Oak Street Films

December 2nd, 2008 by Jarrod Whaley — Filmmakers, Interviews

I first “met” Mr. Adams in 2003 after he stumbled upon this site and sent me an email expressing his interest in my work. At that time, he and a few others were embarking upon a collaborative project of film criticism–with a particular emphasis on the aesthetics and theoretical implications of digital cinema–known as BRAINTRUSTdv. That site’s content (of which Adams is/was the most prolific and visible author) is both singularly far-reaching in scope and penetratingly insightful, and has become somewhat widely read and just as widely admired over the intervening years. Adams has more lately put aside his pen (or keyboard, I suppose), and now divides his time more equitably between making films and raising his young family. Over the five years we have known one another–and it might be worth mentioning here that we’ve never yet met in person–each of us has closely followed the other’s career, and we often find ourselves engaged in long, passionate, and excruciatingly detailed email “conversations” about the state of modern filmmaking, our work, and any number of other topics along generally cinematic lines. He has written thoughtful and painstakingly thorough appraisals of my films, and I likewise have attempted to rise to similar levels of grace and respect in my writing about his work. I consider him to be an invaluable colleague, and I think it’s fair to say that our long correspondence has impacted both of us in innumerable ways as filmmakers.

What follows is the first installment of a long discussion between Alejandro and me; it is focused broadly upon his approach to filmmaking in general and more narrowly upon certain aspects of his most recently completed film (as of this writing), Canary. The second half–which in large part takes up the subject of Babnik, Adams’ as-yet incomplete third feature–can be found here.

After the jump: Part 1 of our two-part conversation.

Jarrod Whaley: You began your creative life as a writer, from what I understand. How exactly did you end up making movies? How jarring was the transition? Or was it?

Alejandro Adams: You phrased the question in an interesting way: the beginning of my creative life? I can feel myself sliding back a little further than usual. I began as a draw-er, probably as a result of exposure to a few comic books when I was six or seven. Few became many. It’s worth noting that comic books reside at the intersection of cinema and literature–they are graphic, a series of static images, but they rely on prose to a large extent to fasten the images together. Marker’s La Jetée is a comic book as cinema. I wish it had spawned a genre [ed. note: It may not have spawned a genre, but it has been known stylistically to inform a thing or two].

You know how Harold Bloom attributes the inner life to Shakespeare–that we are capable of duplicity and self-analysis because Hamlet taught us how to be–I wonder to what extent I exemplify a similar theory. The Spider Man comics of the mid-eighties contained more thought bubbles than spoken words, more inner life than battles with super villains. I haven’t maintained an interest in comics–I gave them up when I converted to cinema at age fourteen or so and never looked back. I got a degree in creative writing, but that was because filmmaking seemed exotically out of reach. It was another decade before that assumption was countermanded. When we got married, my wife had some digital video gear so we began to explore the possibilities together.

JW: I noticed that you used the word “filmmaking” there, and yet until very recently you seemed very much a stickler for the avoidance of this other “f-word” as it might be applied to things shot on video. I only bring this up because it’s something you used to be so adamant about. What brought about the sudden lexical libertinage?

AA: I can be a rigid traditionalist at times. I know some people who still hate hearing the word “film” applied to anything that isn’t film–and they hate to hear people who have worked exclusively with digital technologies referred to as “filmmakers.” I was in that camp for quite a while. A couple of years ago I was having an email exchange with a BRAINTRUSTdv contributor and I smugly said something about the fallacy of the term “film” applied to anything which existed only digitally, and he replied with a really well-informed, affable rebuttal which left me no leg to stand on. He had worked everything out statistically, pointing out that these days even big studio “films” are edited digitally, then put back to film at a certain resolution–say, 4K–which is determined by a computer. So what you’re seeing onscreen in a theater may be on film, but it’s a digital image, like it or not, even if it was acquired on film. Then after a couple of months of theatrical screenings, those canisters of actual film go into a vault, and the “film” as we know it more abstractly proceeds to exist only digitally in its next incarnation, at present on a DVD which will be seen by an astronomically greater number of people than saw it theatrically. In addition to what we used to call “home video” (laserdisc, VHS, Beta, DVD), we now have digital downloads, and if that isn’t taking off in terms of studio offerings, it’s certainly here to stay in terms of piracy. There is no longer a chaste filmmaking process in which the pure film comes out of the pure camera and goes straight to the pure Moviola or Steenbeck editing table where the pure feature film is assembled. From a purist’s point of view, the whole process has been so irreparably bastardized that it now seems petty, reactionary and ill-informed to be a stickler about what is and what isn’t a “film” and who is and who isn’t a “filmmaker.” This doesn’t mean that “film” is an appropriate term to use, only that terminological precision has been rendered moot. I could go around talking about the “mechanically acquired 4K-out feature-length motion picture I saw projected onto a 40-foot screen last night” to distinguish a Hollywood product from my own “standard-definition feature-length motion picture which can be viewed on your set-top DVD player or personal computer,” but it doesn’t sound very dignified. I guess some people who worked with 16mm equipment in film school are threatened by the idea of a ten-year-old kid with a cheap digital camera referring to himself a “director” on YouTube. But come on. It’s YouTube.

JW: Most viewers are probably not at all aware–because I’m quite certain that relatively few people have seen the original source material, unfortunately–that Canary is an expansion of a short film directed by a friend of yours (Sammy Samuelson). This is the first instance of which I’m aware in which you’ve worked with someone else’s story, and that seems particularly unusual given your literary background. Did you decide to make this film because you simply felt some affinity for the concept and felt that you had a compelling personal reaction to it, or did you arrive where you did because of a wish to challenge yourself with the interpretation of someone else’s idea?

AA: It’s not the first time I’ve “adapted.” Sammy and her husband Michael are two of the most gifted writers I know. I borrowed a plot synopsis from Michael to write the script for a 45-minute film called Hegemony, which my wife Marya directed. Except for a few key plot points, all the writing was mine, but I enjoyed working with someone else’s idea, and I thought I could do it again in Canary. But, yeah, I have plenty of story ideas of my own, and I’m not ashamed to use them.

I was floored by the original short film version of Canary. It was silly but creepy. Its ideas were embodied so economically–seven minutes of campy wit and dystopian horror. I don’t think there was a wasted shot. I begged for the raw footage and made a 20-minute version which included music and some playful visual effects which were simple manipulations of what was there–warping, discoloration, superimposed symbols. I kept saying it would make a great feature, but it would need a budget. Well, eventually I decided to try it without a budget. I had just finished my first film and felt a need to tackle something at the other end of the spectrum.

JW: For those readers who haven’t seen the film, we should probably explain that it’s generally about a corporation which provides bodily organs to needy recipients, but which is all too ready to “repossess” those organs in the event that the recipients don’t live up to the corporation’s lifestyle standards. It’s a kind of Science-Fiction / dystopian genre piece on the surface, but I think it is, more importantly, a film about marginal human interaction. What role do notions of genre play, in your mind, in such a fundamentally human story?

AA: Genre is fascinating. I know it’s not a new idea to meddle with genre–it’s something Jarmusch has done a lot of. I get tired of seeing genre constraints limiting the potential of specific films. A thriller is supposed to be fast-paced and have a lot of mood music, for instance. I’ve seen plenty of thrillers which had a lot going for them but seemed paced and scored according to a formula which diminished what was most exciting about them. It’s not as if I want to thumb my nose at genre conventions but I want to think about which conventions serve a certain story and which don’t. Canary has no blood, no music, and its pacing doesn’t manipulate the viewer into a state of excitement. So is it a thriller? Moreover it defies most of the reflexes of the dystopian genre. I wanted to treat the alternate universe as a setting like a beach or a chalet. Which is the main reason Canary doesn’t go out of its way to say, “In 2015 many people lease organs from a powerful biotech company.” I wouldn’t say, “During the summer, many people go to the beach where they strike up brief but intense relationships.” Going out of your way to define a geographical or temporal setting is just a way of admitting its fragility–as if it needs all this scaffolding of information and explication to hold it up. It’s fun in James Bond films to be told when we jump from Brussels to Buenos Aires, but a lot of the magic of cinema is discovery. Wondering when or where something is set is like wondering about character motivations. Why diminish that effect?

JW: What I was getting at (perhaps clumsily) was the idea that in some ways Canary isn’t a genre film at all. It diverges from genre conventions not only on the surface levels, but—and this is a more important point of distinction—in that it’s not a film which feels designed simply to “entertain.” Genre films are slavishly devoted to concepts; they draw us in with thoughts of “oh, that’s an interesting idea for a movie” and then keep us in our seats with precisely formulaic stories. In a sense, any series of films in any particular genre will tell the exact same basic story. Your film, however, seems to diverge completely from the stock storyline that is immediately conjured up when one first hears about its “concept.” So what leads you to apply the trappings of genre to such personal kinds of stories?

AA: Under the pressure of your reiteration of the question, all I can say is that I think genre is something which exists in the viewer or in the culture or on the placard above a video store shelf and not in the work itself.

I’m reminded of Welles going blank when asked about all the unusual camera angles he used in his films. He explained that he didn’t think of any of his angles as unusual–that was how he saw the shot. He wasn’t trying to do anything different or new or unique. I suppose genre should be anathema to any filmmaker who considers himself an artist. But look at Tarkovsky’s Solaris or Malick’s Thin Red Line, films in which genre bends itself around the director’s vision, not vice versa.

JW: Your presentation of Sci-Fi in the naturalistic, hand-held mode is pretty key to the basic humanism of the work, I think. I don’t think the film would be as emotionally affecting as it is if it had been shot from a tripod, or with lots of soaring jib-work and choreographed tracking shots, or if it were laden with special effects.

AA: Well, let’s forget the genre trapping of special effects and just think about how characters are humanized in ANY film. I was watching a low-key Korean drama last night and realized that the all-masters approach was killing it for me. That kind of film requires faces, not just body language, not just a mood created by sedate long takes. Look at Ceylan’s films, especially Climates, and you see a nice balance of close-ups, mediums, and masters. Sometimes an entire scene is done in a master, but it works because we can “see” the characters’ faces in our memory of previous scenes, just as we “see” someone we’re talking to on the phone. There’s a great master in There Will Be Blood in which Kevin J. O’Connor shows up claiming to be Daniel Day-Lewis’s brother. The camera is slightly in motion, almost imperceptibly, and the whole scene unfolds in a long shot, with actors visible from head to toe, one on each side of the frame. It works because the master isn’t a conceit on which the film is built; it’s chosen for that one scene to express something about space, about body language, about the tension between space and body language. So when you see extreme close-up after extreme close-up in Canary–even in the case of marginal, fleeting characters–what does it mean? I guess it’s a humanistic device…

What’s so emotionally affecting about a handheld camera and ubiquitous close-ups? The production apparatus is mired in the goings-on rather than observing them, so there’s a bottom-line increase in the identification quotient. It’s harder to “stand back” as a viewer. There are two films that employ handheld in such a proprietary way that Reality TV and slapdash indie films cannot ruin the effect or the legacy: Breaking the Waves and Rosetta. As far as I’m concerned, these two films created cinematic handheld camerawork as we know it in the 21st century, and every shot I use is in some way bound to those films. No matter how much handheld camera work I ingest, when I return to those films they are fresh, they are inexhaustible lessons in the emotional impact of a technique.

JW: It’s all well and good to talk about hand-held shooting in terms of aesthetics and emotion and ideology, but how much of it has to do with simple economics for you? To what extent do your budgets influence your stylistic choices?

AA: Money determines a lot about how my films are made, but not so much the choice to shoot handheld instead of on a tripod. Using multiple cameras is a time-saving technique which in the long run saves money, despite the seeming luxury of having three or four cameras around.

JW: So assuming you’d had more money to spend on the production of Canary, where might that money have gone?

AA: The simple answer is that I would pay the people who committed their time and energy. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking. I guess I would have done something more suggestive with the clinic, or maybe find a way to make a Canary Industries compound with dozens of organ redistribution specialists buzzing about in their white jumpsuits. But as soon as I say that, the particular impact of the three people we actually DO see in those jumpsuits is totally forfeited. I could have given the Canary van a large logo instead of a very small one. I think it’s only in one brief shot at this point. The news crew could have had an actual production van. I don’t think beyond my means, so to speak, so this kind of question is difficult and answering is ipso facto an expression of regret or dissatisfaction. I get a lot of joy from working with minimal resources, so what-if-I-had-more-money really threatens the whole edifice of my filmmaking practices rather than simply applying potential alterations to an individual project in scene-by-scene terms.

JW: I apologize if that question came across as a bit impertinent, but I think what I’m trying to get at is a discussion of how much of your production model is based on your convictions, and how much of it is in some way tied to the fact that you’re unable right now to throw huge amounts of money around. I’m sure that you get asked about why you’re “still” shooting in standard definition, for example, and I’m curious as to whether you’re eschewing HD because of some firmly-held ideology on your part, or whether the reasoning is simply due to something more practical.

AA: One of the reasons there’s a lapse in low-budget filmmaking right now–and this was the case before the economic crisis–is that the Red camera line will be widely available soon, and a lot of upstart indie directors are so hung up on technology that they’ve postponed their projects until they could get their hands on these cameras. Trust me, I know some of these people [and so does your editor]. With technology changing so rapidly, it seems odd that a particular camera hitting the market would determine anyone’s production schedule. But I look at all this fatuousness and misguidedness as motivation. I had originally intended to make four feature films in the year leading up to the release of the Red cameras, and it looks like I’ll be able to complete two of them. It may sound like there’s a personal chip on my shoulder, but it’s purely cultural. If these people had compelling stories to tell, they wouldn’t need to wait for the next big technological breakthrough to tell them. I know it sounds petty to harp on this, but it’s a personal conviction, and since it provides so much motivation, I’m not going to lighten up about it.

The other factor–and I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere–is that for nearly a hundred years filmmaking technology didn’t change. A director or DP could really learn how to use a camera or film stock to its fullest. Now even very talented and “serious” filmmakers will adopt a new camera technology for every project, which makes it impossible to establish that deep rapport with the machinery. They’re getting about thirty or forty percent of what that camera’s capable of, instead of the 120% that Almendros or Nykvist could have gotten from their cameras. A good example is Soderbergh using the Red One to shoot Che. In post there were all kinds of problems with the footage that they hadn’t foreseen or prepared for. If he’d been shooting on Panavision 35mm cameras or even the XL1 he used on previous projects, he would have known what he was getting into. And I know my mention of the XL1 there just made some readers spit out their cereal. But why? We should have fidelity to the tools. Painters have it, sculptors have it, writers have it, why not filmmakers? My DV cameras were obsolete when I shot my first feature, and they’re getting more obsolete by the minute, and they’re about to be put to work on their fourth feature. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking around wearing a sandwich board which says, “I CAN DO MORE WITH A RUNDOWN STANDARD-DEF CAMERA THAN YOU CAN DO WITH THE RED ONE!”

JW: The cast of this film is pretty huge by comparison to that of most independently produced films. What challenges did that fact create for you as a director, let alone as a producer? Were you able to forge workable personal relationships with all of these cast members?

AA: Huge for a no-budget film, maybe, but it seems so relative to the story. If we’re talking about college-aged kids making movies about their lives, they usually just involve their circle of friends and their story doesn’t require more than that. One shooter on Canary was a friend who came up from L.A. specifically for the project, but we didn’t set out to make a film together. Otherwise, all cast and crew are all perfect strangers to me until we’re well into production. I’ve stayed in touch with a few people from these three projects, but hanging out over drinks once every nine months…? I’m not sure I’m much of a friend-maker.

Canary was conceived to be episodic and have a patchwork feel. At this production level, it’s easier to work with an actor for one production day than it is to work with them over eight weekends. Basically, anyone I liked at the audition got a role. I didn’t want an epic, I just wanted to create a rich socioeconomic fabric and suggest an almost unmanageable cultural breadth. The result is not how I imagined it, but it heads that way.

JW: Interesting. I tend to find that over time, I begin to get to know my collaborators. Communication becomes easier as that process continues. The first day of shooting with people I don’t know is a bit difficult, because I feel like a lot more back-and-forth is required before we can all end up on the same wavelength. It sounds like you’d disagree with me.

AA: Even if I work with the same actors on multiple projects, I use them in different capacities–a lead actor in one project might have a cameo in another project. I set it up so that I can’t get too comfortable with the talent, there’s no shared wavelength. Most of the joy of this process, for me, comes from casting an actor I’ve never seen before and then discovering his or her individual wavelength without necessarily accommodating it. My approach may be surreptitious and underhanded but it’s also nurturing in the sense that it requires more trust from them than they’re used to giving, and I’ve never violated that trust. I’m not there to make friends, and someone recently told me I would NEVER make friends with cast or crew members because I seem very closed off. One of the actresses on my most recent project was handing out business cards on her last day of shooting and she skipped me. I asked her about it later and she said, “I didn’t think you’d be interested.” I’m not recounting that as a badge of honor by any means, but it gives you an idea.

During the production of Around the Bay, Steve Voldseth and I were alone at the house location one day–just me, him, and a camera. We shot some exteriors a couple of blocks down the hill from the house. As we walked back up, we were silent until we got near the house and then Steve said, “I like this house. It’s unpretentious.” We left it at that and continued into the house and kept shooting. I’ll always remember that because I knew Steve and I were making something special and that his performance would get attention, but we had nothing to say to one another, and our respective processes required that silence. Had he not spoken, I might have, but it would have been equally bare-bones small talk, a remark that warranted no response. And as for Carla Pauli on Canary, I more or less treated her as if she wasn’t there, but it was nothing personal.

JW: In my interview with Carla Pauli (who played the lead in Canary), she hinted at the notion that all of the members of your cast “got the same notes”; this statement seemed to indicate that all of your actors were treated with an equal amount of procedural obfuscation….that much of what you wanted to elicit from their performances was something that you communicated less by open request than by some sly brand of mysterious passive-aggression. I know from my own experience as a director that each actor must typically be catered to on an individual and very personal basis. So how insightful was Carla’s appraisal of your general approach?

AA: I don’t share your experience with actors who have specialized needs. Or maybe I’m oblivious.

JW: Let me just briefly interrupt to say that I don’t think you’re oblivious. Maybe we just approach directing in different ways.

AA: If you watch the slapstick YouTube clip of me directing my most recent film, you can see why I might not be sensitive to needy actors–five cameras, two booms, and a dozen actors swirling around a fairly tight space. Not every scene is like that, but I think the actors get the idea that there’s little room for the what’s-my-motivation routine. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them saw me waving and barking and thought, “They’re doing something important here! I’d better get out of the way!” and then remembered, “Oh, yeah, I’m IN this scene.” I’m pretty much in a trance. When I hear myself on the soundtrack later I’m shocked that I spoke at all.

“Procedural obfuscation” is pretty accurate. On Canary, some actors got specific notes, others didn’t. Most of them didn’t know the plot of the film or where their character fit in the narrative. “I thought this was a sci-fi film” was something I heard a lot. My treatment of Carla was unique, though, in the sense that she was present for every production day and I hardly spoke to her. I felt that I covered everything in our initial meeting. My suspicion is that most of what a director says just serves to introduce doubt. If an actor comes into it with doubt, then you should do whatever you have to do to get rid of the doubt, but if they’re confident, you should find a way around using words. That’s probably what you’re calling passive-aggressive. If you finish the third take and you say, “THAT was great,” then all you’re doing is making them wonder what WASN’T great about takes one and two. I try to keep the ball rolling and keep my mouth shut.

There may also be the Kieslowski Effect: having worked most of his life in the shoddy Communist film industry of Poland, Kieslowski was much more concerned with getting a scene right technically than he was with tweaking an actor’s performance. It drove those high-profile French actresses nuts. They would shoot a scene, and he would ask the camera guy how it went. If it went well technically, Kieslowski would press on, leaving his western European actors wondering if they were doing what he wanted. I can’t say I’m technically obsessed, but otherwise the director-actor dynamic I just described is probably close to what I have with my cast. And I am more likely to talk to a camera guy than an actor when a take is over.

I could talk about Carla all day. In reality as well as in the film, she’s a world unto herself.

JW: To what extent do you consider actors to be active collaborators?

AA: My films are made by the people who show up to say the lines and the people who hold the cameras and sound gear. I can’t say it any more plainly than that. Anyone who thinks that’s false modesty, well, I’ll take credit for editing, and believe me, editing takes six million times more stamina and focus than anything that happens during production.

You hear about so-and-so being an “actor’s director.” I doubt that phrase describes me, but actors like my style, my sensibility. I don’t have the actor-hating gene that some famous directors seem to have. I’m a broker–I deliver actors to an audience. That’s what I’m there for. When it works, I’ve given both parties a gift.

JW: Canary seems to be–and some of the reactions to it that I’ve encountered appear to bear this idea out–somewhat less widely accessible than Around the Bay. Is that statement in line with your own perceptions, and if so, to what to you attribute such an assessment?

AA: I don’t know how on earth anyone found Around the Bay accessible. There was one newspaper review which I took as negative but which a friend read as “I’m not smart enough to keep up with this one, but other people might like it.” Canary seems much more accessible to me. Okay, it’s in an alternate universe, but it’s much less formally ostentatious and if we were talking about it in terms of music, I think Canary is a tune made from three or four notes played in slightly different arrangements and Around the Bay is more of a symphony–one critic said something about its use of “all the tools of cinema.” Canary looks like it was made from one tool of the cinema, I think. Yeah, there are a lot of faces, but that in itself doesn’t make complexity. Anything that’s losing people in Canary is losing them because it’s not making an effort to sweep them up, not because it’s abstruse. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. I laugh at Canary a lot and I hardly laugh at Around the Bay, so that’s probably where I’m seeing the difference in accessibility. I know that’s not a reliable gauge. There’s also the fact that Canary is working on a host of metaphorical levels whereas Around the Bay is about what it appears to be about. You’re stumping me with this question. Accessibility or a lack thereof really isn’t an ingredient I consciously put into either of these films. And if I say the most recent project, Babnik, won’t raise these questions of accessibility, I have to remind myself that it’s in Russian, which is quite a high wall to erect right out of the gate.

Tags: alejandro adams, babnik, canary, directing, producing

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Filmmakers, Interviews. The comments left in response to this post have their own RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.