, and his dog, named Silent Partner in his honour, tests the limits of Bill and John’s friendship, as their world crumbles and they realise Alex Silver’s game isn’t entirely honest.

‘It was the story itself that ultimately drew me in,’ Tsilimidos says. ‘I was drawn to the way Daniel was able to write truth of characters. What I found appealing was the fact that it was just two characters that would drive the movie. There’s not a lot of action, but god, it’s an enormous journey for those two men.’

David Field and Syd Brisbane have inhabited these characters on and off since a stage reading four y ears ago, and their incredibly natural performances and interactions are at the heart of the film’s most noticeable feature: its honesty.

‘There’s a beautiful chemistry that exists between David and Syd as human beings,’ he says, eand it’s a chemistry that we utilised for the film. I just can’t imagine any other Bill or John than those two.

‘The honesty is inherent in the writing, so I didn’t want to put the rigours of film adaptation to it. I thought the beauty of the piece needed to exist.’

The story was kept hidden from the three-person crew, forcing them to capture Bill and John’s lives in an almost documentary style. As there was no budget for extras, and the team couldn’t afford to get the greyhound track closed, they had to work out how to film without the regular punters staring at the camera. Easy — start filming five minutes before a race, and nobody cares what you do.

‘You learn that by going there and spending time watching people,’ laughs Tsilimidos. ‘Part of our rehearsal process was actually putting David and Syd, in character, in amongst the punters for at least a month before we started filming. The regular crowd, and they are a very regular crowd, eventually just accepted them as punters.’

One of the strongest elements of ‘Silent Partner’ is its soundtrack, composed by Paul Kelly, who worked with Tsilimidos on his last film, and Uncle Bill’s Gerry Hale.

‘Paul’s sensibilities have been right for me twice,’ Tsilimidos says. ‘Paul’s poetry and voice is one dimension and then his underscore is part of the narrative drive. We sat down and carefully planned out each section, right down to details. The banjo is in fact Alex Silver’s voice, and whenever the banjo is a solo, you become aware that something is going to change.’

Ultimately, with Kelly’s music as a third character, this is a film about two extraordinary performances from two fine actors. And it is a poignant story about mateship when there is nothing else in the world. ‘Silent Partner’ is a small film, partly by necessity, but its bare-bones approach gives it a raw edge and a humanity like few Australian films of recent years.

‘There are Bill and Johns everywhere in the world, and when you strip it down, you’ve got two losers who actually want to be winners,’ Tsilimidos says. ‘These guys are alcoholics, everything is against them and life has passed them by. But they want to be winners, like everyone else.’

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:33 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

From the lovesick policemen of ‘Chungking Express’ to the grimy streets of Argentina in ‘Happy Together’, the visceral, scriptless creations of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai have pushed the visual boundaries of filmmaking to new limits. Wong’s longtime collaborator, Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, spoke to Hype about working for more than ten years with the legendary director.

‘In The Mood For Love’, Wong’s latest creation, sees a massive change in visual direction, forgoing the multiple film stocks and handheld action of previous films for a studied exploration of subtlety, finding meaning hidden in nuances of light and shade.

The film, set in 1960s Hong Kong, is the story of two neighbours (played by regular collaborator Tony Leung and the wonderful Maggie Cheung) who slowly come to realise that their respective partners (never seen on-screen) are having an affair. Desperate to make some sense of this, they act out the beginning stages of an affair themselves, to find out how it all started o but slowly, at least mentally, their own affair becomes consumed by repressed passion. Rich in period detail, particularly in such delights as Cheung’s collection of Cheongsam dresses, the films sees Wong and the team who have worked with him since ‘Days of Being Wild’ in 1990 make both a stunning and logical progression into a formality which would not normally become them. Yet still, at the centre, is a mischievous Australian cinematographer itching to play around.

“All films have a context, whether it be social, cinematic or monetary,” Doyle says. “We made this film this way because of where we were at the time we made it. The look of the film relates very much to our response to what and where we have come from.

“Whenever I got restless or impatient with the simplicity of what we were doing they [would] remind me: it’s not broken, so lets not fix it.”

Doyle, for his part, left the production before its completion, to be replaced by Mark Lee Ping-bin. Rather than a sign of acrimony with his friend, drinking partner and director Wong, it was a sign of his own increasing demand as one of the finest cinematographers in the business.

“I was on the film for 15 months and couldn’t hold off other commitments any longer,” he says. “Mark was not the only one to try to fill my empty shoes. [But] we are older if not wiser. We are more confident so we know when to let go. We hope each film will be different and a lot of bridges have been built over our water since we roughly made ‘Chungking Express’.”

For a cinematographer, used to drinking his way through loose, anarchic films with his buddies, Doyle could not have picked a stranger project to mark his entry into mainstream Hollywood: Gus Van Sant’s rigid, formal shot-for-shot remake of ‘Psycho’.

“I knew if I got to work more or less on time, didn’t drink too overtly on the set, knew who the producers were, and stayed away from the playback of the original I’d be fine,” he says. “All I had to do was get the film in the camera the colours on the screen. Gus was getting 20 million dollars for this ‘art project’ and it seemed that only he and I really knew. Our ePsycho’ is not a movie, it’s a conceptual art work put on film.”

Doyle left Australia as a teenager to spend his life wandering at large, spending time on a kibbutz in Israel, sailing with the Norwegian Merchant Marines, and passing himself off as a Chinese medicine doctor in Thailand. He is one of those Australians who left us so long ago that we can hardly claim him as our own, as much as we would like to, but for his next film he has returned to his homeland, to work on Philip Noyce’s eRabbit Proof Fence’.

“I would be lying if I claimed to be an Australian cinematographer,” he says. “I started in Asia and my heart is still there. But what I am in my world is very much informed by my Australianness. Hopefully I take the piss out of myself often enough to not get complacent or really believe all I say I am. Luckily I have this Chinese persona that leaves his awards in the boot of some girl’s car.

“We are what we make ourselves and our films are just a mirror of that,” he continues. “‘Rabbit’ is no more or less than a reckoning of where the people who made saw themselves at this time in this place. It’s not really my country anymore, but the issues are the same as the ones I live and hopefully deal with every day.”

Doyle did not go to film school or obtain any sort of formal film education o it was a happy accident that saw him first pick up a movie camera and set off down a new path in his rather full life. His disregard for eproper’ lighting and such technicalities as colour temperature and exposure may be his signature, but like all great work, it only happened that way because he didn’t know not to do it.

“I don’t think there is any difference between cooking and dancing and cinematography and a really good script, and a bad time as au pair in Yemen is what you need to get there,” he says. “It’s certainly more valid than Film 101 and even though I have some kind of script writing system in my computer, I avoid it in favour of salacious emails.

“At the end of the day you are your biggest critic and you only be where you should be when you really deserve to, and who can know when that is unless you try?”

Through all of his films with Wong, and his increasing global renown, Doyle has redefined many of the visual rules of filmmaking, capturing a reality far more real than what’s in front of us.

“Most of us have more visual experience in one hour on the World Wide Web than most critics or theorists have accumulated in all the courses they have taken and expound,” he says. “To trust our eyes was what the Impressionists taught us — not words, not equipment, money or conventions like blue moonlight. Look closer at the one you love and you’ll love better. Dance in light and smile in colour is what I said.”

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 1:23 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Grok Magazine

Cast your mind back to somewhere in the mid-eighties, and let me throw a few words at you. The Breakfast Club. Pretty in Pink. Sixteen Candles. John Hughes. Molly. Molly Ringwald. Molly Ringwald was the teen queen who defined what it was to be a Reaganite adolescent; the girl who ran with the Brat Pack and for a brief moment was the coolest chick on the planet. Then, as suddenly as she rose to fame, her blip disappeared off the radar. So what happened?

“I don’t really believe in regret,” she said when Grok spoke to her from New York. “I think you can always learn from the past, but I wouldn’t want a different life. I think that everybody experiences anger during their life. Usually it happens during your teen years, but my teen years were so focussed on work, I was too busy and I really didn’t have time to experience that.

“So I did it later, in my early twenties, and it was really good, because I believe that anger propels you in interesting directions. And my anger propelled me out of Hollywood and into a different place, and that’s what I needed to do at the time.”
Ringwald is soon to appear in Cut, a new Australian horror film of the Scream variety, directed by one-time Hoodoo Guru Kimble Rendall.

“I was offered the movie, blindly, I just received a script and a proposal and everything, and I thought it was really funny. It was an interesting project and I was very curious to come and film in Australia,” she said.

In the film, Ringwald plays a once-famous teen movie star who is now reduced to working on student films and television. Ironic, yes?

“It reminded me a bit of Scream, but with a lot more humour. It’s very tongue in cheek, which I like about it. The character’s a great character for me. I thought she was really fun and outrageous, she’s like the comic relief of the movie. It was a great experience.

“Kimble was a first-time director but I’ve worked with a lot of first-time directors, I always find that they’re kind of interesting in a way because they’re all full of ideas and they have a lot to prove. They’re not jaded. John Hughes, when I first worked with him, that was his directorial debut, so I’ve had a good track record with first time directors.”

Another first-time director that Ringwald has worked with is renowned New York photographer Cindy Sherman, on the oddly schlocky horror/satire Office Killer:

“That’s the only other horror movie that I’ve done,” she laughs. “She was very specific about the look of the movie, because obviously that’s where her expertise lies, she was a little bit green about performance, scripts and all that sort of stuff.

“I remember when I was doing a scene with Jeanne Tripplehorn where the characters had this little cat-fight, and so we were ad-libbing and doing all this stuff, and Cindy was delighted, clapping her hands together and saying ‘Oh my God! You were improvising! You were improvising!’

Some might say that Ringwald has suffered the most horrible fate an actor can sufferoher first films were too successful. Forever, she will be frozen in pop culture as John Hughes’ queen of the screen. However, she still has a lot of love for those films, and is unsurprised by the constant calls for a Breakfast Club sequel.

“I really like those movies, and I’m really proud of them,” she said. “I don’t think there ever will be a Breakfast Clubreunion or that there should be. I’m kind of amazed, and sort of flattered and happy, that those movies have had the shelf life that they have—they still have an impact. That means that they were kind of special, they weren’t just these movies that come and go and nobody really cares about them later.

“All I can really do is do my work. I don’t really notice myself in a lot of ‘Where Are They Now?’ things, at least in America, because I’m working all the time, so I have mercifully escaped that, but I’m always associated with the Brat Pack. Particularly with the fifteenth anniversary of The Breakfast Club, there was a lot of discussion. But I’m also 31 years old, which is when most people are just starting their careers.”
When she began to grow out of high-school films, Ringwald found it hard to find decent roles that were suited to her, and eventually ended up running away from Hollywood, finding a home, a new life and a husband in Paris.

“I went there to work on a movie and I just fell in love with Paris. I was at a time in my life when it seemed like the thing to do. There wouldn’t really be another time to do a thing like that. Later I’d be married and have a family, it was the perfect time to get away and experience life out of the public eye. It wasn’t planned, it just sort of happened, I followed my instincts and it was the best thing I ever did.”

After spending several years in France, even working with Jean-Luc Godard at one stage, Ringwald eventually ended up back in America. One of her first projects was the failed sitcom Townies, which recently aired in Australia to little acclaim during non-ratings season. In fact, it only lasted half a season in total before being axed.
“It was an interesting experience,” she said. “There were things I liked about it, and things I didn’t like. It was interesting, there were good things in it.

“I liked the cast a lot,” she continued, obviously searching for something good to say about the show. “It did pretty well actually, unfortunately we were at a time when the head of ABC was changing and somebody new was coming in and she didn’t really want to work on shows that she didn’t develop herself, so because we were a new show, we hadn’t had the time to establish ourselves, but actually our ratings were quite high.”

In the opening scene of Cut, Molly can be heard belting out a Split Enz number at the top of her voice. Apparently, she’s quite the fan of antipodean rock.

“In the eighties, I had friends who were in a band,” she explained. “Their day job was working as messengers at A&M records, which was the studio which distributed all of the Australian bands, and they used to swipe the LPs and give them to me. That’s why I knew all of these really obscure Australian bands like Hunters & Collectors and the Hoodoo Gurus and had heard them before anybody else did. And I was a really big fan of Split Enz, but I guess they don’t really count as Australian.”

A little known fact about Ringwald is that before becoming a famous actor, she actually released several recordings with her jazz musician father, which may explain a rather strange ambition:

“I’d love to do a musical. I was really little the last time I did any singing, so I don’t
know if that counts, but I would like to do something, because I haven’t really done that in a while.”

And while Molly is limbering up for a new singing career, she finds herself working with a new generation of teen stars who grew up with her films and now star opposite her, such as Katie Holmes in Teaching Mrs Tingle.

“Katie actually interviewed me for Interview magazine, which was really fun,” she said. “It’s nice. I like that I’ve influenced them in a good way. I love Katie and Claire Danes and all these young up-and-coming actresses because they’re all so sweet. Every time they meet me they’re like ‘Oh my God, I love Sixteen Candles’ and it makes me feel like I’ve contributed something. I don’t know what exactly, but it’s flattering.”

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:14 PM | Permalink