Interview

by Jeremy Arnold

Jonathan Nossiter, co-writer (with James Lasdun) and director of the recent digital indie Signs & Wonders, made a name for himself when his first picture, Sunday, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1997. Like James Gray, he was able to attract a powerful cast for his latest drama: Stellan Skarsgard, Charlotte Rampling and Deborah Kara Unger. The story of an American businessman in Athens (Skarsgard) who leaves his wife twice for the same younger woman, the striking Signs & Wonders takes its title from Skarsgard's obsession with assigning meaning to random events in the world. Nossiter, 38, spoke with MovieMaker from his New York home.

MM: Describe your writing collaboration with James Lasdun. How did you begin?

JN: We began with an interest in a character who is obsessed with over-interpreting visual clues in the world. This was exciting because it meant the psychological dimensions of the story would be expressed visually. I also knew I wanted to shoot in Greece, where I'd spent a lot of time. James and I went to Athens with just the barest outline of story, and I started snapping pictures obsessively. I probably took close to 1,000 photos, and in them I started to see connections. Those pictures became the springboard to the story.

MM: So you need to know the locations before you fully know the story?

JN: For me it's vital. Physical space is a central character of any film I make.

MM: What was your actual writing process like?

JN: The dynamics and structures of the scenes were worked out largely in discussion. James wrote most of the dialogue. It's dangerous for a director to write a script entirely on his own because you become obsessed by something. James was an ideal collaborator; he challenged me very powerfully.

MM: Your depiction of the"Americanization" of Athens is striking. How specifically did you describe this in the script - and is it the writer's job to do so?

JN: The scripts I respond to are the barest - the ones which give me the most room to imagine. When you're writing as a director, it's the opposite. Those things are vital. They become a sort of private, encoded language.

MM: Does this also apply to other technical details like camera direction?

JN: The script will have a lot of clues that I'll need visually, but 90 percent of those clues I save for a"shadow script." With Signs & Wonders I actually ended up with three parallel scripts: the script itself, one that was just about camera notation and lighting ideas, and one that was about set design and the tangible properties inside the frame.

MM: Does all that help you on the set?

JN: I don't think I would have had the freedom to be receptive to the actors' improvisations if I didn't have this work behind me. The script needs to be labored over with incredible care but then it needs to be disrespected almost absolutely.

MM: Many pieces of the story are not shown on screen. During the writing stage, are you thinking,"Well, they can fill this bit in, I don't need to show it?"

JN: When one makes a film, there's a beautiful and dreamlike dialogue with the audience. James and I made a decision very early on to be rapier-quick, to jump from peak to peak - not necessarily the peaks of emotional intensity but the peaks [of narrative events]. It's up to the audience to imagine the vast and deeply important experiences that the three characters would have gone through. I think that audiences are very sophisticated in terms of decoding storytelling on film.

MM: What is the most challenging thing about writing and directing your own work?

JN: There's a danger that you'll end up staring at your own belly button. A lot of crap that passes for auteurist cinema is guilty of that. I'd rather watch Rambo any day.

Alec in Wonderland

by Mark Peranson
Cinema Scope

During my first visit to Paris in May, I planned an afternoon around seeing Signs & Wonders at the MK2 theatre in Montparnasse. Confronted with a labyrinthine map in a somewhat familiar language, it still took me 45 minutes to find my way down the spiral alleyway leading to the theatre; by then, it was too late. In Toronto, with its noted, drab postmodern geography, I can t imagine getting lost while trying to find a movie theatre; getting lost inside a multiplex is another thing entirely. But as Jonathan Nossiter s film illustrates through the streets and malls of Athens, the place where Old and New Worlds collide, Toronto and Paris might not be that far apart after all. They both have McDonald s.

The omnipresent Golden Arches aptly have a unique resonance in Nossiter s opaque third film, his second feature. Their vibrant, oil-soaked uber-yellows obsessively reappear, turning up in Deborah Kara Ungar s scarf and the clownlike suit the cuckold Stellan Skarsgard sports. He ratiocinates (a key word in this film) that it s a make-up gift from wife Charlotte Rampling, to atone for his marriage disassembled; by then, he s been thrust into a nightmarish, Pynchonian Wonderland of obsessive stalking. And, by then, we know he s wrong about everything.

A full-blown salvo to the establishment that nevertheless finds its own place near the current end of a continuum of film history, Signs & Wonders is either the last film of the previous millennium, or the first film of the new one. And not just because of its intriguing production, which includes an inventive use of digital video in a way reminiscent of Antonioni s little-seen video experiment The Oberwald Mystery, and a crew assembled from a majority of the NATO members (including a French producer, a British screenwriter, and actors from Sweden, Canada, the US and Greece). The low-keyed tenderness of shared complicity and the downtrodden, slack rhythms of Queens in 1997 s Sunday have been replaced by a monomaniacal impulse to dominate, to chart the state of things in a post-state system.

Densely, almost pathologically, organized, Signs & Wonders is a nourish psychological thriller where the city, an always looming and mysterious place of reflections and intrigue, comes to express the desires of the main character or is nearly willed into being by him. As explained by co-screenwriter James Lasdun, whose short story Ate, Memos or the Miracle was the basis for Nossiter s first feature, Sunday, Alec (Skarsgard) is a Stockholm-born voluntary American a man for whom the pursuit of happiness exists as a religious, fundamentalist imperative. Alec s will dominates him, and he attempts to dominate others through a particular egregious means of interpretation: seeing the world as rational, and people (women, in particular) as commodities to be exchanged.

To illustrate: The ring on the ceiling of Alec s hotel room becomes the ring that his wife says, instead of call , when she mentions a forthcoming telephone conversation. (Both have their corollary in the wedding ring.) Underneath Adrian Utley s soundscape that incorporates elements of Portishead, Tommy Dorsey, and Eric Satie, among others, the beating heart is an examination of male pride and vagarity. Skarsgard s Alec is a desperate man trying in vain to come to grips with what is essentially a confusing world, assured that every choice he makes is the right one. Both noble and perverse, his quest to make his own existence the one that matters is doomed to failure. In a way expressed by Nossiter below, it encapsulates the concern of the filmmaker, making this another in a series of ongoing Cinema Scope interview features exploring this subtext.

All this said, Signs & Wonders is an easy film to walk by, or get lost in. Culling the signal from the noise also see the first scene is Sunday, where Oliver, glasses-off, arises to meet the tumult of a homeless men s shelter may be what Alec does, but is it the viewer s imperative? The tangled web of shifting emotional attachments and their visual counterparts creates an ingrown
confusion, matching Alec s commitment to reason; many, like those at last year s Berlin Film Festival who found the film pretentious and incomprehensible, might just be pissed off. No wonder. It s another sign that the film is about more than an affair, having to do with the personal ramifications of globalization, or the confused way in which we actually live. The attempt to draw something beautiful out of something inherently ugly is an impulse that connects earthy, complicated filmmakers as wide-off as Paul Verhoeven and Bruno Dumont, if not one traceable to the lineage forged by Eustache and Cassavetes. Nossiter can be added to the few who get the world as it exists, and whose non-palliative work, in some way, exists to confuse, discomfort and even anger viewers, to shake them out of their complacency through emotional and physical disaster.

In conversation at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, the part-time director, part-time sommelier came across as especially candid in his vociferous attack on Kodak film, various nationalities and a certain multinational corporation. At length Nossiter expresses disdain for the critic s compulsion for interpretation based on preexisting models. Ultimately, there is no reading between the lines needed to understand Signs & Wonders, unless you want to read it as an implicit criticism of Hollywood moviemaking. Rather, it reflects the world as it exists, especially outside North America hegemonic rationalism on
its last legs. The behaviour studied is that of those caught up in the invisible forces, lacking the recognition that unabridged pursuit of happiness is incompatible with anything but an unbridled individualism. To put it another way, there are no symbols, only signs.

CINEMA SCOPE: How did the film get off the ground, to end up here?

JONATHAN NOSSITER: The project started at Fox Searchlight, and at a certain point they were interested in taking the film in one direction, which I definitely understood, but I felt ready to shoot, so I ended up with MK2. It s sort of like, I guess, women giving birth. Films are deeply traumatic, deeply sexual and deeply physical experiences. They are not rational and intellectual enterprises. And that s true for everyone involved: the producers are out of their minds, directors are completely insane, actors we don t have to say anything about ... It s funny actually being at a festival and talking to the people working the hotel, and then seeing masses of film people. I swear to god, I feel like we ve all dropped acid, because there s a level of collective insanity. In one way, I think it s incredibly beautiful that human collective madness can coalesce to produce some tangible expression I think that s unbelievably beautiful. On the other hand, it s also horrible, and you can see the seamy underside in the way you steamroller over other human sensibilities, over collective social reality, over much more pressing social needs. Festivals are emotionally very polarizing experiences.

SCOPE: Did you have the same experience in Berlin?

NOSSITER: No, because fundamentally Toronto is a great experience, Berlin was brutal. The Variety review was the icing on the cake. What s great about Toronto is that there is a fundamental notion here of kindness, and I don t mean that fatuously, that maybe runs through the Canadian character. Berlin has all of the disadvantages of a high-powered festival and very few of the luxuries. Berlin is asexual, it s brutal. The festival s been moved to the Potsdamer Platz the irony is me being there for a film which to some extent is an attack on the globalization of culture and on the terrible destructive force that it exerts on emotions, to go to this new city, in a No Man s Land, constructed as a nightmare vision of a mall. There s a McDonald s across the street from the main movie theatres you re in this terrifying, claustrophobic, antiseptic, antihuman global nothingness. It s too bad because I was there ten years ago with my first film, Resident Alien and it was in the Zoopalast, and it was all sort of decrepit and you could feel history. Where the Berlin festival is now, history has been erased. So a film festival in a place like that is a somewhat upsetting experience. And the acceptance of the film was deeply polarized.

SCOPE: To a certain extent, you ve described why: the film observes the massive erasing of history and takes a definite, political opposition to it. Is the fact that civilization began in Athens the reason you set Signs &Wonders there? I know you studied Greece.

NOSSITER: It s the cradle of civilization and the coffin these days. There are a lot of reasons. My dad was a journalist and wrote about the dictatorship frequently, so that had something to do with forming my political sense of the world. Athens as a city is a sort of representative nightmare for what s happening to Western cities everywhere. It s just laid out with a kind of rawness. Athens is the raw skeleton of what lurks in Toronto, New York, Vancouver, St Louis, Lille, Frankfurt if you strip away the facade of money and a certain level of history from these cities you d find Athens, which is a teeming, chaotic mess, a kind of maelstrom of anguish and misplaced energy and terrible desperation, a waking urban nightmare. But it s also exhilarating, because it s hugely human and pulsating and powerful. Athens is a place that has obsessed me for a long time. And it s so violently antiaesthetic as an environment, it s a kind of perverse challenge to extract beauty from it.

SCOPE: Is Signs & Wonders an anti-American film?

NOSSITER: No, not at all. The French seem very happy to regard it as anti-American because it makes the French feel better. I think the evil is not America, the evil is McDonald s.

SCOPE: So it s multinational corporations?
NOSSITER: Exactly. McDonald s originates in America, because America has been the dominant power, but the French are equally complicitous in the evilness of the perpetration of McDonald s by accepting them, by embracing them! Obviously, America as the dominant power is the most visible expression of all kinds of illnesses and misdeeds. But I don t feel anti-American, and I don t think the film is anti-American. The film takes a critical look at the reality of Americanization of other parts of the world, but the complicity is mutual. Are the Germans to blame that the French collaborated so easily? The other day Charlotte said something much more intelligent: She sees it as about domination. That s a much better way of putting it, because it incorporates the political and the social dimensions, but also the personal and the emotional, the male-female.

SCOPE: Did the film start with the male-female or the political-social?

NOSSITER: It starts with the male-female. James and I were interested in looking at certain human problems. It always starts very micro, very human. And then the more we work on the script, the more we try to find the eddyings, the potential resonances of human exchange. I think James and I share the view that personal actions are political, in a general sense. These are layers that add on as you go. We started with the idea of a man obsessed with signs, of decoding the world in a peculiarly ugly and absurd male way, and the black humour inherent in that, what forces come into play, how that affects other people. It sort of grew out of that.

SCOPE: How about the style? The way it s shot is almost like a surveillance film, and I m also reminded of Don t Look Now, yellow taking the place of red. I was wondering if there were any influences in that sense. Obviously, though, the style of the film is far different from any of those, or Sunday

NOSSITER: Things take on an organic life, and express themselves organically. I m deeply sceptical of anyone that ever imposes an aesthetic on something before it exists. Aesthetics to me are interesting when they emerge naturally, slowly and largely subconsciously. Now that s a bit disingenuous. With a basic motive force of subconsiousness, you galvanize, you try and organize. You re your own psychotic patient and your own psychiatrist at the same time. You re trying to exploit your own madness, your own illness, your own dysfunction, and also take as accurate a gauge of it as possible. And I think that s the way an aesthetic expression of something functions. Neither James nor I in the writing or directing think about conscious models. (a) I think it s pretentious and (b) if you adopt the model of someone that you admire, I think it s fucking insulting! and (c) it s also very destructive. Like with a love for another person, you want to at least labour under the illusion that it s not interchangeable. There s something specific and individual in the quality of the love that you re bringing to the film. I love seeing films and of course they affect me. But it would be like telling your girlfriend, I love your eyes, they remind me of my third girlfriend

SCOPE: Even if they do, subconsciously. What s curious to me is how you reach this style, how you end up coming to it. Even if it s organic, once you start shooting, you have to shoot the whole film that way

NOSSITER: Well, different elements come into play. If the film has a style, to use that word, it s not something that comes out of the ten best list in Teen magazine or the Marcel Proust school of what s aesthetically cool this week in high school. The use of digital, for instance, was entirely accidental and not agreed on until three weeks before shooting. But what are the factors that led into the accident? The first is my disgust with Kodak, and their monopoly on world film stock. With their McDonaldization of the quality they ve changed the grain from an X to a T to correspond to television, which produces a slick advertising look we re all fucked. Unless you have the geniuses or the resources of Kubrick to break down Kodak film to make it look like video, then you re really fucked with Kodak. We did tests with Fuji, Agfa s gone out of business, I wanted to shoot on Orwo, which is this European stock, but is too unreliable though that would have been a choice. That disgust coincided with spending seven or eight months in pre-production shooting every day three or four hours of digital video, on a mini-DV. I developed an emotional relationship to that city. It s like fucking, it s like making love. You re very implicated physically with that camera. I actually hate video. I have a friend who s a painter who describes it accurately as inherently a godless medium, which it is but the son of a bitch crops up in unexpected places, and after seven or eight months you ve got a feeling for him.

And then a very weird accident happened I d take these hundreds of hours of video footage and freeze-frame them on the television to construct something like a storyboard or organize my thoughts. I d take a 35mm still of the image, and I d send it off to the one hour photo in Athens which is not high tech, and it s more like two days. But omething amazing happened, and this is the joy of making a film, the accidental discovery and there s no doubt about that. I d get these photographs back that I did not feel the author or the agent of and I think the auteur theory should go fuck itself and I d look at these things, and they had a beauty to them. First of all, on the pure physical level, a formal beauty: it took my breath away. Ironically they were printed on Kodak. But there was enough human and technological imperfection that interceded the process that when I looked at these things, there was a grain that has been lost, a texture, a kind of colour bled with a kind of richness. I looked at this stuff and I thought, Shit, I wished the film looked like this. Then we started to send off some of the actual video footage to a lab in Switzerland, Swiss Effects, a real pioneer in digital. It happened to be the month where they made a huge breakthrough in the software to ratchet up the quality level. And also the physical energy of Athens the idea of having a heavy camera to deal with
the madness of that city felt less and less appropriate. And so all of these factors came together. Is that style? I don t know if that s style, that s accidents. But it s a series of accidents where hopefully care, attention to detail, a certain kind of rigour, all of these elements are in play.

SCOPE: Also, once you decided on digital video, you still can use it any number of ways, but you ended up with a surveillance feel, shooting around corners, accentuating certain colours

NOSSITER: Part of that probably would have occurred if we shot in 35mm anyway, because a lot of the film is about observation, and people observing each other, not able to observe each other, not able to understand what they re observing, which, peculiar enough, sounds a lot like what a director does. Particularly the not understanding part. So, I think this was definitely one of the functioning ideas, but one that springs first of all from the central character, so as a gratuitous aesthetic imposed, it s trying to take the logical consequences of what the human being within the frame is doing. Colour also plays a powerful role, and one of the things that I discovered was the technology that was previously available to only big budget Hollywood films, machines where you could take each image and rework it, relight, find different contrasts, shift colours, heighten colours, desaturate

I m a failed painter, I went to art school and that failure has haunted me for a long time. I ve felt frustrated in the past about the limits of timing prints, and how much you intercede, once your narrative and editing is set, once you know where the emotion of the story is, I feel very frustrated at not being able to rework it. If you re painting a still life of a flower and a vase for three months, your emotional relation to it at the end of three months is very different from when you started. As a painter, you can still rework and invest it with different visual qualities; as a filmmaker, you re kind of fucked. Now, with video, I can take a scene which has been lit in a certain way with emphasis on certain colours, and quality and tone in the colour, that would turn out not to be really appropriate given the way Charlotte and Stellan might have played the scene, or the way it was edited, then I can suddenly go back and rework the damned thing, in relation to what I feel is the human or narrative reality. That I can tell you was the most extraordinary part of the whole digital thing. Even if I go back and shoot the next film on 35mm, I ll transfer it to video, then rework the digital, and blow it back up, just because of palette range.

SCOPE: When you say the auteur theory is bullshit are you referring to what the actors bring to the table?

NOSSITER: I think the auteur theory has been blown into a proportion that s ridiculous. Most non-commercial films are driven by a guided personality who is inevitably the director, and they inevitably will reflect the director s sensibility more powerfully than other people s. However, this is a deeply collaborative process; I say this as someone who is deeply egotistical. The pleasure of making a film is a constant struggle, in a positive sense, between the will of your own ego and your own sensibility, and the acceptance, the engagement and the rejection of other people s. And I m lucky, I think, to work with a writer as talented and extraordinary as James Lasdun. Stellan and Charlotte aren t your little Hollywood stars who show up on the set, open their mouths, throw a tantrum and go home. They re artists, they re collaborators. They ll fight tooth and nail for trying to create a reality. The script is a principal launching pad for that reality, but it s not the reality. I m not the reality as a human being as Jonathan Nossiter, I m not the reality as the director. I m trying to find, like Alec, a certain pattern in the reality that s unfolding, I m trying to give it a certain shape but I m not the reality. They re a lot more the concrete emotional reality! And once their work is done, the emotion of the scene can be completely reversed or decimated by the introduction of sound. Sound functions critically and powerfully in any film, and it s up to the director and composer to figure it out if they really want to exploit it or not.

SCOPE: Did you have the soundscape in mind from the beginning?

NOSSITER: Not like that. Sound is vital to me, it s something I think about when writing. I started listening to Portishead while writing, and I was struck by the architectural, cinematic quality that they have naturally, struck by the powerful emotion that was never sentimental, or emotionally cheap, something that both James and I admire. Also, Charlotte and Stellan are actors that are deeply emotional without being cheap and sentimental. It s strange, because some people think the film is unemotional, which I don t understand in the least the emotion just has a restraint to it. Adrian came on the set when we were shooting. I had him discuss extensively with the sound recordist, we were already talking about sounds that he was recording wild on the streets of Athens that could be used either in an harmonic musical fashion or just by themselves. In a way the audience will never know it s being used, but functioning as dramatic, emotional, psychological elements of the scene. With the editor, Madeleine Gavin, who also did Sunday, we re already working sound in great detail even when we re doing rough cuts. It s not like you re doing a picture edit and then you re starting to worry about sound design. I don t understand how you could do that, there s no picture cut that functions exclusive of sound, even if the sound is silence or just production sound. So Adrian came over to New York, we started to work on it, throw ideas back and forth.

SCOPE: Were there any scenes you paid attention to in particular?

NOSSITER: The ski scene was a fiasco because the footage that I shot sucked. That s where video definitely fell down, it didn t provide the heightened richness in the shooting the way I wanted it. Partly because I made some very bad choices. I m extremely happy with the way the scene turned out, it s actually one of the very few scenes in the film that I like, but that s because two things happened after I realized the failure of the dailies. Originally that scene was to be silent, the images were supposed to carry it. I knew that I wanted a non-realistic, fabulist quality, a lush, mysterious richness, but I imagined in my pompous head that I had come up with all these extraordinary images. I saw the dailies and I wanted to cry. Then Madeleine and I cut things together 25 different ways and couldn t generate any interest. I thought that if this scene is as flat and bad as this, then we re fucked, because the whole film turns around on it. Adrian and I started to talk, and I said, Alright, I m going to capitulate, maybe we should think about music here, but I don t want some soupy music scene. Then Adrian sent me what he calls crusty sound. Portishead is quite technologically advanced, but their real interest is in retro, deglamorizing sound, finding crust and grain there s a nice sensibility fit there. Adrian sent me a sound on a little microcassette recorder, and my first reaction was boredom. And Adrian said, You re not really listening to it. He really insisted. It turned out to be this sort of vertiginous sound. He was absolutely right. We started to build stuff out of that, together. We spent weeks labouring over that two minutes of sound. Suddenly, thanks to the sounds he concocted, weird mixes of things, and also bits of Tommy Dorsey I found that he deconstructed or sampled, and we sort of built up this weird, hopscotch layering. I was also able to bring colours out that weren t there, and give it a 50s Technicolor look that I really like.

SCOPE: I have to go back to the fact that it s one of the few scenes in the filmthat you like. Are you serious when you say that?

NOSSITER: Yeah.

SCOPE: But the film as a whole?

NOSSITER: I m the last to be able to judge the quality of the film. I can only tell you about dissatisfactions, and my own dissatisfactions are substantial. I see all the terrible mistakes that I made at various points. Most scenes cause a lot of heartbreak. That s one of the few scenes that given how deep the heartbreak went when I was looking at the dailies, I was exhilarated to see something that I find quite interesting and mysterious, largely thanks to Adrian s sound.

SCOPE: Are you more satisfied with Sunday?

NOSSITER: No, less probably. Less. Sunday is like a little orphan. It s stupid what I m saying and is probably not interesting it s my personality, I find fuel in dissatisfaction.

SCOPE: You re sounding like Alec a bit. Do you relate to him?

NOSSITER: Ah, of course I do, at some level. He horrifies me. I ve never been married, so I ve never ruined a marriage. It ain t autobiographical, if that s what you re asking.

SCOPE: But the pride that he expresses, or his futile attempt to pursue happiness. It s about the need to draw meaning, is that something in particular that you relate to?

NOSSITER: Yeah, that s right. I think there s a lot of joy in the film. On the surface it can be read as a dark, psychological thriller, but to me there s an exhilaration, a joy in the basic rhythms, and I think that has to do with the energy that Stellan brings as a human being, as an actor. Alec is engaged with, in his basic activity, that is to continuously, repeatedly, and I think in some
ways quite nobly, try and find meaning and connections even when it s meaningless, stupid, farfetched and stunted. I think the struggle to try and find connections, no matter how stupid, is a beautiful thing, I think it s one of the most extraordinary things that people can do. And I think it s the greatest thrill in making a film, because that s what you re doing constantly. So I relate at that level.

SCOPE: Can you talk about the ending? Most people seem to be quite mystified by the last 20 minutes.

NOSSITER: You can call it opaque, or a reckoning with a degree of unknowability. It s funny, women in general seem to be more at ease with the nonconclusiveness of things. And to some extent it s the subject of the film, the qualities of unknowability. It is definitely antimale, antirational, antiengineering mind/spirit. And I found that by and large there has definitely been a pattern
of reaction to his film men are more afraid of confronting unpleasant characteristics in themselves and women seem to feel more sympatheticallytowards the film. Some men are downright hostile and pissed off at the film. I ve got a lot of very, very violent responses from men about the film that I find hostile. That said, I m not crazy about the ending. It s probably my least favourite part. But I also think that endings are bad, even in films I love. I think it s always a mistake. The more a film gives me pleasure, the more uninterested I am in the notion of resolution. About the only ending I ve ever loved is the one film about the impossibility of endings, 8 1/2, which has tenof them, each one contradicting the last one. There are all kinds of famous stories about Hollywood directors, brilliant ones, who deliberately tank their ending just to subvert the whole idea of it. It s an instinct that I understand.We wrote 30 different endings, we shot 15 different endings. I don t like the ending, but it was less toxic to me than others. I hope it s a film that engages the spectator with enough power is cumming the greatest moment in fucking? I hope not.

SCOPE: This gender difference is also in the film how Alec and his daughter interpret differently in their games.

NOSSITER: I think the difference is in the emotion of interpretation. I don t think it s monolithic, that there s a female way of viewing the world and a male way of viewing the world. I think there are different models that definitely separate the sexes in the way that they re interested in absorbing and interpreting information. But this is one of the few areas of human existence where I think there s some hope. The sort of brutal, structured rationalism that has guided male culture for so long is being eroded, thank god.

SCOPE: This gets back to the response in Berlin, the bastion of rationality, and the film argues that you can t have cognition without an emotional component to it this is the big theoretical issue with regard to the interpretation of information, and there are de facto views of the world that comes with rationality

NOSSITER: McDonald s comes with it. McDonald s is the logical end result of rationalizing the world, there s just no end about it rationalizing emotions! The fascism of our days is expressed through these things. There s a sign I saw on the way over here for McDonalds, about craving a conscious acknowledgement that they re playing biochemically on your responses in order to induce a result. There s a basic argument in the film that globalization is not some abstract political concept, it fucks you up in the home also. To me this connection is clear, and I m terrified, I m terrified by what s happening in the world by the way people who are otherwise deeply intelligent and sensitive are passively accepting their world being run over, steamrolled, destroyed by these forces of globalization. These are not political issues, these are personal issues, these are deeply emotional issues. You cannot have a love affair in a McDonald s. It can t happen!

Mark Peranson is the editor of Cinema Scope. Signs & Wonders is in release from Mongrel Media in Canada and Strand Releasing in the US.