The King Is Alive
Opened National Wide May 11, 2001
MGM HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Released THE KING IS ALIVE on Home Video on
Nov. 19, 2002
SYNOPSIS
Stranded in the heat of a barren
African desert, eleven bus-passengers shelter in the remnants of an abandoned
town. As rescue grows more remote by the day and anxiety deepens, an idea
emerges: why not stage a play. However the choice of KING LEAR only
manages to plunge this disparate group of travelers into turmoil as they
struggle to overcome both nature's wrath and their own mortality. In the
heat of the desert, emotional and sexual tensions surge around the play's
production, and they are forced to confront their most raw emotions. With
all inhibitions stripped away, their individual fight for survival makes them
perform the ultimate role in front of each other - their own lives.
Tourists are stranded in the desert in Kristian Levring's THE KING IS ALIVE.
Photo credit: Anders Overgaard
ABOUT THE FILM
"I know
an Englishman who lives in the Mojave Desert and he arranged these Shakespeare
evenings with Chuck from the diner and Liz from the petrol station. At one
point, I wanted to make a documentary about him and then I thought it would be a
very good idea for a Dogma project," comments director Kristian Levring on
the genesis of THE KING OF ALIVE.
Levring himself is one of the founders of DOGMA 95,
along with Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Soren Kragh Jacobsen. The
four Danish filmmakers established DOGMA 95 in Copenhagen in March 1995 with the
expressed goal of countering 'certain tendencies' in the cinema today.
This culminated in a manifesto comprising an indisputable set of rules known as
'The Vows of Chastity'. As Levring explains, "Dogma is a set of 10
rules. It is about stripping all the superficials of modern filmmaking -
stripping that off. It's about getting back to the essence of story
making". The first three films comprise Von Trier's THE IDIOTS,
Vinberberg's FESTEN (aka CELEBRATION) and Kragh Jacobsen's MIFUNE.
Levring co-wrote the script with Anders Thomas Jensen,
a young Danish writer whose past work includes ELECTION NIGHT (aka Valgatten -
1998) which garnered him an Academy Award for Best Short Film, and ERNST OG
LYSET (1996) and WOLFGANG (1997), both of which were Academy Award Nominees.
THE KING IS ALIVE is not a filmed version of the
Shakespeare play and, in fact, the choice of the play was essentially
irrelevant. However, King Lear seemed the most appropriate.
"King Lear is undoubtedly an exceptional family drama. The play also
serves as a thesis on the impossibility of taking action, on despair, and on
love affairs that both deceive and betray. Lear also presents us with a
rich palette of all human nature's tints."
Photo Credit: Anders Overgaard
A longtime friend who has a travel agency in South
Africa showed Levring a photograph of Kolmanskop, Namibia, an abandoned diamond
mining town from the 1920's which seemed to offer the ideal backdrop to the
story. On first sight, other locations such as the deserts of the United
States and Mexico seemed better-suited for shooting but ultimately the
filmmakers were convinced that the unique Kolmanskop was the most inspired
choice. "I went for Africa because it's such a vast continent and
there is so much mystique associated with it.", says Levring.
The filmmakers assembled an international ensemble cast
of American, English, French and South African actors including Miles Anderson
(FAST FOOD, CRY FREEDOM), Romane Bohringer (L'APPARTEMENT, SAVAGE NIGHTS), David
Bradley (TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN, LEFT LUGGAGE) David Calder (THE WORLD IS NOT
ENOUGH, FAIRYTALE - A TRUE STORY), Bruce Davison (APT PUPIL, THE CRUCIBLE),
Brion James (THE FIFTH ELEMENT, THE PLAYER), Peter Kubheka (THE AIR UP THERE),
Vusi Kenene (THE AIR UP THERE, CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY), Jennifer Jason Leigh (eXistenZ,
GEORGIA), Janet McTeer (TUMBLEWEEDS, WAKING THE DEAD), Chris Walker (SWING, WHEN
SATURDAY COMES) and Lia Williams ( DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS, FIRELIGHT).
Shooting took place over six weeks in June and July of
1999 with each of the actors doing one to three days rehearsal beforehand.
Levring shot chronologically which strengthened the dramatic development and
also allowed him to make subtle adjustments to the story as the actors
performances evolved. Says Levring, "We did a lot of improvisation
during the shoot and those improvisations were shot and some were used in the
film. They were meant as a kind of way to sharpen the characters - who,
where, how are they - a microscope into their souls. That was very
important because it gave a certain tension and made it more alive."
The enthusiasm of the cast was evident from the
beginning. South Africa actor Vusi Kunene, who stars as 'Moses' says,
"I was attracted to the film by the way in which the writing brings
together the story of King Lear and people stuck in the desert and somehow it
finds a parallel there."
While none of the actors had worked in a Dogma film
before, they were intrigued by the prospect. Kunene says, "When you
read the rules, a lot of them sound ridiculous but once you start working on
that movie, you find them interesting and challenging." David Calder,
who plays 'Charles' adds, "There's a certain intimacy in both the way of
working and the nature of the story. The actors are able to organically
develop both themselves and the role that they play in the story. In other
works, that is often an unknown event."
Producer Patricia Kruijer adds, "Because it's new,
because it's unexplored, because it's a very precise discipline, people are at
their best. The restrictions are there to increase the flow of creativity
- as all the actors will tell you."
THE KING IS ALIVE was shot using up to three hand-held
digital cameras, the result of which was subsequently transferred to 35mm
format. This also afforded a flexibility that the actors were unfamiliar
with. Kunene says, "It's amazing the amount of attention actors get
and how they're allowed to bring out their acting skills without having to worry
about positioning themselves for cameras and worrying about sound - everything
follows you as an actor, you are in charge.
"You get to do things over and over again on
videotape until you get it," adds Bruce Davison, who plays 'Ray'.
"We've been able to tell a story from a truthful point of view instead of a
'result' point of view. We have an ability to take our time and do things
over and over until they really come together."
Davison, along with his co-stars, was equally
enthusiastic about his director. He explains: "I know and trust his
artistry to push us to another level; and each time he's offered us that, it has
been a great opportunity. I've been able to surprise myself with some of
the stuff that I've come up with."
While the film is very much fictional, Levring
nevertheless hopes to convey a testimony of the events which occur when a bus
breaks down in the middle of a desert. As he says, "I wanted to endow
these fictional scenes with an authentic expression, as if it was real. I
want us to believe that what we see has actually taken place."
Actress Janet McTeer, who stars as Liz,
summarizes: "The essential story of this piece, like any well-done
piece of art, is a stripping away of the layers of humanity in its various forms
to that it reveals something about those characters which hopefully communicate
something to the people who are watching."
Newmarket and Good Machine International, Inc. present a Zentropa Entertainment Production in co-production with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in collaboration with SVT Drama and supported by the Danish Film Institute and Nordic Film & TV Fund. A film by Kristian Levring, THE KING IS ALIVE stars Miles Anderson, Romane Bohringer, David Bradley, David Calder, Bruce Davison, Brion James, Peter Kibheka, Vusi Kunene, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Janet McTeer, Chris Walker and Lia Williams. Edited by Nick Wayman Harris, with cinematography by Jens Schlosser and sound by Jen Kuhler. Joyce Nettles served as casting director and Kristina Kornum as production manager. Executive producers are William A. Tyrer, Chris J. Ball, David Linde and Peter Aalbek Jensen. Produced by Patricia Kruijer and Vibeke Windelov, the film is written by Kristian Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen and directed by Kristian Levring.
'The King Is Alive': A Convoy of Snakes Crawling Across the Desert
MOVIE REVIEW
By A. O. SCOTT
"The King Is Alive," a new film by the Danish director Kristian
Levring, a Dogma 95 signer, takes off from a sturdy and irresistible premise: a group of people stranded in the middle of
where struggle for survival against the elements and in the process reveal some basic truths of human nature. This idea has
been explored by countless first-time playwrights, to say nothing of Alfred Hitchcock in "Lifeboat" and the creators of
"Gilligan's Island" and "Survivor."
There is something morbidly fascinating about group behavior in extremis. In comparison with the unlucky travelers Mr. Levring
maroons in the Zimbabwean desert, Tom Hanks's character in "Cast Away" was fortunate indeed, and his problems relatively simple. Not
only did his tropical paradise offer a steady supply of fresh fish and produce, but also his companion was a sensible and sympathetic
volleyball. The dysfunctional tourists in "The King Is Alive," by contrast, offer a rich illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre's
observation in "No Exit" that "hell is other people." Mr. Levring's vision of hell is vivid and stark but — thanks to
that empty, endless desert — touched with a pictorial sublimity rarely attempted within the constraints of the Dogma aesthetic. The
unsparing, invasive naturalism of digital video, which seems specially calibrated to register the play of anxiety and distress
on human faces, also records an inhuman landscape of undulating dunes and blinding sky. The juxtaposition creates a sense of
loneliness and panic, a stomach-turning dread that makes the survival instinct look almost comically weak.
A group of Western travelers — two unhappy married couples, two unattached young women, three older men, a macho soldier of fortune
type — and their African bus driver Moses (Vusi Kunene) run out of fuel in a deserted mining town. Its sole inhabitant is a grizzled
old hermit named Kanana (Peter Kubheka), and the only sustenance on hand (besides the Scotch the tourists have brought with them) is an
ancient supply of spoiled tinned carrots. Jack, the mercenary type (Miles Anderson), sets off in search of help. Left to fend for
themselves, the others try to follow his injunction to keep their spirits up, a pretty pathetic spectacle.
One of them, Henry (David Bradley), is a former actor who has memorized most of "King Lear" and persuades his reluctant fellow
castaways to perform it. The tensions and alliances that develop between them play like a ghoulish backstage comedy. Even in the
face of starvation, their capacity for jealousy, vanity and sexual double-dealing seems undiminished — or, if anything, intensified.
Henry, with an amused intellectual detachment that makes him a stand- in for both the filmmaker and the audience, anticipates
"some fantastic striptease of basic human needs," an apt description, when you consider it, of both "The King Is Alive" and
"King Lear" itself, Shakespeare's most despairing play. "Is
man no more than this?" Lear asks. The film, investigating a similar question, pushes its characters to the very limits of their
humanity even as it strips them to their human essence.
While Mr. Levring's interpolation of "Lear" is, in context, absurd, it does not feel like a literary pretense. Rather, the
playacting the characters engage in — reciting lines they barely understand at first — makes them paradoxically more real and helps
"The King Is Alive" escape the melodramatic contrivances of its story.
The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together
in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as a sexually manipulative American named Gina, drops the
mannerisms that sometimes make her hard to watch but retains the twitchy vulnerability that can make her impossible to turn away
from. The burly, red-faced British actor David Calder is brilliant as cynical, self-deluding Charles, whose sexual transactions with
Gina provide the film with its moments of greatest cruelty and rawest emotion.
Bruce Davison and Janet McTeer, as an American couple whose marriage seems to be collapsing in mutual recrimination, and Chris
Walker and Lia Williams, as their British counterparts, produce scenes of comparable intensity. Henry, Moses and a French woman
named Catherine (Romane Bohringer) seem intermittently to possess a
steadiness and sanity the others lack, but nobody is permitted the luxury of innocence or wisdom. Nothing the desert can do seems able
to match the torment one person can visit on another.
Those who object to "The King Is Alive" will find it an
exercise in dirty-chic nihilism. "Nothing will come of nothing," as old
Lear said. But something does come of Mr. Levring's experiment and of the determination of his admirable cast. In the film's production
notes, Mr. Levring remarks that Dogma is "about getting back to the
essence of story making." This may be arguable, but the primal appetite for narrative — the need to represent and transform
experience even in impossibly harsh circumstances — is the film's deep subject.
Kanana, in a voice-over, relates what he sees as though it were a half- recalled fairy tale. Catherine tells the same story as a
profane (and to her audience, incomprehensible) fairy tale; another character turns it into a nursery rhyme. These moments and the film
itself present an idea of art that is resolutely, even refreshingly, unsentimental. Plays, movies and stories can't save
anyone's life, Mr. Levring suggests. Nor can they offer anything like redemption from evil or comfort in times of mortal anguish.
The best they can offer is a way to fill the time before death, and a method of protesting its coming that is as vain, as compromised
and as heroic as a mad old king howling against a storm.
"The King Is Alive" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes several sex scenes and some
extremely disturbing moments.
THE KING IS ALIVE
Directed by Kristian Levring; written by Mr. Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen, with inspiration from Shakespeare's "King Lear";
director of photography, Jens Schlosser; edited by Nicholas Wayman Harris; produced by Patricia Kruijer and Vibeke
Windelov; released by IFC Films. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: Miles Anderson (Jack), Romane Bohringer (Catherine), David Bradley (Henry), David Calder (Charles), Bruce Davison (Ray), Brion
James (Ashley), Peter Kubheka (Kanana), Vusi Kunene (Moses), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Gina), Janet McTeer (Liz), Chris Walker
Paul) and Lia Williams (Amanda).
Movies: Making 'King Lear' a 'Survivor' in the African Desert
MOVIES
By KAREN DURBIN
WHEN I listened to Kristian Levring describe ``The King Is Alive''
just before he started shooting in July 1999, I winced. A
multicultural gaggle of tourists gets stranded in the African
desert and, at the urging of a Shakespeare buff among them, decides
to pass the time by performing ``King Lear''? Yikes. High concept
meets high falutin'!
Reading the script later, I winced some more. Just as I suspected,
it was dotted with passages from Shakespeare's great tragedy, cheek
by jowl with Mr. Levring's less elevated dialogue. Shakespeare is
hard enough to do; for a director to mix bits of it with his own
writing looked like the sheerest beginner's folly, since it
virtually forced the audience to draw what the Bard so pungently
called ``odorous'' comparisons.
Before conceiving ``The King Is Alive,'' Mr. Levring, who is 44,
made only one feature, 15 years ago, then switched to a lucrative
career shooting television commercials. Free at last from the
vulgar dictates of the marketplace, he was going to have a
full-scale - and probably fatal - art attack.
``You thought I was crazy to do it,'' Mr. Levring observed without
rancor, over tea recently in his New York hotel suite. Lounging at
one end of the coffee table, the
English actress Janet McTeer emitted a low chuckle behind her Earl
Grey. ``Well,'' she says, ``it wasn't a very safe script.''
Ms. McTeer can afford to laugh. Playing the belligerent half of a
quarrelsome married couple whose unhappiness is as much bond as
bondage, she gives a first-among-equals performance in an
international cast that ranges from the stage actors Vusi Kunene
(South Africa) and David Calder and David Bradley (Britain) to
Jennifer Jason Leigh and a fellow American, Bruce Davison (the
passive-aggressive stiletto to Ms. McTeer's furious bludgeon).
Rushing in where most filmmakers don't even want to tread, Mr.
Levring has collected a year's worth of praise on the festival
circuit with his ambitious art film. ``The King Is Alive,'' which
opens May 11, takes on blockbuster questions about the nature of
human existence and the meaning of art. But (the television gods
have been very, very good to Mr. Levring) it plays like a superior
version of ``Survivor,'' in which all the characters are compelling
and no one's survival is a sure thing. As the prospects for rescue
grow dim, its motley crew of intimate strangers find their own
pretensions and constraints being stripped away, until it seems as
if Mr. Levring and his actors have succeeded in peeling life itself
down to its ineffable core.
Taking tea with people whose legs appear to be as long as one's
entire body is a humbling, not to say Corgi-like, experience. The
lanky Ms. McTeer tops six feet. Mr. Levring can look down on her.
With his brooding eyes, flowing dark hair and a voice inflected
with the rumble and drawl of his native Denmark, he's a formidable
mountain of a man. He might make a good Thor if he weren't so
reserved as to seem almost shy.
We first met two years ago at his London house, a vast 19th-century
pile suggestive of a Victorian hunting lodge, surrounded by a
rolling green lawn the size of a small park and situated in the
haute bohemian enclave of Hampstead Heath. As warm with renovators
of every description, as well as the occasional small child with
nanny in pursuit, it felt like the setup for a Marx Brothers movie.
(Chico as plasterer, Margaret Dumont as the mother-in-law, Groucho
the crooked contractor: it virtually writes itself.) Mr. Levring
was the action's still center and imperturbable straight man,
answering everybody's questions, including mine, with a grave,
laconic courtesy.
Mr. Levring is one of the original members of Dogma 95, the
controversial back-to-basics filmmaking collective started six
years ago by Denmark's premiere director-provocateur Lars von
Trier. ``The King Is Alive'' is his film in the Dogma manner, and
when we spoke in London he was so serious and so honored to be part
of the collective that, despite my misgivings, I thought they were
lucky to have him. Dogma's low-tech rules, called the Vow of
Chastity by Mr. von Trier with only half a wink, are sufficiently
austere - hand-held cameras, no extra lighting or props, no
re-shoots or added sounds to patch up mistakes - to challenge any
director, much less one whose previous experience had been confined
to the manipulative visual shorthand that epitomizes everything
Dogma rejects.
Mr. von Trier invited Mr. Levring to make a Dogma film partly from
fondness - ``the only thing I can't forgive Kristian for is being
rich,'' he cracks - but mostly for the same reason Mr. Levring
wanted to make one, because it would be such a radical departure
from his usual work. He has repeatedly turned down offers to make
the glossy Hollywood- style entertainments he calls ``two- hour
commercials,'' and the emotional and stylistic glibness of most
films by directors used to making television ads are notably absent
from ``The King Is Alive.'' Mr. Levring deploys his technical skill
and ingenuity to turn Dogma's limitations into creative
opportunities more effectively than anyone since a fellow Dogmatic,
Thomas Vinterberg, whose elegant 1998 film ``The Celebration'' put
the movement on the film world's radar.
Dogma requires all filming to be done on location. Mr. Levring, who
had made commercials in at least three languages and a dozen
countries, found the mother of all locations in the Kalahari
Desert, specifically a derelict Namibian diamond- mining town
called Kolmanskop, where sand dunes drift like ghosts through the
empty concrete houses. It's a director's dream, to show something
most people have never seen before and couldn't possibly imagine.
But not necessarily an actor's. The six-week shoot took place under
fairly grueling conditions; although the sea and a decent hotel
were only a short bus ride away, 10 miles inland the desert winds
were fierce - not particularly pleasant, Ms. McTeer said briskly,
describing 12-hour days that ended with cast members covered in
sand.
The hand-held-camera tenet inadvertently gave rise to Dogma's most
dubious impact on filmmaking in general, glamorizing the use of
lightweight digital video cameras in place of hefty Arriflexes (and
costly film stock) and inadvertently spawning dozens of pointlessly
grainy-looking movies that don't have much to do with anybody's
rules. But Mr. Levring makes the most eye-pleasing use of DV since
``The Celebration.'' ``The King Is Alive'' is strikingly beautiful,
with thick, saturated colors that feel desert-hot and as raw and
elemental as the characters' emotions. And DV's super-voyeuristic
home-movie quality (you never forget that you're watching other
people through a lens) feels organic to the film, turning the
viewer into an unseen tourist, the one who's always filming
everybody else with a camcorder. It's not only consonant with the
movie's fictional universe, it heightens the story's dual sense of
intimacy and exposure. (These travelers are about to come unglued,
get psychologically naked, maybe die.) Finally, DV's grainy texture
looks tailor-made for the desert setting - as Ms. McTeer can attest, the very air is gritty.
With their limited technological artifice, Dogma movies depend almost as
heavily on good performances as live theater does. Knowing this,
actors are drawn to them by the chance to do sustained, challenging
work. Mr. Levring said that Jennifer Jason Leigh was eager to be in
the film, although she told him that she often required 10 to 15
takes to nail a scene. Playing the pivotal role of a drastically
fallen innocent, she does her best work since Robert Altman's
``Short Cuts''; Mr. Levring says even her most difficult scenes
required only two or three takes. Of course, most television
commercials call for about as much subtlety as vaudeville, whether
the principals are miming true love, wallet loss or acid
indigestion. Which makes Mr. Levring's skill with actors all the
more impressive - in particular his ability to forge a cohesive
ensemble out of a half-dozen nationalities.
Talent isn't enough. Get the chemistry wrong and you end up with a
half-dozen gifted actors all hard at work in different movies. Mr.
Levring spent a long time casting and then several weeks in
rehearsal before he started shooting. Likening the process to
working a puzzle, he says, ``Every time you choose an actor to play
one part, you eliminate some candidates for other parts.'' Because
of her schedule, Ms. McTeer was the last to arrive on location. ``I
remember sitting there thinking, `Bloody hell, this is either going
to gel and be brilliant or it's going to be just a nightmare.'''
As for my own doubts about the wisdom of having one's characters do
Shakespeare, what I didn't realize from the script was that they
were meant to do it badly. This was an incidental scattering of bus
travelers, half of whom had never heard of ``King Lear.'' Their
efforts to get their mouths around the sonorous lines are comical
at first, but as the merciless days wear on, they become something
else. Explaining why he chose to make his first film within Dogma's
demanding framework, Mr. Levring says: ``Sometimes you set yourself
a whole different way of doing something in order to challenge your
imagination to its limits. It's an exercise in madness, pushing the
envelope of yourself, but it's also about the pursuit of creative
boundaries. You can never make a fool of yourself when you take a
really big risk. The ones who make fools of themselves are those
who never take the chance.''
Ultimately, ``The King Is Alive'' becomes about art and its
function as a human enterprise. That we make things that serve no
purpose other than their own expression isn't just important to our
lives; it's central to our identity, the key to who we are. Our
intricate self-consciousness is what makes us human, and it's also
what gives rise to our need to make art.
When the last tourists, parched, starving and semi-delirious,
persist in trying to speak Shakespeare's lines to one another, it's
intensely moving. They're trying to hold on to their humanity and,
by extension, to ours. With Shakespeare whispering brokenly in his
ear, Mr. Levring has spun human gold from human dross, finding the
tragic dimension in his characters and the pity and terror in his
audience.
DOGMA 95 - The Rules
1. Shooting must be on a location.
2. The sound must never be produced apart form the images or vice versa.
3. The camera must be hand-held.
4. The film must be in color.
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action.
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.