Carlo loves his wife but wishes that he would wake up one morning and she would no longer be there, just gone.  His work in a criminal organization has become routine.  Divorce would take too long, be too painful, besides he loves her and couldn't stand to see her in the arms of another man.  There has to be a quick solution, one that is final and forever, but first, a hairy, hunky Latin soap opera star is coming to dinner.  Maybe the wife will make meat loaf.

   Real life is ugly and sometimes boring.  We spend our lives shackled to the daily grind accumulating a few dollars in hopes that we will live long enough to spend them.  Those of us who die early usually don't die  glamorous deaths saving the world from an alien invasion or stopping a virus outbreak threatening to take down a city.  No, we waste away eaten up with cancer, or run down by a drunk, or the victim of domestic abuse.  Some of us never get a chance and are taken from this earth by a sad careless act left crying in the back seat of a car in the sweltering heat--more than one life lost.

    Real life is hidden and forgotten and repeated over and over again.

    Argentinean born filmmaker Daniel Pace doesn't want to make movies that help us forget.  His film, "14 Ways to Wear Lipstick" http://14ways.com/  carefully mixes in real life elements with familiar movie themes but fails to give the audience a Hollywood escape hatch.  The film tells the story of Carlo after he is forced to flee Italy to America, gets married to a girl he dearly loves, and becomes unhappy.  It is a deliberate film that requires patience, but its rewards overcome its shortcomings.    The audience will be reminded of uncomfortable moments in life; the same life without cloned and living dinosaurs or undead scorpion kings, but where mistakes are made that stay with you forever.

    "14 Ways" is Pace's first feature and was selected from among 1700 other films to be part of the Slamdance Film Festival in January, 1999.  Although his background is in computers, his heart lies behind the camera.  Daniel Pace talked to us about filmmaking and his new feature "Lights Over Phoenix."

Einsiders.com: Recently, Roger Corman was asked what types of films were his favorite, he responded by saying he liked films that emphasize characterization and the development of the character. You spend a lot of time developing the character of Carlo in "14 Ways," how important is character development to a film regardless of the genre--drama, action, horror and the like?

Daniel Pace: Characterization, and I would add plot, are the foundations of any film, but for a movie to work there must be a balance between the two. In the case of Carlo my goal was to create a character that was good and evil, passive and aggressive, thoughtful and irrational and then through plot try to justify murder. Obviously not a mainstream proposition.

Hollywood films are highly moral in their structure...[t]hat’s why Americans don’t like French movies with fuzzy endings; they need a conclusion and it better be one that conforms to our morals.
--Daniel Pace tells it like it is.

Did I overdevelop Carlo? I think we get to know too much about him, and when you get to know someone too much you may find things that you don’t like. Carlo is a character of contradictions. He has a capacity to love very deeply and at the same time he has the capacity to kill. All human emotions though. Can we like someone like that? Perhaps, but depends who he kills. In the case of "14," the answer is not an easy one. Carlo’s human nature is in constant conflict with his morality and at the end human nature wins.

America is mostly a puritan society where most events in life are judged from a moral perspective. We tend to see Good or Evil but nothing much in between. Hollywood films are highly moral in their structure; the bad guy always gets what he deserves which gives the audience a sense of relief. Never mind the sex and blood in the middle, at the end morality prevails. That’s why Americans don’t like French movies with fuzzy endings; they need a conclusion and it better be one that conforms to our morals.

Directing from the trunk

Nietzsche wrote that morality represses human nature, and Freud said that anything repressed resurfaces somewhere as something else. Alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity, suicide, violence, depression are common in this society. Is that human nature trying to get a gasp of fresh air? Are we repressing it too much? Rarely you see a film where human nature is reflected sincerely without having a mandatory restorative third act where everything must go back to "normal" so the audience can go home safe and sound believing that what they just saw is a reflection of real life, or that real life should be like that. I tried to portray Carlo in a way that would allow for his true nature to eventually surface. I don’t know if I failed or not in that attempt but when you peel someone’s personality to the bare bone you won’t usually find something very pretty.

Einsiders.com: Sounds like you have a bleak view of humanity. Don’t people go to the theater to escape their mundane lives? I mean, we don’t have to go to the brand new stadium seating, multi, multi-plex, paying in upwards of $9.00 to be reminded how selfish and ugly we are, do we? Those films are renters, right?

Daniel Pace:  People want to escape, be moved and feel "safe" at the same time. How’s that achieved; through comedy, action or drama doesn’t really matter. When you remove the word "safe" from that premise you have a film that many people are going to feel uncomfortable with. It has nothing to do with how I view humanity but it has a lot to do with how a society functions and reacts to certain stimuli.

I think that the tremendous amount of propaganda that we see at every level is really shaping public opinion, culture, beliefs and what movies we go see. I think primarily people go to the movies because they’ve been bombarded with advertisement and "positive" reviews. Then word mouth will do the rest of course; "Pearl Harbor" what?

However, there’s no doubt that people want to be entertained and our goal as filmmakers should be simply that: to entertain. The question is what entertains people? Not every Hollywood production is a success. Having said that, I think that any story, no matter how dark, can be told but its success or failure depends on how you package it and how you present in order to appeal a particular public and be "safe."  Mark Twain was a genius at that in his writing. "14" is an in your face movie, definitely not a Saturday night family thing. I had no intention of "dressing it up" to make more digestible. Let’s say that "14" represents my dark side.

Many Independent films end up in the shelves of video stores because they can’t find a large audience, but how can they find an audience without marketing dollars. It’s a catch 22 proposition. But it’s also a question of the state of the independent cinema, which is arguably in chaos right now.

It’s true that not many people want to see a depressing film. Me included. But from a very purist point of view a filmmaker should make the film that she or he wants. The trick is that to be a successful filmmaker you must attract a substantial audience and to be very honest I think you have to make at least a couple films to realize what works and what doesn’t. It also takes self-criticism, which can be hard to swallow. First films are usually like uncut diamonds.

So, in order to get your $9.00 bucks the filmmaker must work harder, shaping and re-shaping the story and the dialog until the punches are noticeable but subtle enough to be "safe."

To summarize, I think that purely entertainment films and films that defy the audience are both important and they should both exist, regardless of whether they’re going to be shown in a multi-plex or live happily in a video store.

The rich guys own the entire city, the people, the dogs, everything. The bad guys are feared by God. Jealousy usually involves some form of unthinkable cruelty. Incest is not uncommon. Love is blind and hot… And the list goes on. Human nature at its best.
--Pace on growing up in Argentina.

Daniel Pace: I used available lighting. It was a bit underexposed in an effort to deteriorate the image. I tried to get the look of the film to match the state of mind of the characters; somewhat monochromatic.

"Lights over Phoenix" will be on the other hand an optimistic film, but also it’s a scary and suspenseful one. Detail and color will play an important role. But because I’m dealing with a subject matter that deals with the unknown I will try to use people’s imagination rather than showing everything.

The Latin soap opera "Kill Me With Your Love" was terrific in "14 Ways." What is the origin of the soap opera and the possible uses of this plot device in other works?

I grew up in Argentina and soap operas were very popular there. Latin soaps are incredibly melodramatic and passionate. Everything about them is bold and large. The rich guys own the entire city, the people, the dogs, everything. The bad guys are feared by God. Jealousy usually involves some form of unthinkable cruelty. Incest is not uncommon. Love is blind and hot… And the list goes on. Human nature at its best.

The idea of the soap opera in the film represents Carlo’s wife’s fantasy. Her need for passion in her life and also hope. The religious elements throughout the film also represent hope in their lives. It’s funny though because I was incredibly critiqued by the Bishop of Phoenix because of this "corrosive" film. I guess the Bishop lives in a different world were none of this happens. Lucky him. I actually filmed the soap scenes in Mexico City with real soap actors. Everything was very low budget of course. A friend there let me use his house and I used a cheap Hi8 camera using a couple of lights. I didn’t even have a tripod; I forgot it in the hotel. So I did the whole thing hand held.

I heard somewhere that the economy in Argentina is so bad at the present time that people are waiting in long lines to claim their grandparents' Spanish (or is it Italian) citizenship. Any chance that you would go back to Argentina and make a film there?

You heard right, and it’s both Italian and Spanish. The government subsidizes filmmaking over there but it’s quite difficult right now to get a project going. Obviously my roots are over there but having lived half of my life in this country I feel quite comfortable with the American idiosyncrasy. I’ve got to know this culture quite well and I think it’s quite rich and interesting from a filmmaking angle. I’ll perhaps always incorporate some Latin elements in my films but primarily I want to focus on American stories.

Tell us about your latest feature, "Lights over Phoenix."

Well, the film is still in pre-production and we’re actually shooting a documentary followed by the film. The documentary is about to be shot in a two-three weeks. I needed to introduce the film somehow. So, the documentary will show what people saw that night of March 13, 1997 in Phoenix and the theories behind the event.

The film will answer the question formulated in the documentary. In the process of investigating this event, I came across interesting connections and "coincidences" that have been overlooked. Remember Zen philosophy: "All those coincidences are not really coincidences all the time."

We’ve all heard the stories of abduction where individuals were subject to torturous examinations and operations. In Lights, it’s completely different. Perhaps it’s a new phenomenon or something that people have never reported. I was in Argentina a few years ago someone told me a story that happened to someone in my hometown on a Saturday night. It was quite fascinating and eerie but since I’m skeptical by nature I thought of it as a folk tale and nothing else. A few years later, in Mexico City, one of my crewmembers told me of a similar story, but this time the person involved in the incident was he. What happened to four people in Phoenix the night the lights showed up matches those stories. At that point, I decided that was my next film.

What generally is the eerie incident you heard stories about?

Aahhh! I can’t tell you that. Call me paranoid but I’m keeping several aspects of this project a secret.

Compare "A Clockwork Orange" with "Natural Born Killers." (I really can’t take the credit for this neat little matching, your suggestion is cool.)

I’ve heard a lot about character development and almost every book on screenwriting argues that rich characters are the key of a good story. No doubt, but I think we’re forgetting something just as important that without it, no character development effort can fully work. I think that suspension of disbelief is the most important aspect that the filmmaker must be able to master. In other words, the world that he or she creates must be believable no matter how odd. "Clockwork Orange" comes to mind as an example of oddity that works because we immediately accept that world as real, no matter how eccentric. "Natural Born Killers" on the other hand, fails in my mind to create a convincing world, perhaps because you are so aware at all times of the director’s manipulations and tricks trying to convince us that what we are seeing is real. So, yes, characterization is crucial, but I think that the creation of the world where that story is going to take place is even more important, because without it I can’t imagine how a character can live in it and be convincing no matter how well developed he is.

Jonathan W. Hickman