Like his much buzzed shorts, Scott Prendergast's debut feature brings to the screen his poignant outsider's perspective and talent for creating vivid comic characters. Born in Galveston, Texas but raised in Portland, Oregon, Prendergast attended Columbia University and then pursued a career as a comic writer and improviser at L.A.'s Groundlings Theater. He went on to develop his own one man comedy improv show, UNman, which had a two-year run in NYC. In the late 90s, he started making short films – grounded as much in performance comedy as cinema – which he wrote, directed, produced and edited, on top of frequently playing all the roles. He attracted a lot of attention with his two shorts, Anna Is Being Stalked (2002) and The Delicious (2003), idiosyncratic, bittersweet and often very funny films which demonstrated Prendergast's mastery of shortform cinema and his development as an all round filmmaker.

Though Prendergast's shorts were small, self-contained works, he conveys the expansive world of Kabluey, his debut feature, with surprising ease. The plot, inspired by incidents in his own life, revolves around hapless loser Salman (Prendergast) who is asked to help his sister-in-law Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) look after her two demanding sons while Salman's brother is away fighting in Iraq. As Salman is broke, Leslie finds him a job – which turns out to be dressing up in a giant blue mascot costume and handing out flyers on a lonely, boiling hot highway. Kabluey continues Prendergast's preoccupation with socially awkward men struggling to find their place in life, presenting an absurdist, melancholy perspective on the world. As he weaves together slapstick comedy and moments of profound sadness, he displays a confidence that belies his relative inexperience as a director. Prendergast gives a perfectly understated performance as the passive protagonist, Kudrow impresses as the dowdy, downtrodden Leslie, and there are also spirited comic turns by Conchata Ferrell and Teri Garr.

Filmmaker spoke to Prendergast about Kabluey's “Eureka!” moment, hitting rock bottom before making the film, and getting over excited about his first trip to a movie theater.




Filmmaker: I believe you were on an airplane when you first got the idea for Kabluey.

Prendergast: My brother is in the National Guard. He was in Iraq and I was staying with his wife, taking care of the kids. We were on a family vacation: she would sit on the beach and drink margaritas and cry, and we would take care of the kids. On the way back from that vacation, I was sitting on an airplane and I just thought, “Man in a big blue mascot costume.” I opened up my laptop and wrote “Man in big blue mascot costume – this is your first feature.” I turned to the guy sitting next to me and went, “A man in a big blue mascot costume,” and he went, “What? Who are you? What are you talking about?” I was like, “No, no, no, it's amazing!” [laughs] So it just popped into my head, but at first it was just going to be an idea about the costume, like a whole wealth of jokes about him being on the inside and people not recognizing him, him having a pointless job, not being able to hold the flyers, the woman [who hired him] not caring. But gradually as I was working on it, I thought, “I should make my real story part of this story, so maybe this guy is taking care of his nephews and it's going horribly like it's going horribly for me,” and that's how it came together.

Filmmaker: And where did the title come in?

Prendergast: When everything goes wrong, people say, “My whole life went kabluey!” But it's also from Batman the TV show: when you punch somebody, it says “Kabam!,” “Kapow!,” “Kabluey!”

Filmmaker: There is certainly a cartoon element to the film.

Prendergast: I think that was like the number one issue for me. As I was on the airplane, I took a little cocktail napkin and drew out the suit, having him look as much like a cartoon as possible. Having him look as much like a weird, alien object was really important, so I did the initial drawing and then we had a graphic artist refine it. A company here in New York called Gepetto built the suit and I kept coming back to New York because we wanted the head to hang at the exact right angle so he looked depressed. We just wanted it to look totally surreal so that when you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're not really sure what you're seeing.

Filmmaker: You said that you decided that this would be your first feature, but was it the first feature script you'd written?

Prendergast: I'd tried to write another one. When I first got to L.A., my agents and managers were saying to me, “Welcome to L.A. This is what we're going to do: you're going to write a romantic comedy and we're going to sell it. You're going to get into the studio system, you're going to earn a lot of money, it's going to be amazing and we're going to begin your Hollywood career as a screenwriter.” I, being an idiot, was like “O.K.” I'd never written a feature film, so I spent nine months writing this really horrible, crappy romantic comedy that I didn't care about. And then it didn't go anywhere and it was dumb and it was bad, and then I realized, “What am I doing? All I've ever done is make short films that I'm in that are about my life – that's what I have to do for the feature.” So I wrote Kabluey, and that's what worked.

Filmmaker: None of your short films feel like features in miniature, so how much did you alter your writing approach when you wrote Kabluey?

Prendergast: When I wrote short films, I would have an idea and it would be pretty simple – a woman being stalked by an albino, or a man in a red pantsuit – and I'd just sit down and write it and I'd be done. When I started writing features, I was like, “OK, I'll just sit down and write it.” So I'd sit down and start writing, but it does not work that way. [laughs] I had great characters and great ambiance, but it just wasn't going anywhere. Figuring out a plot and keeping the audience entertained for two hours is really, really hard. So I think part of the way that Kabluey worked was that I had the initial context (which was the mascot suit) but I knew that that wasn't enough to sustain the whole and that's when I started thinking, “Well, what's going on in this guy's life?” and that's when the sister-in-law story came in. So really I had two stories and I think it worked that you had one slapstick story and one sad story and they're kind of overlapping and they come together in the end. But it was hard. Let me tell you, writing a feature was probably the hardest thing I've done in my entire life, but now I feel, at least temporarily, like I've got it down.

Filmmaker: Was the fact that one plotline was autobiographical a help or a hindrance to you?

Prendergast: Well, I told my family “I'm writing a movie about a mascot costume – it's going to be so funny!” and then gradually I realized I was going to write about the family and I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want them to get upset or know. It's true when they say “Write what you know,” because it's helpful: some of the lines that Lisa Kudrow says in the movie are lines that my sister-in-law actually said, and some of the things that happened – like her watching the news during dinner – my sister-in-law did every night. So I put in a lot of real emotional subject matter, but I didn't tell them until the movie was all ready to go. Right before we shot, I went and visited my sister-in-law and said, “Hey, so I have something to tell you... Yeah... So... You know that movie I was writing about the mascot costume? Well, there's this other character in the movie who's a woman and she's got two little kids and her husband's at war and her brother-in-law comes to help her...” She sort of gave me this very thin look, but kept folding laundry. I said, “And she sort of does some questionable things and she's sort of an unlikeable character and she really makes some mistakes, but I dramatized it all because it's a movie and we have to have a fictional plot so she does some things that didn't really happen...” My sister-in-law, without missing a beat, said, “Who is playing me?” I said, “Lisa Kudrow.” She said, “OK, fine, whatever you want.”

Filmmaker: How driven were you to make Kabluey?

Prendergast: Well, I had made a bunch of short films, I could see that I wasn't going to get to the next stage of my career until I learned to write a feature script. I was living in New York and I lost everything: I quit my temp job doing word processing for law firms in the middle of the night, I was in a relationship that ended, I lost the apartment, I spent all my money and everything ended because I just had tunnel vision where I was like, “If I'm going to get this movie made, I need to give up everything to get there.” I lost everything and ended up moving back to Portland, Oregon, and living with my family. I had no money. My mother's a real estate agent and she had this house for sale, so I was living in this empty house and I was going to the library every day and writing the script. In a way it was gorgeous because I would be working in this tiny study cubicle and I knew that script was good, and even though my life was collapsing and I was $25,000 in credit card debt and I had no money and I had crashed my mother's car and I had no job and I had ended my relationship and I was living in a city where I didn't know very many people, every day I would go to the library and I had this undeniable, hot, burning joy because I was thinking “This script is going to be awesome!” I knew it was going to work.

Filmmaker: It seems almost like an act of masochism to cast yourself as the guy inside the blue mascot suit who stands all day in the extreme heat. It looks hugely uncomfortable in the movie, but was it as bad for you in reality?

Prendergast: It's all absolutely true. The funny part is that in the script there are jokes about him not being able to use his hands and being trapped inside the suit when it's really hot and sweaty, but when we first got the suit they brought it in and we were in this conference room and they put me in it. Then everybody was like, “Oh my God, we've got to get the producers to show them,” so they all left the room and closed the door. I couldn't get out of the room and I couldn't open the door, and they'd just sort of forgotten. And it's very claustrophobic inside that suit, and I was laughing at myself, like “Oh my God, it's real. You wrote it, and now it's actually happening. You're trapped inside this suit and you can't get out.” It was weird. It was awkward because there were times when I was on camera and I couldn't see anything because the suit is actually blind – there is no peephole (we faked that in the movie) and you can't see anything. We'd do a take, then we'd pop the head off and someone would run up with a clamshell to show me the footage. In terms of the performance, it was very helpful because I was living the exact factors in the movie: it was really weird and claustrophobic and shut off. You can't be in that suit for more than half an hour at a time, because you will die. I mean, it's 100 degrees in Austin, Texas and you're in giant blue foam suit. It was not medically possible to stay in there longer than that.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Prendergast: I think the first film I ever saw in a theater was Snow White, which I recently rented again because I got this book about earlier Disney animation. I remember that I was so excited about going to that movie that I popped popcorn and dyed it with food coloring and then made these cones so we could have our own popcorn. I think I even made costumes for all the kids that were going. It was a big production. I was six or seven. All the kids in the neighborhood went as a group, and I think I drove the parents crazy. I remember getting in trouble for being too excited.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest experience you've had during your time in the film industry?

Prendergast: The strangest experience is probably being in a giant blue mascot costume out by the side of the road in Texas. When we were shooting the wide shots, the suit would be standing there and the camera would be half a mile away. Real cars would drive by on the road and people would stop and be like, “What the fuck are you?” and I was like “No, no, no, it's part of a movie.” They're like, “There are no cameras here,” and I would say, “No, they're right over there. Please, you're disturbing the shot. Could you just keep going.” I was worried that people would try and kill me, would try and hit me like in the movie.

Filmmaker: Finally, what phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Prendergast: Be prepared. Well, that's not true, that's my philosophy on work. I'm a Boy Scout, so I have to say “Be prepared.” I don't really have a philosophy on life, just “Weird shit is going to go down.” It's true, though. Weird, weird, weird things will happen.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 7/04/2008 10:41:00 AM Comments (0)

Hated and loved in equal measure, Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker who could never be accused of being boring. The French writer director seems courting controversy since the beginning of her career: she was a literary sensation at the age of 17 when she published her first novel, L'homme Facile which was sufficiently racy to be forbidden reading for minors and her first cinematic involvement was acting in Bernardo Bertolucci's sordid classic Last Tango in Paris (1972). She made her directorial debut in 1976 with an adaptation of her own novel Une Vrai Jeune Fille, but her portrait of adolescent female sexuality was considered pornographic and would not be released until 1999. While writing further bestselling novels as well as screenplays for Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, Maurice Pialat's Police and even the soft-core porn classic Bilitis, she tried to continue her directing career but struggled until the international success of 36 Fillette (1988), about the sexual awakening of a 14-year-old girl. Charges that her films were more pornography than art were fueled by her casting Euro porn legend Rocco Siffredi in Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004), however both those films were critically acclaimed and, along with her 2000 success Fat Girl!, helped further raise her profile.

In 2004, Breillat suffered a stroke and was confined to a hospital bed for five months, but remarkably a year to the day after the stroke, she began shooting her latest film, The Last Mistress. Based on a novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, the film is a period piece and thus a significant departure for Breillat whose previous work has all been deeply grounded in modernity. The story is nevertheless as erotically charged as ever: aristocratic Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou) marries the rich, devoted Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida) but is lured into infidelity by La Vellini (Asia Argento), the earthy courtesan whose primal desires match his own. The Last Mistress has all the trappings of a period piece – lavish costumes, elaborate sets, etc. – but Breillat makes the material her own by transforming Barbey d'Aurevilly's 19th century novel into a vital and highly sexual noir. Breillat gets brave performances from her two ill-fated lovers, Aattou and Argento, and the stylistic grandeur perfectly offsets the emotional intensity of the film, which is Breillat's most exciting so far if not also her best.

Filmmaker spoke to Breillat at last year's New York Film Festival about her love of sex and violence, her romantic side, and the importance of being hated.



Filmmaker: How are you?

Breillat: For me, to be in New York and have a film at the New York Film Festival is fantastic because the first time [I was at the festival] with 36 Fillette, I was hated in France. It did so well here that it allowed me to make another film because they discovered that I wasn't the worst filmmaker in French cinema. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Let's talk about The Last Mistress. How long ago did you first read the novel?

Breillat: Since I wanted to adapt it right away, it must have been 10 or 15 years ago. In fact, right after Perfect Love.

Filmmaker: And what was your initial reaction to the book?

Breillat: It's like it is with my actors – [I felt] that it belonged to me.

Filmmaker: Did you have a very clear vision of how you wanted the film to be?

Breillat: No, I never have a clear vision in advance. You start the film and it makes itself on its own at a certain point. Now in France they all want to call us “réalisateur” [French for “director”], but I always say that I only “realize” the film after I've made it. I only know what movie I have made afterwards. [laughs] A “réalisateur” is like a mason, and I'm an architect.

Filmmaker: How difficult was it physically, after your stroke, to make this film?

Breillat: The only difference was the insurance companies – nobody would insure me. I have a producer [who insured me]. I don't think any [other] producer in the world would have produced a film like this under those circumstances.

Filmmaker: This cost 10 times as much as any of your previous films so did you feel a lot of pressure because of that?

Breillat: No, because I did it exactly the same way. I was extremely precise with the project and if anything I saved money because I used less film than I had anticipated. I didn't do one more hour than was budgeted for. It was me that chose everything – I was obsessed with lace and I went to the flea market and picked everything out, I chose all the objects.

Filmmaker: The film seems to continue a preoccupation that you have with the relationship between violence and sexuality.

Breillat: In cinema, I love violence and sexuality. I love blood, but not in the style of chainsaw massacres. Apart from the painters from the Renaissance who are my absolute inspiration, when I was very small I had a passion for [Chaim] Soutine. You know, that crazy painter who painted hanging carcasses. [laughs] I was a lot like that in the end. I love that funereal violence. Also [Francis] Bacon was very violent. I adore Cronenberg, who's very violent - and I hope I'll be as violent as he is in my next movie! [laughs]

Filmmaker: As with Anatomy of Hell, this is a film where the male lead seems to be your muse.

Breillat: I'm always told that I don't like men and that I like women so much more in my films. But I think, in any case, with this movie I project myself and identify with the character of the young man. The camera is in love with him. It's his intimacy that the camera penetrates. Asia is a person who is much more on the exterior and is more the fantasy of the femme fatale.

Filmmaker: So in the past you've felt that you've liked your male characters, but film critics haven't?

Breillat: Yes, because in the end the males were the ones that acted but what interested me was how a woman looked in the eyes of a man. Because the look constitutes the person. As a woman, you don't really know what you're made of under a man's gaze. As I'm an entomologist, that's what interested me the most, to see that. [laughs] Now that I've seen it, I can project myself into the body of men.

Filmmaker: You described the Asia Argento character as the fantasy of a femme fatale, and this almost feels like a period film noir.

Breillat: Yes, the novel's like that. I adore film noir and femme fatales – Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe – they're always fatal only to themselves. I also love the iconography of American film noir and femme fatales but also Orientalism, those femme fatales as well. What makes Vellini a femme fatale is that she has that side of a Flamenca from Seville, and then a very feminine side. Her father was a toreador, and all toreadors have a very feminine side – they dance with bulls. They're dressed in a very Oriental fashion, wearing golden bolero. All of the paintings of the 19th century with that Oriental influence have in them the dream of the femme fatale in the harem. Orientalism is also a fantasy of the femme fatale, so I wanted to mix the two.

Filmmaker: Your films have previously always been very grounded in the present, so what do you feel is the contemporary relevance of this film?

Breillat: Well, for one thing, there's an androgyny between boys and girls currently. Dior and Chanel, all they're creating for boys is dandy costumes. If you look at ads for Hugo Boss, all of the models have a feminine beauty. The look of masculine beauty that you can see in Renaissance paintings or Holbein's paintings has become a model for contemporary beauty. That sort of rock 'n' roll look that's almost masculine that you see in women is an iconography of this time as well. Furthermore, this story takes place during what I call the last cry of the aristocracy: the aristocracy are rich, they didn't worry about money – the bankers were the ones who worried about money, not the aristocrats. Their moral values were more in their nobility of character than in the heart, with large freedom of spirit and mores. Passion had its place in the aristocracy; when she says, “Hermangarde is rich enough for both of them,” that's not something that would be said during the century of the bourgeoisie. The century of the bourgeoisie, with the rise of industrialism in society, is just starting to appear when this novel is being written. And with the appearance of the bourgeoisie is the hypocrisy of a certain puritanism. And I personally believe that we're still in the 19th century.

Filmmaker: But you've said elsewhere that you're an 18th century woman.

Breillat: Of course. I'm free, I'm not a horrible bourgeoise. [laughs]

Filmmaker: I'm interested in how you view the feminist aspect of this film.

Breillat: If I had written this, they would have told me I'm a feminist but it's Barbey d'Aurevilly who wrote it. Everything that the two older women say when they're discussing men would have seemed like clichés had it not been for the fact that Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote all of it word for word. And there's also little digs about women who are too well educated whose moral values degenerate that's also in Barbey d'Aurevilly's book. I find the two very amusing.

Filmmaker: There's a line in the movie, “It's the perverse influence of over-provocative novels on female common sense.” Does that also come straight from the novel?

Breillat: That's the only one where I can't remember whether I invented it or it was actually in the novel.

Filmmaker: Your movies seem like the modern equivalent of “over-provocative novels.”

Breillat: This book had a lot of problems with censorship. [Barbey d'Aurevilly] almost went to prison because of this book, so he had to then go and backpedal and say that actually what he was really doing was showing how awful vice was, and that he was singing the praises of virtue.

Filmmaker: How much do you associate with him, comparing what he was doing then and what you're doing now as a filmmaker?

Breillat: I think it's clear that if I had lived at the time that he did, I would have been Barbey d'Aurevilly. I'm very romantic, contrary to what most people think. He can be very provocative, but also very romantic.

Filmmaker: You've said that this film is closest to you as a person. Can you explain exactly why that is?

Breillat: It is the film where I plunge to the core of romanticism. It's always been said that I'm absolutely unromantic, but I think that everybody was wrong. They've always made a mistake that way because, for instance, Romance was very romantic. Romanticism is always something that's very dark. Romanticism is despair – Lord Byron killed himself. It's an adolescent despair of having an ideal that you can never attain. I'm like Madame De Flers, who's furiously, avidly 18th century; I'm furiously, avidly adolescent.

Filmmaker: You said that with Anatomy of Hell you closed a chapter stylistically so that you could move on to this. How did you know you'd finished working in that vein?

Breillat: It's not a certain style, it's that Anatomy of Hell is like a theory, and once you've made a theory you can move on to something else that is more romantic. In fairness, I'm not a mathematician or a philosopher and it gave me the chance to come back to something that was more fictional. And softer. Because a theorem is radicalness, but it's also absolute solitude and there's almost no fiction in Anatomy of Hell.

Filmmaker: You were saying before that you came to New York with 36 Fillette and that the reception here made the French reevaluate the quality of your work. How isolated have you felt as a voice in French film?

Breillat: I felt lynched in France. It wasn't that they didn't like the movie, they hated me. When 36 Fillette was chosen for the New York Film Festival, the president of uniFrance made a special trip to come here so he could say that my film was not representative of French cinema and that they had made a mistake in selecting me. When I say it's hate, it's hate. It's not called by any other name. It was stupefying.

Filmmaker: Do you feel that's still the case today?

Breillat: It's half and half. When you have people who really hate you then there's other people who start to love you. The French finally noticed that there was another world aside from France around them. And to not be representative of French cinema could mean that you are representative of cinema and that's, in fact, much better.

Filmmaker: Do you think this film will change the way the French film community feels about you?

Breillat: Yes, there are some people who hated me who are now starting to say that, yes, I had made a really good film now, that I had calmed down. But I have not calmed down! [laughs] They're wrong. And people who are wrong will always be wrong. [laughs]

Filmmaker: You compared yourself to Ryno because somebody says of him that if he becomes a politician then he will always try to be unpopular.

Breillat: That's totally me. Even when I was young and published my first book, people would say, “Who did you write this book for?” I always said, “For me. Only for me.” I was very arrogant. When I did my second movie, Tapage Nocturne, I was on a television programme and was attacked by Gainsbourg, who said it was a porno film. In fact, it was a portrait of a modern woman in the exact same way that 36 Fillette is the portrait of an adolescent. At the beginning I was shy and allowing myself to be insulted, and all of a sudden I looked them straight in the eye and said I was 20 years ahead of my time and the future would prove me right. Despite that, when I saw my first film [A Real Young Girl] 25 years after it came out, I looked at it and said, “Well, it's a young film, but it's a modern film.” At that time with that film, the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes refused me because it was a horrible film and pornographic. They said it was also very badly directed, so I sent them a letter with return receipt requested because I was making a date for the future and the future would prove them wrong. I've always been arrogant, and arrogance in France is not perceived well. It's a country where they cover their heads, a country of courtesans. I always say in interviews that France is the country of Louis XIV and Marshal Pétain, and that's the deep French character. Of course, there are exceptions and, of course, the exceptions are sublime and beautiful.

Filmmaker: Do you sometimes feel pressure to be controversial, to keep on upsetting people?

Breillat: No, I don't do it on purpose but my shell has gotten a little thicker so I can take it, but sometimes I do cry. After the Berlin Film Festival where I was on the jury, I was sitting on the plane and there in the paper was an announcement that looked like a notice of death, framed in black, saying “FINISH WITH CATHERINE BREILLAT” in enormous black letters, like they wanted to kill me. It's phenomenal hate. I thought I had come back with 36 Fillette, so I sobbed for two days. I was desperate and then I lifted my head up and I wrote an article for a very sophisticated French review and I called it “The Importance of Being Hated.”

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/27/2008 02:30:00 PM Comments (0)

After observing and learning from some of the best directors around, writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi has put all her acquired wisdom to use in a distinctive and promising debut. Born in Rome, the multi-talented Miniucchi is notable for the number of mediums she has worked in: a prolific maker of documentaries and music videos, she has also written poetry, songs, plays and short stories, and is an accomplished photographer. While in Italy, Miniucchi worked with Federico Fellini and the Taviani brothers, and went on to serve an apprenticeship with Lina Wertmuller. She moved to the U.S. to study at Harvard and the American Film Institute, and then interned with Francis Ford Coppola at American Zoetrope. Miniucchi made a name for herself making arts-related documentaries (her subjects include Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Paul Verhoeven), and has complemented her non-fiction career with more lucrative stints as a music video director, helming promos for such artists as Devo, White Zombie and Gloria Estefan.

Given that Miniucchi made the 60-minute film Normality back in 1990 and has also directed a handful of shorts, her debut feature, Expired, is a long time coming. The film is an unlikely and often unromantic love story: meek meter maid (Samantha Morton) attracts the attention of brutish traffic officer Jay (Jason Patric) and a relationship awkwardly develops between them. Jay is an emotionally crippled loner and good-hearted Claire lives with her ailing mother (Teri Garr), but despite their wildly different personalities, these opposites attract and there seems a small chance they could be happy together. Against the backdrop of a depressing and alienating Los Angeles, Miniucchi presents the dysfunctional central relationship in a blackly comic manner redolent of Neil LaBute. Indeed, Patric plays Jay like he's the half-brother of Cary, his pathologically unfeeling character in LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, delivering his barbed dialogue with obvious relish. The interactions between Jay and Claire are often excruciating and Expired is intentionally uncomfortable viewing, however the strength of Miniucchi's writing and even-handed direction and the performances from the ever-excellent Morton and Patric (who has seldom been better) make this a compelling viewing experience.

Filmmaker spoke to Miniucchi about her own experiences with parking attendants, the illustrious directors she has worked with, and fleeing a location after it was trashed by gang bangers.



Filmmaker: You present Los Angeles very differently than most films, as you make it seem a very boring, alienating place. Did the way you paint it come from the perspective of the characters or from how you yourself see the city?

Miniucchi: It's a very interesting question because I think it's a bit of both. Some is a bit of personal experience – the alienating factor, the loneliness. I think a lot of us experience these things in this town. On the other hand, the characters are everyday people and so the environment that they live in is certainly not a glamorous L.A. It's working class, everyday life in a big city where at times you have to even take the bus and not drive your own car. There's a lot of people like this in this town.

Filmmaker: Tell me about the research that you did for the film, and what your experiences meeting meter maids and traffic officers have been like.

Miniucchi: Maybe I should have done more research. I didn't do much research, I just witnessed a couple of incidents. I lived one myself and then I just started writing the story. When I finished the script, I did go to the parking attendants' office, spoke to a supervisor and asked him, “Look, I put down these couple of incidents – are they realistic?” He said, “Oh, my God, yes!” It happens to these [traffic officers] all the time that these guys abuse them and he was saying that people spit at them, throw ice creams, drinks, all kinds of stuff at them. So I had reason to pretty much keep it the way it was.

Filmmaker: What was the initial incident that prompted you to start writing the script?

Miniucchi: I witnessed a woman who was not too slim and she was giving a ticket. This driver, this guy, really reacted in such an impolite and abusive way and called her “fatso” and went off [at her]. She was so hurt. I guess that's what stayed with me. They're supposed not to talk back. It was so touching. I lived one experience that was kind of the opposite: I was being kind of normal and kind and this guy was so abrupt and impolite and really abusive of his authority. I thought, “Wow, what happens if these guys meet and fall in love at work?” So the story just unfolded that way.

Filmmaker: Those two people were presumably the inspirations for Claire and Jay, but how did you turn them into fully fleshed out characters?

Miniucchi: They did it themselves, I think. I believe when one writes something, one listens to what one starts off with – it kind of directs you and tells you what to write and what is appropriate that would come out of that person's mouth. So it took shape slowly. I just had in mind a very gentle, wallflower kind of person and another one [who was] angry, abrupt and frustrated, snappier. I just fictionalized it, pushed it a bit to the extreme. I guess reality when it's too real becomes funny, so it also became quite comedic. People seem to laugh a lot through the movie, so that humor [came through].

Filmmaker: There seems to be a parallel with the work of Neil LaBute in this. Was he an influence?

Miniucchi: You know, it's very strange because I've never seen his films, and it's not the first time [somebody has made the comparison]. One of my producers, Fred Roos, said when he saw the film for the first time, “My God, you are a female LaBute.” I saw Nurse Betty years ago, and then I saw a piece of Jason [Patric]'s film he did with him [Your Friends and Neighbors], just to check out Jason. But I swear I never thought of him.

Filmmaker: Let's talk about that vision for the film. So much of the film's distinctiveness comes from the dialogue and the contrast in exchanges between the meek Claire and the callous, emotionally stunted Jay. How easy was it to write their conversations?

Miniucchi: [laughs] I don't know, I just pushed it a little bit. I thought, “What would happen if I went in this direction?” and I started to like it. Then I needed to be consistent and the characters kept telling me what they would say, so it just unfolded itself that way. Then I read the script with Jason, and Jason changed a couple of lines here and there. One of my favorites lines that he changed was when he says, by the door after having dinner at her place, “I might call you.” In the script originally it was “I will call you,” so it gave it an extra [kick]. English is not my first language after all so there were a couple of incidents where, very kindly, he came up with a couple of new lines here and there.

Filmmaker: How much did you actually like your characters and enjoy writing them? They both have very obvious flaws and I would imagine that Jay is extremely unlikable to a lot of people who watch the film.

Miniucchi: My experience with the film is that people would probably not like to be in a relationship with somebody like him. But people actually enjoy and laugh mostly at his performance. He's the one who creates the most humor – absurd humor, I would say – in the picture. A lot of young guys identify with him. There are guys that are a little bit undependable and scared of contact and a little bit more abrupt. I saw a lot of people relating to him, saying “Oh, I've been like that, ha ha ha ha ha!” or “I've been Jay!” A lot of guys.

Filmmaker: When you were writing the script or shooting the film, were you ever worried that he was too unlikable?

Miniucchi: Yes, I did, and I thought that if he was not performed properly it would have been a disaster. So I got Jason to bring out the humor in him and moments of compassion, because the guy is supposed to be pathetic, a person you feel sorry for not just feel put off by. He's a man that has jeopardized his own life, has made mistakes. It's hard to turn back, now he's angry and he's lonely and he's hurt and he has difficulties in finding love and keeping love and managing love. He's a sad person.

Filmmaker: This is one of the bleakest and most unusual romances I've seen in a long time, so I have to ask you whether this is a reflection of your personal perception of romance?

Miniucchi: I'm interested in human nature, I'm interested in the depths of human nature. I think it's such a mysterious world, the world of relationships and it can take you in so many different directions. In this one, they're this way; in another script, they [might be] much more romantic or funnier. If you portray something on the screen that's not been portrayed every day, it might be interesting because it opens up to a different kind of thing that hasn't been seen as much or as often. So that's interesting to a writer-director, and the characters and the story are loaded with pathos, with emotions, with psychological depths.

Filmmaker: You've had a lot of experience working on music videos and documentaries, but how much had you worked with actors before?

Miniucchi: Well, I had made about nine fictional films of different lengths. My first film was Normality and was almost 70 minutes long. It was a comedy – fun, dark at times – and it was about loneliness too. [laughs] And then I made another six different shorts of strange lengths - 25, 35, 40 minutes. Then I was making my first feature film some years ago, with Harvey Keitel, Judy Davis, Matthew McConaughey and Jeremy Piven, and unfortunately in the middle of shooting it fell apart due to the embezzlement of funds by one of the executive producers. That created such a shock, and it ruined my life for many years. I said, “Enough of this for a while,” and went into documentaries. The music videos I did all along because I needed to make a living. Unfortunately. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Looking at your résumé, you've written poetry, short stories and songs, you're a photographer, you've directed music videos, documentaries and now a fiction feature. Which one of those do you view as your primary mode of creative expression? Or are they all essential to you?

Miniucchi: Writing and making a film is the thing – it's when I feel I'm in the right place doing what I want to do and what I know how to do and what I feel like doing the most. But, in between, your creativity sometimes has to be expressed no matter what, so writing or taking a picture are much more immediate. It's between you and the medium itself and doesn't have to go through so many other people waiting around for the funding. So I guess a lot of artists do have these other [modes of] expression on the side to help them through, to find an outlet for their creativity while they wait around to have a film put together, which is not an easy task.

Filmmaker: You've worked with or made documentaries about an incredible list of people: Lina Wertmuller, the Taviani brothers, Fellini, Coppola, Scorsese, Verhoeven and Altman. Out of all of those great directors, who influenced the most?

Miniucchi: I admire a lot of those people and I am sure that they live within me somewhat. The most incredible piece of advice that really changed my life was from Bob Altman who said to me, “Never take any advice.” [laughs] It carried a lot of weight because it was basically encouraging me to just go ahead and do what I was born to do and believed in, and not let anybody stop me. A piece of advice like that goes a long way and I was enormously influenced by that. All [those directors] shared an incredible, honest passion for their work and for their creative expression that went beyond the [money]. None of them cared about money, fame or any of that, it was really about the work and what they wanted to say. Stylistically and content-wise, it's hard to tell who is the one that influenced me the most because I think that the beauty of each one of us as artists is to express oneself in a very honest way so that the real self comes through, and there being only one of us that will automatically be original. So if you listen to your honest voice, you will be setting yourself apart.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Miniucchi: Fantasia. But the first films I ever saw as a grown-up were Ingmar Bergman's films, aged 12 or 13, and I think that's what put the film bug in me. My mum has always been a huge film buff and would take us to see movies a lot, and my father's an artist so it's hard to tell where the real first thing comes, but certainly seeing Bergman's films at such an early age [had an impact].

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the strangest thing you've experienced during your time in the film industry?

Miniucchi: We had found a little house that was perfect [for Expired’s Aunt Tilda character]. There was a man in his mid-fifties living with his mom and it was a cute little house that you could tell had been around for a while, and in the back it had an extra guest house which we thought would be perfect for Jason's apartment. My art director started painting the room there, Jason picked out what [colors he wanted for the walls], and so I went there to check the colors of the paint and all of a sudden we found the house turned upside down. Mattresses had been scattered and slashed, bottles of beer everywhere, everybody gone and [there were] a huge amount of gang bangers outside the house with huge muscle cars, waiting around. We just never went back. We fled. I took my production designer and drove as fast as I could. To this day, she and I never really discovered what really happened. It was a very strange experience. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/20/2008 10:38:00 AM Comments (0)

For more than 40 years, Werner Herzog has been redrawing the map, both cinematically and geographically. He started making short films in the mid-1960s, and made an impact internationally with Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), the tale of a mad conquistador's doomed jungle quest, the first of five collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog and Kinski's relationship was often turbulent and violent, but the ambitious, outlandish and usually unhinged films they made together over the course of the 70s and 80s – Nosferatu (1978), Woyzeck (1978), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) – would all become classics, as would other Herzog films of the period such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Stroszek (1977). Herzog's narrative features have boldly explored dark, uncharted areas of the psyche as well as the planet, and in his parallel, synergetic career as a documentary filmmaker he has tackled similar themes. His non-fiction films predominantly bear the mark of the fearless adventurer, from his early The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969) through to 1997's Little Dieter Needs to Fly (which he remade last year as Rescue Dawn) and the recent hit Grizzly Man (2005).

Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog's latest documentary, proves that at the age of 65 he is still undaunted by the world's least hospitable places. The film is a typically offbeat travelogue of his visit to Antarctica, a place which fascinates him not only because of its natural phenomena (the active volcano Mount Erebus, the strange world beneath the ice) but also because of its unusual collection of inhabitants, scientists, bohemians and nomads, who have found their way to the base of the planet. The film engages with Herzog's career-long preoccupation with man's relationship to savage nature and is ultimately an idiosyncratic vision of the planet's seventh continent, where the director finds a parade of people with buckets on their heads, disoriented penguins and a woman who transforms herself into human hand luggage.

Filmmaker spoke to Herzog about the genesis of his latest expedition, fainting at Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, and the need for documentaries in a world filled with video games, virtual realities, the internet, Photoshop, WrestleMania and breast implants.




Filmmaker: How are you?

Herzog: I'm a bit jet lagged. I've come from Europe, and a few days before I flew from Los Angeles to Europe – that's nine hours, and back six hours. It takes me some time to understand where I am, and who I am and why. [laughs]

Filmmaker: How long did it take you to get used to Antarctica, with the long flight and then constant daylight once you arrived?

Herzog: Well, jet lag doesn't occur there because it's on the same line of longitude as New Zealand, but it's a long flight, almost eight hours. It's quite a distance down there. And adapting to Antarctica, I think nobody ever will be able to fully adapt, you are only partially adapted. We are not made for understanding that there's five months of day and never night, and then some twilight zone, and then five months of night. We are clearly not really organized for that. When you're on the South Pole, you look in one direction and you look north. You turn around 180 degrees and you're still looking north. Any direction you're looking is north, and it's a strange notion.

Filmmaker: Did you ever consider shooting during the Antarctic winter?

Herzog: No, because you couldn't do much filming. It's always dark, you could only do interior stuff, and it's extremely cold. And then the population is very limited – you have the so-called “winter-overs,” but it's maybe only 20% of the regular population of scientists, and many of them are just in maintenance. There are some scientists who love the Antarctic night, for instance astronomers who can do long-time observations, and some others who love to be there at that time for good reasons.

Filmmaker: A major focus of the film seems to be to show the people who go to Antarctica, and the reasons they travel there, rather than concentrating entirely on the nature and landscape of the place.

Herzog: In a way it started out with landscape, but I say that with necessary caution because it was all underwater footage. [It's] a completely strange science fiction world, totally fascinating, and we have never seen anything like that on any screen, so that was what intrigued me to go there and I wanted to do diving and filming under the water. I got intrigued by the continent in a way and I wanted to go down there. I knew I would never have a chance until this diver and musician Henry Kaiser told me, “Watch out, there is an artists' and writers' program [run] by the National Science Program. Why don't you apply?” Even after I applied I thought I had no chance because there are Nobel Prize winners lining up to get the chance to go there and do science but all of a sudden I find myself invited. I didn't know if this was a good or a bad surprise because you couldn't do any scouting. You are flown down, and six weeks later you are flown back and you have to have a movie in the can.

Filmmaker: Given those restrictions, how clear an idea did you have of what you wanted the movie to be?

Herzog: Well, I had a couple of basic places that interested me, for example, this very high active volcano, Mount Erebus. I knew I would go to a diving camp and I knew roughly who I would meet there, for example the lead biologist at this camp was a great fan of early 1950s doomsday science fiction movies and I got fascinated by him showing them to his colleagues and divers. A few things I knew in advance; I knew I would probably do something about neutrino research, but it was quite vague and I had no idea who the people were doing this. I had to be quick and look out and find people, but I'm a filmmaker and I do find the real people.

Filmmaker: You mentioned diving and the science fiction elements of Antarctica. Did you do any diving yourself?

Herzog: No, I'm not a diver but I really wanted a crash course and [to] learn quickly [laughs] and I was immediately dissuaded from it. There's no way to do it because it's too dangerous and only the best of the best do it. Antarctica cannot afford to waste resources in a big rescue operation. In fact, they did have fatalities – it is dangerous and it's not to make any jokes about. I have no problem to delegate filming underwater to a really good diver.

Filmmaker: Was there any way that you could direct the divers who were filming for you?

Herzog: No, they are left alone down there. But Henry Kaiser, who shot almost all of the [underwater] footage understood that, for example, I wanted to have long takes not just five-second clips and he did it marvelously. I wanted him to go very close to certain strange creatures and he understood it and came back with fantastic footage. I owe him not only the footage under the water but lots of the music in the film. He did it together with David Lindley and it's just very, very beautiful.

Filmmaker: The choral music in the film seems to suggest the experience of being in Antarctica is almost religious.

Herzog: Yes and it's not only me, others understand it similarly. Some of the divers before they go under the ice speak jokingly of “going into the cathedral.” There is a strange sacrality about some of these landscapes underwater or outside. It's very, very odd, and through this Orthodox Russian Church choir music you all of a sudden understand it and start to see it. The music allows us to see it.

Filmmaker: Although you narrate the film, we don't really see you in Encounters.

Herzog: You do see me , but it's from behind when I'm crawling through some ice tunnels up in the volcano. But you do not see my face. It was better [that way]. We tried to do it without any person, but it's better to follow the curiosity of the human being. I did not want to be shown, but it was also good for the cinematographer, because I could whisper to him, “There's a bump – watch out.”

Filmmaker: The relationship between man and nature has been one of your preoccupations, so were there ways that you wanted to explore that specifically in this film?

Herzog: In a way yes, although of course I'm not out on huge expeditions like in the old days and of course I see many of the absurdities down there. McMurdo Station is like a noisy, ugly mining town with the noise of Caterpillars, and the first thing you run into is an ATM machine. You just do not expect that.

Filmmaker: How many places are there left that you want to go and film?

Herzog: There's enough - I've always been curious. In the film there's a very nice moment where a Caterpillar driver – who actually is a philosopher and has a degree in comparative literature – speaks about how his grandmother read The Odyssey to him, about the Argonauts. He says, “That's when I fell in love with the world,” and I thought, “That's exactly what I've done in many films, falling in love with the world.” This is clearly a film where I have fallen in love with Antarctica and it's actually my Antarctica, my love story with Antarctica. And hence there are many places I will never go. They are sending robots to Mars. It's far too expensive and risky to send human beings but sometimes I think instead of a robot they should send a poet up there. It would be me that would volunteer, I would be the first to apply. Of course I'll never be there, but so be it.

Filmmaker: How does Antarctica rank in terms of the most unforgiving places you've been to for films?

Herzog: We should be careful to avoid the clichés about Antarctica. Antarctica, the way human beings experience now in most cases is very easy. It's easy. You have the aerobics studio and yoga classes and an ATM machine and a warm bed like in a motel or a college dorm.

Filmmaker: Do you almost wish you had been there 100 years ago when it was untamed?

Herzog: Well, that's an interesting question. Not really, because there were very, very good films made at that time. Shackleton had 35mm film with him and they created phenomenal footage which in our spirit of today we probably could not achieve. It has a very strange beauty and I do not mind that I have not been down there 100 years ago. I'm never out to seek the difficulties in the world in any of my films, I'm a professional filmmaker. I avoid the difficulties as long as I can do that, but if they are in my path I'm not afraid to cope with it.

Filmmaker: There's a fascinating part of the film where you have a conversation with a scientist about penguins.

Herzog: I was interested in one basic question though I knew I wouldn't get a real full answer: “Is there such a thing as insanity or derangement among animals?” As we were in a penguin colony, [I asked] “Is there such a thing among penguins?” All of a sudden, I get very interesting answers. Not a full explanation – we'll probably never have it – but it's good to ask an unusual question once in a while.

Filmmaker: OK, well maybe I can ask a slightly unusual question myself now. With your direct association with the wilds of nature, isn't it paradoxical that you live in L.A., which I think you have called the most culturally rich city in the world?

Herzog: No, not in the world, in America. With the most cultural substance. Of course it sounds provocative now sitting in New York – New Yorkers will immediately contest it. But there's a serious side about Los Angeles beyond the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, and I've made a lot of films not out in wild nature. My next film is going to take place in New Orleans. I don't see myself pinned down to films about wild nature. It appears in some of the movies, yes. When I film in the jungle in Fitzcarraldo, the jungle is just another forest. Period. It's nothing so special.

Filmmaker: But what is it that L.A. gives you that you can't get elsewhere?

Herzog: It's complicated. I would need much more time than we have. There's something very vibrant, things get done there. Things get made here in New York; much of the culture is being consumed and not so much fabricated. Of course there are painters here, but some of [the culture] was borrowed from Europe, like the opera. Los Angeles is very essentially American. I moved to Los Angeles because I married an American. I'm happily married and I enjoy to be in Los Angeles and it's new horizons, new alliances, new subjects. I'd never have been in touch with Henry Kaiser if I hadn't been there, or the National Science Foundation, I never would have made Grizzly Man with the Discovery Channel and Creative Differences. So it's a very good time for me.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film, and which film was it?

Herzog: I do not cry in movies, I laugh in movies. But I do faint. I keep fainting in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, the wonderful great silent film. There's a moment where they cut the elbow vein of Joan and blood is spurting out, and that's when I faint.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Herzog: I would cast Humphrey Bogart, the young Marlon Brando. I don't know what film I would make – I wouldn't want to repeat any film that was already made. I would love to venture out with some of the finest: Lillian Gish, Edward G. Robinson. They are so great that I would find it the most exciting challenge to work with them and engage them. [And] Fred Astaire. [laughs]

Filmmaker: What's the worst (or weirdest) job you've ever had?

Herzog: A parking attendant at the Munich Oktoberfest where I had to deal with 3,000 drunk drivers each night.

Filmmaker: Finally, will the current interest in documentaries last, or is it just a fad?

Herzog: I believe it's a natural concomitant of a very massive shift in our understanding of reality because we have got video games, virtual realities, the internet, Photoshop, WrestleMania, breast implants, so it's an onslaught of new things. We as filmmakers have a huge, momentous task to redefine our sense of reality and that's why I do Fitzcarraldo, where I move a ship over a mountain. Although it looks like a fever dream, you know it's not a joke because it is a ship over a mountain and not a digital effect.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/11/2008 11:46:00 PM Comments (0)

Though best known for playing a legendary director on screen, Martin Hynes seems destined to become an auteur in reality as well. A native of Eugene, Oregon, Hynes studied history at Columbia before embarking on a career as an actor and sketch comedian. He then enrolled in the graduate film program at USC where he not only made the highly-regarded short Al As In Al (1995) but played the eponymous lead in Joe Nussbaum's cult favorite George Lucas in Love (1999). He made his feature debut with the Woody Allen-esque romantic comedy The Big Split (1999), which he wrote, directed and co-starred in opposite Judy Greer. Subsequently, Hynes has focused on writing: he sold a spec script, Stealing Stanford (which, in 2002, was made into a very different film as Stealing Harvard), and on commission penned the Martin Lawrence vehicle Expiration Date and a remake of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Hynes' directorial return, The Go-Getter, was inspired by his emotional response to the death of his mother and the collapse of his marriage soon after. A feeling of poignancy and loss underpins this individualistic road movie, the story of Mercer (Lou Taylor Pucci), a young man who steals a car to drive across the country and tell his half brother that their mother has died. The journey is punctuated by Mercer's quirky encounters with the people he meets on the road, such as his childhood crush, Joely (Jena Malone), his half-brother's ex-colleague (Judy Greer) and ex-lover (Maura Tierney) – and Kate (Zooey Deschanel), the surprisingly unperturbed owner of the car he stole. The Go-Getter is, in essence, the perfect indie road movie: it has all the requisites, such as offbeat characters, an evocative soundtrack (by M. Ward), and lush 35mm cinematography, but what makes it work so beautifully is that these elements exist not for show but to better tell the story, which has a clarity and emotional resonance that takes Hynes' movie well beyond the ordinary.

Filmmaker spoke to Hynes about his move away from acting, the roots of The Go-Getter, and abandoning his lead actor while shooting guerrilla-style in Mexico.



Filmmaker: OK, before we get started, let's just get rid of the elephant in the room: you were George Lucas in George Lucas in Love.

Hynes: [laughs] Yes. I was a grad student at USC and I used to act. Before I went to film school I was an actor, and at the time I still fancied myself something like a goy-ish version of Woody Allen. I got a call at some point from a guy named Joe Nussbaum and he told me “We're making this film George Lucas in Love. It's a funny little satire, and we think you look like a young George Lucas.” I'm not a Star Wars fan, so he had to explain to me why things were funny, but I said OK. It was a two-day shoot, and it was really fun. The thing was so ridiculously successful because of the cult of Star Wars, it was unbelievable. We shot it on May 1, and by June 10 I was in a hotel room in Chicago when my agent called and said, “You should watch CNN at 3 o'clock,” and I was on TV. The film had been passed around Hollywood so quickly, and this was before Youtube. Lucas apparently sent a very nice note to Joe saying that my performance “gave him tingles,” which is a little daunting to hear.

Filmmaker: And then you also acted in your first feature as writer-director, The Big Split.

Hynes: That was right after film school. I had sold a script and basically took all the money and managed to lose it all very quickly by making The Big Split. That was when I still thought I was Woody Allen or something. I didn't realize yet that I cannot do everything all the time, and really well. I had not had that pretty obvious realization that I was not a superhero, and what I realized (despite my then overweening vanity and arrogance) was that I would never become anywhere near a director if I kept writing parts for myself to act in. And I would never be a good writer because my range as an actor is, as was said about Katherine Hepburn, the entire emotional gamut from A to B. I'm a pretty decent straight man, but it's so dull to write for that. So I had a realization that I had to do less. I stopped going to auditions and focused on writing better stories. It took me three different scripts finally to write Go-Getter, which was something that people starting responding to.

Filmmaker: You also wrote scripts on commission for studios in that period.

Hynes: That's the way I've been able to pay the rent most of the time since film school, but for the last three or four years I haven't. I went to school to direct, but I took a lot of writing classes and so when I finished and was working at an ad agency and really hating it, I decided to write something to sell. Unbelievably, it worked. I wrote this film that was called Stealing Stanford, which was this funny comedy about this mom and dad (who I imagined to be Diane Keaton and Steve Martin) who can't pay for their daughter's education and so take to a life of crime. That was bought and then completely changed – the part written for Diane Keaton was played by Tom Green. I think Diane Keaton and Tom Green are often up for the same parts... But that lead to other jobs which allowed me to pay the bills, but I was still pretty focused on making my own movies.

Filmmaker: You say in the director's notes that The Go-Getter was written out of loss, “a parent and a young marriage.” Can you elaborate?

Hynes: I think that more than anything accounts for the creative changes that happened with The Go-Getter. Just when we were making The Big Split, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. There was something about that – and quickly understanding that she was going to die – that changed my perspective about life in a way that I didn't expect. In the midst of being shaken up by that news, my perspective about my marriage changed. I was really young, and so that marriage ended just after my mom died. That was a huge amount of loss. I remember I went home for Thanksgiving that year and my father gave me all these letters that my mom and dad had written to each other the one time in their marriage they weren't in the same place. I sat in the University of Oregon library and just read these letters for three days; I remember looking out of the window at these huge Douglas-fir trees moving in the wind in this old pioneer cemetery. That was the point at which I had this conscious thought of “I have to do less.” I thought “This is going to take a really long time because I'm not a good enough director yet,” and that's the point at which I started writing really different things which led to The Go-Getter. But that was '99 and I didn't write The Go-Getter until '04.

Filmmaker: How long was the gestation period on The Go-Getter?

Hynes: Remarkably short considering how long some of the other gestation periods have been. I wrote it in '04, we shot it in '05 and finished editing it in '06 and then waited for Sundance in '07. It's really the period between shooting it and now that's been long. I wrote it and met with Lucy Barzun Donnelly, my producer, and we really hit it off. Within six months, she had the money for the movie, which never happens, plus, she got it without actors attached. The first person we had attached, actually, was M. Ward. Written into the script was “Mercer goes into his buddy J.'s band rehearsal to borrow a shirt, and they're playing a song and then they stop, and then that song becomes the overture and that band becomes the whole soundtrack.” But I didn't know what band it would be, I just wrote it into the script, thinking “It'll work out one way or another,” and then I heard Matt play and thought he was tremendous. We sent him the script before we sent it to anybody else and he said yes.

Filmmaker: His music works beautifully as a thread that runs through the film.

Hynes: Matt understood the script right off the bat. We met in L.A and had burritos and talked for three hours, about movies mainly, and discovered we had a lot of the same tastes. He trusted me and said I could use any of his songs and that we would together on some other things. He's not a film composer, but he did some really cool little instrumental pieces and then recorded that end titles song with Zooey which is obviously how they met, and they've gone on to do some lovely work [under the name She and Him].

Filmmaker: You assembled a really great cast for the film, despite the low budget.

Hynes: From top to bottom, I'm so lucky. Zooey read it and really liked it, the same with Maura, Bill, all these people. This, more than anything I've written, has this nice energy around it. People responded. Lou just read the script and responded to it, and the story with him is pretty funny. He'd been in Thumbsucker and Lucy kept telling me, “You're gonna love this kid, he's perfect.” I finally saw it and thought, “Of course. We'd be so lucky to have him,” but it was a few days before I was leaving the country to go to Norway for a friend's wedding. I said, “If Lou is anywhere near here, I have to meet him before I go.” Then I got a voicemail message saying “Hey, this is Lou Pucci. I'm doing this press tour and I'm going to be in San Francisco tomorrow. Do you wanna have lunch?” It's Sunday at midnight and on Tuesday morning I'm leaving for Norway, so I called him back and said, “Sure, I'll meet you for lunch. No problem.” I flew to San Francisco and I went to the hotel where his junket was happening. I met Lou and his press people said, “You have exactly an hour with him, that's it!” We had a really nice lunch and I'm thinking, “God, this is going really well, we're clicking, I think we really get each other.” At the end he says, “I have a really good feeling about this, but I need you to do one thing for me. I need you to insult me.” I said “What?” He said, “Yeah, I've got all these people blowing smoke up my ass on this press tour and it all seems like such total bullshit. I really wish you'd just cut me down to size.” So I just kinda went off on him, and he thought that was hilarious. A week later, he said he'd do the movie.

Filmmaker: This is only your second film, but the atmospherics of the film – the cinematography and the music – are incredibly stylish but also completely unified and assured. How did you achieve that?

Hynes: For me, this film felt emotionally and professionally like a restart and, in terms of the directing, I really went back to school: I watched scores of films that I wished I'd watched before and I also became better friends with Byron Shah, my cinematographer who I went to school with. We watched films together and talked about them as I was writing The Go-Getter, so the idea of how this would be shot was even built into the script. Byron and I then convinced Lucy to give us $20 – 25,000 to go on the road for a week and to shoot about 8,000 feet of film and travel about 2,000 miles. It was four of us on the road in a minivan and a shitty picture car for eight days: we did a big loop and hit almost all of the locations in the film. We tried everything – different filters, different lenses, different film stocks, different shooting styles – and had all this film, and it paid off so remarkably. It's something that people don't usually do and we found it to be so incredibly beneficial. Not one frame of it ended up on the movie, but it paid for itself time and time again. Then we went back with the principal crew and tech scouted the locations again, and in Mexico. To make a film like this for so little money when you're shooting on 35, we had to plan every single thing.

Filmmaker: Aside from your previous desire to be Woody Allen, what are you influences?

Hynes: Hal Ashby's The Last Detail is really the best road movie I've ever seen and I think anybody would be lucky to make anything with that kind of emotional honesty to it. Also Wong Kar-Wai and Hirokazu Koreeda were people that we watched. [Koreeda's] After Life is one of my very favorite films. Obviously Godard is in there; in The Go-Getter, you probably noticed the dance from Band of Outsiders.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing you've experienced during your time in the film industry?

Hynes: We're shooting the final day of The Go-Getter in Mexico in Encinada and somebody's forgotten to bring the permit that says it's legal for us to shoot. We have a crew, a flatbed truck with a camera on the back of it, we're shooting at rush hour in a Mexican city with no permit and no police helping us – so, of course, we get pulled over by the cops. I don't speak Spanish, and everybody's arguing and telling us they're going to take everything and throw us in jail, so we have one other little camera and we walk off down the street. We go a couple of blocks around the corner and we're setting up a shot with Lou – who's two blocks up the street – when our second A.D. comes running around the corner and says, “Everybody go, the cops are coming! If you don't have your paperwork, run, they're going to take us to prison!” So we all just scatter, leaving Lou Taylor Pucci two blocks up the street; he turned around for just a second and everybody's gone!

Filmmaker: If you could hand out an Oscar to someone who's never won, who would you give it to?

Hynes: Leslie Shatz is wonderful. He's the sound designer who's recently been working with Gus Van Sant – he did Last Days and I think he did Paranoid Park and Elefant as well. He's just the fucking bomb. I'm talking about somebody who is masterfully and poetically using subjective, non-linear, non-representational sound to tell an emotional story in a way that's just, like, ridiculous. I would be so lucky to ever get to work with him.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/06/2008 12:15:00 AM Comments (0)