Interview: Lee, Hirsch & Martin
Field of Dreams
Elliot Teichberg had no idea what he was getting into when he brokered the deal that saw Woodstock come to a neighbour’s farm. Maybe that’s why he didn’t even plan to attend the show. Director Ang Lee and the stars of Taking Woodstock explain
By Bruce Kirkland
Haphazard, chaotic and legendary: Woodstock is one of the seminal events of the hippy era, a period on the rambling sentence that was the 1960s.
Now, 40 years later, Ang Lee’s whimsical movie Taking Woodstock skirts around the edges of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, those three days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York.
Lee’s film stars comedian Demetri Martin, while Liev Schrieber and Emile Hirsch have pivotal roles. But Taking Woodstock never gets any of them close to the Woodstock stage. Instead, Lee (famed for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) keeps them on the fringes.
“As a filmmaker, the heart of the film is done,” Lee says during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival. “It was done by the documentary. I cannot recreate the concert. There is no way I can do that. Neither am I interested in that. What I can do is [show] how it affected a small group of people in a very sensitive way. That’s something I can make.”
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From left to right: Kelli Garner, Paul Dano and Demetri Martin
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Taking Woodstock is the mostly true story of local resident
Elliot Teichberg — played by Martin — and how he enabled the Woodstock
promoters to come to Bethel after being kicked out of Wallkill, another
Upstate New York town. Teichberg, who wrote his autobiographical book Taking Woodstock
under the name Elliot Tiber, brought the festival to Bethel to help his
parents attract customers to their failing motel, which was falling
into neglect and ruin. But there are undercurrents, too.
“It’s a call from a distance,” Lee says. “It’s an idea. It’s not a
nostalgic feeling of the past. It is something of innocence, of
idealism, or harmony, of possibilities.”
Recalling how Woodstock represented those ideals in 1969, Lee says
they are still worth thinking about as “something that we need,
something that I’m longing for, something to capture because it is
whimsy.”
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In the film, Elliot has a best friend, the fictional Billy. Just back from Vietnam, Billy is a head case whose Woodstock experience is a soothing balm for psychological wounds. “Everyone is searching for his identity, you know what I mean?” asks Hirsch, also in Cannes. “Billy is a guy who is probably a normal cool guy in the town of Bethel before he gets to Vietnam.”
When he gets back, Hirsch says, “he’s lost himself, you know.” So he hangs out with Elliot and interacts with the waves of hippies and other music fans flooding the area for the concert. “Woodstock was the medium that lets this character really find himself. That’s, to me, what I really liked when I saw the film.”
Some of Hirsch’s favourite scenes show Martin just walking with the extras, recalling the news footage and off-stage excerpts from the 1970 documentary that gave people a glimpse of the calm nature of Woodstock patrons, he says. “Even though there’s not a lot of dialogue in those scenes, it’s the vibes, it’s the mood, it’s the energy that, when you’re in places like that, you can’t necessarily put in words. But it’s positivity. It’s a lack of cynicism.”
Hirsch was born in March of 1985, making him just 24. He jokes that it would be helpful for young people like him to have a guidebook so they can talk about things like Woodstock with people who lived through that era. “They need to make just one big book — The Book of Sh-t You Need to Know, if you were born after so-and-so, everything you need to know to get along with all the adults, no matter how old they are.”
This is the first lead movie role for 36-year-old Martin, who’s better known for his appearances on The Daily Show and as the star of the comedy series Important Things With Demetri Martin. So seeing himself on the big screen at Cannes was an understandably strange experience.
“You hopefully get over that and start thinking more about the story,” he says. “I was thinking: Yeah, there is a great historical event attached to this and everyone brings their own expectations to it. At the same time, you’re just telling a story. So, hopefully, you just resonate with people and there is something about human nature.”
And something about the anti-Semitism the Teichberg family faced, something about the prejudices Elliot faced as a gay man in the era. That made him a classic Ang Lee character, Martin says.
“I think Ang likes to tell stories where people might not be that comfortable in their own skin, or maybe he likes to look from the outside in. He likes the story of somebody who is a bit of an outsider.”
Bruce Kirkland is a film and DVD critic for The Toronto Sun and Sun Media.
CAN YOU DIG IT?
Director Ang Lee is known for his attention to detail, making sure the clothes, hairstyles, props and language of his films correspond to the period in which they are set.
For Taking Woodstock, he hired David Silver to act as the film’s historian. One of Silver’s jobs was to create the “Hippie Lingo” glossary, a compendium of words and phrases that were popular during the era, and that are used in the film. Here’s an excerpt from the glossary:
Axe: Any musical instrument, or any tool you use to do your art
Ball: (as a noun) A good time; (as a verb) Sexual intercourse
Bread: Money (“I’m broke — man, can you lay some bread on me?”)
Freak: Insiders’ synonym for hippie (possibly coined by Frank Zappa)
Fuzz: The police
Gas: Sublime (“They’ve never sounded better — that was a gas!”)
Head: Insiders’ term for a member of the counterculture (possibly coined by Ken Kesey)
Lid: An ounce of marijuana
Mike: Microgram
Pig: Hippies’ term for the police
Rap: To speak/communicate in the language of hip
Ripped: Under the influence of an illegal substance
Roach: A small butt of marijuana
—Ingrid Randoja