With a rumbly belly and a slight twitch above my right eyebrow (which I assume was related to an acute nutritional deficiency stemming from my decision that morning to sleep in rather than eat breakfast before rushing out the door), I stare and drool like a famished dog at the assortment of hot, meaty, aromatic tacos laid out before me in the bright, virtually empty dining room of San Francisco’s back-alley taco spot, Cala.

Beef tongue. Pork. Mushroom and kale. Soft-boiled egg. Chile verde. The smells are intense, deep, and fresh, seducing me as they waft up and tickle my nose. It’s too much to take. I’m itching to wrap my fingers around those steamy tortillas and stuff slow-brasied goodness into my goddamn face. But I don’t dare lift a finger.

In just a few minutes, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold will be huddling up with me (and two food writers) around the Mexico City-inspired dishes to eat and talk about City of Gold, Laura Gabbert’s documentary about Gold’s career, philosophy, and the city he loves, Los Angeles. After a short wait (that, due to my rabid hunger, feels agonizingly long), the mustachioed man of the hour walks in, we shake hands, and we eat. It’s gloriously tasty. Slowly but surely, in between bites, our conversation gets underway.

The film, shot over several years in and around the myriad neighborhoods of L.A., is equally touristic and philosophical, celebrating the unexplored corners and food stops of the city through the lens of Gold’s approach to culinary discovery. It premiered at Sundance last year, just weeks after Gold dropped the food critic anonymity game and began showing his face openly, to both readers and restauranteurs alike, citing the ubiquity of social media as the main factor in the decision. The film marks the first deep public look into Gold’s life and passion and is an inspiring, engaging piece of food-world filmmaking.

City of Gold is playing in select cities now.

Did Laura have complete creative control over the film?
I was allowed to tell her if something was unusually stupid, but that actually didn’t really happen. It’s not like I had final cut.

Were you in the editing room?
I didn’t go into the editing room. I didn’t really see anything until there was, like, a rough cut about two weeks before Sundance.

I imagine people would think something was up when you were being followed around by cameras during filming.
Yes and no. They were all restaurants I’d been to a million times. The ground rule was that [Laura] wasn’t allowed to film me reviewing anything. For most of the places we’d film in, a bunch of white people with film cameras wasn’t that much weirder than a bunch of white people without film cameras. My approach is sort of the opposite of what I call the “chamber of commerce” approach, where you go in, have a hearty handshake with the owner and he or she explains what the cuisine is about and what marvels your tongue is supposed to experience. Or the ones that are super food porn-y and they’re in the kitchen and it’s like, bang bang bang fireball, then perfectly plated thing. Then you have them do the, “Mmmm…” There’s none of that in this [movie]. It’s as far from the Food Network aesthetic as you could possibly get, probably.

It captures Los Angeles really well.
Thank you. That was the main thing we were trying to do, look at the city the same way I do. I’ve [seen] Laura’s first movie, Sunset Stories,  which is about this odd, beautiful friendship between two 90-year-old women in an old age home in Hollywood. You just can’t watch that movie without getting a little verklempt. She’s good at the verklempt. I was fearing that [City of Gold] would be too sentimental, but I was happy, because it didn’t seem to be that sentimental at all. There were a couple things, especially when they talk to the restaurant owners…which I have to say, I had nothing to do with. It happened almost by accident. They were going into the restaurants with me, we were shooting the food, then they’d go back the next day to shoot b-roll in the kitchen. They did that documentary thing, where you talk to the cooks and the people who run the restaurant on camera. It turned out to be some of the most interesting stuff.

I’ve always sort of ranted about how so many people define Los Angeles by flying into town, being put up in the Beverly Wilshire hotel and writing about what they can get to in ten minutes in their rental car. That’s fine, in a way, but there’s so much more.

Your work’s had a tremendous impact on so many people in that city. You’ve been writing about food now for thirty years. I’m sure you’ve seen a shift over the years in how people search for food, young people finding the kinds of places you like on their own. Is that heartening to see?
Yeah, it’s good. Food has become almost tribal, in a way that wouldn’t be thinkable ten years ago. People are on Team Vegan, or Team Omnivore, or Team Nose-To-Tail, or they refuse to eat any Mexican food that isn’t in some really inconvenient suburb. Or they’re localvores and everything needs to come from within a fifty-mile radius. Sometimes they coincide. I think it’s funny that the nose-to-tail people and the vegans have so much in common. They both have as their goal eating as few animals as possible. You go to people in bars and they’ll talk to you about homemade dinners until you just want to melt into a puddle and float down the drain. You have people who raise chickens in their backyard and they compete to see who has the yellowest eggs. It’s cool. It’s creative.

What’s the biggest misconception about your career?
Maybe that I spend my entire life talking about taco stands. I do, but I’m the critic for the L.A. Times. I’ve got a lot of turf to cover. I write about more of that than anybody else in my position, but it’s not the only thing I do. When somebody doesn’t like the review I’ve given their restaurant, they’ll always snipe about the taco thing. Then again, there are twelve million people of Mexican origin in the L.A. metro area—that’s a lot of freaking people! That’s bigger than any city in Mexico except for Mexico City. It’s bigger than Guadalajara. If you’re not taking the Mexican community seriously, then what are you taking seriously? What is more important than that?

You and Laura started this project years ago. I imagine it took some time to build trust between you two before the project could really get going.
We sort of met a weird way. A friend asked me to donate a “dinner with a critic” to her kid’s school’s silent auction. Laura bid on it and we went to dinner. She brought up the idea and I said no. She’d keep bringing it up, and the next year my kid ended up going to school with her kid, so I ended up being in the same drop-off line. It’s much harder to say no to somebody you see every day. And, obviously, the anonymity thing was more for the readers’ sake than for what was actually going on inside the restaurants.

It’s like, you go in [the restaurant] and it’s less being anonymous than that you’re not noticing them noticing you pretending not to notice them…It got to be a distraction. There’s a point at which, if there were people who don’t recognize a critic and if the chef can make a difference—which I will say he cannot—then it’s giving the advantage to people who have superior warning systems. All I can do is reserve under weird names and show up late so I don’t get jumped ahead in the line. Service doesn’t really get better, it just gets more nervous. They ask you how you’re doing every 45 seconds instead of every five minutes, which is not really an improvement.

Independent filmmaking is the art of making a lot with a little. There are few filmmakers out there who have mastered this better than Sean Baker, whose micro-budget productions Prince of Broadway and Starlet have carved out a special spot for him in today’s crowded indie landscape.

Baker goes indie-er than ever with Tangerine, the Sundance smash shot on iPhone 5s. Baker and cinematographer Radium Chung accentuate the positives of their tech limitations by painting a frantic, swirling, ultraviolet portrait of Los Angeles the likes of which we’ve never seen. The story follows two transgender sex workers—Alexandra (Mya Taylor) and Sin-Dee (Kiki Rodriguez)—on a wild night of drugs, violence, prostitution and revenge inspired almost exclusively by true-to-life stories.

I spoke to Sean during his visit to San Francisco about his experience making the film, which is out now in select cities and opens in SF this Friday, July 17.

Talk about your collaboration process with Chris.
We’ve now made two features together, Starlet and Tangerine. We’ve also written other scripts that are hopefully getting made. It’s an interesting way of working. We break the story together, and in both cases we’ve gone through an extensive research process. With Tangerine, we had no idea what story we were going to tell. We didn’t go into this world knowing we were going to tell this story of boyfriend vengeance.

So you picked the milieu first.
Oh yeah, yeah. I did that with my film Prince of Broadway and also Take Out, which I co-directed. We found the location first and decided to collaborate with the people who inhabit this world and find the story with them. In this case, we had months of Mya Taylor telling us stories, and those anecdotes got sprinkled throughout the film. Then, it was Kiki who actually told us the story of this one transgender prostitute who found out her boyfriend was cheating on her with a fish. As soon as we heard that, we realized it was such a layered plot that we could make it our A plot and sprinkled the anecdotes around it. When we realize we have something that can be our beginning, middle and end, we walk away and break it down and figure out the scenes. Then, we ask each other which scenes we’re most happy with. We choose the scenes, write them and share them with each other.

We try to use modern technology as much as possible. I think we wrote all of Starlet on two different coasts on Goggle Drive. For this one, we were in the same city at the same time, but we’d literally share screens sometimes and write together. If I wasn’t 100% happy with what he did, I’d try to re-write it or vice versa. Then we have a “script-ment,” which is basically half-script, half-treament. It was around 70 pages. It has dialogue but some of it is left open for improvisation. This film had a whole other element with the Armenian side of the plot. In that case, we were able to use our friend Karren Karagulian, who played Razmik, to collaborate. He’s one of my best friends and has been in all my films. He’d take our dialogue and give it authentic Armenian texture and flavor.

What about the girls?
We also took the “script-ment” to Mya and Kiki and asked if they approved. They loved it. They were nervous about the last scene. The reason it’s the last scene is that we realized through our research that it was something incredibly important and difficult for them. They’re dealing with identity every day, and to strip that away and be forced to show something you don’t want to show to the world is really difficult. I give them props for doing that scene. We only shot it once, one take. You can read on Kiki’s face how nervous she is. It was the hardest scene for them to shoot, and for us, too. They didn’t want anybody to see them. We had to have PAs make sure none of their friends could see into the laundromat from the parking lot. I knew that we had it in one take, and I wasn’t going to put them through it again.

With scenes like that and movies like yours, you really get to see people get their hands dirty. It feels real.
Well, we definitely got our hands dirty. I hate that it’s almost necessary. Mary Shelley said something like, “It’s sad that better art comes from chaos.” It’s a catch-22: you have to put yourself and your crew through this to make something that stands out. This is the fourth time I’ve done it, and it takes a toll on everybody.

Talk to me about your editing process. Are you thinking about the audience as you edit?
I have gotten to the point where I’m just making films for myself. I actually don’t like watching my movies with an audience. Chris does. He watches every screening. I pop my head in. I’m disciplined with the editing, so I know I’m getting it to that specific runtime and I’m not going overboard. I’m okay with whether jokes work or not. As long as they work for me, it’s fine. I don’t believe in test screenings. Would Lars Von Trier or Paul Thomas Anderson do that? I don’t think so. You have to be confident with what you’re putting out there. You also have to be aware of audience expectations, but as long as I know people are out there with a certain sensibility, I’m confident.

Ricky Gervais said on one of his interview shows that he’s never going to dumb down his stand-up comedy or write for other people. He said, “I write for myself. Hopefully there are enough people out there to fill the theater.”
He’s a genius. He’s the best. I always quote and tweet him.

I find it interesting that Chris watches your screenings and you don’t.
I think the reason our partnership works is that we come from different schools. I lean toward real arthouse, independent stuff and foreign films. He’s very mainstream and is in love with Disney. He knows everything about Disney and Spielberg and Lucas. If I wrote this film by myself, it would probably have no plot and be slow as molasses. He would make a fantasy film with a fairy tale ending. We meet somewhere in the middle.

Makes sense when I think back to the film.
I think it makes sense for Starlet, too. You can see a lot of Chris in there. Even with the title. The double-meaning with naming the dog Starlet and thinking it refers to her career. That’s all Chris.

Do you get tired of talking about the iPhone thing?
I don’t get tired of it. I’m sure I will eventually. But it’s something I was surprised about myself. The whole reason we shot on the iPhone came from a very organic place. We didn’t have the budget to shoot on higher formants. We could’ve gotten away with something small, like a DSLR, but that would’ve added crew members and added to the presence I didn’t want on the street. We had no idea until we were actually shooting how valuable the tool was. I was using two first-timers in the lead roles, so these girls had smartphones between takes that they were taking selfies with. I realized early on that there wasn’t that hump I had to get over like I had to with my other films.

In my other films, when I was working with first-time actors and shoving a camera in their face, it took a few days for them to get comfortable. [But in Tangerine], they were comfortable within a minute. It didn’t even feel like we were making a feature film—it felt like we were making home movies. They had the confidence level of the other seasoned actors on-set because of the iPhone.

I know the necessity for the iPhones came from an organic place, but hopefully this movie will inspire young filmmakers to make movies with whatever tools they have available.
I hope so. I’ve been hearing that, and we’ve been getting a lot of nice, very positive messages on Facebook and Twitter. If this has helped in any way, shape or form, we’re happy. I know that [DP] Radium Chung came from shooting 35mm on The Americans and was shooting iPhone on our movie the next week. For him, there was that moment when he said, “What am I DOING?” [laughs] “I’m a professional cinematographer getting on Variety’s Top 10 to Watch list. I can’t believe I’m shooting on an iPhone!” But I think that what we realized was that the only way to make this film good was to embrace it and say, “Look, we’re going to take advantage of every benefit this thing can bring. Yes, it’s not going to look like 70mm, but it’s going to be as cinematic as possible, and we’re going to use how small it is and how inconspicuous it can make us to capture something that a 70mm camera wouldn’t.”

In the advertising for Brad Peyton‘s natural disaster flick San Andreas, there’s an unspoken promise. It’s one of unbridled tectonic terror and eye-popping structural devastation, the sort of stuff we used to lap up like thirsty dogs every summer in the ’90s, when disaster movies came out seemingly every week. In this respect, San Andreas makes good on its promise, with a sizable chunk of its nearly 2-hour runtime dedicated to demonstrating in painful detail the effects of a series of earthquakes that rattles California and reduces San Francisco to a pile of urban mush.

But there’s another, deeper promise that comes as a package deal with all of the NorCal mass destruction: death (minor spoilers inbound). Earthquakes and tsunamis are frightening because they kill us, simple as that. The script written by Carlton Cuse (Lost) has a major flaw in that nobody of consequence dies. Aside from a bit player meeting a heroic demise early on, every death we see involves either an extra (typically computer generated) or a character whose death Cuse makes one hundred percent certain will not make us sad. The establishing of stakes and value of life is the difference between a bad disaster movie and a good one, and on this front San Andreas bites the dust.

Dwayne Johnson plays Ray, a rescue helicopter pilot for the Los Angeles Fire Department. He’s a family man, though that’s been a stressful role to upkeep as of late as his family’s been recently fractured. He and his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino) are in the process of getting a divorce. What’s worse, Emma’s getting ready to move in with her millionaire developer boyfriend, Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), and she’s taking she and Ray’s daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), with her. This obviously doesn’t sit well with Ray, who’s a ball of pent-up frustration and regret, but he’s got lives to save.

When a “swarm” of earthquakes surges up the San Andreas fault from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, Ray and Emma reunite to save their daughter, who’s flown up with Daniel to the soon-to-be-flattened San Francisco. Daniel, of course, reveals himself to be a sniveling villain who leaves Blake for dead in a pile of rubble. Thankfully, while her parents race against the clock to make their way up the coastline, Blake befriends two British brothers (Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson), who aid and accompany her in her mission to find higher ground in the hilly city by the bay.

Bolstering the parents’ drive to save their daughter is the dark memory of their other daughter, Mallory, who died in a river rafting accident years before. Aside from providing grandiose views of buildings toppling into each other like sky-high dominos, the 9.6 quake at the center of the movie also serves to shake up the repressed guilt and sorrow Ray’s bottled up inside since his daughter’s death, feelings that contributed heavily to he and Emma’s divorce. This is meant to be touching, but really, it’s just another way for the film to tiptoe around death. While tragic, Mallory’s death is a red herring, a plot device designed to give the story gravity without actually killing off a character we actually get to know. Nice try, Cuse, but no cigar.

The film’s obligatory scientific expert is played by Paul Giamatti, who’s cast perfectly. The “expert” character’s job in any disaster film is to sell us on the seriousness and consequences of the impending events. Giamatti does a bang-up job, especially when he screams at his fellow seismologists at Cal Tech to “TAKE COVER!” whenever he senses an incoming tremor. His character develops technology that’s able to predict the time and magnitude of earthquakes, but of course, it’s too little too late. It’s essentially a detail written in as an excuse for him to deliver the “here comes the Big One” speech, a speech which obviously can’t be made in real life since seismologists have no way of predicting when the next “Big One” will strike.

The images of destruction the filmmakers and visual effects teams conjure up look great. I’m a Bay Area boy, but there was a sadistic thrill in watching the landmarks and buildings I’ve grown up with smashed into oblivion. Some memorable shots: the Bay Bridge twisting and contorting so violently it takes the shape of a DNA strand; a gang of boats racing up a towering tsunami to make it to the other side before it crests; a long shot of Emma frantically scrambling to the roof of a crumbling building. These sequences, exhilarating as they are, are strung together so poorly by the narrative that they offer no more enjoyment than a Universal Studios theme park ride.

When Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson left the world of professional wrestling to conquer Hollywood, everyone laughed (including me, a lifelong WWE fan). When he started, he was awful (The Scorpion King is an unwatchable shlock-fest). But San Andreas is yet further proof that “Rocky” has proven everybody wrong: he ties with Giamatti as best actor in the movie. (That’s not for lack of competition, either, as the rest of the cast do a great job themselves.) He nails not just the action scenes, but the somber ones where he laments the loss of his daughter.

His casting feels a bit off, though. He’s got more muscle on him than everyone else in the movie combined, but he rarely gets to use them. Mostly, we see him driving things: helicopters, trucks, boats—you name it. I don’t want to see him drive stuff; I want to see him smash stuff! He punches one guy and moves the occasional semi-heavy thing out of the way. I’m not saying Johnson should be hitting things in every movie. But in this movie, more physicality would have been nice.

[Spoiler warning #2.] San Andreas is just one kill away from being pretty good. If just one of the main five characters had died, it would have made a world of difference. The effects are great and the destruction is extensive, but the loss of someone we care about is the one thing that could have truly sold us on the weight of it all. Instead, Peyton and Cuse are gun-shy and baby us like over-protective parents covering their children’s eyes during the “scary” parts. The scariest thing about San Andreas is that, as a depiction of such wide-spread death and devastation, it only elicits a half-hearted shrug.

Nick Broomfield (Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, Biggie and Tupac) is a filmmaker with a purpose. His on-the-move, cut-to-the-core style of documentary filmmaking is on display more than ever in his latest project, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, a murder mystery that blooms into a stirring profile of a community forgotten and forsaken by the outside world.

The film pivots on Broomfield’s investigation of a serial killer named Lonnie Franklin, who was arrested in 2010 after going on a 25 year killing spree in which he allegedly abused and murdered over 100 women in South Central Los Angeles. Enlisting the help of a crafty, charismatic ally named Pam and the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murder, Broomfield set out to find surviving victims of the Grim Sleeper in the impoverished community in order to crack open the long-stagnant case.

The question at the center of Grim Sleeper isn’t so much about Franklin himself as it is the troubling state of law enforcement in South Central. Why did it take so long to catch Franklin, who may be the most prolific serial killer in history? Society has turned a blind eye to communities like South Central, and Broomfield’s film exposes the dire consequences of such negligence, which he rightly equates to apartheid.

I had a chance to speak with Broomfield about the film, which is airing now on HBO.

The Q&As for this movie must be intense.
I think people are shocked that the people in South Central are so wonderful. Also, there’s complete amazement that these murders could have gone on for so many years and police didn’t do anything about it. They’re shocked that this kind of racism and, in a way, an apartheid system, is in existence. There’s so little communication between the wealthy areas in most American cities, like LA. People in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills would never ever go into South Central, and people from South Central would rarely go into the wealthier parts of the city. Because of that, communication has really broken down. One group of people live in absolute poverty, and if there’s a murder, no one does anything about it.

I couldn’t believe that people didn’t put together that there was a serial killer running around for years and years.
It’s not reported in the newspapers. Over 250 women disappeared, but none of it was reported. People just didn’t know, and the police didn’t admit there was a serial killer on the loose for twenty years or so. When I asked [an officer] about that, he said they didn’t want to tip the serial killer off by saying that they knew. It was such rubbish, kind of laughable. In the meantime, the community didn’t know there was a killer on the loose, so they didn’t have plans to patrol the streets or prepare themselves. The police weren’t functioning properly.

When I met with Christopher Franklin, the son of the so-called Grim Sleeper, he said the amazing thing was that his father had so many fans in law enforcement, which I thought was astonishing. He said sheriffs would run up to him and shake his hand. “You’re the son of the Grim Sleeper!” They thought he was so cool because he was clearing the streets of prostitutes and drug addicts, saving their time.

For a lot of people in this country, the crack epidemic is a thing of the past. It was an ’80s thing or a ’90s thing. But in this community, it’s very much still alive.
There has never been any real systematic attempt to deal with the crack epidemic in South Central. A lot of people who are addicted to crack are deliberately excluded from the programs that can get them off addiction. You’ve got this catch-22 where the people who have the biggest problems–they’re addicted, have a felony conviction for possession–are the ones who can’t actually get over their addiction. What is required is a systematic approach to that whole community to get rid of the epidemic.

When I finished the film, the thing that immediately jumped out at me was that the title had transformed. At first, I thought the operative words were Grim Sleeper, but in fact, your focus in the movie is actually the Tales rather than the man himself.
As soon as I thought of Tales, I knew that was it. It’s a wider story than a literal whodunnit about the Grim Sleeper. It’s not, “Did he do it?” It’s, “How is this possible at all that it went on for 25 year period?”

Your approach to filmmaking is an adaptive one. You go into projects without a real agenda. But like you say in the movie, you were a couple of English white guys strolling into South Central. What was your “in?”
I spent a long time interviewing different people who might do just that for us. That’s the single most difficult thing when you start. I think there had been a lot of crews going in there in the past, news crews who had gone in and upset people in the neighborhood. We managed to find a well-known comedian called Tiffany Haddish, who’s on the Kevin Hart show. She’s wonderful. She’d grown up on the street next to Lonnie Franklin. She was the one who took us into the community, where she’s very respected. When they started calling me “peckerwood” and stuff, she’d [give them grief], and they all fell in love with her. She was the ideal person to go in with. She was supposed to be working on the film more, but she was too busy with auditions and things. We met Pam very early on, and she became our guardian angel.

She was your key to the city.
Key to the city! The awful thing is, Pam is looking for a job now even though she’s so bright and gifted and dependable. It’s partly because of her felony convictions, and partly because she lives in an area where there aren’t many jobs. It’s so difficult in that community to move on with your life and do something else. There’s so little opportunity.

Would you categorize your filmmaking style as fearless?
I think I’m a dreadful coward, really. I never felt frightened in South Central. I have a good barometer for fear. The people are very, very hospitable and kind and warm. They’re very accepting. Initially I think they thought I was there to talk about the worst things that happen on the street. But once you establish a different relationship, they’re so forthcoming. We had an office in the community, and people would come in there to talk to us. It was a very different way of working for me because I’m a cinéma vérité kind of guy. I like to film people in the street, in their situation, but you have to go with what you’re given.

It’s funny, all of my friends who had lived in LA all their lives but had never been to South Central, their first question was, “What kind of security or back-up do you have?” Like we needed a tank or something. Of course, it wasn’t like that at all. These people are smart and articulate and warm, but they’re labeled as voodoo men or something, which I think is really unhealthy.

You mentioned Chris earlier. Throughout the movie, you hear things about Chris and get an idea of what he may be like in your head. But when you actually begin speaking with him on camera, you see that he’s so charismatic and charming. It was a big surprise for me.
He’s so suffered. He had this terrible fear that he may be genetically connected to his father in that he’d be into the same things. But at the same time, he loves his father. He was tormented and cut off by a lot of his family who felt that he had snitched on his father because his DNA was used to catch him. He’s very much the victim of the story. He did go through some rough periods through his life, but it’s a rough neighborhood. I like Chris.

The first time we interviewed him, I think he was taking massive sedatives or something. He was making no sense. But then he called us up after a few days and said he wanted to talk again. That was the second interview, which is in the film and makes a lot more sense. He was in a dilemma. He didn’t want to be seen to admit that his father had committed all these terrible murders. But at the same time, he wanted to represent his dilemma of being his son.

Your filmmaking philosophy is very reality-based. You’re about spontaneity and naturalism. But at the end of the day, your films are very well constructed and organized. You’re still a storyteller, after all. Talk about striking that balance between spontaneity and craftsmanship.
You have to be fluent with the equipment that you can capture things and not do things twice. At the same time, you’re constructing a narrative, choosing to follow certain people who are your main subjects, like Pam or Chris or the Black Coalition. They define it, but at the same time, you know there are certain things you need to talk to them about. We filmed over the course of a year-and-a-half because the trial kept getting delayed. The great virtue of that was that we shot over a very long period of time, so we got to know people really well. Films like this benefit from that a lot.

I can’t imagine the film without Pam.
Everyone wants as much Pam as possible. We actually screened the film for her, and she was kind of talking to the screen. She was moved to tears at the end of the film when the women are speaking. I think the film’s a shock for people in the community. Even though they live there, they’re so unaware of just how big a thing this was. They all know one or two people who disappeared, but very few people realize the massive scale of literally hundreds of people disappearing. There were hundreds of pictures of missing women found in his house, most of which haven’t been found. I think a lot of people in the community can’t understand why we spoke to so many survivors, but the police didn’t.

The police didn’t speak to someone like Jerry, for example, who worked with Lonnie as a mechanic and accompanied him nearly every night to pick up women. Jerry said to us that he knew at least half the women on the police composite of 180 women. Police have still not talked to him. I don’t consider myself some kind of sleuth. Any police officer worth anything would have gotten to him very quickly. It makes you think they don’t really care.

There’s this trend of documentaries that almost try to mimic the look and feel of narrative films. From what I understand, you’re not interested in that.
I think if you’re going to do that, why don’t you do a proper feature film with the full benefits of it rather than confusing the audience? I just think it blurs too many edges. The wonderful thing is, you’ve got Pennebaker and Leacock and Maysles coming along and redefining documentary. Before them, documentaries had been shot on sound stages. They made it something incredibly exciting, and we need to go on from there rather than go back to where we were.

The Face of Love has a premise that would prove a challenging sell for any filmmaker. Annette Bening plays a widow named Nikki who, five years after the death of her husband Garrett (Ed Harris), sees a man who looks like him at a museum. Exactly like him, in fact. The sight of the handsome doppelgänger intoxicates her with both fear and ecstasy, and she feels compelled to stalk him around Los Angeles.

Now, this can either be read as the behavior of a mad woman, or the behavior of a woman tragically chasing the ghost of her lost love. Either way, it’s completely absurd, but a good filmmaker can make it work, make us suspend our disbelief and buy into Nikki’s dark fantasy. Director Arie Posin doesn’t make it work, but he comes close, mostly thanks to his leads, both great actors. Without their talents, the film–with its momentum-less, scrambled script and pedestrian camerawork–would shatter into a million pieces.

When Nikki finally tracks down Garrett’s double, a man named Tom (Harris again, obviously) who teaches painting at Occidental College, and talks to him face to face, she’s hit with a tidal wave of emotion that floors her. (Bening is wonderful in this moment, writhing in pain, disbelief, and joy, as if she’s standing inches from the sun.) Predictably, she finds herself gravitating toward him, and him to her, and they fall into a relationship, though Nikki mentions nothing of Tom’s uncanny resemblance to her dear Garrett.

Is this a morally compromising pairing? At least on Nikki’s end of things, it seems to be teetering on the edge. One can easily see why she’s fallen for Tom, and besides him looking like Garrett, he actually seems like a sweet, good-hearted man. But it’s a clearly indefensible decision to not tell him that he looks just like her dead husband. She even tells him that Garrett dumped her, for some reason. She starts bringing Tom to she and Garrett’s old haunts, an idiotic display that makes no sense. He’s going to find out, you silly lady! Sympathy wanes when we see her make mistakes as dumb as this.

The reveal the film ambles toward is too contrived to generate any real suspense. We can see it coming a mile away, and when it hits–at the site of Garrett’s death, an empty beach in Mexico–it’s underwhelming, and a little weird (Bening and Harris nearly drown in an ocean of melodrama). In an earlier, climactic scene, Nikki’s daughter (Jess Weixler) is floored when she sees Tom, and when she blows up in his face Nikki yells “I need him!”, an allusion to addiction that Bening delivers well, but again feels a bit irksome.

Despite the ridiculousness of the story, it brings up some compelling ideas. How would you react if you met a double of your dead lover? And on the other side of the situation, how would you react if you were Tom and discovered you were the spitting image of your girlfriend’s dead husband? The moral implications of the scenario are intriguing, but this kind of love story is incredibly hard to buy into. Hitchcock did it in Vertigo, which The Face of Love resembles in more ways than one, but Posin struggles here.

Robin Williams plays Nikki’s jealous neighbor, who’s been asking her out for years but keeps getting shoved back into the friend zone. He’s little more than a plot device, but he makes the most of it, just like the two leads. Though most of us would turn and run in his situation, Harris makes us believe that he’s truly falling for this woman, despite her erratic, suspicious behavior. Bening has some fantastic moments (mostly in the first half of the film, before all logic goes out the window), and her chemistry with Harris is expectedly dynamic.

The Face of Love has the ingredients of a good film: terrific actors, a thought-provoking premise, and a capable director at the helm. But what sours the pot is the film’s script, which tells the story in such a meandering, unfocused fashion that the film loses us as the character’s actions descend into nonsensicality. Still, it’s hard not to be at least a little invested when you’ve got such incredible actors playing off each other on screen.

In Arie Posin’s The Face of Love, we follow a widow named Nikki (Annette Bening) who meets a man named Tom (Ed Harris) who looks, impossibly, exactly like her dead husband. Memories of her husband come rushing back to her as she and Tom start a relationship. Is she falling in love with Tom, or falling in love with her husband all over again? The film also stars Robin Williams and Jess Weixler.

Director/co-writer Posin chatted with us about working with Bening and Harris, how the film is inspired by his mother, paying homage to Vertigo, making Los Angeles romantic again, and more.

The Face of Love opens this Friday in San Francisco and is playing now in select cities.

You have two incredible collaborators manning your lead roles. As a director and storyteller, what was it like having such seasoned talents at your disposal?

Arie: It was a gift, a joy. The summer that I spent editing this movie was the best summer I’ve had maybe ever. It was a season of pure joy. On set they’re just so true and authentic, take after take. I feel like my job on set is to be kind of a firs line lie detector. Do I believe what I’m seeing? Do I believe the emotions? In the editing room, you can see that there were 5, 6, 7 takes that are all true and identical in their believability, but they’re also all subtly different. [Annette and Ed] are able to shade things and give you dimensions. It gives me such freedom to shape the movie. But at the same time, the hardest thing to do was to edit, because there are so many wonderful takes.

The story of how the idea for this story came to light is pretty remarkable. It came from your mother, correct?

Arie: Yeah. Years ago, a few years after my dad had passed away, my mother would come over to see me. She said words that are pretty similar to what Annette’s character says in the movie. She said, “A funny thing happened to me today. I was by the museum, in a cross walk on Wilshire Boulevard. I looked up and I saw a man coming towards me who looked like a perfect double of your father.” I said, “What did you do?” and she said, “It shocked me. He had a big smile on his face…and it felt so nice. It felt like it used to.” That’s the story that stuck with me and that I began to obsess, dream, and eventually write about.

I imagine going through something like that, you must feel a little bit crazy inside. What do you think the relationship is between sanity and love?

Arie: I think it’s different for everyone. My thought on it for this movie was, in a sense, that kind of love you have…you know, she spent 30 years with her husband, and she had him ripped away from her violently, tragically, just when they were at this stage where they’re thinking, “What are the two of us going to do together for the rest of our lives?” Seeing someone again who wakes up those feelings would be almost like an addiction. You get a taste, and you want more, despite yourself and despite the fact that it’s a transgressive relationship. It’s a compulsion, an obsession.

In terms of sanity, that was one of the biggest questions for me in writing the script and even throughout production. Annette’s falling in love through the course of the story, but she’s also falling back in love with her late husband. The question is always, she’s on this journey towards madness, but where is she at? How do we chart that? Is she crazy here, not crazy here? And it went back to the story with my mom, which became a real touchstone for us. The truth in that situation is that my mom wasn’t crazy, you know? She wasn’t imagining it. She saw this guy that looked like my dad, and it shook her to her core. I thought it was important that Nikki be sane, but as long as we could bear it. Once she goes mad, the audience becomes an observer of that. But to really participate, I thought it was important for her to be sane, then spiraling eventually into madness, but being able to hold that off as long as possible.

There are obvious similarities between the plot of your film and Vertigo.

Arie: Vertigo is one of my favorite movies. Hitchcock is unquestionably the master. There’s so much film grammar that we take for granted that was first proposed and best used by him. We all owe a lot to him. Having said that, when we wrote the first draft of the script, we set it in a museum because my mom’s story happened at the museum. The best cinematographers ask, “How few lights can I bring to a location in order to catch the naturalness of it?” That’s where the museum came out of. It didn’t come out of trying to do a take on a Vertigo type story. It all evolved from a very natural, organic place. But once we had the first draft and read it, it occurred to us: there’s a double in Vertigo, and there’s a double here. There’s a museum in both. A friend of mine saw the movie last week and said there was more than that. He said, “Well, she jumps into the bay in Vertigo, and she jumps into the ocean in your movie.” There are other movies that we love, and we had to check and make sure that if we were stealing, we we’d be stealing deliberately. (laughs) Another movie we talked about was The Double Life of Veronique. There’s a double there, as well, and it takes this metaphysical look at people who look alike. It’s been done many times.

Although this is a romantic movie, I wanted it to be infused with tension and suspense. The premise doesn’t naturally suggests suspense and tension, and yet I love so many of those movies in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s that were romantic but also had a bit of tension. And that’s certainly true of Vertigo.

San Francisco plays a big part in Vertigo, and Los Angeles plays a big part in yours.

Arie: That was something that I was very much inspired by Vertigo about. San Francisco is so much a character in that movie. I’ve fallen in love with Los Angeles, and I wanted it to become a backdrop. I live here, and I feel the romantic side of the city. It’s beautiful, but I haven’t seen it in movies in a long, long time. That was my hope. There was actually a moment when a financier offered to make the movie with us if we shot it in Baton Rouge. We turned it down with hopes of staying in LA and using the city as the backdrop for our story, a character in itself.

What scene are you most proud of?

Arie: One of the most challenging scenes in the movie is the scene where the daughter comes in and discovers that her mom has been in a relationship with a man that looks like her father. From the moment Nikki keeps this secret, the audience is savvy enough to know that the secret is going to come out. The question is how and when, and who’s going to find out. On one level, you want to fulfill that expectation, but on the other hand also make it surprising. In that scene, you have three people in a very hot, violent confrontation, and what I wanted to convey was the three points of view. They’re each coming at it with their own point of view, and I wanted the audience to identify with all three of them. As we bounce around the scene, you know why each person is reacting the way they are, and you can see the story from their perspective. That was a real challenge in the writing, shooting, and editing.

It’s a big scene to carry on your shoulders. I had a director friend of mine say, “It takes some nerve to take potentially the biggest scene in your movie and put it on the shoulders of the least experienced actor in the scene.” On top of that, he said, “If that scene didn’t work, the movie would fall apart.” It was a really critical scene, and Jess (Weixler, who plays the daugher) played it so brilliantly, against two of the best actors that we have.