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Michael Almereyda director of This So-Called Disaster
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Jun 14, 2004
I remember very well when Michael Almereyda’s film Nadja came out. I was in film school at the time and so many people started bringing Fisher Price Pixelvision cameras into class but of course only a small percentage of them worked. No matter because now we were in the world of Almereyda. One of misfit vampires, where skyscrapers are substituted for castles and a place where the scariest of actors sit calmly and talk about their work.
The first one is Nadja, of course; the second is his adaptation of Hamlet set in New York City in 2000; and the third is his latest work to hit theatres, This So-Called Disaster, which is a documentary about the making of the Sam Shepard play The Late Henry Moss, that starred Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Cheech Marin and Woody Harrelson. The play went up for a short one month run at the Theater on the Square in San Francisco.
Check out the website for This So-Called Disaster
Daniel Robert Epstein: I know you directed Sam Shepard in Hamlet. Did he just call you up to do this project?
Michael Almereyda: He called me out of the blue before Hamlet came out. He had some idea that it would be fun to have a record of these actors in this play, "The Late Henry Moss." I didn’t learn until the night of the movie’s premiere, the real thought behind it. He explained that in 40 years of writing and directing plays, not a single one had been recorded. That’s not quite true, because there is the Malkovich version of True West.
DRE:
Also there is the Bruce Willis cable TV version.
MA:
I’m afraid I didn’t catch that one. What he meant was that there hasn’t been a camera around to record any of his plays as they were hatched. Even to get photographs from these plays now was tough. I’ve become an accidental archeologist of Sam’s work, and found there are some plays that haven’t left a trace--no physical evidence, not even a smudged newspaper photo.
DRE:
It’s almost a crime.
MA:
Sam explained that it’s the nature of theatre. By being ephemeral you celebrate the moment and also lose the moment. This movie was an attempt to capture something before it vanished.
DRE:
Had you done anything like this before?
MA:
One year at Sundance [Film Festival] I interviewed every film director, using a Pixelvision camera, every director, that is, who would come into my hotel room plus Robert Redford, who made me come to him. It was an interesting rogue’s gallery of directors. The interview technique was the same. I had people declare their names and the date and answer some questions as straightforwardly as possible.
DRE:
Did you have a film at Sundance that year?
MA:
Yes, that was Nadja, ten years ago.
DRE:
What made you do it?
MA:
Just to have something to do while I was there. Sundance is actually not the most filmmaker friendly place. At Sundance, which is what the movie was called, you have a sense of being very isolated while being besieged with media requests, but you’re not necessarily exposed to other filmmakers. You are not encouraged to make contact or have conversations with other filmmakers, so I thought this would be a way to force the issue. It was the anniversary of the invention of movies. It had been one hundred years since the Lumiere brothers came on the scene and projected celluloid for commercial exhibition. So I asked everyone if they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of movies. Since they were at a film festival they were all willfully upbeat, but as they explained themselves there was a certain downward curve.
DRE:
That was a big year at Sundance.
MA:
Yeah, Atom Egoyan, Richard Linklater, John Turturro, Abel Ferrara, Todd Haynes and of course some people you never heard of. The Shooting Gallery produced the movie “At Sundance”. They instantaneously gave me money but they also instantaneously sold the movie to cable. Film Forum wanted to show it but they didn’t have the capacity to video project and The Shooting Gallery didn’t want to spring for the blowup. That’s why it happens to be lost to oblivion.
DRE:
How did you get yourself into the mindset of doing a documentary?
MA:
I’ve done a lot of DV recording on my own. I’m fascinated by the idea of what’s real and what isn’t in filmmaking. When there’s a camera around, even if you're filming a fantasy, there’s some kind of documentary impulse at work, because you're recording real people and, often, real places. A lot of filmmakers are tormented by the fact that what’s happening off to the side while you’re making a movie can seem more interesting than what your camera is trained on. So, in shooting a documentary, it’s liberating to be there to record whatever is happening. It can be really remarkable to catch things that are spontaneous and completely unpredictable. I’d like to do more work like this, pure documentary recording. The downside is that it’s tough to shape the footage into a coherent structure. Also it’s hard to get funding for this type of thing. But it’s hard to get funding for everything.
DRE:
You’ve got a lot of actors who don’t have the best reputations in the documentary. Did that make you nervous or did Sam assure you?
MA:
There were no assurances possible. At one point Sam said to me “You know when you're in trouble when the sanest person in your cast is Cheech Marin.” But everyone showed up because they wanted to work and they were dedicated to the play and to him. Everyone was very well behaved. They’re complicated and gifted people, so that wasn’t a worry of mine.
DRE:
Did they know who you were?
MA:
Not really. It was actually a nightmare just to get the documentary started. I was there at the first readthrough but there was resistance even though they had given casual consent. It was necessary for lawyers to get involved and I had to wait three weeks before we were able to turn on the cameras. Paranoia and insanity came into play. Finally, a basic trust had to take over. Sam finally said that the camera was going to be on and he didn’t want to hear anything more about it.
DRE:
What was the sticking point?
MA:
It was the usual legal stuff, mostly. Sam was naïve to think that you get actors of this caliber and they’ll just shrug and accept a video camera in the room.
DRE:
I just saw Days of Heaven for the first time recently. What was it like directing Sam in Hamlet?
MA:
Days of Heaven was his first movie. In the latest Village Voice I interviewed Sam and mainly talked about Days of Heaven [laughs]. He said some stuff I never knew about. Terence Malick's willingness to take risks is really impressive
But Hamlet wasn’t really a regular movie for me or for Sam. For one thing we were doing Shakespeare. Sam was excited, because Shakespeare means a great deal to him. Despite the cowboy persona, he’s a man of language and you can’t find better language than Shakespeare. By the time Sam got in front of the camera he had been rehearsing by himself for a month and a half. He said he never worked so hard for a movie, and I think the performance shows that. The words challenged him and he wanted to rise to the challenge.
DRE:
What did you get out of this experience artistically?
MA:
I learned a deeper respect for actors even though I already respected them just fine. You get something extra from seeing actors at that level working together in one place, one concentrated effort. To see the quality of generosity among them. It’s almost like seeing a high school class trying to put something together. There is a sense of humility and even humiliation because they were going so deep, serving Sam's play. It wasn’t a macho thing. It was a kind of emotional bravery.
The sad thing about the production, which isn’t reflected in the movie, is that the actor’s star personas clouded the audiences’ ability to look at the play, to really see it. Audiences weren’t seeing the characters but instead were gawking at Nick Nolte and Sean Penn onstage. It’s like they were bird watching. Taking in the thrill of the celebrity rather than getting immersed in the play itself.
DRE:
Could that be due to the fact that the play went up in San Francisco rather than New York or Paris?
MA:
I hate to say that San Francisco is provincial but that would be one conclusion. In a recent interview Sam said he’s had enough of the provinces. I think it was an unexpected backfire.
Anyhow, to get back to your question, what did I get out of this, I learned that documentaries can be endless and I’d rather do fiction films. [Laughs] But, for all that, I’m now doing another documentary, on a photographer named William Eggleston. He lives in Memphis and does color work that has been hugely influential to many people. People often compare him to David Lynch. He came onto the scene in the 70’s and had the first one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’ll be a more mysterious documentary than the Shepard one.
DRE:
Will it be very in-depth into who Eggleston is?
MA:
Almost definitely not. It will be a bit unusual as a portrait of an artist, because it’s kind of opaque. It just shows this guy taking pictures. On the surface you might think its nothing, but everyone I’ve shown it to says it’s fascinating and haunting. You see him walking around in mundane reality and then you see what he distills from it in his pictures. It’s like those movies of Jackson Pollock painting where you just watch him, and that’s enough. There aren’t many movies like that. We’re in a culture where everything has to be explained, which I’m part of because here I am trying to explain myself to you, but often its more revealing to get right up close to somebody and watch what they do. To value things that are silent and wordless. Within photography circles Eggleston is famously unable to explain himself. His pictures are hugely respected, people write about them, sometimes very cleverly, but the photos tend to defy that. I’m hoping to present the mystery without framing it with words.
DRE:
Was he an influence on you?
MA:
Sure. Early on a lot of people compared my movies to David Lynch [who produced Nadja]. That was flattering, but the connection always felt relatively incidental to me. Two sharper influences happen to be Shepard and Eggleston. In a weird way Lynch is kind of a fusion of those two but he probably has never read Shepard’s work. It’s just a shared sensibility, recognizing that mundane reality is pretty weird. If you respect it then it can be more shocking and disturbing than any kind of horror movie.
DRE:
Was it tough to find a story within the Sam Shepard documentary?
MA:
It was hard to find a balance because there were at least three stories going on at once; the story of the play, then the story of the people putting the play together, then the submerged story of the autobiographical aspects relating to Sam. Those three things were overlapping and running parallel all the time.
DRE:
Do you make any kind of connection with the actors in the Shepard play?
MA:
Some more than others. At the time Nolte’s mother had just died and he had injured himself so he was a mess and completely immersed in the play. I hardly had any eye contact with him until a year later when I went to his house to get the interview that’s in the movie. Now we’re talking about doing a couple movies together.
DRE:
Have you ever been offered studio movies?
MA:
No, but I’ve written for major studios. I did a draft of Total Recall and some of my dialogue got in the movie.
DRE:
What?
MA:
In the last line of the movie Schwarzenegger says “I just had a terrible thought: what if this is a dream?’ and she responds, “Well then, kiss me quick before you wake up.”
DRE:
What year did you write your draft?
MA:
1987. They made it the next year. Dino De Laurentiis was producing it at the time and Bruce Beresford was going to direct. When the movie came out I was surprised to see how much of my stuff was in there.
DRE:
Surprisingly enough Cherry 2000 was on cable the other night. I was going to watch it but I decided not to.
MA:
I had a lot of hope for that but it was just a botched job. Everyone involved expected something better but it had a first time director and he wasn’t necessarily the right person for the job. I got a lot of work from the script. In Hollywood, people still tease me by saying it should be remade with the same script and no one would recognize it.
DRE:
Did you go to film school?
MA:
No. I dropped out of school and I got an agent pretty quick from writing screenplays. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was. The agency represented a bunch of terrific writers such as Nick Kazan, Ron Nyswaner and Ron Shelton. So I was 21 and getting some good work. But I was very impatient and wanted to direct, so I jumped ship.
DRE:
How did Twister come about?
MA:
It took about three years to set up. It was adapted from a novel by Mary Robison. I called her up cold and she gave me the option for free.
DRE:
That’s another movie that’s always on cable.
MA:
I didn’t know that because I don’t have cable.
DRE:
You don’t need it to watch your own movies.
MA:
I sure don’t.
DRE:
What was it like working with Crispin Glover back then?
MA:
It was very difficult. He was nervous. I had met him on the set of River’s Edge and courted him for the movie. I spent some time with him and even knew beforehand what he was going to do on that famous David Letterman appearance. Letterman didn’t know but I did. One friend said it was like watching The Challenger explode because it was so horrifying.
DRE:
I wish to god I could have seen that live.
MA:
I also saw him go back on the show and be nice. That sort of sums up Crispin. He can explode, and then he can be nice.
DRE:
I’m a fan of his. I love his album.
MA:
Me too. Together we wrote the song he sings over the end credits of Twister. I gave him the lyrics and he wrote the music. He also came up with the title, “Daddy is so mean.” The basic lyrics, actually, come from a Goethe folk song.
DRE:
What made you use vampires as characters in the movie Nadja?
MA:
A lot of my movies seem to be vampire movies without fangs. The nocturnal lifestyle seems to be something I know about. The genesis of Nadja was that [Film historian and archivist] William K. Everson had mentioned this movie Dracula's Daughter in his book Classics of the Horror Film. I loved the idea of the iconic figure of Dracula having a messed up daughter who wanted to escape but couldn’t. I figured it’d be interesting to combine the story of a spoiled rich girl with vampire mythology. I wrote it for my friend, Elina Lowensohn, a true Romanian.
DRE:
When you shot Nadja on a Pixel camera it caused a stir at film schools and everyone was trying to get one. Even I found one in a friend’s garage.
MA:
Did it work?
DRE:
It sure did. Was your camera a more professional type of Pixel camera?
MA:
No, we just wired it so we wouldn’t have to record on the audiotape. You could plug it into another deck.
DRE:
How is it shooting in New York now?
MA:
Hamlet was very difficult to shoot. We shot in Super-16, with a good many locations, for under $2 million. We couldn’t do it again now, five years later. Everything is more expensive, crews are more jaded, and my heroic producers, who were extremely energetic and altruistic, have split up.
DRE:
What are you trying to put together now?
MA:
Three or four films; one based on a short story by Jonathan Lethem which I retitled Tonight at Noon. Patrick Stewart has asked me to direct The Merchant of Venice set in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Ian McKellen is also attached and that could get going. Trouble is Al Pacino just shot a version of it in Venice, Italy last year. I also want to do a movie about backyard wrestling with a Rebel Without a Cause type plot. That’s called Thrasher.
DRE:
That seems like it would be easier to finance.
MA:
It’s been hard. I’m also working on a movie about Louis Armstrong and a script about aliens in Las Vegas. I seem to be working up a Vegas motif. Anyhow, that’s five balls in the air. Where they land is anybody’s guess.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
I remember very well when Michael Almereyda’s film Nadja came out. I was in film school at the time and so many people started bringing Fisher Price Pixelvision cameras into class but of course only a small percentage of them worked. No matter because now we were in the world of Almereyda. One of misfit vampires, where skyscrapers are substituted for castles and a place where the scariest of actors sit calmly and talk about their work.
The first one is Nadja, of course; the second is his adaptation of Hamlet set in New York City in 2000; and the third is his latest work to hit theatres, This So-Called Disaster, which is a documentary about the making of the Sam Shepard play The Late Henry Moss, that starred Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Cheech Marin and Woody Harrelson. The play went up for a short one month run at the Theater on the Square in San Francisco.
Check out the website for This So-Called Disaster
Daniel Robert Epstein: I know you directed Sam Shepard in Hamlet. Did he just call you up to do this project?
Michael Almereyda: He called me out of the blue before Hamlet came out. He had some idea that it would be fun to have a record of these actors in this play, "The Late Henry Moss." I didn’t learn until the night of the movie’s premiere, the real thought behind it. He explained that in 40 years of writing and directing plays, not a single one had been recorded. That’s not quite true, because there is the Malkovich version of True West.
DRE:
Also there is the Bruce Willis cable TV version.
MA:
I’m afraid I didn’t catch that one. What he meant was that there hasn’t been a camera around to record any of his plays as they were hatched. Even to get photographs from these plays now was tough. I’ve become an accidental archeologist of Sam’s work, and found there are some plays that haven’t left a trace--no physical evidence, not even a smudged newspaper photo.
DRE:
It’s almost a crime.
MA:
Sam explained that it’s the nature of theatre. By being ephemeral you celebrate the moment and also lose the moment. This movie was an attempt to capture something before it vanished.
DRE:
Had you done anything like this before?
MA:
One year at Sundance [Film Festival] I interviewed every film director, using a Pixelvision camera, every director, that is, who would come into my hotel room plus Robert Redford, who made me come to him. It was an interesting rogue’s gallery of directors. The interview technique was the same. I had people declare their names and the date and answer some questions as straightforwardly as possible.
DRE:
Did you have a film at Sundance that year?
MA:
Yes, that was Nadja, ten years ago.
DRE:
What made you do it?
MA:
Just to have something to do while I was there. Sundance is actually not the most filmmaker friendly place. At Sundance, which is what the movie was called, you have a sense of being very isolated while being besieged with media requests, but you’re not necessarily exposed to other filmmakers. You are not encouraged to make contact or have conversations with other filmmakers, so I thought this would be a way to force the issue. It was the anniversary of the invention of movies. It had been one hundred years since the Lumiere brothers came on the scene and projected celluloid for commercial exhibition. So I asked everyone if they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of movies. Since they were at a film festival they were all willfully upbeat, but as they explained themselves there was a certain downward curve.
DRE:
That was a big year at Sundance.
MA:
Yeah, Atom Egoyan, Richard Linklater, John Turturro, Abel Ferrara, Todd Haynes and of course some people you never heard of. The Shooting Gallery produced the movie “At Sundance”. They instantaneously gave me money but they also instantaneously sold the movie to cable. Film Forum wanted to show it but they didn’t have the capacity to video project and The Shooting Gallery didn’t want to spring for the blowup. That’s why it happens to be lost to oblivion.
DRE:
How did you get yourself into the mindset of doing a documentary?
MA:
I’ve done a lot of DV recording on my own. I’m fascinated by the idea of what’s real and what isn’t in filmmaking. When there’s a camera around, even if you're filming a fantasy, there’s some kind of documentary impulse at work, because you're recording real people and, often, real places. A lot of filmmakers are tormented by the fact that what’s happening off to the side while you’re making a movie can seem more interesting than what your camera is trained on. So, in shooting a documentary, it’s liberating to be there to record whatever is happening. It can be really remarkable to catch things that are spontaneous and completely unpredictable. I’d like to do more work like this, pure documentary recording. The downside is that it’s tough to shape the footage into a coherent structure. Also it’s hard to get funding for this type of thing. But it’s hard to get funding for everything.
DRE:
You’ve got a lot of actors who don’t have the best reputations in the documentary. Did that make you nervous or did Sam assure you?
MA:
There were no assurances possible. At one point Sam said to me “You know when you're in trouble when the sanest person in your cast is Cheech Marin.” But everyone showed up because they wanted to work and they were dedicated to the play and to him. Everyone was very well behaved. They’re complicated and gifted people, so that wasn’t a worry of mine.
DRE:
Did they know who you were?
MA:
Not really. It was actually a nightmare just to get the documentary started. I was there at the first readthrough but there was resistance even though they had given casual consent. It was necessary for lawyers to get involved and I had to wait three weeks before we were able to turn on the cameras. Paranoia and insanity came into play. Finally, a basic trust had to take over. Sam finally said that the camera was going to be on and he didn’t want to hear anything more about it.
DRE:
What was the sticking point?
MA:
It was the usual legal stuff, mostly. Sam was naïve to think that you get actors of this caliber and they’ll just shrug and accept a video camera in the room.
DRE:
I just saw Days of Heaven for the first time recently. What was it like directing Sam in Hamlet?
MA:
Days of Heaven was his first movie. In the latest Village Voice I interviewed Sam and mainly talked about Days of Heaven [laughs]. He said some stuff I never knew about. Terence Malick's willingness to take risks is really impressive
But Hamlet wasn’t really a regular movie for me or for Sam. For one thing we were doing Shakespeare. Sam was excited, because Shakespeare means a great deal to him. Despite the cowboy persona, he’s a man of language and you can’t find better language than Shakespeare. By the time Sam got in front of the camera he had been rehearsing by himself for a month and a half. He said he never worked so hard for a movie, and I think the performance shows that. The words challenged him and he wanted to rise to the challenge.
But Hamlet wasn’t really a regular movie for me or for Sam. For one thing we were doing Shakespeare. Sam was excited, because Shakespeare means a great deal to him. Despite the cowboy persona, he’s a man of language and you can’t find better language than Shakespeare. By the time Sam got in front of the camera he had been rehearsing by himself for a month and a half. He said he never worked so hard for a movie, and I think the performance shows that. The words challenged him and he wanted to rise to the challenge.
DRE:
What did you get out of this experience artistically?
MA:
I learned a deeper respect for actors even though I already respected them just fine. You get something extra from seeing actors at that level working together in one place, one concentrated effort. To see the quality of generosity among them. It’s almost like seeing a high school class trying to put something together. There is a sense of humility and even humiliation because they were going so deep, serving Sam's play. It wasn’t a macho thing. It was a kind of emotional bravery.
The sad thing about the production, which isn’t reflected in the movie, is that the actor’s star personas clouded the audiences’ ability to look at the play, to really see it. Audiences weren’t seeing the characters but instead were gawking at Nick Nolte and Sean Penn onstage. It’s like they were bird watching. Taking in the thrill of the celebrity rather than getting immersed in the play itself.
The sad thing about the production, which isn’t reflected in the movie, is that the actor’s star personas clouded the audiences’ ability to look at the play, to really see it. Audiences weren’t seeing the characters but instead were gawking at Nick Nolte and Sean Penn onstage. It’s like they were bird watching. Taking in the thrill of the celebrity rather than getting immersed in the play itself.
DRE:
Could that be due to the fact that the play went up in San Francisco rather than New York or Paris?
MA:
I hate to say that San Francisco is provincial but that would be one conclusion. In a recent interview Sam said he’s had enough of the provinces. I think it was an unexpected backfire.
Anyhow, to get back to your question, what did I get out of this, I learned that documentaries can be endless and I’d rather do fiction films. [Laughs] But, for all that, I’m now doing another documentary, on a photographer named William Eggleston. He lives in Memphis and does color work that has been hugely influential to many people. People often compare him to David Lynch. He came onto the scene in the 70’s and had the first one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’ll be a more mysterious documentary than the Shepard one.
Anyhow, to get back to your question, what did I get out of this, I learned that documentaries can be endless and I’d rather do fiction films. [Laughs] But, for all that, I’m now doing another documentary, on a photographer named William Eggleston. He lives in Memphis and does color work that has been hugely influential to many people. People often compare him to David Lynch. He came onto the scene in the 70’s and had the first one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’ll be a more mysterious documentary than the Shepard one.
DRE:
Will it be very in-depth into who Eggleston is?
MA:
Almost definitely not. It will be a bit unusual as a portrait of an artist, because it’s kind of opaque. It just shows this guy taking pictures. On the surface you might think its nothing, but everyone I’ve shown it to says it’s fascinating and haunting. You see him walking around in mundane reality and then you see what he distills from it in his pictures. It’s like those movies of Jackson Pollock painting where you just watch him, and that’s enough. There aren’t many movies like that. We’re in a culture where everything has to be explained, which I’m part of because here I am trying to explain myself to you, but often its more revealing to get right up close to somebody and watch what they do. To value things that are silent and wordless. Within photography circles Eggleston is famously unable to explain himself. His pictures are hugely respected, people write about them, sometimes very cleverly, but the photos tend to defy that. I’m hoping to present the mystery without framing it with words.
DRE:
Was he an influence on you?
MA:
Sure. Early on a lot of people compared my movies to David Lynch [who produced Nadja]. That was flattering, but the connection always felt relatively incidental to me. Two sharper influences happen to be Shepard and Eggleston. In a weird way Lynch is kind of a fusion of those two but he probably has never read Shepard’s work. It’s just a shared sensibility, recognizing that mundane reality is pretty weird. If you respect it then it can be more shocking and disturbing than any kind of horror movie.
DRE:
Was it tough to find a story within the Sam Shepard documentary?
MA:
It was hard to find a balance because there were at least three stories going on at once; the story of the play, then the story of the people putting the play together, then the submerged story of the autobiographical aspects relating to Sam. Those three things were overlapping and running parallel all the time.
DRE:
Do you make any kind of connection with the actors in the Shepard play?
MA:
Some more than others. At the time Nolte’s mother had just died and he had injured himself so he was a mess and completely immersed in the play. I hardly had any eye contact with him until a year later when I went to his house to get the interview that’s in the movie. Now we’re talking about doing a couple movies together.
DRE:
Have you ever been offered studio movies?
MA:
No, but I’ve written for major studios. I did a draft of Total Recall and some of my dialogue got in the movie.
DRE:
What?
MA:
In the last line of the movie Schwarzenegger says “I just had a terrible thought: what if this is a dream?’ and she responds, “Well then, kiss me quick before you wake up.”
DRE:
What year did you write your draft?
MA:
1987. They made it the next year. Dino De Laurentiis was producing it at the time and Bruce Beresford was going to direct. When the movie came out I was surprised to see how much of my stuff was in there.
DRE:
Surprisingly enough Cherry 2000 was on cable the other night. I was going to watch it but I decided not to.
MA:
I had a lot of hope for that but it was just a botched job. Everyone involved expected something better but it had a first time director and he wasn’t necessarily the right person for the job. I got a lot of work from the script. In Hollywood, people still tease me by saying it should be remade with the same script and no one would recognize it.
DRE:
Did you go to film school?
MA:
No. I dropped out of school and I got an agent pretty quick from writing screenplays. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was. The agency represented a bunch of terrific writers such as Nick Kazan, Ron Nyswaner and Ron Shelton. So I was 21 and getting some good work. But I was very impatient and wanted to direct, so I jumped ship.
DRE:
How did Twister come about?
MA:
It took about three years to set up. It was adapted from a novel by Mary Robison. I called her up cold and she gave me the option for free.
DRE:
That’s another movie that’s always on cable.
MA:
I didn’t know that because I don’t have cable.
DRE:
You don’t need it to watch your own movies.
MA:
I sure don’t.
DRE:
What was it like working with Crispin Glover back then?
MA:
It was very difficult. He was nervous. I had met him on the set of River’s Edge and courted him for the movie. I spent some time with him and even knew beforehand what he was going to do on that famous David Letterman appearance. Letterman didn’t know but I did. One friend said it was like watching The Challenger explode because it was so horrifying.
DRE:
I wish to god I could have seen that live.
MA:
I also saw him go back on the show and be nice. That sort of sums up Crispin. He can explode, and then he can be nice.
DRE:
I’m a fan of his. I love his album.
MA:
Me too. Together we wrote the song he sings over the end credits of Twister. I gave him the lyrics and he wrote the music. He also came up with the title, “Daddy is so mean.” The basic lyrics, actually, come from a Goethe folk song.
DRE:
What made you use vampires as characters in the movie Nadja?
MA:
A lot of my movies seem to be vampire movies without fangs. The nocturnal lifestyle seems to be something I know about. The genesis of Nadja was that [Film historian and archivist] William K. Everson had mentioned this movie Dracula's Daughter in his book Classics of the Horror Film. I loved the idea of the iconic figure of Dracula having a messed up daughter who wanted to escape but couldn’t. I figured it’d be interesting to combine the story of a spoiled rich girl with vampire mythology. I wrote it for my friend, Elina Lowensohn, a true Romanian.
DRE:
When you shot Nadja on a Pixel camera it caused a stir at film schools and everyone was trying to get one. Even I found one in a friend’s garage.
MA:
Did it work?
DRE:
It sure did. Was your camera a more professional type of Pixel camera?
MA:
No, we just wired it so we wouldn’t have to record on the audiotape. You could plug it into another deck.
DRE:
How is it shooting in New York now?
MA:
Hamlet was very difficult to shoot. We shot in Super-16, with a good many locations, for under $2 million. We couldn’t do it again now, five years later. Everything is more expensive, crews are more jaded, and my heroic producers, who were extremely energetic and altruistic, have split up.
DRE:
What are you trying to put together now?
MA:
Three or four films; one based on a short story by Jonathan Lethem which I retitled Tonight at Noon. Patrick Stewart has asked me to direct The Merchant of Venice set in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Ian McKellen is also attached and that could get going. Trouble is Al Pacino just shot a version of it in Venice, Italy last year. I also want to do a movie about backyard wrestling with a Rebel Without a Cause type plot. That’s called Thrasher.
DRE:
That seems like it would be easier to finance.
MA:
It’s been hard. I’m also working on a movie about Louis Armstrong and a script about aliens in Las Vegas. I seem to be working up a Vegas motif. Anyhow, that’s five balls in the air. Where they land is anybody’s guess.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
