Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Aug 15, 2022, 06:28AM

We Can’t Lose Any Money

A 2018 RogerEbert.com interview with filmmaker Debra Granik vs. a 2018 Narthaki interview with choreographer Jonathan Hollander.

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Debra Granik: You're allowed to explore, take a lot of pictures, meet people, and ask questions.

Jonathan Hollander: But what happens next? We can't lose any money.

Granik: You’re right. But our appetite got reduced.

Hollander: So it’s a balance. That’s the point.

Granik: It’s like taking a bullet sometimes.

•••

Hollander: There is an internal focus you must have, because if you're going to get people to respect you, watch you, be fascinated by you, you have to believe that you are worth watching.

Granik: Yeah. We've gone full circle and I think we probably do it every hundred years or something.

Hollander: That's just not part of how I process things.

Granik: It's an interesting, complex process. Culture just gets so stale.

Hollander: And we didn’t. But that leads me to the next part of my talk, which is how we've integrated working with the crisis of the world right now, which is refugees, displaced people. 

•••

Granik: You have to be very calm to hold them because they need to feel safe; they can't feel like you're going to crush them.

Hollander: They don't understand the stories, the music, the mudras etc., and I said to them that I don't understand the mudras, I don't understand the nuances of what the artist is thinking and doing either.

Granik: That incident, or that little moment, was described in the book. I left that really open.

Hollander: I'm speaking dispassionately now, but it was one of the most terrible blows I've personally experienced.

Granik: Thank you.

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