SOON, a play – published and available in paperback June 17, 2010. Perfect-bound paperback, 85 pages.

SOON, music from the play – digital release through Bug Digital July 6, 2010. Pre-release (entire “album”) from Possible Films June 29.

Originally staged in Europe and the United States in 1998 and 2001 respectively, SOON is a fever-dream verbal avalanche about the joys, sorrows, and disasters of “creative religiosity”. Inspired by the Branch Davidian Conflict of 1993, the play explores the turbulent spiritual needs and the tortured reasoning of sectarian “end-time” Christians in America. Hilarious, moving,  and sociologically astute, SOON “touched a naked nerve in contemporary American sensibility.” (Western European Stages)

INTERVIEW:

How did you become interested in this subject?

I think the most important things were just the events at Waco. I was making Amateur at the time [Amateur, feature film, released 1994]. I was very busy, rushing around. And meanwhile these events were transpiring down in Texas. Every once in awhile I’d stop and read a newspaper or see a report on TV and (…) Because in the previous ten years I had – on my own – done a lot of reading about Christianity. I wanted to understand it historically, I think. I never really understood the difference between Protestants and Catholics, for instance. So, I did all this reading. And I was one of those people in the first days of the conflict amazed to see journalists not knowing what Koresh and his people were referring to when they mentioned the “seven seals”. I mean, yes, I understand the regular guy on the street might not get this. But, also, professional armed agents of the government had no idea – that first day or so – what was meant by the seven seals, even though they had apparently been studying these Christian sectarians for months. So, I set out eventually to write about American gun laws and freedom of religion. But reading more and more about these people – the Branch Davidians in particular, but Adventism generally – I came to appreciate how these basically radical sectarian religious ideals are pretty tangled up with some of our most commonly held notions of freedom in America.

Why now, after all these years, are you finally publishing the play?

Honestly, I wanted finally to just get the thing off my desk. Really! For almost ten years I’ve told myself I should write up the definitive version – one that made clear what happens in the play. Because the play didn’t come about in the conventional way; that is, with me writing it and then going into rehearsals. I wrote a lot, and a lot of that was in fact texts from different sources (the bible, the historical record, and so on) – and we had a very long rehearsal period where we moved text around, changed lines from one character to another (…) In fact, the characters were only very broadly defined in what I wrote. It was through work with the actors – in both productions – that personalities were gradually discovered or invented. In the end, it is like the two productions were the latest drafts of the play. I could only write the play down once we had done these performances.

As you clearly state in the introduction, you are an atheist.           

Yes. I was raised Roman Catholic, taught by nuns and all that. Struggled to understand the world that way. But by ten or eleven I didn’t practice. Still, through my adolescence, my youth, and well into my thirties, I worked hard to articulate for myself what my spiritual life consisted of. I still do, of course, but at least now it is easier to say I am an atheist. I’m not religious. So, I believe this is progress. I’m skeptical by nature. I don’t apologize for that. I’m not dead certain about anything. But I’m clear about my attitude to that uncertainty. It took me a good deal of my life to acquire that.

But you are not perfectly critical of these religious people you portray.

No, I think I am perfectly critical of them. I’m not perfectly judgmental. I make an attempt to understand their reasoning without feeling the need to approve of that reasoning. Frankly, when I spend time with evangelicals I think to myself, these people are crazy. But, on the other hand, I’ve met professional politicians and professional journalists and also feel that the aims and ambitions of these people are often pretty strange too. So, you know, I tend generally to cut people some slack.

Do you identify more with these outsiders than with politicians and media professionals?

No, certainly not. But… I don’t think it’s my nature, necessarily – to try to understand everybody no matter how distant they are from me. Rather, I think it is more a result of having found my calling as a maker of fiction. I found that quite early in life. And I am drawn to imagining myself into the mindset of characters – especially characters I don’t understand. SOON offered me an opportunity to do that in some depth. In any event, it was by imagining myself into the minds and hearts of these sectarians that I began to acquire a greater critical awareness of the media in particular. And that affected the films I made in the following years… In some of my films, for instance, I have made a similar effort to enter into the mindset of politicians and media professionals – No Such Thing, Henry Fool, Girl From Monday…

How was the US staging different from the 1998 production in Salzburg and Antwerp?

Generally, we thought of the European production as large, quiet, and slow; the US version was small, loud, and fast. You can hear that difference in the music I made for the second production.

What influenced you in regard to the music?

At first: Appalachian music. These fiddle and accordion songs one comes across in these things… Shaker chants. But then it was just the needs of the story. The language has a rhythm from scene to scene that is hard to avoid. We made a lot of music after spending time watching the actors work on the scenes.

And the upcoming release of the music is from both productions?

Yes. It’s a mix of the strongest music from both productions. But it’s also revisited. I’ve taken some pieces of music and made songs out of them by cutting in scraps of the shows dialogue. And sometimes I just leave the spoken words alone for twenty or thirty seconds.

Returning to the book: This is your first play. Will there be others?

I wonder sometimes. Writing is what comes easiest to me. I can do it alone. I don’t need dozens of people and lots of money. But I don’t really enjoy plays. We call Soon a play for convenience. But in reality it was some kind of intensively text based dance piece. However, when I see theater I enjoy I remember what encouraged me to do Soon. That would be theater like The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Big Dance Theater, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, etc… By and large, not plays. So, I imagine I might want to write things that interesting theater makers can use. I guess that’s possible.

You are now in some ways distributing your own works – Possible Films is a publisher. What are the challenges in this?

Trying to reach a wider audience with limited means. That seems to be the challenge. It’s building, though. Each week more people visit the website and purchase music or films. Now it is also books. I’m lucky in that I have a lot of work to present. In some ways everything is different because you can – with constant effort – be in direct contact with your audience all over the world. On the other hand, you are competing for their attention with trillions of other entertainments equally easy to access. So, it’s just as hard as ever to get their attention.

Excerpts from an interview with Hal Hartley in New York, October 2009, by actor, filmmaker and playwright, DJ Mendel. The collection, POSSIBLE FILMS 2 (“PF2″) will be screened at the IFC Center in NYC on April 22. 

DM: It feels very much like an album, this collection of films. These are the new songs.

HH: Yes. That’s right. I noticed this somewhere along the way. None of the films were completed. They all existed in some state of incompleteness and I would just play them, tinker with them here and there, going from one to the other. This would have been, I guess, early 2009, before leaving Berlin. I would make changes to one because of something I had discovered in another. And I began to sense that they could possibly respond to one another.

DM: Which one came first?

HH: The first one was Adventure. Miho and I visited her family in Japan in November 2006. (Note: Miho Nikaido, Hartley’s wife since 1996) I started just making pictures of my in-laws in order to show my own family back here in the States, because I’m sure they’ll never meet each other. I always need a person, a human figure, in order to make pictures of anything – mountains, fields. Without a human figure, I’m sort of lost. So Miho was always there to be the human figure. She’s used to it after all these years; being asked to walk here, look there, etcetera. But then I started focusing on her, asking her questions. Then, after we left her family, we stayed for a week by ourselves in Tokyo. We decided to interview each other.

DM: Only because he shows up later in this group of films, I wanted to ask if you were thinking about Godard’s film, with his wife. You showed it once at the old apartment.

HH: Yes, Godard and Mieville’s Soft & Hard. (Note: “Soft and Hard – A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends On A Hard Subject”, 1985, Video, by Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville) It was on my mind once we decided to interview each other. I mean by this that I tried to take some encouragement from their example – a couple talking very straight to one another on camera, under their own auspices, so to speak. I was nervous about allowing ourselves to be seen, Miho and I.

[edit]

But in the end, I found these pieces that manage to convey something larger than just the two of us. It took a long time to make. I had a version of it as early as February 2007. But then I kept revising and expanding as I came to see it mostly as a portrait of Miho. But, of course, at this point, a portrait of Miho would have to include this man she’s married to – me.

DM: If Adventure is the most personally revealing, is Implied Harmonies the most professionally revealing?

HH: I wasn’t sure for a long time if I would include Implied Harmonies. I guess I considered it just a television friendly doc about making la Commedia. But as the other films came together, I saw it as part of that continuum – how I live, creative action at the center of life, my friends, the things we talk about. Louis is a friend and we really do talk like that to one another. And he is, of course, also of an earlier generation that I want to learn things from. Not unlike the way I want to learn things from Godard. I think I probably asked Andriessen the same questions I asked Godard. (Note: In 1994 Hartley interviewed Godard for Filmmaker Magazine in New York).

DM: For that matter, I never knew Rembrandt was such a big inspiration for you.

HH: He wasn’t, necessarily, before I was there in Amsterdam living next door to the museum. They made a museum out of one of the houses he lived in.

DM: I see you really do keep his portrait on your editing desk here.

HH: That’s a postcard I bought in the museum shop. It’s called Rembrandt Laughing. It was only designated as one of his own works in the early nineties, I think. I have nothing but admiration for this man, Rembrandt. He was, like I say in the film, an artist, a businessman, and a technologist. If he were alive today, he would have invented PhotoShop or something. But why I keep his picture there is because I learned a lot about his life when I was there (in Amsterdam). On any given day, he was making art, selling art, haggling about all kinds of business, and, up there in his etching room, inventing and perfecting the way people would be etching for the next three hundred years. He had lots of pressure on him, loads of responsibilities – wives, girlfriends, students… And he still had time to laugh. So, here at my editing desk, where I generally face all the crap the modern world throws at me; technology, business, criticism… I just look at Rembrandt. He seems to be saying: I’m getting away with murder! I can’t believe I’m still alive! Which is a healthy state of mind, I think.

[edit]

Anyway, Implied Harmonies was supposed to be a real making-of documentary. But I was so overwhelmed by the production of the actual opera I had no time to shoot much. So, after I was back in Berlin for a few months, I watched the footage I did have – the orchestra rehearsing, blocking rehearsal with the singers, some interviews… And then I just copied out parts of my diary and turned them into letters to Jordana, who did, in fact function as an assistant for me in Berlin… 

DM: You shot all these films yourself, then. It’s a fairly rigorous and insistent aesthetic you pursue.

HH: Shooting your own things isn’t such a big deal anymore when the equipment is so manageable. But I’ve always liked to shoot anyway. Not a feature, of course, when there is so much to do and such intense schedules. But with things this intimate, it’s my principle joy.

DM: But there is a way of looking that – I think – demands a lot of discipline.

HH: The frames don’t move. For the most part, the shots are locked off. There are, of course, in the non-fiction films here… shots that are hand-held or panning, tilting, and so on. But what I’m really after are frames like the ones in A/Muse or The Apologies. The performer and I work to discover what needs to happen and then I start thinking about how to see it. I make adjustments to my frame and adjustments to the performer’s score of movement. I have a few lights, usually one good assistant. I allow us the time required… to find something good.

DM: The Apologies falls right in the middle of the five films and it, itself, is divided into three neat parts. And the middle part concerns a young actress rehearsing an old monologue about being – what? – dumped by her lover.

HH: That would seem to be the gist of it, yeah.

DM: But it is meaningful, I think, that there is something Romantic… funny, of course, but regretful, like something has been cut off or abused somehow… about all these films that radiates out from that particular film; from the center of that film.

HH: Tragic melodrama, maybe. (laughter…) That’s my inheritance from German literature – all those well dressed people wandering around in the wind and rain on the seashore. I love that stuff. But… yes, there is this embrace of… the idealist incapable of making him or herself understood. And that is… that is what we all live with if we want to be creative people rather than manufacturers. 

[edit]

There is no distance between the heart, the mind, and the mouth here. What one feels, one speaks. I’m trying, in a sort of man-in-the-street way, to appropriate the elevated sentiments of classical tragedy. But with the economy of a radio commercial.

[edit]

The Apologies began because Ireen (Kirsch), who is a friend of mine trying to figure out if she wants to be an actress, asked me to direct her audition tape for the drama school she was applying to. She wanted to do this, well… kind of musty old Hofmannsthal thing; standard issue stuff from the “Monologe fur Frauen” book every young actress in Germany keeps on a shelf somewhere. (Note: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Austrian dramatist, b:1874 – d:1929) First of all, I tried to talk her out of going to drama school. Then I agreed, but only if she would allow me to take some liberties with the thing. Basically, I wanted to make moving pictures of this girl practicing the monologue. And I invented a little situation within which this could happen; that she would be lent this apartment by an older man friend of hers while he was away so she would have some privacy and time to rehearse. Only then, did I decide to actually write the sequence with the man, which comes before, and the sequence with the girlfriend, which comes after.

DM: And they represent the battle between the creative personality and the critic.

HH: Yeah, the love affair between the artist and the critic; the commercial artist and the commercial critic. The best fights always happen in love stories.

DM: And the Hofmannsthal made you think of this artist/critic situation?

HH: No. It was the other way around. I think I had been wounded around that time by some article someone had written about me. So there were these principles I wanted to expose and consider in a frank, in fact – unapologetic – light. And that made me use the Hofmannsthal differently. 

DM: But what does the title, The Apologies, refer to; apologies, as in, I apologize?

HH: No. It’s the old thing they used to do in the renaissance. A book used to be prefaced by an “apologia”, an expression of gratitude that someone would take the time to read the efforts of such an idiot as oneself. That kind of thing. At first, I was calling this “Apologia”. I think that’s what led me to start it off with Nikolai reciting Aeschylus – the high tone of the ancients, etcetera. But then I wanted it more down to earth.

[edit]

DM: A/Muse…

HH: The best thing that happened making la Commedia was finding this actress Christina Flick. She had never been in front of a motion picture camera before the first morning we began shooting la Commedia. By lunchtime, me and Vlad (Note: Vlad Subotic, director of photography) felt we had found a new star. So, when I got back to Berlin, we stayed in touch. I told her that if she came to Berlin I’d write a movie for her. Well, she finally came in May 2009. Since I was already planning to return to the US, I wanted in some way to express my ambivalent feelings. Why was I returning? Why had I stayed? What had I accomplished?  Like with The Apologies, it’s really a diary film, but passed through these characters. Which helps, I think, keep it from becoming too personal, too introverted. I want the films – even these – to be part of broader ways of conceiving the world. Muses are part of our way of thinking about inspiration. But here, we had the muse pursuing the artist who himself has gone off to be a businessman. Which, of course, is not such an unusual thing for an artist who has been staying alive for the past quarter century doing it. But I liked to see this in contrast to this youthful, eager, optimistic urge to create that the actress has. I still very much have that urge too. But I also have this experience someone younger can’t yet have.

[edit]

HH: Accomplice was actually made in New York. The four other films were complete, but I felt they needed a short, succinct finale. It was clear to me that I had managed to create a suite. And the whole thing needed a recapitulation. So I thought I’d make a little movie using some unused shots of Jordana from Implied Harmonies. And then, I found the footage of Godard being interviewed by Bordwell, which had been lying around for years.

DM: Did you really steal those videotapes?

HH: No. I made that up. But I am, in fact, using someone else’s footage without permission. So I feel like a criminal anyway. And I did, in fact, rediscover those videotapes. Early in my career, in 1992, I was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis when Bruce Jenkins was the curator. I did some interviews in the morning and then I had all day to myself before screening Trust in the evening. Bruce showed me their archive and in it – where they had all sorts of interesting stuff – way up high on some distant dusty shelf, there was this banged up cardboard box with “Godard Tapes” written across the side. I asked what that was. No one really knew. We brought down the box and found four or six big old ¾ inch U-Matic tapes, unlabeled, out of their cases, just tossed away almost… Some one remembered that Godard had come through town in the early eighties, promoting one of his films. That would probably have been Every Man For Himself, most likely. And I distinctly remember being told that the tapes were thought to be useless because Godard had been so difficult and uncooperative that there was no way they could use the footage to make a sensible TV interview. So, since I had nothing to do all afternoon, I asked if I could view the tapes and, in the process, identify and label them – just put them in order. I did this and found Godard to be remarkably generous with his responses; but it was true, he responded on his own terms. Not terms conventional TV in 1982 would make room for. Jenkins made me a VHS copy of the footage and sent it to me in NY a few months later.

DM: But that’s not from those tapes at the end is it? When he talks about filmmaking still being possible?

HH: No, in fact, that is from the audiotape I made when he and I spoke in 1994 in New York.

DM: Is that why you called your company Possible Films?

HH: No. It had been called Possible Films since 1991. But when I listened to that old tape and I heard him saying this – that films are still possible – I just knew it would be a perfect way to end this group of films.

DM: You made all these film in your apartment. You don’t seem to have made an effort to disguise this from one film to another.

HH: No. We moved some things around to perfect the shots. But, no, the idea was to let the viewer see that this is where I live. This is how I live.

DM: Even the restaurant across the street manages to become deeply, mysteriously, expressive.

HH: I made shots of that place throughout the final year in Berlin: Le Copains, or “the buddies” or “pals”, “Bar Americain”. There was this collision of cultural references all the time I was in Berlin. An American living in Berlin in the old French zone… The New German Cinema of the seventies brought me to filmmaking; the French New Wave set me afloat, American films gave me the tools… Still, there I was; an American living in Berlin, eating at a French Restaurant, with my Turkish-French assistant and her Italian boyfriend making calls each week to my Japanese wife in New York… It all tries somehow to relate that atmosphere… an unaligned creative person almost anywhere in the world… when they refuse to subscribe to the mainstream status quo. One feels like a criminal, or an exile, an auslander, or – as we say in the States – an alien.

DM: Fugitive, uprooted, adrift…

HH: Yes! And having you read those lines like a film noir crime drama was important. (Note: Mendel does the English Voice Over in Accomplice) This unseen criminal has big things on his mind and in his heart. Yeah, ok, maybe even romantic things.

Transcribed and annotated by Jack Patrick, New York City, November 2009

Dear Mr. Hartley,

As I said, No Such Thing is the centerpiece of my seminar, Myth Made Visible.  I asked the students to formulate questions for you and I tried to make them comprehensible and useful without compromising their integrity. It was important that they each formulate one essential question. The film was universally acclaimed – they didn’t know your work (but they generally see only mainstream stuff – almost no European films, etc.) – and they really all thought it was fabulous. And that’s a good thing. Thanks for the film!

Best, Nancy Goldring

Q: What does “corporate” mean to you as a filmmaker and how do you balance commentary and art?

As a filmmaker, “corporate” means to me much the same thing it means to me as a person; very specific regulations on an individual’s freedom of decision. There is always some degree of corporate procedure in even the smallest company and the smallest film production. It’s necessary to some degree. In the bigger corporate environments I’ve witnessed (and, admittedly, they were particularly unhealthy) it tends to become an outright restriction of a person’s right to think for him or her self. For me, art – in my case, specifically, fiction – has always been the best way to relate commentary. I almost never start from having something I want to say, but from something I want to ask. The joy of creating characters is that they can disagree. And then one can – if one makes the effort to appreciate the two opposing positions – let the characters relate the commentary by way of their argument; sort of a demonstration of how an issue exists in the world.

Q: At the end of the movie, what is the relationship between good and evil. Is it the same at the beginning and the end? Why did the film end so abruptly? Did you have other ideas about how to end the movie?

If good and evil are treated in this film at all, I’d have to say it’s as being beside the point in the bigger scheme of things. I tried to tell the story from the Monster’s point of view. The monster, not being human, doesn’t share human notions of good and evil. Even one set of humans – say, the villagers – have a totally different conception of right and wrong from other communities – the city folk, for instance. No, I had no other ideas about ending the film. I realized how it would end while writing in the early stages. Once I came upon the idea that the monster’s friend, Doctor Artaud, would suggest that the monster might just be a figment of the collective imagination – a myth – which, having become so real it might exist more surely than we ourselves do… Following that train of thought, I knew the film would have to end as if the world were ending with it… as if the world of the story was the dream of the Monster… so, if he is eliminated, would the world around him be eliminated as well?

Q: Why was the monster not explained to the viewer; his existence or non-existence after he is destroyed?

Because the Monster himself doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t know why he exists or how he came in to being. Some people, like Dr. Artaud, have suggestions. But no one knows for sure. For me the important thing is that none of us knows how we got here or why – but we have to continue.

Q: Why did you have Beatrice succumb to corruption after having overcome so may obstacles and remains so strong?

This is a very telling question and one I have had to answer a lot – in America – since making the film. I can only respond to this question by posing another: what is so corrupt about a young woman who has been through all that pain and suffering taking some time off to party and have sex? Personally, I think she deserved a little fun. But my personal feelings don’t have much to do with the decision to illustrate her relaxation. As a storyteller I suspected we would like her more, empathize more with her, if we witnessed all aspects of her – and a healthy young woman wanting to make love is just as important as her spiritual certainty. I didn’t want her to be a nun.

Q: What is the role of media in relation to myth in our times or can it possibly be a contemporary mode of transmission?

I think the media is the primary generator and conveyance of popular mythology now. Which is probably no different than in ancient times, except media was word-of-mouth then. But speed is important. And what we call media now is specifically characterized by speed of transmission.

Q: What role if any did the painful surgery Beatrice undergoes have in the way she reacted to her meeting with the monster?

It seemed important that the heroine endure some sort of rite of passage. This, I’m sure, is a regular part of any so called coming-of-age myth or myth of spiritual attainment. You all might know more about that than me, seeing as how you’re discussing these things in class. But it seemed required. On a more basic level, I thought she needed to be strong and fearless by virtue of having already endured intense suffering, both physical (the operation) and emotional (the panic she must have witnessed in the plane as it crashed into the ocean). And I imagined that this would make her a very different kind of person. Different in such a way that people who saw her on the street would know that she had been to places (again, physically and emotionally) where most people haven’t been. This was the meaning of the townspeople trying to touch her as she leaves the hospital – a really old kind of hero/saint transformation. As if her very presence had healing powers, etc.

Q: Could another mythical character have been as effective as the monster? Was the monster based on a person (such as Norman Mailer)?

Norman Mailer? No. Wow, interesting, though. No, the Monster was based on no one in particular. But I drew on the book Grendel, by John Gardner.  Grendel is popularly referred to as Beowulf told from the monster’s point of view, and it has always been an important book for me. There is a lot of James Cagney’s gangster characters in there too.

Q: What most inspired you to make this movie – was it related to 9/11?

The movie was shot a year before 9/11 and, in fact, it’s release was delayed because the studio felt it would be too troublesome to distribute after the attack. I drew on contemporary news items relating different kinds of terrorist attacks for Beatrice’s arduous journey to the airport – the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, the first attempt on the Twin Towers in 1993, Timothy McViegh’s bombing in Oklahoma City, etc…

Q: Is this based on any specific pre-existing myths?

No. I thought I might be able to make a perfectly contemporary monster movie – a sort of relevant fairytale of modernity. But The Wizard of Oz was helpful – Sarah Polley’s hair is done just like Dorothy’s. Murnau’s Nosferatu – it is Nosferatu and the novel Dracula that dwell on the sadness of eternal life. And the Mothra and Godzilla movies made in Japan in the fifties and early sixties were helpful – there is always a journalist trying to unearth some well-kept government secret or the niece of a famous scientist looking for her uncle.

I have been asked to say something anecdotal and – if possible – encouraging to you graduates of the program, specifically in regard to being an independent filmmaker. 

The most encouraging news about being an independent filmmaker is that no one is stopping you from doing it. Of course, depending on the type of film you want to make, you can’t expect lots of people to try and help you either. But I suspect its the same in any of the arts and, also, in business.

The life of an independent filmmaker has something in common with that of an entrepreneur. These are people who have chosen not to, necessarily, have the security of a steady job, but whose work is to have ideas and try to get others as excited as they are about the possibility of these ideas. The entrepreneur might say: look, if we raise enough capital to buy these beautiful materials, we can build these houses with a nice view of the hills, sell them later on, and make some money for ourselves. 

This is not unlike what a filmmaker sounds like when he or she says: if we raise capital to hire these beautiful actors and make this story about a boy, a girl, and their guns (or whatever) we might very well receive positive reviews and be accepted to film festivals, make our money back and maybe even a little more too. And, besides, we’ll be a little bit famous briefly.

The motivation is almost always this simple – to bring something into the world we want to exist.It might be, in our reckoning, Truth & Beauty (capitalized). Or maybe simply to make some money in a way that is more fun than working in a bank or being a construction worker. 

I see now that I wanted to say I make movies for both of these reasons at different times. But, thinking about it while I prepared this speech for you, I understand this is not accurate. In fact, I am always operating in both these ways – trying to make something beautiful and true and make a living. I am not against money. But it is true: when push comes to shove and I have to choose, I tend to choose the insecurity of my independence over the security of money.

Often, one cannot have both – money and independence. Comfort, security, and cash is often purchased by giving up one’s independence. And by independence I do not mean a style of filmmaking or even a manner of doing business. Although it is that, a little. What I mean is an independent mind which refuses to give up the responsibility of reaching it’s own conclusions; independence as the acceptance of the responsibility to think for oneself.

Personally, in one way or another, my entire body of work has been about this. So, it must be important to me even if I do not spend all my time thinking about it. If for no other reason, your filmmaking can be enlightening only because it reveals something about yourself while you’re dead set on illustrating nothing but something about the world around you. It can be how you find yourself in the world.

So, here is my anecdote: In January of 2004 I spent 12 days shooting my latest feature film here in New York. As usual, it was a small budget, we worked long hours and very intensely. There is nothing unusual about that. But those twelve days were also the coldest on record in New York City for something like a hundred years. 

I remember standing in a room with my head phones on, bundled up in my coat, watching the tv monitor and knowing that the scene we were working on was as good as anything I had ever done. As you can imagine, this is not a bad feeling. But, I also remember standing on a street corner later that day, with the crew freezing to death around me, and deciding not to do another take of a shot I knew I could do better under different – warmer – circumstances. The shot I made was adequate. But I had much more to shoot that day and the spirit of the crew – not to mention their health – demanded my attention as much as anything else. I acquiesced and I moved on.

I lived this way for those twelve days and – even more intensely – during the three months of editing, when anything that is not excellent can only be laid at one’s own feet. This is what makes a certain type of creative person seem grouchy and impatient. And I admit I am one of these people. But every once in a while merely adequate work can, by artful manipulation, become something a little more than adequate. You live to fight another day. And that’s enough sometimes for a day or two.

So, I finished this film and suddenly my assistant is asking me to look at a first cut of the “making of” documentary he has been editing on the side. I look at this footage and I’m amazed at the joy that is evident in me and my associates as we work in minus 10 degree weather. It is exactly like watching children play. We are completely outside our own adult ideas of ourselves. Spontaneous, unselfconscious, we are so consumed with what we are doing we can hardly talk like grown-up people – we sound like maniacs. Happy, busy maniacs.

How could I have forgotten this? I don’t know. But I always do.

It helps to be reminded of it because people do ask all the time: why do you do this? Not people who – rightfully – wouldn’t know any better, but people who really know what it is we do; professionals who have no illusions about the nature of film production and know it to be a lot more than the glamour most people, further afield, associate with it. They know the difference between wanting to be a filmmaker and wanting to make films; between the idea of a certain life-style attractively advertised in movie magazines and the reality of suffering to bring into existence something you believe in deeply, often in the face of indifference or outright hostility.

Most people choose not to expose themselves to this degree. And who can blame them? But others can’t seem to avoid it. Despite friendly advice, informed criticism, the desperate pleas of ones family and friends, some of us insist on the beauty and truth of our ideas, feelings, and actions. 

If you’re fired up enough to act upon what you feel, a certain amount of opposition is all one can count on. Of course, you are often understood, appreciated, and receive encouragement. That happens on occasion. But you cannot count on it. Opposition, you can count on. It’s not going to flatter you and let you live. So, make a friend of it. It will sharpen your wits and keep you asking: why am I doing this?

September 2008: The Deauville American Film Festival in France presented actress Parker Posey with a retrospective and tribute and invited Hartley to say a few words:

Good evening.

As we can see from the films being shown here this week, Parker Posey has worked with a great variety of people and made many different kinds of films.

I can only speak for myself, but I’m sure these other filmmakers will agree with my admiration for Parker’s unique achievements.

Parker was the first actor I ever met whom I recognized as a movie star. And she hadn’t made any movies yet. She was just graduating from college. But she was unmistakably a movie star.

Apart from her skill and discipline, there is a definite and unavoidable attitude; a stance in relation to the world at large (and the movies in particular) which is an undisguised challenge to a filmmaker like myself – a challenge that says in so many words or gestures: “ok, you may have written the dialogue, and you may be making the pictures, but right now you are making pictures of me and that – more or less – changes everything.”

It’s true and it’s how it should be. It’s scary and it’s fun, and I’ve never come away from shooting a scene with Parker where I have not learned something.

If I had to point out one thing that distinguishes Parker’s performances and makes them so valuable – I’d have to say it is intelligence. Her emotional involvement and identification with her characters is always total. But she also provides a compelling awareness of what her characters might represent in the world where any given movie she is in is being shown. That’s to say, there is a critical dimension to her performances. She’s a good old fashioned modernist. And I like that.

Now, what I’m describing, of course, is also irony. I’m a little old fashioned, so I still consider irony the height of wit. And I think Parker’s performances in any number of films over the last decade demonstrate this wit like no other actor in America.

So, please join the festival and myself in welcoming, and applauding, the excellent and unique achievements of my friend and sometimes accomplice, Parker Posey.

Interview with the Spanish daily, Diario de Leon, on the occasion of the retrospective of Hartley’s films at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon.

DdL: Throughout your career you have always explored new media to express yourself, your fears, hopes, your nostalgic point of view in life, etc. In which one do you feel more comfortable, the cinema, theatre, opera…?

HH: I feel most comfortable making films. Ultimately, even my theater projects and the opera in 2008… these were somehow film projects.

DdL: Your films have passed from intimate stories in which characters are depicted through their relation with their closest world to those in which the world is much bigger, as well as the problems you concern yourself with.

HH: That reflects my own awareness of the wider world around me as I grew up and moved further out into that world. But my process is still the same. I try to react to what the world around me feels like at any given time.

DdL: We all seem to be in a kind of cage, in a a room, “a huis clos”, where other people are our worst enemies. Is there any way out?

HH: In my films “the way out” has always been other people. Usually it is some sort of love affair that is also an indication of a general human reality. The Girl From Monday probably takes this to its logical extreme. (It’s hard to tell from the translation, but I suspect you might be asking specifically about these new short films, PF2, so I will address that too.) All five of these films were made in my home in Berlin – a large apartment I rented. I was busy making feature films, like Fay Grim, and writing others. But I took the apartment because it was a good place to shoot little movies. And I took only subject matter that could be treated there. Or, to say it differently; I accepted any subject matter, but always treated it through the use of that space.

DdL: What role has religion played in your creation?

HH: It has been significant. I am not religious myself. And I have never tried to make a religious film. But I am very interested in how our inherited religious cultures help define the present time. I appreciate religious texts and some religious traditions as poetry. And I use some of this poetic short-hand to create new and unexpected meanings.

DdL: Has your artistic agenda changed since the 9-11?

HH: In some ways no, and in someways yes. My film, No Such Thing, which was made a year before 9-11 but released much later, was further delayed because the distributors felt it to be not sufficiently sensitive to the country’s rattled nerves. 9-11 should not have surprised anyone who reads a major newspaper at least once a week. Since I try to make movies that reflect the time and place they are made in, there is no way I can avoid the details of how communal life changes in the aftermath of events like these.

DdL: What was your personal aftermath of 9-11?

HH: Like many people here in NY, I guess. People were really helpful, sensible, and brave for three days. Then the president and his gang started talking about a “crusade” and a “war on terror”, etc. The newspapers all went along with it. Most people became idiots. Terrorists continued to kill. The US invaded Iraq. After awhile, I moved to Berlin.

DdL: Did your politics change as a result?

HH: I began to worry about my fellow citizens. That they could re-elect Bush in 2004 after so much damage and waste really shook me. So, yes, I think my political expectations changed. I lost faith in the population of my country.

DdL: Why don’t you come into the comercial cinema?

HH: What I am interested in is not popular enough to be commercial. If one of my films happens to become a little bit commercial, I’m happy about it. But I’m not the kind of person to arrange his creative energy to suit the needs of the commercial cinema without compromise. I always compromise. Sometimes the commercial cinema does too. Sometimes we need each other more. Sometimes less.

DdL: You have an aristotelian point of view regarding sense of humor. What do you want to express with such ironic detachment?

HH: Was Aristotle ironic? I need to know my Greeks better. Anyway, detachment is always just the “appearance of detachment”. It helps us see better. As a writer, I try to express my understanding of situations and my sympathy with characters ironically because irony highlights contradiction. It provides the contrast which helps to show the variety of human nature.

DdL: Is this a world populated with useless Sisyphus-like people?

HH: I’m not sure if you are asking me about “the real world” we share together, or the little world portrayed in my collection of new short films. Nevertheless, in both there are always some Sisyphus types. Apart from loving to write such types because they can be very funny, I also (in the real world) feel they are not always useless. It takes all types, as they say. Camus’ famous essay concludes,  “The struggle itself…is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Is it strange that independent American filmmaker Hal Hartley is staging an opera in Amsterdam? Probably not. Though it is tempting to view his work on La Commedia as a departure from the emotionally high-concept films he has made in the course of his career, Hartley has in fact worked in theater before, and collaborated with Louis Andriessen as early as 1999 on the short film, The New Math(s). Perhaps more importantly, from the beginning of his career in the late 1980′s, Hartley has always made space to investigate different ways of expressing himself.

During the 1990s, Hartley made movies that encapsulated everything a legitimate alternative to mainstream American movies might offer; they were entertaining, thought-provoking comedies that delivered, amongst much else, astute social criticism. Hartley has been persistently vocal about what he sees as the importance of making art that does not need to be produced on a huge scale and appeal to a mass-culture. He believes there is a vibrant and relevant alternative, and his own creative output, then as now, has been sufficient evidence to support this view. Few filmmakers have exhibited such a persistent long-range set of pursuits with regards to style and subject matter and sustained such a large and devoted following. Still, it is only as time has passed that we are able to look back and put into perspective the less obvious but remarkably steady progress of Hartley’s work.

At this stage in his career, it’s interesting to note that the core themes of Hartley’s recent projects remain similar to those of his earliest films, even if the underlying circumstances and plots have grown in stature. The director has long been fascinated with the way individuals communicate with one another as they investigate their place in the world, and how they determine what is important and equally significant, what is not. The characters he explored in his first features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, interact with their worlds in the same way Parker Posey does in his most recent project, Fay Grim, honestly uninformed but willing to learn and incapable of violating their consciences. His heroes and heroines would rather avoid conflict, but understand they cannot. Their embrace of confrontation becomes Hartley’s window onto the world. From the working class town he grew up in, and in which he set his first films, to the corridors of international diplomacy and corporate intrigue in his latest, the scope of Hartley’s vision has expanded in tandem with his own movements out into that very world.

“My films went out of the home,” says Hartley. “The earlier films were about individuals, people-to-people, people relating to their families and their immediate environments. Most of them are family-based. The more recent films deal with the individual and society.” And yet, the through-line of social engagement in his work was as vibrant in 1988 as it is today. Whether it is the way in which young people learn how to love and fear each other (Trust, Simple Men, Amateur) or how people are forced to re-think their situation as citizens (No Such Thing, The Girl From Monday, Fay Grim), Hartley has insisted on making stories out of the material of the world that surrounds him at the time. It is the thread that runs from The Unbelievable Truth in 1988 to Fay Grim twenty years later. Hartley does not want to make films about himself or his own personal experiences, but he understands that his subject, the world we all share at any given time can only be conveyed meaningfully through the committed transparency of the artist’s personality.

But there is something more here, as well. Hartley is proof that independent filmmaking is possible, and that an artist doesn’t need to be hugely famous and enormously wealthy in order to be relevant. He may also be representative of how an independently minded creative person can successfully operate in an increasingly globalized world.

The second decade of Hartley’s work could be said to start with the release in 1998 of The Book of Life, a deceptively light comedy wherein Jesus is sent to contemporary Manhattan to inaugurate the final judgment and begin the end of the world. But after a series of very funny and gripping arguments with Satan (who wiles away his days in the lobby bar of an upscale hotel, not unlike the Lucifer of La Commedia), he decides against it, quits his job as the Redeemer, and exiles himself from heaven. It was Hartley’s most overt examination of religion and morality, but he might never have written The Book of Life had he not spent the preceding two years writing his play, Soon, which also premiered in 1998 at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.

This play, which was later staged in Antwerp, and again in California in 2001, is based upon the 1993 events that took place in Waco, Texas, in which the Branch Davidians, a Christian fundamentalist group, engaged in a terrifying and wasteful stand-off with agents of the U.S. government. The initial clash was in a gun battle that left both fundamentalists and federal agents dead; after a 51-day siege, a fire in the central building of the Branch Davidian community killed many of the remaining occupants, including 21 children. The actions had a profound impact on Hartley, who was not and is not by nature a religious person. It affected him as a citizen, and left him wanting to better understand the civil situation and to have a better grasp of freedom of religion and his country’s gun laws. Ultimately it plunged him into a new awareness of the centrality of the media in contemporary life: the daily 24-hour news cycle that tends to blur politics, advertising and journalism into an easily digestible product for quick and disposable consumption.

These concerns underlie all of the work of the second decade of Hartley’s career. And the way one project segues into the next is, in fact, so obvious it is often overlooked. From Soon and The Book of Life it was just a few short steps away to a monster movie, No Such Thing, and a little later, a tale of science fiction, The Girl From Monday. Admittedly, these films wear their respective genres lightly, but the connection to the political, ethical, and spiritual concerns of the previous work is clear. Hartley never comes off sounding paranoid or like a conspiracy theorist. His politics are never overt. But he has had the presence of mind to hear what we sound like when we discuss our contemporary situation in even the most sensible and detached terms: we sound like we are describing a science fiction novel or a monster movie.

The Girl From Monday is, at its heart, a meditation on rampant consumerism, while No Such Thing, through a strange and lovely lens, considers what the world might be like if everything was removed that could not be reduced to an immediately entertaining sound-byte. Poetry, these two films suggest, would be frowned upon, the poetry that requires monsters and bodiless aliens from outer space to represent the crucial human truths. (But poetry is no illusion. Though it was filmed almost a year prior to September 11, 2001, the release of No Such Thing was delayed by the distributor because it was felt to be insufficiently sensitive to the rattled nerves of the country in the wake of the terrorist attacks. What can be observed by this is that Hartley was working in a more politically sensitive artistic arena some years before the events of 9/11 pushed the rest of the world there.)

Though he may be leveling some light-hearted social criticism at larger institutions governments, corporations, religious sects than he did in his younger years, these organizations are not Hartley’s principle aim. They just happen to be there, on the path on his way to visit the characters he seems to love as much as anyone in real life. These characters are still interacting with their surroundings in the same ways, with understanding and sympathy expressed ironically through comic misunderstanding and naive sounding questions that manage to express profound truths. And this is important for Hartley, influenced as he is equally by such things as the theatrical farces of Moliere, the 1940′s Hollywood comedies of Preston Sturges, and the earnestly questioning Marxist dialectics presented by Jean-Luc Godard. For him, ironic detachment is never divorced from emotional engagement, nor honest skepticism from curiosity.

His films have always been critical in this regard. Hartley is not just entertaining us. He wants us to think about what we, the audience, are doing while we are watching his movie. This is most obviously and hilariously demonstrated in Flirt, by the German construction workers arguing over whether or not the filmmaker (Hartley himself) will succeed in his attempt to finish the movie they themselves are characters in. One of them suggests that even if he fails the failure itself will be a fascinating triumph. The same, in fact, can be said about Hartley’s entire body of work. Its challenges and joys lie in his courage to attempt.

While the transition to opera is an wholly sensible step in his career, for the first time Hartley is directly collaborating with another artist, creating work that supports someone else’s implicit vision rather than his own. It presents an entirely unique set of challenges, beyond exploring a new medium. So, what is Hartley attempting in La Commedia, and how is he going about it?

Hartley: “This is really something different for me. First, I’m just trying to present the live performance of this music in an exciting, moving, and fun way. I have woven together a kind of story from different strands found in the work Louis has created – ideas, opinions, jokes, poetic images contained in the various texts he has brought together. There is no story implicit in it, in the texts he’s set to music. And the story I imply in the motion pictures are inspired as much by Louis Andriessen’s expressed connection to this city, Amsterdam, as to his interest in a certain scene in the Inferno, to his relationship with Jeanette Yanikian as to a certain passage of Vondel. It is really a site-specific piece as well as, for me, an act of solidarity with a particular composer, a celebration of a certain attitude to life. Not Mozart or Wagner, I’m afraid. We’re too much in the here and now for that. Also, for me, it’s an opportunity to exercise telling stories without dialogue. I always take advantage of those types of opportunities. Also, this creation of a story on five screens, I’m really curious about the effect of that. Finally, but connected to all this, the film is subordinate to the music. The staging is, as well. How do you create this intriguing environment where the music can take over and make us all feel something big, where the music fuses all these other elements together? So far I’ve found it has to do with not being too specific. Characters and situations, in the movie as well as on stage, have to be only implied, not spelt out too exactly. Recognizable but general. I guess I’m hoping to create the circumstances for some sort of flood of associations that are meaningful but hard to state explicitly. That’s a long way out from what I usually do as a filmmaker. Here, the meaning is the music.”

On June 27 in Munich, on behalf of the Munich International Film Festival, Hal presented actress Julie Christie with the festival’s CineMerit Award, recognizing her excellent and on-going achievements in cinema. Christie first met Hartley when she performed in his film, No Such Thing (2001), which is where she also met the brilliant Sarah Polley who directed the actress in Away From Her (2006), for which Christie received an Oscar nomination.

Hal Hartley’s award presentation speech,
June 27, 2008, Munich

Good evening. Thank you.

I’m very happy to have been asked to say a few words upon the occasion of the Munich Film Festival’s presentation of its CineMerit Award to Julie Christie.

I was not asked to do so because I am some sort of expert on her career. I am not. We worked together once and very briefly and we became friends.

And, although key points in my own development as a filmmaker coincided with the discovery of certain films Julie had decided to be in – for instance: Don’t Look Now, by Nicolas Roeg, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, by Robert Altman, The Gold Diggers, by Sally Potter – the few words I have to say tonight are in fact a cleaned up version of what I told my wife, Miho, when she wanted to know more about our fascinating new friend from England.

My impression of Julie Christie was never very unusual, I think; as with many people, to me, she seemed important and encouraging simply for existing in the motion picture business – she seemed to belong there, in some sense to define it at its best, but also to appear as though she were just passing through. She telegraphed a healthy disregard for the supposedly awesome significance of “The Movies.” She continues to provide an example of integrity, imagination, commonsense, and (critically) a sense of humor, about herself and the entertainment industry.

Through the roles she has played, she has allowed herself to be glamorous, vulgar, mysterious, funny, charming, argumentative, sexy, helpless, strict, and even unapproachable. And she always does this on her own terms.

And this really does make – and has always made – Julie Christie “Not Just Another Beautiful Actress.”

Even a random selection of her films will show she is a committed and imaginative actor. But she also continues to display a certain attitude to the world which is not only genuinely attractive but consistent over such a wide variety of roles. If I may say so, this is evidence of a skillful and intuitive command of everything about herself – her critical intelligence, creative instinct, curiosity, even her prejudices, her fears, her insecurities – they all come to bear on these obviously special performances which never seem forced, arbitrary, or by-the-book.

The course of her career has been determined by the things that interest her and not by the passing trends and preoccupations of an industry geared to the requirements of mass culture. However – and this is important – she has penetrated that mass culture. She has become a representative personality, an inspiration towards a certain ideal of self-possession and relevant engagement with the issues of our time.

As things go, this is a rare and important thing.

So, Julie, thank you for allowing us to thank you for your efforts.

Personally, but not unrelated, I’m glad to know you. Your friendship and conversation demands attention, challenges easy assumptions, and is often just downright hilarious. It’s a kind of inheritance I am quite protective of; and one I hope to be able to pass on, in some manner, following your example, to another generation.

Thanks.

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.

]]> http://www.possiblefilms.com/2008/03/odeon-magazine/feed/ 0