Interviews

Director Charles Oliver Puts Film School Rejects on the ‘Take’

Posted by Cole Abaius (cole.abaius@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 18, 2008

After seeing the emotionally devastating indie film, Take, I was lucky enough to talk with director Charles Oliver about choices, consequences and avoiding film school. He certainly had a lot to say, and we here at Film School Rejects were eager to listen.

Take is a story about paths crossing and the quickness with which life can be altered dramatically. If you’re interested, and I know you are, at least rhetorically, you should check out my review before you dig into the interview. You should also make yourself a snack. Popcorn works.

Oliver is the first director I’ve interviewed who actually anticipated the question of film school coming up. I barely got to greet him before he asked, “Do I had to have had dropped out of film school to be interviewed by you?”

After a few bad jokes on my end, he spoke up about his own decision to skip film school.

“Two reasons. I was considering undergrad film school as my major in college, and I decided not to go through with that because I felt like I wanted to tell stories from the world-at-large, and if I limited myself to film school, I wouldn’t have too many stories to tell as a writer/director. And I wanted to learn a lot more than just film. So I went on to humanities instead.

I considered it again as a proper grad program, so I went out and visited a couple of schools, and to tell you the truth, at least the classes I attended, they sort of were all the reasons, all the things I hated about the film industry - and it took quite a bit to get me involved in the film industry in the first place - were represented in those classrooms. I thought, ‘This is what I hate about it, and I’m just not interested’.”

Getting down to business, I brought up the concept of choice versus fate being present in a story like Take where the audience knows something tragic and unavoidable is going to happen. Even with that fatalistic element involved in the structure, Oliver claimed that the characters were responsible for their own actions.

“I think it’s more about choices, some of which we have more control over than others. Sort of an obtuse answer, but I think it’s more a film about choices and consequences - some of which come later. You know, it’s not about his choice to rob the store, it’s about his choice with what he does with that at the end of his life. And it’s not about her choice to go into the store, it’s more about what happens, what she does after so, yeah, I think it would be more about choices than it would be about fate.

And again, there’s certainly a lot of dialog about both of those things in the film.

There certainly is this feeling, which was intentional, of impending doom, that it’s almost spiraling out of control, and so I guess there’s that sort of sense that something’s going to happen that you can’t avoid. It’s just that there’s choices you make now that inherently affect what happens a year from now, a week from now, a day from now.”

In order to create that world, Oliver and cinematographer Tristan Whitman worked to consciously separate elements into four convergent categories - focusing on the two main characters in both the past and the present. Perhaps the most interesting choice involved framing individuals so that they were either, “horizontally or vertically confined” to give a sense of “entrapment.” The goal with his being to create an environment to “make the characters feel trapped by their own decisions.”

This most clearly shows up with Saul who is literally in prison, framed constantly by his prison cell or intimate close shots, but even before his imprisonment, he is constantly art directed in a way that makes him look and feel bound by limitation and enclosure.

“He’s really trapped in his past as well. He’s almost always framed inside a doorway or by bars or by something that’s a vertical cage that’s always around him.”

Of course, one of the most important themes of the film is forgiveness, and, after bringing up the concept of forgiveness as a means to survival, I asked Oliver to elucidate on what he meant considering the nature and role that it plays in the film.

“It’s an interesting idea, and some people react to it differently. I think when we forgive someone it needs to be for the right reasons. It can’t be entirely selfish, but it’s more of an issue of survival in the case of these kinds of situations. I don’t want to give too much away for your readers, but I think…it’s about the benefit of the doubt.

When we’re making a judgment with what someone has done, whether it’s huge and dramatic like in the film or if it’s something small in our everyday lives,…it’s more important to consider the things we don’t know than the things we do know. The truth of the matter is, Ana doesn’t necessarily know what’s happened in Saul’s past leading up to the moment in the grocery store, and the truth of the matter is…neither do we as viewers because we’re seeing this through their sort of imaginary eyes. So we don’t know what kind of guy Saul was.

We just know how Ana constructed him in her mind. The truth of the matter, he was probably worse, he probably did some horrible things, but at the end of the day, in order for her to survive and to exist as a person who has love and warmth in their life, she has to get to a place where she can let go of this…It is a survival skill at some point, to forgive, when it hijacks your life like it often does with people in cases of when a pretty major event happens.”

Oliver went on to speak of how anger and resentment, “eat at our hearts and souls” and how we can live within the confinements of becoming a victim of the crimes perpetrated against us or rising above those actions by choosing forgiveness and redemption.

This is obviously a concept close to Oliver’s heart. Not only has he made a film using it as a central theme, but he became interested in Restorative Justice - a theory and practiced program that arranges for victim-offender mediation among other services meant to heal the wounds of crime in a constructive manner - after writing the first draft of the script.

“I never wanted to talk about the program formally - it’s not a documentary about Restorative Justice at all. The words ‘Restorative Justice’ are never uttered in the film, but the principles upon which that prison reform system is worked on are certainly amplified in the film.”

In fact, Oliver has met with some lawmakers - and advocates more dialog with our representatives - regarding prison reform in order to add reconciliation and the principles of Restorative Justice to the system.

It seems clear that Charles Oliver’s thoughtfulness, passion and planning contributed heavily toward Take being such a strong first outing as a director.

For the future, Oliver remained vague but promises an upcoming project with the writer of Galaxy Quest. The film should be a little more comedic but still approach some deeper, philosophical questions that Oliver wants to tackle. We’ll try to keep an eye on him, because he’s definitely a talented directing and writing presence who will hopefully find a few things he likes about the business and choose to stick around.