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“A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman” featured at the 2012 TOKYO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF) in the World Cinema category.

This 3D animated dramedy, loosely based on Chapman’s autobiography, was directed by a triumvirate of directors Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett, and produced by London company Bill and Ben Productions. Although not a Python film in essence, it does feature all but one of the remaining Pythons (Idle being absent). Making use of Chapman’s own recorded voice before he passed away from cancer, the film used 14 animation companies, and welcomed collaboration not only from the Pythons but also from the likes of Cameron Diaz cameoing hilariously as Sigmund Freud’s voice.

A rollercoaster of diverse animation styles following extracts from Chapman’s memoirs, the film takes you on a very up and down journey, sometimes tragic and sombre, sometimes laugh-out-loud bonkers.

In the Japanese press screening, everyone for the most part kept very quiet throughout the film, with only myself and one other foreign press member caught several times giggling and spluttering. Loaded with comedy sex scenes, commentaries on homosexuality, and giant phalluses floating around the screen – all in 3D, mind you – it left me wondering how the Japanese were going to receive this one. It turns out that it wasn’t with disgust or disdain that silence prevailed in the theatre, but more a sense of awe which had struck the press population. It certainly kept them all awake – always handy during a film festival.

I meet one of the three directors Ben Timlett at a festival party and get chatting about all things Python and Tokyo. It turns into another great excuse to explore the city and bond with a fellow Brit over tea purchased from a conbini in the wee hours of the morning when nothing else is open. This interview, however, took place in an actual office – well a room with fake walls.

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So, tell me how you know your colleague Bill Jones and how you got into film.

Basically, I grew up with Bill jones, who is Terry Jones’ son. We met when we were 4 and we instantly became Bill and Ben, so we were lucky to be surrounded by film, which was influencing us as we grew up. Bill had many au pairs – he was a bit richer than my parents and it was brilliant for my parents to just leave me and my brother (me mostly) with Bill’s au pair. So I spent a lot of time at the Jones’ over the years. And all our families would go on holiday together. So, we’re very close

So it wasn’t an intimidated thought at all to go into film?

It’s hard not to be influenced by it. Bill’s dad feels a bit guilty about that. My brother is an academic, and he’s always more interested in what my brother has to say! No, I’m just being modest… I think in a sense, he feels better about my brother doing something else. And Bill’s sister Sally is an artist, so they did other things. But yeah, Bill and I found our way into film

How important do you think it is to the filmmaking process to have chemistry, not just in friendship, but on the production side of things and when you’re working with people on set?

It’s a really important part of it. There’s a professional etiquette that goes across the whole crew. You don’t necessarily have to ‘click’ but you can get the work done. When you’re working creatively as a creative team, you need to get on, you need to be bringing stuff to it, and be respecting each other.

So, you grew up together and started making films together. What kind of films were you into?

As kids, we grew up making mostly pastiches of stuff like “Alien” and “Predator.”

Ah, YouTube wasn’t around then – what a shame…

Yeah, we were definitely influenced by all that shlock stuff – anything violent with guns, one-liners…

Do you still make any parodies, these days?

No, but our greatest achievement as teenagers was when at 15. We made a film all our mates were in. Just when wheelie bins arrived, we made a film called “Attack of the Wheelie Bins” and it was a huge hit with our mates! We had a big premiere at Bill’s house. I subsequently heard that people had copied it and were showing it in Oxford – someone said they’d seen it at an Oxford film club…

The guy I made that with a guy called Matt Baker actually works for the company HanWay and works for Jeremy Thomas now, so he’s a proper filmmaker – the real deal.

Looking at the films you’ve worked on, you seem to have a real passion for music, but are you more into film these days?

It’s difficult for me to talk about my passion for music. I lucked in to working on a couple of really interesting music documentaries. It was purely just by chance that I got the opportunity to work on them. The reality of it was that the punk stuff was something I learned far more about while making the films, and that was the most exciting thing. It’s not like I thought I knew everything – actually very little in reality, I discovered. It was a brilliant opportunity. That’s the great thing about documentary: if you think you know a lot about it, then you’re probably the wrong person. Sometimes you can really discover a subject and delve deeply into it, without necessarily having to be a world expert.

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Moving on to the subject of Python, it’d be difficult to do all the work you’ve done without having some love of Python, but has doing the TV series and the film led you to discover elements of Python that you hadn’t noticed before?

Absolutely. I can’t really define it. It’s culturally definitely part of Bill, and it’s culturally part of me, throughout our lives. When I started doing the documentary series, I didn’t watch all the original TV series, I tried to stay a little bit separated from it. It’s funny because my editor at the time watched everything and I really wanted to see what she picked out and what stuff appealed to her. And we did that with the other editor as well. Sometimes that’s much more interesting. I had the things I remember and grew up with, but it was much more interesting because she picked things I wouldn’t pick out.

How would you explain to people not in the know what made Python so groundbreaking, and it represented a unique period of British comedy history?

It’s the fact that it’s just so silly at times – that can appeal to anyone. That’s why Benny Hill is a huge success in so many different countries. What the Python’s managed to is to inject some very clever intellectual, political views in some ways. In fact it was apolitical, not political, but they managed to make a point with it and that is the hardest thing of all. If you can make people laugh until they cry and make a point, you’re doing something exceptional. I think “Life of Brian” is the greatest achievement of that. But the only other film which I love that much that makes a point is “Trading Places” because it has a point to make but it was so funny and so clever. I think it’s the hardest thing to do, and they pulled it off.

Your new film “A Liar’s Autobiography” based on Graham Chapman’s memoirs is already raising some eyebrows even among the press. In the production process, was there ever a moment when you felt the film had gone too far?

I wanted to push it! The moment it went too far was when my wife censored it. She’d had enough. When she watched a version in animatic form where the composers John Greswell and Christopher Taylor had done their temp version of “Sit On My Face” for the scene we scripted where the moustachioed cleaner bursts into the room and sings, he sang in their version “Sit on my face, baby Jesus,” and my wife being a Catholic said, “That’s it!” So we gave her a credit on the film as “religious advisor.”

So that was your moral line at that point!

It got a 15 rating in the UK. What people don’t realise is it’s a box-ticking exercise and actually there isn’t that much if you do the box-ticking. It also got an R rating in America. It’s funny, I had a big debate with an American who said it would only get NC17 and that we’d never be able to get it as an R, but I said, “Listen: it’s just box-ticking.” And it got an R rating. Maybe it’s just how it makes you feel at the end of it!

I love how Cameron Diaz is the voice of Sigmund Freud. She has a big passion for Python, but how did this come about?

We had the idea of having a gratuitous guest star arrive in the voice of Sigmund Freud, and I thought wouldn’t it be funny if it was Al Pacino, but then Bill reminded me that Cameron wanted to do the TV series but the schedules didn’t meet. So we wrote her an email and she said yes!

That’s really impressive. And how did the Americans react when you told them you got Cameron Diaz?

They were happy! She was great and she really threw herself into it. She got the joke, and I love it throwing off the audience.

Getting to the production side of the film, you had to coordinate a lot of animation for the film.

My animation producer is Justin Weyers, who’s a small Australian who doesn’t sleep – and that came into great effect when he was dealing with the film. He was just amazing, because not only was he having to deal with the fact that all these companies use different processes, he was also effectively training them to make their work in 3D. He was just incredible, the amount of work he put in. And then I remember him telling us he wanted to do a section. He was overseeing all the companies for us, but then he also wanted himself to do a part of the film, so he did “Biggles.” I think it almost killed him – he took on too much, he admitted it. He’s incredibly talented.

What would you say to the Japanese audiences who may possibly feel overwhelmed by the visual content?

Well, I’ve watched some anime that is more overwhelming than this! I’d be very interested to see how it squares up against what I remember watching as a kid…

And what would you say to fans of Python who will see this film?

The first thing to remember is that this is not a Python film, it’s a Graham Chapman film – it’s his writing, his performance, his narration. And I think the main thing is to just sit back and enjoy it.

And there’s a lot to learn about him through the film as well, about his alcoholism and homosexuality…

It’s all in there, in a sense. He’s constantly trying to self-psychoanalyse himself. That’s all the Freud stuff, and that’s why the psychiatrist keeps turning up at the end. He’s basically struggling to work out who he is, and I think he did his whole life. And there are certain things which are just props to avoid people finding out.

There are different layers in the film, definitely…

Yes, just like there were different layers to him. His pipe was a layer – it was a way of avoiding being asked difficult questions, of looking intelligent.

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What message of advice would you pass on to filmmakers based on your experience?

In my limited experience, I’d say keep making stuff, don’t sit in your bedroom for 2 or 3 years writing your greatest screenplay, keep making shorts, keep doing things, keep editing – it’s the only way to learn.

People I’ve seen who’ve really grown into filmmakers are the ones who just every year do 2 or 3 things whether they’re small or big, on their own dime sometimes. And try not to get caught up in finding funding for your short or that nonsense – just try to do 2 or 3 things a year. And collaborate as well.

 

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“What Maisie Knew” is an American film featuring in the 2012 competition section of TOKYO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF). Alongside the stellar lineup of Julianne Moore (“Susanna”), Alexander Skarsgard (“Lincoln”), Steve Coogan (“Beale”) and Joanna Vanderham (“Margo”), the eponymous Maisie is played by then 6-year-old Onata Aprile who is immensely talented and highly watchable with her natural flair for acting.

Reviewed positively at Toronto International Film Festival, this was a film on my hit list, if only to witness ‘Julianne Moore – the rock star.’ What greeted me was an astonishingly delicate and rich story of a young girl growing up while her divorced parents simultaneously tear each other apart, each on a collision course of self-destruction, in the process forgetting about the child and anyone else in their path. Based loosely on the Henry James novel of the same title (originating in 1897), it’s a beautifully crafted piece, generously giving screen time to all central characters, while sufficiently mindful of retaining the point of view of the perpetually ignored Maisie who with very little dialogue manages to steal the show effortlessly with great subtlety of expression and intensity of presence. There’s a real onscreen battle between Moore and Aprile as mother and daughter struggle to connect even in the intimate scenes with only the two of them, the filmmakers throwing us right from the start into the crater of the parents’ dysfunctional relationship of convenience in order to lay the groundwork for the push-pull relationship between mother and daughter.

It’s not every day that you see a film so sensitively shot and perfectly cast. Although Moore has been praised and dismissed in equal measure for her portrayal of the rock star mum, she smashes the part, capitalising on every look, gesture and line, successfully balancing herself between the obnoxious adrenalin-junkie creative and the damaged soul who has found a way to bury her feelings for her daughter and everyone else, at least until the final stage of the movie. Skarsgard is perfect as the doting Lincoln who takes Maisie under his wing, an unconscious act which sparks fireworks with his controlling rockstar wife, as is Scottish actress Vanderham who plays the naïve but well-meaning nanny. Coogan can do no wrong as the enigmatic father who continues to break Maisie’s heart with empty promises but who gives way to the more vibrant and morally-driven characters as the story moves on.

What is particularly delightful is how the camera focuses less and less on the adults and shifts more towards the child’s perspective during the course of the film, so that by the time we reach a critical point in the mother-daughter relationship, we are fully engaged and rooting for Maisie to find whatever safe way possible for her to survive and not wholly lose her innocence.

Praised in the press conference by the co-directors, Aprile turned out to be an actress of great natural initiative and sensitivity. Over the period of the 7-week shoot, she barely had time off, the directors referring to her as a “gift” given her positive attitude and high energy.

Meeting Scott and David at a TIFF party, we get chatting immediately about Tokyo and the film. They have a real passion for Japan, and it turns out that Scott once lived in Shiga back in high school and still speaks Japanese. After some jaunting around the city including a trip up the landmark Tokyo Tower, we manage to take some time out for some serious film talk.

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So how did you get into film?

SCOTT: David was first a friend of my sister Kelly. After he finished his architecture degree, he was trying to decide what to do with his life and took art classes, then met Kelly. We became pals – he would be round the house during holiday times and vice versa.

DAVID: Then I went off to do an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Scott started grad school at Berkeley, where he was doing Japanese film studies in the Rhetoric Department. When I was finishing my degree and he was finishing his MA, we were both feeling a bit at a loose end and cooked up the idea of making a short film. And Kelly has designed all our work apart from “Uncertainty” and still works with us. We’re self-taught filmmakers – we taught ourselves how to do it and just figured out our own process together, which is the reason why we share the credits. We’re more technical than a lot of directors, I think because there weren’t pipelines for us to fit in. We had to learn it a little bit more from the ground up.

SCOTT: We’re more technical in a more rudimentary way in that we started out making 16mm films, we learned the craft of building a film and what all the jobs are on set by having to do everything ourselves.

Do you think the way you learned your craft has made you better directors?

SCOTT: I think we both think it helps us do our job.

DAVID: Every director knows how to do all the things that we do. There’s just the anxiety of not being connected to any community. We were based in the San Francisco bay area for a long time and there’s not much of a filmmaking community there – there’s a documentary community, but we didn’t wind up having any filmmaking friends living there, so it felt very isolating.

SCOTT: I think that’s why people go to film school – they come out of school with a whole bunch of filmmaking friends, but we didn’t have that, we just had each other.

But you’ve worked on a lot of projects, even so…

SCOTT: It really depends on your perspective. If you look at what we wished we’d done, we feel like big failures!

DAVID: I mean, the many movies we spent years on that didn’t come into fruition…

SCOTT: Or you look at someone with a really productive career, like Michael Winterbottom or Steven Soderbergh who really crank out material, we look at those careers with a lot of envy…

DAVID: Money, money, money…

That’s a big factor…

SCOTT: Always

Did that ever put you off from going into features? Did you ever have moments of panic?

SCOTT: It always seems like you can’t make it happen. Even when you’re on set, you always feel like it’s about to fall apart. It’s a very precarious business.

In those moments, how do you reassure each other?

SCOTT: I don’t know if we have a routine, but that’s one of the times when it’s really helpful to have each other because things get really dicey a lot. On this film in particular, all the way through production and post, we had huge problems.

DAVID: We had huge hurdles to overcome. On this movie, it’s unthinkable to have gone through what we had to go through on our own – it would have been awful. It’s interesting, Scott often talks about filmmaking being collaborative, but a directing job is a very forward-motion job. You have to be vulnerable to another person in a particular kind of way, you have to be willing to let go of things.

Scott and I made a rule early on in our work together which has really helped us through, which was that if we had a problem or differing opinions about a particular thing we were trying to do and we’d spent enough time talking it through but were still disagreeing, we would never play tit for tat and we would always look for a third way – and we hold to that really strictly. Probably 8 out of 10 times, the third route is the better route than either of the original ideas. We just have to both be able to believe in it, so in those moments, you have to let go of something. And there have been some moments where each of us don’t want to let go of that, but we don’t even think about it anymore.

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So you guys clearly have a chemistry. In terms of this film, there’s a sense of chemistry going on even on the screen. How important is chemistry not just on the production side but on the set, working with the actors?

SCOTT: It’s huge – it’s everything. I know there are times when actors hate each other and manage to portray love – they’re actors and they’re good at faking things. But especially with a movie like this, when you’re working with a 6-year-old girl, a lot of what you’re seeing has to be honest. Alexander Skarsgard made a point of bonding with Onata Aprile who plays Maisie, because we all knew that relationship was the emotional core of the movie and it needed that kind of trust and connection – what you’re seeing is very honest.

Similarly, in our previous film “Uncertainty,” we spent a month rehearsing with Joe Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins, the 2 actors in that film. It was an improvisational film, so they had to learn to trust each other and understand each other’s history as people who have known each other for a long time would. We spent a month rehearsing with them just to build a relationship.

You mentioned in the press conference that Julianne Moore joined the project quite late in the day and it’s normally difficult to create chemistry on set when that happens, but that she’s so professional and talented that she was right there and ready engage straight away…

SCOTT: And maybe one nice thing about her character in this situation is that she was the person who people are afraid of – her daughter’s afraid of her, her boyfriend’s afraid of her, her husband’s afraid of her, the nanny’s afraid of her – so the fact that she was an intimidating presence worked as an advantage for us.

And you said she didn’t have much time to bond with Onata?

DAVID: And they didn’t ever really bond especially. I mean, Julie liked Onata and Onata liked Julie but that wasn’t a relationship. And it was interesting because it kind of followed from the film – she loves her daughter but in a way she loves herself a little bit more.

I mean, she’s not a deplorable character – I was actually wondered how far you would push it with her character, if you’d have her throwing things, if there would be a slap…

DAVID: The script and the material that got shot actually took her a couple of steps further than is in the movie, but we started feeling like we were losing credibility with the character, that people were just going to reject her, that we were going too far, that she just seemed like an unbelievable character.

SCOTT: And it’s important for the balance of the movie that you do see she intends to be a good mother but she’s just not really capable of it, that she does love her daughter, and her daughter loves her. There’s a strong bond between them, but it’s just not that maternal.

I guess if you made her too difficult a person, then you can’t understand why Maisie’s conflicted – you needed to have her somehow likeable…

DAVID: The movie’s full of those little moments like that. In the scene when she gets taken home by the waitress when Lincoln isn’t at the restaurant, when she parts the curtain and the waitress comes over, as written, Maisie is supposed to have more of a breakdown. But as talented as Onata is, being able to emote like that, like bursting into tears and being upset, isn’t really realistic. So we played with that scene quite a bit in terms of shooting. And in the end when we were cutting it, that was another scene where if we go too far with it, the audience is going to reject all the adults’ complicity in the story at that point and not accept the redemption that happens at the end of the film. You’d want to call in child services because it’s gone too far.

The scene towards the end between Julianne and Onata, where the light bulb goes off in Susanna and she realises she’s gone too far and that her daughter’s afraid of her, you’ve commented that a lot of the magic of that scene was thanks to Onata’s acting talent…

DAVID: We rewrote that scene at the eleventh hour with Julie, because we weren’t happy with the way it was scripted initially. Scott and I had played with it on our own, but the three of us sat down and started thinking about what to do with the scene. It was Julie’s idea to concretise this idea of fear and to make it about fear. We loved that idea, so went with it and cobbled together the dialogue part of it. To me, the dialogue is sort of unimportant beyond that very idea. Onata thought in that scene that she should become more emotional, so when we were shooting it, trying to get her to simply react physically to Julie was kind of the trick on the night, and that is the kind of thing Onata is quite good at.

We go to Onata twice when Susanna comes back to her: there’s a slightly wider shot and there’s a slightly closer shot – and in the slightly closer shot, Onata moves about just 2 or 3 inches and Susanna asks her, “Are you afraid of me?” and then we cut back to Maisie. There’s literally just a small movement, and actually that sells the entire thing. In everything we’ve done, nothing has ever been quite that subtle and had quite that huge an emotional effect.

SCOTT: It was to explain what it is that Susanna sees that allows her to turn – what she can see in what Maisie’s doing that will affect her emotionally so that she can then change her course.

Was Julie channelling any musicians for her role?

DAVID: We actually brought Alison Mosshart from The Kills to the table. Julie sings 2 of their songs. Alison was the stylistic benchmark – but she’s younger than Julie…

SCOTT: …and she’s not a mother… I’m sure if she were, she’d be a great mother! She’s really, really nice. Julie didn’t base the character on Alison’s personality… Before we started shooting, we took Julie, Alexander and Steve Coogan to a Kills concert – they happened to be coming to New York at just the right time. Julie watched her onstage, then I think they became pals.

Julianne Moore as a rock star – it’s a great idea. You could have really pushed it in terms of her homelife with the smoking and drinking, but again you seemed cautious not to go too far…

SCOTT: You want people to be able to connect enough.

DAVID: And we also wanted the rock star stuff to be the background that it is. We’re super allergic to the fakeness of that kind of stuff in movies – we really wanted it to feel authentic, to feel like it’s just the background of their lives.

The title of the movie comes from the title of the Henry James novel, but what do you feel the title refers to in this film version, in your own minds?

SCOTT: I guess just in a superficial way, it’s the structure of the storytelling – the scenes you see are Maisie’s experience and that’s the limit of our presentation of these events. You see what Maisie knew in the situation, that’s what makes up the story.

DAVID: I’m not sure the tense is exactly right for our movie. It’s more right for James because it takes place over a much longer period of time. In our film, it’s more like what Maisie “sees.” But it was the idea of trying to convey the experience of the kid that caught our attention in terms of wanting to do it – it’s less about the story and more about the experience.

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Do you have a message for independent filmmakers who want to learn the filmmaking craft from the ground up as you did?

SCOTT: I’m afraid we’re in no position to give advice – I wish we were!

Anything you wish you’d known when you started out?

DAVID: This sounds so clichéd, but when we were starting out, I really appreciated hearing filmmakers like Coppola and Scorsese talk about their young days – they’d say the most important thing was simply to make the work and find a way to make things. And I still think that’s the most salient advice you can give someone: Don’t keep thinking about things, actually go out and make them.

SCOTT: And that’s still advice we have to give ourselves all the time: If you’re making films because you like the result, it’s a really frustrating business or pastime, but if you’re making films because you like the process of what that is, then it’s a really exciting thing to be doing.

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