We did this interview in Berlin in 2004, after his short foray in commercial cinema with No Such Thing, but before Fay Grim and Ned Rifle. It’s the first time this interview has been published in English.
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(00:00:03)
First, I wanted to ask why so many dangerous, we can say, macho types in your films?
(00:00:12)
Especially in the early ones. Macho types — Robert Burke and Martin Donovan in Unbelievable Truth, especially Donovan, behave like macho. Not classic Latin style of macho, but like an American macho.
(00:00:30)
Yeah, sort of.
(00:00:31)
I wouldn’t say macho.
(00:00:32)
I would say just out of control.
(00:00:34)
Sort of boyish more than macho.
(00:00:41)
More kind of a helpless but endearing anger.
(00:00:50)
Helpless but endearing anger.
(00:00:52)
That would be… It’s an anger that interests you?
(00:01:00)
Yeah, frustration. You know, somebody like that — like the Martin Donovan character in Trust — being someone who seems to have more heart and more intelligence than the community he lives in.
(00:01:20)
And so there’s a pressure.
(00:01:23)
And I think it’s quite funny, actually, when people like that explode just for a little bit and then they get back in line.
(00:01:33)
Wow.
(00:01:37)
Those movies are highly social — about the social environment that suppresses the main hero of the movie. Why was this theme so important to you? Did you yourself live in such a closed society?
(00:01:58)
Are we talking about Trust?
(00:02:01)
We’re talking about Trust, The Unbelievable Truth, and I think Simple Men too.
(00:02:21)
Yeah. I grew up in a suburb outside New York City. I don’t think I was ever as frustrated as these characters, but I recognize their frustration.
(00:02:34)
When I tell a story, I sort of start with something personal that I feel. It’s close. But then I lift it, make it bigger.
(00:02:47)
Well, back then… I think it’s the same as now. I have lots of questions about the society that I live in. I’m not a revolutionary, but I just feel I can’t help it. I have to ask questions about what is the right and the wrong thing to do. And most of these characters tend to ask those questions.
(00:03:16)
In Simple Men it’s a little different, because one of them is sort of the problem. The older brother — he’s the problem with the society, really. The younger one — but he’s not really. He’s only that because he’s weak in a different way and he doesn’t understand that he’s weak. And once he recognizes that, he gets strong and kind of changes.
(00:03:37)
All of these things, I think, are really quite traditional in a sense, particularly in American storytelling — in novels, in movies, classic American movies.
(00:03:49)
This pressure, this dynamic between the individual and society. I’ve always felt very much in line with an American tradition that way.
(00:04:05)
And…
(00:04:07)
What names can you name in these American traditions that you’re in line with?
(00:04:15)
Well, in the movies I would think Howard Hawks, some of John Ford — yeah, particularly westerns both with Hawks and Ford — because that’s our real invention, that’s our real mythology, for good or for bad.
(00:04:33)
In novels and writing, I think it would be like John Steinbeck and John Gardner.
(00:04:53)
Yeah, I mean, I think those are probably the most obvious.
(00:04:58)
In Simple Men, I had kind of impressions that there you start maybe even mocking this dangerous man of the early films.
(00:05:12)
Like mocking?
(00:05:15)
Because especially this moment when he says, “I will be dangerous, I will be sincere, I will be mysterious,” and then when she repeats to him, almost verbatim — was it really that? Was it like some reflection on the early concept of yours?
(00:05:39)
No, it certainly wasn’t self-reflexive, I think is the English word you’re thinking of — you know, commenting on it earlier. It was just…
(00:05:40)
It was just something I’ve seen in life. How I constructed it had to do with my love of building language traps, you know, like a little puzzle.
(00:06:06)
And what intrigued me about that character was that he’s actually quite a good person, but he does not know that. And it’s how he’s going to find out that he’s a good person.
(00:06:18)
Yeah.
(00:06:22)
Very few really bad persons in your movies. Almost all of the heroes are good persons.
(00:06:29)
Yeah.
(00:06:30)
Yeah, I think I have a hard time imagining a truly bad person. In fact, I mean, I think I can certainly imagine — you could look at a newspaper and see examples of terrible people all over. And that’s a fact of life.
(00:06:45)
But I think in making characters, what interests me, what excites me, is to dig inside and find out why they are the way they are. And if the bad person has certain good aspects to them, I think they’re more interesting. There are more possibilities.
(00:07:05)
So that’s probably a result of that.
(00:07:11)
Henry Fool — he’s a bad person, a good person. This is probably the biggest example of this.
(00:07:19)
With Henry, I wanted to… I’m going to get a lot of crunching on your tape.
(00:07:25)
With Henry, it was simple. I thought, what would it be like if the most honest person in town were the most unreliable person?
(00:07:38)
In certain ways, he’s very weak — like he’s not in control of himself, he can’t control his desires, and is unbelievably egotistical. You know, this kind of difference.
(00:07:56)
Yeah.
(00:07:58)
And that grew a little bit out of having many people ask me, in a situation like this, “Who are your influences?”
(00:08:08)
And it made me think it’s possible that the person who influences you the most is very different from you.
(00:08:20)
When you choose between Martin Donovan and Robert Burke, what cases do you choose Donovan and Burke? They are never in the same film as the main characters.
(00:08:36)
Well, back then I think all three of us — our careers were just starting, and we made a lot of films very quickly. There was definitely a particular type of leading man that Martin would play better.
(00:08:54)
Burke is macho. He is that kind of guy. He plays soldiers and stuff like that in movies all the time. He’s got a black belt in karate. And sometimes that’s right.
(00:09:09)
But, for instance, in Trust, he would not have been appropriate.
(00:09:14)
Actually, Bill Sage, who plays the younger brother in Simple Men, was almost going to play Matthew in Trust.
(00:09:24)
But I just felt he was too young at the time — he was only 19 or 20. And then Martin was ten years older than what I had written. But he was just so much more complicated by being a bit older.
(00:09:43)
Are you friends in real life? I mean, close friends? Do you communicate often? Do you go for a beer or something?
(00:09:53)
Less now because we get older and have families and move around and stuff. But back then, yeah, we all hung out together a lot.
(00:09:59)
How do you find and choose your actors? What is the process?
(00:10:00)
It’s casting. I put ads in the appropriate newspapers, and then we just start meeting people.
(00:10:20)
I put them on videotape.
(00:10:22)
So when the first actors, like, say, Martin and Robert — you found them…?
(00:10:28)
I think Robert is who, not Ray.
(00:10:30)
Burke is Robert.
(00:10:34)
Martin and Robert — you found them, like, on some audition, or you knew them before?
(00:10:41)
That was different. I had gone to college with Robert. He was in the acting program at the college; I was in film. I knew him. We had worked together at college.
(00:10:52)
Martin I saw in a play. He was associated with a theater group called the Cucaracha Theater in Lower Manhattan.
(00:11:02)
And after the first film, The Unbelievable Truth, we knew we would be making Trust. And I knew I’d be making it with Adrienne Shelley, who’s the lead in both of those.
(00:11:13)
She and I had seen Martin in the same play, and when I suggested perhaps Matthew should be older, she had the same feeling. She said, “Yeah, that’d be great.”
(00:11:27)
Yeah.
(00:11:32)
Your team — what they usually call the “Hartley team” — all these actors, they are great actors, they play absolutely great in your movies. But it looks like their careers didn’t work — they didn’t become big names outside of your movies. And they are wonderful actors. Why do you think it didn’t happen?
(00:11:59)
I think it has to do with the fact that my films are very marginal — they’re not very popular films in America or anywhere else. And so the people who cast the very big films don’t look at those films.
(00:12:19)
They might hear about them. For instance, Robert and Martin have gone on to have very good careers as supporting actors, mostly in television. But they make a lot of money, and they do very well.
(00:12:34)
But it’s true, yeah — they did not get the big spotlight.
(00:12:40)
I think in Martin’s case, his interest in acting was difficult. It wasn’t towards the mainstream. He was always looking for… I mean, the kind of theater he was involved in makes my movies look like mainstream movies.
(00:13:02)
It was only later, when he got into his mid-thirties and had children, that he said, “I’m going to go for the big money.”
(00:13:15)
In the early ’90s, when those films were made — the late ’80s, early ’90s — in America there really was an alternative cinema. And you could make a whole career out of it, at least for almost ten years.
(00:13:30)
There were many filmmakers and actors making movies, and they had no inclination, no desire to go toward Hollywood or to get into television. It was a very exciting and fruitful mix going on.
(00:13:47)
It all ended, you know, ’96, ’97.
(00:13:49)
Why did it end?
(00:13:52)
Why did it end?
(00:13:56)
I think the larger companies saw that there was something interesting happening, and they bought these companies and then instituted their same old mainstream rules.
(00:14:10)
So basically everything became more homogenized again.
(00:14:15)
Do you think that American independent cinema is dying, or it’s just a temporary lapse in it?
(00:14:24)
I think that what it was back then is over. And I think something else is probably coming to life. And, you know, it’s definitely going to have to do with younger people for the most part — younger people discovering older people, older people discovering them — and new technologies.
(00:14:44)
Yeah, I feel it’s really different. Even for myself, I feel a new wave of films — in my own that I’m making and that I’m producing, and that my friends are making. There seems to be the opportunity for a whole new wave of alternative — I prefer the word alternative because it’s very specific — it’s alternative to the mainstream, heavily publicized, heavily marketed entertainment.
(00:15:09)
What we used to call “art films,” but you’re not allowed to say that now.
(00:15:18)
The movie No Such Thing — was it a big-budget movie for you?
(00:15:30)
No, not really. Maybe a million dollars more. It was about the same size as Amateur, which we made in 1993.
(00:15:43)
And all of that money went to lawyers and stuff too, because I made that for a studio. You know, they gave us the money, and we made it the way I always make films. But, you know, there are a lot more lawyers involved when you work with a big corporation.
(00:15:58)
So we got a million dollars extra, but we spent a million dollars on legal fees.
(00:16:03)
And this big corporation, this studio — did it give you full creative control, or did they try to get involved in the process?
(00:16:12)
They gave me full creative control, although at the end, when they were marketing the film, they did a lot of testing, which took a long, long time.
(00:16:28)
I think they wanted the film to be something it’s not. They didn’t know how to think about a film that’s an alternative art film. So it took a long time; it just sat around. But they did not interfere with my filmmaking.
(00:16:42)
They read the script, and Francis Coppola was the middle person. And he convinced me. He said, “If you do this for them, I’m in the middle.”
(00:16:56)
Did you like this experience? Did you like to work for a studio? Are you going to continue to do these things?
(00:17:13)
No. I think it’s very wasteful and slow. I don’t like working that slow, either in pre-production or in post-production.
(00:17:23)
And the important thing is getting the film out to the people who will like it. The studios are big corporations — like these big buildings — no one is personally responsible for their actions. So you can’t just get somebody and say, “Listen, you shouldn’t wait so long. You should open it.”
(00:17:44)
We don’t need a hundred prints of this movie across America in one weekend. We need two prints — one in Los Angeles, one in New York. After three weeks, get a new one; we put it in Chicago.
(00:17:58)
Which is how independent distribution used to be. It’s hard, it’s more work, but it doesn’t cost as much money.
(00:18:08)
I make a living being an independent producer. It’s not like you have to be poor. So I don’t like that. I just think it’s wasteful.
(00:18:23)
How do you find money for your movies?
(00:18:28)
Well, these days it’s different. Back then, in the ’90s, there was something that you might have — you know, it was how everybody did it — it was through pre-sales.
(00:18:36)
I’d go to a German distributor, a French distributor, an English distributor, show them the script, and then they would give me a piece of the money that they would eventually spend for the film.
(00:18:49)
Then I would go to a bank, get all the money, make the film, and whatever. That doesn’t happen anymore because there aren’t really any more… there are no longer independent distribution companies. They’re all corporations.
(00:19:11)
How do they do it now?
(00:19:15)
Basically, now they would want to give you all the money, and they want all the rights for the entire world forever — which means you’ll never make any money.
(00:19:32)
So you have to make the film large enough in terms of money so that you can pay yourself and your people. And once it gets that large, it’s sort of not possible to make a real art film because you’re spending so much money.
(00:19:48)
In order to make that money back, you have to make a film that’s going to be popular with everybody. And that’s pretty much how independent cinema dies.
(00:20:02)
We need smaller films, smaller producers, smaller sales agents, smaller distributors. Corporatism is what’s killing it.
(00:20:06)
Will we get them — the smaller producers?
(00:20:18)
Yeah, we definitely will. And it has a lot to do with the new technologies — computer and video technologies.
(00:20:24)
My company itself, Possible Films, has become a distributor. I distribute my own films now. I sell my own films and I distribute them, because that’s the only way that an art filmmaker can actually make money now.
(00:20:36)
There’s no other way to do it. The distributors have big offices and nice cars. The filmmakers usually don’t.
(00:20:45)
So, you know, you finance your movies yourself?
(00:20:53)
Well, I coordinate. I don’t spend my own money, but I coordinate financing.
(00:20:58)
And where nowadays do you get money?
(00:21:03)
Private sources.
(00:21:04)
Sponsors?
(00:21:07)
Well, not sponsors — investors.
(00:21:08)
Yeah, investors. Private people with enough money to invest in a project. And if I can convince them how we can make money, then they give me some money.
(00:21:20)
Are there some foundations, some sponsors that just give money for art cinema without hoping their investments will be returned?
(00:21:34)
No. In America, no.
(00:21:37)
I mean, there are things like the Guggenheim Grant. I know there are some government organizations in Canada.
(00:21:45)
Yeah, Canada is a different thing, yeah.
(00:21:48)
Yeah, Canada and most of the countries of Europe — they support the arts. That doesn’t happen in the United States.
(00:21:59)
Are you going to make some movie in Europe?
(00:22:03)
Probably. I’ve made some here in Europe — Flirt.
(00:22:08)
Yeah, that’s right.
(00:22:11)
That was Asia as well.
(00:22:12)
That was a long time ago.
(00:22:15)
Yeah, I think I may be making a movie here next year, in various parts of Europe.
(00:22:22)
And if it’s not a secret, what will the movie be about?
(00:22:27)
It’s essentially Henry Fool Part 2. It’s called Fay Grim. It’s about the wife, Fay. And it’s a movie about a well-intentioned but naïve American who learns about the world.
(00:22:46)
About Flirt — was this concept of three short movies with basically the same script, different movies, originally the concept? Did you first make the New York part and then decide to make the same for Berlin and Tokyo?
(00:23:05)
Well, when we made the New York part, it was just a short film. But while I was making the film, I suggested to my cameraman, Mike Spiller, and Ted Hope, the producer, that it would be interesting to take the same story and do it in different ways.
(00:23:23)
We all liked that idea.
(00:23:24)
And as time went on — later that year, we went on to make Amateur in New York as well — so it had to be a while. But then Ted kept bringing the idea up, saying, “Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe we can go around the world too.”
(00:23:40)
I said, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” We could not only make different characters, but put it in a different milieu, of different cultures.
(00:23:50)
And that’s really how it came about. I mean, you see, that was something that could really happen in the mid-1990s. You could make a feature film gradually, little by little.
(00:24:00)
And that was a tiny little film — less than a million dollars.
(00:24:07)
What did happen, do you think, at the end of the ’90s that everything became so commercial?
(00:24:15)
Well, all the smaller companies were bought by the large conglomerates.
(00:24:19)
Yeah, I understand that. I mean, was it like a culmination of some natural process, or was it some jump, some…
(00:24:30)
It always happens. I think it happened in the ’70s too. There was a lot of independent filmmaking happening — the Cassavetes and the early Scorsese films and things like that. It got the studios kind of excited, and then they sort of co-opted these people.
(00:24:55)
So it’s just a cyclical process, and we don’t have to be so alarmed about it?
(00:24:58)
Yeah, I wouldn’t be alarmed about it. I would just keep making films and keep trying to discover new ways of making films — and more importantly, new ways of getting films seen, how to get them to the people who want to see them.
(00:25:00)
Distrust advertising is a regular practice, you know, that helps a lot. What are the new ways of distributing films?
(00:25:29)
Well, DVD, I think, is going to be a big way. And video projection — that’s what my company is highlighting.
(00:25:41)
We’re creating a network of theaters around North America that project digital. And since so many films now are made digital, we can keep costs down by not having to make prints.
(00:25:55)
And then, you know, we do a limited distribution in these theaters across the country. And then we follow it up very quickly with the DVD sales directly from my website and with affiliated stores around North America.
(00:26:15)
About Amateur — did you just want to make an action movie, or was there some other idea behind it?
(00:26:26)
Yeah, because it looked very different from your previous movies.
(00:26:32)
It certainly looked like a Hal Hartley movie, absolutely, but it was like a step in some other direction.
(00:26:40)
Certainly it felt that way at the time. One, it was my first film in New York City — in the city where I actually lived. It was not in a suburb, so that was big.
(00:26:54)
Yeah, and the embracing of a genre was something different. I mean, I felt that the subject matter was pretty much the same — the kinds of people who were in it, the kinds of characters — but it was… I was interested in playing around with a genre.
(00:27:13)
What would the kinds of characters who exist in my fiction be like if they were in a detective movie or a cop show or something? That’s pretty much how I started.
(00:27:27)
I had notes about the story, and then I just started watching some television cop shows and looking at action movies — mostly detective movies. And, you know, it’s fun.
(00:27:44)
When you’re a storyteller, you have ambitions to tell all sorts of different kinds of stories. And if the opportunity comes up, you’d be surprised how much easier it is to raise money for a movie if you tell people it’s an action thriller. Suddenly, they’re like, “Oh, good.”
(00:28:04)
Isabelle Huppert — was it your idea to make a movie with her, or did you just think that she fit this movie?
(00:28:18)
Well, that was kind of a coincidence. She got in touch with me around that time, and we met in Paris a couple of times and discussed working together.
(00:28:27)
I think I had originally written that character as not — you know, she wasn’t French; she was an American; she was a nun. But I thought, well, that doesn’t matter.
(00:28:41)
And she was anxious to do something funnier. She felt at the time that it was difficult for her in France to have funny roles, and she felt like maybe leaving France for a little while would do that.
(00:28:55)
Also, you know, she always takes opportunities to act in English — that’s very important to her.
(00:29:05)
And in Amateur, in your early movies, there are many talks about violence — I mean, armed violence, about guns, about this hand grenade in Trust, about some people who kill somebody — and in Amateur it really happens for the first time.
(00:29:31)
That the people are really killing each other and…
(00:29:39)
Yeah.
(00:29:42)
This probably grows from curiosity. It was a long time ago — I’m trying to think my way back.
(00:29:48)
Yeah, you know, the first couple of films I felt — this is a little technical, it’s not so much about the ideas — but filmmaking is a technical thing.
(00:30:03)
I had great joy at the beginning of my career in making shots of people this big — you know — and details.
(00:30:08)
And I think by the time I made Simple Men, I was really feeling I was gaining confidence and achieving a kind of grace in execution that was very exciting.
(00:30:22)
I discovered certain things in Simple Men — I don’t know when you last saw the film or how well you remember it — but I haven’t seen it in many years. I remember there’s a scene upstairs in the house in the country where the younger son is looking for the girl, the Romanian girl.
(00:30:45)
And, you know, they’re hiding, and it’s all this camera movement. And I loved that.
(00:30:55)
I remember staying up late the night before and walking around that space and figuring it out. And in its tiny little way, it’s action.
(00:31:09)
And I think by then I was saying, “The next movie, I have to find more opportunities for this. I want to do this more.” And that probably led to more — it’s not graphic — but actual shooting with people.
(00:31:25)
She’ll learn about that.
(00:31:31)
Well, now I will start flattering you, because it looks to me that your movies are perfect in some sense — because every movement, every word, it’s absolutely in place. You cannot stick a knife, as they say, between any part of it.
(00:31:49)
Well, maybe. I don’t know. But films are illusions, actually. So if this illusion works in a film, it’s real.
(00:31:57)
It’s true, because when I am making the movies, I’m seeing all these things that I could have done better. Even when I look at them years later, I’m like, “That — right here — this is perfect, this is good; right here — this is adequate; it’s a fix.”
(00:32:17)
But at the same time, I would never be able to finish a movie if I didn’t have the confidence — just the knowledge — that once you put something together in some way, if it was a good idea to start with, it will work, even if it’s not perfect.
(00:32:37)
I’m a perfectionist — back and forth.
(00:32:46)
I’ve learned that if you have an idea before you make the thing, before you make the picture, you strive and strive and strive to make it exactly what you want.
(00:33:01)
But you have to remember that the process of making the picture will introduce to you other things, and that it will change and shift. So I’m not a perfectionist in the sense of being stubborn.
(00:33:17)
But do you imagine every move, every…
(00:33:22)
Do you imagine every move, every — the way…
(00:33:30)
Fuck. That’s most unwelcome.
(00:33:33)
Okay.
(00:33:35)
Okay.
(00:33:37)
Every move, every trace of every… Are you using this for the radio?
(00:33:47)
Yeah, that’s why.
(00:33:52)
No, no, I’m going to broadcast it. So — every track, every move that an actor makes — do you make a choreography of your movies?
(00:34:02)
Yes, I do. You know, I draw it out, much like on this — if I know the space, I’ll be extremely specific.
(00:34:21)
And then when we get there with the actors, we try some things. We try out the choreography I had planned, but we often discover better things.
(00:34:32)
Do you let your actors improvise, or is all they do written down before?
(00:34:42)
Yeah, I mean, we perform what I wrote. But improvising is not a bad idea in the rehearsal process, because sometimes they just need to be messy and try out many things in order to understand what it was that was written.
(00:34:58)
But when you’re shooting, it’s all settled down.
(00:35:04)
About Henry Fool — why is this name?
(00:35:09)
Why is his name Henry Fool? ‘With a noble ‘e’ dropped out”?
(00:35:14)
Well, obviously I wanted him to be something of a clown. You know how in the old European sense the king had a fool — there’s a tradition of that type of character.
(00:35:29)
Also, in English, it just sounds like a novel. It sounds like some big, fat novel. It had been with me for a long time.
(00:35:42)
I originally thought up the name when I was a freshman at college. I wrote it down. I said, “I like that.” I’d make up names for characters — I didn’t even have stories to put them in.
(00:35:57)
Why did you change at least all the male cast in this film? I think none of the actors that played major parts in your previous movies play there.
(00:36:13)
Well, two things. First of all, I thought that the two men needed to be new. Henry certainly needed to be someone that nobody knew — literally. So that was it for him. I wouldn’t have even considered one of my other actors.
(00:36:39)
Now, with Simon, it was different. I had been watching James Urbaniak for a couple of years, watching him doing theater. I used him in two short films. I was very interested to learn how to utilize his skills.
(00:36:58)
He just seemed perfect for this. And he looked like Beckett.
(00:37:05)
Why was the movie sponsored by Budweiser?
(00:37:12)
No, but that’s common. Maybe it’s here too, but it’s common in the United States to get product placement because you have to take care of your crew.
(00:37:24)
But it’s funny — Budweiser is this… Sorry. Maybe we should move inside.
(00:37:30)
Okay.
(00:37:37)
Just with some cinéma vérité kind of sound?
(00:37:44)
Well, normal sounds, yes — but it’s safe as this, I think. You cannot broadcast this scenario.
(00:37:51)
Let’s go inside.
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Okay.
(00:38:06)
You were talking about Henry Fool.
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Yeah, and about the Budweiser in the first place.
(00:38:11)
Oh, that is funny. I mean, that’s just a — that’s really a representative middle-class, lower-middle-class beer, which I had always been trying to get in my movies since the beginning, and they would never agree.
(00:38:27)
They’d read my scripts or something and say, “No, no, whatever.” But in this one they said yes. I couldn’t figure it out.
(00:38:36)
This one is probably because they often think about what it’s associated with. Like, for instance, in Trust, we wanted to get Budweiser for the girl to get drunk on — you know, when she meets Matthew — and they said, “No, this is no good because this is bad. She’s underage, and we don’t want to be associated with underage drinking.”
(00:38:57)
But in Henry Fool they agreed — for, like, an ex-con pederast, you know, to be drinking their beer all the time.
(00:39:07)
Yeah, I think it’s okay because he’s like a macho-macho guy.
(00:39:10)
Well, not exactly macho, but like a real guy who drinks real beer. Maybe that was the concept.
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I think of Henry as being sort of polymorphously perverse, you know.
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Dangerous type.
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It’s always attractive for beer drinkers, maybe.
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I don’t know. Maybe that was what they were thinking.
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And so, to put your product into a movie, you have to get an agreement from the company?
(00:39:42)
Yes.
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If you just shoot some beer, I don’t know, some car — they can sue you for it?
(00:39:53)
Yes. They can prevent your film from being distributed.
(00:39:59)
In Flirt…
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I was editing some online...
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It’s like a personal question.
(00:40:11):
I was editing some online movie magazine, and we had a big argument with one of my authors.
(00:40:18):
If The Flirt was about that—all the stories are basically the same—or it was about the stories, the same stories are actually very different.
(00:40:31):
So what is it really about?
(00:40:34):
I think it is. I think they are different.
(00:40:37):I mean, I think that what interested us was that the same words could take on new meanings if you put them in a different milieu.
(00:40:50):
Also, we didn’t want to be too strict with ourselves.
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The initial idea was to say, let’s make three little movies from the same idea itself but let ourselves be affected by the culture that we were in.
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By the time we got to Japan, the whole idea of a gun—a handgun—that just doesn’t happen in Japan.
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I mean, there are no guns, you know.
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So it had to be really big, whereas in New York, somebody with a gun—it’s not the end of the world.
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Yeah.
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You met your wife when shooting The Flirt?
(00:41:32):
Yes.
(00:41:33):
She first was your actress and then your wife?
(00:41:37):
Well, we met before we made the film, maybe about half a year, nine months before we made the film.
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We met in Tokyo and began discussing the possibility of working together in this film.
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The ending of the Japanese part of the movie—does it have some connection to your own life?
(00:42:09):
No. I mean, the idea of me being put in it came about from the sequence in Berlin when the three construction workers start to discuss whether the project was even going to work.
(00:42:26):
Because that was real. And I started to make the…
(00:42:29):
When I was here in Berlin, in the months before making the film, I was doing the adaptation—the strict adaptation from the New York version into a German milieu, a German gay milieu.
(00:42:44):
At a certain point, when the three men in the bathroom in New York were to give their advice to Dwight, it just occurred to me that this has stopped.
(00:42:57):
It’s not going anywhere. It’s not becoming something new.
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So obviously the chorus has to, because they function as a chorus in their old Greek idea. They have to talk about something new. They have to give them different advice, but is that breaking the rules of the game too much?
(00:43:20):
I didn’t know.
(00:43:21):
So basically what the three construction workers in Berlin say to Dwight comes directly from my notebook.
(00:43:28):
I was writing to myself, sort of terrified, saying, I think this whole idea is bad. I don’t think it’s going to work.
(00:43:38):
And of course now we’ve got money from these people, and we’re paying people and stuff.
(00:43:44):
Then once I made that little switch and put that in the mouths of the construction workers, the making of the film became part of the fun of watching the movie.
(00:43:57):
I said, well, if I do that once, now I just can’t stop here. The next version has to go a little bit further.
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You know, if the way I said it at the time is like in Berlin, the screen gets slit.
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And in Japan, the maker has to come through.
(00:44:15): In Berlin, the filmmaker is recognized as part of the thing you’re watching. Now it’s going to come through.
(00:44:27):
But I… I had to be talked into it.
(00:44:33):
My first idea was I was going to call Martin Donovan and tell him to go to Tokyo, where he would play the filmmaker.
(00:44:41):
Then Ted Hope said, no, he should play you.
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Then Mike Spiller said, no, Hal should play Hal.
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And it was true. It was a great idea, and it took me a little while to agree to it.
(00:44:57):But apart from that, it wasn’t personal.
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Who did the choreography of this Butoh?
(00:45:07):
You or some Japanese guy?
(00:45:19):
It was… Miho used to be one of the principal dancers for Kazuo Ono, who’s one of the originators of Butoh dancing in the ’50s and ’60s.
(00:45:31):
His son Yoshito is also a choreographer, and the men who are dancing with Miho are members of his company.
(00:45:39):
So Yoshito choreographed this, and then we adjusted it for my choreography of the camera.
(00:45:47):
But Yoshito Ono is the choreographer.
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In Simple Men and Surviving Desire, your character started to dance.
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Why did you start it? Why did you put it in your films, and why didn’t you continue this?
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I think it was just enthusiasm.
(00:46:12):
It’s fun to make pictures of people moving and dancing.
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There are ideas in the story that push it along.
(00:46:22):
I thought in Surviving Desire, which was the first time we did it, it would be fun to represent in a formal manner his excitement about the girl having kissed him.
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That was all. I just wanted to do something really different.
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And so we had a lot of fun with that.
(00:46:43):
Later that year, we did Simple Men. I mean, we made Surviving Desire and Simple Men within two or three months of each other.
(00:46:53):
In Simple Men, it was different. Story-wise, it had to do with the fact that we needed a way to convey the passage of time.
(00:47:02):
It’s been very quiet in this country house for, in the movie, I think like half an hour, 40 minutes.
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Then we needed a quick, abbreviated way to say many things have happened; now they’re very relaxed.
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And so we did that.
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Why haven’t I done it since? I don’t know. I think I just discovered other things I was interested in.
(00:47:28):
Sometimes the most mundane, normal scenes are just as choreographed. They’re just not big.
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Did you ever have plans to make a musical?
(00:47:45):
Yeah, I play around with it every now and again.
(00:47:48):
I once asked the band They Might Be Giants if they would like to collaborate on a musical, but they didn’t get it.
(00:47:56):
This was many years ago, and when I saw Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge, that’s exactly what I was thinking about—this type of playfulness with songs and all.
(00:48:11):
But that was it. Maybe dance films—if we are talking about Baz Luhrmann—maybe something like Strictly Ballroom.
(00:48:23):
That didn’t interest me so much, but I mean, Moulin Rouge, I think, was tremendous. Very ambitious and excellently achieved. And a very simple idea.
(00:48:41):
Kimono, why did you decide to make a silent movie without words?
(00:48:47):
Well, ever since the beginning of my career, I’ve wanted to use fewer words.
(00:48:51):
It’s funny, but that’s what most people associate with my movies: dialogue.
(00:48:59):
Yeah, and it comes kind of easily to me.
(00:49:05):
But there are many other things about filmmaking I like.
(00:49:09):
So with the shorter films I make, if you were able to see all of them together, I think you would see that pretty consistently.
(00:49:17):
I sort of take the opportunity to do different things that I don’t do in my feature films.
(00:49:22):
And one of them is dialogue—trying not to use dialogue.
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The other thing was very practical.
(00:49:31):
There was so little money from the German television show that there was absolutely no way we could have a full crew and make a 35mm film of the quality that I demand.
(00:49:46):
So I just told them right away, I said, I’ll do something with no sound, and we’ll build the sound later, which is cheap these days with computer editing.
(00:55:03):
And then in most of your later movies, there are no happy endings. I never think of it as a happy or sad ending. I think of it as true or false.
(00:55:18):
You know, like there’s… Can a happy ending be true?
(00:55:24):
Yeah. I think in The Unbelievable Truth, perhaps that’s a happy ending: the boy and the girl get together, but they’re still nervous. They look up, they’re listening for bombs or whatever.
(00:55:38):
Because too many movies that I’ve seen all my life kind of force the happy ending. People in more complex situations are more multifarious and multifaceted. There can be happiness, and there can still be nervousness.
(00:55:55):
A lot of my movies end with, to use a musical analogy, suspension. They go up, and just when you’re expecting the foot to come down and conclusion, it doesn’t.
(00:56:09):
It ends. Henry Fool is a perfect example of that, but so is The Unbelievable Truth.
(00:56:16):
Right. You’ll have to see the next one. But they all sort of end that way, too.
(00:56:22):
Maybe The Flirt has a very small conclusion, but we don’t know. I’m still asleep. We don’t know what’s going to happen.
(00:56:30):
Well, The Flirt, in a way, we kind of know because of your marriage.
(00:56:35):
Yes.
(00:56:39):
Those bombs and The Unbelievable Truth… were you at some time afraid of the bombs, or were people around afraid, or was it just a metaphor for your unsettledness?
(00:56:52):
No. I mean, that was 1988. I was… you know… I grew up, born in 1959, and you just grow up with this constant thing. Also, I learned about the world very quickly.
(00:57:18):
And I think it’s not uncommon for young people to learn a lot very quickly, and it turns—they kind of get suffocated—it turns into despair.
(00:57:30):
A little bit like that girl in the movie: she needs to learn a little bit of balance. She’s kind of reactionary. She understands that, wow, we could kill each other so easily, with all these politicians around the world who might do this first.
(00:57:51):
She needs to fall in love and actually relax a little, and then not throw her concerns out the window.
(00:58:01):
You have to learn how to live to survive doubt. You have to be able to have doubt, but you have to be able to not let it kill you.
(00:58:14):
Censure is dangerous. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, sincere people can be dangerous.
(00:58:45):
For society or for the… I think you could definitely take it in terms of the personal and the societal. Balance is important.
(00:58:59):
Sometimes I think what the joke is there, the irony in that dialogue is suggesting that perhaps we think sincerity is… we think about it too simply.
(00:59:16):
I mean, Stalin was sincere, right? George Bush is sincere.
(00:59:22):
I’m not quite sure about Stalin.
(00:59:25):
Right, but we don’t know. But you can certainly imagine.
(00:59:27):
I mean, I know perfectly sincere people in America who think George W. Bush is a good person with the interests of humanity in his heart.
(00:59:39):
These people are sincere, and they’re going to vote for him. But you can be sincerely stupid, you can be sincerely doubtful.
(00:59:51):
I’m a skeptic by nature, in the old Greek way of being a skeptic: to always keep an open mind, to search for balance, and not to be reactionary, basically.
(01:00:08):
What are your favorite modern directors?
(01:00:15):
Um, yeah, it’ll take me a minute to… What have I been looking at?
(01:00:22):
Uh… I’ve been liking the work that Lars von Trier is doing.
(01:00:30):
Yeah.
(01:00:33):
Of course, the things that really shaped me 20 years ago were Godard and [Rainer] Werner Fassbinder.
(01:00:41):
I don’t know, it’s a hard question. There’s so many films. I like a lot of films.
(01:00:50):
Why are you now in Berlin, there’s a retrospective of your movies?
(01:00:55):
Why am I here in Berlin?
(01:00:57):
I have been awarded a fellowship with the American Academy in Berlin, which is a cultural embassy of the United States to Berlin.
(01:01:04):
They award these fellowships for three months’ time to various disciplines.
(01:01:13):
The 11 fellows who are here this year are a scientist, a poet, two art historians, archaeologists, and me.
(01:01:27):
And it gives us the opportunity to research and do something. I have a lot of writing I wanted to accomplish.
(01:01:35):
And then also to make ourselves available for things like this: any sort of cultural exchange, some contact between people…
(01:01:48):
Particularly in Berlin, generally in Europe, between the US and…
(01:01:55):
Do you make some music besides the music for your films?
(01:02:01):
Not usually. The past couple of years I’ve made some music for other people’s films and for other people’s performances.
(01:02:09):
Right now I’m collaborating with the choreographer David Newman in New York, who is doing a big piece in the spring, and I’m making the music for that.
