Best Directors: The 'Fresh Air' Interviews

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Best Directors: The Fresh Air Interviews

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli of tvworthwatching.com, sitting
in for Terry Gross.

Over the past year, Terry has spoken with all five movie directors who
are up for Academy Awards this weekend. So on the eve of the Oscars, we
thought we'd condense those conversations into a one-stop visit with all
five Best Director nominees: Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, Jason
Reitman, Lee Daniels; and our first guest, James Cameron.

James Cameron has directed what are considered, by some measures, the
two highest-grossing films of all time, the 1997 film "Titanic" and of
course, his latest film, "Avatar." "Avatar" has made over $2.3 billion
and has received nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best
Director.

"Avatar" stars Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, an injured Marine who is
now in a wheelchair. He takes a job with a military contractor to work
on the planet Pandora, where the company is trying to extract a precious
ore. But the natives on the planet, the Na'vi tribe, are getting in the
way.

Jake's job is to be an avatar, to take the form of one of the Na'vi and
infiltrate them - both for anthropological information and to try to get
them out of the way. In this scene, he's reluctantly recording one of
his first video logs about starting to learn the Na'vi ways.

(Soundbite of film, "Avatar")

Mr. SAM WORTHINGTON (Actor): (As Jake Sully) This is a video log, 12
times 21, 32. Do I have do this now, like - I really need to get some
rack.

Unidentified Woman #1 (Actor): (As character) No, now, when it's fresh.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. WORTHINGTON: (As Tully) Okay, location: shack, and the days are
starting to blur together.

The language is a pain, but you know, I figure it's like field-stripping
a weapon, just repetition, repetition.

Na'vi.

Unidentified Woman #2 (Actor): (As character) Na'vi.

Mr. WORTHINGTON: (As Tully) Na'vi.

Unidentified Woman #2: (As character) Na'vi. (Unintelligible).

Mr. WORTHINGTON: (As Tully) Neytiri calls me scoun(ph). It means moron.

TERRY GROSS, host:

Jim Cameron, welcome to FRESH AIR. Can I ask you to give us an example
of a shot or two, or a scene, that epitomizes for you what you can do
with 3-D that you couldn't do in a regular film?

Mr. JAMES CAMERON (Filmmaker, "Avatar"): Well, I think it's sometimes as
simple as, you know, a shot in a snowstorm would feel so much more
tactile to the viewer. You'd actually feel like the snowflakes were
falling on you and around you, you know, that sort of thing, any time
that the medium of the air between you and the subject can be filled
with something.

So we did a lot of stuff in "Avatar" with, you know, floating wood
sprites and little bits of stuff floating in the sunlight and so on, and
rain and foreground leaves and things like that. It's all a way of
wrapping the audience in the experience of the movie.

GROSS: And there's even a shot - and I think this looked deeper because
of the 3-D, but you tell me - there's a shot in which the spaceship
that's transporting the people to Pandora, it's a shot of, like, a long,
narrow bench, basically, of seats, like a row of seats that the guys are
sitting on. And I think it looked particularly long because of the 3-D,
or is that just me?

Mr. CAMERON: No, I think you're right. I think it's an enhanced sense of
depth. We get depth queuing in flat images all the time. We understand
perspective, you know, linear perspective, aerial perspective. When we
see a human figure, and that figure's very tiny, we don't - our brain
immediately says that's not a tiny guy, an inch tall, that's somebody
very far away.

So all those depth queues are always there. When you add what 3-D does,
3-D gives you parallax information. It actually gives you the difference
between what the left eye sees and what the right eye sees, and that
creates even more depth information.

So now all these different depth queues have to be correlated in the
brain in the space of a few microseconds when you first see the image.
And I would submit, although I haven't seen data on this, that the brain
is more active. The brain is more engaged in the processing of the
images.

GROSS: Didn't you help develop, like, a special, new virtual camera?

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah, but that's a whole different deal. That has
nothing...

GROSS: What is it?

Mr. CAMERON: That has nothing to do with 3-D. The virtual camera was a
way of interfacing with a CG world so that I could view my actors as
their characters when we were doing performance capture. So imagine,
here's Zoe Saldana or Sam Worthington in our capture space, which we
called the volume, and when you look at them, they're wearing kind of a
black outfit, which is their capture suit, but what I look at, and what
I see in my virtual camera monitor is an image of them as a 10-foot-
tall, blue, alien creature with a tail.

GROSS: Wow, that's...

(Soundbite of laughter) Mr. CAMERON: And it's in real time.

GROSS: That's kind of amazing.

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah, it's simultaneous.

GROSS: So there's, like, a computer, a CG computer in the camera that
transforms the image?

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah, more or less. The camera really is just a monitor and
a set of tracking markers, and it connects to a couple of computers,
actually. The first one takes in that tracking data and figures out
where the camera is in space relative to the actors, and then the second
computer takes that information about the characters and where they are
and turns them or the actors and where they are and turns them into
their characters and supplies the setting.

So I would see Zoe and Sam as Neytiri and Jake in the jungle of Pandora,
for example, you know, fully lit image of the Pandoran rain forest. You
know, it's not the same as the final image of the movie in the sense
that it's a much lower resolution so it can render in real time.

GROSS: Let's talk about the characters a little bit.

Mr. CAMERON: Sure.

GROSS: Let me tell you one of the first things that strikes me about the
heroine. Now, in comics and in pulps, and I know you're big fans of
those, the women were always curvaceous and buxom and, of course,
scantily clad.

Mr. CAMERON: Of course. That's a given.

GROSS: That's a given. Now, the heroine in "Avatar" is so skinny. I
mean, all the characters are. All of the characters in this imaginary
moon, they're all kind of elongated and very thin. So she's elongated
and very thin with, like, little breasts.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: And scantily clad.

Mr. CAMERON: Athletic breasts.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Oh.

Mr. CAMERON: Something that wouldn't be cumbersome when you're running
through the forest rapidly in pursuit of your prey.

GROSS: So I'm wondering about that decision because I think that must
say something. I'm not sure what it says, but I figure it must say
something about people's expectations of sexuality or athleticism now
and, like, you know, a female heroine and also what, I mean, a lot of
action and fantasy films are directed at young males, and young males
usually want to see that full-figured, buxom, you know.

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah, yeah. They don't...

GROSS: So talk to me a little bit about designing her and how that
compares to, like the female sci-fi comic heroines you grew up with.

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah, I mean, your typical comic heroine is, you know, is
quite voluptuous. You know, we were just looking for something that was
a little bit alien, and so, you know, I use the example of, you know,
Giocometti sculpture, you know, where you have these kind of vertically
attenuated figures and then relating it back to some, you know, tribal
cultures in Africa like the Masai, you know, herders who were, you know,
very, very tall and lean and, you know, quite beautiful, and you could
see they are muscular, very clearly defined.

And you know, it was a way of having them be human and slightly pushed
at the same time. Because for me, the Na'vi always were about an
expression of kind of the better part of ourselves in the sense of them
being, you know, kind of the almost the Rousseau model of the noble
savage, untainted by civilization, all that, which is a quite romantic
idea, and not one I think is really true, by the way, in the real world.
But it made sense to me that in this film, you've got this polarization
where the humans actually represent an aspect of human nature that is,
you know, venal and corrupt and aggressive and so on.

And the Na'vi represent an aspect of human nature that is more
aspirational for us. They're more the way we would see ourselves or want
to be. You know, they're athletic, they're graceful, they're, you know,
connected to their environment and to each other and so on.

You know, so I didn't want to make them these fat waddlers, kind of
crashing through the bush. I wanted them to suggest a kind of antelope-
like grace.

GROSS: Now, you had to make up a language, also, I think with the help
of a linguist.

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah.

GROSS: What were you looking for in the language, and how do you put
together a kind of grammatically coherent language?

Mr. CAMERON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, that's where the linguist, Dr. Paul
Frommer, came in. And he was the head of the linguistics department at
USC at the time, and he did more than help. He actually created the
language. Or more properly, he created the translations of the lines
that we needed for the script. I don't think - he didn't create, like, a
full language with a vocabulary of 20,000 words, but I think we now have
a vocabulary of about 1,200 or 1,300 words.

And I actually had him on set with me so that if the actors wanted to
improvise, they could go over to him, and say how would I saw this, how
would I say that? Sometimes he had to create words right on the spot,
but they had to be words that were consistent with the kind of sound
system that we were using for the language.

And I guess I sort of set it in motion when I created character names
and place names and based them on some, you know, kind of Polynesian
sounds and some Indonesian sounds. And he riffed on that, and he brought
in some African sounds that were ejective consonants and things like
that, kind of clicks and pops, and he sprinkled those in. And he came up
with a syntax and a typical sentence structure, which I think has the
verb at the end, kind of in the German sentence structure, you know, I
to the store go. It's noun, object, verb. So I think that's how Na'vi is
structured.

So it follows linguistic rules, and that's why it sounds correct. And
all the actors had to adhere to a standard of pronunciation so that it
didn't sound like everybody was making up their own gobbledygook, which
I think over and a two-and-a-half-hour movie you would have felt you
were being had if we had done it that way.

GROSS: So can you speak to me in the Na'vi language?

Mr. CAMERON: You know, I mean, I can only say lines that are in the
film.

GROSS: Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

Mr. CAMERON: I can say, well: (Speaking Na'vi language). That means I
see you, my sister. No, I see you my brother.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. CAMERON: (Speaking foreign language) is I see you, my sister. Or
(speaking foreign language) means I was going to kill him, but there was
a sign from Awha(ph).

GROSS: One more question: a lot of people have noted that your film is
up against "The Hurt Locker" for an Oscar.

Mr. CAMERON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And "The Hurt Locker" was directed by Kathryn Bigelow who you
were once married to. And I think she gave you a copy of the screenplay
to look at even though you had long separated...

Mr. CAMERON: Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: ...because she wanted your opinion on it. So this is like a big
media story that, you know, ex-spouses up against each other at Oscar.
So what does that mean to you?

Mr. CAMERON: Well, I think it completely trivializes our relationship to
reduce us to exes. You know, we were married for almost two years 20
years ago and since then we've been colleagues and collaborators and
close friends for 20 years.

And I've produced two of her films and, you know, I've always sort of,
you know, steadfastly promoted her career as a director, you know, when
I was actually acting as her producer and subsequently, not that she in
recent years has really needed any help. She's, you know, definitely
been well-established, and the accolades that she's getting now, you
know, in this awards season and the critical recognition and so on is
for one, way overdue.

For two, it's such a great celebration of her accomplishments as a
filmmaker that, you know, I'm the first one to cheer when she wins an
award. For me, it's a win-win situation.

BIANCULLI: James Cameron, speaking with Terry Gross last month. Coming
up:

(Soundbite of film, "The Hurt Locker")

Mr. DAVID MORSE (Actor): (As Colonel Reed) What's the best way to go
about disarming one of these things?

Mr. JEREMY RENNER (Actor): (As Staff Sergeant William James) The way you
don't die, sir.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MORSE: (As Colonel Reed) That's a good one.

BIANCULLI: We'll hear from the director of "The Hurt Locker," Kathryn
Bigelow. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Our next Best Director Oscar interview is with Kathryn
Bigelow, director of "The Hurt Locker." It's about an Army bomb squad in
Iraq. Terry spoke with Kathryn Bigelow, and with the movie's
screenwriter, Mark Boal, who's also up for an Academy Award.

"The Hurt Locker," based on Boal's reporting from Iraq, stars Jeremy
Renner as a sergeant who's just taken over the team. He is fearless and
brilliant at diffusing bombs, but often recklessly risks his life and
the lives of his men. In this scene, Renner and one of his
sharpshooters, played by Anthony Mackie, are in Renner's room. Mackie
pulls out a box from under Renner's bed and it's filled with fuses,
wires and other remnants of bombs Renner has diffused.

(Soundbite of movie, "The Hurt Locker")

Mr. ANTHONY MACKIE (Actor): (as Sergeant JT Sanborn) What do we have
here?

Mr. RENNER (Actor): (as James) They're, you know, bomb parts,
signatures.

Mr. MACKIE: (as Sanborn) Yeah. Yeah. I see that, but what they doing
under your bed?

Mr. RENNER: (as James) Well, this one is from the U.N. building, flaming
car, dead-man switch, boom. This guy was good. I like him. This one, you
know, is from our first call together. This box is full of stuff that
almost killed me.

Mr. MACKIE: (as Sanborn) What about this one? Where is this one from,
Will?

Mr. RENNER: (as James) It's my wedding ring. Like I said, stuff that
almost killed me.

(Soundbite of laughter)

TERRY GROSS, host:

Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, welcome to FRESH AIR. Kathryn, the first IED
that we see go off is in, it's close to the beginning of the film, and
it's a really horrifying moment. I mean, you basically see, and I think
you shot this, part of this in slow motion - you basically see the
pavement lift up and fragment and fly into the air.

Can you talk a little bit about shooting that scene and making it have
real impact, and by that I mean it's not special-effects impact. There's
so many movies where things are always blowing up, and it's visually
dazzling, but you don't necessarily feel anything. You're just thinking,
like, wow, pretty cool, stuff blowing up, big special effects. But this
you really feel the threat and the impact and the danger and the horror.

Ms. KATHRYN BIGELOW (Director, "The Hurt Locker"): Well, I wanted to
really put the viewer at the epicenter of the event and, you know,
really feel that horror, and we shot the movie in the Middle East. We
shot it in Amman, Jordan. That particular location happened to have been
in a very densely populated area.

In fact, it was near a customs house, and there was something like
200,000 cars that traveled through that area on a daily basis, although
we did shut that part of the city down temporarily. But it was a very
densely populated area, and we knew that had to be a form and type of
detonation that was very palpable.

We were very interested in trying to replicate it as realistically as
possible. In the case of a 155, which was the particular ordinance in
the middle of the road, it was meant to have a very dark, dense, thick
look that was very different than those kind of gaseous orange plumes of
kind of fuel that perhaps maybe is more conventional in films.

Anyway, so we performed this detonation, and the effects man, Richard
Stutsman, did an extraordinary job, but it was a very, very large - I
think you could you see it for - it was like a four-story-high explosion
that you could see for, you know, miles and miles, and I used something
called a phantom camera, which shoots 10,000 frames per second, you
know, to kind of look at the granular nature of a detonation of that
size.

GROSS: Mark, when you were embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq. How close
did you get to any of the explosions?

Mr. MARK BOAL (Screenwriter, "The Hurt Locker"): Well, I got - you know,
when you're embedded, unfortunately or fortunately, you're just sort of
right there with the soldiers. So I was as close as the soldiers would
be, and it, you know, depended.

If they were a mile away, I was mile away. If they were 100 yards away,
I was 100 yards away, and close enough that you can feel the heat of the
explosion, which is really quite impressive and intensive. It's almost
like someone's taking a hair dryer and spraying it in your face, and
obviously close enough that the shrapnel is whizzing by around you, and
it's very loud and percussive. It's like being at a rock concert.

GROSS: And did the bomb squad team have a pretty decent idea of what the
range of the blast will be if the blast goes off so that they know what
the safety zone is?

Mr. BOAL: They do. They're kind of - have a very keen sense of that,
actually, and their whole expertise in terms of the physics of it is
quite extraordinary and impressive. I mean, these are guys that are
actually trained to diffuse nuclear bombs.

So for them to calculate the physical blast radius of an IED is
something they can do. It's the kind of math they can do in their head
very quickly, and so they can tell you with a pretty high degree of
certainty where the blast is gonna go and what the impact will be on a
given structure, whether it'll take down a house or put a hole in a
house or whatever.

But again, that's assuming that they know exactly what the content of
the bomb is, and some of the time they don't really know.

GROSS: Kathryn, one of the things that made an impression on me in the
movie is that occasionally there'd be, like, a stray feral cat walking
across the street or down the street. And one of the cats has only three
functioning legs, and one of the cats just looks half, like, starved to
death and unhealthy and kind of afraid. And I was wondering, like,
whether you cast these cats, whether these were, like, stray cats that
you found or that were actually - happened to be walking down the
street.

Ms. BIGELOW: In all honesty, they happened to be walking down the
street. Kind of the bonus of shooting in situ, in an environment that
was in an area that was sort of I suppose kind of down market, shall we
say.

And so it's a matter of always keeping your camera department alive and
looking in all directions just in case there might be some surprise, a
beautiful woman up on a balcony, head shrouded in cloth, looking down,
gazing down on you, and just trying to be very sensitive to the
environment in which you're in.

GROSS: You know, one of the things I got the impression of from your
movie is that your movie is in part about men who have no talent for
ordinary life, for life on the home front, for ordinary family life,
that something is stirred in them being on the front lines, being in
danger, being in a bomb squad, you know, that kind of work, but at the
same time, you reach a point where you can't take that anymore, either,
and then what are you left with?

And I guess I'd just be interested in some of the thoughts you had
during the making of the movie about people for whom ordinary life isn't
enough, isn't pleasurable or fulfilling in any way?

Ms. BIGELOW: Well, I don't know if you're familiar with Chris Hedges'
book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."

GROSS: Yes.

Ms. BIGELOW: It's a pretty extraordinary piece of writing, and he
discusses that very fact, that sense of purpose and meaning that moments
of peak experience can provide. In this case we're obviously referencing
combat, and it could come with, you know, race car driving or, again,
moments of peak experience that once, you know, once that captures your
imagine, it's a very difficult feeling, sensation, emotional peak to
replicate other than in that context.

BIANCULLI: Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal speaking
to Terry Gross. They are both up for Oscars this weekend, as are the
three directors featured in the second half of our show. I'm David
Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I’m David Bianculli sitting in for Terry
Gross.

Like James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, Quentin Tarantino earned his
newest Oscar nomination by directing a film about war. But instead of
the battlefield of an imaginary world, or a very current real one,
Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" takes place during the Nazi
occupation of France during World War II with a scenario that takes some
very bold liberties with actual history. Terry spoke with Quentin
Tarantino last summer.

The film also follows a team of American soldiers hunting down Nazis.
The Germans will come to call this group the Basterds. They are led by
Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt.

(Soundbite of movie, "Inglourious Basterds")

Mr. BRAD PITT (Actor): (As Lieutenant Aldo Raine) My name is Lieutenant
Aldo Raine, and I'm putting together a special team, and I need me eight
soldiers, eight Jewish-American soldiers. Now, you all might have heard
rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little
earlier. We're going to be dropped into France dressed as civilians, and
once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhacking guerrilla army, we're
going to be doing one thing and one thing only: killing Nazis. Sound
good?

Unidentified Group (Actors): (As characters) Yes, sir.

GROSS: Quentin Tarantino, welcome to FRESH AIR. So in this team of
Jewish soldiers that the Brad Pitt character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine,
puts together, he tells them that he's got a little Injun in him, that
he's part Apache, and that their battle plan will be the battle plan of
Apaches, that they're going...

Mr. QUENTIN TARANTINO (Director, "Inglourious Basterds"): Yeah.

GROSS: ...to scare their enemies. He says the Germans will be sickened
by us, and the Germans will talk about us, and the Germans will fear us.
And when the Germans close their eyes at night and their subconscious
tortures them for the evil they've done, it will be thoughts of us that
it tortures them with. And he explains to these Jewish soldiers that
they have to scalp the Nazis when they get them, and he insists that
they each bring back 100 scalps each or die trying. How did you come up
with the idea of scalping...

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: ...of the Jews scalping the Nazis that they hunt down? Again,
it's this hybrid of World War II and Westerns, but why that?

Mr. TARANTINO: Well, it hit me that an Apache resistance would be a
wonderful metaphor for Jewish-American soldiers to be using behind enemy
lines against the Nazis because the Apache Indians were able, from
different points of time, between having 200 braves to 22 braves, were
able to fight off for decades both the Spaniards and the Mexicans and
the U.S. Cavalry for years because of their - they were great guerrilla
fighters. They were great resistance fighters. And one of their ways of
winning battles was psychological battles.

They never did straight-up fights. It wasn't about, you know, getting
killed in the line of fire. It was all ambush, ambush, ambush, and then
you take the scalps, and you - even though the scalping wasn't created
by the American Indians. It was created by the white men against
Indians, and they just took it and claimed it.

But they would, you know, scalp them and desecrate the bodies, you know,
tie them to cactuses or bury them in anthills or things like that, and
you know, cut up the bodies and stuff, and then the other enemy soldiers
would come across and find their comrades laying there ripped apart, and
they would be sickened by it, and it would scare them. It would
psychologically get into their heads, so much so that if you're a U.S.
Cavalry guy and you thought you were going to be captured by the
Apaches, you might kill yourself. If they were with their wives and they
thought they were going to be captured, they would shoot their wives for
fear of the Apaches getting them.

GROSS: You're part Cherokee.

Mr. TARANTINO: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Did you identify with the Indians when you watched Westerns?

Mr. TARANTINO: Oh yeah, no, completely. I always did. Yeah, I was always
- I remember, like literally saying - watching some cowboy-and-Indian
movie with my mother, and I go, so, if we were back then, we'd be the
Indians, right? She goes, yup, that's who we'd be.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. TARANTINO: We wouldn't be those guys in the covered wagons. We'd be
the Indians.

But the idea of using the Apache resistance, one, it works effective to
actually get German soldiers to think of Jews that way. You know, and
they're not just any Jews, they're the American Jews. They're Jews with
entitlement. They have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So
we're going to inflict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to
endure it. And so the fact that you could get - actually get Nazis
scared of a band of Jews, that's -again, that's a gigantic psychological
thing.

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though
metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and you know, you have
genocide aligning itself with another genocide.

GROSS: "Inglourious Basterds" is so much about movies. It's about the
genres that you're using. It's about - a movie theater plays a prominent
role in it, movies themselves. I don't want to give away a lot, so I'm
going to talk in code here. But movies are in some ways the hero of the
film. But it's also about how Hitler perverted movies and how his
propaganda man, Joseph Goebbels, perverted movies by making these
propaganda films. Did you go and watch German propaganda films while you
were making "Inglourious Basterds"?

Mr. TARANTINO: Yeah, I watched a few of them. Oddly enough, most of the
books written about the subject aren't very good because they just focus
in on the more hateful movies that they did very early, early on when
they were trying to, you know, get Germany into the war, whether it be
anti-Semitic movies like "Jud Suss," or "The Eternal Jew," or movies
made against the Polish to help, you know, create sympathy for them to
invade Poland. And, you know, there'd be movies where there would be
some German girl living in Poland who's raped by the Polish or
something. And then they'd make movies against England, you know, in the
same way, to help, you know, feather their nest for their aggressions.

But the truth of the matter is, that was fairly, fairly early on in
Goebbels' 800 movies that he made in Germany. The majority of them,
especially once the war got going, you hardly saw Nazi officers in it at
all. They were mostly musicals, comedies and melodramas and stories of
great German men from the past.

You know, if you want to see jackbooting Nazis in movies, you've got to
watch American movies made at that time.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: That's funny.

Mr. TARANTINO: Yeah, I mean, there were some...

GROSS: Well, what about the Leni Riefenstahl films?

Mr. TARANTINO: Well, yeah, but Goebbels had nothing to do with those.
Leni Riefenstahl was the one person Goebbels had no control over in the
filmmaking community of Nazi Germany, and they despised each other. But
because she was Hitler's favorite, she could do what she wanted. She was
the only filmmaker that did not have to cow down to Joseph Goebbels. But
even then, you know, that was all before the war. Her movies "Olympia"
and "Triumph of the Will" were made before, you know, America even got
into the war.

GROSS: Can I ask you a casting question about "Inglourious Basterds?"

Mr. TARANTINO: Sure.

GROSS: The casting is great. But what's - the person who's just like
brand new to me and I think most American viewers and is like super
extraordinary and it is Christoph Waltz who plays the quote "Jew
hunter," the person...

Mr. TARANTINO: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...who is sent by the Gestapo to find the last remaining Jews
hiding out in the countryside of France. And this is an actor who speaks
three languages very well in the movie. He plays this Jew hunter, this
Nazi, as somebody who, like a lot of mobsters are portrayed in movies
who on the...

Mr. TARANTINO: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...surface is like very polite and gracious and complimentary.
And, you know, he's just like taking your measure so he can totally undo
you and probably kill you or...

Mr. TARANTINO: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...whatever it is. And he's very kind of like neat and organized
and he - when he's at the farmhouse looking for the Jews who he suspects
are hiding, he takes out...

Mr. TARANTINO: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...his papers and he fills his fountain pen very neatly. And
everything is done with a little flourish. How did you find this actor,
Christoph Waltz, who is so splendid in this? What was your audition like
for him? How did you know you had found your man?

Mr. TARANTINO: Well, you know, it was wild because I had seen already
like a few different German actors for this part and was not finding my
Landa at all. And part of the problem was, well, obviously they could
speak German well.

And most, actually, German actors have like, some speaking of French.
So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them
doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency. You
know, a lot of them could come in and we could speak for the next nine
hours in English and there would be no problem. It was - English wasn't
the language for them to read poetry in. And there is a - there's a
poetic quality to my dialogue. It's not poetry but it's kind of like it.
It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but
it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of
like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together.

And you have to be able to sell my jokes. And if you're talking about
somebody like Sam Jackson, they do that. Christopher Walken can do it
and a lot of people can do it, all right. Sam is just probably like the
most famous for it. And when it came to a lot of these German actors
with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry
out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And they were
struggling with it. And then, Christoph came in and I didn't know who
Christoph was. He's a TV actor in Germany. He does like miniseries and
stuff. He came in and I can literally say halfway through the reading of
that first scene in the farmhouse, I knew I'd found my Landa.

BIANCULLI: Quentin Tarantino speaking to Terry Gross. Coming up, a talk
with Lee Daniels, director of the movie "Precious." This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Our next guest in this best director Oscar fest is Lee
Daniels who directed the movie "Precious." Set in Harlem in 1987, it's
about a 350-pound, illiterate, 16-year-old African-American girl who is
physically abused by her mother and impregnated more than once by her
own father. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, plays the young girl Precious. And
in this scene, Precious is visiting her welfare caseworker played by
Mariah Carey.

(Soundbite of movie, "Precious")

Ms. GABOUREY SIDIBE (Actress): (As Precious) You don't even like me.

Ms. MARIAH CAREY (Singer-songwriter, Actress): (As Mrs. Weiss) Have we
not been in this room together for, like, a year, discussing your life?

Ms. SIDIBE: (As Precious) Does that mean we like each other, because we
discuss my life?

Ms. CAREY: (As Mrs. Weiss) I can't speak for you. I can only speak for
me, and I do like you. I do.

Ms. SIDIBE: (As Precious) So are you Italian, or what color are you,
anyway? Are you some type of black or Spanish?

Ms. CAREY: (As Mrs. Weiss) What color do you think I am? No, I'd like to
know. What color do you think I am?

Ms. SIDIBE: (As Precious) My throat is dry.

Ms. CAREY: (As Mrs. Weiss) Your throat is dry?

Ms. SIDIBE: (As Precious) It's really hot in here.

Ms. CAREY: (As Mrs. Weiss) It is kind of hot in here. I'm going to go
get a soda.

GROSS: Lee Daniels, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let me agree with everybody
who says that Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, really does an
extraordinary job. And she wasn't a professional actress. How did you
put out the call? I mean, did you have a casting call for 350-pound
teenagers? I mean, how did you find her?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. LEE DANIELS (Director, Producer, "Precious"): I called an agent in
Hollywood and said listen, can you help me? I'm looking for a 355-pound
black girl, and he just - there was silence on the phone. And I realized
at that point, okay, well, here we go. I've got to attack this from a
completely different way than I ordinarily attack the casting process.
And that meant work, a lot of work.

But my brilliant casting director, Billy Hopkins, and my sister in Los
Angeles, Leah Daniels-Butler, began a search for the girl. And they had
to have seen at least a thousand girls. And we actually narrowed it down
to, like, 20 girls. These girls were in a Precious camp, where they were
dancing, and these girls were...

GROSS: This is like a Precious training camp you're talking about.

Mr. DANIELS: Yeah, yeah. They were dancing. They were having acting
lessons, had a vocal instructor. And it was so beautiful watching these
girls, who I'd find at McDonald's or we flew in from, you know, a Radio
Shack in Chicago and, you know...

GROSS: GROSS: Wait, wait, wait, let's stop right there. So you'd go up
to somebody in McDonald's and say, well, they look heavy.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: They look fat and may be talented. I will go up to them? I mean -
yeah.

Mr. DANIELS: Yeah, they immediately - it was not as easy as you would
think, you know. They were very guarded. It wasn't easy coasting these
girls into - the two times that I did it, once was at a theater, the
girl serving behind the counter, you know, the movie theater, and the
other one was at a McDonald's. And it was not - you know, it was not
easy.

But so, anyway, they did this, and then they put out open calls, which
is really a good thing, too. They had a, you know, put posters out in
schools and stuff around the country. And so anyway, we had these 20
girls narrowed down. They were the real girls. These girls really were,
you know, they had problems speaking in their diction, and Gabby came
in. It was a great audition. And then when I meant to meet her, she
started talking like this white girl from the Valley, and I just thought
my God, this is - who are you? And I realized at that moment if I had
used one of the girls that was really Precious, that I would have been
exploiting them. I would have made a mockery of Precious.

So this girl is not Precious. And so she's, you know, she has a
different life, and she's - though she's from Harlem, she's very worldly
and really has a sense of self-confidence that either, I don't know,
I've never seen anything like it before in my life. She is truly, you
know, either in denial about her physicality, or she's on a higher
plane. I know she's got several boyfriends. She's so secure with who she
is that it's mind-blowing.

GROSS: You also got a terrific performance out of Mo'Nique, who's best
known as a comic and talk-show host.

Mr. DANIELS: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: She plays the mother, the very emotionally and physically abusive
mother. Before we talk about her performance, let me play a short scene.
And this is a scene - Precious and the social worker are in the office.
Precious has explained to the social worker, the Mariah Carey character,
about the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her father and her
mother, and the social worker has called in the mother because the
mother insists that she wants Precious and Precious' new baby to move
back in. And, of course, Precious doesn't want to do that.

So here's the scene where the social worker, played by Mariah Carey, and
the mother, Mary, played by Mo'Nique, are talking with each other.

(Soundbite of movie, "Precious")

Ms. MARIAH CAREY (Singer, Actress): (As Mrs. Weiss) You've been calling
this office, saying you want to be reunited with Precious and your
grandchild. Now I really need to know what's going on in that home.

Ms. MO'NIQUE (Actress): (As Mary) Mrs. Weiss, I understand we need to
discuss it, but I'm just telling you. You said I've been calling here,
and I've been wanting to see Precious and my grandson. You're goddamn
right I want to see them, because they belong to me, okay? Now there was
a time Precious had everything, and I done told her that, and me and
Carl(ph), we love Precious, and you need to know that. We love Precious,
and we had dreams. Precious was born around the same time Mrs. Weiss'
son got killed - the summertime. She was born the summertime, remember?
Remember that?

Ms. GABOUREY SIDIBE (Actor): (As Precious) I was born in November.

Ms. MO'NIQUE: (As Mary) November. Yeah. That's right.

GROSS: How did you know that Mo'Nique could pull that off?

Mr. DANIELS: We're very good friends, and I had already worked with her
before on "Shadowboxer." And through that friendship, you know,
"Precious" came along. And though in the book, Precious' mom, Mary, is
actually bigger than Precious, and it's sort of the reverse in the film,
I knew that Mo'Nique would tear it out.

BIANCULLI: Lee Daniels, director of "Precious."

Coming up:

(Soundbite of movie, "Up in the Air")

Mr. GEORGE CLOONEY (Actor): (As Ryan Bingham) To know me is to fly with
me. This is where I live. When I run my card, the system automatically
prompts the desk clerk to greet me with this exact statement:

Unidentified Woman (Actress): A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Bingham.

BIANCULLI: We'll hear from Jason Reitman, the director of "Up in the
Air" after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Our final guest in today's best director Oscar fest is Jason
Reitman, nominated for his movie adaptation of Walter Kirn's book "Up in
the Air." Terry spoke with Jason Reitman last year.

The movie stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a man who gets hired by
corporations to deliver the bad news to employees who are about to be
laid off. This potentially depressing job requires lots of travel, but
rather than being depressed by that too, Ryan loves to fly. And he
loves, especially, to rack up frequent flyer miles and all the perks
that come with them. His goal in the film is to pass the 10 million mile
mark.

In this scene, George Clooney, as Ryan, is at a hotel bar flirting with
a fellow business traveler played by Vera Farmiga. They're comparing
their elite status cards from airlines, hotels and car rental agencies.

(Soundbite of movie, “Up in the Air”)

Mr. CLOONEY (Actor): (As Bingham) Oh, Maplewood card. How dare you bring
that into this palace?

Ms. VERA FARMIGA (Actor): (As Alex Goran) Hilton offers equal value and
better food, but the Maplewood gives out more cookies at check-in.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) Oh, they got you with the cookies, did they?

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) I'm a sucker for simulated hospitality.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) You know, there's an industry term for that.
It's a mixture of faux and homey: fauxmey(ph).

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) Oh my God. I wasn't sure this actually existed.
This is the American Airlines...

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) It's a concierge key, yeah.

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) What is that, carbon fiber?

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) Graphite.

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) Oh, God, I love the weight.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) I was pretty excited the day that bad boy came
in.

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) Yeah, I'll say. I put up pretty pedestrian
numbers, like 60 thou a year domestic.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) It's not bad.

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) Don't patronize me. What's your total?

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) It's a personal question.

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) Oh, please.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham) And we hardly know each other.

Ms. FARMIGA: (As Goran) Oh come on, show some hubris. Come on, impress
me. I'll bet it's huge.

Mr. CLOONEY: (As Bingham): You have no idea.

TERRY GROSS: Jason Reitman, welcome back to FRESH AIR. There's a scene
at the beginning of the film that I really love. It's the first time
George Clooney is at the airport, and he goes through the whole ritual.
And you photograph it so ritualistically: the collapsing of the handle
on the carry-on luggage so it can be put on the, you know, security
conveyor belt and then, you know, slipping off of his shoes, putting
them in the little box, putting his shoes back on. Can you talk about
shooting that to get a ritualistic flavor from it?

Mr. JASON REITMAN (Director): Well, certainly. I choreographed all of
the way that George packed his luggage and the way he went through
security. I was very specific about the kind of Tetris of how that all
works. And we were the first movie to ever shoot in the real TSA.
Normally, if you see a film that has a scene of a person going through a
security checkpoint, they just threw up a metal detector in a hotel
hallway or at a convention center hallway, and we were the first film to
be allowed to shoot in the real thing.

It was actually very tricky to shoot. I choreographed every single shot.
I storyboarded it out. We went out to the security checkpoint at Lambert
Field in St. Louis, and we did a trial run, where I shot the whole thing
on video, edited it together, refined it again and then – because we
were given basically a slot, from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m., when there were
no passenger going through, where they basically closed down one side of
security and let us use the other. And it’s actually the hardest night
of shooting I've ever done.

GROSS: What kind of lighting did you want? I mean, the lighting in
airports and airplanes tends not to be very flattering.

Mr. REITMAN: Well, look – I think actually, particularly in modern
airports, there is some beautiful, atrium-style lighting. Often, you get
these giant windows, and if you're there at the right time of day, light
will kind of cut across the entire airport, sending these giant shadows
and, you know, beautiful colors that are coming off of the horizon. So –
and then other times, you are in these dank, fluorescent-lit holes, and
you feel like a prisoner. So we wanted to create an arc over the course
of the entire film, where at the beginning of the film, the world is
beautiful, and we are seeing Ryan's version of air world. The lighting
is, there's a lot of half-light, there's a lot of contrast, there's a
lot of muted colors and tones. We used a lot of wide angles and moving
camera. Even the extras were picked because they were kind of more fit
and more attractive, and they were – you know, we tailored their clothes
better. The production design, there was not a scuff on anything.
Everything was shiny and perfect. And over the course of the film, the
colors became warmer, and the shooting became more handheld and long-
lens, and the film stock was grainier, and even the extras were picked
because they were sloppier.

GROSS: You also have some great aerial shots of what you'd see from
flying in a plane. How did you get those?

Mr. REITMAN: Well, you know, I wanted to see the world from two
perspectives: one from 20,000 feet in the air, and the other one, the
world is two inches away from your face and nothing really in between.
So the trick is to get footage from that high up. You know, normally
when you see aerial footage in a film, it's done at 5,000 feet up, which
is helicopter height. No one shoots from up in the sky the way you see
outside a plane when you're up, actually up there.

And I figured, you know, we'd just throw a plane up and point a camera
down, and it would be as simple as that, but it was a lot trickier, in
fact. We tried once with a jet, with a camera shooting down through a
little glass dome, but the atmosphere was wrong, and the film grain was
wrong, and the optics weren't quite good enough. So we went back up with
a propeller plane, but to get it that high, the pilots had to wear
oxygen masks, and this time, we put a digital camera on the wing. And
then if you can imagine this, the camera would only go down, let's say,
75 degrees. It wouldn't go down 90 degrees to point straight down. So to
get it to go straight down, they would then put the plane into a dive,
and that is how we got straight-down footage.

GROSS: People are really curious about, like, how product placement
works in movies now. Where, like, you see a certain brand of product,
and what happens often is that the that company has paid to have their
product in the movie. Now I know that American Airlines has kind of
partnered with you on the movie and that they let you use some of their
facilities. Is that a product placement thing or something different?

Mr. REITMAN: Well, American Airlines actually gave us no money. What we
did was - it was a bit of a trade - that they gave us access to their
gates and their checking counters. They even flew in a 757 for us to fly
on, which is unheard of. When you shoot a plane in a movie, you’re
always on what's called a mock-up, which is fuselage that's on a stage
and we were shooting on an actual plane half the time. And in trade, you
know, Ryan exclusively flies American.

I thought a lot about this because I'm as sensitive as any one else is
to product placement in the film, and I really did not want my film to
come off as some sort of shill. But the truth is, Ryan’s greatest friend
on Earth is his airline. He knows American and Hertz and Hilton closer
than he knows any individual person, because I had the choice to
actually make it fictitious. But if it was a fictitious named airline
like Sunshine Airlines or something like this, all of a sudden the movie
is a satire, it doesn’t take place in the real world, and I wanted this
film to be set in reality. And American ended up being this wonderful
partner to us. I mean, one, you know, they flew was everywhere we shot.
They gave us the chance to create a sense of reality.

GROSS: The downside of them flying you everywhere is you probably got no
miles for those flights.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. REITMAN: You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly right. The
frustration of getting free flights is you don’t get miles. And one of
the reasons I don’t use my miles to travel is when you use your miles to
travel, you don’t get miles.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: That's right.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Oh, boy.

BIANCULLI: Jason Reitman, speaking to Terry Gross last year. He and all
the other best director nominees will learn their Oscar fates when ABC
televises the Academy Awards Sunday night.

(Soundbite of song, "This Land Is Your Land")

BIANCULLI: You can find interview highlights with all five best
directors as well as other Oscar coverage at our Web site at
freshair.npr.org.

For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: On the next FRESH AIR, we meet professor, writer, and former
dominatrix Melissa Febos.

Professor MELISSA FEBOS (Author, "Whip Smart"): People are actually
surprised. I did another interview, recently, where the interviewer ask
me where my favorite boutiques for shopping for equipment were - and
actually Home Depot was one of my favorite outlets.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BIANCULLI: Her new memoir is "Whip Smart."

Join us.

(Soundbite of music)
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