a SIFF 2008 interview

Sexual Controversy
Filmmaker Alan Ball Talks About His New Film Towelhead

Towelhead, based on the acclaimed novel by Alicia Erian, is a stark, darkly uncompromising coming of age melodrama about a 13-year-old named Jasira, beautifully played by newcomer Summer Bishil, doscovering her sexuality in a Huston, Texas suburb. It is a frighteningly uncompromising tale filled with pedophilia, racism, youthful alienation, adult stupidity and suburban malaise.

Summer Bishil and writer/director Alan Ball on the set of Warner Independent's Towelhead

In short, it is a film not for the faint of heart, not that this should come as a surprise for anyone even remotely familiar with screenwriter and director Alan Ball. After all, he’s the mind behind HBO’s Emmy-winning “Six Feet Under” and was an Oscar-winner for writing American Beauty, to popular entertainments known for their abilities to push both buttons and boundaries with uncompromising ease.

Not that either of those successes meant it was easy to see this particular project come to fruition. In fact, if you ask the filmmaker, it was just the opposite. “It’s been a crazy adventure,” admits Ball. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy [to get made] after I read the novel, but I have to say I didn’t think it would be this difficult. I am, however, extremely pleased with how everything turned out, but it’s still been hard every single step of the way. Extremely difficult.”

I sat down with the respected writer during the Seattle International Film Festival to discuss Towelhead, his feature-length directorial debut. During our brief time together we chatted about everything from the furor over the picture’s title, the confusion over the story’s multiple themes, the actual age of his diminutive youthful star and even a little bit about his bloodthirsty new series for HBO “True Blood.” Here are some of the highlights from our conversation.

(Note: There are some minor spoilers contained here. Please keep that in mind before proceeding.)

On the Film’s Title

“This is the title. This is the one I fought for. This is the one the movie should have. It’s the appropriate title. Absolutely appropriate and it couldn’t have gone out into the world with any other. I just couldn’t let it happen.”

“When I wrote the script, it was obviously based on a novel called Towelhead. It was what Alicia [Erian] titled it and it was the one I in turn used. It got passed on by every single studio. Every single mini-studio. Every single mini-mini independent studio. Everyone was just terrified by it. At that point, we started thinking that maybe we needed to change the title to get financing.”

“After some thought, we ended up deciding to make it completely independently, and at the [2007] Toronto Film Festival we screened it with the title ‘Nothing is Private’ which was really not a good title for the movie. I think it is indicative that we were never able to think of a title that was as good as the original title, and when Warner Bros. first showed interest in distributing it the first thing the said they wanted to do was go back to the original title, Towelhead, and send it out to the theaters that way. I was – am – very happy about that.”

On How He Knew the Book Would Make a Really Good Film

“I could just see it. It was so unique, so completely genuine. It felt very real. I loved the humor in it even though I wouldn’t ever classify it as a comedy. I loved the clash of cultures, the details all felt really well observed and really true to life. It was just a wild ride and I couldn’t put it down. I read it in one weekend, the whole time being really terrified something very, very bad was going to happen in the end. And then, when it didn’t, it didn’t feel like phony Hollywood redemption, it felt real, and I was extremely emotionally affected by it.”

The Perils of Making a Movie about Evil Being Committed but Not One about Evil People Doing It

“The book refused to judge its characters and I really felt it was important that the movie not do that as well. This isn’t going to be easy for every viewer, and anyone who wants their films to be all laid out in black and white are probably going to be disappointed. For me, I just don’t find things that are ‘all’ right or ‘all’ wrong to be very interesting. I want to see people’s layers, want to see what makes them who they are. The book did that [beautifully] and I felt it was only right if our film did the same.”

On Walking the Line between Darkly Humorous and Forgivably Sensationalistic

“It wasn’t a conscious decision to walk that line. That was just the story and the book was exactly the same way. It makes you uncomfortable yet you can’t put it down and it’s extremely funny, but at the same time you’re emotionally involved in it.”

“That was the main thing, to keep [audiences] emotionally involved, with Jasira especially but also with all the characters, to see the moments where there are doing things for their own reasons, things that they shouldn’t do. But they’re human beings, they’re lonely. They’re insecure. But they’re also warm and caring, most of them filled with love for those supporting them. I just didn’t feel like we were doing our job if we weren’t able to showcase that.”

 Bishil and Aaron Eckhart share a moment in Warner Independent's Towelhead

“I think, one of the things that surprised me when I started watching the movie with audiences [was] how big the laughs were, how much the humor played. I never set out with the idea to make certain scenes funny, and I think most of the humor in the movie comes from the absurdity of the situation. As a director, and I think the actors were doing this, too, I always played it seriously and I think that [honesty] is where most of the humor comes from. If we had tried to make this movie funny it would have been a disaster. I don’t think there is any question on that front.”

On Allowing Jasira to Not Be Damaged By Her Ordeals

“It’s such a statistically common experience. The estimates are between one and four women and one and six men, and I think for something to be so statistically common there is a specific mythology behind child sexual abuse that the only way as a culture that we can approach it is to say that the perpetrator is a subhuman monster and the child is 150-percent innocent and does not enjoy any aspect of the experience at all and is forever damaged by it completely beyond repair.”

“While I think that is completely true in some instances I also think in the majority of cases it probably isn’t, and that was one of the things I really responded to in the book because I didn’t feel like [Jasira] was destroyed, I didn’t feel like she was punished for being sexually curious. The book was even positive about the sexual experience, not of course with what she has with Mr. Vuoso, but it was in regards to the relationship with Thomas and in regards to her own sexual awakening.”

“I mean, by the end of the book not only has she survived this tremendous ordeal, but she also becomes much in control of her own body and her own life and was able to extricate herself from an abusive situation and discover surrogate parents who are arguably the only ones qualified to actually be parents. I thought that was really refreshing and gratifying and as such was something we needed to make sure and translate to the film absolutely intact.”

On Presenting Complicated Human Beings and Not One-Dimensional Archetypes

“I know that when I go to movies and they do all the judging for me and all the thinking for me and I’m just expected to sit there like this boneless chicken I just so don’t care. The movies and work I respond to are stories that present the complexity of life in all its messy and brutal beauty and don’t tell me what I’m supposed to feel. Then I’m allowed to interact with the story in a way that’s much more gratifying. That’s the only kind of work I like to see and it is the only kind of work I like to do.”

“I think the vast majority of our culture is all about selling us something, it is designed to manipulate. So much of the art that is out there is manufactured to try and convince us to purchase a product, to sell us some kind of fashion, to promote this idea of what it is that makes life authentic. And it is all completely manufactured. It isn’t genuine. It isn’t real. I think it is increasingly difficult to live an authentic life without being influenced or shaped or influenced by culture, and the predominate culture we live in right now is the marketing culture and I’m not remotely interested in promoting that. I want to talk about what’s real, what’s important, and I hope my work does that.”

On Discovering Summer Bishil

“Oh my god, thank goodness we did fin her! I knew that this movie depended on this actress, and I had the bond company saying that the actors playing Thomas and Jasira had to be 18 or else they wouldn’t insure the movie, so it was imperative that I find this girl.”

Bishil is front and center in Warner Independent's Towelhead

“When I first saw her it was just, wow, she just really captured your attention. Not only does she look beautiful, you just like her. She was everything that this character needed to be and it became pretty obvious that she was the one.”

“One of the really great things about her was that, even though she was 18, she still had some of these natural childlike mannerisms. She wasn’t like an actor who had been working since she was five. In fact, it was almost like fate because [Summer] also had this really worldly background and this really strong sense of self which allowed her to really play these [tough], extremely intense moments in a way that was real and didn’t feel prurient or disgusting. She was able to create a character who could carry an entire movie.”

On Period Setting Allowing for Modern Commentary

“It gives you an in. This story is set during the first Gulf War, a time when I man named Bush was President of the United States. Right now, America is waging war in the Middle East and men named Bush and Cheney are calling the shots. Seventeen, eighteen years later and nothing has changed.”

“I think in a sense it is our fault in that we allow this to go on, that we allow money and corporate interests to be the things our government serves and not the [voting public] at large, and I think this is because we are just an incredibly distracted populace. We have to work harder and harder everyday, and the last thing you want to do is wrap your brain around complex situations and educate yourself. It’s a lot easier to just turn on the television or plug into the video game. Unfortunately, the price we’re paying is that our country is being hijacked and sold to the highest bidder, and that’s just unfortunate.”

“I’ve read reviews of this movie where critics talk about the main characters as being Muslim, one critic even referred to Rifat as an Iraqi, and I don’t even know how to respond to that. They see an Arab character and they immediately think Muslim, they think Iraq. It could not be clearer in the movie that he [and Jasira] are Christian. I could not have used the words Lebanese or Lebanon more than I already do. And yet these misconceptions remain, and these are big critics who write for big organizations and I just appalled.”

Bishil and Ball discuss a scene in Warner Independent's Towelhead

“On the one hand it’s just incredibly ignorant, which is inexcusable, or on the other the least generous view is that it’s on purpose, which is even more inexcusable. In the larger sense, and I am about to say something really pretentious, I think [this] is why as a human race we seem to be failing and are the only species who willingly destroys our environment because we’re so unable to think of ourselves as members of the same race, the same group. That’s the world we’re dealing with right now, and if that’s not a world worth commenting on than I don’t know what is.”

- Portions of this interview reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle

Additional Links:

-  Towelhead review by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  2008 SIFF Blog by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  2008 Seattle International Film Festival Home Page
-  Towelhead Theatrical Trailer