Thom Fitzgerald wants to talk about false advertising. The director is speaking on his cell phone from South Africa, where he's currently shooting part of his upcoming film, Three Needles, a drama involving characters struggling with HIV in three countries. "But," the director says, laughing, "I've asked [the studio] how they want me to describe it. They say 'it's about a disease. So say it's kind of like Outbreak.'"
Fitzgerald can joke about such inanities now, but two years ago, after being sent to Bucharest by the USA Network to film "a sensitive musical about people on the fringe of society," the filmmaker found himself unexpectedly bamboozled by his producers. "They called me there, and told me to lose the musical numbers and, you know, add some murders. Seriously, I was getting notes about having the cast wear tighter T-shirts. These things happen." Virtually against his will, Fitzgerald ended up making a made-for-television horror flick, that he admits "might have been called Wolf Girl. It aired last Halloween if you're interested."
Despite the disappointment of the experience, Fitzgerald found himself drawn back to Bucharest to film a project of his own device. The digital feature The Wild Dogs, an uncommonly sensitive drama about the poverty and hardship suffered by the city's Gypsy residents, was directly inspired by Fitzgerald's experiences on the previous shoot. In the film, Fitzgerald plays Geordie, a Canadian pornographer sent by his venomous boss to Bucharest to find "teenage Lolita girls" for a website. "That producer," Fitzgerald says, "definitely has some of the characteristics of a network executive."
Like ABC Africa, Abbas Kiarostami's indelible documentary about children with AIDS in Uganda, The Wild Dogs manages to be unobtrusive in its observations of a struggling community, eliciting aching empathy rather than exploitative pity. It's a difficult balancing act, especially considering that Fitzgerald's film isn't a documentary: it's a precariously moving narrative that, as he puts it, "tries to let the real world in." The director's casting of himself in the role of interloping pornographer has evocative undertones in this regard, especially when the film's central theme of misplaced charity is introduced.
Geordie's attempts to help some of the people he meets -- Gypsies, mostly, including a memorably party-hearty midget and a teenage boy who crawls on spindly, backwards legs -- don't work out as expected. Neither does his relationship with Moll (Clueless star Rachel Blanchard), the beautifully bored daughter of a Western diplomat who becomes cruelly objectified as the pair grow closer. "Geordie's charity to these people comes out of guilt. But what I'm trying to say is that efforts to help others, which don't change you, don't really help. It's about the hierarchy of exploitation and charity, and how the line between the two is finer than we'd like to admit."
It's a line that Fitzgerald himself had to walk very carefully, seeing as many of the non-professional actors had been cast in his ill-fated horror film in a profoundly unflattering light. "The primary heroes -- the little man, the legless boy, the backwards Gypsy -- had all been in the background of the first movie, in the freak-show." The more time Fitzgerald spent with these extras, however, the more he felt inspired to focus on their lives instead. Returning to Bucharest for The Wild Dogs allowed him not only to reconnect with his unique friends, but to try to make a film that more properly represented their experiences and environment. "They're not playing themselves in this movie, but I did involve them in an effort to show their lives as they are. A lot of the storyline elements were culled from the stories they had shared, or events as they were actually happening."
Despite the closeness of the cast, Fitzgerald says that shooting in Bucharest was not an easy experience. "Every time we would go to shoot something, the police would come and shut us down, even if we had a permit. We discovered the trick was to get a permit for the wrong location, and then they would go there instead." Other, even less foreseeable problems were presented by some of the city's inhabitants. One of Fitzgerald's indigenous performers, a legless boy named Marcel Catalin Ungurianu, was filming a scene when "some good citizens came over and shouted 'why are you photographing this disgusting child? This is not the real Romania!' I just said, 'well, you're standing right next to him, you know. If that's the real Romania, I don't want to photograph it, either.'"
Difficulties aside, Fitzgerald agrees that it is this same authenticity of time and place that proves so central to his film's power. The title refers to the plague of stray dogs that has affected Bucharest since Ceausescu's fall in the mid-'80s, and there is hardly a shot in the film that does not contain at least one wandering canine. "There are 200,000 dogs on the street, and 60 dog-catchers working to catch 200 dogs a day. You do the math."
Using digital video allowed Fitzgerald great latitude in his storytelling technique -- for instance, he was able to send a single cameraman on a month-long hunt for images of the dogs. This led to the heart-breaking subplot involving a sad-eyed, would-be dog-catcher named Victor (David Hayman) who, feeling pity for his quarry, tragically attempts to take their plight into his own hands. "Like everyone else in the film, he's trying to do the noble thing. He wants to do right by the dogs, but it's a foolish gesture, sadly. "
In abandoning the haunting lyricism of acclaimed past works like The Hanging Garden, Fitzgerald has made a film that, despite being difficult to watch, proves worth its numerous aesthetic and thematic risks. "It was important to me to do this film, because in coming to Romania, I had, in a bold misstep, haphazardly depicted its people as background freaks. I wanted to polarize that depiction, and of course, to change it." |
)
