At the movies, Tarsem Singh is best known for edgy, darkly visual thrillers like The Cell and Immortals. For fans of those movies, the family friendly fairy tale Mirror Mirror seems like a left turn. For Signh it is not.
The director won acclaim for his music videos and industry clout for his commercial work. Notable videos include R.E.M.s Losing My Religion. In his commercials, you wouldnt know Singh was there because its all about the clients product.Mirror Mirror is a new version of the Snow White fairy tale, the first of two with Snow White and the Huntsman coming this summer. Singhs version is a traditional costume fantasy, albeit with his own unique visuals and a feminist twist. This Snow White (Lily Collins) saves Prince Charming (Armie Hammer) with HER kiss instead of vice versa. She also becomes a kick ass heroine with the seven dwarves. Snow sings a Bollywood style musical number over the end titles. Julia Roberts plays the evil queen, who actually enters the mirror into an alternate realm where her reflection cautions her against evil magic.
On the press circuit with his stars, Singh has been revealing he did not intend to make four visual movies, and that he had some ideas about stepmothers he could not fit into the movie. So when we had a chance to speak with him privately over the phone, we were able to ask him to elaborate personally on the ideas in his latest film.
SuicideGirls: What is the hardest thing about achieving your visual style?
Tarsem Singh: Hmm. Hmm. Thats a bloody loaded question. Okay. Well, if it isnt material thats generated from me and its coming from somebody else, the hardest thing is to tell the guy that I cant show you what I mean right now but can I show it to you later? Usually when youre writing, when the script is everything, people can write it and show you what they mean. They can draw it. I cant illustrate. All I can do is talk about a tone and say, Okay, I get it. This is hardcore and going to be violent or No, this is a family film. Id like it to be charming. Things like that dont translate as easily as scripts or straight storytelling does. When the stuff is visual, unless you have something like a 500 lb. gorilla like Julia Roberts on your side who will just say, Let the man do what he wants, its difficult. Id say its a tough one. You just dance and hope nobody notices when youre tripping up.
SG: How about in the execution from your head to what appears on screen?
TS: Thats what I live for. That would be like saying, So how do you breathe? If I could define it I think I might stop breathing. Its usually very far flung. Its usually taking an idea and just saying, Well, this is the entrance of the idea. We meet the queen, shes kind of using people like pawns but I dont want it to be chess. So what can we do thats fun to make? Then we sit down and somebody says, Well, they can be playing some sort of a square game, blah blah blah blah blah. They could be playing BattleShip. Okay, Battleship with the rules of chess but the things are on peoples heads. Okay, that makes sense. Thats kind of how we throw things around because they dont come to me on paper in that form. Its just the queen saying certain things and I say, Here you could put a ball. Here you could put a stylized chess game. Here you could put that. Thats kind of what I live for.
SG: How did you develop the idea of the mirror world that she enters?
TS: Ooh, tough one. That one went all around because for me, that was the defining thing for the film for me that I just said it cant be that you just go Mirror mirror and then theres a mirror with the voice of James Earle Jones that tells you what to do. I just said you cant go there, so what do we do with it? It originally used to be that she had a sister who did all this black and everything and she didnt. I was okay with that idea too but eventually when it came down that in the mirror, I kind of sold it to myself and to Julia much more along the tone of no matter how evil a person is, no matter what they do, they always have a way of justifying what they do. To a certain extent, some people outsource their evil from themselves. It can be I heard voices, the devil made me do it, blah blah blah blah. So I said take an approach like that and think almost like a shrink thats telling you, Go ahead and do the bad things you need to do. That would be look in the mirror and theres the idealized you. Youre almost disassociating yourself from what you do so that the evil that youre going to do, you cant blame on yourself. So its literally a bit of a Freudian approach to it an split the two up and that was as good for me as having a sister that did black magic and the queen being separate. So that actually changed once we were almost on the shoot. We were always questioning what does it look like? And everybody was saying go to just the simplest one. Let her just go and talk to the mirror. I just thought no, the visual answer cant be that simple. Then literally I embraced it when literally instead of talking to the mirror she goes into the mirror and then arrives in a landscape where she has a monologue with her inner self. Once I sold that to myself and everybody bought it, then it was just a question of designing it but that was the toughest one actually. It took the longest way to get there.
SG: What was the idea of stepmothers that you wanted to include in the movie?
TS: It wasnt so much my idea but it was the original idea of Snow White before the brothers Grimm. It was always the idea that girls past a certain age should not live in the home with their parents. Its just not right so the morality tale that came out of that one, was the mother was starting to become evil to Snow White. But when the brothers Grimm came along, sensitive to the storytelling of that period they were the original studio heads. They said, No, no, no, this is not acceptable to people. Lets make her stepmother because its easier to make her evil then. I think unfortunately 200 years later, there are so many stepmothers out here and most of them are very nice. So I just think the times have turned. It wouldve been nice because I would have just had to go back instead of making the stepmother evil, it shouldnt have been a stepmother. But when you kind of define or redefine genre, theres only so many rules you want to break before it becomes not a recognizable part. You have a queen thats likeable in this particular instance, thats enough. You dont have to make the prince an ugly guy who then becomes charming. He just was a charming guy. Snow White was the purest good girl you could meet. So it was muddying the water and actually taking the stepmother element out, just because its so iconicly clear to people, as much as you show an older woman giving an apple to a young girl, anyone will tell you what that is. Thats Snow White and thats her stepmom so it was just that. It was too ingrained in the psyche to try to change. I was trying to figure out a way to change it but we never did.
SG: Its been an evil queen for so long that you cant even change it back to a stepmother.
TS: She is her stepmother. In the original one she kills the evil queen really badly. You really cant go back to those pages because peoples appetites change. Certain things that theyre okay to read in literature, they cant see visually or itd be too graphic for them. You just adapt to the times. The queen dies a really horrible death. I think they boiled some shoes they put inside a furnace and she has to dance until she dies. You show that, even in animation it wouldnt be acceptable, forget about real film. Its just that certain things people are okay to read, but if you show it to them they wouldnt. Like most people are okay to eat lamb, but if you show them a lamb being killed and they balk at the idea.
SG: Thats sort of like The Hunger Games, a very graphic book but a PG-13 movie.
TS: They would just lose the audience. They mustve done something smart because it seems to be working for a very large group of people. I havent seen the film. I intend to tonight.
SG: Was shooting the Bollywood song like doing a music video?
TS: No, for me it was very much an integral part of the film. Its just one of those things that once we did it, I had that specific song in mind. I had it exactly that as an ending. Unfortunately specifically the parents, specifically the dads would not accept it. They just said, No, this is a fairy tale, it doesnt go there. They didnt have the license in their culture to allow that in. I tried moving it here, I tried to make it look like people used to sing and dance before and they wouldnt have it. In the end, the numbers just the way the studio was showing it to me was so much more. The children loved it. They just said the problem is they come with parents and if the parents dont talk to each other and say, Its a good movie, it wont work and its only harming us. So we took it out. And in the end, when the international people saw it, they said, In our culture it works because the song is not part of the titles, its part of the movie internationally. Theyve taken it out in America an at the last second I went to the studio and I said, Listen, I gave you everything you asked for. This is so much part of my DNA. Can you put it in the titles? At the last second we tried to find a pause, and in that pause I put the photographs of what the dwarves now do, which a friend of mine shot over the weekend, and they allowed me to put the song in the titles because that seems to be to a certain extent more palatable to an American audience. In the titles you can break certain rules.
SG: What part of the film would it be in in the international version?
TS: Its about three minutes before it ends. Everybody turns to look at Snow White and nobody knows what shes going to do. Is she sad, is she this? She just morosely walks into the center of it and breaks into a song and says its all right. Then everybodys amazed by her because they have not danced for 10 years and they start dancing with her.
SG: Did you want to include that because youre Indian or just a fan of those movies?
TS: No, I havent seen an Indian movie for 30 years. Ive seen one actually. So it wasnt that. I just like the spirit. The thing is you kind of make certain rules. With animation songs are probably more acceptable. Then you have musicals and then you have nonmusicals. There seems to be a rule for people and it just doesnt look like there was enough appetite for it out there. I just wanted to do it because I just really as a kid this was a song that Id heard a really kitschy Iranian version of it by a woman called Googoosh who was the original Lady Gaga in the 70s in Iran. I just said, Ive got to get this song and have Snow White sing it. Google her and look at the song. She got it from another girl called Nina Hart who sang it in the middle of a Milos Forman film [Taking Off] on the titles. Check out those two version and they could not be more far away than what I wanted but they are brilliant.
SG: Ive probably seen more Bollywood movies than you and Ive only seen a few.
TS: No, Ive seen hundreds but theyre all before 1979.
SG: Do you recommend any?
TS: Yeah, see Disco Dancer. See Sholay, the original one.
SG: Did Snow White have to become a fighting warrior in your version?
TS: She didnt have to. Thats the only piece of wardrobe that me and Eiko [Ishioka] felt we didnt really get correct because she was always supposed to end up in the Princes clothes but they didnt fit her and blah blah so we kind of ended up making this in between. It was about empowering a girl as opposed to a princess sitting there waiting for the prince to come and get you. It made sense that basically she would start raiding with them but in a Robin Hood fashion as opposed to what they wanted which is just to be rich.
SG: You pointed out that nobody says this is a poison apple but we know. There seems to be an epidemic of overexplaining in movies. Can we get back to visual understanding?
TS: You wont get that argument out of me. I get criticized for it all the time and Im like, Hey, if you can tell it visually, dont talk about it. You dont have to build it up at all. You go to anybody and if youre doing Superman, you just show this guy flying, somebody shows him a rock and he cant fly anymore, you understand thats kryptonite. Its ingrained into the psyche of most people so you dont have to have a scene where she says, Give me that poison, blah blah blah. You dont need any of that. Its wonderful when you see that with children, when theyre just getting happy for the movie ending when that comes in, they just have the air sucked out of them and theyre almost mouthing, Dont take the apple. I was just thinking, We didnt even set up the apple. They got it in two seconds.
SG: I was just worried youd forget about the apple because you already take out the part where the prince kisses her back to life.
TS: Well, we kind of had that and we thought we know where the source material comes from, why not have fun with it? I had a much bigger scene originally that I was pushing for but it just required so much more time that it didnt work.
SG: What was your scene?
TS: My thing was that she would eat the apple, like she would become disguised and Snow White would eat the apple. Now this is the original tale and I had always loved that idea, that she would eat the apple and then when she would die, everybody would tell him kiss her. He kisses her and she doesnt wake up. Then everybody looks at him really suspiciously that maybe they werent in love. Maybe he doesnt love her and Snow Whites dead. Then they pick her up and when theyre taking her away, one of the dwarves, the clumsy one trips and she falls and the apple was just stuck in her throat and comes out. So she gets up, everybodys shocked that she didnt even die, she turns and looks at the prince and thinks, Oh my God, he kissed me back to life so he must love me and she hugs him and he just tells the dwarves to shut up, Ill take the credit for it. Then they continue singing and dancing, but it was just another step that I think for a kiddie movie, this was about the time limit. We couldnt take it there.
SG: Youd said you only wanted to do three visual movies and now you have four, but why would you only want to have four visual movies?
TS: No, back to back. I think I will do more of them and I will do probably a lot more but I think now if I do one more, two more of this, best case scenario for me would be not a bad place to be. Id just end up with Tim Burtons rejects, in that area which is if it aint weird dont give it to him. So I just have to mix it up. At least this one wasnt an R-rated film so I said okay, now its good to go into that territory and then Ill wait and think if theres something that I can do because most people only know me from my work in films. I say no, I do the most conservative ads you can think of and I do really straight storytelling stories. I just havent done them yet for cinema so people think this is all I want to do. If I dont mix it up now, its not a box Ill be able to step out of. If I dont mix it up now, Ill probably be doing only visual films.
SG: Whats an example of a straight storytelling type movie?
TS: Any Haneke movie, any Kieslowski film, most Polanski films. Just straight drama that doesnt rely on the fantastic or on composition or on the grace of the image.
SG: Something that focuses on the actors?
TS: Actors, story, script. Thats not particularly right now what Ive done which is everybodys very much a pawn on what the film looks like.
SG: What is your next film?
TS: Hopefully if it happens, in the next week we will know, but its a small film about a drone attack. It would look like almost three different wars, from the people who are flying the video planes that theyre flying on monitors theyre flying from Vegas and the bombing is happening over a village in Africa that theyre trying to stop some terrorists on, the politics involved in basically giving the go ahead for a project like that. It feels like three different things but its the same war and you have such a different perspective on what the result is. For some people its going to be like something coming from the sky and wiping you out. For others its like a really tense video game and the politics is politics.
SG: What is that called?
TS: Eye in the Sky. Ill know within a week if thats happening. I hope it is.
SG: Do you have any cast attached?
TS: No, basically there are so many characters in this its going to be an ensemble which is usually easier because one great role or two great roles, you get an actor and youre off in running. This is the film.
SG: Do you still do commercials and music videos?
TS: I do commercials a lot. I did very few music videos. I just did them right out of school and then my musical taste unfortunately goes for music that probably doesnt really have an outlet. Its much more folk and classical. They dont really have any music videos for those. It was never really a job. I did music videos because I loved them and then just moved on, and I love doing advertising because I love telling short tales and learning new toys every day.
SG: So you wont be doing a video for an LMFAO song?
TS: I dont know who they are, Im so out of contemporary music.
SG: They sing a song called Sexy an I Know It.
TS: Well, that sounds good to me.
Mirror Mirror is now playing.
The director won acclaim for his music videos and industry clout for his commercial work. Notable videos include R.E.M.s Losing My Religion. In his commercials, you wouldnt know Singh was there because its all about the clients product.Mirror Mirror is a new version of the Snow White fairy tale, the first of two with Snow White and the Huntsman coming this summer. Singhs version is a traditional costume fantasy, albeit with his own unique visuals and a feminist twist. This Snow White (Lily Collins) saves Prince Charming (Armie Hammer) with HER kiss instead of vice versa. She also becomes a kick ass heroine with the seven dwarves. Snow sings a Bollywood style musical number over the end titles. Julia Roberts plays the evil queen, who actually enters the mirror into an alternate realm where her reflection cautions her against evil magic.
On the press circuit with his stars, Singh has been revealing he did not intend to make four visual movies, and that he had some ideas about stepmothers he could not fit into the movie. So when we had a chance to speak with him privately over the phone, we were able to ask him to elaborate personally on the ideas in his latest film.
SuicideGirls: What is the hardest thing about achieving your visual style?
Tarsem Singh: Hmm. Hmm. Thats a bloody loaded question. Okay. Well, if it isnt material thats generated from me and its coming from somebody else, the hardest thing is to tell the guy that I cant show you what I mean right now but can I show it to you later? Usually when youre writing, when the script is everything, people can write it and show you what they mean. They can draw it. I cant illustrate. All I can do is talk about a tone and say, Okay, I get it. This is hardcore and going to be violent or No, this is a family film. Id like it to be charming. Things like that dont translate as easily as scripts or straight storytelling does. When the stuff is visual, unless you have something like a 500 lb. gorilla like Julia Roberts on your side who will just say, Let the man do what he wants, its difficult. Id say its a tough one. You just dance and hope nobody notices when youre tripping up.
SG: How about in the execution from your head to what appears on screen?
TS: Thats what I live for. That would be like saying, So how do you breathe? If I could define it I think I might stop breathing. Its usually very far flung. Its usually taking an idea and just saying, Well, this is the entrance of the idea. We meet the queen, shes kind of using people like pawns but I dont want it to be chess. So what can we do thats fun to make? Then we sit down and somebody says, Well, they can be playing some sort of a square game, blah blah blah blah blah. They could be playing BattleShip. Okay, Battleship with the rules of chess but the things are on peoples heads. Okay, that makes sense. Thats kind of how we throw things around because they dont come to me on paper in that form. Its just the queen saying certain things and I say, Here you could put a ball. Here you could put a stylized chess game. Here you could put that. Thats kind of what I live for.
SG: How did you develop the idea of the mirror world that she enters?
TS: Ooh, tough one. That one went all around because for me, that was the defining thing for the film for me that I just said it cant be that you just go Mirror mirror and then theres a mirror with the voice of James Earle Jones that tells you what to do. I just said you cant go there, so what do we do with it? It originally used to be that she had a sister who did all this black and everything and she didnt. I was okay with that idea too but eventually when it came down that in the mirror, I kind of sold it to myself and to Julia much more along the tone of no matter how evil a person is, no matter what they do, they always have a way of justifying what they do. To a certain extent, some people outsource their evil from themselves. It can be I heard voices, the devil made me do it, blah blah blah blah. So I said take an approach like that and think almost like a shrink thats telling you, Go ahead and do the bad things you need to do. That would be look in the mirror and theres the idealized you. Youre almost disassociating yourself from what you do so that the evil that youre going to do, you cant blame on yourself. So its literally a bit of a Freudian approach to it an split the two up and that was as good for me as having a sister that did black magic and the queen being separate. So that actually changed once we were almost on the shoot. We were always questioning what does it look like? And everybody was saying go to just the simplest one. Let her just go and talk to the mirror. I just thought no, the visual answer cant be that simple. Then literally I embraced it when literally instead of talking to the mirror she goes into the mirror and then arrives in a landscape where she has a monologue with her inner self. Once I sold that to myself and everybody bought it, then it was just a question of designing it but that was the toughest one actually. It took the longest way to get there.
SG: What was the idea of stepmothers that you wanted to include in the movie?
TS: It wasnt so much my idea but it was the original idea of Snow White before the brothers Grimm. It was always the idea that girls past a certain age should not live in the home with their parents. Its just not right so the morality tale that came out of that one, was the mother was starting to become evil to Snow White. But when the brothers Grimm came along, sensitive to the storytelling of that period they were the original studio heads. They said, No, no, no, this is not acceptable to people. Lets make her stepmother because its easier to make her evil then. I think unfortunately 200 years later, there are so many stepmothers out here and most of them are very nice. So I just think the times have turned. It wouldve been nice because I would have just had to go back instead of making the stepmother evil, it shouldnt have been a stepmother. But when you kind of define or redefine genre, theres only so many rules you want to break before it becomes not a recognizable part. You have a queen thats likeable in this particular instance, thats enough. You dont have to make the prince an ugly guy who then becomes charming. He just was a charming guy. Snow White was the purest good girl you could meet. So it was muddying the water and actually taking the stepmother element out, just because its so iconicly clear to people, as much as you show an older woman giving an apple to a young girl, anyone will tell you what that is. Thats Snow White and thats her stepmom so it was just that. It was too ingrained in the psyche to try to change. I was trying to figure out a way to change it but we never did.
SG: Its been an evil queen for so long that you cant even change it back to a stepmother.
TS: She is her stepmother. In the original one she kills the evil queen really badly. You really cant go back to those pages because peoples appetites change. Certain things that theyre okay to read in literature, they cant see visually or itd be too graphic for them. You just adapt to the times. The queen dies a really horrible death. I think they boiled some shoes they put inside a furnace and she has to dance until she dies. You show that, even in animation it wouldnt be acceptable, forget about real film. Its just that certain things people are okay to read, but if you show it to them they wouldnt. Like most people are okay to eat lamb, but if you show them a lamb being killed and they balk at the idea.
SG: Thats sort of like The Hunger Games, a very graphic book but a PG-13 movie.
TS: They would just lose the audience. They mustve done something smart because it seems to be working for a very large group of people. I havent seen the film. I intend to tonight.
SG: Was shooting the Bollywood song like doing a music video?
TS: No, for me it was very much an integral part of the film. Its just one of those things that once we did it, I had that specific song in mind. I had it exactly that as an ending. Unfortunately specifically the parents, specifically the dads would not accept it. They just said, No, this is a fairy tale, it doesnt go there. They didnt have the license in their culture to allow that in. I tried moving it here, I tried to make it look like people used to sing and dance before and they wouldnt have it. In the end, the numbers just the way the studio was showing it to me was so much more. The children loved it. They just said the problem is they come with parents and if the parents dont talk to each other and say, Its a good movie, it wont work and its only harming us. So we took it out. And in the end, when the international people saw it, they said, In our culture it works because the song is not part of the titles, its part of the movie internationally. Theyve taken it out in America an at the last second I went to the studio and I said, Listen, I gave you everything you asked for. This is so much part of my DNA. Can you put it in the titles? At the last second we tried to find a pause, and in that pause I put the photographs of what the dwarves now do, which a friend of mine shot over the weekend, and they allowed me to put the song in the titles because that seems to be to a certain extent more palatable to an American audience. In the titles you can break certain rules.
SG: What part of the film would it be in in the international version?
TS: Its about three minutes before it ends. Everybody turns to look at Snow White and nobody knows what shes going to do. Is she sad, is she this? She just morosely walks into the center of it and breaks into a song and says its all right. Then everybodys amazed by her because they have not danced for 10 years and they start dancing with her.
SG: Did you want to include that because youre Indian or just a fan of those movies?
TS: No, I havent seen an Indian movie for 30 years. Ive seen one actually. So it wasnt that. I just like the spirit. The thing is you kind of make certain rules. With animation songs are probably more acceptable. Then you have musicals and then you have nonmusicals. There seems to be a rule for people and it just doesnt look like there was enough appetite for it out there. I just wanted to do it because I just really as a kid this was a song that Id heard a really kitschy Iranian version of it by a woman called Googoosh who was the original Lady Gaga in the 70s in Iran. I just said, Ive got to get this song and have Snow White sing it. Google her and look at the song. She got it from another girl called Nina Hart who sang it in the middle of a Milos Forman film [Taking Off] on the titles. Check out those two version and they could not be more far away than what I wanted but they are brilliant.
SG: Ive probably seen more Bollywood movies than you and Ive only seen a few.
TS: No, Ive seen hundreds but theyre all before 1979.
SG: Do you recommend any?
TS: Yeah, see Disco Dancer. See Sholay, the original one.
SG: Did Snow White have to become a fighting warrior in your version?
TS: She didnt have to. Thats the only piece of wardrobe that me and Eiko [Ishioka] felt we didnt really get correct because she was always supposed to end up in the Princes clothes but they didnt fit her and blah blah so we kind of ended up making this in between. It was about empowering a girl as opposed to a princess sitting there waiting for the prince to come and get you. It made sense that basically she would start raiding with them but in a Robin Hood fashion as opposed to what they wanted which is just to be rich.
SG: You pointed out that nobody says this is a poison apple but we know. There seems to be an epidemic of overexplaining in movies. Can we get back to visual understanding?
TS: You wont get that argument out of me. I get criticized for it all the time and Im like, Hey, if you can tell it visually, dont talk about it. You dont have to build it up at all. You go to anybody and if youre doing Superman, you just show this guy flying, somebody shows him a rock and he cant fly anymore, you understand thats kryptonite. Its ingrained into the psyche of most people so you dont have to have a scene where she says, Give me that poison, blah blah blah. You dont need any of that. Its wonderful when you see that with children, when theyre just getting happy for the movie ending when that comes in, they just have the air sucked out of them and theyre almost mouthing, Dont take the apple. I was just thinking, We didnt even set up the apple. They got it in two seconds.
SG: I was just worried youd forget about the apple because you already take out the part where the prince kisses her back to life.
TS: Well, we kind of had that and we thought we know where the source material comes from, why not have fun with it? I had a much bigger scene originally that I was pushing for but it just required so much more time that it didnt work.
SG: What was your scene?
TS: My thing was that she would eat the apple, like she would become disguised and Snow White would eat the apple. Now this is the original tale and I had always loved that idea, that she would eat the apple and then when she would die, everybody would tell him kiss her. He kisses her and she doesnt wake up. Then everybody looks at him really suspiciously that maybe they werent in love. Maybe he doesnt love her and Snow Whites dead. Then they pick her up and when theyre taking her away, one of the dwarves, the clumsy one trips and she falls and the apple was just stuck in her throat and comes out. So she gets up, everybodys shocked that she didnt even die, she turns and looks at the prince and thinks, Oh my God, he kissed me back to life so he must love me and she hugs him and he just tells the dwarves to shut up, Ill take the credit for it. Then they continue singing and dancing, but it was just another step that I think for a kiddie movie, this was about the time limit. We couldnt take it there.
SG: Youd said you only wanted to do three visual movies and now you have four, but why would you only want to have four visual movies?
TS: No, back to back. I think I will do more of them and I will do probably a lot more but I think now if I do one more, two more of this, best case scenario for me would be not a bad place to be. Id just end up with Tim Burtons rejects, in that area which is if it aint weird dont give it to him. So I just have to mix it up. At least this one wasnt an R-rated film so I said okay, now its good to go into that territory and then Ill wait and think if theres something that I can do because most people only know me from my work in films. I say no, I do the most conservative ads you can think of and I do really straight storytelling stories. I just havent done them yet for cinema so people think this is all I want to do. If I dont mix it up now, its not a box Ill be able to step out of. If I dont mix it up now, Ill probably be doing only visual films.
SG: Whats an example of a straight storytelling type movie?
TS: Any Haneke movie, any Kieslowski film, most Polanski films. Just straight drama that doesnt rely on the fantastic or on composition or on the grace of the image.
SG: Something that focuses on the actors?
TS: Actors, story, script. Thats not particularly right now what Ive done which is everybodys very much a pawn on what the film looks like.
SG: What is your next film?
TS: Hopefully if it happens, in the next week we will know, but its a small film about a drone attack. It would look like almost three different wars, from the people who are flying the video planes that theyre flying on monitors theyre flying from Vegas and the bombing is happening over a village in Africa that theyre trying to stop some terrorists on, the politics involved in basically giving the go ahead for a project like that. It feels like three different things but its the same war and you have such a different perspective on what the result is. For some people its going to be like something coming from the sky and wiping you out. For others its like a really tense video game and the politics is politics.
SG: What is that called?
TS: Eye in the Sky. Ill know within a week if thats happening. I hope it is.
SG: Do you have any cast attached?
TS: No, basically there are so many characters in this its going to be an ensemble which is usually easier because one great role or two great roles, you get an actor and youre off in running. This is the film.
SG: Do you still do commercials and music videos?
TS: I do commercials a lot. I did very few music videos. I just did them right out of school and then my musical taste unfortunately goes for music that probably doesnt really have an outlet. Its much more folk and classical. They dont really have any music videos for those. It was never really a job. I did music videos because I loved them and then just moved on, and I love doing advertising because I love telling short tales and learning new toys every day.
SG: So you wont be doing a video for an LMFAO song?
TS: I dont know who they are, Im so out of contemporary music.
SG: They sing a song called Sexy an I Know It.
TS: Well, that sounds good to me.
Mirror Mirror is now playing.