#nyff56

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Il materiale di origine: Paul Bruinooge / Oscar Isaac at the New York Film Festival after party for At Eternity’s Gate at Ascent in New York City. (12th October, 2018)

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NYFF - High Life Premiere 

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NYFF 56.

“I always flirt with death” is the first line of the 1978 song Another Girl, Another Planet by English rock band The Only Ones. It’s also the first line in Alex Ross Perry’s new film Her Smell, sung by Perry muse Elisabeth Moss (pictured above) as the addicted, destructive grunge star Becky Something. Perry and his crew went through a number of songs before realizing The Only Ones’ classic was the right number to open the film. “That’s the movie… that’s the first line,” writer-director Perry told the New York Film Festival audience during its US premiere screenings this weekend.

A rock’n’roll drama, Her Smell is something like a horror film, tense and unhinged, with a structure that leaves viewers guessing. The first scene, which tracks Becky and her band Something She from the end of a gig through to a backstage spiritual ritual, runs 24 minutes.

The structural formality was inspired by Steve Jobs (2015), written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle—“a film that nobody remembers and nobody liked,” Perry joked. (Not true at Letterboxd, where it maintains a solid 3.6.) With its three scenes, Perry explained that Steve Jobs carries the tension of live theater, where “you don’t know how long you’re looking at the same set for”. Perry wanted to remove the safety net of predictability for Her Smell’s audience too.

Her Smell has five acts, which Perry sorted into public / private / public / private / public scenes as we follow Becky Something’s destructive path and meet her family and band members along the way. “It’s a movie about identity… Do you act the same when there’s no-one looking?” At every opportunity, the crew chose to repeat shots from earlier scenes, going so far as to have an iPad on set displaying earlier frames, so that they could get a later shot looking as close as possible to earlier shots, “to make it feel like we’ve been here before.”

Alex Ross Perry and Elisabeth Moss on the NYFF56 red carpet. Photo: Philip May.

Though the film’s lead character, Becky Something, is her own particular beast, Perry drew on many legendary rock stars to create her. Most of all Axl Rose, because “he’s somebody that everybody seemed to have a story about”. Her Smell introduces Becky Something mid-career, mid-addictions. She sees visions, makes wildly illogical pronouncements, keeps a shaman on the payroll, and rules her band with a narcissist’s myopic cruelty.

“Jesus, it’s fucking hard,” Elisabeth Moss remembers thinking during filming, specifically when it came to making her character’s Riot Grrl act authentic. Her own musical background is in jazz and blues, with “minimal” exposure to punk. Along with her supporting cast—Agyness Deyn, Dylan Gelula, Ashley Benson, Cara Delevingne, Gayle Rankin and Amber Heard—Moss studied and shadowed other musicians. “We only had to learn enough to look like we knew what we were doing.”

Moss told the NYFF audience that her process was “very instinctual; I don’t like to plan a lot… I just follow the script. If it’s a good script and a good writer I follow that map.” As well as the covers she sings (The Only Ones and, erm, Bryan Adams), Moss performed songs written for her screen band by Alicia Bognanno of Bully, and Anika Pyle.

Moss joked with Perry that “it was nice to finally do something serious”. Something tougher than “the loose improv comedy style of Handmaid’s Tale,” Perry cracked back.

Moss followed up with a quick insight into the future of her hit television series: “Season 3′s gonna be craaazy!” The audience went wild.

Stay tuned for more NYFF56 coverage.

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Il materiale di origine: Jamie McCarthy / Oscar Isaac at the premiere for At Eternity’s Gate at Alice Tully Hall during the 56th New York Film Festival At Lincoln Center in New York City. (12th October, 2018)

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Il materiale di origine: @alfonsohdiaz (Instagram) / Oscar Isaac at the premiere for At Eternity’s Gate at Alice Tully Hall during the 56th New York Film Festival At Lincoln Center in New York City. (12th October, 2018) #myedit

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Il materiale di origine: @crolins (Twitter)

Sooo, Oscar pees 💦 off the side of the hill in this film. Was this his own idea or Julian Schnabel’s idea? 🤔😂

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Oscar Isaac red carpet interview from the At Eternity’s Gate premiere during the 56th New York Film Festival. (12th October, 2018)