Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi - NOWNESS

Designer Olympia Le-Tan's embroidered clutch-bags spring to life in director Spike Jonze’s tragicomic stop-motion animation Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side).

On a shelf in famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, the star-crossed love story of a klutzy skeleton and his flame-haired amour plays out amidst Le-Tan’s illustrations of iconic first-edition book covers.

"It's such a beautiful and romantic place,” offers Le-Tan of the antiquarian bookstore. "The perfect setting for our story!” The project started after Jonze asked for a Catcher in the Rye embroidery to put on his wall and the plucky Le-Tan asked for a film in return.

Enlisting French filmmaker Simon Cahn to co-direct, the team wrote the script between Los Angeles and Paris over a six month period, before working night and day animating the 3,000 pieces of felt Le-Tan had cut by hand.

“I love getting performances from, telling stories about and humanizing things that aren’t human,” said Jonze of working with Le-Tan’s characters.

After spending five years adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze’s recent shorts include robot love story I’m Here and an inspired G.I. Joe-starring video for The Beastie Boys.

“A short is like a sketch,” he says. “You can have an idea or a feeling and just go and do it.” Here the iconic director reveals his creative process to writer Maryam L'Ange.

How did the film come about?
I met Olympia in Paris through friends of mine. She was just starting to make the bags for her friends. She had a bunch of the scraps in her bag, all of the cut-out pieces of felt. I just loved it. I loved all the artwork she picked, the texture of it, the stitching of the felt. We joked about making a film and just went for it. It was this thing with no schedule, no pressure and no real reason to be—other than just that we thought it would be fun.

Did you write the story together?
Yeah we did. We would look at all the artwork over lunch whenever we would be in the same city, noting any ideas that would just make us smile. It was done like that, with no real plans.

What’s your creative process?
You just start with what the feeling is. For this one the feeling definitely started with the handmade aesthetic and charm of Olympia’s work. Instantly I had the idea of doing it in a bookstore after-hours, imagining the lights coming down and these guys off their books. Me and Olympia both wanted to make a love story, and it was fun to do it with these characters. It evolved naturally and it all just started with the feeling. From there you entertain yourself with ideas that excite you.

Do you go with your gut instinct?
If it cracks me up. We were talking about the skeleton coming off his book and the girl in the Dracula book waving at him. Olympia is someone who is just absurd, she’s used to just saying anything. She just started making the blowjob gesture as a joke to make us laugh but I was like, “We’ve got to do that.” It’s about taking things that could just be a joke while brainstorming and actually going for it and using it.

What inspires you?
People inspire me. Humberto Leon and Carol Lim [from Opening Ceremony] and the confidence and creativity in how they run their business. Pixar’s really inspiring, they make films in the best possible way. They’re always focused on story. I could list a million people that inspire me all the time. David Bowie’s music, Charlie Kauffman, David Russell. A lot of people that I work with too, just conversations I have with them about what we want to do.

China Harass US Film-makers: Deny Visas and Banned from Chinese Festival

BEIJING — When the American filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill traveled around Sichuan Province last year to document the anger of parents whose children had died in school collapses during the earthquake in May, they ran into a chilly reception from officials.

Chinese Police officers harassed the two film-makers and their co-workers, detained and interrogated them for eight hours.

Now, the Chinese government has denied both of them visas, blocking them from presenting their documentary, “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province,” at the Beijing Independent Film Festival this week. The two men, who made the film for HBO with the co-producer Peter Kwong, said their visa applications were rejected late last week.

“We are extremely disappointed that the Chinese government denied our request for visas and that we will not be permitted to discuss this film with a Chinese audience in Beijing,” Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said in a joint e-mail message. “The denial of our visas fits in with a pattern of what seems to be a complete commitment on the part of this Chinese government to crush any inquiry into the possibility of wrongful deaths during the earthquake in Sichuan.”

Chen Cong, a vice consul in the press office of the Chinese Consulate in New York, declined to explain the rejection, saying that diplomatic organizations had “the right not to give a reason for why the visa was denied.”

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill have both won Emmy Awards and have worked together on highly praised documentaries, including “Baghdad ER.” The Sichuan documentary was shown on HBO in May, one year after the earthquake, and got positive reviews. The official Web site of the film is blocked in China.

The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to silence any mention of the collapsed schools and, according to an official count, the 5,335 children who died or remain missing. In the weeks after the earthquake, which left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, parents took to the streets to demand official investigations into why so many school buildings had collapsed even though other buildings around them remained standing. The parents said shoddy construction and corruption were the obvious causes.

Local officials ordered security forces to detain the parents or tried to buy the silence of the parents with compensation money. Meanwhile, journalists who tried approaching the schools were stopped, and two rights advocates who pressed for official inquiries were detained. The two advocates, Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren, were put on trial last month.

Artists trying to raise consciousness over the collapsed schools have been similarly harassed. The Chinese filmmaker Pan Jianlin was tracked by security officials after his documentary on the deaths, “Who Killed Our Children?” was shown last year at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea. Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who often criticizes the Communist Party, had his Web site blocked after he tried to compile online a comprehensive tally of dead schoolchildren. He was temporarily detained in Sichuan last month when he tried to attend the trial of Mr. Tan.

A person helping to organize the film festival in Beijing said the HBO documentary would be shown on Thursday even though the filmmakers would not be able to attend. The festival is showcasing more than 80 films, and each one is generally shown once.