Writer-director Robert Eggers made a splash at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival with his feature debut about witches in colonial New England; after camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed on a film set, her parents became advocates for production safety; the play 'Placas' tells the story of a man who escapes one of the world's most brutal gangs.
Can Sarah Jones' death save lives on film and TV sets?
It's been two years since Sarah Jones was killed on the set of "Midnight Rider," the biopic about Gregg Allman that was being shot in Georgia.
The 27-year-old camera assistant was part of a crew that was shooting on an active train trestle without permission. When a freight train rolled into the area, Jones was killed and several others were injured.
Jones’ death brought widespread attention to movie set safety, particularly on low-budget productions like “Midnight Rider” that might skirt rules and regulations to get an unauthorized or unsafe shot. The campaign to keep movie sets as safe as possible continues.
Jones’ parents, Richard and Elizabeth Jones, are playing a central role in that effort. They have a non-profit called Safety for Sarah, and they also are working on a documentary called “We Are Sarah Jones” that is intended to raise awareness about safety issues for crew members.
The couple recently traveled from South Carolina to Los Angeles to meet with studio executives, union officials and filmmakers, and they visited several sets to talk about their efforts. They also stopped by The Frame's studio for an interview with John Horn.
Interview Highlights:
Elizabeth, can you talk a little bit about Sarah herself? What kind of person was she?
Elizabeth: She was a fun person. She loved travel, and by the age of 27 she'd been to probably four or five countries. We knew she wanted to get into the camera business, though we thought it was post-production.
After she did an internship with "Army Wives," she realized that she wanted to be a camera assistant. She wanted to handle the camera, handle the big stuff, and she wanted to show that she had the gumption to do that. Camerawork is normally a man's job, but she was able to do it, and she was proud of that.
Did you ever think that what she was doing was dangerous?
Richard: No. And maybe that's part of what struck a nerve in the industry — there's no reason for what they were doing to have been dangerous. We understand that certain stunts in the industry can be dangerous, but then again, it's astounding how safe the industry has made stunts.
There's a tremendous amount of upfront effort and planning before the actual stunt is done. She worked on "Furious 7," and she'd tell me about all these different preparations they'd do for one shoot. So it can be done. But that day, it was such an unnecessary death. It was so preventable.
You've pushed for a way in which crew members can report an unsafe working condition without having to fear the loss of their job. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Richard: Part of what we want to do is to empower all people on sets, no matter what position they're in, to be able to speak up if they feel like there's a dangerous situation. There's an initiative that we're really just [unveiling] — the Safety for Sarah End Credit Program. If [producers] sign up for it, one of the items they agree on is to allow any cast or crew to call a Sarah timeout, which gives them 60 seconds to raise concerns about safety.
That's an important item to empower all people on the set to be able to speak up, [because] it's inherent in the industry that if a crew member makes a fuss, they might not get fired, they just may never get another call. So it's really a challenge.
Having lost a child, and having decided to use that loss as a starting point for what you're working on now, how did you move from grieving to action? And how long did it take you to figure out that this is what you needed and wanted to do?
Richard: We've been approached by so many in the industry asking us to be a voice for them. It's obviously not something we chose, but we do feel a calling, in a sense. It's never been a question to us, it's simply what's in front of us.
Elizabeth: Sarah wrote a paper in high school, which she started by writing: "I believe all things happen for a reason." She lived by that. And I believe that, when she passed on, it became our commission to make this a better world in the film industry. That's what we're commissioned to do.
Richard: This isn't about Sarah Jones. She's gone from this world and we can't get her back. But if she can make a difference and save another life, that's what we're trying to accomplish. It's about the living.
'The Witch': Real and fairytale worlds converge in Robert Eggers' dark directorial debut
Any guesses what "The Witch" might be about?
The movie's set in 17th century New England and chronicles the supernatural events that plague a family of devout Calvinists: one child goes missing; another becomes possessed; and even some of the farm animals begin behaving as if they're controlled by evil spirits.
"The Witch" is the debut film by Robert Eggers, who won a directing award when "The Witch" premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival. When Eggers joined us on The Frame, he talked about his childhood — which was full of witch-centric nightmares — and the blurred line between reality and fantasy in the 17th century.
Interview Highlights:
Did you have parents who told you ghost stories in bed? I try to scare my children before they go to sleep.
[laughs] Well, be careful. One time before I went to bed, my father asked: "How do you know if you're awake or dreaming?" And I was absolutely terrified for three months, because I didn't know. And my parents didn't know what was wrong with me, but that was that summer.
There's a little bit of Hansel and Gretel in "The Witch" in that the young boy named Caleb ventures into the woods and stumbles upon a witch's house. When you were writing this movie, were you thinking about classic fairy tales? Historical records of trials? What are the influences that shaped your approach to this story?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Also, that moment with Caleb was another witch dream that I had. It's a cinematic cliché and an archetypal moment, but I had that dream.
In the research, the most interesting thing was that it was very clear in the early modern period that the real world and the fairy tale world were the same thing. That's just the end of the story. Aside from some members of the extreme intelligentsia, they were the same thing.
So witches were real, and if someone said you were an evil witch, you were a fairy tale ogress who was capable of riding on a stick, abducting children and doing all kinds of ungodly things.
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But there's a specificity that you're after too, and it goes from the language in the movie — which sounds a bit like Old English — to the production design. How determined were you to be as authentic to the period as you could possibly be? Was any of that an issue for the actors?
It wasn't an issue for the actors because I only cast people who could do it. If you couldn't do it, you didn't get a second audition. [laughs] But basically, if you're not transported to the 17th century, and you're not in the mindset of these English Calvinist settlers, then the witch can't be real for you as an audience.
Sure, it's fun to go for authenticity for authenticity's sake, but that's not the point. The point is to transport you. It was years of working with historians, museums and people in the living history community to figure out how to do all of this stuff right.
The language is my interpretation of what a lay family speaking Caroline-era English in New England sounded like. Then I was in the primary sources, pulling up sentences and phrases and categorizing them for different situations where I might want to use them.
Were these transcripts from witch trials?
Transcripts from witch trials, but also journals and diaries. Lewis Bayly wrote this Puritan prayer manual, "The Practice of Piety," that was very helpful. It was a bit of a collage, but there are some things that are really intact — the things that children say while they're possessed are things that children really said while possessed.
It's a really interesting time in the English language because New England was the most literate part of the Western world — you had to read the Bible, and it was against the law not to teach your children how to read. You had to have that personal relationship with God. A hundred years earlier, even less, you had people being burned at the stake in England for translating the Bible into English.
People who have excelled at genre films, they pay attention to sound design. I want to talk your approach.
There was a lot of sound design in the film trying to make nature a character — this overwhelming Romantic nature that was just so much bigger than man. So we did a lot of work of creating textures of winds through branches. We did post-production in Canada, so some of the branches are actually hockey sticks clacking together. Originally, I only wanted to have sound design, I didn't want to have a score. But I realized very quickly that there are things in this film, places I was trying to go to, emotional experiences that you can't get to without music.
How did you meet Mark Korven, your composer?
Mark Korven is incredible. I wanted to have a score that was using 17th century music, 17th century instruments and super dissonant 20th century music. Mark was an expert in all of this stuff .... I was always trying to take away melody and I was also trying to make things sloppier all of the time.
'Placas': How a former MS-13 gang member inspired a play about starting over
On a recent evening at South Coast Repertory theater, actors take the stage to tell the redemptive story of one man’s escape from Mara Salvatrucha — one of the world’s largest and most brutal street gangs.
With its roots in L.A. and meteoric rise in El Salvador, MS-13, as the gang is known, has been the subject of numerous documentary films, such as National Geographic's "World's Most Dangerous Gang."
But what about the stories of gang members who want to break away and start over? Former MS-13 member Alex Sanchez remembers what it was like to make that transition.
I remember those moments when I was tested by the gang, when I was tested by law enforcement and I was tested by my own mother because she didn’t believe that I had changed.
Sanchez, is now the executive director of Homies Unidos, an organization that provides gang prevention services in Los Angeles and El Salvador. His story inspired the play, “Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo,” which opens on Feb. 18 at CASA 0101 Theater in Boyle Heights.
SANCHEZ: My story was about me trying to survive the death squads that were trying to kill me, but also that I needed to be a father to my son, and that was the motivating factor for me to keep living.
“Placas,”which is barrio slang for body tattoos, made its premiere at the San Francisco International Arts Festival in 2012 and has since toured the country. It uses the theme of tattoo removal as a way to erase the mark of gang-life, and follows the story of Fausto, a Salvadoran ex-gang member living in San Francisco’s Mission District who struggles to start over and re-connect with his son.
In the production, Fausto is played by Ric Salinas, an original member of the socially-minded comedy-theater troupe, Culture Clash. Salinas, who was born in El Salvador, says he was hesitant to accept the role of Fausto because he didn’t want to be involved in a stereotypical story about Salvadoran gang life. But he reconsidered when he read the script.
SALINAS: It’s about a father and a son — about loss, about regret, about a past that needs to be shed. So when I do this performance and I look out in the audience and there’s young African American men, there’s Asian men, there’s even Anglos — they [can] relate to it.
“Placas’” playwright Paul Flores conducted more than 100 interviews in El Salvador and the U.S. with former and active members of various gangs, their families and social workers. Flores remembers one encounter with 18th Street gang members in El Salvador.
FLORES: I would say these were positive folks, but they were connected to the gang. [They] put me in the middle of a circle and told me they had seen people like me before, photographers who want to take pictures of their tattoos [and] document how depraved and violent they are, just so they could get famous off of it. And I told them my job was to ask what they would like to tell the world about [themselves]. And then they said, O.K., yeah. We need to have a voice.
“Placas” director Fidel Gomez says he wants the play to be a tool to reflect populations that don’t usually see themselves onstage:
GOMEZ: What got me in, and what’s keeping me in, is really the work [the play] does for the community — a community that doesn’t get to see theater about themselves and may use this as a gateway to open up about change, about dealing with trauma, about family relationships.
And playwright Flores wants those communities to see how the arts can promote healing in a violent world.
FLORES: Violence is really common in the United States and how we deal with it will really determine the future of our community’s ability to sustain itself. So I think that culture can help our communities. That helps us see ourselves in a positive, humanistic light.
"Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo" will be performed Thursdays through Sundays from Feb. 18-28 at CASA 0101 in Boyle Heights.