'The story is the most important thing'
With the stunning animated documentary Waltz With Bashir now showing in cinemas across the UK, Screenjabber's Michael Edwards caught up for a chat with the film's art director, David Polonsky
ME: How did you come to be involved in the project?
DP: I was doing a project with Ari [Folman] just before the film, a documentary series called 'The Material that Love is Made of' and it had little bits of animation in it. And I guess we just naturally moved along to the big thing.
ME: It is a big thing! An animated documentary, was the format really a natural progression or were you just hit with this idea?
DP: The idea itself was the gripping thing, more than anything else. The idea of trying to re-imagine people's stories and stuff like that.
ME: What were you initial thoughts on how to deal with it?
DP: Oooh! The good thing was that we didn't have too much time to brood on it. Ari had to submit a pitch to this forum at the Toronto Film Festival to get funds for the film, and we had something like a month and a half to do three minutes. So we just drafted the script and he recorded himself and Yoni [Goodman], the director of animation, and myself we did the pitch in like three weeks. And most of it is still in the film so it kind of hammered out the way it was going to be done in this frantic, quick solution which is, in a way, natural. But there was a little bit of trial and error in the beginning.
ME: So what were the key things you felt you had to get right for this project?
DP: It had to have this sense of truthfulness, the emphasis is on the sense of it. You can't pretend you're showing how it was but you have to create a guise of authenticity: a feeling that this could be true. And obviously you couldn't have references for everything. Like for the scene we did for the pitch, it takes place inside the Beirut airport. Now, besides the fact that I couldn't go to Beirut because I have an Israeli passport, the building itself was demolished and rebuilt so we had no idea what the inside looked like. But you have all these things [as a reference], like it's the 80s and you have to have this retro look, and it's Lebanon, and the building is from the 30s and the impression it makes on Ari the young soldier who's coming into the European splendour of this modernist building. It's all in the details though, and we collected these posters for Lebanese airline companies and it's not there for the viewer to catch but together it comes alive. That's one thing. And for the characters what was crucial was to draw people and not characters, they couldn't be stylised. It would be much easier for the animators if you could exagerrate some of the features and stuff like that but they had to be, in a way, humble drawing. It's not a show of draftsmanship or bold compositions, you had to keep your mind on the story.
ME: With that in mind, how difficult was it to find the balance between 'traditional animation' and CG?
DP: There wasn't anyting traditional about the process. Yoni had to come up with a new technique of using flash animation because it's kind of cut-out animation: one extreme of this is South Park and the other is Waltz with Bashir but basically it's the same approach which is not drawing each frame anew but using specific elements and moving them about. This was something that wasn't done exactly in this way before, it was invented especially for the film, so we obviously had a lot of mistakes in the beginning!
ME: What films have influenced the style you brought to the film?
DP: I'm not sure it's films that influenced it. For the way of the narrative, the use of the camera, this is more Ari's way of telling the story. But in terms of visual style my influences come from a lot of places, some things come from German expressionism, some are kind of Japanese, so I don't know. It's hard tell!
ME: What are your favourite animated films from the past 10 years or so?
DP: I really like the mainstream things, I love Pixar. Wall.E was great.
ME: You might be competing with them for the best animation Oscar...
DP: I wish! Those are lovely films and I love the way they manage to manipulate this huge machine, the studio, to innovate and create new things each time. So these are wonderful films. Persepolis was a great film too.
ME: Should that have beaten Ratatouille to the Oscar last year? I would've given it to Persepolis.
DP: I'm not sure, I loved Ratatouille. I knew the book before I saw Persepolis so i wasn't that surprised anymore. Of course Persepolis is much more groundbreaking but Ratatouille is complete in its field.
ME: But do you think Wall.E is better than Ratatouille?
DP: No.
ME: Why?
DP: Why is Ratatouille better than Wall.E ... hmmm, that's a hard a question! I think it has to be a very prosaic answer. Ratatouille is richer. Wall.E is based on a brilliant idea that works with the film, it's silent most of the time and it works and is engaging, and in a way it's even more artistic but it's harder to pull off something that's just a well-crafted story like Ratatouille, which keeps you engaged every second and it's so in tune with the story that you forget it's animation. That's the idea I think, basically. In anything you do the story is the most important thing.
ME: Has making Waltz with Bashir changed the way you look at other war films?
DP: It made me appreciate classics more. It's much easier to get what you want in a drawing but if you look at films like Apocalypse Now and understand that he's actually directing the elements it's insane. It puts you in awe.
ME: It's strange hearing these kind of modest answers when I've seen Waltz with Bashir and, honestly, I was just blown away by it. I really feel like it raised the bar in the way people look at war films and made the usual depictions of war look lazy. Do you think this will force other filmmakers to think more in depth about the personal experience of war?
DP: I hope so. But I think our greatest achievement was taking responsibility for exactly what you tell people about war. I mean taking control of every aspect of the frame because it's drawn, and the idea is to take the most dramatic material you can find - which is war - but it's also the lousiest thing, the dirtiest thing, and you elevate it and adjust it and make it possible for yourself to live with it through art. And few war films can do that because it's easy to go to one of the extremes and glorify it because of the explosions and the strange beauty, or make it impersonal and say people have become beasts and that's it.
ME: There's been a massive crop of war films, especially about Iraq, coming out recently and I can't think of one that stood out. Can you?
DP: I think it's impossible to make films while the war is still going on, and I also think that if it's really about war it has to be done by people who were really involved with the war. Not that I mean they have to have seen action but it can be brought up just because it's a 'hot topic' and it's much more than that.
ME: In a sense I felt like a lot of the films have felt like propaganda films and the filmmakers were just using it as a forum for their views...
DP: It can, yeah, that's exactly the point. Films are not made to make a statement, you can't make a film just in order to say words there. Just say words, it's simpler and cheaper! The idea is to create art and be honest about it. You can't relate to events of this magnitude in such a direct response, you have to look in retrospect because while it's going on more important things keep happening. You can't talk about these things when people are still being killed in the space you're depicting.
ME: In that case, what would you say is the most effective war film you've seen?
DP: I'm tempted again to say Apocalypse Now. What I was saying before about being involved in war, Coppola obviously didn't go to Vietnam but something in the way this film was made IS war itself, he involves himself in war, and you get a sense of that in the film.
• Waltz With Bashir is now on general release