SEYMOUR CASSEL: THE ACTOR
By Jim Healy

An Italian-translated version of this interview originally appeared in a book co-edited by Jim Healy and Emanuela Martini, published in conjunction with the John Cassavetes retrospective at the 2007 Torino Film Festival. Seymour Cassel will appear in person in the Dryden on May 16 and 17, following screenings of Faces and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

Audiotaping an interview with the garrulous, demonstrative Seymour Cassel for later transcription can be a problematic task. A born performer, Cassel always illustrates his stories and reminiscences with little bits of pantomime and physical shtick, which includes dead-on impersonations of his friends and co-stars like Peter Falk and John Cassavetes.

Almost literally born into show business, Cassel’s mother was a burlesque dancer with the famous Minsky’s showgirls and at age four, he would participate in on-stage antics with baggy-pants comics. A notorious ladies man, Cassel has linked his obsession with the fairer sex to his upbringing: “I saw more naked breasts before the age of four than most men see in their lifetime!”

His mother’s career kept Cassel steadily on the road as a child. When she married a career military man, Cassel spent a brief part of his adolescence in Panama City. When she divorced, she brought the young Seymour home to Detroit, MI where his dalliances with juvenile delinquency ultimately led to his joining the U.S. navy.

Released from the service, he went to New York to pursue a career as an actor in the mid 1950s. He studied briefly with Stella Adler until he discovered the acting workshop co-founded by John Cassavetes and Burton Lane. Looking for a free scholarship, Cassel made a lifelong friend and collaborator in Cassavetes, who immediately put Cassel to work as a crew member on SHADOWS.

Cassavetes proved to be Cassel’s patron saint and main mentor as the young actor entered show business. For most of the next ten years, Cassel’s was primarily employed as a crew member and/or performer in Cassavetes’ film and television work, culminating in an Academy Award-nominated performance in FACES and his first leading role opposite Gena Rowlands in MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ.

Although he continued to work with Cassavetes on such projects as THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE and LOVE STREAMS, Cassel developed enough clout to attract the attention of filmmakers like Ken Russell, Don Siegel, and Sam Peckinpah, with whom he was also very close. After Cassavetes’ death in 1989, Cassel found work on studio projects directed by the likes of Adrian Lyne, Andrew Bergman, Barry Levinson, and Wes Anderson, who has cast Cassel in three of his features.

But it was his work for Cassavetes and his leading turn opposite Steve Buscemi in the 1992 feature IN THE SOUP that has made him much in demand for roles in independent features. An outspoken proponent for the rights of actors, he’s currently campaigning to become president of the Screen Actors Guild from his home in Santa Monica, CA.

JIM HEALY: How did you come to work on Shadows?

SEYMOUR CASSEL: They had already started on the movie when I showed up [at the workshop] looking for the free scholarship, which meant John just let me come for free. He paid for the space for the school in the Variety Arts building and his partner, Burt Lane, ran the school. Through the improvisations in the class with Leilia [Goldoni] and Ben Carruthers, John had already developed the story of the movie. He probably had it in his head all along that he wanted to direct a movie, because he was frustrated as an actor. So he went on Jean Shepherd’s radio show, said he was making the movie and asked for investors. He got over a $1,000! With that, he bought more film. But when I showed up, he took me in his office and talked with me for an hour and I told him my life story.

JH: What did you learn from being a crew member on Shadows and Faces?

SC: I learned I didn’t want to do that! Seriously, first thing I learned was how to load a 16mm magazine in a black bag. Then I learned to thread the camera with it, then pull focus, how to operate a boom. The torturous part was during editing. We shot so much film.

We had to do it that way, but it taught me a lot about film. Everyone got to operate the camera a little bit too. There was always a job for someone and no one was expendable. One day during Faces, a camera operator was playing basketball on one of the breaks and he tore his Achilles tendon, so from then on, he became a loader.

JH: I get the feeling there was a little bit of bluff involved that helped you enter the movie business.

SC: There’s always a lot of bluff involved, especially in this business and John recognized this in me. He was also mischievous and I had that and he sensed that in me.

Once we were in the White Elephant Bar in London and a couple of producers would come in and John would ask them to sit down. They asked, “You got any scripts you’re working on.” John would say, “Yes, I’ve got this one thing.” And he’d look at me [eyes dart suspiciously] because he knew I knew he was lying and he’d make it up.

JH: You were in London when Shadows was first released there?

SC: Yes, ’60 or ’61. John and I had been in Ireland where we had been in a movie [the Ted Allan scripted The Webster Boy], John bought two round-trip first-class tickets. Al [Ruban], [Maurice] Mo McEndree, and myself, we went out drinking to different bars and we wind up at Downey’s. It’s getting along to four in the morning and John asked Mo if he wanted to go to Europe with him and Mo said no. John asked me and I said sure. But I was working on a Playhouse 90 directed by Sidney Lumet. I had about six lines and I was supposed to be at work the next day. We went back to my place and John fell asleep on the couch and I packed a bag. When I woke him up, I said, “Let’s go.” We go to the airport and I called Playhouse 90 to tell them to recast me. I went to London and we were in the hotel for a couple of days and we went on to Ireland where I got a part in the movie.

Then, it was Easter time and we had four days off. John said, “Gena and I are going to Paris.” I said, “Great, I’ve never been to Paris.” “No Gena and I are going.” I said, “Fine, I can get another hotel room.” “I’m not taking you to Paris with me.” I said, “What do you think I want to do, stay here in Ireland? They don’t fuck, I mean, they’re religious as hell!”

I stayed behind in Europe. I cashed in my first class TWA return ticket for a coach and I spent the money and got a place on the Right Bank in Paris. It was lucky I stayed over. I eventually went back to London because I could speak the language and thought I could get a job. I was staying at Ted Allan’s place when I got a call from Penelope Houston at Sight and Sound. She called me on a Friday and she said [affecting British accent], “Do you have the print of Shadows?”

“No, don’t you have it?”

“No, and you know the movie shows on Monday.”

I called John in California and said “Where’s the print of Shadows? It shows here on Monday.”

He said, “Oh fuck, I forgot!” He had to put it on a plane.

But David Robinson in the Financial Times wrote a great review and we got a distribution deal with the Boulting Brothers who had their own theater.

JH: Did you like working with Bobby Darin on Too Late Blues.

SC: Yes. He wanted to do everything because he knew he was going to die early, because of the heart thing he had. John liked Bobby. He didn’t want Bobby for that movie, he wanted Montgomery Clift and Gena [instead of Stella Stevens]. Clift had had an accident and he was also a drinker, so that was a problem for the studio.

Stella was a nice girl. Marty Rankin, the head of the studio, was one of her boyfriends. She got better as she got older, especially in the Peckinpah film [The Ballad of Cable Hogue].

JH: What do you remember about Cassavetes’ studio experience making Too Late Blues.

SC: I forget the name of the cameraman, the guy who shot it, old-time cameraman [Lionel Lindon] and John wanted a different set-up. The cameraman said, “What do you want me to do, drill a hole in the fucking floor?” and John said “No, just put the camera down and I’ll shoot it myself.”

JH: He wanted to follow the actors around more easily…

SC: Well, actors tell your story. Hopefully the writer is there when you do it and Johnny was, so if there was a problem, he could re-write the scene. Then he got to know his actors as people. In Faces, when I’m singing to the girls, John knew he had no money for music rights, and John knew I was doing rap music before they even thought of it, so I just did it: [sings] “Put on the red meat, Mama/Don’ want no taters, no onions…” It was loosey-goosey kind-of stuff. The ‘Mechanical Man’ he told me to do because he saw me do it before. My biggest thrill was to entertain him as well as the actors I worked with because he would stand right next to the camera going [covering his mouth, suppressing a laugh]. He taught me how to incorporate myself in my work. I grew up watching people. I was always an astute observer and John taught me how to use that too.

JH: So, even before you met Cassavetes, what drew you to performing was a need to represent the behavior you had seen?

SC: Yeah, but I wanted to be loved and liked too, and I knew if I could do things people liked, they’d like me.

JH: Did you want to be famous too?

SC: No, I didn’t care about fame. Before I got nominated for the Oscar for Faces, while we were cutting the movie, John said, “See, you’re going to win an Oscar. I’m telling you.” He was so happy when I got nominated and he was happy for Lynn [Carlin] too. We were supposed to go to the awards together, but the day of the show, I called him and he said he couldn’t come. It dawned on me that he didn’t give a shit that he got nominated [for a best screenplay Oscar]. He always gave to his actors. He was really phenomenal that way.

John’s passion was to be able to make movies his way. It’s easy to get people to believe in you when you do the kind of work he did from Shadows to Faces. Benny and Peter never worked for John and they saw Faces and came to him. He then told them he had a story about four guys: one dies and the story is about the other three guys. Peter saw Faces and he said [imitating Falk] “Jesus Christ! That’s a great movie!” But when he was shooting Husbands, he asked Ben Gazzara, “Do you know what the fuck John is talking about? Do you know what he’s saying? Would you tell me because I don’t know what the fuck he wants!”

JH: He seldom talked to actors about their characters during production.

SC: That’s true, but I don’t think [Falk] was used to John’s way of shooting. During Husbands, he was very insecure. By the time he did A Woman Under the Influence, John got Peter to stop worrying about his glass eye, because he needed to shoot him a certain way.

JH: Your character in Faces is almost a symbol for a generation, a hippie prototype, if maybe a bit older than the average hippie.

SC: My hair wasn’t as long then [in 1965 when the movie was shot]. When it came out [in 1968], that [the hippie youth movement] was all happening.

JH: Your character, Chettie, seems to be a bit of you and a bit of Cassavetes rolled into one. He doesn’t live by any rules, especially when it comes to women, yet he’s the moral center of the film.

SC: He has a morality, but there’s nothing immoral about wanting to get laid. He cares about [Lynn Carlin’s character] and the other women in the story. John was one of the most compassionate people who understood the humanity that each person had. His ear was so good too. He could see the way people would not react to each other or the way they would be abrupt with each other or maybe he could sense it.

John and I were together once and we saw Raul Julia and his wife and John told me he could see that she was in a lot of pain. He told me he’d catch up with me and he went and talked with them for about an hour. He said he knew that they weren’t communicating and they were such lovely people. He was amazing at that.

JH: You’ve also said he was superstitious.

SC: He’s a Greek and they’re superstitious gamblers. I remember calling him in Rome from the Venice Film Festival where Faces was showing and I told him to come up because I thought we were going to win awards. He said, “No, I have to work.” He was superstitious because I had been in Venice in ’61 with Shadows by myself when that won. He went to Berlin and wins there for A Woman Under the Influence but I couldn’t go. He took Gena. He goes there a second time with Gena for Love Streams and he calls me and says, “Sey, you should’ve heard the fucking audience when you came on, the applause!”

I said, “Why didn’t you take me.”

He says, “Well, I’ve got my wife.”

I said, “You’re superstitious, you cocksucker!” [laughs]

Greeks are unbelievable. It’s not like John wouldn’t step on a crack or any of that shit, but he loved to roll the dice. John was crazy in a way, a wonderful crazy, and so was I. There are stories I can’t tell about John, you know. Not while Gena is still alive.

JH: I understand there were times when you had to take the blame for things that weren’t always your fault.

SC: I always got blamed. We’d go out to the Lakers Game and he even lied about that. He’d tell me he had tickets for the game, but he wouldn’t show them to me. When we got to the game, he said, “just follow me,” so I knew something was up. We’re sitting right on the court, where the visiting team sits. When I asked where he got the tickets, he says, “I won ‘em in a raffle.”

I say, “I’m not Gena. You may have told her that, but you didn’t get these tickets in a raffle.”

He says, “Oh yeah I did.” They were like $150/$200 tickets.

We’d go out after the game some nights and be out late. I’d pick him up and drop him off. One time, the next day I called and Gena said to me, “Seymour, I don’t want you coming into this house any more.” And she hung up. So for a while, when I’d call John and Gena would answer, I’d hang up.

JH: How long did that go on for?

SC: For a while. When we had softball practice, he’d say, “Don’t worry, I’ll meet you at the bottom of the driveway.” Finally, one night when I picked him up, I said, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you tell her that you were the one who kept me out late? Just once?”

He said, “What? And have her be mad at me?

JH: Speaking of sports, the subject runs through some of Cassavetes movies. There’s the baseball team in Too Late Blues and the basketball discussions in Husbands.

SC: We played sports all the time. Back in New York in Central Park, we used to play Puerto Ricans up at 102nd and 5th – hardball. That’s how I got Al (Ruban) involved. He was working at a garage near Carnegie Hall and I got him to come play for us. He was the third baseman. We’d play the Puerto Ricans for a couple of cases of beer and if they didn’t win, they’d run. If we lost, they’d stay and we’d have to buy them a couple cases. John loved ball – football, basketball, all of the sports. We’d play in the rain against Columbia students.

When shooting Faces, [John] had a basketball court right outside his living room. We’d have a quick lunch, shoot some hoops, then we’d film again.

JH: Was Cassavetes very competitive?

SC: He was very competitive. He taught me how to play chess when we were cutting Shadows on 63rd, just off Madison. We played waiting for other editors to show up. He beat me over and over again and he said he didn’t want to play me any more. I said “why?”

“Because you’re no good.”

“Yes, but I’m getting better.” So I went down to the village on weekends to the park.

JH: To practice?

SC: Yeah, and I played these guys there and about six weeks later, I said [to Cassavetes], “Let’s play some chess. I think I’m better.” And I beat him.

He said, “Let’s play another,” and I beat him again. He wanted to play again and I said, “No, you gotta practice a little bit.” That’s how competitive he always was.

JH: Why do you think Cassavetes was such a contrarian, so argumentative?

SC: Because people carry their attitudes and beliefs like they were written in gold. If you’re a street-smart kid, you say, ‘are you kidding me?” and John was good at picking up on that stuff, and he could bullshit with the best of them. He would argue a lot. Gena almost didn’t marry him because he was so jealous.

JH: What are your memories of making Minnie and Moskowitz?

SC: We had just finished a scene and John went up to a grip and asked him what he thought of the scene. The grip said, “it was great, John!”

John says, “Yeah, Gena was good, but Seymour was a little weak.” He was doing it to bug my ass because he knew I could hear everything he said!

JH: Al Ruban thinks that the one thing wrong with Minnie and Moskowitz is that you never see the two main characters having actual sex, consummating their relationship.

SC: Well, that’s because John didn’t trust me![laughs] The scene at the Palomino where we’re dancing and I dip her, Gena opened her mouth and I went in. After the scene, John didn’t say shit, he didn’t care, but Gena gave it to me, so I took it. [laughs]

JH: Was Cassavetes squeamish about showing erotic intimacy?

SC: He didn’t like to really show it. You could know it without seeing it. Like in Faces when you see me and Lynn Carlin the morning after.

JH: What was it like to work with Timothy Carey?

SC: John loved Tim Carey. Tim was great. He was wild and there were times you had to watch him. I asked Gadge [Elia Kazan] why he never used him again after East of Eden. He said he almost broke Jimmy [Dean]’s arm. He was playing a bouncer and he was trying to throw Jimmy out – that was his job. Brando used him in One Eyed Jacks. In Killing of a Chinese Bookie he wore editing gloves for his performance.

John shot lots of footage on Tim, just to see what he would do and he came up with weird stuff like his lines about his elbows getting fat in Minnie and Moskowitz.

Tim gave John a German shepherd and John said he didn’t want it, so Tim said, “No, it’s a great dog. He’s a watchdog. Look, he’s not afraid of guns.” And he shot a gun off over the dogs head. John said, “Ok, I’ll take the dog!”

JH: Can you talk about your experience with Sam Peckinpah?

SC: Sam was a conniving son of a bitch. I mean, I loved him. I drank with him. We went to Bogota together. We were going to do a movie from a book called Snowblind. We were going to write the script together, but it got all screwed up. He was a maverick. Sam was a loner more than John was.

JH: How do you feel about New York vs. California living?

SC: I love it here, and I love New York too, but you can’t make a living in the theater and tickets are so expensive - $100 for good seats! It’s too expensive to live there now. The city is so crowded. My apartment on 46th between 9th and 10th was $40 a month. I had a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room on the ground floor. Richard Hepburn, Kate’s brother, was a playwright and he lived across the hall. I helped him steal a bench from Central Park so we could put in the back of the place. We drove it up 10th avenue in my car.

JH: When did you first come out to California?

SC: I came out here in ’61 for Too Late Blues and then I came back about a year later. I was thinking, “They’re not actors: Rock Hudson, Robert Wagner, Tab Hunter.” I had worked as an extra on that film [Tab Hunter] did with Sophia Loren [His Kind of Woman]. He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Acting is as complicated as you make it and the more simple you make it, the better you’re going to be. If you take your time, have fun and enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll make it interesting for yourself, then the other actors pay attention and the words mean something now, because they mean something to you. You can’t make it as laborious as all that.

John taught me a lesson. You can steal anything you want, just make it better when you steal it. I just did that on a movie I just shot on Staten Island and it’s called Staten Island. The director gave me tapes with Charlie Chaplin. I play a deaf mute and I don’t talk in the whole movie and I’m one of the leads. Since I couldn’t speak, I ended up taking the famous globe ballet from The Great Dictator for a scene when I win a trifecta.

John was the closest friend I ever had, plus he was like an older brother.

AL RUBAN: THE TRUCK
By Jim Healy

An Italian-translated version of this interview originally appeared in a book co-edited by Jim Healy and Emanuela Martini, published in conjunction with the John Cassavetes retrospective at the 2007 Torino Film Festival. Al Ruban will appear in person in the Dryden on May 16, 17, and 18 following screenings of Faces, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Husbands.

“We used to call him The Truck,” Seymour Cassel tells me about Al Ruban. Ruban was a key collaborator on seven of John Cassavetes’ eleven features, beginning with the first, SHADOWS, in 1958, and ending with LOVE STREAMS in 1984. Today, almost two full decades after Cassavetes’ death, Ruban is still a formidable presence. Tall, trim and outspoken, it’s easy to understand how he earned his nickname. When you speak to him about his experiences in bringing these films to completion, it’s clear that his tenacious, ‘no-bullshit’ manner was a major asset to Cassavetes’ rogue band of do-it-yourself film craftsmen.

Ruban began as a production assistant on SHADOWS, then served as either cinemtographer, producer, or both on FACES, HUSBANDS, MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, OPENING NIGHT, and LOVE STREAMS. He also turned in brief performances in LOVE STREAMS and, as the gangster who takes Cosmo Vitelli’s money in the opening scene of the long version of CHINESE BOOKIE.

Between SHADOWS and FACES, Ruban ran his own production company in New York, where he churned out softcore features for the grindhouse market. Internationally recognized for his work with Cassavetes, he was hired as inematographer for Peter Lillenthal’s 1979 German drama, DAVID, and Gonzalo Herralde’s JET LAG (VÉRTIGO EN MANHATTAN, 1981). Later, he also helped produce John Avildsen’s HAPPY NEW YEAR (1987), with Peter Falk, and Peter Bogdanovich’s TEXASVILLE (1990).

In 1989, Ruban took over management of Faces Distributing Corp. overseeing the enormously successful re-release, to theaters and home video, of the five independently made films owned by the Cassavetes estate: SHADOWS, FACES, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOOKIE, and OPENING NIGHT. He currently resides and works in New Jersey.

Although his particularly innovative and inspired camera work on FACES has been praised by numerous critics and academics, Ruban has no pretensions of being a ‘great artist.’ On the contrary, he sees himself as someone who was without ambition in the early part of his life, and who had the good fortune to meet John Cassavetes in 1958, after a short-lived career in minor league baseball…

AL RUBAN: I managed to get up to double A ball for a little while, and then it was over for me. My original contract was with the farm team of the St. Louis Browns. The problem is I didn’t know what life was about until I got much older, so when I was playing baseball, I was playing and having a good time. It was a game to me.

JIM HEALY: And it was baseball that led you directly to Cassavetes…

AR: Yeah. I had been out of professional sports and was playing in Central Park in New York – a mixture of softball and some hardball. A friend of mine one day said, “I know these actors uptown on 86th Street with a baseball league. They play these Puerto Rican guys and they always lose. Would you like to play with them?” It sounded interesting and I went up there and played with them and they kept inviting me back to play. We just didn’t lose as often. On that team was John, Seymour [Cassel], [Maurice] Mo McEndree and a few people who also worked on SHADOWS. One day, John came to me and said, “would you like to work on the crew?” I professed my ignorance. My only connection to the movies was paying an admission and I told him I didn’t have any knowledge of how to make a movie and he said we’d all foot our way through together…and that sounded appealing to me.

JH: At that point, had the Paris Theatre screening already happened?

AR: No. I was there for the midnight screenings in 1958. I remember not being terribly impressed. John and I had previously talked about a particular scene where I said the actor looked like he was anticipating what was going to happen next. Along the way, somehow, it was recorded that I shouted: ‘He’s anticipating!’ while the scene was being shot, which I would never do under any circumstances. I did shout it out during the scene at the Paris Theatre screening.

Then we went on to shoot another couple of weeks. I just got to carry the equipment and find some locations. That’s it. I got the credit of Assistant Cameraman. I got to see and touch and find some things out, but it was more the experience that was wonderful for me. I thought, “This is just like playing ball. This is fun!” And that’s how I got into the business.

JH: How did SHADOWS lead to your next job?

AR: I got a job at a small production house, McEndree and I, doing…I guess what were called porno films at the time. You could show a breast or two, but that was the extent of what you could do. I worked there for about two years and I got to handle all the equipment and it was an education for me.

JH: Were you editing then too?

AR: I edited some, which was not a difficult task because usually whatever you shot was the picture! [laughs] But yeah, I became very familiar with the process. I then said to two of my friends, ‘What’s the point of struggling and doing this for somebody else when we could struggle and do it for ourselves?’ So we made a few of those films for ourselves.

John had just finished work on something and he came to visit me and I showed him the latest piece that I was working on, which I called THE SEXPLOITERS, about housewives on Long Island who were going out and picking up these daily contacts. I showed it to John and he had a particularly peculiar way of laughing: he’d grab his nose and go [makes sputtering, snickering noise], and he laughed through all the footage I showed him.

He then told me about FACES, which was called several different things along the way, but at that point was called THE MARRIAGE. He said he wanted to do it and he asked me how to go about doing it with limited money. So I finally suggested we could buy used equipment. That way, we’d own whatever we had and we wouldn’t be limited by any kind of payments…if he could afford it. And he said ‘OK. How much?’ and I suggested a price and he went back to California and sent me the money. Then, I went around New York and picked up stuff and put it in a trailer and took my family and the equipment and another guy who was going to work with us named George O’Halloran and we went to Mo McEndree’s home in Iola, KS, and I left my wife and children and took George and went on to California. I introduced everyone to the equipment because I was the only experienced person and that’s how it got started.

JH: What do you make of all the critical interpretations of these films you and Cassavetes worked on?

AR: We’re not as clever as people have made it out to be. Some of the things just happen. The films speak for themselves and quite often you just do something that seems right to you without having thought it out beforehand.

We made them for ourselves and none of us ever thought they’d get to play before an audience. We had to make films that way. That’s the advantage and disadvantage of having grown up with John: he always made films for himself. He had to like it and have an interest in it. He’d write something, be in love with it and talk about it with everybody: the guy who delivered the groceries, the guy that delivered the water, people walking in the streets. He’d say, “hey, you wanna hear this?” But when he directed, the writer was dead. He directed the film from his new, changing point of view. He would re-write the scenes if the actors had difficulties or if they explored some new territories he hadn’t thought of. He would always accommodate the actors if he thought it improved the story. And when he finished production, and began editing, he was not happy with the writer and director, and he would change what they did.

JH: Can you give us an idea of how you and Cassavetes interacted during production?

AR: We started our careers together at a point where neither of us knew very much and I had great respect for him, but when we were working together, I never looked at him as an important figure. We had a healthy debate every day of our lives together and always about the work. I would voice my opinion as strongly as I could and when, in the end, he said, “I can’t do that,” I said “OK.” He was the director and in that sense it was his vision, not anyone else’s. I learned, particularly during FACES, that he would never instruct the actors to do anything. They got a sense of the character working through the rehearsals, which were always long periods before shooting began.

I would go to him early in the shoot and ask him to tell me what he wanted out of a scene: “Give me a hint. At least tell me the emotion you want in the scene and I can light it.” But I realized that the way he worked with actors was the way he worked with the crew. He really didn’t tell you anything. He wanted you to come to work with some thoughts of your own and contribute. He was never bashful and I knew to just light the scene and if he wouldn’t like it, I would change it, but over all those years, he never really changed anything I did, other than one time when he ordered me to get rid of some lights. I think that was on CHINESE BOOKIE, could’ve been LOVE STREAMS. He said, “those lights are destructive to actors’ eyes.” To which I said “bullshit” but I changed the lights.

JH: The actors always came first?

AR: They did and why not? In FACES, we put no marks on the floor and that was a rule of John’s, you had to follow the actors with the camera. [Cassavetes] would say “I don’t care, you’ve got to get them,” so a lot of the time we were just catching up with the actors and the action was different in every take. That’s the way it was and he’d use it in the film if he liked the performance. It didn’t matter to him if the focus went soft in a few places. He would rather it didn’t but the performance was everything.

JH: Working on some of the films was not always a happy experience for you.

AR: I had some lousy experiences, from my point of view, on a couple of them. My first problems with John were on HUSBANDS and we had some flare-ups. I guess I was getting growing pains. He came to me after FACES and said “I never want to go into the editing room again.” I said, “OK”, and we hired Peter Tanner out of London to come in and be the editor. Tanner and I worked on the editing of HUSBANDS. We put it together the way John shot it.

JH: It corresponded to the shooting script, right?

AR: Yes. I did it the way he wrote it and shot it. We screened the picture to over 1,000 people. I thought they all loved it. People were talking about it and were ecstatic. Benny (Gazzara) was out of this world, he was so happy about it. The film starred Ben Gazzara and everyone else played subordinate roles. But out of that 1,000 people, there was only one person who really disliked it. That was John. So I left the editing room and he went in, but we had already sold the picture to Columbia.

Columbia also saw that first cut and they were not unhappy with it, but when John took the picture and re-edited it, they were very unhappy. They wanted changes and I suggested shortening the bar scene. For me, I wouldn’t put up with bullshit from these guys for more than five minutes. I thought you could cut it into a ‘can you top this?’ kind of moment, and then you could cut to the scene in the bathroom and it would still be dynamic, because you would have great contrast. [In Cassavetes’ cut,] these guys seem kind of arrogant and boorish in their behavior, so even when they go in and throw up, the impact is not quite there. You understand why the audience feels the way they do. But he was rather curt with me when I made that suggestion. He wanted it his way and ‘fuck it!’ I left him for a little while after that picture and I made a commitment to make another picture with Benny. We were going to do a film called FUNZY AND THE HOLY NAME SOCIETY. The money for the picture fell out the day before we were going to start shooting.

JH: How did you get involved with MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ after your falling out on HUSBANDS?

AR: [John] asked me to do that picture and I said no, because I was still pissed at him, but he’s a smart guy, so he had [Universal Pictures Executive] Ned Tanen call me and Ned said, “Frankly, it would make me feel more comfortable if you would do the picture.” So it fed my ego, my vanity, and I said, “OK, since you put it that way.” Somebody else wanted me other than John, but it was not quite so pleasant for me. Again, we reached a point, in the editing, where we disagreed. I thought [MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ] was a fantasy, and a lot of people wouldn’t accept the relationship between Seymour and Gena. I thought they were both wonderful, but I also thought that when Seymour carries Minnie up the stairs, they should have consummated the moment. It would have taken it out of fantasy and made the relationship real.

JH: They should have had sex at that moment?

AR: Yeah. You don’t have to show them, but you gotta let the audience know that it’s consummated, in my opinion, but [John] wouldn’t do it. I thought that was a moment lost for the audience, for them to feel that this was more than just dreamland, because any doubts they might have had over this relationship would have been cured, in my opinion, if that had happened. And it didn’t. He wanted to make his film from that point on and it wasn’t that he rejected everybody’s suggestions, but because I had such a close relationship, some rejections I took more personally. Perhaps I shouldn’t have.

JH: You parted company with him for a while after MINNIE, right?

AR: John called me and said we’re going to do A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, but I didn’t want to work with him at that point. John called me after they had shot WOMAN and asked me to come out to look at it, which I did. It was the toughest film I had ever seen. I saw it with two of the critics for the Daily News, who were crying in that theater.. Extraordinary. Tougher than the final version.

JH: What did it mean to be a producer for John Cassavetes?

AR: I enjoyed it. Basically I was the guy who kept our promises. That’s the way I liked to look at it. Before we would start shooting, we would settle on the general direction of the script, and we would settle on the actors. Then we would do a budget and I would go through it – in great detail with John – and say ‘here’s what we have.’ If John felt we needed something that was outside of that budget, I would not automatically say, ‘No, you can’t have it.’ I would usually say “Ok, I’ll try and get that, but if I get that, something else has to go,” because I did not want to wind up owing, I considered that bad fiscal management. When you have money you can make all sorts of promises, but you can’t fuck the people. I can’t go to the crew at the end of the week and say, “I can’t pay you because I have no money for work that you’ve just done.” John could be cavalier about those kinds of things, so I insisted that he stay out of it, and he would always know what I was doing. If he came and asked me how much money we had, I would tell him. If he came and suggested something that was really stupid, I would tell him it was stupid. If it was about the story or the actors, I’d give in at some point, but if it was about payment, I would not give in. He’d have to go my way, unless he could bring more money to the production. I had the power of the pen. He didn’t sign any checks and I took it very seriously. That was part of my contribution to make it happen. John busted his ass and did everything he could for that same reason. It’ one thing to start a project, but it’s another thing to actually finish it and to be able to do all the things you set out to do. That to me is a tremendous accomplishment. It hasn’t always been easy. It’s been tough. But that’s exciting in itself.

JH: There were times, though, before some productions began, when you had disagreements about money.

AR: He was a prick in that way, John. We were doing HUSBANDS and I went to the financier, Bino Cicogna, in Italy, to negotiate my contract, and had one of those experiences in life that you’re convinced will never repeat itself. No matter what I said to him, [Cicogna] said, “Yes.” I had learned not to take a lump sum for my work when I work with John, because the work goes on and on and on. I would’ve made a million dollars on that picture, but when I came back and told John what a great experience I had, that no matter what I said, Cicogna said yes, John was aghast. So I had to go back and renegotiate my deal to make it better for John. Only to find out that John had sewn everything up in terms of his contract. I was happy, at first, to do that picture, but I learned, you must negotiate your own deal. That’s why I didn’t do GLORIA.

I was on GLORIA for three days and I got upset because John wanted to incorporate me into his deal. I had objected to a few other things too. I didn’t like Buck Henry as the father. I didn’t like the kid in his Cuban heels. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all old tenements and was completely Italian. You would never get a gangster to sit down at a meeting and have pasta and orange juice. That is absolutely ludicrous. John said, “but it’s funny.” Funny, but not true. You could have him put whipped cream on that pasta, that would be funny too. I would say that mutually we decided that I wouldn’t do that picture. I left.

JH: After you saw the film, you still weren’t impressed with it?

AR: No, because I know how it came about. He didn’t want to direct that picture. He didn’t like gangsters. We had a terrible time on KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.

JH: Because he didn’t like gangsters or violence…

AR:…But he wrote it and when it came time to kill the bookie, he didn’t want to shoot it. I said, “What are you talking about? You gotta kill him!” And Benny would say, “John, after all, you wrote this, and the title is THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.” [laughs] We went around and around and John was serious. At that point, he did not want to kill him. So, quietly, he said, “ok, Al, let’s go kill the bookie.” We went back and did it.

JH: Maybe he thought the title would be ironic?

AR: No, I don’t think that at all, because we had already shot scenes that take place after the killing. [laughs]. I thought that film was going to make us a lot of money. We had to pull it after six or seven days. We were playing it at the Columbia in New York City, and when you come out at the end of a screening, the people were so angry and so vocal, telling people in line to not see the movie, “It sucks! It’s terrible!” all kinds of awful, awful things. Because we were handling our own advertising and distribution, we couldn’t sustain it and wait for the mood to change. It was deadly. Deadly.

JH: I read that for the initial release version of CHINESE BOOKIE, he turned over the editing to others because he was going to shoot another film that he was just acting in.

AR: Not true. That was his version. Nobody else did that. That’s what he wanted at the time. I feel he had personal reasons for playing it out at that length because he wanted a vehicle for Meade Roberts, who played Mr. Sophistication. I guess, in some way, John felt an obligation. Innumerable times, Ben and I said he had to cut that stuff, that this guy [Roberts] is boring. Deadly.

JH: I’ve read that you were the one who had to deal most with the union disputes on these non-union productions.

AR: I was the one, but I knew I would be from the beginning. The actors, especially Peter [Falk] and Ben, were all very supportive, in fact, I can’t think of a single actor, except maybe [OPENING NIGHT’s] Paul Stewart, who was difficult, and Paul was wonderful to me. He was just such an old time hand that he wanted things in a certain way and certain things he had to talk about with John, which was ok with me. He’d say, “I can’t talk to you Al, because you’re too nice.”

JH: I get the feeling that on LOVE STREAMS, the studio, Cannon, pretty much left you alone.

AR: Very much so. They were a peculiar company. They rode roughshod over their other low-budget productions, but not ours, because John was very strong. Chris Pearce was supposed to be the production manager, but he never worked on the film, because he was running Cannon. I got along well with him, and then I got into the union and took over as a production manager. Strangely, they wanted me to go out and get vendors who served the film’s cast and crew, and they would abuse them. I wouldn’t let that happen and I paid everyone out of our petty cash account. I ran the account up to $25,000 and they kept replenishing it, but they wouldn’t have paid the bills if they were sent into the official Cannon system. They were hoping to ultimately pay a dime on every dollar.

Other than that, they never interfered. On LOVE STREAMS, I came in as executive producer, with Golan and Globus as producers, though they never showed up. They tried to upgrade the status of their company by doing a Cassavetes film. John told Golan, “If we win any awards, you’re going to get the prize.” In any case, we had an Israeli cameraman, David Gurfinkel, a nice guy, and he had an Israeli camera crew. John loved the first two days of footage and was praising David Gurfinkel, and I had a sense of impending doom and I went to David and said, “That’s terrific, but don’t take it to heart. There are good days and bad days.” Two days later, John hated the footage and David. David came to me and said he was quitting. I said you can’t quit, wait until you get fired. But he complained about his ulcers and quit. John came to me and said, “Al, you gotta shoot this.” I said, “Fuck you, John, I’m not shooting it. I’m already working six days a week. I’m not doing it.” He said, “Ok, but you gotta talk to Golan.” So he gets on the phone – in my office – and gets Menahem on the phone in Tel Aviv and says, “Menahem, I’m with Al. He doesn’t want to shoot the picture!” and hands me the phone. Menahem says, “Please Al, you must, only for two weeks and I’ll find another cameraman.” So, I give in. Now I’m producing it, I’m production manager, and director of photography and I’m now working seven days a week! Madness. Madness. But that’s how John was. He always wanted me to shoot the picture, because that meant there was one less person to talk to. [laughs] He was the same way with [composer and sound designer] Bo Harwood, who never gets enough credit for the work he did.

JH: I get the feeling that on the films you shot after FACES, you became cinematographer by default. Were there some jobs you enjoyed more than others?

AR: The one thing I really enjoyed was being on a film from beginning to end. It’s like giving birth to a child and seeing it develop. It didn’t much matter after it went out, although it was, but the romance is gone. [After working with Cassavetes,] I worked on other films as a cameraman. I had difficulty with the people I was working with and working for because I didn’t respect them. I could have made it a lot easier on myself by just going along and doing my thing, but by nature, I’m not that way, and having grown up with John, I never had to be that way. I always had free rein to do whatever I had to do, and he trusted that, because I never screwed him around, and I would treat everyone the same way. If I had a problem, I would tell you, I wouldn’t sit back in the weeds and wait for the moment to pass. If I have difficulty, I will express it to you. If a director is having problems with someone on the crew, you have to have that person replaced. I don’t find it difficult to do that. Otherwise, you lose so many strides, you create factions within the company where someone has to side with one person over another, because we’re usually talking here about department heads.

JH: What were the circumstances with Jon Voight leaving LOVE STREAMS?

AR: We were negotiating with Jon and he accepted the part in the film and Cannon offered him a sum of money that he agreed to. The night before production began, [Voight] called me and said, “Al, I can’t do it. I’m backing out. I hope you understand. I just cannot do it. Please tell John.” There was no action to be taken. If he didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to do it. Because it was so close to the start of production, John, who did not want to play the part [of Robert Harmon], said he would because there was not enough time to get someone else.

JH: Is it true that Voight wanted to direct the film?

AR: He never said that to me. Maybe there was some private conversation between him and the person who wrote that. I can’t believe it because [Voight] knew John. John was going to direct the picture and [Voight] accepted the role knowing that. [Voight’s] career really took off again after that and he’s been working non-stop ever since. So, for him, it wasn’t the wrong move. It just was a lousy thing to do.

JH: Did you feel the release of LOVE STREAMS was botched?

AR: I didn’t feel it was botched. They just didn’t have the faith to release it, and let it build up momentum. Cannon just couldn’t do that. Everything had to be now. It was good for what it was. We won the Golden Bear in Berlin and we brought the award back to Menahem.

JH: Can you talk about how you were involved in re-releasing the five Cassavetes-owned films after his death?

AR: In 1989, before John passed away, Sam called me at home to tell me that John only had a couple of days to live. He asked me to come out to see him and I said no. I said I would come out for the funeral, but I wasn’t going to go there to watch him die. I had too much respect for him. So, I went out, handled the funeral arrangements for Gena. When it was over, she was still upset, and I asked if she wanted me to take the films and see what I could do with them. She said yes, please. I later found out that John died with no money. His films were his only assets besides his house. He left her broke. I got a call from Bruce Jenkins at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He wanted to run the films, but I couldn’t afford to make new prints, so I proposed that if he could find a bunch of venues to take the films on tour, we could make the new prints. He had them booked for a year and two months, in wonderful places where people really wanted to see the films. The bookings paid for themselves. I then talked with my friend Julian Schlossberg at Castle Hill. He wanted to distribute the films. He was enamored of them, but I insisted on the films being booked for one week at a time in New York, in sequence, and then, after a week, no matter what kind of business it was doing, the film should be pulled. It was a huge success, then we moved to the Laemmle Theaters in L.A. and played them the same way. Then, Disney, of all studios, called and wanted to put out video cassettes! This was the decision of Bill Mechanic, who was then running the company. He really wanted to do it and we made another deal that was very profitable. They brought out WOMAN first, but it didn’t go beyond a certain plateau in sales. They put the color films out first, but they didn’t sell enough units. WOMAN sold 44,000 units, but it wasn’t enough. Then they did CHINESE BOOKIE and it sold less, but they were charging $99 a tape! A mistake. How would you expect to sell it to the people who love these films, unless you sell at a more accommodating price? They didn’t want to release the black and white films, so I made a separate deal for those.

JH: When you went to work with other filmmakers, it was quite a different experience, I’d imagine.

AR: And how! Everybody in film I’ve worked with works hard, and for different reasons. I’ve been on productions that cost in excess of twenty million dollars that were all disasters at the box office. I did TEXASVILLE and HAPPY NEW YEAR, and they each played, maybe a week, at best. They really didn’t need me on those pictures. They just needed a body to do the things that you’re supposed to do within the system of making these multi-million dollar movies, which is not me. So I couldn’t help them, not that I couldn’t make it better or make it worse. It didn’t matter. The industry is set up that way and that’s the way it goes, which is why commercial films are invariably not as good as they should be. It’s hard to have a passion for your work when the people with box office clout have the say, because they’re only looking out for their interests. They want to keep their image alive. I really can’t fault them for that…or I can, but I understand why it’s done in this system.

JH: Is there a specific kind of movie you like, as a viewer?

AR: I want to like the characters or some of the characters. I want to be interested in the film. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending. I just want to find something to like so that I’m drawn into the story. I have no problems with whatever happens because when I’m involved, I’m taken for a ride. I show up being a very willing participant. I don’t care if it’s a musical, comedy, heavy drama, whatever. I just want to believe the people. Even if it’s a villain, I want to see something in that character that I believe. Most people are like that. They show up and say, “here I am. I want to believe you until you make me not believe you.” If you fall out of the picture, it’s very hard to get you back into it again. You fall into that emotional line, it’s hard to recover for an audience. Nowadays, it’s just titillation.

JH: A lot of viewers see the Cassavetes films as, if not pessimistic, then ‘downbeat.’ He saw them as essentially hopeful, apparently. I wonder if that’s because there’s always something hopeful in honesty, in that believability that you’re talking about.

AR: I think so. Everyone in life, unless you’re depressed, is hopeful, always looking for things to get better and we so foolishly screw things up for so many different reasons, for petty things. If you make a commitment to your spouse, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world should be turned off to you. That doesn’t mean you should commit adultery, it just means you should have more of an interest in your commitment. It’s just too easy to travel so many different roads at the same time and blame something or someone else for everything that goes wrong, every failure you might reach. You should take responsibility for what you’ve done. Own up to it because that’s the only way you can improve the situation for yourself, not even for others, just for yourself. The only way you get any better is by saying, “goddammit, I made a mistake there,” admitting it and moving on.

He really was a visionary. I never knew it at the time we were doing it. He created characters, he involved people, he had a willingness to let the actors take over the characters. As a testament to his talent, here we are today. He’s actually become more popular since his death in ’89. His attitudes come through the films. You don’t have to know him. I mean, often he would say, later in life, as death was approaching, that he didn’t want to do interviews. He’d do it to promote the films as they were coming out, but he cared nothing about leaving a legacy through interviews. He said, “just let ‘em see my films. Then they’ll know everything there is to know.”

He was an obsessive Greek. Earlier in his career, he was the greatest salesman. He had charm and could get you to do whatever he wanted you to do. As he moved on in life, it changed somewhat and he didn’t need to use his charm. He became an obsessive creator, who wanted to make his own creations.

JH: Was he discouraged by something?

AR: I really don’t have the insight to that. I always felt he became more determined to have the films reflect his current thinking, whatever that was, and it always changed. He was always writing. He had a compulsion to write. And if he could sell his material, he would sell it when he needed money, but he never wanted to go back and sell something he had written before as a current project. He always had to write and work on something new – deal with some part of the world or life that he had not dealt with before.

Some of the more difficult things to put up with were when I would argue with him about a scene and he would convince me to his way of thinking. Then, the next day, he’d change his mind again and I felt betrayed because he deserted his own view. But that was momentary because it happened so often and I got past it: [John] was a guy who was thinking all the time and I was only thinking about the things that I was doing. He was thinking about the big picture, so he has my undying respect for that.

On June 26th, 1999, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch visited George Eastman House to present his most recent film, Year of the Horse (1997), a documentary and concert film about Neil Young and Crazy Horse. In this conversation with the audience after the screening, Jarmusch discusses his experience on the film, and touches on a variety of other subjects, like working with actor Roberto Benignini and the musician Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He also reveals the secret wellspring for his creative ideas. We present this interview in support of our mini retrospective on Jarmusch, unspooling at the Dryden Theatre on select dates in February.

JJ – Jim Jarmusch
PCU – Paolo Cherchi-Usai, moderator
AM – Audience member

JJ: Year of the Horse is a film from a few years ago that was actually instigated by Neil Young. I’ve been a big fan of his music, particularly with the band Crazy Horse. So, after I worked with Neil, he did the score for my film Dead Man, and then I made a video for Crazy Horse, that was shot mostly using Super 8 cameras, and a few months after that Neil called me up and said, “Why don’t we make a longer film that looks like that.” So, within a week or two I was out on the road with Neil and Crazy Horse. And the result was The Year of the Horse… It’s not exactly a documentary, it’s not exactly a concert film. It’s, I don’t know what it is.

It’s shot on Super 8, on 16 mil, and there’s a little bit on video, the interview sequences. And then it was all bumped up to 35, blown up. So, it’s got a very raw kind of look that I think is appropriate to the music they make.

Umm, are there any questions?

AM: Which camera did you shoot? Were you on the stage?

JJ: I was on the stage, usually on this side of the stage. Yeah, but we switched around somewhat… There were three 16 cameras in the house and the stuff we shot outside of Seattle, in Washington. There were two 16 cameras in the house.

AM: How’d you pick the animation piece?

JJ: Actually, we didn’t make it. It was from my editor that I work with, Jay Rabinowitz – his kid is a huge fan of Shining Time Station. And, so, there was animated piece on that show that Jay brought in and said he wanted to work into the film. So, we did.

AM: We know what stock this was shot on, and I’m curious what the sound was recorded on.

JJ: Yeah, the music is recorded by Neil’s guy that records all of his live stuff. So, it was recorded on, and I don’t even remember, but I guess six track stereo.

AM: Is there a soundtrack?

JJ: No, there isn’t a soundtrack. But, there is a record that was made called Year of the Horse that is from the same tour and all from live concerts. But, none of the same songs are the same exact versions that we used in the film. But, it was strange, because when I was editing the film I would call Neil up and ask him, “Look, these are songs I’m proposing to use. What do you think?” And he would just say, “Well, whatever you think. You choose the songs.” So, he didn’t really want to be involved in what performances I chose. But then, when he made the record, he chose some of these songs, but all from different performances. So, there is kind of a soundtrack.

AM: Was Pancho happy in the end?

JJ: I don’t know if Pancho’s ever happy… Yeah, Pancho I got along really well. You probably don’t believe me but the one time that I knew Pancho, that I was close to Pancho, I was standing off stage and I had a lit cigarette in my mouth, and as they went on stage, he snatched the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his mouth and gave me the finger. And then I knew, “Wow, I’m down with Pancho,” you know? So, he’s really a great and amazing person. And what I really respect is that he says what he thinks. And I agree, actually, with what he says, or it wouldn’t be in the film. I mean, you can’t try to capture that.

My favorite rock and roll movies that are real documents are probably Don’t Look Back, the Pennebaker film about Dylan, and a film that Robert Frank made called Cocksucker Blues about The Stones on tour in ’72. And these films capture the musical artists at very pivotal times in their career history. And for me to make a film, or anyone, to make a film like that about Neil and Crazy Horse, you would probably have to have been around when they were playing music from their record, Tonight’s the Night which the record company wouldn’t release until two years after it was made. They were playing in small clubs, people were walking out, there’d be fifteen people at the end of the gig, very upset that Neil wasn’t playing his hit records. You probably could have gotten a really great film out of something like that , but I didn’t have that chance. I wasn’t there then and there was no intention like, “We’re going to make a searing insight into Neil Young and Crazy Horse.” Instead it was a very offhand project that was proposed to me by Neil and I was really – because I’m a fan of him and Crazy Horse – I was really happy to have a chance to try and make something out of the footage. But I know it’d be very pretentious of me to say, “This is a great documentary, or even, concert film.” It’s just… It is what it is. And, so, because they have such longevity, if that comes through in the film then there’s something in there about them. But, it’s not as deep or insightful as other real documents about musicians that I really like.

AM: I noticed that a lot of your shots came together to fit the music…

JJ: Well we only did that on the last song really, “Like A Hurricane“.

AM: Was this a conscious decision?

JJ: No, it wasn’t conscious, maybe sort of intuitive. And, for me, music is always the most inspiring form for me, and I just think music is so pure. And when I get depressed and, sort of down, on the way humans treat each other on this planet, I try to think about how much music means to people. And if you think, in any culture at any time, people are playing or listening to music. And people listen to music in their car, and they listen to music at home. Humans love music, you know. And that makes me feel, sometimes, better about being a human. Because it’s something that does knit us together, and it is something very strong, and it doesn’t have to have language to move you, and it doesn’t have to be from your culture. So, I’m very sensitive to music. I get a lot of inspiration from music. And I think that there’s a very large part of filmmaking that is very musical because, like a piece of music, a film passes before your eyes and ears in its own rhythm and time. It’s not like a painting or a book where you can stop, and read it again, or look at a different part. You have to follow its flow. So, there’s a connection in filmmaking to music that’s very important to me. But, I don’t think I answered your question at all.

AM: Along those same lines, when I was coming here tonight I wasn’t sure if I was preparing myself to see a Jim Jarmusch film or a Neil Young film. And I like both, I’ve seen all of your films, or at least five or six of them, I like Neil Young, of course. And I was curious with the audience whether it was going to be Neil Young people, Jim Jarmusch people, whatever. So, I guess my question goes back to, with you and Neil working together, do you think Neil was as flattered to be working with a filmmaker like you as you were flattered by working with a musician like Neil?

JJ: Gee, put me on the spot, why don’t you?

JJ: I know that I can honestly say that Neil respects me and he certainly knows that I respect him. And he’s treated me with great respect when we collaborated on Dead Man, and also when I made a video for Crazy Horse he gave me complete – he just said, “look, you know what you’re doing. You do it.” And he did the same with this film. So, I know there’s mutual respect there, but beyond that I’m not quite sure how to answer that. He deserves a lot more respect from me than me from him, in my opinion.

AM: What was his reaction to the film?

JJ: He liked the film a lot. I think he was very happy that Crazy Horse got some respect too, because, you know, they’re a really great rock group and a lot of people don’t even know their names, you know. Because Neil overshadows them in his popularity, and in the fact that he does a lot of projects without them. So, when Neil’s out on tour by himself, they’re out in the San Fernando valley putting up drywall, or whatever. And so, he was happy that the film gave them respect too and was some kind of half assed portrait of their connection to each other. I think he likes it. He was happy with it.

AM: Which of Neil’s films have you seen?

JJ: I’ve seen Human Highway and Journey Through the Past.

AM: What is your Neil video like compared to the rest?

JJ: You’d have to ask a film critic that… Different.

AM: Had you seen Neil in concert before doing this movie?

JJ: Yeah, I had. I think I’d seen Neil four or five times before.

AM: Was the Neil Young style of music what you grew up with and most influenced you growing up?

JJ: No, but I sort of go back to, like, the punk rock era. And I used to argue a lot when we were in our early twenties and I spent a lot of time at CBGB’s and I have a lot of friends still that are musicians – from The Ramones to Debbie Harry. And I remember arguing, not with those people particularly, but I used to argue about Neil Young. Because I thought Tonight’s the Night was an incredible record and had a lot of connection, in some ways to certain things you can never generalize. I mean, the whole thing, like, punk rock, is just some thing time magazine or something made up. It was like, a group of some kind of subculture. But, I used to argue, and there was a hardcore thing about, like, “Yeah, those are hippies. That’s hippie music, that’s…” And it was healthy to reject that. But, it’s not healthy to reject things that could be incredibly valuable, or that could be incredibly close to where you’re at, it could be a strength. So, even back then, in the late ’70s I remember defending, vehemently so, Neil Young’s work with Crazy Horse.

AM: Was working on this film the first time you actually met Neil Young?

JJ: Yeah, I never met him until, actually, while we were shooting Dead Man. While I was writing Dead Man my dream was to have Neil do the music, but, I didn’t know him, you know. So, then they were playing, Crazy Horse, in Sedona, Arizona and we were shooting and we had a day off when they had a gig there. So, we got tickets for our crew, and I’d been trying to reach Neil before that, but with no success. And I did get to meet him backstage, he was hanging outside of his tour bus, and I introduced myself and gave him a script, and told him about the film, and he probably threw the script away, and said, “I don’t plan anything in advance, but it’s real nice to meet you.” And then I sent him a cassette, a video of the film, in an early stage, and he called me back within, like, two days and said, “Hey, I saw your film I want to do the score.” So, it did happen magically somehow. But I never met him until then.

AM: Got any tobacco?

JJ: Yes, I do actually. [The Audience Laughs] It’s an inside joke…

AM: You’ve worked with many actors, but, specifically, I was wondering if you keep in touch with Roberto Benigni, and I was also wondering how you felt about his Life is Beautiful.

JJ: Yeah, I stay, always, in contact with Roberto. And he was in and out of New York on his way back and forth through L.A. and wherever, so, I saw him each time. Nothing that Roberto does would surprise me. So, I was not surprised by anything, you know. Because everything he does is surprising.

So, it’s kind of contradictory, but that’s Roberto. And I loved his film, because I know him and I love his heart and where things come from. And I thought, I know the intention of his film was from a place very sincere, loving, beautiful place. If I could get out of my own subjectivity and be more objective I might have some problems with his film, and I might, there are certain things that I would question about its setting. And, I don’t know, I was trying to imagine, say you took a story about a character that was a Native American child being taken on the Trail Of Tears and, could you make a comedy out of that in some way? I’m not sure how you could. I don’t know, but it’s too complicated for me because I cannot separate the Roberto I know from the work that I see. So, I can’t critique his film. I liked his film, but I know where it comes from in him. So, I thought it was a very loving, beautiful film. I did have some problem with the end, I thought it was a little… the kid wins the tank, you know. There are a few things, filmmaking-wise, I could critique, but I like the film and I know what he meant it to be, and it reached a lot of people in a beautiful way.

AM: Were you ever in a recording band or did you ever use your own music for a film?

JJ: Stupidly, no. But I’m half deaf from growing up in front of amplifiers anyway.

AM: How much of Year of the Horse is comprised of clips from years past?

JJ: …Partly. Neil gave me access to footage from ‘76 and ‘86, and this was shot in ‘96. So, I wove in those. He let me look at a lot of footage and said, “If there’s anything in here you want to use.” So, I selectively used some of it, but I really wanted to keep it mostly in the present. But, I wanted to have some things reflected back. But, I’ll tell you, they are still having the same exact arguments now.

JJ: I’m serious, I saw that same argument. Over the same song! The same vocal part!
[The Audience Laughs] Like, Billy Talbot is something else, you know. I mean, I love that guy, but he’s still arguing about the same things with Neil.

AM: Do you know why [inaudible song title] was never recorded?

JJ: No, I don’t. [The Audience Laughs] What I want to know is why On the Beach isn’t on CD, which is one of my favorites, but…

[One Audience Person Claps Loudly]

JJ: I have it on vinyl, but it sounds like someone served pizza on it, and spilled beer on it, which, probably they have.

AM: That’s the way it should sound.

JJ: Yeah, it sounds pretty good.

AM: Where did you shoot the interview, and does Neil Young take his father on tour?

JJ: We shot the interviews backstage in a venue in Dublin. And I shot them there because I thought it was out last gig, and I kept threatening the band that I was going to interrogate them, and it was sort of my last chance. Although I didn’t know that I would go outside of Seattle and film more. But, it was the last leg of the European tour that I was with them. So, I found that room backstage that I thought looked interesting for an interrogation room and hauled them in there one by one. And Neil’s father was there on vacation in Ireland, just traveling. So, he happened to be there. So, I dragged his ass in there too! [The Audience Laughs] But, he’s great, Neil’s father is very known in Canada as a sports writer and a novelist. And sometimes if you go in Canada, sometimes people say to Neil, “Oh yeah, you’re Scott’s kid, right?” And they know Scott more than Neil.

AM: What’s your next project?
JJ: Well, I just finished a new film called Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Seriously, I’m not joking! [The Audience Laughs] And it was premiered at Cannes, and I think it’s going to be released in the states, probably, early next year, if not this fall. And I would love to bring it up here and have some kind of premiere up here.
[The Audience Claps Loudly]

JJ: I can’t say for sure, but Paolo and I have been talking about doing something special here, if we can.

AM: Are your films officially included in the George Eastman film library now?

JJ: No, they’re not, but they are being stored thanks to Paolo’s help. They are getting saved.

PCU: Who are the musicians on that film?

JJ: For?

PCU: For the new film.

JJ: Oh, my new film. The score was done by RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, in New York. And he did a beautiful score.

PCU: You can bring him too.

JJ: I don’t know. [The Audience Laughs] That might be problematic.

But, they’re really great and RZA‘s a really brilliant and great musician. It was also a dream come true because when I was writing this film, Ghost Dog, what I was listening to was a lot of hip hop stuff, and I’ve been a fan of the Wu-Tang since I’ve known of them. And I luckily knew people who knew RZA and who got to him, and he did the score. He’s amazing. He went with us to Cannes, too, to premiere the film.

AM: When will this film we just saw be released publicly? Will it come out?

JJ: I hope so, but Neil owns this film. He asked me to make the film, so his company produced it. And one never knows what the hell Neil’s going to do with stuff.

JJ: I mean, he’s got archived stuff from, oh man, his whole career. Incredible stuff, demo recordings from pre Buffalo Springfield and even recordings of him playing with Rick James before he even left Toronto. Incredible stuff. So, I don’t know, I keep asking Neil why that isn’t made available.

AM: Was Neil at all nervous about shooting and putting out a more avant-garde concert video like this?

JJ: He seemed to have no trepidation whatsoever. He was just like, you know, “Yeah”.

AM: There are many people who like to say that Neil will never release all of his music himself and that it’s just not going to get put out there, would you believe that?

JJ: No, I wouldn’t believe that… Because I’ve been in his studio, in his ranch, with him and he’s working endlessly on putting out all of his recorded material. Like, he’s definitely going to do it, but he’s always got some other project. He has a new album now, that’s finished, that he’s going to release. He’s always got so many things going on that I know he’ll do it, but it’s never the priority because he knows it exists as a body of work. And I’ve been yelling at him for years to get “On the Beach” out, and he did master it, and then he didn’t like the way it was mastered and, so, it didn’t come out, it didn’t get re-released. So, I don’t think it will be soon, but it will. Eventually, all of his stuff will come out.

AM: I’d love to know where your ideas come from, but, that’s like asking you how you got to be as tall as you are. I guess I would want to know…

JJ: I drank a lot of milk. [The Audience Laughs]

AM: What were the inspirations that caused you to be a writer and a filmmaker? Are there films or filmmakers that, maybe, come to mind?

JJ: That’s an impossible question because, to me, I can say that I really am inspired by so many things from literature, to music, and films, and people I’ve met, and things I’ve observed, that it’s so vast a kind of thing, you know. It’s such a gift to be a living human being. I keep thinking about the planet Earth and the universe, and its existence is just so brief. And we get this gift of being living creatures for this flash of time that… Well, I’m sounding like a real stoner now!
[The Audience Laughs Uproariously]

JJ: It’s like, “Wow”… But, sincerely, I mean there’s so many incredible thing that you get inspired by. I couldn’t start listing them.

AM: Did you ever want to be anything else, because of your influences, growing up?

JJ: A little bit. I sort of wanted to be a writer, and I was, kind of, a musician for a while. And I feel like I was supposed to be a musician, but I took a detour somehow and became a filmmaker. But, so many things are so inspiring, you know? I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s not a good answer but… Have you got about five days where I can start listing things that inspire me?

AM: What musical inspirations of yours would you be interested in making a film about?

JJ: Link Ray, Iggy Pop. Old Dirty Bastard maybe… [Tom] Waits. I actually have a film I made that I haven’t finished that I shot years ago. English TV asked me to make a half-hour show on Waits and then, before I started editing it, they told me they weren’t going to give me any money to finish it.

But I have some great stuff of Waits. Incredible stuff I should cut together. But, it wouldn’t be a feature, it’d be, like, a half an hour. Wow, there’s a lot of great musicians, I’m not sure. I did want to make a film about Pygmy musicians in central Africa. I think their music’s incredible. But, I don’t know.

AM: Yeah, I saw you on a Bravo documentary about Lee Marvin and you mentioned some other connection, do you want to explain that further?

JJ: Well, I wanted to make a film, years and years ago, called The Sun Song… Well, it wasn’t going to be called this, but, it was basically going to have Lee Marvin in it and then Tom Waits, and John Lurie, and then another friend named Richard Bose. And all of us look, a little bit, like we could be related to Lee Marvin. [The Audience Laughs] And then Lee died and we started this secret organization called “The Sons of Lee Marvin.” [The Audience Laughs] And, it does exist, this organization, as you saw. I gave John Boorman a card, he’s an honorary member now. So, I love Lee Marvin… He’s a hell of an actor.

BLUECAT SCREENWRITING WORKSHOP in Rochester, New York with Fairport Native Gordy Hoffman

Do you have a great idea for a movie? Have you started your screenplay, but unable to finish? Maybe you’ve written your script, and you’re struggling with your rewrite. Sundance Film Festival Award Winner and BlueCat founder and judge Gordy Hoffman is coming to Rochester to conduct live all-day workshops on the art of screenwriting. The Art of Screenwriting Workshop will include topics such as selecting an idea, finding your creative voice, scripting effective dialogue, compelling character arcs, the rewrite, effective story construction, audience relationship, work habits and discipline, production alternatives, industry awareness and more. The Advanced Script Intensive will allow screenwriters to review their scripts in an intimate setting of 10 writers or less. All writers in the Advanced Workshop will submit an excerpt of 10 pages prior to the workshop to ensure an intense, inspirational session. Note: There will be two sessions of the Advanced Script Intensive, with a limit of FIVE writers per session. Both Workshops will focus on measuring your screenwriting challenges, cultivating your fresh ideas, as well as encouraging and inspiring your true instincts for storytelling in movies. Please bring your laptops or pen and paper—we will be screenwriting!

Workshops held at:
Rochester Talent
11 Centre Park
Rochester, NY 14614
585.271.4327

Register here

Art of Screenwriting Workshop
Sunday, August 5th 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. Fee: $75

Advanced Script
Intensive (Two Sessions Available - Limit 5 per session)
Saturday, August 4th 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Sold Out!
Tuesday, August 7th 6:30 pm. - 10:30 p.m.
Fee: $75

Bio of Gordy Hoffman: Winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival for LOVE LIZA, Gordy Hoffman made his feature directorial debut with his script, A COAT OF SNOW, which world premiered at the 2005 Locarno Intl Film Festival. A COAT OF SNOW made its North American Premiere at the Arclight in Hollywood, going on to screen at the Milan Film Festival and the historic George Eastman House. Recently, the movie won the 2006 Domani Vision Award at VisionFest, held at the Tribeca Cinemas in NY. Gordy is the founder and judge of the BlueCat Screenplay Competition. He currently teaches screenwriting at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Bitter Films: A Don Hertzfeldt Odyssey

~Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

Can a bunch of goofy cartoons provide any sort of intellectual stimulation? It’s possible that the reams of paper that have been used for graduate school theses on Bugs Bunny and Betty Boop have come close to rivaling the amount needed to animate these characters in the first place, so let’s assume the answer to this question is yes. But as in any other artistic endeavor, the number of bad animated films throughout 100 years of film history has far surpassed the tally for those animations that have endured. These surviving gems were typically made by innovative artists like Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Max and Dave Fleischer, who understood not only how to bring a drawing to life, but also the true nature of cinema.

Don Hertzfeldt’s animated short films are inherently cinematic. This is not something that can be said for a lot of films, both live action and animated. Cinema, as projected on film anyway, is essentially an illusion: a series of still photographs that fool the human mind into thinking it’s seeing movement. In order to succeed, the art of cinema requires two things: the first is a good projector with enough light and the capability to run film through it 24 frames per second so that we don’t notice the black spaces in between the frames. The second thing that’s required is the will and imagination of the audience. Most mainstream movies today are satisfied to just provide the illusion of movement and action, while their pedestrian scripts and unimaginative direction never give audiences the opportunity to use their minds and their own personal experiences in order to fill in the other black spaces that a movie can figuratively offer, such as questions about narrative, characters, or even, heaven forbid, how what’s happening on the screen might relate to their own lives.

Whether you see them projected on film in a theatrical setting or on this DVD, Don Hertzfeldt’s films will certainly amuse you and make you laugh, but they will also provide you with the space to project your own possible universes. This generous notion will be apparent to you right away because Hertzfeldt’s hand-drawn characters are little more than non-descript stick figures or plain-looking bunnies – not much to look at. But Hertzfeldt understands that one small gesture such as the shifting of eyes or one careful step can suggest a limitless galaxy of feelings. He rarely uses dialogue and when he does, it’s often improvised after the animation is completed or spoken in alien (and probably non-existent) languages. Still, it’s never the lines that count, but the pauses in between them. These characteristics are something he shares in common with those great and influential filmmakers from the golden age of animation mentioned above.

While watching his entire output to date on this DVD, you will certainly be impressed by Don Hertzfeldt’s growth and maturity as a filmmaker. Only 2 years pass between the making of the very funny first film Ah L’amour - which derives much of its humor from a pervasive and somewhat exaggerated fear of women – and the making of his 3rd film, the sweet but equally funny Lily and Jim. The latter film suggests that there are a number of reasons why men and women have so much trouble getting together, but doesn’t really lay the blame on either sex.

Lily and Jim is also the film that first introduces what has become Don’s trademark existential sense of dread, which exists in those quiet spaces between lines of awkward dialogue. This sense that the worst is going to happen blooms to full fruition in Billy’s Baloon, which uses no dialogue at all but builds suspense between the sound effects of a harmless old balloon pummeling a small child. The result is truly unnerving and incredibly funny, so much more than just a sick and twisted cartoon parody of Albert Lamorisse’s classic short film The Red Balloon (1956).

In his most recent work, like the Oscar-nominated Rejected, and especially in The Meaning of Life, we see a movement away from simple dread towards explorations of what it means to be an artist and what it means to be simply alive. There are moments in both of these films that recall Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in the way that they boldly confound an audience’s expectations of where and how a film should begin and end. Like all great art, they are more interested in asking questions than answering them.

Some might think this is a lot to say about movies where characters rip their friends’ flesh off and wear it on their heads like a hat while declaring they are the Queen of France. In their ability to throw a viewer into convulsions of laughter, nothing can compete with the power of Don Hertzfeldt’s films. Be prepared to have lots of fun while watching these mini masterpieces, and if they make you think a little too, just consider that another of the great dvd bonus features in this first volume from Don Hertzfeldt’s Bitter Films.

Hertzfeldt on Hertzfeldt

The following comments were compiled from comments made by Don Hertzfeldt during a retrospective screening of his work and question-and-answer session at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY on September 24, 2005

Don Hertzfeldt: I hate it when people talk during movies, so, I’ll try to keep it brief and just throw something at me if I’m rambling or get boring.

UC Santa Barbara is a school that’s tops in the country for things like theory and history and criticism and analysis, but there’s very little focus on production. So, by virtue of that, no one else was using the animation camera. And I was able to make four films while I was there

AH, L’AMOUR (1995)

I was eighteen years old and a freshman at UC Santa Barbara. The beginning production class was taught by a guy named Dana Driskel. His whole thing was if you can’t summarize your movie in one sentence, you’ve got no point. We all had to pitch a premise. I didn’t have a premise. I just wanted to do a cartoon like the stuff I did in high school, which was just stick figures attacking each other. Dana said, “no, no, no, no, you gotta have a premise. Where are you coming from with this?” So, I went home and thought about how I was going to justify stick figures killing each other? No doubt there was a girl somewhere in my life who was mean to me. So, the next day I come back in and I say, “my premise is: women are evil.” Dana says, “well, see now, that’s a premise.”

GENRE (1996)

The following year, I made Genre, which was probably the weakest thing I’ve ever done. But it owes a lot to the stuff I used to do in high school too.

LILY AND JIM (1997)

I was, up to this point, pretty naively clinging to, my written shooting scripts, basically because I didn’t know any other way to do it. I thought that’s what everyone did when they make a movie. But I didn’t really have to communicate any ideas to anybody else creatively because I was more-or-less doing everything. With Lily and Jim, we brought Robert May and Karen Anger to do the voices and they improvised about a quarter of the dialogue that ended up in the film. I gutted my script, included their stuff and blended it all together in the sound mix. Without Karen and Rob, I think it would be completely lost.

BILLY’S BALOON (1998)

Lily and Jim is basically all dialogue and gesticulations, which is just boring as all hell to animate. So I felt I just wanted to do something that was action again—no dialogue, just have a little fun. And I had a dream about a little boy who’s running in a field. He’s running and running and he slowly starts floating until he’s flying through the air. And then he gets hit by an airplane. Somehow that all came together in Billy’s Balloon.

REJECTED (1999)

Soon after Lily and Jim, I started to get approached to do commercials for television and interstitials for weird cable programs and things like that. I would never do a commercial. I never have and I never will. It’s just the sort of thing that goes against every bone in my body. But I was sitting around with Rob after receiving one offer and we were wondering what would happen if we just took their money and intentionally made the most horrible, inappropriate garbage we could? Just to see if it would get on air. Sort of like the guy who put the rake in the modern art museum, I guess. So we started riffing on that and I think it just sort of snowballed from there and I started to get more ideas and they started to get funnier. I realized I had another film here and we could do an Andy Kaufman kind of thing.

WELCOME TO THE SHOW (2003)
INTERMISSION IN THE THIRD DIMENSION (2003)
THE END OF THE SHOW (2003)

I co-curate a touring theatrical program called The Animation Show. For the first year out, I did three cartoons to kind of bookend the program and give it some sort of shape. I thought that middle one actually came out pretty good.

THE MEANING OF LIFE (2005)

The laughter ends here. The Meaning of Life is a movie that I wanted to make before Billy’s Balloon, but I wasn’t a good enough animator yet, and I didn’t know how to do it yet technically or without a computer. We don’t use computers for anything other than sound mix. Everything is hand-drawn and shot traditionally on two big old animation rigs. The Meaning of Life took about four years to make. It was a lot like writing a novel by etching into a rock one letter at a time with your fingernails. The story and the visuals are all in your head; but that’s the pace it takes to come out. That’s the density of this miserable project.

All arguments about digital and film aside, quality-wise, I’ve always felt the old-fashioned process helps me creatively. If there’s a shot I have to come up with, an outer space special effect for instance, I just use backlights and a camera. I’ve got to physically create that. I’ve gotta construct plastic sheets. I’ve got to get the lighting right. I’m gonna have to experiment and come up with things I might not have come up with before. Whereas when I work with a computer, a lot of the time, the first thing I try works out great or just ok and I’ll move on…I don’t feel like I’m really thinking about what I’m doing and experimenting. I really like real light and a real camera lens. If there’s a problem with the camera, I can fix it with my hands and it’s not like “file not found” or something.

The film took a long time to make and the deadline for Sundance was coming up. It looked like we could probably get it done in time and that helped focus and get our act together and have a goal. Ironically, I’ve always felt that the film has always been about three to five percent unfinished. The DVD will feature a remastered version, which allows me to go back and flesh it out and finish it. I’m not pulling a George Lucas or anything. I’m not adding Jabba the Hut or Greedo shooting first.

The finished crowd scene was completed on an enormous stack of paper and I got a fireproof safe to put it in. At one point, I thought it was perfectly logical to get a bigger fireproof safe to put the fireproof safe into and every time I left the apartment, I thought, “someone’s breaking in, someone’s breaking into the apartment and they’re gonna steal the stack of stick figure drawings. I just know it.” It was pretty bad. I sunk into a pretty deep depression making the movie. It’s good to get it out of my head.

Question: What’s most interesting about The Meaning of Life is that it’s not played for laughs. Was there ever a point during its making where you thought about putting in something like a cloud with hemorrhoid problems again, or something like that?

Don: No. It’s a film I wanted to make for a long time. A lot of people have asked me, “Why didn’t you do another comedy? Why is it so different?” It’s not something I really think about. The film I’m working on now, it’s a comedy, but it’s got some sad bits, and some weird bits, um, but it’s, you know, it’s just what’s next. I wanted to make something beautiful. I’ve listened to a lot of artists talk and I know how pretentious it sounds, but it was just the one that had to come out of my head next.

Are there any other animators or particular filmmakers, writers or philosophers that have influenced your work?

Um, Monty Python. The philosophy of Monty Python. Honestly, I don’t watch a lot of animation and I don’t get a lot of inspiration from animation. I don’t feel like I’m a part of that community. I went to a very traditional film school. I’ve never taken a course of animation. Lots of times I just feel like an independent filmmaker who happens to animate and use trick photography and things. I like Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch and Edward Gorey. I don’t read fiction. I’m constantly reading non-fiction and science books. If you animate anything, you have to know a little bit about everything, so I’m constantly reading ten things at once. As a writer, you need constant input in order to have an output. I’m not talking about plagiarizing; you just need stuff going on.

There’s a short film called Tango and it’s an Academy Award winner from 1982. I’m embarrassed because I don’t know the name of the director [Zbigniew Rybczynski]. It’s a Polish film, and I think that if I had the name of the director in front of me, I couldn’t pronounce it. It is a film that I saw when I was very, very young. I wouldn’t even call it an inspiration so much as a benchmark for The Meaning of Life. I saw this film and it’s very early CGI. At the time, in the early ’80, it’s something that no one had ever seen done before. It’s basically an extended crowd scene, and this movie stuck with me when I was little and I always wondered, “can you do a crowd scene like that or bigger animated traditionally by hand?’’ So, when I did The Meaning of Life and I was working with all those people, all those crowds, I remembered Tango. I wondered if I could pull this off with traditional animation like they did with a computer. I think I did, but it just took four years.

Since you’re someone who grew up in the video age, I’m curious how you developed your appreciation for film. I’m sure that by the time you got to school you watched a lot of films on video as opposed to 16mm.

Yeah. When I graduated from film school the digital age had taken over and I just didn’t learn it. I learned traditional photography and my first four films were all completed on 16mm. I just like the organic quality of it. It’s much more difficult to make and maybe I’m masochistic. I feel like there’s a process you have to go through, you know where you’ll get better ideas as you go along. Rejected was something that there is no script for. I learned over the years, especially with comedy, that over the course of a year-and-a-half making something like Rejected, you get sick of your own jokes. It’s just not funny after the second week. So, we just started having more faith that I could just do all the animation and just have mouths moving and have Rob, who is funny, improvise voices over that. I think the long process of working with film, allows us to do that, allows us to come up with better stuff as we go along and really shape it organically. TheMeaning of Life is the first film we edited on a computer and it worked out great, but it was strange for me because when you work on a flat bed, you’ve got the film and a razor blade and, it’s easy to, for example, cut six frames from a scene. It takes about five minutes. I have time to walk around and think about the cut and think about what we’re doing. With computers, it’s just a key stroke and we’re ready to move on. And I’m not ready, you know, I need to take my time.

Do you think that kind of patient thinking is absent from filmmaking in general because of the move to digital cutting and editing?

It shouldn’t be. I don’t want to speculate what other guys are doing, but that’s the way I experience it. Maybe I’m just partially retarded and I take an extra long time to think, but I don’t know. I just like chewing on things.

Do you agree with your professors that you have to have a premise of one sentence when making a film?

I learned from that experience, that having it in your head, that one simple sentence, you’re forced to focus; and you’re forced to realize that this is the film you’re making, this is what you’re trying to say through this. I think that might work for any medium. If you’re painting a picture, what’s your point?

Can you talk about the reactions audiences have had to The Meaning of Life?

I’ve gone on tour with the Animation Show for about twelve cities now. We’ve gotten radically different reactions to The Meaning of Life and I really love it. I really love the awkward silences; I love tension in a movie house, like turning down the volume and making everyone sit quietly and hear the chairs squeaking. It’s like that shot in Billy’s Balloon where it drags on just a little too long…twisting the knife. I’m losing my train of thought but what I want to say is that most people love it or hate it. I’ve heard from girls who’ve said they cried and I’ve heard from people who say, “I just completely didn’t get it; I totally hated that movie.” I think everyone’s right; I think it’s all equally valid. I think that’s the point of art. My point is that I hate it when artists loom over their work too much and dictate and say, “this means this and you’re wrong and you’re right and you’ve got it.” Once it’s out there, it’s not yours anymore; it’s all equal. I just feel for thousands of years, people have argued and whined and killed each other over nothing. What’s the point of everything when what they do with themselves is usually a complete waste of time? The opening scene I don’t think of as abstract at all. I think you can go to any mall during the Christmas season and just sit down and you’ll see that exact parade of humanity playing out.

Your first two films were centered around women. Was that due to the fact that you were a freshman in college? And, do you still think women are evil because I noticed that the rest of the films pushed away from that concept?

No, I think women are superior to men in every possible way except maybe at killing people in certain video games. When the first film came out, yes, I was eighteen years old and I think every male goes through that in college. But at the first screenings of the film, women were cheering louder than the men. I also did my best to make the guy not so innocent himself by having him pass by the big fat woman. That’s my favorite part. He’s kind of a prick himself. It all evens out I think. I think the man and the woman are both equally inept in Lily and Jim.

How involved are you with the DVD production both with your Bitter Films, Vol. 1 coming up and with The Animation Show?

The Animation Show is very time consuming. And Mike and I curate the thing; we program every film. And the lineup for the DVDs of The Animation Show are always a little bit different than the theatrical versions. We program the leftovers that we feel are just as good but may not fit in the theatrical program. But the actual production of the DVDs we leave to our guys in the office to work with all the filmmakers and put together any extras they’d like to do—commentaries or whatever. For the Bitter Films DVD, I’m a little too involved. I’ve actually been obsessively looming over every aspect of that. It’s ten years worth of films and ten years worth of special features. I’ve been going through the closets and boxes and boxes of stuff. All of the films are being transferred to high definition for the first time from the original camera negatives. The negatives require some digital cleanup and restoration work because they’re really dirty and scratched up. I really do think that digital and film have a lot to gain from each other and that’s just one small example. Anyone who tells you that film is going to die or that digital’s going to die, they’re just trying to sell you something.

Can you talk about your creative process versus the technical aspect of your work?

Creating is a lot of waiting. Someone watching me on one of these projects would probably think I’m just a big slacker because I’ll pace the desk, I’ll watch a movie, I’ll check my e-mail. I have to be in the right mood. To put it really, really crudely - I think maybe Steve Martin said this and maybe he was paraphrasing someone else—but, he said, the creative process is a lot like going to the bathroom. You can sit down and you can force yourself and try and try and try and it’s not going to be very good. It’s not going to work out well. Which is damn true. But if you just wait, if you’re patient, it’ll happen. It’ll flow. Of all the philosophies and writings about the creative process I’ve ever read, that seems like it makes the most sense. It’s like being happy. You can’t force yourself to be happy. It’s just there one day. I feel like most of the time I’m waiting, then it’s off to the races. I’m pretty nocturnal. For The Meaning of Life, I was up until about six in the morning everyday and going to bed when the sun was coming up just because it was quiet and the phone didn’t ring and, if I checked my e-mail at five in the morning, I was fucked because no one was e-mailing me.

Technically, it’s all pen and paper. If there’s a wrinkle or a tear in the paper, I’ll leave it. There’s not much more to it than that. Everything is what you see. For The Meaning of Life, there are three hundred human characters in the opening sequence and every one of them was individually animated. Everyone has a distinct walk and a line they’re repeating. The first problem I faced making that film was figuring out if animation paper, which is very thin, could withstand the punishment of all of these characters going on at once. The paper turned into a kind of cottony mush towards the end, but it held up. Sometimes there are special tricks like the shot where the sun flies away from the camera, which requires special lights and special materials other than pen and paper.

What special tricks were required for combining live action with animation in Genre?

It’s just what it looks like. I had my camera operator up on a ladder looking down and on every piece of paper I just put my hand in and just held it real still and she would direct my hand one millimeter this way or that way. It looks really cool, but it’s really easy to do. The same process was done with the Intermission film with shaking the lollipop. I just put a lollipop on the artwork and adjusted it with the worst stop motion animation known to man.

Given the arduousness of your process, are there any films that you come up with that you feel you can’t make just because of the limits of your natural life?

I have feature projects and live action projects. Live action projects are just too expensive for me. I still live like I did in college. When I was in film school, during freshman year everyone was making live action because they want to be the next Steven Spielberg, but they’ve all got thirty thousand dollars of a rich uncle’s money to spend on it. I just didn’t have that sort of funding. Ah, L’Amour was made for four hundred dollars in two weeks or so. I didn’t have to cast my friend to play a forty year-old and I had complete control over everything with animation. Certainly there’s some live action stuff that I’ve always wanted to try, but there’s just no money for it. I did the feature dance in Hollywood around 1999. There was actually a feature script of Lily and Jim written. And I met with every studio that was doing animation at the time. Now, of course, no one is doing 2-D animation anymore. And everyone told me, “we really want to do this. We really want to take on Disney.” But they didn’t want to do anything that Disney wouldn’t want to do. They all wanted to see it, but they didn’t want to pay for it and risk it. It was a lot of commuting to Los Angeles and I realized that I’m still really young and I can still do whatever I want to on this level and there’s still a pretty cool audience out there waiting for a new film every now and then. So, I just kind of put it on the shelf and said, “I’ll worry about that later.” I don’t have kids and I don’t have to eat well. I don’t have to wear a tie or go to the office or anything. I can just keep making cartoons with my friends and grow up a little later, I guess.

In making live action films, you can, if you don’t like a scene, have the actors do it again. I know you don’t have that luxury in animation. Have you ever found yourself re-doing a scene? How much of a perfectionist are you?

I am a true perfectionist and I’m probably my worst critic. The hardest thing is to cut out the stuff that you spent the most time on. For Lily and Jim, I’ve got hours and hours of Rob and Karen improvising because as soon as I realized that my script wasn’t as funny as anything they could come up with, I started to roll tape. So, we had a lot of material to pick and choose from and splice in there. For the dvd, we were able to recreate an alternate movie from all their other dialogue and it’s just as good. The one good thing about animation is that you can get the timing down perfectly and I firmly believe that one or two frames can make the difference of a scene being funny or not. There’s something about timing that you can really get at microscopically when you animate.

What would you have done if the commercials and interstitials in Rejected had actually been accepted for broadcast?

Well, it is fictional. When the film was finished, there were a lot of people who actually thought it was a non-fiction film. They though it was a documentary. I don’t understand that because all the characters die at the end. I don’t really know how they could see that. The rumor that it was real sort of grew and it was fueled by a lot of film critics who review your film without watching it. They’ll read the synopsis. Our synopsis said that these commercials were rejected just to set up the joke. So, a lot of reviews went to press saying that it was a non-fiction film and things like, “Wow, Don made lemons out of lemonade here. He got rejected, but he made a really neat short out of it.” For the longest time, we just let it go. I’d do Q&As and I’d get asked and I’d just say, “I can’t legally discuss…” It grew weird, it grew into this Andy Kaufmann sort of thing. So, I wondered what would happen if we really did get these on air now and just confuse everyone even more by taking out The Family Learning Channel and just say you’re watching MTV or the Cartoon Network or something. Then, to put another spin on the whole thing, Rejected was supposed to air on the Cartoon Network a few years ago. We got it on the air in Cartoon Network Spain and all these European offshoots of the Cartoon Network. In America, they were all excited. They ran ads for it, you know, “This weekend, Rejected, uncut, commercial free. We’ve got the balls to show it!”

Can you comment on other television commercials that have ripped-off your style?

It’s a bummer only because I don’t want people thinking that I actually did it. You know, you can’t copyright a stick figure. Maybe we popularized it. Rejected is so anti-corporate and so hateful about that sort of thing. And it just flies over the heads of ad agencies. They just see it as something else that they can poison and rip off. My only gripe is that people actually think that I do commercials and I’ll never do a commercial. As long as everybody knows that, and tells their friends, we’ll never have to worry about it. It’s annoying, and I can maybe get a lawyer, but it seems like such a square thing to do and everyone’s suing each other and I’d probably lose anyway. I don’t think you can copyright something like stick figures, so…c’est la vie. There were some cell phone commercials a few years ago that did something off of Lily and Jim—the same sort of squiggly stick figure thing—and, before they were made, they actually e-mailed me and they said, “Can we just pay you a lot of money to do these commercials?” And I said, “No, I don’t really want to do commercials.” And they said, “Ok, what if we just paid you a lot of money and we just used your style? You don’t have to do anything.” And I said, “well, it’s just as bad because people are going to think I did it and I’m just not interested.” They wrote back and said, “what if we just sent you our art and you just tell us when it’s far away enough from your stuff so you won’t sue us.” In hindsight, I should have just told them to fuck off. So they start sending me these weird mutant stick fi