BeatRoute Magazine BC Print Edition February 2018

FILM
ENTANGLEMENT
ON FILM AND VINYL: A CONVERSATION WITH FILMMAKER JASON JAMES
PAT MULLEN
THIS MONTH IN FILM
BRENDAN LEE
A Fantastic Woman – February 2
When young waitress Marina falls in love with the much older
Orlando, nothing matters but their love for one another. But with
Orlando’s sudden passing, Marina is treated with vulgarity, forced
to fight for her place in this world as a transgender woman. A
Fantastic Woman is the Chilean entry for Best Foreign Film at the
2018 Academy Awards.
Early Man – February 16
A caveman named Dug is forced to unite his tribe as they stand
their historical ground against the incoming Bronze Age. Early
Man is the newest Claymation comedy from visionary Nick Park
(Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run). Voiced by Eddie Redmayne,
Maisie Williams, and Tom Hiddleston, the film promises to be
Park’s most cracking contraption yet.
Local filmmaker Jason James is willing to flip the script to honour the story in his latest outing, Entanglement.
Nostalgia – February 16
“Objects, memories, items that are tangible. These are our artifacts,
our scars.” This drama from Mark Pellington tells a web of stories
connected over time through love, loss and the objects we share
with one another. If one thing’s clear from the trailer, it’s this: tears
will be shed.
“I’m a total research nerd,” admits Jason James. The Vancouver
filmmaker explains the process of exploring the worlds of his
movies, like the new dramedy Entanglement, which opens in
theatres this February. James often begins his research on Tumblr,
creating micro-blogs filled with videos, songs, and images that
inspire him. “It’s like a moving, shifting scrapbook where I throw
thoughts and ideas,” he says. “When I’m trying to get an actor on
board, I’ll write them a warm, fuzzy email and send a link to the
Tumblr site.” This practice of finding nuggets of art and culture
brings the characters to life and gives Entanglement a world that
is offbeat and humorous, but painfully real.
Entanglement stars BC native Thomas Middleditch (Silicon
Valley) as Ben, a lonely and depressed man who learns he nearly
had a sister, but that his birth complicated the adoption process
for his parents. When Ben finds this spiritual-sibling, Hanna (The
Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby’s Jess Weixler), their relationship
inspires him to see the many lives with which he’s intimately
connected. James notes that he began to understand Ben after
consulting his friend, psychologist Dr. Maia Love, who diagnosed
the character with schizoaffective bipolar disorder. Identifying
Ben’s mental illness helps ground Entanglement in reality and
contrasts the offbeat magical realism of the film.
James likes to get inside the heads of prospective actors during
casting.
“I watch interviews with actors on late night TV and at film
festivals to see who they innately are as people,” he says. “I
remember watching this interview with Thomas at the Sundance
Film Festival and they asked him, ‘What’s your favourite song?’
He started talking about Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘The King of Carrot
Flowers,’ and he just started bawling. To me, that was Ben. He’s on
the verge of a breakdown. He’s this raw, emotional dude.”
Music, and our relationship with it, also inspires the aesthetic
of Entanglement. “When I first read the film and created that
Tumblr site,” says James, “the first word that came to mind was
‘vinyl.’ I wanted the film to feel hand-made, hand-drawn, and a
little bit messy.”
Entanglement’s visual design flows with underwater sequences
and dreamy images that let viewers swim in Ben’s sea of selfdoubts
and desires. One scene offers a trippy blink-and-you’llmiss-it
effect in a bowling alley where Hanna snaps her fingers
and the wall behind her, a galaxy mural of sparkling stars, ripples
like a hypnotic vision. It’s the first signal for a twist that reveals
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the extent of Ben’s illness.
James turned to local crews for visual effects, since his previous
films, like the rom-com That Burning Feeling, didn’t call for many.
However, the crews skilled in creating visuals like spaceships and
explosions for Hollywood tent-poles are like digital to vinyl’s
analogue.
“Their job is to make the unreal real,” James observes. “I wanted
the visual effects to feel unreal and bump up against reality. I
wanted them to feel childish or handmade and to create this
collective consciousness of images and ideas coming out of
Ben’s head.” For example, James cites some cartoon deer that
Ben and Hanna spy during a drug-induced trip that recall the
classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoon, while fireworks
resemble Windows 95 screensaver fireworks: “Cheap, weird, and a
little bit off-putting,” he laughs.
Researching the story world extends to the city itself. James
doesn’t hire location scouts and instead drives around listening
to playlists inspired by the script.
“Sometimes the locations will inform the story, like the
bowling alley,” says James. “It really suited the film, so we rewrote
a scene that was originally at a park bench into this location and
then the visual effects moment came from that.”
Langley dive Lee’s Chicken offers another element of local
character. The fried chicken joint isn’t in the original script, but
enjoys a prominent role as Ben’s go-to greasy spoon. He even
takes Hanna there for a date where menu offerings of chickenfried
steak bewilder her.
“Jason [Filiatrault] had written this fancy hipster hot dog
restaurant in Calgary into the script,” says James, who visited
locations that inspired the screenplay. “It felt a bit sad, lonely,
and left behind, and that spoke to what Ben was going through.
We rewrote the script. We couldn’t change the sign, so we had to
change some of the dialogue, like the chicken-fried steak. It was
something that I found in the real world to inform the creative.”
Having juggled producer, writer, and director roles on different
projects, James appreciates that filmmaking is a malleable
process.
“When you’re making a film, you have three different scripts:
the film you write, the film you shoot, and the film you edit,” he
says. “And you’re constantly reworking the material along the
way. The idea of finding things in the real world that inspire the
process is something I love about filmmaking.”
Annihilation – February 23
Alex Garland returns with his highly anticipated follow-up to
2015’s Ex Machina. Based off the novel of the same name (the
first in a trilogy), a kaleidoscopic “shimmer” envelops a town’s
surrounding forest, and a group of volunteer scientists journey
within to search for the source of all this real-world surrealism.
Annihilation stars Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac.
Hannah – February 23
Charlotte Rampling embodies Hannah, a woman coping with
a newfound life of loneliness and struggle when faced with her
husband’s imprisonment. What’s sure to be a paralyzing character
study of an older woman crushed by denial, this TIFF + Venice Film
Festival selection may very well give us Rampling at her absolute,
soul-crushing best.
Annihilation
February 2018