 In Conversation with Phil Kaufman
Host: Michael Sragow, film critic, Baltimore Sun
A co-presentation of Film Arts Foundation and the Castro Theatre
Thursday, November 4, 7:30pm, $9 members, $10 general
Castro Theatre
On the occasion of our 20th anniversary, the Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema presents director and writer Phil Kaufman, celebrating his nearly 35-year commitment to Bay Area filmmaking and for exemplifying a true independent spirit. This special evening features clips from the director’s body of work in addition to Kaufman in conversation with film critic Michael Sragow.
San Francisco filmmaker Philip Kaufman has made a career out of the unexpected. Starting with his Chicago-based, independent features – the modern-dress parable Goldstein (1963) and the
comic-strip satire Fearless Frank (1965) -- and his first major-studio productions -- the revisionist Western The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and the Arctic saga The White Dawn (1974) -- Kaufman has explored outer and inner space with irreverence and gusto. From his 1978 update of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers through The Wanderers (1979), The Right Stuff (1983), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Henry & June (1990), he has amassed a body of work that's varied, zesty and stunningly original and accomplished.
Living in the Bay Area for the past three decades and making films here whenever possible -- most recently, his savvy variation on women-in-jeopardy films, Twisted (2004) -- Kaufman has been able to extend his range so that it encompasses the epic and the intimate, without losing his real-world grounding or his sense of humor. His playful adaptation of Michael Crichton's controversial thriller Rising Sun (1993), with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes cracking a murder committed in the L.A. offices of a Japanese corporation, debunked Americans and Japanese gleefully and equally. With Quills (2000), perhaps *the* key movie of the Clinton era, he turned playwright Doug Wright's fictionalized portrait of the Marquis De Sade into a sensual comic horror film about erotic exploration and hypocrisy and the power of unfettered words.
Kaufman's in the tradition of American film's great eclectic, John Huston, who also forayed from rambunctious, sardonic adventures to daring literary adaptations. Like Huston at his best, Kaufman immerses himself in his material and modulates his style from picture to picture, satisfying the demands of each new subject and maintaining an edge of spontaneity.
-Michael Sragow
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