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 Alan Ball
Interview By: Michael Dance 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 might be offended. But at the same time, I would support anybody's right to call their movie that, because the last time I checked, there's free speech. I think when you make it forbidden to use those words, it's a lot easier to pretend racism doesn't exist, or that it's not really the problem that it is. Pretending things aren't as bad as they are is never helpful." 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 ... |
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