Park City Dispatch. 7.

Craig Phillips has taken notes on quite a panel.

A Sundance roundtable featuring four unique voices in American independent cinema - Hal Hartley, Tamara Jenkins, David Gordon Green and Gregg Araki - was focused on how each of them are making their way today and what's changed since they first started. The discussion was a great opportunity for both enlightenment and amusement; of the panelists, Hartley was the most chatty, and the funny Jenkins - possibly overwhelmed or just a little shy - the least. (She spiritually resembles the character Laura Linney plays in her new film The Savages.) But they all contributed enormously to this conversation; what follows is a sort of "best of."

On the genesis for their newest films, each of which have screened at Sundance:

Hartley: Fay Grim [site] is part two of what appears to be an ongoing process for me. I made a film in 1996 called Henry Fool, which me and my compatriots used to joke about being such a large story that it would [continue in the] future, [and] would talk about this story of a crazy, mixed-up but loveable family in Queens, New York as if it were my Star Wars. We would joke about, it but three or four years after the shooting, I couldn't joke about it any more, because it seemed like a really good idea. It's been a great ambition of mine since '91, when I first met Parker Posey, to write a movie for her from beginning to end, top to bottom. But I never found the right material - and we'd become friends, spoke all the time; [I] got to know her manner and everything - when we did this character Faye in Henry Fool, I understood what I had to do and it was really a perfect fit - that character, her talent, her manner, and how I write. It was sometime around 2000 that I really seriously started writing Fay Grim.

Gregg Araki: Smiley Face is kind of a potsmoking stoner comedy, which seems like an unlikely movie for people who are more familiar with my other work, but it does in a weird way fit the whole trajectory of my movies. Mysterious Skin was also sort of a departure in that it was based on a book, and was more serious and dramatic and heavy than some of my earlier work. I'm very proud of that but after doing such a dark and serious film I really wanted to do something the complete opposite. I wrote the script for Skin but didn't come up with those characters or the story - everything about it really belonged to Scott Heim. And Smiley Face was a script by a young writer named Dylan Haggerty who'd never had a script produced before. I just fell in love with this character and the story and love this movie as much as any I've done.

David Gordon Green: About three years ago I was here with another movie [Undertow], and a buddy of mine, Jesse Peretz [The Chateau], who's a filmmaker, too, said he was interested in directing this book, Snow Angels, by Stuart O'Nan, and asked if I'd be interested in adapting it. I'd never done a job before, and thought it'd be interesting to write for somebody else. I read the book and liked it, and then just started adapting it. I gave it to him a couple of weeks later and said, here's a direction I'd like to take it in if you want to talk more seriously about doing it. I worked with him for about a year and a half on it, developing it. He went off to do another movie and the producers that had acquired the property asked me if I wanted to step in and do the film. I wanted to step back a draft or two, take it where I felt like I had authorship over it. Developing it with somebody else's voice was an interesting process.

Tamara Jenkins: Unlike anyone else up here, I am the least prolific person on the planet. These guys are so frightening. Every year there's a new movie by every single one of them. And I'll think, is it because I'm a girl, and I'm just slow? And then I was with this woman on a film panel yesterday who really made me feel like I was in the Special Olympics. But these guys are just amazing. As I said I'm really slow and think I wrote the first scene for The Savages, or the first scene that was the nucleus for it, with a brother and sister, about ten years ago.

On what she's been up to since Slums of Beverly Hills:

Jenkins: I was submitted every teen girl comedy. [laughter] I got involved with a book that ended up being kind of a disaster for me and I worked on it for three years. That was horrible because it never happened; it was like the Bermuda Triangle for lost time. Regarding things that you get submitted because you've done a film about a teenage girl, they were just generic and not very interesting. And even just reading that stuff is totally time-consuming and can throw you off your instincts and what you're supposed to be doing yourself as a creative person. I can't imagine writing a script and giving it to somebody else, because to me writing a script is such a grueling process. I mean, I've done a couple of things for hire, which was rewriting pieces of somebody else's script as a job. They were rewrites on small jobs, on things that needed reshoots and things like that. But I've never been able to write something from beginning to end and then give it up.

I would love to adapt something I fell in love with, a novel. If my obsessions and the book's obsessions connect, it could be this really great thing.

Araki: It's very much like falling in love. You don't really know why. When I think about the stories Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face, they're literally so night and day, but I love them equally. I guess it's like another filmmaker said, all your films are like your children - I don't have kids of my own - you love them for all their faults. For me at least it's always been kind of personal. I just go with my gut.

On feeling pressure to produce:

Jenkins: I felt a lot of personal pressure because it was taking me so long to get another movie made. There was an article in the New York Times years ago that was about "Why do women [directors] take so long between their first and second features?" And there was a picture of me! [laughter] Like, "Wanted Dead or Alive." I didn't have children, so I didn't have that excuse, and I wasn't married, and I thought, Well, what am I doing? Then I got married, so I checked one thing off the list at least. I mean, I was doing things. I directed a play. I wrote things that were published, did public service announcements for Amnesty International, small odd things - I just wasn't making feature films. And when there's a setback, I'm always down for the count. Unlike these guys - I don't know how you do it. You guys must write really fast. [indicates Hartley] I know you do. And you guys, too. You're not like a woman agonizing.

I was self-loathing: "Why can't I do this?" But I do think in the amount of time its taken me to do another movie, that I work so hard at writing for my own personal growth, fiction and screenplays, and I'm very pleased that I feel like I'm getting better at it.

Green: I try not to have much of a preconceived expectation of myself. I just try to do whatever I think is funny. Like a funny phone call - yeah, I'll do that. I just want to have a good time.

Hartley: Just recently I adapted a Jack Kerouac novel, Doctor Sax, into a screenplay, for the nephew of Kerouac who owns the book. I was teaching in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they were around there - friends with one of my business partners - and asked my advice on where I'd I go if I wanted to make this material. I think they wanted to make an animated version of the novel, which makes sense because it's about Kerouac's childhood and fantasy life. But they seemed to be going in a bad direction. Every time I talked to them, I'd try to pass on my experience. There are good decisions to make and bad decisions, the right people and the wrong people. Given their sensibility and what the book was, I thought they were talking to the wrong people. That was my opinion. Eventually, I knew the book so well and these people so well that I just said, "Oh forget it. Look, I'll write a script version and then use that version and get going with it." I don't know why. As soon as I said that, I was like, Uhhhhhgggh...[sighs]

But it was, in fact, a great exercise for me to take somebody else's voice - to take Kerouac's particular way of seeing characters and situations, and the words he put into people's mouths - and apply a structure and momentum to it that I didn't think was in the book. To just make a satisfying experience for people who like Kerouac. I didn't feel like my sensibility was very evident. I don't know what will happen to that project at this point, but it was a worthwhile thing.

Like Tamara was saying, when you make your first film and it's coined a certain type of movie, everybody comes to you with thousands of scripts that are about the same thing. When people would give me scripts that were supposedly like The Unbelievable Truth, I didn't understand what they were thinking. And couldn't provide anything to those scripts.

On development money:

Hartley: I don't think I've ever been in a development situation. It's always: Write the script and then come to the table with the script. These are my friends and we want to make this film. I guess I mean I've never been paid to develop a script. That sounds like such a civilized thing. Actually, I was just paid to write a short film that they don't even have the money for making yet. And when they paid me, I said, "Gentlemen, this is the most civilized thing I've ever had happen!" Just unbelievable. In Europe, they think of American [artists] as these, like, Jeremiah Johnson types, mountain men, who eat sticks because we don't have any government funding or anything like that. I said, "Yeah, it is sort of like that."

Green: I guess development to me is like flirting with a girl; you have to give yourself a lot of opportunities to turn around and go the other way, or you can hook up. You get in a room with producers, financiers, actors, you kind of all look at each other, assess each other, size each other up, see if it works. If it does, take the next step. Some of them, I'll write, get producers attached, and then I'll get to the casting and all of a sudden the studio or whoever I'm working with will say, "Eh, we see a different cast." I'll say, I don't like that idea, then go away and close up that project, open up another one. So I've got a number of experiences in... not going all the way.

But there are times when I'll feel it. There's that energy about 30 percent of the way through the development when you don't have that anxiety, where you know you've got the people and are gonna muscle it through. It's gonna happen, we're going to face our obstacles - do or die, we're rolling camera in six weeks. You get that attitude - get the right people together and it happens. In my experience, with the ones that didn't happen, I'm glad they didn't happen because there was something about them that would have stunk it up anyway.

On finding the right producer and people who "get" them:

Green: It's just somebody you can communicate with, jump in the trenches with. One producer's followed me through all four of my films, Lisa Muskat. And a lot of the crew, too, I met in film school, and we all just knew early on, when we were making short films and school projects that we had a similar vibe, style. We like working with each other, know when to work, when to play. You get that kind of communication with somebody, know how to be tough, push each other in the right direction, and it works. When people make you feel guilty about things and you know you shouldn't be, or try to be confrontational when it should be rationally discussed, or they're being passive aggressive about things that should be laid on the table, then... it's time to find some new friends.

Hartley: I started out with a group of people, and I don't know if they had the same ambitions, but they wanted to be successful. We all did. So we could help each other. At the beginning it wasn't so important that my producers or my crew particularly liked the concepts of the movies I wanted to make. We were honest with each other. Of course, they were the type of people who were polite, too. They wouldn't wake up in the morning and say, "You know, I hate the kind of work you do, but we need to shoot a movie." They were decent people.

So it takes time, hanging out with people, getting to know them. Ted Hope and I have this professional relationship for awhile that's been really productive. I don't think we had the same taste in movies at all, really, at least when you're sitting around a table talking about movies. But like David was saying, when you're down in the trenches trying to make something happen, a lot of a person's soul is revealed and you want to be able to trust them. Ultimately, maybe it's not that important that they "get" you. Or they get you but they don't have to share your tastes and sensibilities.

It might be worthwhile to compare it to a corporate business model and something that's more hands-on entrepreneurial. I made one movie that was supposed to be independent but was made for a studio, and this experience of dealing with people whose allegiance is to their paycheck from this huge corporation is remarkable - the hypocrisy and the outright silliness. I had to work a lot harder to protect the film. There'd be really hilarious things, like a middle management guy talking to you, saying, "This is really great, this is really great." And then his boss shows up and says, "I don't know, we have to do something about the third act." And the other guy says, "Exactly. Third act." I mean, you see this stuff mocked in movies all the time but it comes from a real place, from the corporate world, where your humanity is shaped by your function in the machine. Corporate attitude is what I immediately recognize as the problem. And that even comes through in some smaller budgeted productions. You just have to recognize it for what it is and disconnect it.

Araki: Like what David was saying, it is a lot like dating, finding someone who's compatible. I've been through it, had "bad dates" and "good dates." There's so many really great people out there who are really talented and great to work with, and there are probably even more horrible people out there. You have to encounter both and learn to avoid the terrible people at all costs. You have to trust your instincts.

On what they enjoy about independent filmmaking (or, as the moderator put it, "You're certainly not in it for the money"):

Hartley: Well, to be perfectly honest, I am in it for the money. I mean, I consider myself an artist, too, and try to be true to that, but I do have a family to take care of. Why should I do this for nothing? I've learned a lot about doing business; I just do it in a particular way. I'm much more interested in talking to business people than I am talking to philanthropists. I don't want to be a charity case. It's important because, in the early days of your career, you get a lot of people talking about support. "We supported you." Right, you didn't program the film on television and make money - you were supporting me, that wasn't business. Right. So, you have to be careful about that. But, yeah, I'm a professional filmmaker; that means I get paid for what I do. No reason to be ashamed of admitting that.

Green: I think everything is fun. I even like going to the corporate meetings and pitching it. Getting everybody excited, that's kind of fun. The only thing I don't like is when you have to make the credits for your movie and everybody starts crying because they wanted their name in a specific place. I actually had to appeal to my union so that the title of my movie could come after my name. There's so many weird politics about it; everybody gets really possessive about credits. I don't think we should even have credits - the title sequence should just be cool parts of the movie, and they should take out the titles.

I also don't like doing ADR [additional dialogue recording] - I don't like looping things.

Jenkins: Yeah, that credit thing is so bizarre. It's like a laboratory for bizarre human behavior. We just had it with our film, too. There was so much drama - or it was really like a comedy. I could not believe the way people were about it!

Araki: Yeah. Credits suck. It's just the whole "Produced by," "Executive Producer," "Associate Producer," that whole thing.

On the current climate and what's changed over the years:

Green: There's a lot of ways of approaching the financing, structuring and putting the project together, but with this particular project [Snow Angels], it became pretty clear that it was execution dependent. It needed to prove itself. It wasn't something that you could pitch to a studio or a distributor and have them get enthusiastic about. It was something that they could respect the writing maybe or the casting, but it really had to be made without the corporate involvement because this one needed special handling. You needed to show people what the movie was about rather than trying to verbalize it. But every situation is different. You look at the market, what people are selling, and this wasn't a project that had an obvious fit there, so we had to make it as good as we could. There are projects where you have a great concept and the package is wonderful and you make a killing up front, but you make a mediocre movie.

You have to have a respect for where the business meets the art and try to make those compromises to the best of your judgment for a particular project.

Araki: I've always said that I would rather make a movie today for a million dollars than five years from now for ten million. That's just the way I feel. That's why all my movies have been made with these very tight budgets and in a certain independently financed way. People think, oh, you're Gregg Araki, it must be so easy for you, people just throw money your way. It's not like that. Every movie is harder and harder, there's less and less movies, less and less companies out there, and more and more people wanting to make movies - like this room full of people all have movies to make. It's really competitive.

On how technology has changed since they started making films, and changed the way they make them:

Hartley: It's changed shooting, because I've been able to work with smaller cameras, DV stuff. I'm looking at the camera trying to see what that material can give me. I don't want to just try to make this new material try to do what 35mm does. It's changed my work in that it's pushed me into different imagery.

Araki: It's amazing. My first movies were literally edited on a 16mm upright sewing machine, basically, splice and tape and the whole deal. Doom Generation was one of the first movies that we cut digitally on the Avid. And I remember we had to put down a huge chunk of the budget for it, like $100,000. And then for Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face, we used a Final Cut system that was literally $2,000 for the whole thing - computers, software, everything. It makes it all so much easier, and I love the process of editing; it's so creative now. I've edited all my films and it's one of my favorite parts of the process because you just get to play with the material forever. With film editing, you never did that. You'd just cut and say, "Okay, this scene's kind of working out - don't touch it! Because it's going to fall apart if you run it through an editor again!" Now you can just play with it, sculpt it, change it - the creative freedom is amazing.

Hartley: I'd like to tell a funny story having to do with Gregg. Before I started my first feature film, I came across an article in one of thse movie fanzines in '87. It was an interview with Gregg talking about his first two films...

Araki: They were literally black and white non-sync features.

Hartley: And Gregg said, "Well, the first feature film cost $5,000, but the second film cost $3,000 because we had learned so much on the first one." [laughter] I cut that out, Xeroxed it, glued it to my wall. It was great.

Jenkins: Was there a difference for me? You mean because they'd invented sound? [laughter] I went to film school and shot on 16mm film and we edited on splicers and tape. What was especially new this time was doing a DI - digital intermediate color correction. This was like a gift from God. We got it because the studios, Lone Star and Fox Searchlight, each paid for half. It was kind of late in the game and we really wanted this to come to Sundance and didn't have time to do the answer prints. So a bonus of coming to the festival was this acceleration cost where they said, "Well, we're going to have to do a DI."

It was phenomenal experience, where you get to go into a room, at this place called Laser Pacific in LA. It was incredible. We shot really quickly - it was 120 pages in 30 days. I thought that was really quick, though you guys probably think that's luxurious. Anyway, my DP [Mott Hupfel] was fantastic, but we had some issues in a few scenes with low light, and with DI you could take a little chunk, even just one part of a person's face that was too dark and just tweak it. It's very expensive; you can only be in this room for so long unless you're making some epic movie and have tons of money. But we got to correct a few things and it was incredible. [For example], the movie is supposed to be set in winter but we shot it in April in New York - thank God there was a snowstorm one day. That was amazing and helps sell the whole thing. But we had some problems with [too much] green throughout the whole thing and we could go in and suck out the green in these areas of the film just to make it not look like April.

On obtaining music rights:

Araki: I am a total music-head, and my movies are frequently inspired by music, so sometimes in my scripts, like in Mysterious Skin, it actually mentioned the Slowdive song that plays over the opening credits. But having been through the music ringer so many times now, the music thing is getting worse and worse for every movie. Smiley Face has a lot of my usual suspects, Chemical Brothers and all that, but also some weird cues like Styx and REO Speedwagon. As a filmmaker, also, you have to be able to - I have a huge collection - you have to be able to switch, if it's like $2,000 for that song, or $100,000, forget it. You can't insist on a specific song because you'll never finish the movie.

Green: Yeah, you have to be open-minded when you walk into it. I always have things in mind, and play music on the set constantly. I have an idea where I'm going to go. And I have a composer, David Wingo, that I work with on all my movies - he's my best friend since we went to see The Karate Kid in the third grade - he can do all sorts of stuff, so if I can't get the rights to a song I really want, he can do a version that's in the same vein. But you try to take personal approaches to it. Like Explosions in the Sky. I communicated with them directly, and said, "I know you guys are big now but it would be fun to work together." And there are other record labels where it's like, if you're not talking big bucks, it's not even worth the paperwork, so don't bother. Like we were trying to get some older, more well-known songs, and I wanted a Bread song in the movie, which was tough to get. It turned out my uncle was in a fraternity with David Gates and dropped him an email to ask about it. So you try to do those kinds of things, sometime it helps, sometimes it's a dead end.

Araki: Sometimes even that little indie label you think is cool is owned by these huge corporations like Time Warner. And because there are so many layoffs in the music industry, they have like two people clearing all the music rights for Time Warner. It's scary.

On what attracts them to particular projects:

Araki: It's weird what appeals to me. I just sort of follow my heart. Either come across material like Mysterious Skin or Smiley Face, or by writing my own scripts. Gus Van Sant gave me the best advice. He said you shouldn't worry about what everyone else is doing or what's hot or what's selling. I just do what I do. There are certain things I know I don't want to do, like I know I don't want to do a gangster movie. There are certain genres I just don't want to go near. I'm pretty open to almost anything else. I've been working on this horror sci-fi thing for a few years, and there's this family drama, an Ordinary People kind of thing - I don't know why it appeals to me, but it totally does. I try not to limit it to a "this is me" kind of thing, I just look for stories that appeal to me, that I fall in love with.

On European money:

Hartley: I once was pretty well supported in Europe, by the French, but that's over. Every single time it's a totally different thing. There were three films in a row - my second, third and fourth were made for a company in England called Zena. And that was a business deal, not "support." It was good business for both of us, but then that dried up. In the early 90s, they were making pre-sales in Europe. There was a lot of interest at that time in independent American films. It was a real new thing then, but for this American independent filmmaker at least, they lost interest. So I had to look to other places, and now most of my funding comes from the United States.

On producing other people's work and supporting up and coming filmmakers:

Green: I like helping my friends. People that help you out and work real hard and you see that they've got initiative, you see them invested in themselves. That makes you want to jump in there and help them out in whatever way possible. That may just be a phone call, a "go get 'em, Tiger," or giving them some money, or maybe literally make phone calls for them or physically help push the dolly, like I did on Great World of Sound. You kind of gauge what they need, and how passionate you are about what they're doing. It's just a matter of getting good voices out there, making movies so I stop wasting my money on some of the garbage I've shelled out cash for.

Hartley: For me, teaching has been my connection to the younger next generation. It's always kind of shocking when you discover that you actually have something that somebody else needs to know. It's like, Oh yeah, I actually do know something about that! That's very satisfying. It's very important, too, for me to stay connected to younger people, to know what's going on and what they're interested in. They're very ambitious and they're very smart, but they want to be famous and powerful.

Araki: It's really a generation thing. Hal and I and Rick Linklater and Quentin, we look back and see we were a sort of weird, 80s film school generation. We were all so passionate about filmmakers, Godard, Cahiers du Cinema, auteur theory, Hitchcock, Hawks. And the next generation seems different. When I was in film school, there were a few specific filmmakers that everyone was influenced by - Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola... Now there's a completely different mindset and it makes me feel old. [laughs]

On living in LA:

Araki: I live in Los Angeles and love it. [laughs] A lot of people hate Hollywood and all the fake people and all that. I was just talking the other day to Miguel Arteta, who just moved to New York, and other filmmakers, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, they moved to New York, too. The cliché about LA is that everyone there is so mellow and brain dead, and life is easy because it's sunny all the time. But for me as a filmmaker, New York is such a struggle - like even just to get a carton of milk, that's your whole day, "I got milk and lived" - that I wouldn't have any energy left to make movies and write scripts. In LA, I have such an easy life, work on my scripts, work on my movies, do my stuff, that I feel fortunate.

Hartley: You're from there, right?

Araki: Yeah, well, I grew up in Santa Barbara, Southern California...

Hartley: I think this is important because - it's not necessarily about a lifestyle, but you're very part and parcel about the geography of the place. I think that contributes to an artist's voice. I've never had much of a reason to be in LA but I remember discovering your films and thinking, Wow, this is a side of LA I've never heard about. Even the authorial voice of your work was something I hadn't heard about. But it definitely seemed like LA. And around the same time, I was also getting interested in X. I said, Wow, there's something else happening there that they don't tell you about. [Note: Hartley currently lives in Berlin.]

Jenkins: I live in New York. It's a hard thing not to live by choice there because it's expensive. But I've lived in the East Village for 15 years.

Green: Los Angeles and New York are both exciting, wonderful places, and I think you can sculpt them into being the communities with resources that you need. But I like to be bored, and whenever I'm in those places, I always feel the need to go out because there's always some once in a lifetime opportunity, something amazing happening. I live in New Orleans, where I can just sit back on my porch and something amazing's just gonna go right by, and I'll just sit there with a book or a lemonade watching it go by. I like to stay away from the business, keep it peaceful.

On the pressures of the indie market; and the "Sundance film":

Jenkins: You're talking about the institutionalization of the independent aesthetic, right? Like that there's this "originality" - "Oh, they're quirky," and they're this, and that it's going to be that kind of independent film or that kind. I do think there's this kind of expectation when you're seeking financing that they need to be able to plug it into something that they've already seen that was successful. Just like they do in Hollywood. It's just a different economic branch of the same problem. If there's something utterly unique, or if it hasn't been discussed before, it's harder. There was a lot of anxiety with my movie because it's not the sexiest subject matter in the world - two middle-aged siblings put their father in a nursing home - that doesn't sound really sexy. It was really hard to get financing for it. I don't know, I think there is that desire to find something else like it that did well.

Araki: I don't want to sound like a preacher or something, but I don't think you should make a movie just because it's like another movie that was successful at Sundance. One of the horrors of 90s American cinema is all the people who wanted to make their Reservoir Dogs, which resulted in some of the worst films ever made. You need to stay true to your own individual voice and what you want to say, and not go, "Oh, Little Miss Sunshine is great and I want to make the Sunshine of next year." As a filmmaker, you need to be true to your voice, and hope that will connect on a broader level.

Posted by dwhudson at January 26, 2007 1:53 AM