25 May 2012

Event: Alex Ross Perry Q&A on The Color Wheel

Fresh off a weeklong engagement at BAM, The Color Wheel opened for a week at Cinema Village. "This is very exciting," director Alex Ross Perry wrote on his Facebook wall. "I saw The Brown Bunny for the second time at Cinema Village." At a Q&A with The New Yorker's Richard Brody on Wednesday, the second-to-last day of the BAM run, Perry talked about Vincent Gallo, Philip Roth, incest, and the differences between his character and his real self. (Mostly, it has to do with a belt.)

Alex Ross Perry loves BAM, so much so that he wore the free BAM socks he was recently given to a Q&A at the Rose Cinemas after a screening of his breakthrough feature, The Color Wheel, making him the first director, he hoped, to wear BAM socks at a BAM Q&A. Like his film, Perry can be silly, but also serious, cutting, and droll. His influences are varied, but Philip Roth is probably the biggest on the film's story and tone, he said—"humor plus the existential sense of sexual dread"; it's no accident that the credits use the typeface from the first edition of Portnoy's Complaint. (Perry said he spoke to the font's original designer, who was excited about their using it, and who "gave us advice, which we didn't use, on how to make the T better.")

Keep reading this dispatch at The L Magazine.

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