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Interview: Ari Folman on The Congress

We spoke with the director at Cannes about The Congress’s fascinating origins and reception thus far.

Interview: Ari Folman on The Congress

Five years ago, Ari Folman’s striking animated documentary Waltz with Bashir made a triumphant run through festivals worldwide, winning several significant international prizes and garnering something of a surprise Oscar nomination in the foreign-language category. The film, which depicted the author’s search for his lost memories of his service in the 1982 Lebanon War, was grim, moving, and fiercely original in execution. Five years later, Folman returns to Cannes with The Congress, which opened the festival’s Director’s Fortnight section. Partly based on Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, the film, given its radical, some would say uncertain, aesthetic, has understandably divided critics and audiences alike. Slant had the chance to talk with Folman from the Croisette about The Congress’s fascinating origins, its reception thus far, and the future of film.

What is it about animation you’re so drawn to?

It’s really addictive. You either have to be very stupid or very brave to do classic animation in 2013. And I’m both. The freedom you have in animation is fantastic.

How long after completing Waltz with Bashir did you start thinking about this project?

Five years ago I came to Cannes with Bashir and it was exactly the moment when I started thinking about this one. I optioned the rights for Stanislaw Lem’s novel two days before coming to the festival. I wanted to declare that I was doing it here, when I had my film in the competition. It’s been exactly five years since then, out of which four-and-a-half years was constant work. It’s been tough.

Tougher than usual?

Yes. The live-action part went really smoothly. We shot it two-and-a-half years ago in Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. But the animated part was very complicated, because it’s all classic technique, hand-drawn. The European system of financing films made us do it whenever and wherever somebody was willing to give us money. Even if there was no studio, we had to establish one. The work was split between Israel, Luxemburg, Brussels, Liege, Hamburg, Berlin, and Poland. Then we got stuck with the assist work: Philippines, Ukraine, Turkey, and India. This is 55 minutes of material [made in] 10 countries—only because of budget reasons.

It must have been very stressful.

Believe it or not, but when it all started I had black hair. And yesterday, during some business lunch, a German journalist approached me and said, “Wow! I interviewed you two years ago and now you look so old!” [laughs] My hair turned gray because of the animation part. It was very complicated technically, but also artistically sometimes it felt like a nightmare. Every studio has a completely different philosophy and approach. For example, in Luxemburg they do everything manually, paper on the light table, like Disney 80 years ago. Then they scan it with fax machines. Really old school. Then I noticed that what they did with Robin Wright’s part, the movements and everything, was very feminine, fluent, soft. And the works from Israel—of course!—or Germany were very masculine, hard. So I had to bring a team of the best animators from Brussels to Tel Aviv just to shllajf all of it, so the characters would be consistent. It took us a year to accomplish that.

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Why do you think it was so difficult to gather the money? Waltz with Bashir was an amazing international success; one would think such accomplishment makes everything easier for a filmmaker.

It’s because people don’t want to invest in animation for adults…

…unless it’s erotic.

True. You naughty girl! I still feel lucky that this crazy idea got made after all. I was expected to do Waltz with Bashir 2, or take my mother, who survived the Holocaust, to Auschwitz. Making another dark animation—that would’ve been a lot easier for me. When you come from where I come from and tell people that you want to make a sci-fi film with Robin Wright and Harvey Keitel, they’re like, “What’s your problem, man? You did so well last time. Can’t you find something in the Middle Eastern part of the world, there are so many interesting things here! Why get out of the ghetto? Stay put!”

So the idea of a film about an aging actress and her struggle to protect individuality seemed more interesting to you?

Like I mentioned before, I was here in 2008 and I’d already optioned Lem’s novel, but I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with it, apart from knowing I wanted to combine animation and real life. And one day I went to visit my sales agent in the festival market and saw an old lady there. He asked me whether I recognized her, and I didn’t. He told me her name and I was shocked. She was a film goddess from the ’70s, top of the tops! But no one identified her as such. Her face was completely done. It was really sad. I thought, she’s an old woman coming to the mecca of cinema, and her films, specifically two or three, will stay great forever. Thanks to them she will be forever young, a 25-year-old goddess. But here she is and nobody knows it’s her. And I thought, okay, Ijon Tichy from the book is an actress now. I had this image of an aging actress, her young face immortalized on celluloid. This is what you see when Robin’s character arrives at the Hotel Miramont in the animation part. She enters the lobby, and her son, with whom she’s talking, asks her whether people recognize her as the new trailer is all over the media! And she says, “No, nobody. I’m just an old lady to them.” This place, the lobby, is like Cannes: a market. I just copied the scene I saw five years earlier and put it into wild animation, but the idea is exactly the same.

Do you find it funny when some critics find similarities between The Congress and The Matrix, but don’t even notice that the film is partly based on one of the most outstanding novels?

First of all, the Wachowski brothers stole a lot from the book themselves. Every film buff knows that. I think the book is a huge inspiration, but Lem wrote it about the ’60s communist era and dictatorship. He set it in Costa Rica and South America. He made an allegory, so he wouldn’t be attacked. But with dictatorships, it doesn’t really matter what exactly it is, communist or fascist. In the end the idea is always the same. I didn’t want to talk about the communism, because it was not a part of my life, I wasn’t there. Lem talks about identity, who one is, how to control one’s feelings. It’s all in the movie. A lot of particular scenes from the book are in the film. Of course, they’re exaggerated, and I play with the material. Believe it or not, but every time I got stuck during this four-and-a-half/five-year period, I read the book. It’s a short one. And every time it saved me. It gave me a solution.

How do you feel about contradicting opinions of the media? After the Cannes premiere, some have claimed The Congress is a revelation while others are significantly less enthusiastic.

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I feel good about it. I like that the reviews are mixed. After Waltz with Bashir, I only received positive opinions. It was nice, but it’s not me. This one is more like me. It’s like with kids: There’s always one that’s really wild and causes a lot of problems. You get calls from school, there’s plenty of drama. But deep inside you know that this little guy represents you best. You will never admit it, but it’s true. And this is how I feel about this film. Yes, it’s out there and maybe some people think it’s too much, but that’s okay. When I make a film like this, I can’t promise people will love it. But I can assure them that, if they buy a ticket, I’ll take them on a train, on a roller coaster. They will not be cheated.

Robin Wright’s part is a true challenge for an actress. What did you have to do to convince her to act—and finally also produce the film?

Actually, at first Cate Blachett was supposed to do this movie, but it didn’t work out. I approached Robin and she said yes. This was probably the easiest part. [It was clear to me] she needed to be a partner, doesn’t matter what title she officially has. She needed to know she has a creative position in it. She was very brave to take this part. I had this one moment on set, when Harvey Keitel turned to me and said, “I can’t believe she’s doing that! I would’ve never done it. She’s crazy!” But what we have to remember is that it’s not her in the movie, it’s a character. She gave it her name, and filmography, made it believable. In this film she’s abused a lot, some scenes are really tough. But Robin never wanted to change a word. For her it was like playing Janet Jones—just a part in the movie. After watching the film with the audience I knew, the on-screen persona she created isn’t the Robin Wright I know. It’s the actress.

Is your film also a commentary on how women’s position in show business is changing?

Hollywood doesn’t make films for women anymore, ‘cause they don’t sell films as well as men. It’s so sad! But also what women do to themselves scares me sometimes. When I traveled with Waltz, receiving all the awards, I was shocked! Seeing those actresses who can’t express anything with their faces—nothing is real in them. Why? Me and my wife thought it resembled a freak show. I truly believe that even if such scanning machines as the one in the film will be available, we’ll always have flesh-and-blood actors. Although I look at my kids and I think that in 15 years time, when watching a movie, they wouldn’t care less whether the actor they’re watching is real or invented.

The idea of scanning and multiplying actors sounds like a very bankable idea.

Studios already have this idea, the technology is there, they can do it tomorrow morning. They don’t do it, because it doesn’t seem to be a right moment. Maybe they’ll never use it.

What next challenges are there waiting for you in the future?

I look at myself, and I’m 50, unfortunately [laughs]. I’m not Oliveira, I’m not gonna direct till the age of 103. I have five films in me at the most, as one takes about four years. I’m a filmmaker, this is my only language. And, as an Israeli, I have issues with my personality as well. I might do an Israeli film in Hebrew—as long as it speaks the language I believe I can direct. Whatever happens, you’ll always find yourself in film.

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Anna Tatarska

Anna Tatarska is a film and cultural journalist with a career spanning almost a decade. She lives in Warsaw, Poland.

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