ERROR:
subscribe to style file blog via RSSshouts and mumbles
January 30, 2008 9:41 am
2007 was a banner year for mumblecore. New York City’s IFC Center turned over its theater to the mumblecore movie crew for two weeks last summer, sold out pretty much every show, and got The New York Times to trumpet the emergence of cinema’s “Generation DIY.” Flagship mumblecore members the Duplass Brothers and Andrew Bujalski landed money deals out in Hollywood. And the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary anointed “mumblecore” its runner-up word of the year. “Locavore” carried the day, but that’s OK: Much like the Fauves and the Punks before them, the mumblecore filmmakers take pains to point out that critics are making them part of a movement that doesn’t really exist. “We all know each other from festivals, and we all support each other, and our work has all been promoted by the programmers at South by Southwest,” acknowledges director Aaron Katz, whose atmospheric films “Dance Party USA” and “Quiet City” number among the critics’ mumblecore favorites. “But I look at what Mark and Jay Duplass do, for instance, and what I see is how different their work is from mine. People who advance the idea of a ‘mumblecore’ scene, I think they’re watching our movies for their similarities.” Those similarities do exist, but as this week’s DVD release of Katz’s films attests, the best mumblecore work stands on its own. Here, Katz talks about shooting his way out of post-college angst, his issues with Malcolm McDowell, and why “mumblecore” is really just another way of saying “indie.”
So were you at Sundance?
That whole Park City thing kind of passes me by.
The reason I ask is that I was looking at the Sundance slate, and almost every feature in competition had at least one major star. Even the shorts have stars. It got me wondering whether the press has cottoned onto the mumblecore scene because it’s the only really indie thing going.
Well, I can’t speak for the press, but I can certainly affirm that my movies are 100 percent indie, in the sense that every single thing on-screen got there independently of the movie industry. That’s the magic of digital—you shoot on DV, you edit at home, and if you’re willing to drive yourself crazy, like I am, you can even mix the sound in Final Cut. It’s not the ideal way to work for every project, but if you’re making something small and idiosyncratic and personal, you get to hold all the pieces in your hand, if you know what I mean. As wary as I am of the mumblecore label, I will say that’s the thing that unites us as directors—we like to hold all the pieces. And you’d better like it, if you’re making a movie for $3,000.
How on earth do you make a movie for $3,000? I mean, a decent camera costs that.
Step one is to find a DP with his own camera. That’s a cheat, but then again, it’s not—you make a movie on the cheap by getting people to donate their time and their expertise and their equipment and their space. We made “Dance Party USA” for $3,000 because that’s what was in my bank account—I’d just graduated from film school and I was adamant about shooting something right away. I’d seen too many people who graduated ahead of me get bogged down trying to find the money to support a crew. I decided to aim small, and find a story I could tell with what I had on hand and what I could easily and cheaply get a hold of.
Now that you’ve made two of those small, personal films, do you feel like you’re ready to graduate to larger budgets?
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. My favorite thing about working small is that you’re forced to build these very invigorated collaborative relationships. My producers and I have gotten to a point with each other where we can sort of read each other’s minds, and you can’t buy that kind of trust. It comes out of, you know, everyone coming back to the same apartment after shooting all day, and watching the same thing on TV and eating the same leftovers and basically sharing the experience. It’s hard for me to imagine working any other way. But having said that, the script I’m writing now is one that would probably have to go through a more traditional production process—attach a star, attract financing—because it’s a period piece, set in the seventies. And then there’s my fantasy project, which is to write and direct an adaptation of one of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels.
George MacDonald Fraser—he died recently, right? I remember reading all these obituaries that talked about Flashman, his great Zelig-like antihero, and wondering why no one had ever adapted the books to film. Seems like a franchise…
One of them was adapted, actually—Malcolm McDowell plays Captain Flashman. Which is all wrong, because the thing about Malcolm McDowell is that he always seems like he’s up to something, and the whole point of Flashman is that he comes across as the world’s most upstanding individual.
Who would you cast as Captain Flashman?
Jeez, I have no idea. I can’t even think about stars. Stars mean trailers. Trailers mean crew. One of these days, though. One of these days.
tags:
