Alan Ball
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Alan Ball has perhaps one of the most enviable careers for an aspiring writer in Hollywood. His first original screenplay, American Beauty, ended up winning him an Academy Award in 2000. He went on to work for creativity-friendly HBO, where he created the much-lauded Six Feet Under. And after cutting his teeth directing some episodes, he’s returned to the big screen as the writer and director of Towelhead, which opens in select cities September 12th and rolls out to more in the two weeks following.
As the title implies, it’s not an easy film. “We tried a different title,” Ball tells The Cinema Source, referring to Nothing is Private, the title used when the film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year. “It was mostly out of fear that I had changed it. [Towelhead] is a racial slur. It’s offensive.”
But that never sat well with Ball, perhaps because Towelhead is the name of the book, by Alicia Erian, upon which the movie is based. After cutting the movie down about twenty minutes after the festival, Ball changed the title back. “Towelhead is the title of the book, and it’s the right title for this story.”
The title remains a point of argument. “I actually had been to a screening,” Ball says, “and a Middle Eastern man came up to me after the screening and said, ‘How can you call this movie Towelhead? That’s so offensive.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but were you able to see the movie was about racism, and the way we can’t see people the way they really are because of our preconceived [notions]?’ And he was too upset. He said, ‘I know you’re gay, what if somebody called a movie Faggot? What would you think of that?’ And I thought. And I thought, well I’d probably be intrigued, and I
The title is only one of Towelhead‘s controversial aspects. The story follows one school year of a thirteen-year-old Arab-American girl names Jasira (pronounced Jazeera) who experiments with sex with an older boy, is molested by the next door neighbor, is hit by her father, and is relentlessly subject to racist taunting.
“I’m aware that this movie pushes a lot of emotional buttons, and I’m aware that there are a lot of people who will not be able to see beyond that,” Ball says. “I think the people that are open to this kind of movie are going to get it, and the people that are not open, that can’t see beyond those things, are not. And that’s fine. I don’t think you can make anything that everybody’s going to respond to, or everybody’s going to get. Maybe you can make something that a much wider audience would respond to, but that’s really not my interest at this point in my career.”
Still, he is interested in making movies, and knew that a movie with this much uncomfortable subject matter would be tough to get made. “[The sexual content] all had to be suggested. Otherwise it would just take you out of the story, it would be too shocking and too jarring and too — unnecessary. So, when I sent the script out, I had a page on the front of the script saying, ‘There will be no graphic nudity, all sexual actions will be suggested, the camera will
Casting also proved to be tricky: find too young an actress to play Jasira, and the film would be uninsurable; too old, and it would show. “I thought, well how are we going to find this girl?” he says. “It’s not like there’s a huge talent pool of really incredible actresses who can carry a movie who are eighteen and look thirteen and look Middle Eastern. We hired casting directors in London, in Australia, in New York, and Detroit, and then my casting director works out of L.A., and I was thinking, we’re going to have to scour the globe to find this girl! And Summer [Bishil] lives in Pasadena. Her agent just called her and said, ‘Go in for this audition.’ And she was so good. Thank God we found her.”
Then there was the role of the next door neighbor who molests Jasira. Ball’s first choice was Aaron Eckhart, but getting such a name actor for the role was more than a snap. “The first time I met Aaron, he said, ‘I don’t want to play a pedophile,’” Ball remembers. “And I said, ‘Well good, because I don’t think this guy is a pedophile.’ And we talked about it, and I told him I really think it’s kind of a love story — for him.”
Turning the character into a blatant creep, Ball had decided, was the worst way to portray him. “It’s mostly [Aaron's] work in Erin Brockovich that made me see him for this role, because he was so charming, and so decent, and such a good guy, and I thought that’s where you have to go with this character. You can’t have it be this weird, creepy guy. It’s not like he
It turned out to be Eckhart’s involvement that finally got the movie its green light. “Once he signed on, we got the money,” Ball says. “So I owe a lot to him…We found a new company, and they paid for it, and then [after it was done] we took it to Toronto, shopped it around, and Warner Independent bought it at that point.”
All things considered, the experience of actually making the film turned out to be incredibly positive. “It might sound kind of odd since it’s such an uncomfortable movie, but it was actually a really fun movie to make,” Ball says. “Everyone was doing it because they believed in it. Nobody–” he laughs “–nobody was making any money.”
One of the things that Ball found surprising about the story, when he first read the book, was that it was not anti-sex. The sex Jasira has with the boy at school ultimately becomes a positive experience. “Even though she was sexually molested, the story itself was sex positive. It was like, sex is okay, and it’s healthy, and she’s not a bad person for enjoying it. I loved that aspect — not only is she not destroyed for life, she still likes sex.”
It was refreshing for Ball, especially in a culture that he sees as having a disturbing set of double standards. “We like our women to be victims. We like girls in this storyline to be ruined for life. We’re conditioned to think that’s the worst thing that can happen to a girl. We don’t like girls to be sexually
At its heart, the story is a coming-of-age tale. “At the beginning of the movie, Jasira’s a pleaser. It’s only toward the end of the movie when she starts to realize, I have to take care of myself. I’m the person I need to please first. She’s a child, you know? And the thing that’s going on with Aaron is exciting, it gives her a sense of power, it makes her feel special and important when nothing else in her life is making her feel that way. And it’s not until [eventually] that she starts to feel: he’s using me. I feel really bad about what’s happening to me.”
Ball’s other current project could not be more different than Towelhead: he’s returned to HBO to create the vampire series True Blood, based on a book series by Charlaine Harris, and he still seems amused to be taking on such an escapist project for once. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before,” he says. “It has that sort of genre, science fiction/fantasy/horror element that is really adventurous. There are a lot of chases, it’s kind of pulpy and popcorn, and I think maybe after five years of Six Feet Under, I was kind of ready for something like that.”
The world of True Blood, which premiered on September 7th, sounds kind of like X-Men with vampires instead of mutants; in fact, X-Men‘s own Anna Paquin stars. “It takes place in a world where vampires have made their existence known to humans, because of the development of synthetic blood made by the Japanese, which they claim satisfies their nutritional requirements, and so humans have nothing to fear,” Ball says. “And so they’re trying to assimilate themselves
HBO has been thrown a lot of resources into promoting it virally: they’ve been advertising True Blood as though it was a real drink, and have created posters and PSAs for the American Vampire League and the anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun Church.
“It’s really smart and really fun…I’m really, really happy that they’ve promoted the show as aggressively as they have.”
For now, Ball will continue to promote both Towelhead and True Blood, and expects the latter to have a second season: “It’s not official, but HBO made a deal with the studio for stage space, so I’m assuming that’s going to continue.” Beyond that though, aside from a few writing projects he’s been tinkering with, he’s ready to take a break.
“[As a writer,] I’m drawn to the more troubled characters, I’m drawn to the more conflicted storylines, I’m way more interested in a character who’s fucking up than a character who’s getting everything right,” Ball says. But at this point, he’s a little fatigued inhabiting those worlds. “I would prefer that the people in my life are the people who are getting things right and actually know how to deal with conflict, and are pretty self-aware…so I think the first thing I want to do is go on vacation. Because it’s a pretty gonzo time right now.” ❏
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