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THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF FILMMAKING,
WITH TOO MANY DIGRESSIONS AND AVATAR REFERENCES (cont'd)
an essay by andrew bujalski
There were movies in my youth that laid ground work for the video game cinema to come, but I think I persisted in seeing the human themes in them even if that was not their primary thrust. And as I got older I discovered that other movies existed that did away with the presumption that a fantastical high concept was prerequisite to exploring characters and situations, and indeed a movie that took place in a recognizable environment was often much more surprising than one that took place in outer space. Most of Europe, for example, seemed to have much weirder stuff going on than the Mos Eisley cantina ever did.
When I got to college I started in earnest to make my own narrative films, and they were not very good. I had fantasies of what I wanted to see on the screen, but they were fuzzy fantasies and I had no clue how to realize them. Though the program I was in had a strong documentary backbone and imparted hugely valuable lessons about using reality as a material, I think I frankly didn't know enough about reality to know how to work with it. As for casting, I went the conventional route, putting up notices to lure in semi-professional actors bearing headshots, and culling from there to my best options to play the leads. In these actors' defense, the ones I worked with were all committed collaborators and affable people, and in the hands of a director who'd known better how to deploy them, they might have been great. But I was slowly discovering that I was getting more interesting, if often inelegant, results from the supporting cast, which mostly consisted of non-actor friends of mine that I'd talked into helping me out. They lacked for technique-as did I-but there was a vibrancy to what they were doing that I didn't know how to get in the "real" actors' performances. Anyone watching those films would have had no trouble telling the two camps of performers apart, and I think in large part the advantage that my friends had was that they did not particularly care about pleasing the director, and this gave them an innate freedom that communicated very effectively on screen.
A more sensible young filmmaker might have taken the lesson that it was time to go brush up on craft and learn how to talk to professional actors, but-and mind you, none of this was ever a conscious plan-in the back of my head I was thinking about how to improve my directing skills with the non-pros. If I could get their work to be more consistent then I'd have a tool to build a kind of world that I wasn't accustomed to seeing on screen. It seemed that part of an actor's training was to be constantly pushing the story forward with clear objectives, clear actions, clear reactions; but I wanted to short circuit that clarity and get palpable uncertainty up there. I wanted to see people struggling to understand their lives in real time. I wanted to use film to do things I couldn't get at in any other medium-certainly not on paper.
Nonetheless, it was paper that consumed me my first couple years out of college, as between crummy day jobs I spent much of my free time working on screenplays. I knew I wanted to make one but I also had a vague understanding of what a massive commitment that would be, and my first few attempts didn't seem worthy. Finally I hit upon the idea of writing a movie with the notion that my roommate at the time, Kate Dollenmayer, would play the lead. Kate was and is an enormously charismatic person, and I had some inkling, just from watching her tell an anecdote, or how she'd conduct herself at a party full of strangers, of what her instincts as a performer might be. Because we had both happened to move to Austin where we didn't have any other friends, we were spending a lot of time together, and I could at least trick myself into believing I had internalized her rhythms enough that I could write for her voice. I wanted to dislodge myself from the trap of writing characters who only seemed mouthpieces for me, and writing with Kate in mind helped tremendously. It also meant that I had, rather gung ho, tied the fate of my movie, which was more or less inseparable from my fate, to the participation of one person with no proven acting ability or ambition in that regard. I was asking a huge amount of her-and I would not have attempted to make the movie without her, I would have rather gone off and tried writing something else. The fact that she gave it as much of her time and energy as she did, I can only attribute to good luck. The fact that she happened to be a magnificently skilled actor I attribute to really, really good luck.
We shot on 16mm because I loved it and because I believed that we needed its painterly qualities to get this story across. Our style was observational to a fault, but I didn't want it be clinical, I needed warmth. To that end all of our energy was focused on performance. The camera only moved when it might have been more distracting for it not to move. Lights were set up to get an exposure on the negative, but beyond that I wanted nothing to do with them, our poor beleaguered cinematographer, the excellent Matthias Grunsky, was constantly having to suffer my demands that he take lights down if he couldn't justify why he was putting them up. I wanted a minimum of equipment, a minimum of crew, and a minimum of noise.
And this is probably a good moment to put a few minutes of that film up on the screen here... [Cue Funny Ha Ha DVD at 26:40, play through to 33:23. Marnie kisses Wyatt at the party, leaves the party, kisses Dave in the car.]
I am currently teaching a directing workshop at the University of Texas with an emphasis on working with actors, and my teaching assistant and I are constantly encouraging the students to get "strong" choices from their performers, because we often see a lack of commitment that leads to gummy scenes. But strong choices with too little thought behind them can become a kind of steroid, jacking up a scene into nonsense. I am not suggesting that big emotions have run their course in the history of drama-on the contrary, every year a dozen movies are going to come out that show us love and death and hilarity and misery and sex and violence in ways that make us feel like we've never seen them before, and it's truly a marvel every time someone pulls it off. But I've wagered ten years of my own work on a hunch that it does not violate the tenets of good drama to tell stories that take place on lower frequencies, because to me the most beguiling aspects of human behavior-the things that really beg the question, Why am I me and not you? and perhaps more to the point, How the hell did you end up being you anyway?-emerge not when the stakes are at their highest, when an atomic bomb is in the room needing to be defused, but when the stakes are unclear. Most of our lives are lived in this zone, where it's not entirely clear what will be gained or lost when we decide to help each other, or love each other, or betray each other-but we do it anyway, and there is a wealth of untold stories in those little choices.
My t.a. suggested to me at the beginning of the semester that we try having the students run an improv exercise called "The Bouncer." I don't have much background in the theater world, from whence these exercises come, and I didn't know it, so he explained to me that it consists of one performer playing a nightclub bouncer, who is not allowed in the exercise to say any word except "NO," and the other performer doing everything he or she can to convince the bouncer that they absolutely need access to this club. This sounded to me like it would be fun, and, sensing I was intrigued, the t.a. went on to tell me that it gets really good when you up the stakes for the actors-tell them, for example, that they have a friend who's inside the club who they know is about to get murdered unless they can get in there and save them...And then suddenly the exercise sounded no fun at all to me, because I realized that I didn't care that much about watching someone in such a situation-I have sympathy for someone who needs to save a friend from being murdered, naturally, but I don't find them to be an inherently compelling character. I was much more interested when I thought we were just talking about someone who is abjectly desperate to get into a nightclub for no reason other than their certainty that they belong inside that room. The less they could articulate their own desire, the more I wanted to see a movie about them.
On the Funny Ha Ha set, everything had been designed so that the actors would have my full attention, but I found myself very frequently frustrating them because I didn't want them to have too clear a sense of their own motivations. In the sequence we just watched, Marshall Lewy, who plays Wyatt, the first guy she kisses, very much wanted to know why he was turning away her advances. And though a concrete motivation would have been simple to provide-say, you have a girlfriend, or you're gay, or her breath stinks-in the moment he asked, I wouldn't give it to him. Marshall's a very smart guy and a strong actor and I only wanted to see what would happen if I left him to his own devices on that one. He may well have himself just picked out one of those reasonable motivations I mentioned, but I didn't want to give him license to make it pat, and the performance he came up with was very satisfying to me-I believed it.
No doubt, the finished movie certainly has its clumsily crafted moments, and its larger limitations, but I felt like we were putting something sturdy enough up there that it could bear the weight of an audience's eyes. Not everyone was gonna like it, but I didn't think they would see right through it; we had something worth showing. Now, what exactly we had made, I don't know. The director is the last person you should ever ask about what a movie means because movies in many ways are incomplete until a viewer has received them, and we can't participate in that, it's like asking someone to look at the back of their own skull. We can't get there. I've tried to tell you a little bit about my personal intentions in making the film, but when a film is done, the original intentions have been chipped away and are of no more value than a sculptor's original block of marble. If I may be allowed another discursion on a sci-fi megahit: This is why George Lucas has come to seem such a tragic figure in recent decades. His obsessive tinkering with Star Wars, lucrative though it clearly is, has met with steady derision from his fans, most of whom believe that they are better qualified to steward the legacy of those films than the man who dreamt the whole thing up. And though I will always take the artist's side in any fight-I have to-in this case the fans are onto something. Lucas acts as if he believes that Star Wars still belongs in his head, while the rest of us know that that's the last place it belongs anymore, it was supposed to have been evicted from those premises in 1977.
Speaking of a filmmaker hanging around his own work too much, I should note that we are going to screen my most recent film Beeswax in this auditorium tonight. I was quite honored at the invitation to speak here, and also delighted that they were going to show the film, but it does mark an unusual occasion for me as I always avoid talking about my work before an audience has watched it. When asked to introduce a screening, I typically say "Thanks for coming, I hope you enjoy it," and get the hell out of there, because telling the audience how they ought to interpret what they're about to see runs counter to what I was trying to accomplish in the first place, which was to create a work that connects with people when I personally am not present in the room-indeed, I think most artists hold dear the dream that their stuff might continue to connect after they've died, so the movie had better learn to get along without me. I don't want to pull a Lucas and try to yank your experience away from you...What I'm trying to say is, for anyone planning on watching the movie tonight, I'm going to stall talking about it for a little while longer up here, but I'm not offended if you want to get out of here or cover your ears at any point.
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