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AFI FILM FEST DVD

Review by Deppraved

AFI DVD I can hardly believe it, but I FINALLY have my AFI Film Fest DVD in my possession! Months of waiting! I didn't watch the entire DVD tonight because there's a lot on it covering the entire 10 days of the festival. I watched the parts where Johnny was involved, which I was quite pleasantly surprised, is a lot.

They have the entire on-stage interview between Richard Schickel and Johnny. The only parts they cut out was when they played the various film clips...they didn't show the film clips themselves, but all of the dialogue between Richard and Johnny before and after each clip is there. The interview is not dissimilar to when Johnny was on "Inside the Actor's Studio" in that Richard goes through questions about Johnny's films one by one. However, with the 90 minute limit and the fact that Johnny speaks slowly and haltingly...and in many cases, so does Richard, they didn't get to the majority of Johnny's films.

They discussed Cry-Baby, Edward Scissorhands, Benny & Joon, Ed Wood, Donnie Brasco and then made the jump to POTC and The Libertine. Prior to discussing the films, Richard asked Johnny a lot of questions about his early influences in childhood, how he got into acting, how he creates his characters and makes his film choices, etc. Johnny talked quite a bit about his "actor heroes" such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and he also talked about other more contemporary actors that he admires. He talked about the silent film theater in L.A. where they would let him go in during the day while the theater was closed to the public, and he would sit and watch silent films all day, asking for them to be replayed again and again so he could study the actors' movements, facial expressions, and how they conveyed the story without words.

Johnny was, as always, nervous and constantly touching his hair and his mustache, shifting in his seat, and twisting his rings on his fingers. He was gracious and funny and very self-deprecating, always making jokes about how sick he was going to be when he had to sit and watch his own film clips. He couldn't very well avoid seeing the clips. They had a huge movie screen behind where Johnny and Richard were sitting so the audience could see the clips, but they also had monitors on the front of the stage which were facing Johnny and Richard so that they could see the clips. After seeing several of them, Richard would ask Johnny how that made him feel, and he would say, "Frightened! Very frightened!"

The quality of the videography is not what I expected. It's almost the same quality that you would get from a wedding videographer. The video camera was quite a distance from the stage, and for at least half of the interview, they showed Johnny and Richard sitting on stage from a distance. You couldn't see their faces up close or their expressions. About halfway through, the videographer finally got the bright idea of closing in on Johnny so that you could see Johnny better. In doing so, he totally cut Richard out of the picture for quite a long while. You could hear Richard asking the questions, but couldn't see him, and all you could see was Johnny sitting in his chair looking in Richard's direction as he was listening to Richard's questions or comments. Then the videographer pulled back out a bit so that you could see both of them on stage again.

The sound is not the best quality either. Both Johnny and Richard were mic'd, but there is quite a bit of sound distortion in that you can hear every other little sound that they make while on stage and sometimes it interferes with trying to listen to what they're saying. For instance, they're both sitting in black leather chairs on stage. Every time either of them shifted in their chair, you could hear that squishy squeaking sound of the leather. Towards the end of the interview, Richard keeps using his hands and arms a lot while he's talking and in doing so, he keeps brushing his coat sleeve against the mic that's clipped to his lapel and it sounds like wind rushing through the mic. It gets rather annoying.

There is a section on the DVD called "Red Carpet" and within that section, there is a short piece on the red carpet for The Libertine premiere. They show Johnny standing there being photographed as photographers scream his name to get his attention, then a very short bit of Samantha Morton on the red carpet, then they cut directly to an interview with Johnny on the red carpet. It's only a few minutes long. They show John Malkovich very briefly, and then Johnny walking toward the auditorium waving at the crowd.

I was able to write down the text of what Johnny said in the red carpet interview because it's so short, so here it is:

Johnny: "I thought Stephen Jeffrey's play was, you know, perfection, really. I just thought it was the perfect, perfect piece. And I thought about the challenge of turning this amazing piece of theater and translating that to cinema was an enourmous challenge."

Interviewer: "I loved the dialogue."

Johnny: "Beautiful, beautiful dialogue. Great writer. One of my favorite lines of all time...which is...somehow it always sticks in my head...(he hesitates and furrows his brow as if he's trying to remember the line) ... he (Rochester) says, 'Life is not an urgent succession of nows; it's a listless trickle of why should I's.' (Johnny laughs softly and smiles.) It just kind of makes sense to me."

Johnny: "When it was mentioned that they might do this kind of...this little tribute or salute thing tonight, I went through about 14 million emotions in a half second. It was like shock and fear and appreciation and honored and flattered and more fear and confusion...so I'm still in the confusion stage."

There's another section on the DVD called "Interviews" and when you click on that, you get icons for many of the films that were premiered at the festival. I only watched the one for The Libertine. It had a red carpet interview with Laurence Dunmore, then the same interview with Johnny that was already shown in the "Red Carpet" section, and then the camera switched to inside the theater just prior to the movie's first showing. A woman from the Film Festival is announcing the film and introduces Laurence Dunmore. He comes to the mic on stage and makes a speech thanking everyone involved with the movie. Then he calls Samantha, John and Johnny up on stage and they stand in a row while the audience applauds. When the applause dies down, they're all just standing there, and Laurence makes a joke about how the three of them are now going to do a little dance for everyone, then Johnny kicks up his leg as if he's in a can-can line, then makes a joke about "Now we're all just going to stand here while everyone stares at us. Or we're going to stand here while the film is playing and stare back at every one of you," and he points to the audience.

Then Laurence, apparently unexpectedly, calls each of them to the mic to make a short statement. It caught Samantha completely off guard and she had no idea what to say, and seemed very shy and self-conscious. John Malkovich spoke next and was very brief. Then Johnny went to the mic, and he actually stayed there longer than the others and made jokes the entire time. You would have thought he was doing a stand-up comedy routine. At the end of his bit, he said something like, "Well, I hope you all enjoy the film...and if you don't, well it's too late. Because it's finished."

The sound during this segment was really annoying because you could hear all the background noise from the audience, sometimes louder than the people speaking into the mic. The mic on stage seemed to have some problems - it was either way too low so that you could hardly hear them, or at one point they turned it up very loud so that it was booming when Laurence Dunmore spoke. You could hear people in the audience coughing, and even the videographer who was holding the video camera started coughing which obliterated anything that was being said on stage. You could also hear her laughing a couple of times. She's holding the video camera with it rolling, and the camera's mic is right there by her face, and she doesn't know enough not to cough and laugh and make noise while she's filming. In another spot, a woman walked directly in front of the video camera, totally oblivious, and stood directly in front of the camera for at least 5 seconds totally blocking the view to the stage. Then she walked off, then came back through and walked in front of the camera again. I think it was someone from the audience.

At the end when Johnny was up on stage making his jokes, between the poor quality of the sound and the fact that his natural speaking voice is often very soft-spoken, I still haven't figured out what he said in a few places because I just couldn't decipher it.

So, all in all, I'm quite disappointed with the quality of the videography and the sound on the DVD - it just isn't professional. However, to me at least, it's worth buying the DVD if you're a JD collector like I am, and it's also worth seeing the 90 minute interview with Richard Schickel and hearing Johnny's answers and observations, his jokes about himself, and his "take" on various things in life.

If anyone would like to buy it, it's $19.99 plus shipping (they charged $2.99 for shipping on mine). You can go to the AFI website and buy it there with a link to CustomFlix, the company that copies and distributes the DVDs. I haven't tried looking at the CustomFlix website to see if you can buy it directly from them without going through the AFI site. If you want to try, it's www.customflix.com. The DVD is called "AFI Festival Highlights 2005."