Interview: Pixar's Mike Jones on co-writing "Soul" and "Luca"

by Nathaniel R

Pixar's Soul centers around a music teacher Joe, who feels he missed his calling. He always wanted to be a famous jazz musician. Through the course of the spiritually minded adventure, which takes us from Earth to The Great Beyond and The Great Before and back again, Joe comes to understand that his calling was to teach. None us know ahead of time where our lives and career might take us. For instance, I was certain I was going to be an illustrator and ended up in Human Resources and now identify as a writer. This is also true of Pixar's Mike Jones. He was once on our side of the movie world as an entertainment journalist but always planned to shoot movies. "I went to NYU film school to be a cinematographer. You have to take a writing course as an undergrad and the teacher took me aside and said, 'You want to think about writing instead?'" Jones continued to pursue cinematography but, as it turns out, the teacher was right and the seed was planted "I did start to kind of write on my own. And after I got out of film school, I kept writing." This led him to a brief entertainment journalism career until he made the leap to filmmaking, if not in the way he originally intended. Years later he has a thriving career at Pixar as a screenwriter.

We recently spoke to him about the process of developing Soul and what it's like to be a co-writer since Pixar generally has several creatives on each film...

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Gay Best Friend: Calla Mackie in "Rachel, Rachel" (1968)

a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope

Who wouldn't risk it all for Estelle Parsons in those Edna Mode glasses?

We’re continuing our retro streak of the Gay Best Friend series this week, though we’re moving a bit forward in time (and to the subject of a Smackdown). In our Rebel Without a Cause entry, we discussed how director Nicholas Ray, actor Sal Mineo and writer Stewart Stern all coded Plato as gay, even though the Hays Code wouldn’t let homosexuality be openly discussed on film. This week, we’re looking at another Stewart Stern script, Rachel, Rachel. That film premiered thirteen years later (1968) and with the dissolution of the code we see less of a need to rely on coding. Estelle Parsons’ gregarious teacher Calla Mackie is established as a lesbian within the film. However, it reinforces tropes in gay representation that would continue for decades later. Calla may be a burst of energy early on, but her story moves into the “sad lesbian” and “tragic gay” frameworks we’ve become all too familiar with.

Before delving into Calla, we have to set up the object of her affection, the titular Rachel (Joanne Woodward)...

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Revisiting 1989's International Oscars: Cinema Paradiso vs Camille Claudel vs Jesus of Montreal

by Nathaniel R

You've gotten to know Juan Carlos a little bit as a new contributor here at TFE. He hosts a podcast "The One Inch Barrier" which is how I sought him out to join us here. Each episode looks at one year of the Best International Feature Film race at the Oscars, moving backward chronologically. Each season covers one decade. I've finally made the time to guest-star, for the season four premiere to discuss a year that's deeply embedded in my history: 1989... aka the year my beloved Pfeiffer lost Best Actress. We discuss Italy's winner Cinema Paradiso which is all about moviegoing and nostalgia (so appropriate for the now), France's presumed runner up Camille Claudel (which was also nominated for Best Actress for Isabelle Adjani), and Canada's provocative Jesus of Montreal. A few other films make cameos, too, including Hong Kong's Painted Faces which is randomly streaming on Netflix; it was not nominated but makes an interesting companion piece to Cinema Paradiso.  

Please do share your feelings on these four films, none of which we've discussed on the site! 

100th Anniversary: "Leaves from Satan's Book"

by Cláudio Alves

Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of my favorite filmmakers. I'll never forget the first time I watched The Passion of Joan of Arc on the big screen and was transported, how experiencing Vampyr felt like witnessing a projected nightmare, the ecstasy of Ordet's ending or Gertrud's stern ruminations on love. It's to my great shame that I'm not familiar with the Danish director's early works, having mostly ignored them until now. The centennial of Dreyer's second feature, Leaves from Satan's Book, makes this a great time to start correcting these cinephilic lacunas…

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Review: The Devil All The Time

by Juan Carlos

“Delusions.” 

 That is probably what you would say when you see people calling themselves Christians while raising half a million dollars for a domestic terrorist. Or when they continue to support a president that has no respect for human rights unless the human being in question is straight and white and male.

That is also Robert Pattinson’s most memorable line delivery in The Devil All The Time, a recently debuting Netflix original. Telling the sprawling story of religiosity and violence set in post-WWII and pre-Vietnam War America, the film attempts to trace a chain of events which branch out into several storylines which ultimately merge in tragic ways...

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