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		Interview with Newton Thomas Sigel HBO Let's start with the genesis of the project for you as director, how it came to you and what attracted you to it. NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL I had been talking to HBO about the possibility of directing something for them, and "Point Of Origin" had an on again, off again life at HBO for some time. One of the people involved was John Herzfeld who was a director whom I had met before and who knew of my work. Another was a production executive at HBO, Kary Antholis, who had at one time begun a documentary about John Orr (the arson investigator portrayed by Ray Liotta in the film), and they thought I would be good for the project, and approached me, and I guess you would say the rest is history. HBO Were you involved in the evolution of the script? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL They actually brought me two completely different drafts of the script, and we had to pretty much go back to a page one rewrite, and come up with a new draft. Eventually, another writer was brought in, a third writer, and he did a draft based sort of on an amalgamation of the two existing drafts, and that draft was what we used to get the production up and running. HBO What kind of challenges did it present to have a central character like John Orr who - as John Herzfeld said - is such a Jekyll and Hyde character? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL The most interesting thing about this story was, even less the crime and investigation aspect, as really a study into somebody who was so able to compartmentalize and rationalize his own sort of moral fabric and moral organizing principles. You're not looking at a schizophrenic who doesn't know what he's doing or what's going on, but you're really looking at the ultimate sociopath. Somebody who can rationalize and compartmentalize his actions so fully and so well that he's able to operate in the way he did. So, for me, first and foremost, it was a character study. Now having said that, you have a very complex dramatic problem in the sense that HBO was very interested in the film having a certain suspense element where we don't really know whether or not this person is the villain. So, what that means is that you can't from the very beginning delve into the way the guy is able to divide up the sections of his life, and you have to initially present him somewhat sympathetically or somewhat favorably, which, frankly, is kind of interesting because that's what most of his colleagues and most of the people around him obviously were familiar with. One of the things that we tried to do fairly early in the story is have a visual depiction of the psychological process that the investigator uses, and hide it, in the sense that we would have some groundwork laid for when you finally realize what John Orr was all about, that there was some kind of logic to it, or it made some kind of sense. You had something that you already could build on. HBO So, in a sense, it's kind of an exploration of the nature of evil? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Well, I don't know that I even believe in evil, I mean, I think it's an exploration of the nature of this particular character. It's the nature of a disturbed sociopath and how he was able to operate for many, many years, undetected, really, you know, with seemingly completely contradictory psychological organizing principles, which I guess is what, John (Herzfeld) means by Jekyll and Hyde. HBO On the technical side, the visual effects side of this film seems like a huge undertaking, and enormously challenging. You've got these characters seemingly plunged into a very realistic world of fire. How did you prepare for that? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Well, I've worked as a cinematographer and as a documentary filmmaker for many years, so most of the things that you see in the film are, technically, things that I've had to deal with before whether it's fire or visual effects or motion control or that kind of stuff. And, you know, in this particular film, what I was looking for was really ways that we could use the visual language of cinema to express some of the subjective aspects of our story because it's a very subjective story, and the most interesting part about the story is the subjective aspect. So, having said that, I looked for ways we could manipulate and use film language to express that in a way people hadn't seen before, hadn't really thought about before. One of the really interesting things about fire investigation is that these investigators show up at a site, and they see just a pile of destruction, and from that pile of destruction, they actually have to work their way backwards to the point where they can put together a story, a story of what happened in this particular situation, so they look at all kinds of elements there, and they try to reconstruct what it is that happened. That's how they do a fire investigation. And as I studied fire investigation, that's what intrigued me, was how you express that, and it seemed to me one of the best ways to express that was to create that distinction between the investigator, John Orr, and his surroundings, the fire environment, where you were basically expressing the idea of him reconstructing the environment around him to bring him to an understanding of what had happened there. So that's the genesis of where some of the motion control effects at the beginning of the film came from. HBO Now, to the layperson watching the film, are you putting Ray Liotta and John Leguizamo in the midst of fire? How does that all work in a practical sense on the set? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Well, in this particular film, we used a lot of real fire, and we did some manipulation digitally in post. With the actors that could, like Ray Liotta, we did quite a bit of work in actual fire, some with him, some with stunt doubles, and the most challenging thing was really with the child at the beginning of the film, because you have a situation where you have to be extremely sensitive to the fact that he's a small child, and you don't want to put him in danger or in anything that would scare him. So we had to do a lot of camera trickery, so to speak, in order to put the child into the fire. Ray did quite a bit of stuff himself, and some of the most extravagant stuff was done by a stuntman. HBO So a great deal of what we are seeing in this film is the real deal? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Yeah. Fire is somewhat problematic in terms of being able to recreate realistically in CGI, until recently. It's funny, because I'm dealing with it right now and I think we've gotten to a point where it's actually really good, and we'll be able to do a lot more CGI than we've done in the past. But at the time when we were doing "Point of Origin," the concern about making it look real dictated that we had to do most of it practical, as opposed to CGI. HBO There must have been some very interesting technical parameters then that you were working with. NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Yeah, we couldn't really burn anybody's building down, so we had to construct all the sets where we were doing any significant fire. HBO So those were all done on lots, out in L.A.? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Yeah. HBO One of the questions I asked John Herzfeld, and I'd like to ask you has to do with the concept of what I called 'glib, affectless violence' in so many crime films these days. In contrast, "Point of Origin" is much more of a classic crime and punishment-type story. Was that a conscious choice when you were creating this film? NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL Absolutely, I mean, for me, I think violence in films is a huge issue because the fact is that most violence in film is sexy. It's attractive. People enjoy it, and I think there's been a million studies and a million debates about whether that contributes to violence in our society or not, but I think that the use of violence in film is, has been and will probably continue to be tremendously irresponsible in the sense that filmmakers, many filmmakers have put violence into the film without any real thought of the implications of what's really being expressed. I mean, you know, if you look at our current fascination with Hong Kong films, it's all about violence. And, you know, you can't make an action film now without guys flying around on wires, kicking the crap out of each other. So, you know, going back to "Three Kings", back to "Platoon", you know, films that I've worked on, for me personally, it's not that I think you have to avoid violence in film, but I think whenever you have any kind of element of violence within your film, I think you have to really ask yourself what the net kinetic effect on an audience is, and if it's titillation or romanticization, or sexification, if you would have such a word, of the violence. I think you're basically doing a disservice to humanity. That's why the opening with the little boy was really important to me, because I really wanted to understand that if we were going to see fire, and that if we were going to, basically, take a critical stance against arson, that we really needed to see the human cost of arson. And for me, the human cost of arson in this story was seeing this small child die. HBO That's all the time we have. Tom Sigel, thank you. NEWTON THOMAS SIGEL You're very welcome. (END TOM SIGEL INTERVIEW)		Ray Liotta John Leguizamo Newton Thomas Sigel John Herzfeld


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