Possible Films

Hal Hartley interviewed by Oliver Kerkdijk for Odeon Magazine, Amsterdam (March 2008)

OK: What’s the connection between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Hal Hartley?

HH: Louis Andriessen.

OK: You’ve moved to Berlin, staged plays in Antwerp and Salzburg, others have staged theatrical versions of your screenplays in this part of the world, a retrospective of your work was shown in Poland. Would you say you’re a fish out of water or rather a the classic ex-pat artist who has found his home in Europe?

HH: I think it’s more an aspect of globalization – the differences between one part of the world and another are fewer these days. I feel at home in a lot of places. It makes very little difference to my day-to-day life and work whether I’m living in New York, Berlin, Paris, or Amsterdam. A person like me finds himself working in different countries, making friends and business associates all over the world. After awhile, it’s hard to say I live in this or that particular city.

OK: How does the move affect your work?

HH: Not much. I’m an American filmmaker making films about Americans. But I think as I grow older and spend more time in more parts of the world, my characters tend to be Americans who are also in other parts of the world. I sense that this is significant – this globalization thing. More and more of my writing does try to give an impression of the way life is lived now when a lot of us do our work all over the world.

OK: Did it shape your approach to La Commedia?

HH: No. I can’t say it has. When I do something like this – staging a music performance or a play… I step aside from my ongoing and primary work, which is filmmaking. In a case like this, I try to be reactive – I react to what’s there; in this case Louis’ music and the ideas and images contained within it. The joy of this sort of work is in supporting something rich and interesting.

OK: Where lies the challenge in combining the two-dimensionality of film with the three-dimensionality of theatre and an orchestra performing?

HH: I am not very good at imagining activity on stage. I have to have time to invent it with the performers. This is what I did with Soon, which you referred to earlier. It was developed with the performers over a few months of time. This is not possible in this situation with La Commedia. You have to decide a year or two in advance what will happen on stage. This is why I have made a movie for La Commedia; because this is what I know how to do. What happens on the stage is a collaboration with my set and lighting designers. It’s fun, but it’s an entirely new thing for me.

OK: Does the time of your early films seem a remote place now?

HH: It is far away in time, but when I see those films the young man who made them feels very close. I understand him and like him. I’m glad I was him and not someone else.

OK: Are there parallels to be drawn between your take on Dante and the world we currently have to make do with?

HH: Certainly, that’s the way Dante wrote it. He was writing a description of reality as he saw it – then, now, tomorrow. Today, while working with the score, Andriessen sat back and admitted to me that he doubted Dante was ever even religious. It’s not so far out – he existed in this completely catholic world but was very modern.

OK: Is art a way of escaping the often crass realities of everyday life or a weapon to attack them with?

HH: Art is my preferred crass reality. I was educated and encouraged to think that art is the definition of not escaping reality but of confronting it. Dante’s poem, I was surprised to learn, was originally called “The Comedy”. Later generations called it the “Divine Comedy” – which tended to elevate it. But, though it’s an awesomely ambitious poem trying to provide a whole way of looking at reality, it’s filled with a lot of the average sentimentalities, stupidities, and heroisms of everyday life.

OK: Would you say that you, Whit Stillman and a few others of the 90s’ independents grew disillusioned with the movie industry or that the various forays into other territories and countries were a natural move?

HH: I accomplished all I wanted to achieve in the film business by 1997. Then I moved on towards what I felt was most interesting to me – which, of course, is what I had always been doing from the beginning anyway. So, I was certainly not disillusioned. I had even been financially successful making fairly marginal art films with a lot of creative freedom. So, I was quite grateful, in fact. But I felt I had finished with something – something that was about being young. It was time to move on. And the mainstream film business didn’t seem to offer me what I needed to grow creatively. So, I needed to step aside from that and find different environments that would allow me to experiment and explore. I don’t know about other people. I had a great time. I still do.

OK: What do you like best about La Commedia?

HH: The music. I hope my film and the staging don’t get too much in the way.