While I can't say I enjoyed every second of it, Film 2, the way-out-of-depth film course I took in my sophomore year of college, wound up being an incredibly important experience. First it taught me that while occasionally grueling it isn't that hard to make movies so long as you delegate appropriately (sometimes showing up is all people know how to do, and even then you're often on your own). Second it taught me that if you're gonna invest time and effort into something it's best to have control over everything so that way if it's a mess, it's a mess your way. I'd rather a monster I could be proud of then a fuck-up-by-committee. Film 2 and the experience of working on film with people who kinda-sorta didn't care led me to start making my documentary on Canadian Music, which led me to start Poorly Shot Interviews Over Coffee, so it's rather a neat wrap-around that I should wind up interviewing my Film 2 professor Rob Patton-Spruill poorly and over coffee.
His latest film Do It Again chronicles Boston Globe reporter Geoff Edgers in his quest to reunite The Kinks and is coincidentally the kind of film I pastiched in my final project for film 2, the little-seen mockumentary Forgotten Luminaries IV: Erasmus Jones, co-directed with Kyle McDonald. Spruill's previous work has tread the line between reality and fiction (in a kind of neo-realistic sense; he calls it "Truthy" a la Stephen Colbert), so this kind of narrative documentary makes a lot of sense. Tonally it's a long way from his other films, but it does make a kind of sense. When I asked him to do an interview before his film premiered at the Boston Independent Film Festival, he agreed and went so far as to bring writer/producer/star Edgers along for the trip. I guess it pays to keep in touch. Rob and I don't agree on much as film goes (he likes spectacle, I like art films) but Emerson College does tend to bring together strange elements and people. Do It Again might not make it to your town, in all probability if Rob keeps making the films he wants to the way he wants to none of his films may end up in your town and whatever else is true of him, I respect the christ out of his devotion to film and that he has never not done things his way. In ten years I'd like to say maybe we have that in common but I won't know until I get there and have half his output under my belt. But that's a long way off....
I'm standing at the counter of the Clear Conscious Cafe waiting on two lattes, one with low-fat milk, the other with soymilk. I chatted genially with the two hip kids behind the counter and occasionally looked back to my chair where David Gedge sat. David Gedge of the Wedding Present. David Gedge was waiting on me. He'd been making music as the vocalist and rhythm guitar player of The Wedding Present four years before I was born. Four months after me their second studio album, Bizarro, was released. That's why the Wedding Present were here, to play all of Bizarro for a crowd of Boston's hippest. Hours later, looking out on the crowd I'd pick out such Cambridge personalities as Ned Hinkle, creative director of the Brattle Theatre, and that guy with the beard who works at Planet Records. Two days later one of the baristas at Espresso Royale would tell me how bummed he was he'd missed the show. For the thirty minutes that Gedge and I chatted and for the hour I stood behind the velvet rope, dancing spasmodically while the band played their best songs, I was the envy of all the world. This won't happen again. I make sure to enjoy every second of it.
Gedge makes for an ideal interview. He's just as anxious to talk film as I am and we lose track of time chatting about the oscars vs. the BAFTAs, running films by each other to see if we'd seen them (I missed Marie Antoinette, he Hunger), our mutual love of British Sea Power and especially their last record Man of Aran. I don't always feel like I'm my age. My favorite records were recorded mostly before my birth and I'm practically a custodian at area art houses, I'm there so often. I bore everyone in earshot with this film or that band and I'm never satisfied unless I'm finding some obscure 70s film and then ripping its soundtrack. Gedge's hunger was no less grand but he enjoys a distance from film that I don't that ensures he goes into everything new, no prejudice. I envy him that. I also envy his creative genius and drive. He's made nearly a dozen proper albums in TWP and his side project with Steve Albini, Cinerama, inspired by film scores. Gedge has routinely sacrificed commercial success for artistic integrity and for that he has a life pass. If he'd released the same album over and over again he'd still be worthy of respect, but he's never stopped evolving which makes him a rare bird indeed. Standing at the counter, I felt awed. Two days later at espresso royale in my Wedding Present shirt, I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. I get shit for being into music and film to the point of esotericism, but occasionally I get to meet people like David Gedge and it's all worth it.
I'd like to first say that Vimeo, Veoh and Youtube will not accept my film because the file size is too big, so while it is available on Veoh, I really despise the shape it's in.
In a way I'd almost like it if I could have a lot of time to pass between when I shoot something and when I deliver it to the public because I feel like time equals activity and thus a more interesting story to tell about how the film came to be. This time around mostly what kept me from editing this, my second documentary, my first film of any kind to be sorta, kinda feature length (70 minutes is nothing to sneeze at, I suppose. Of Time And The City is 65, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is 80, and my film is nowhere near as good as either. Staying Alive is 96, though, so I guess I could have shaped up a bit). Anyway, I still feel a swell of pride even knowing that my amateurish work is going to turn some people off. So, from the top then.
Lindsay Anderson, one of the greatest directors who ever lived and one of the most brilliant critical minds of his generation, summed up the waning appeal of Shakespeare perfectly in an unpublished article for a Russian film journal in 1959. In talking about Laurence Olivier's slavish Shakespeare adaptations, he said "Shakespeare has today become merely a respectable evasion of the present. His plays are performed without any feeling for their significance for today. Perhaps [audiences] could be helped...by presenting [the plays] in a different way, specially calculated for the present-day audience..." Though the disco era isn't exactly a going concern I can think of nothing that more perfectly encapsulates Anderson's wish than A.R.T.'s immersive Shakespearian studies and specifically The Donkey Show. There isn't a song played in the show's 60 minute running time written after 1981 but this is an era where barriers need to be torn down once and for all, where notions of sexuality need to have the doors blown off of them. The patrons of TheDonkey Show, gay and straight, have come because the difference between heterosexual and homosexual doesn't mean a thing. Many of my friends have shown me pictures of themselves in drag for the first time at college parties. I've always been a little bored by those novel displays of androgyny because I'd never needed that torn down. I've unselfconsciously worn women's clothing before and objectively see the appeal of women and men alike; it's hard not to when the fairies at the heart of the play dance around in their underwear for as long as they do. My film will hopefully be seen as a celebration of the human body as something to be celebrated, not hidden away, nor for that matter exploited, rated or chastised. The opening in this way is my dealing with the intimidation of letting go of the confines of hundreds of years of America's sexual identity. You have to ignore everything you've been told. With any luck people will see No Fourth Wall and realize that the notion of their being a huge difference between finding men attractive and women attractive is altogether counter-productive. People are wonderful and often they look great in their underwear.
But how did I get here? On the syllabus for Theatre Appreciation was the option to make a short film profiling a theatrical designer. The trade-off: you don't have to take the exam or the mid-term. I went looking for a subject that day. My first idea was to track down the geniuses responsible for Sleep No More, a non-traditional, immersive theatrical production run out of an old high school and sponsored by the American Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square. Well, that turned into a dead-end and every show until closing soon sold out. Panicking I looked at the A.R.T. website and remembered everything I'd heard about the other option listed, The Donkey Show.An underground sensation for the six years it ran in New York and the other cities it had hit since, the bright colours and costumes were too exciting to ignore; I was so there. Two weeks later I found myself walking to the Oberon, a chic cabaret space a few blocks away from Harvard Square known for its sexually charged content. So what is the Donkey Show? It's Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream performed in a way that you've never seen before, in fact it's all but unrecognizable. But you know what? I'm glad it's so different. Having seen the play in a few straight (and squirm-inducingly boring) contexts, I was happy to have the academia stripped away and see the subtext become text.
Allegra Libonati, the supervising director, was good enough to sit down and do an interview with me before the show began. She coaxed two of her star players into it as well and so for 15 minutes I did my best to get a few things straight before the night turned into glitter and a colour pallet that'd make the Wachowski Brothers jealous (any Speed Racer fans in the house? No? Moving on). One thing that was clear immediately and you can see it in her eyes, which is why I was so keen to get her in close-up, is just how much Allegra believes in the show. Having seen it, I understand why. It is genius in that it makes something everyone knows to the point of irrelevancy (namely disco but also the bard) and gives it new life in a way I would never have thought possible. In fact if you'd told me in January that the most fun I'd have this semester was going to be at a mostly-drag version of a Shakespeare play, I'd have laughed in your face. And yet I'm still laughing because there are some people who will never get to have the fun of those who've been to a Donkey Show, who are willing to submit entirely to it. Those people are going to live a long, long time and have much less fun than those of us willing to have their shirts pulled off by women wearing only boots, hot-pink underwear and butterfly shaped pasties. At the risk of sounding of self-assured, The Donkey Show is the kind of thing you need to be open to to know what living feels like. I can tell you that when the show began and I was in the thick of things I wanted nothing more than to put the camera down and just join in the fun. Anyone who's seen me dance can probably tell you that it's a good thing there was an exam on the line.
The film proper starts with the show itself. Following the two characters through the pre-show ritual of audience gauging was exhilarating because it was like filming a movie I hadn't rehearsed. The players already had their lines down, all I had to do was capture it all. Following Dr. Wheelgood, the Donkey Show's Puck surrogate, inside the Oberon I couldn't help feeling, even as I was filming it, a little like P.T. Anderson following Mark Wahlberg around Burt Reynolds' house. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm nowhere near any of that, but the feeling was there all the same. But something remarkable took place when the show started. That night I'd been trying to shake a cold, my head hurt, it was freezing and I was just generally in a bad state. Yet, when the show got started, when the action began and I started following it, all of that went away. My sinuses cleared for the duration of the evening, my body righted itself and let me make my movie; somehow filming cured me momentarily. Walking home, the frenzied shoot completed, and realizing that I'd gone two hours without coughing made me remember just how much I love doing this. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. I got a long way to go before Boogie Nights, but there's no way I'd be happy doing anything else...though I'm pretty sure P.T. Anderson used 35mm and not a handheld camcorder. And a more experienced or professional documentarian probably would have made arrangements to have the sound recorded from the PA so I could synch it later. I am neither professional nor particularly experienced, so the audio is what my little camera picked up. I followed the action the best I could feeling at times like a combat photographer, just trying to stay afloat and get everything in focus while the show exploded around me. The Oberon is almost a black box and the space was designed so that the players could make the most of every inch of the place. From the very start the players dance athletically on walls, chairs, tables, the bar, the stage, the balconies, the two movable blocks that were the play's only real set and with whomever was nearest. The four men who played the fairies were in perpetual motion the entire time and they do of these most weekends; I get tired just thinking about it. Even more impressive is that each character is...well, perhaps I'll let you just watch and figure that out for yourself. I was as floored as anyone when the bows came around and I found out who was who.
There was a lot I wanted to do. I wanted to do ten times as many shots of double exposures. I wanted to mess with the colour way more than I did. I wanted to edit the film into a ten minute seizure-causing cluster of images. The montage set to Cerrone's "Give Me Love" is the one bit where I let myself get carried away. There was a solid half hour of dancing before the play actually started so I let my baggage get the better of me and turned three minutes of dancing into me time before I let the play run the show. If I were to do more than I did it wouldn't have been fair to the subject. The Donkey Show was the reason I was there and so to make the film about anything else would have been disingenuous. So as the Cerrone song ends and the real audio comes in, I start to integrate the opening action inside the club and from there theDonkey Show is on and you, like I did in capturing it, simply have to stay afloat. Because really they did everything. I was simply an observer, more often than not lost in the Plato's retreat they'd concocted for anyone willing to spend an evening doing something slightly out of the ordinary. There were very few moments I had any control over, but those few I feel rather proud of. They're little things, to be sure, the angle at which I captured Tytania's waking from her drug-induced stupor, capturing the ending full-on, making the bows and final dance perfectly symmetrical (goddamn how I love symmetry), those were things I made sure to capture but I can't take credit for their appearance. I can't stress enough that I was simply there with my camera while this meticulously crafted evening unfolded. The elaborately dressed regulars served as a constant reminder that I had no control, that this had happened before and would happen dozens more times after I left. I was just glad to be allowed to capture what I did and present it to those who can't make it themselves or who want to relive it whenever they feel like it. I obviously can't charge money for this film but I wouldn't anyway, this is for everyone and it's on me.
Wednesday was just one of those days. Woke up to an email from Shelly about the design for the website. Too feathery. I ate cereal with a fork and then left my house way later than I intended only to discover that I'd forgotten the camera I was going to need to interview Holy Hail later that day. Well, I was only a few minutes behind, so I said I'd come back between classes to get it. A little later I found myself walking back up the stairs to my apartment. Another email from Shelly. New design...too green. Another email. Turns out the slutty little red riding hood costume I'd ordered won't be able to make it on time for my film shoot on friday. Damnit! What else is she supposed to wear when Ted Hughes murders her? I pick something else out and demand overnight shipping; they probably ignore my demand. I grabbed my camera but decided it was best to eat something. And I'd been meaning to film myself fixing coffee for my autobiographical/manifesto film, so I could do that. It's a ten minute walk to Mr. Crepe in Davis Square from my apartment. And while I was there I might as well get a crepe, yeah? I was due that night to see Laura Jorgensen play a song at the Berklee storytellers concert series and knew that the interview and her show were pretty close together. So, I finished my crepe, got on the subway, went to class, performed a scene from Pulp Fiction and then just when I thought I could relax in an air conditioned classroom for the remaining hour or so, our professor brought us outside to do a walking exercise in the hot sun. The objective? Walk as slowly as possible in a group where there wasn't any shade. How I wish I was kidding. When that was finished I ran to the subway, deciding against a tripod for the interview. Arrived at the Paradise earlier than the band, discovered they didn't serve coffee, got my interview, ran back to the subway, caught Laura's performance, went back, filmed the band live, said goodbye to the guys in Holy Hail I could find, got back on the subway, rode to Davis Square and Mr. Crepe once more, put the camera on in front of me and drank coffee. Walked home, another email from Shelly: "what color scheme do you want?" Good question. I'm better at complaining than helping. Sent a reply, edited the interview. It's currently 3:11 AM Thursday morning and the video just uploaded, which means that it's gonna look all cluttered and terrible for a few hours until it's finished processing...I wish I could say I learned something.
What I did discover was how great Holy Hail are live (I already knew how great Laura was). Sounding like the best of the British post-no-wavers (Cocteau Twins, The Creatures, 8 Eyed Spy...ok, so they're not English, but whatever), HH are awesome. Jagged guitar, reverb-soaked vocals, drums like a clock wearing boxing gloves and an omnipresent howl from all parties, even during their onstage banter, they know how to make an impression. Having been made privy to the band on their excellent Dying Party EP, I was psyched to hear them expand the pallet and they didn't disappoint. It's always nice to feel like you've wandered into an outtake from Wings of Desire. I decided to do a little expanding of my own and added a bit of a montage to their song "Marry on Mountaintops," what might be my favorite of their tunes. I liked the energy of the thing and just kept adding to it. Just one more thing for my phantom professor to bitch about. Holy Hail have a new album out on the 13th of April and if you like being rocked, having rock done to you, or jumping up and down inside rock, buy it. It's calling your name.
Someday I'll explain the long and winding path that brought me to my first proper fiction film. But for now the premise, the ideas. Two soldiers wander through a desolate, snowy landscape. Are they deserters? Have they been deserted? They have no weapons and no food. They remember what brought them here and it becomes plain enough that though they are different, though one is rich and one is poor, one loquacious and the other silent, one amoral and the other puritanical, they have one thing in common: they're both at war and neither will go home without scars. The Riverbedwill look at the way that casualties of war reverberate through generations causing pain and loss long after the war is over.
The Riverbed is my tribute to the work of the late Larisa Shepitko, a brave and visionary director killed before her time. My hope is that my film will encourage others to seek out her work and bring those films which remain unavailable to the English speaking world for us to love and appreciate. I made it with about 300 dollars and couldn't have done any of it without the help and support of my friends and family.
Sweetgrass is a film I'd been hearing about for a while before I learned about the two people behind it. The works of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have since become something of an obsession for me. They're a team of husband-and-wife anthropologists and filmmakers who work for Harvard University and museums when they aren't off making films. Until Sweetgrass, their movies had wound up in just such settings, but they finally graduated into the public eye like their predecessor/frequent subject the documentarian Robert Gardner. Like the best of Gardner's work (Forest of Bliss springs to mind) Sweetgrass is a trip into a part of the world you didn't know existed like this. Unlike Gardner, Sweetgrass offers you almost no aid as to what you're seeing. It is many things, a documentary, a revisionist western, a tragedy, a comedy, a thing of poetic beauty. When I figured out that Barbash and Taylor lived near Harvard, getting an interview became priority number one.
Lisa was that rare interview subject who seemed just as committed as the interviewer. She asked me if we could meet a little closer to her office on account of a torrential downpour which had started the night before and showed no signs of stopping. Unfortunately I'd left early, in my eternal wisdom, to get us a table at the bustling Cafe Crema in Harvard Square, and didn't realize she didn't relish getting as wet as I did. So, sopping wet and brimming with the confidence that comes from climbing mountains in search of a subject, she sat down with a cappuccino and we talked about film and anthropology for twenty minutes. When that was done, we talked about film for another fifteen before she was on her way again, back into the rain. So invested in our discussion was I that I had a hell of a hard time sheering it to the usual 4 or 5 minutes and so broke from tradition a little and indulged myself in Barbash's insight. Incidentally the sound in the crowded cafe was pretty deafening and she was 100% right about the audio on my camera not being able to pick it up. I recorded the interview with a small digital recorder I purchased at radio shack to do an interview with a camera shy Sunset Rubdown last June which wound up being a smart idea. I had to edit the film, then edit the sound track and synch it to our conversation, which is about as tedious as it sounds. So if Lisa Barbash ever tells you the audio isn't going to work, do yourself a favor: swallow your pride and find a better table. She knows what she's talking about.
I've read Barbash and Taylor's work in the anthology they edited together about Robert Gardner, I'm looking for their early films and now enjoy the sound of Lucien Castaing-Taylor's voice as some do the sound of waves or rainfall. Listen to him talk about the west, it's like aural velvet. Barbash is as nice and fascinating a person as I've ever met and she really loves her many hats: anthropologist, filmmaker, wife, mother. She and Taylor have made a film that's going to be treasured by their many audiences for years to come and it deserves all the praise that's been heaped upon it.
An email passed through my inbox with special events at my neighborhood Borders location. There at the bottom, Harlan Coben, appearance and signing. "Hmm...." thought I. Kickstarting my ever reliable "why not?" logic, I shot his management an email, expecting a thank-but-no-thanks.I went about my day and by the time I went to bed, I'd forgotten I'd even done it. I woke up to a voice mail and an email from a rather professional sounding woman claiming to be Harlan Coben's publisher's PR woman. That's a lot of connections and she certainly sounded intimidating; I didn't know how many of her compliments I was supposed to take to heart (I took them all, incidentally. Low self-esteem will do that to you...). So the following day I had a press packet and a hardcover copy of Caught by Harlan Coben, which I read that night. The next day I found myself running at high speed down Boylston Street toward the Borders, having been kept late in class thanks to my putting my film on the core the wrong direction. I scoured the maze-like bookstore and finally found him in a sterile office away from the faux-coziness of the rest of the store. I was kinda hoping to have it out in the bustling and colorful Seattle's Best attached at the hip to the book store but the management had other plans and so with a single cup of coffee rising from the table like a plateau through a John Ford skyscape, we sat and did our interview. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do anything. Four days before the interview I'd no idea Harlan Coben was even going to be in town.
The most I knew about Harlan Coben prior to spotting his name in that email was that his book Tell No One was the source of a brisk and romantic thriller of the same name by french director Guillame Canet. His latest, Caught, is what I'd call a suburban panic novel. Everyone has a secret, everyone's guilty, everyone's out to harm your family. Coben's style isn't the sort I routinely seek out but I'd be lying if I said I didn't really want to know whether Dan Mercer had killed that girl or not. If that doesn't make sense, then you ought to read the book. I tried asking Coben about some things that perhaps he doesn't get asked about often enough, though a few of his answers I recognized from other interviews. I wanted to let him know that I knew those answers already, but how to do so without sounding like the smarmy punk you are? It's tough but I was glad I got to ask some questions I hope he didn't hear all that often and I even made a pretty huge mistake, which I kept off camera because my pride damages easily. Zing! Anyway, Coben was great about my fuck ups and was a tremendous guy for finding time for me and a tiny camera...though he didn't have any coffee...
Incidentally it was here that I finally settled on a font for the series. Helvetica titles, Comic Sans and Chalkboard for the professor's notes. Thank you to Kyle McDonald for instilling the importance of a good font in my subconscious.
After my interview with Lee Daniels I realized that maybe it was time I devoted some time to my own work, especially after that guy who'd won best short film at the oscars in '94 said that a short film is the key to success. So I thought that it was time to get people excited for some of the work me and my friends have done. How best to do this? Perhaps a trailer was in order! Thinking that because The Riverbedis kind of a thematic bummer, that I'd lighten things up with the trailer and made it a tribute to Godard's trailer for Contempt. So for the seven nerds that got that, and to everyone else who thinks that my paltry attempts at the French language are funny, enjoy. The film itself is due in early Summer.
In the trailer, you'll see Nick Smerkanich, Sebastian Downs, Maggie Farrell, Tim Earle & Sarah Duff. In the movie you'll also see Laura Jorgensen, Lina Pearson and Tucker Johnson. I'm in the trailer and in the movie, but as two different people.
My friend Laura Jorgensen is insanely talented and a much nicer person than you or me. I'm jealous constantly. While sitting next to her in History of Film Scoring (a class I had to take at Berklee because Emerson wouldn't let me advance any further in my major until I backtracked and took a class I'd proved I didn't need to take by accidentally taking the class a level above it and getting an A) she asked if I could help her shoot a short film for a class she was in on Post-Modern Art. Absolutely, if for no other reason than I'd never used my camera's black and white function and was curious to see how it would look. Plus if I wasn't worried about direction and had only to focus on the cinematography, I could probably have a lot of fun. So I met her and about a dozen of her friends and we shot this movie about the way trash is accumulating all over the place and that modern life is being defined largely by consumption. It was a pretty clever film and I was more than happy to do it. After we did the last scenes I started taking footage of a few isolated spots in her house and of the lighting fixtures on houses across the street. It got me thinking about a war film I'd considered making. I asked Laura to sort of pose in a few different spots all over her living room and then the plot kind of fell into place. I ran the idea past my best friend and the other half of my brain, Sarah Duff, about it being in black and white, and all of this and she was immediately behind it and so began The Riverbed. I shot it largely at home in and around the few towns on the PA/NJ border where myself and my few friends/actors lived. By the time school started again I had most of it shot. There were, however, a few things I wanted to shoot involving some people in Boston, namely Laura. So when one night she was going to play a show near Berklee, I called my friend Tim Earle and I met him there with my camera. I filmed his stuff in and around the club she was playing as part of the film and then stayed and filmed the rest of the show at Laura's request. Having again forgotten my tripod and never having been great at panning, the work was shoddy, to be sure, but at the center was Laura and her music so I figured I couldn't lose. She wanted isolated songs to put up on her various musical channels but I went ahead and made one short film that encompassed all of them and gave me a chance to work out how to fix mistakes with clever editing. When it was done I showed it to Laura, who thought it was great and then to Sarah who also liked it. The subject and Sarah have been the two people I go to for edification. If the subject isn't embarrassed and if Sarah enjoys the movie, I know I've done ok. On top of being a document of Laura playing, it's about all the things that happen in a second and the sound of silence that wraps itself around all the things we listen for. I named it after a particularly prescient lyric in my favorite of Laura's songs. This weekend she's going to record her first proper album with a band. I can't wait.
Eboni, Emerson College's black affinity group, took a risk scheduling a lecture with director Lee Daniels on the day that the academy of motion picture arts and sciences were due to announce their nominations. On the one hand Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire was an independent film that perhaps hadn't made the splash that say something like Atonement had a few years ago, though they carried the same kind of calculated tear-jerking weight. And it's not like the Academy has done the black community any favors for the 80 years they've been around. Take a look at the nominees in every category since the days of Wings and Sunrise and you could be forgiven for thinking they might just ignore Daniels and his movie altogether. On the other hand it was executive produced by Oprah and Tyler Perry, both bringing their own built-in audiences to the movie. And 2009/2010 was shaping up to be the year that Mo'Nique won every prize she was nominated for and it would seem like bad form to exclude the film her performance is housed in, especially as hers is only one of a dozen or so truly remarkable performances in the movie. Daniels' previous directorial effort, Shadowboxer, had garnered nothing but whispered contempt from critics and audiences stayed away in the millions. It may not be Night and the City but it's a pretty decent way to come into understanding the pain of Precious. Both hark back to eras of great cinematic punishment and to the men at the forefront of very important movements (the films of Nagisa Oshima and Vittorio De Sica, respectively). Daniels became the second black man to be nominated for a best directing Oscar and the first to get nominated for a Director's guild award. I don't think it was all that big a deal when Eboni had to reschedule.
What was a big deal, as I found out, was getting a one-on-one interview with Lee Daniels. I wound up part of a veritable junior press cotillion. While well-dressed proper correspondents to Emerson's apparently huge network of news TV and radio stations danced about the place with lighting and sound considerations, I stood in a corner wearing an old plaid shirt and trying to keep my fist-sized HD camera steady while I asked my questions; I had forgotten my tripod. Their questions were largely the kind of thing you hear asked on Entertainment Tonight, that is to say, stuff I could give a shit about. I imagine my endless rambling questions about whether or not he internalized the likes of In The Realm of the Senses probably shut their brains off for the 20 minutes it took me to get them out, so I think we're even. My other challenge was being able to pass this off as an interview over Coffee. My solution as you can see, was a bit of an extension of my anger at the junior press corps and of how my school does everything it does. Ultimately my interview isn't as important as any other interview but I still feel a little angry that time is carved out for young professionals training to tiptoe around relevant questions. And there I go making friends again. What bothers me more than anything is when someone walks into an interview only to be asked the same thing every other interviewer in the country has already put to him. That day, sweating under all the lights, I'd never been happier to be the shabby wildcard in the corner.
Precious is a great film. Better than I expected it to be, better than anything I'd heard about it led me to believe it could be. And Daniels, as any one of a thousand interviews he's done could tell you, got here the hard way. He did everything himself and wound up on top of the world and it doesn't look like he's letting himself slide off anytime soon. Is doing snarky interviews of people I admire going to get me an Academy Award, someday? No. As if making fun of other correspondents wasn't enough, I don't think I'm ever gonna have the money to submit anything I do for a nomination.
My editor at Between Love and Like has an ever expanding list of bands she loves and reports on consistently. She asked me to cover a show by a band called Cymbals Eat Guitars I thought I'd heard mentioned on some blog or other and thought "well, I might as well" and asked their management if I could do an interview with them. I may or may not have withheld the name of the series. These days I say it with pride, but with only one done, I wasn't quite the mountain of confidence I am today. And even now I'm not exactly Bill Dexhart. Anyway, they said yes and as they were playing at Boston University, I scoured for a place nearby and settled on Espresso Royale. Having embarassed myself show up late for Screaming Females I made sure to show up early....almost an hour early, actually. On the plus side I finished the book I was reading, but, I also didn't schedule the interview early enough for the place to stay open for the whole interview. It was kind of winding down, I guess. Professionalism is not exactly a hallmark of an Honors Zombie Film. Don't tell anybody, ok? Speaking of, I knew less about Cymbals than I did about Screaming Females and so did my best to get the boys talking about...well anything. Having just finished their soundcheck they were a bit fatigued but they were and remain incredibly nice guys with a great and distinct sound.
They played a great and very loud show. And though it would be the better part of three months before I did another one, this and my interview with Screaming Females sat gathering plays on the youtube and in doing slowly built up my resolve in picking further interview subjects. Cymbals Eat Guitars are on their way to being huge and I can only hope that I helped a little bit, but that's not terribly realistic, is it?
After having spent the better part of my summer making a documentary on Canadian Musicians but still plenty left to do before I could edit it, I was hungry to do more. More editing, more shooting, more interviewing, more everything. So when I heard that Screaming Females were going to play the Middle East I thought "what the hell? I like bands as much as any journalist and can maybe not embarrass myself..." I got in touch with their management and set up a twenty minute interview and knowing only their music proceeded to wing it. The band arrived earlier than me so I felt a little embarrassed but after setting us up at a table and wedging my tripod next to my chair, I just sort of started firing until I got everyone to speak up at least once, including their friend/jack-of-all-trades Perry who sells merch for them at shows (one of his many responsibilities).
The attempt was to basically do what most interviews didn't do, to show artists being people. I started out a little shaky (id' done approximately two interviews before this, both in print, that didn't have to do with my Canada film and the last of those was over a month before I shot this). I wanted to meet them on whatever terms they wanted. I'd seen interviews (and indeed done a few for the Canada Film) where people just clam up because they don't feel good bragging about this or that subtextual whatever in their latest work. I wanted to give these guys a chance to talk about what they wanted to talk about. That, I hope, I managed to do. The show they played that night was truly awesome. Interview or no, there's no ignoring the fact that Screaming Females are one of the best bands around, live especially.
The format was something I used to deal with the fact that everyday at film school you run into a couple of reminders that what you think is cool is actually ten steps behind everyone else. There are talented kids all around you at film school, but there are also plenty of other people who serve to remind you that what you want to do is never ever in a million years going to make money or curry public support. So I decided to anticipate critical response to this and all my future work by supplying it myself as if I were being graded. I was new to iMovie so if it seems a little hectic, that's because it is. A few interviews down the line I'd change the font permanently to make it look more academic, so this one is very much a prototype.
A month or two after the interview I went to go see them open for Arctic Monkeys. I walked roughly 12 blocks in the rain from a film shoot to go see them and it was totally worth it. Once inside I found the merch table and caught up with Perry before the band came out to check sales. I got my now customary surprise hug from Marissa and then said hello to Mike and Jarrett before they took the stage and upstaged the main act by rocking a crowd of unsuspecting pre-teens and drunken young professionals harder than they'd anticipated. I loved every second of it.
