Relaxing on a plush couch in a ritzy hotel just off the Sunset Strip, Thomas Vinterberg looks more like the new cast member on “Ally McBeal” than the rebel filmmaker who caused a stir last spring at Cannes by loudly proclaiming the virtues of the cinematic manifesto Dogma 95.
Drawn up by a collective of Danish directors three years ago, the document was promoted as a “rescue operation to counter certain tendencies in film today,” including the auteur concept, special effects, makeup, false lighting and dramaturgical predictability. Dogma 95’s 10-point “Vow of Chastity” was put forward at the festival alongside Vinterberg’s prize-winning black comedy “The Celebration” and Lars von Trier’s “Idiots.”
Although a similar edict might not have raised a ripple of interest if it were composed in a TriBeCa coffee house, it piqued the interest of critics at the festival who were desperate for something to write about besides the tired hype surrounding such American duds as “Primary Colors” and “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.” So far as anyone knows, Dogma 95’s tenets have yet to be endorsed anywhere west, south or east of Copenhagen.
With the arrival of “The Celebration” on these shores — accompanied by mostly glowing reviews — art-house audiences finally will get a chance to see one of the pictures that caused all the fuss. In fact, if anything, it mostly resembles the kind of lean, often improvisational exercises–one minute hysterically funny, the next merely hysterical–championed by John Cassavetes and other underfinanced American independent filmmakers in the ’60s and early ’70s.
After six months of defending Dogma 95, you’d think Vinterberg would have tired of the subject by now. But, he asserts, with a twinkle in his blue eyes, “I’m here as a missionary for the Dogma church. I’m glad to tell about it.”
The 29-year-old director says he’s “quite conscious” of Cassavetes’ work, “But I was thinking more about Nicolas Roeg, Coppola and Bergman. In Denmark, there is this wave of improvisation, and I’m a bit tired of it . . . because a lot of what the actors say is nonsense. I kind of miss the respect for the written word.”
“The Celebration,” scripted by Vinterberg and Danish film teacher Mogens Rukov, describes the insanity that ensues at a reunion when Christian, the prodigal son of a wealthy businessman, opens the vault on his family’s sordid secrets during a series of toasts. The patriarch and his wife are shaken, Christian’s slightly demented siblings angrily debate his charges, the guests are stunned and the kitchen help plots further mayhem.
Adhering to the principles of Dogma 95–with a few acknowledged lapses that had to be forgiven before winning a certificate of approval from “the brothers”–“The Celebration” attains its gritty, realistic feel thanks, in part, to the use of a hand-held, $1,700 Sony PC-7 video camera, natural lighting and sets, and minimal editing. Although the party scenes often seem improvised and drawn from the actors’ real-life experiences, Vinterberg insists that they largely stuck to the screenwriters’ words and merely supplied realistic reactions to them.
“This was more about seeking the truth of the moment within the frames of fiction,” he explained. “There’s still a script, and these are still actors performing something. But this is about trying to catch the moment, so that what you see on screen is what actually took place while shooting.
“This is not an effort to make realism. It’s an effort to come closer to the flesh and blood on the screen.”
Dogma 95 allowed Vinterberg to shoot several takes of the same scene, while the unobtrusive camera–the size of a paperback book–opened up the set for the actors, allowing them to play against each other, instead of the cinematographer.
“There are these 10 rules, or vows, and everything outside of them is allowed,” the director allowed. “The limitation to editing is that when you cut the film, you must cut the sound, as well. You cannot have sound from one take and add it to another.
“What you see and what you hear are what took place.”
Of course, he cautioned, “You can say you’re back to manipulating, especially in this case, because I had 60 hours of material–I could make every film I wanted from it. But, actually, it allowed me to come even closer to what was going on during that scene on that particular day.”
Although he insists that the collective was in earnest when it came up with the manifesto, you don’t have to dig too far below the surface to find Vinterberg’s sense of humor, and a more realistic take on Dogma 95.
“First of all, we were trying to avoid the laziness of the studio films, and European mediocrity,” he explained. “We were trying to make a renewal . . . trying to avoid all these layers of makeup, artificial light, strings on the soundtrack and stuff like that . . . come back to the basics of filmmaking. Dogma 95 is a reaction to all the things filmmakers automatically do.”
He said he liked “Titanic” because “It was so enormous and so fluffy, so overwhelming and huge. My film is just all the way in another direction. . . . It was actually a very great relief and very great liberation to make these rules, and, of course, a lot of fun. Yet, at the same time, we felt very serious about it.”
Naturally, it helps that Danish filmmakers can take advantage of state subsidies and some private investors are willing to go along with Dogma 95’s reluctance to shop around their scripts.
“This allows us to make experiments and helps create some courage, because we’re not relying on commercial success at the box office,” said Vinterberg, after suggesting that his next project probably won’t be produced under the collective’s banner. “The irony is that this film is a box-office success in Denmark, right next to `Titanic.’ That’s a great relief.
“In Denmark, it’s much easier to be an independent.”
AN OLD PROBLEM
As if the recent Riley Weston scandal needed any further amplification, a study commissioned by the West Coast branch of the Writers Guild of America now shows that the percentage of work available to Hollywood’s older scribes is declining.
The 32-year-old actor’s assertion that she had to pose as a teenager to land writing gigs with “Felicity” and Disney was partially borne out in the survey, which found that, while 7 in 10 TV and film writers under age 30 had jobs in 1997, fewer than 1 in 3 writers 50 and above found similar work (although those who did were better paid). Ten years ago, nearly half of the guild writers in their 50s were employed.
About 77 TV series last season had no writers over 50, with several prime-time shows (“Friends,” “Veronica’s Closet”) having none over 40.
In the ’90s, the study notes that the huge pay gap between white males and women and minorities has nearly closed–more so in television than film–even though the percentage of women writers in film and TV has not increased since 1991 (23 percent) and minority writers still make up between 5 and 7 percent of active writers.
The WB, UPN and Fox now do a much better job hiring minority writers than do the older networks, but 80 percent of the 168 TV series analyzed in the study had one or no minority representatives in the past season. Women were virtually shut out of such popular shows as “Frasier,” “The X-Files,” “Politically Incorrect” and “The Tonight Show.”
