Interview: The Man Behind "Puss in Boots" Is A Dog Person!

Monty and PussMonty meows and leaps up on the chair beside me. Cats always know when something is up. In this case, what's up is a phone call to Chris Miller the director of Puss in Boots, who is still reeling from his first Oscar nomination last month when Puss in Boots won itself a slot in the Best Animated Feature race. "Oh my god, it's insanity," Miller admits. "That day is a blur. I've never been through this before so I was pretty overwhelmed at the scope of it."

Monty does a little spin and settles in. If my cat understood any words beyond "treat", "Monty" and "no"*, he might be incensed by Miller's next confession when I ask him about his own pet situation. "Technically I'm more of a dog person. I can't lie about that."

* There is still some debate about whether or not Monty understand this word.

Miller is sadly pet free himself at the moment, still in mourning for the loss of a beloved pug. But this past year in cinema has been a dog person's dream and Miller is enjoying it. Martin Scorsese's plea for a write-in vote for "Blackie" at the inaugural Golden Collar Awards made him laugh and, like the rest of the world, Miller is crazy about "Uggie" from The Artist. He sheepishly admits that the main reason he attended a recent screening and Q&A of Oscar's frontrunning film was Uggie-related. "I thought 'I wonder if Uggie will be there. Oh I hope the dog shows up' I'm being totally honest!"

He was surprised and thrilled about Antonio Banderas open letter which added to the Golden Collar fuss by speaking out about Puss's snub. Puss in Boots, the character, has been in Miller's life for nearly ten years and it's the one cat he loves as much as dogs. "That cat was my favorite from the onset," he says recalling his years with the Shrek franchise. He loved Puss' intrigue. "He came with some history already. Or at least you knew he had some incredibly history. "

"Fear me. If you dare!

NATHANIEL: I'm curious about the career track for animation directors. You've done a lot of voicework and story art? How did you graduate to directing?

CHRIS MILLER: I was involved in story early on in my career and the writing end of it. With Antz and the Shrek movies we were given a lot of latitude to come up with material, characters and dialogue.
A lot of times we'd be sort of given an idea and sent off to come up with something. You share it with the producers and the directors and you sell it a bit. In doing that you get a little taste of everything in cinema. You're writing, you're composing shots, you're blocking out scenes, coming up with character interaction. You're really getting a first crack at visualizing a sequence. Looking back it was a great training ground for direction.

[Improvisation, Oscar madness, and moviemaking from your bedroom after the jump]

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After Link

Letters of Note a telegram from Marlon Brando to Marilyn Monroe
Old Hollywood Rita Moreno West Side Story rehearsal photo. Love it.
In Contention "The top ten shots of 2011" Tapley's annual selection.
Cartoon Brew is interviewing the makers of the Oscar nominated animated short films each morning. This one is on The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore which I reviewed last week.
People White Collar star Matt Bomer who will soon be seen (and a lot of him, too, presumably) in Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike comes out. I've been so busy I almost missed this news. Congratulations Bomer!

The Incredible Suit rants about the whole embarrassing ordeal of a national awards show (BAFTA) that's not aired live and then only aired in a highlights package. It's true. That's one of the reasons why it's the only regular movie awards show that many movie fans seem to feel okay about skipping.
My New Plaid Pants Which is Hotter? Vertigo edition
Capital New York Sheila O'Malley on the Best Actress performances
Rope of Silicon more pics from the set of After Earth. RoS is right. Jaden Smith does look more and more like his daddy.
Oscar Metrics Mark Harris argues for eliminated the animated feature category.
La Daily Musto an amusing he doesn't swing that way story from Raquel Welch about her hots for Stephen Boyd on the set of Fantastic Voyage. When I was a little kid I loved Stephen Boyd. Of course I did.

Coming Soon Bryan Fuller the genius behind the very original series Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies is sadly only doing reinterpretations now. We hope it's due to Hollywood's risk aversion and not due to his creative well drying up. His next two projects are a Munsters redo (pushed back) and now a TV series about Hannibal Lecter which has a direct-to-series order. Difficult to imagine it in series form but Fuller does fine work.
24 Frames Emmanuel Lubezki wins the ASC cinematography award for The Tree of Life. Next stop Oscar... Or will it swing The Artist's way?
The Wrap Oscar nominated composer Dory Previn (Two for the Seesaw) dies.
Movie|Line "Oscar season distilled into 14 words." lol because it's true.
Just Jared First look at Brad Pitt (and Richard Jenkins) in Cogan's Trade

And just in cast you missed it, the teaser to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

The Film Experience is the only site that seems to know who Benjamin Walker is -- it cracks me up that people headline this as a Tim Burton project just because he is the only "name" among the executive team -- but that's because we're the best. And the most Streep/Stage obsessed of movie sites.

20:11 Take The Warriors To Shelter

Year in Review Fun! It's the final installment of our peculiar time stamp fetish. The 20th minute and 11th second of the movies of 2011 in chronological order of US release date. It's like flipping channels for snapshots of the film year! For those who like a challenge, I've written the film titles in invisible ink (you can highlight to see them) below the screencap. We'd keep going but it will take too long for the rest of the movies to make it to DVD.

How many have you seen? Do these images make you want to stop surfing and watch?

Jan | Feb | March | April| May | June | July

Part 8: Samplings from August through October

Great. Write my obituary 'Charlotte Phelan: dead; Her daughter: still single.' " 

THE HELP ... lots more on this movie.

-Good fun. We'll have good fun from now on.
-Fight. Maybe we fight outside the car.
-[Laughs] I think it's gonna get more and more excite [sic] the championship."

SENNA

-Don't you think we'd feel more comfortable with our clothes off?
-Unbelievable, just unbelievable
-Why not?
-The rules! Not to mention your girlfriend
-What, Ingrid? She's very uninhibited. She'd have had her top off at the check-in desk."

ONE DAY

...a few more moments frozen in time after the jump. Have you seen any of these movies?

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Kill Your Darlings (Casting The Beats)

JA from MNPP here. It seems like it's the dream of every young actor to play one of the Beats - sensitive yet masculine fellows in sharp clothes with pre-praised snappy dialogue: what could go wrong? Well...  they were kind of all having sex with each other for one, and that keeps the money-men away. So the budgets stay tiny, pre-production gets drawn way out, and names come and go, come and go. I've been following the news on one of these projects for awhile - Kill Your Darlings first blipped onto my radar back in 2009, when it was announced that Chris Evans was going to play Jack Kerouac. That's the sort of headline that grabs my attention, you see. 

William S Burroughs, Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg

KYD is about the sordid story at the start of the Beats, involving the poet Lucien Carr who was friends with Kerouac and William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Carr murdered a man named David Kammerer, supposedly because Kammerer came onto him. That gay-panic defense seems somewhat unlikely given the fact that Ginsberg maintained he'd had sex with Carr, but you can read more about the background to the story here.

Besides Chris Evans, KYD was originally going to have Ben Whishaw playing Carr and Jesse Eisenberg was going to play Allen Ginsberg. Then silence. Who knows what iterations of actors came after that, but the next thing we heard was two and a half years later, this past November that is, when Daniel Radcliffe was announced as set to play Ginsberg.

Well a couple of days ago we got more casting news. A lot more, actually. Young Leonardo DiCaprio doppleganger Dane DeHaan, who just topped the box office this month in the generally well-received found-footage movie Chronicle, is set to play the murderer Lucien Carr. Dexter's Michael C. Hall will be playing the victim, David Kammerer. Elizabeth Olsen is set to play Carr's girlfriend Edie. The great Ben Foster is playing William Burroughs, while Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kyra Sedgwick are set to play...we don't know who. Somebodies!

Michael C Hall (a victim for once?) and Dane DeHaan

Jack Huston | Jack Kerouac

Finally  Jack Huston, of yes those Hustons, is going to play Jack Kerouac.

Bullhead.

Jose on one of this year's Foreign Film nominees...

The steaks in Bullhead are so red that you can practically taste the blood coming out of them. The intensity of their color is such that you can’t look away whenever a piece of meat is onscreen. They look both enticing and completely disgusting which makes sense given that meat is this film's currency of choice. Director Michael R. Roskam’s debut is a dark, complex thriller that breathes new life into the coming-of-age story and the gangster drama by setting it in the unexplored world of cattle farming.

Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a young cattle farmer who is dragged unwillingly into the underworld of hormone trafficking after getting involved with a corrupt beef trader. A mysterious murder brings Jacky’s childhood friend, Diederik (Jeroen Perceval), back into his life and threatens to reveal a secret he’s been hiding for over two decades.

Roskam weaves a deceptively simple tale about the loss of innocence that works because he subverts the notions of the genre, giving us a movie that questions if the events in our past can fully determine our future. Anchored by Schoenaert’s masterful committed performance (he gained over 60 pounds of muscle for the part) the film also works as a fascinating character study. Jacky is addicted to hormones and has become a minotaur of sorts, a man who suppresses his humanity at will to let out his inner animal. Schoenaert could’ve easily relied on his character’s past to build a performance filled with quirks. Instead he interiorizes all the pain only to release it through a shattering series of confused glances. He always looks as if he’s a werewolf about to transform.

The film transforms into something more than an effective thriller. At the center of Bullhead is something else altogether, a surprising brilliant study of sexual identity. What makes someone a “man”. While other movies have explored this question through metaphors, Roskam goes to the core of the situation creating a perfect companion piece to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. Bullhead could’ve been merely sensationalist but is instead chilling. The director not only points out that the cruelty of violence is often unseen, but he also reveals sexism embedded in the way we speak. Children often hear their parents say they will “become men” someday but rarely understand what this truly means. Is manhood a meritocracy? Should a piece of meat really define you?

Oscar analysis: Bullhead is a surprising inclusion among this year’s Best Foreign Language Film nominees because of its disturbing plot and violence. It feels like one of those  “special” movies chosen by the executive committee and as such joins the ranks of Gotz Spielmann’s Revanche  and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth in terms of 'the nomination is enough of an honor given its unlikelihood to have happened in the first place'. Though Bullhead probably has no chance of winning its combination of genre awesomeness and impressive central performance make it an exemplary work of art. It will undoubtedly be remade in English in a few years.