Hal Hartley’s 1994 fan favorite Amateur is finally available on DVD and Blu-ray from Artificial Eye.

Starring Isabelle Huppert and Martin Donovan, Amateur is the story of a man who wakes up in an alley with no memory of who he is. Stumbling into a coffee shop, he is befriended by an ex-nun who is failing in her attempts to write marketable pornography and is convinced that the Virgin Mary wants her to intervene in the destiny of a troubled young girl (Elina Lowensohn) with whom this handsome amnesiac is somehow involved. Artificial Eye’s British rerelease has been remastered in stunning HD from the original interpositive, and is presented with the bonus short “Professional Amateurs: The Making of Amateur.”

Hal’s reflections today on his iconic, thoughtful, hilarious and tragic existential thriller:

The confines were there to be played with and resisted. Is this where the explicit sex is supposed to happen? Let’s make it sexy but very tender and implied. Is this the extreme violence? Let’s formalize it out of all sensationalism. It wasn’t just to be smart-alecky, but was a (admittedly meta-fictional) attempt to let legitimately human thoughts and feelings to screw up the genre expectations and create something in spite of the genre.

There’s a disconnect between what the characters are and what they want to be: Isabelle is all soul and no body, but she wants to dwell in the body. Martin is all generosity and kindness now that he doesn’t know who he is, but everyone else knows he’s a cruel violent bastard. Elina thinks she’s being a real smart double-crosser but is of course an incompetent criminal. They’re all amateurs in that sense. But amateur, also, the word stems from the French and Latin, ‘to love.’

Artificial Eye will also be releasing Simple Men and The Unbelievable Truth on DVD and Blu-ray. Stateside, Olive Films’ Hal Hartley library now includes The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Flirt, and Meanwhile on DVD and Blu-ray, as well a Girl From Monday / Book of Life double feature DVD.

Amateur, now on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK.

Skink Ink’s exhibition “Still Lives” runs through April 29, 2013 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Hal’s debut film The Unbelievable Truth (1989) returns to the big screen this Friday at First Time Fest in New York City. Watch the trailer and buy your ticket to the March 1 screening and Q & A at the festival’s website.

The film—starring Adrienne Shelly, Robert John Burke, and Edie Falco—will be available on Blu-ray and DVD this Spring from our friends at Olive Films.

What motivated you to write this script?

Almost since I was first out of college, I had been toying with a romantic melodrama concerning two young people without work and the complication of a pregnancy where the paternity is uncertain. The uncertain paternity issue preoccupied me because it was something I had gone through in college. In fact, almost all the dialogue in the clinic scene where Matthew accompanies Maria and gets in a fight with another, more calloused, guy, is verbatim. I didn’t get in a fight, but I had that conversation with the only other male person in the waiting area. He was older than me and thought he was giving me the benefit of his experience, I guess. I wrote a few versions of that between 1985 and 1987 and then let it rest. Then, in 1988, I made The Unbelievable Truth.

How was making your second film different from making your first?

We had more money. It was still a small film at six hundred thousand dollars, but it was a vast step up from the first one which had been made for only sixty thousand. I was also much more practiced after making the first and so was my crew. We were able to make scenes with a little bit more production value: more extras, a few little stunts, a much more well equipped art department.

You overhauled the part of Maria for Adrienne Shelly, and this was the first of six films you made starring Martin Donovan. What made each of them such favorites for you as leads?

At the time, I didn’t think of them as favorites. I thought they were just perfect for the parts. I had been very gratified by Adrienne’s work in the first film. I hardly remember directing her in The Unbelievable Truth. She knew what the character was like and only asked about certain lines that weren’t perfectly clear to her. Trust was different and she saw that too when I gave her the script. But it was working with her on The Unbelievable Truth—and seeing how audiences reacted to her—that made me go back and read the script of Trust again. Because I was thinking of something I could do with her. I read it and thought, ok, I’m a much better writer than I was three years ago. I sat down and re-wrote from top to bottom. But, also, I had an actual person in mind now who was, besides all this, someone I was, by then, involved with romantically. I can see things in the film now that grew directly out of that relationship: the stuff with her not wanting to wear her glasses… that is directly taken from life.

She and I attended a play that Martin was in while I was already in discussions with the English company that wanted to produce Trust. After the show, I asked her what she thought of the guy who played so and so, because I’d liked him and thought maybe he’d be good to audition as Matthew. As I remember, she was nodding excitedly right away. She was having the same idea.

How did the device of Matthew’s grenade come to you?

I can’t remember exactly. But my writing had been getting that way, aiming to pack objects with a lot of narrative meaning in and of themselves.

Is the depiction of love in Trust consistent with ideas about love in other films you’ve made?

No. I think that in Trust and—in a related but different manner, in Simple Men—I worked out my youthful, ecstatic but tortured adoration of females and got on with them in a much less troubled way. It was personal. I was desperate for some reasoning in the heart department. It’s impossible, of course, and I intuited that. I knew it would be funny and endearing at least. But after those film romantic sacrifice was no longer something I felt the need to deal with. I had done it. Other people have to do it now, their own way.

Ultimately, does Trust offer a positive view of the world?

Oh, definitely. People, whom I think of as the only manageable part of the world, taking control of their own lives and feelings. Even Matthew, I think, as he is driven off to jail. Theses people have convictions—even if they’re not able to articulate them—and they’re capable of acting upon them, eventually. I get the feeling Matthew’s been cured somehow by his witnessing of this girl’s selflessness. A selflessness that she’s had to discover for herself and earn. Because that has got to be the most dumb-assed romantic self-pitying nonsense imaginable—to attempt blowing yourself up with the evil factory because your girlfriend won’t allow you to be the father of her unwanted child. But she fixes him somehow or other. That’s very positive.

Why do you think the people who love this film have responded to it so strongly?

The characters, I think. The two lead characters are admirable, if flawed. And people of a certain age identified with them. The antagonists, like the Maria’s mom and Matthew’s dad, are refreshingly emphatic in their aims and attitudes.  So, I don’t know… great characters, well written, a beautiful and handsome cast.

Why hasn’t it been more widely available until now?

It had the bad luck to be largely financed by an American company that went out of business just before the industry changed from VHS to DVD. That company’s library of films got sold to a major Hollywood studio that encountered some obscure legal problem preventing them from exploiting the library they had just purchased. That’s all I know. But that’s all over and Olive Films have bought the library.

How do you think the film functions today?

Pretty well. I still don’t see many movies like this out there. There is no well adjusted tempering of each character’s prejudices. It’s a pushy little film with a big heart, I think.

Presented here for the first time in limited first run edition are the complete and definitive scenarios for Hal Hartley’s films The Book of Life (1997), No Such Thing (1999), and The Girl from Monday (2003), numbered and signed by the author.

“For years I’ve wanted to get these three screenplays all put together in a book. They were all conceived around the same time (late 1997 to the middle of 2000), one after the other, inspired by similar interests and discontents. And—after all this time—I decided to rewrite them almost more like novels, freeing them from most of the technical requirements of the screenplay form, allowing myself to describe the invisible workings of each character’s mind and heart—and my own attitudes about the situations I describe. I’m no novelist—at least not yet—though retelling these stories in this manner has gotten me excited about trying! But most of all I just wanted to get the stories out there in book form. The three films are pretty off-the-beaten-track to begin with and they were distributed in only a small way. Which is perfectly ok. But I think they work as a good reading experience too. I took this opportunity to write in greater depth about the ideas and situations that are dealt with more lightly in the films.”  —Hal Hartley, 11/17/12 (from attempts to write an introduction to a forthcoming French edition of The Girl From Monday screenplay)

Perfect-bound paperback, 229 pages

Richard Sylvarnes’ video for Hal’s song The Chevalier’s Unpaid Bill, off the album Our Lady of the Highway

Featuring sequences from The Last Words of Dutch Schultz

Michael Koshkin’s video for Hal’s song In Case She’s Waiting, off the album Our Lady of the Highway

Featuring Ashley de la Montaña

New music from Hal Hartley.

Our Lady of the Highway is 14 new instrumental songs composed over the past few years. Early mixes of some have appeared here on the website and one of them “The Bride’s Older Sister” grew from a tune made for Henry Fool (1998). But otherwise these are new tracks recorded and mastered this past winter and spring.

Decidedly guitar and drum driven bluesy grooves and some other fairly danceable fun!

Available here at possiblefilms.com for now and everywhere else from August on.

Thanks for listening!

Track List
Listen to this song at our website.
02. In Case She’s Waiting
03. Crooked Smile
04. The Bride’s Older Sister
05. Bethlehem Pennsylvania
06. Dangerous New Skirt
07. Accomplice
08. Our Lady Of The Highway
09. Likely Excuses
10. The Chevalier’s Unpaid Bill
11. Prettiest Lawyer
12. Any Other Sensible Dude
13. Walking Into Lindenhurst
14. Prayer

FLIRT (1996) screens at IFC Center in New York Wednesday April 4 at 8pm. Tickets available here. Hal and members of the cast will be present. This is the first digitally restored 16×9 version of the film ever screened. What Hal says: “The best work I’ve ever done.”