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In this video [the kickstarter promotion video for Soft in the Head: ] you’re a bit of a dictator….

Yeah….

 

 

What happened?

I found that it didn’t work for me. I like what I can find when there’s chaos. I prefer that to just trying to demand things from people. But, it’s funny, I think that you said….one night when we were drinking after the shoot or in the middle of the shoot, I think you said I was a something of a dictator in disguise or something like that.

 

 

I remember that, yes.

So maybe that's where that lies….I've shifted from being someone who yells and demands things to being someone who sets things up…sets up miserable situations for people.

 

 

So you’re just an omnipresent dictator.

Exactly. (*laughs*) The best kind.

 

 

Well, I want to hear when that shift happened. Was it after The Blind [Nathan’s first feature, which he describes as a disaster and won’t let anyone see] or before?

Yeah, it was after The Blind. On my early movies, on my short films, I wanted to be this dictatorial presence; I wanted to be able to shape everything. I thought that I had an idea of what I needed and I thought that that was what this idea of having a vision was all about. And then I wasn’t happy with anything I was doing.  I mean, I wasn’t proud of it.

 

 

This was while you were filming or after?

Afterwards. I was always ashamed of what I made. So then, while making the feature when I had this crew of 40 people and I had all this excess, I realized that I couldn’t handle it and I didn’t want to; it wasn’t allowing me to work in a way that felt in any way conducive to my personality. Basically, I was setting myself up for failure. So I went into a deep depression after that, came out the other side, and realized I have fun setting up chaotic situations.

 

 

And so, well I want to talk more about why you’re drawn to chaos in the making of something later, but it’s interesting because you go from chaos, but the second half of filmmaking…the editing…how do you…

Well, with Exit Elena, I would do the first cut, I was cutting everyday and Kia (star and co-writer of Exit Elena) would come home and we would go through things together and I would re-cut. And then, it still needed work because I was too close to the goddamn thing, so then I brought Cody (editor on Exit Elena and cinematographer and editor on Soft in the Head and Simian) on for two weeks at the very end and he was able to see what needed to be discarded and that was great. With Soft in the Head, it was the same deal. I would edit everyday and I was getting more and more frustrated with the piece. Exit Elena we stuck to the outline much more than with Soft in the Head. With Soft in the Head, basically we ended up throwing out the outline three days into the shoot and writing the story down on a napkin as we went along. So the story really had to be created in the edit. And the rough cut was a mess and Cody came in and really helped shape it and turn it into something that was coherent because I had made these scenes that were really long winded and didn’t, I don’t know, it was just incomprehensible on a certain level and I couldn’t figure out why because I felt that the emotions were right if you were to take the scenes separately, to watch it scene by scene, but together there was no coherence, so it was driving me crazy. As I’ve edited these pictures that are improvised, I’ve realized more and more that editing is not about one particular scene, there will be weak scenes, there will be strong scenes, but I wanted every scene to be strong and that was the problem with it. It was a piece of shit! But Cody really brought it to what it is. And with this one [Simian], Cody is editing it and I’m there. So I didn’t do a first pass and I’m just there while Cody is suffering through what we shot. And it’s strange; you realize that editing is always about suffering through the footage at first and eventually you make peace with it. But I think you only make peace with it after it’s out there because you’re just always struggling with the fact that you feel like it doesn’t work. And that’s so fucking frustrating. Because, you know, you have certain elements that work very well but you know things are not coming together.

 

 

You always feel as though it doesn’t work until it’s released into the world, until other people are watching it?

Yep! Yeah. And even then it’s questionable. But that’s why, as soon as I’m editing something, I start developing the next movie because I need to feel like, alright, well, I failed on this one, I can succeed on the next one. There’s always that hope.

 

 

Well, I guess I can relate to that with my own small, very small, experience with directing theatre. I think what I’m doing isn’t worth anything until the audience responds to it. But it’s different with theatre because you can say having an audience in the room is still the process of making it --

It shifts.

 

 

Yeah. Whereas with film you’re presenting a finished product.

Yeah, you’re presenting it to them and they’re not changing it, their reactions are not changing it.

 

 

But their reactions are changing you!

Yes, exactly! And that’s all that matters, right? And you’ll put that down seriously.

 

 

Yes, ‘parentheses laughs maniacally’.

Yeah, that’s what I’m good at: maniacally laughing. You know, people take mania as a sense of evil, but I think it’s actually being able to laugh at life, which I realize is the only thing I care about.

 

 

Is that in part why you’re fascinated with total chaos?

Yeah, because it makes me happy! And chaos and laughter are more or less the same. I mean it’s that disruption, something breaking apart, breaking through. I love that. And that’s why, you know, I love seeing Cassavetes’ movies and all that shit.  There’s just that great sense of laughter; a strain of laughter under it all. And it’s not joyous.

 

 

No, it’s tragic. Everything you’re watching unfold is totally devastating. But at the same time, it’s all sort of lighthearted. It has a cheekiness to it.

Absolutely. I always feel like, life’s a joke. Life’s a joke.

 

 

Life’s a joke we must take seriously.

Exactly! That’s my motto in life.

 

 

I know. I pulled that quote from an interview you did.

It’s true. And you know, I’ll go into these depressions where I don’t feel that way in the least. But then something will open that back up, whatever it is that triggers it, a particular person or a particular situation or even a movie I see, and I realize that that’s crucial to being able to cope with life. Simply taking it as a joke. And taking it seriously. Because if not, goddamnit, everyone is laughing at us, you know? Whenever I think about making a movie I always think about the most humiliating situations I can put down on paper first. Because those are the things I laugh at. 

 

 

So now you want to put other people in humiliating situations.

Well, yes and no. I think that life is full of them. And that’s where humor tends to go these days.

 

 

But your humiliation isn’t crude, just –

Just general social situations. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I realized that I never feel comfortable. Most of the time I feel uncomfortable. So I go through one situation to another that’s uncomfortable and I just want people to understand that on a certain level because what else can I do? That’s how I see the world and I realized that’s the only thing I can do. I use the method of cinema. Of Advanced Cinema.

 

 

You realize you’re not European.

Of devolved cinema. When I say Advanced Cinema I mean humiliation.

The joy of it is, with the way I make movies, is that you can make these uncomfortable situations but it doesn’t seem like a punch line.  It just seems like you’re just floating through it and then it’s over and you’re on to the next thing. There’s no punch line. Before you arrive at the punch line you’re onto the next scene so you’re not allowed to laugh. And that’s what I like. Because that’s life. You’re just moving through it.

 

 

And you can only laugh at the event once it’s in the past.

And we’re not setting ourselves up to be punch lines, we just end up being one. With TV shows like The Office, which I do find very funny, it’s always about setting up the punch lines and delivering on them. But I think it’s funnier for me to watch these situations that are being set up, and you know they’re being set up, but you never deliver on the punch line.

 

 

So you say that creating and presenting these uncomfortable situations is your own sort of coping method but you’ve also said that you want to make the audience feel uncomfortable.

Yeah, I’ve said that in Q&As, etc. but I don’t know if I believe that. It’s the only way I can make something. You know, they always tell you in school to ‘make what you know’ and I never understood what that meant so I was like, okay, well then I’ll write about my mother. And then I did end up writing about my mother. So I guess I did end up making what I know. But I also think it’s "make what you feel," and I do feel that way. But I don’t necessarily know if I want to make other people feel uncomfortable because I don’t know if they do feel that uncomfortable watching these movies. Maybe they do. I was happy when someone, after seeing Soft in the Head, said they felt like they were constantly going through a panic attack. And that was like a compliment! And maybe that’s a sick thing. I don’t know. I wonder about this though, I mean, eventually I’d like to be able to make something…you know Fassbinder always said he wanted to make movies that were as beautiful as Hollywood but had truth to them. That was his ideal and that’s a lovely ideal. It’s odd, I always take that quote and feel like I can apply it to my movies and I want it to apply to my movies but then I think about it and I can’t apply it to my movies. That’s how I always start off thinking. I set down to do that, to make Fassbinder’s ideal, something that’s as beautiful as a Hollywood movie but has truth to it, but I never do that in the end.

 

 

Well, Simian looks beautiful…

Absolutely, but it’s not –

 

 

What do you mean by ‘beautiful’? Or what did you take that to mean?

I always took it as classic Hollywood – if you look at his later movies, they’re big, beautiful shiny objects but the psychology behind them is fantastic. Everything is captured so well in the asceticism that is present in every frame of like Veronika Voss and The Marriage of Maria Braun. It’s funny though, I’m trying to go back to this train of thought and why I brought that up because I feel like there’s a connection but the only connection is that’s where I always start when I think of new projects. I want to make something bigger, so I always think that I want to make something that’s more ‘Hollywood’, but I don’t even like…I mean, I do like old Hollywood, but I know I can’t make anything like Fassbinder. I’m not as precise, his sense of precision is something I don’t possess.

 

 

But that’s where you begin isn’t it?

It’s where I began, so I still think in those terms but I then work against them throughout in order to ensure it’ll look like shit in the end. Not shit, but you know, chaotic and hectic and overwhelming, not necessarily a streamlined experience.

 

 

That is something that’s interesting, that sort of what has become ‘truthful’ now is shitty cameras and…

Yeah. It is kind of funny. Seeing something like Leviathan [2012 documentary by Lucian Casting-Taylor and Verena Pavel], I always go back to this, it was more beautiful than anything I’ve seen this year in terms of the way it was shot, in terms of everything. And so maybe that’s the new Hollywood: where cameras can go and what they can capture. I keep thinking about how to capture a person’s nervous breakdown in the way that Leviathan captures fishing. That would be my ideal. I have no idea what that would look like. 

 

 

So, this is a total tangent, but I’ve become sort of disturbed by this increasing need to capture something and turn it into a secondary experience. And how that ability to capture things used to be secluded to an elite, a specific group of people and now is available to anyone who owns a phone.

Absolutely. But some of the best things you see these days are captured on phones. I think more and more we'll come to accept those videos as a new – I mean, some of the best stuff I’ve seen is on YouTube. Like that grape lady! You know what I mean? I mean, just watching that whole experience is so much more satisfying on so many levels than so many things you pay to go and see. And so it’s how to take that sense of life and put it on a screen and make that your constant objective. And I guess that’s as beautiful and big as Hollywood because you’re capturing human beings and putting them on a screen and blowing them up but it has that truth to it. So I can apply it in that way, it’s just not going to have the shimmer and shine; it’s not going to have that artifice. Fassbinder was always talking about artifice and how you could show this hypocrisy of human beings in general through these Hollywood signifiers and all that shit. And he did it so well. But I know I can’t do that so I try to apply it in my own small way and love it.

 

 

So if you could articulate why you want to make movies, why you want to capture these pieces of human existence, would it be akin to Fassbinder’s?

No, I mean that was the starting point. Whenever I start a new project I always read interviews with him and Maurice Pialat, these incredibly pessimistic hateful people on a certain level, but also full of this other kind of love, I don’t know what it is, but it’s there, it’s present. But the reason why I make movies is because I’m so fucking anxious I need somewhere to put all of my energy. The best part about movie making is no matter what kind of movie you’re making it’s always going to be stressful and you can count on that. And knowing that, and knowing my family–the chaos that you’re constantly assaulted with when you’re around my family–I love that and it also drives me crazy. But that’s what I know and so that’s what I want to bring to the screen. It also makes me feel like I’m doing something with my life or what I know. Rather than just simply hiding it away and suffering over the fact that I can’t deal with life as it is, I try and make these things that show how I see things. And I set up all these situations and let them fall where they will. And they have to be picked up in the edit. In the end I don’t know. I don’t know why I make movies. And that’s part of why I do it. Why do you think I make movies? From what you know about me.

 

 

Well…I can speak to what I’m interested in, in your type of filmmaking…and that is that every little piece is very small and very specific but it’s an exploration.  But I feel like the major drive in each scene/situation is a curiosity. 

Yeah, maybe it is curiosity. Because I find myself drawn to subjects I would never give two shits about otherwise, but as soon as they’re part of a story, a part of this world of humiliation that I am now going to focus on...

 

 

It also speaks to the people in your movies, the reason you don’t really work with ‘actors’…

It’s true, I don’t really pick actors. Or I pick reluctant actors.

 

 

In an interview you said, “let people in, keep performers out”.

Yeah, and maybe I have a problem with that because in the end that’ll be why I won’t be able to make bigger movies.

 

 

Well it goes back to what you were saying about your meltdown and then reckoning with your idea of what a director is and a director with a vision and a straight and narrow plan and then throwing that all away. It’s hard to get performers involved.

Exactly. And then you get good people involved instead. And the good ones like you afterwards, and the bad ones dislike you. Just joking.

 

But it’s funny because I always think about the way my mother tells stories. It’s just a series of tangents, there’s no beginning, there is no end. And the most beautiful thing I can think of that’s inherent to my view of the world and telling stories is that I love tangents, I love the fact that telling a straightforward story has never been a part of my life because my mother can’t tell one for the life of her. But she’s a wonderful storyteller in her own way, just they’re not your traditional stories with an end.  Like Don Quixote, if my mother came to her senses it would be a tragedy.  I love Don Quixote.  I love The Idiot. But The Idiot is also some sort of take on Don Quixote and it’s referenced in that book. It’s so oddly flawed in the way the story is told, it’s almost like my mother told that story.

 

 

Do you think you’ll try and make it? Is that still something that interests you?

Oh, absolutely, I think about that book all the time. I always feel like I’m looking for characters that have some absurd objective and then watering it down through their situation. Like in Exit Elena, she wants to find a place to live so she becomes a nurse’s aid and then it’s a slightly absurd situation because she wants a family but the family she ends up staying with isn’t exactly ideal. But you can make these small objectives have absurdities to them, and I guess I always liked characters who have absurdities to them. I mean, making movies is obviously absurd. You can’t make money off of them at this point, nobody wants to see them, you’ll get theatrical runs and then ten people will show up.

 

 

But you chose movies over making theatre. And making theatre is even more absurd in that sense.

Oh, yeah. And before theatre I had poetry!

 

 

Right! So, tell me the trajectory.

Alright. From the beginning?

 

 

Yes.

Alright. So, when I was 7 I started drawing. I think I had about 7 strep throats when I was 7 so I started drawing. And I was very obsessive as a kid. You really want it from the beginning?

 

 

From the very beginning.

Alright so when I was a little kid I was scared of going outside. This is right around the time of the Charles Stuart murder. Of course this had nothing to do with my life but I saw it on the news. I don’t even remember the details of this murder case but I remember how much it affected me. I was probably 5, if that. This guy, he said that his wife had been murdered so they were looking for the murderer but then it ended up that he had killed his pregnant wife and I think his brother was involved and it just petrified me. And that took place in Boston and I was living in the suburbs so I was terrified of going into the city because I thought everyone would die as soon as they entered Boston. But it had nothing to do with the case itself, it was just the fact that at that point I realized that people are irrational and that was a horrible, eye-opening thing. You just become terrified of that irrational side of life. And it’s worse than all the fairytales and all the Disney shit you’re being fed. So I remember having heavy abandonment issues when I was young, for no particular reason because they were actually very protective of me. It was just anxiety abandonment issues. And then I was scared I was going to be kidnapped.

 

 

So you lived your first ten years in your house…

Yeah, so I was extremely scared but I was also just a pain in the ass to deal with as a human being. But anyway, I started drawing when I was 7 and the rest is misery. My mother thought I was extremely talented, which I don’t know if I actually am, but that was the first phase of my “artistic life”, I guess you could say; the anxiety was the first phase, the second was drawing. I was drawing and then I was skateboarding. I designed skateboards and snowboards when I was 8. And then when I was 12, my brother brought home a CD of Rimbaud’s poetry sung over weird dance music. And I fell in love with Rimbaud. So then I gave up skateboarding and snowboarding and I thought that I was a French poet!

 

 

And this is age…

Around 13/14. I was convinced that I was meant to be Rimbaud. I learned French and I started writing poetry in French. And I was very gung-ho about all of these 19th century French poets, obscurities and heavyweights. And I learned French versification and I can’t understand any of my poems now but I wrote hundreds of poems in French. And then my cat, Spunky, who I would recite Baudelaire to and who I was obsessed with, died when I was 15 and I started having anxiety attacks. And the following year I went to France on a study abroad program and was completely disillusioned because I thought that I’d go to France and everyone would be obsessed with 19th century French poetry. And I arrived there and that wasn’t the case. But while I was there, I began getting obsessed with Strindberg and Artaud so that’s when I realized that poetry was dead but theatre was still alive. But then I was like, all of these theatre people are dead so why don’t I see some artists from the 60s and 70s who are still alive. So I was in New York visiting my brother and I saw Richard Foreman’s Now That Comedy Is Dead My Life is Empty.  Which was amazing. I remember the air, walking into that space, it felt heavy like when you walk into a museum. It was just this grand feeling that I hadn’t felt in years. It was at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery. And I went there and I fell in love. I was obsessed with alchemy from years of reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and the sense that there’s a mysticism to life and he was able to present that. And so I realized that I wanted to be a playwright. And I said, “fuck France” and I went to NYU for playwriting. And while there wrote a bunch of experimental plays, which no one liked, and I got an internship with the Ontological Hysteric for a summer and through that I was able to get an internship with Richard Foreman the following year. And then, Richard Foreman basically told me that theatre was dead while we were working on his play.

 

 

Which play was it?

It was King Cowboy Rufus Rules the World. It was about George Bush. And there was a great version that he ended up scrapping weeks before it went up. It was brilliant; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this thing. And then the next day he decided it was shit and made this thing that was much more obvious for some reason. It was weird and sort of disappointing. But he would recommend all these great films to watch while I was there, so that’s when I started watching Fassbinder and Passolini. And my life was falling apart so those people came in handy and I could watch 40 Fassbinder films or however many Passolini and that was the beginning of the end, I guess. I switched from playwriting to screenwriting my last year at NYU.

 

 

Were you interested in film before Richard Foreman told you to go into it?

No. I mean I was semi-interested once upon a time. I remember seeing Svuantmeyer and I’d seen Bunuel early on because my mother had shown me Un Chien Andelou because I was really into the surrealists. And I remember seeing Annie Hall when I was probably 7 and being extremely depressed, I thought it was the most depressing thing I’d ever seen in my life and only years later realizing why. And my father wanted to be a filmmaker when he was in his 20s. I always kind of thought films were stupid. I always had trouble sitting through movies, I still do. You have to sit down for certain period of time, there’s no interaction with anything. And as a kid, like with every animation, you knew what was going to take place more or less. And it was excruciating! “I have to sit through this, again and again and again, the same story, the same setup? And it’s the same horrible porridge every time and I have to sit through this and pretend it’s delicious? I just want to pee!” So, I always found going to movies frustrating. Although I did love Stand By Me and Uncle Buck, but other than that I had a lot of trouble with movies.

 

 

So, I saw a talk with Willem Defoe and Robert Wilson, and somewhere in it Willem Defoe said, “theatre is conjuring and film is capturing”. And it seems, to me at least, that you’re trying to marry the two. You’re trying to conjure something while capturing it…during the actual process of shooting something you conjure and then you capture whatever you made and make it what you want it to be in the editing room.

That’s a beautiful way to put it. That’s a great way to wrap it up. That’s it!

 

 

So we could end there, but I still want to go back to this idea of chaos, especially in terms of making a film. What is it about complete chaos that interests you?

I just love how people react to it – some people are crazy and some people just lay low.

 

 

You mean in the making of it, not in the reception of it.

I don’t even know what the reception is. The thing about movies these days is you get a bunch of reviews but nobody’s reading them. People might hear your name if it’s being tossed around and then go see your stuff, but who the fuck knows. Who knows how things are going to be received. But I like this idea that the making of it has some reason behind it and that it’s about conjuring and that it’s going to be captured because you have a camera in there. But why do I keep coming back to chaos? I think because I don’t have any fucking ideas, I don’t have any ideas about the world. I have notions that I want to put into play and I want to see what people do with them. The only thing that interests me is watching insanity unfold because people are people then. I keep shying away from it and then returning to it, so it’s obviously something I have to stick with and accept that it’s going to be hectic while making and doing it but there’s something I love about that as well and can stand behind.

 

 

But the reasons that you’re drawn to chaos–is that purely isolated to the making of it or do you want to see it translated into a finished product?

I’d love to see it translated into a finished product. There’s some movies where you feel like you’re witnessing insanity onscreen and I’d love to be able to do that. That’s my goal. I’d love to be able to capture that sense where you see all these characters just batting around and you feel like everyone’s losing it. I don’t know what’s interesting about that…

 

 

Well, I think it’s interesting because you’re taking something that’s very technical and square, really, and trying to break it.

Exactly! Because you’re not framing anything. You’re getting rid of the frame, basically. You’re saying that it’s going to explode. And that’s why with Cassavetes, who cares about what the frame is or about what you’re seeing. It’s almost more about what you’re feeling at that given moment and that’s what dictates how you go through the movie. And that’s why his films are so goddamn beautiful. And that all comes around to Fassbinder. Maybe he fulfilled what Fassbinder always intended. Because they’re big and beautiful but there’s truth to them.

 

 

So how to either mask or incorporate the manipulation that is the editing process?

Well, you have to have something to present. You collect all of these things and then you have to present something that is palatable on a certain level. You have to allow people to move through this realm of chaos so you give them structure. And as soon as you see the footage, you know that there are things that if you string them together there’ll have some sense to them. So you’re making sense out of nonsense. And that’s basically what we do with our lives when we tell stories.

 

 

So everyone’s a dictator in their own way.

And once you realize that, you become a funny dictator and you’re laughing at yourself constantly and no one takes you seriously, which is the best part. The harmful dictators are the ones who think they can actually shape things.