Cold Mountain (2003)

Directed by Anthony Minghella

It's been a while since my last note. I have been pretty busy working on a couple of projects. Anyway, the film was excellent.he also made "The English Patient" which was one of my favorite films for a long time. I read an interview about Cold Mountain. The site is
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_11_33/ai_111114552/pg_6 It was pretty interesting, and I'm going to take a nice story from the interview.

"There was a very interesting thing that happened when I was writing the screenplay for Cold Mountain and exploring the close of the film, which I knew needed to involve nature's cycle of life and death and seeding and growing, but which I couldn't find a way to dramatize. I write in a small house I have in the country, which is surrounded by farmland, and over the Easter holidays I had some American friends staying with me who came in on the morning of Easter Sunday, absolutely horrified because they said that at dawn they'd seen some pagan ritual in the fields in which a farmer had skinned a dead lamb and dressed another lamb in its skin. I said I didn't think they'd be killing lambs in the fields and skinning them, but I went over to the farm and asked what had happened; they told me that one of the lambs had died in the night, and that since they have three or four lambs whose mothers had rejected them, they put the skin of the dead lamb on one of the rejected ones hoping to fool the mother into feeding it. And it did, and the lamb was going to survive. That seemed to be a wonderful paradigm of what the film should be about, really, which is the need for renewal and the joy of survival."

I've been filming Monica, a choreographic fellow for a week. Her piece begins from she and Anna, another dancer stand still on a table. (I uploaded the photos of them a couple of days ago)
Monica was inspired by one of Ron Mueck's works that she saw in Brooklyn museum. (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/ron_mueck/) I asked her why she wanted to imitate the pose of the figure. And, she said, "I wanted to feel what it's like to be her (the old woman) and imagine what she sees and feels." Monica recently lost her last grandmother and feels that she lost the connection to the generation that her grandmother belonged. She thought it would be important for her to make a piece related to "aging" and "death."
I've been watching her process for this piece, and am very curious about where she will go with the subject she has chosen.
It is so amazing to be able to come close to an artist and see what's happening inside her brain and mind. Thanks.