"Free to Investigate": Hal Hartley By Hannah Eaves April 24, 2005 - 11:39 PM PDT "We call it the Wong Kar-Wai button." Did your decision to form Possible Films stem from your experiences with No Such Thing? No. It had something to do with the way we conceived the new film, The Girl From Monday, because it started quite casually. Kyle [Gilman, Managing Director on the Possible Films Collection] and I decided to distribute, on the website, the CD of my music. We had some success with that and, since Kyle has a lot of knowledge of these things, we broadened the website to include the collection of shorts [The Sisters of Mercy, Kimono, The Other Also, NYC 3/94, The New Math(s) and Opera No.1]. We now have a modest, ongoing sales thing with that. Then we began thinking about this new movie. We knew it was going to be a very low budget and experimental film in some ways, and we thought, "Well, maybe this is the right way to think about the release of a film like this since this is up and running and it's working. So why don't we make a movie that's for this kind of venue?" I felt kind of relaxed about it, because whenever I'm making a piece like this, a Book of Life, or Flirt, ones that are more formally challenging to a mainstream audience, I'm always worrying about it doing well for the distributor. They're going to have to spend so much money to market it and print it. I thought, "Well, this takes a lot of the pressure off; I can make a modestly budgeted film." We may not make our money back right away but I feel pretty certain that we'll make our money back as time goes on. No Such Thing Going back to No Such Thing, there was a nice guy at MGM who would call me every Sunday night and tell me how many seats were sold during the week. It was only out for three weeks and MGM, who hated this movie - they didn't understand it at all - were obligated by their contract with Francis Coppola's company to put it out. Every film that Francis signed on to executive produce they had to release, so they just did the absolute minimum. So this guy would call me up and tell me how many people came, and I was kind of shocked at the numbers. I don't remember what the numbers were. In the big picture, I guess they were pretty small, but in the picture of a Hal Hartley movie, I thought they were huge. "I cannot believe it! You're telling me that thirty thousand people went to see a Hal Hartley film this week, in this small town?" And he's like, "Yeah, but you know we'd have to do ten times that for the studio to consider keeping it in the theater after week three, so I'm sorry but..." So it's a funny thing. And that does effect what we're doing for Girl From Monday and the collection as a whole. Thinking on a different scale. Kyle and I had a great conversation with two documentary filmmakers, from San Francisco, I think. They gave us a lot of great information about self-distribution. They've made four or five films over the past twenty years that they've self-distributed and they have contacts with art houses and the appropriate-sized movie houses across the country. It's a lot of telephone work, connecting with them and working out relationships so that you can trust those people in Kansas City to have two showings of the film and then ship the print to Seattle. It becomes this network. No one's going to get rich, but your film will get seen, you'll make a little money. I like that. I've always liked that. When I started making films, it was very much at that period of time where rock and roll was starting to be called alternative and that small kind of mentality was very attractive. I never expected my first film to get the type of release that it did. I guess I was always hoping for success but not fame. Those first two films just kind of hit much bigger... then again, it's a matter of scale. For me, it seemed quite big. For most people in the motion picture business, I guess it's miniscule. I was reading an interview you did with Jean-Luc Godard. It was at a time when electronic editing was just starting and you talk a little bit about the idea of electronic distribution, so you were thinking about it even back then? I was getting all that from my partner, Steve Hamilton, who was my assistant editor back in 1992. He's very visionary about the uses of new technology. He came from the computer business to be an intern for me. We were editing in film at the time but he picked it up in an afternoon and, by the next day, I was like, "I want this guy forever." He's great on the telephone, he's great with people, he loves machinery. So as the years went on, it wasn't that long, two years later, he was telling me we should do this Avid thing. So I let him lead and we kind of formulated a company called Spin Cycle Post. We used some of the money I made making Amateur to buy the initial machinery and we actually made the first third, the NY section of Flirt, expressly as an exercise to learn how to use this new computer technology. You also talk in that interview about watching movies on your computer. Yeah, I think the long view for Hamilton and me is streaming. We are forced to think in long-short-term and then in the short-long-term. They're always promising that streaming will be foolproof three years from now, and that then turns into six, but we think that's where the future lies. Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloydand Hal Hartley on the set of The Girl From Monday How do you work differently in digital video than in film? In your works shot on film, there seem to be more wide shots and landscapes. Well, I start from the nature of the material. I was never attracted to video as a substitute for motion picture photography. I love motion picture photography. I like lots of different things. I like video, too. I try to look for qualities I can get out of digital video that are endemic to it, rather than just trying to cop the look of motion pictures. HD is a different thing. My next movie will probably be in high definition video. Then I don't really see any appreciable difference between motion picture photography and HD. The resolution is just tremendous. When I work in video, I like to say that I do damage to the camera. I spent months making shorter pieces to try and figure out when the camera [the Sony VX2000 in The Girl From Monday] freaks out. Particularly interlaced video - I think that's interesting. Prosumer cameras have all those controls built in, too, so you don't make white that's "illegal." It's all based on broadcast qualifications. So if you look right into a light the camera's kind of like, "No, yes, no, yes." I've always thought of it as the visual equivalent of what electronic popular music or amplified electric music has been making for fifteen years now. Distortion has a visual texture. I'm apt to be listening to Sonic Youth more as a reference than I am watching movies, because there's much more freedom in music about using distortion. All that blurriness comes out of that aesthetic. It's not so much in this one, because I think we were able to mess around with those limiters, but when we made The Book of Life, in 1998, one of my favorite parts of that in terms of distortion is the shot where Polly Harvey comes out of this elevator and walks in this really bright hallway, very reflective, but exposed for inside the elevator. The door opens and, wham, Polly becomes this stick figure alien. You can actually see the white - it's not actually white - it's white, then yellow, then purple. That is a digital artifact. The effect in The Girl From Monday, is that a shutter effect? Yes, we call it the Wong Kar-Wai button. We should actually call it the Christopher Doyle button. I was able to tell Wong Kar-Wai that in London last year. He had seen Book of Life and he said, "How did you do that thing?" And I said, "We call it the Wong Kar-Wai button." He said, "Shit. Because we do it, Chris does it, and it's so expensive! We have to do this printing." I think they thought, if I understood him correctly, that they had discovered an interesting way to shoot in low light situations so that they didn't need more lights. So they could keep the shutter open longer and you'd get this streaky kind of thing which was cool, but also you didn't need many lights because the shutter was open longer. next >>> Index "We call it the Wong Kar-Wai button." "I will make a movie entirely audio." back to past articles

Hannah Eaves Originally hailing from Australia, the home of greatly-missed Victoria Bitter and the 'laid back life,' Hannah is currently based in San Francisco. Her writing can also be found in SOMA Magazine, The Santa Cruz Sentinel and Intersection Magazine, which she co-publishes with Jonathan Marlow. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles