Hal Hartley has had a rabid cult following since he wrote and directed such films as The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. Since creating his biggest grossing film, Henry Fool, Hartley has taken many different risks with his work such as working with a major studio on No Such Thing and now he is prepping a sequel to Henry Fool called Fay Grim.
But before that Hartley has written, directed and released The Girl from Monday. This latest digital feature is a science fiction film set in a world where people and their sexual activities are traded like stock options and where the counter revolutionaries arent even sure why they want to overthrow the world. Bill Sage plays an employee of the mega firm Triple M who encounters a leftist alien woman from the constellation Monday.
Check out the official site of The Girl from Monday
Daniel Robert Epstein: Since you shot The Girl from Monday on video, did you have to use the regular amount of lights?
Hal Hartley: This was not casual filmmaking so it was very much lit. We had a small lighting kit that could be moved around because we didnt want to have to use a truck to move the lights around. We wanted lights and grip equipment that could be moved in bins. We had two big bins we would push down the sidewalk. Video doesnt like a lot of lights because then it will start to look like bad British television.
DRE: Did you steal any of the New York City street shots?
HH: The one thing we stole was a shot of Sabrina [Lloyd] on the cell phone with Jack [Bill Sage] the morning before they go to the insurance meeting. We had permits for everything but we happened to be standing in front of the Hitachi building and they were just being assholes. She was doing her lines while we were being screamed at.
DRE: Did you write this script and then decide to shoot it this way or did you write it to be shot this way?
HH: I wrote the script to be a small 35mm movie. But when we decided to shoot it on digital video there were no changes to the script. Even if I shot it in 35mm I would have done it the same way.
DRE: And edit it the same way?
HH: Maybe not. I think the ease of it being on the computer made it so more post work could be done. I might not have done certain things if I knew it was going to end up in 35mm.
DRE: Was No Such Thing financed by a studio?
HH: Yes it was a studio movie.
DRE: Its interesting that you did a movie where people are considered commodities after working for a studio.
HH: [laughs] A little bit.
DRE: Was it a coincidence?
HH: It is because I wrote No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday at the same time in 1999. I was writing No Such Thing and getting ready for the production when a producer friend suggested we do a small movie that had to do with sex. But I dont really think that much about something unless Im writing it so I wrote it very quickly. The two films have things in common like the uses and abuses of media and competing moralities.
DRE: Its such a clich to say this but The Girl from Monday felt a bit post 9/11.
HH: People also said the same thing about No Such Thing because it had the terrorist element in the beginning but it was shot before 9/11. No Such Thing was delayed by MGM until 2003 because of that.
DRE: In The Girl from Monday soldiers are running around the streets of New York City, so was 9/11 a direct influence on it?
HH: Most people think the world is very different after 9/11 and I dont think that. The kind of world The Girl from Monday comments on was the world before and after 9/11. I do feel that before 9/11 I felt a large police presence in the United States and also I did feel the effects of the super pressurized advertising world and media saturation as well. People seem to draw a line between pre and post 9/11 too easily.
DRE: Thats because Time magazine tells them that.
HH: People dont really want to think for themselves so they are happy to read Time magazine and feel that is the language they are supposed to use to discuss the world. That has given The Girl from Monday a meaning and resonance I didnt mean for it to have but I am happy to have it. The only thing I added after 9/11 was Jacks voiceover after the Triple M break-in where he is sleeping on the couch and its a poem expressing his profound ambivalence whether he wants to be on the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary side.
DRE: You never make it exactly clear in The Girl from Monday what the world is like. There are a lot of boardrooms talking about people as commodities but boardrooms sound like that today, they sounded like that 50 years ago, they sounded like that 1000 years ago and it will probably sound like that tomorrow. That idea has been forced on you because 12 years ago you were being touted as the filmmaker thats going to change the way American movies are, did you ever feel any pressure about that?
HH: I dont involve myself with that. I forget about it. If its something I can use to make a movie or more importantly to get people to keep going to see my movies then thats good. As a working artist it would be the kiss of death if I let that affect me.
DRE: Thats interesting that its more important for you to have people see your movies than for you to make them. It seems like a lot of filmmakers might feel that way but they would never voice it.
HH: There is this dynamic that any creative person works with every single day. Its making the work, damn all the torpedoes and dont give a shit about anything. But on the other hand it must be seen. No one just wants to make their work then just put it on the shelf and have no one see it.
DRE: I think Jim Jarmusch said that movies dont really work if no one sees them.
HH: I think so as well. They have to be seen,???? so there is this give and take that I like very much. For me making movies is the only way Im good at communicating with people.
DRE: [laughs] Would your wife agree?
HH: Yeah, shes the same.
The thing to remember is that doesnt mean that you have to give audiences whatever they want. Thats easy and I think I know how to do that. Lots of people know how to do that.
DRE: Do you know how to do that because youve done it?
HH: I definitely did it at least twice. When I made The Unbelievable Truth I knew people would want to see it. Thats not where I started from but I convinced people to give me money because I was able to say with complete confidence If we make this movie for this amount of money its going to be a success and it was. I did it again with Henry Fool which was my biggest grossing film. I was writing Henry Fool for a year and a half and all of sudden I got the feeling that it would be a hit. It had all the things like topicality, gross stuff, sex and scandalous stuff. All the things that popular movies usually have. The fun of doing this is sticking to your guns and doing what you need to do as a creative person and making sure youre not too obscure. To make it accessible enough but still not pander to the population.
DRE: What did MGM/UA want out of No Such Thing?
HH: They wanted whatever [executive producer] Francis Coppola wanted. Francis loved the script and wanted to do it. I dont really have any complaints about it except they were dumb corporate people. Francis read the script, gave it the go ahead, Francis then liked the film and passed it onto MGM. MGM never read the script and most of them didnt even know who I was. They just trusted Francis so they didnt do their own homework.
DRE: They were probably like This is isnt Jeepers Creepers!
HH: Exactly. So Francis tried to tell them that I wasnt the kind of guy who makes Jeepers Creepers and why didnt they watch my other films before they gave him the go ahead. They were terrified of the film but were also contractually obligated to release the film in the United States but it wasnt specified when. Of course everyone gets fired at these studios every six months so No Such Thing lost all its steam by the time they released it. Usually I have more control over my movies but my friends and my lawyer were advising that since I was getting a paycheck, which I needed at the time, I wont have any say. So I did it.
DRE: Is that why you had such a break in-between No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday?
HH: No I wasnt trying to fight MGM. I was doing other things. I was teaching, I wrote a lot of Fay Grim which is the new movie were going to do, I wrote some theater. Also we did the American production of my play, Soon.
DRE: How was the production of The Girl from Monday?
HH: It was fast and super hard. Its funny because in 1988 when I made The Unbelievable Truth in 11 days at the age of 28. At that age you really can live on beer, pizza, bagels and shit like that. Over the years I said I would never do that again because as you get older you get slower and my standards are higher. Then I found myself doing it again at 44 during the 12 coldest days in New York history.
DRE: Did shooting that fast energize you or were you like My joints hurt?
HH: For the past couple of weeks Ive been watching Richard Sylvarnes edit together the making-of documentary for The Girl from Monday for the DVD. I cant believe. When I see this footage, I see how much joy there was on set. Just how funny we are with each other and how we are like children playing in the sandbox. Its so gratifying and encouraging because it was physically hard. There were a couple of nights I didnt even get out of my clothes. I even slept in boots because we would finish the day at 11:30 at night and I had to get up at 5am the next day. I was so fucking cold that the thought of getting undressed was just too painful.
DRE: Did you know Leo Fitzpatrick before he was in The Girl from Monday?
HH: No, I didnt but I knew his work. Since then weve become very good friends, hes fascinating and were definitely going to work together again.
But the agent who represents Bill Sage also represents Leo Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Lloyd. That agent sent Leo to be put on an audition tape. My assistant was doing the auditions while I was teaching at Harvard so when I came back there would be a stack of audition tapes. When I saw Leo I was the only one who knew who he was. He just came in amongst 25 other guys.
DRE: I never thought he was going to be a great actor until I saw Storytelling.
HH: Thats the one where I realized he wasnt just charming and weird but also a great actor.
DRE: Im not sure if I would call The Girl from Monday an actors piece.
HH: I dont know. When you say actors piece it could mean a lot of things.
DRE: I guess Im saying that because there is no static camera.
HH: Thats more about cinematography. The actors are doing the same amount of work whether Im shooting in 35mm in static frames or video. In the making-of documentary Leo has a very funny interview where he says, "I come to this film and Hal has one camera and I thought that since it was on video there would be cameras everywhere. So I was angry at first. A lot of movies made with DV are causal and overcovered so the actors do have to work less. That to me means that as a filmmaker you arent committed to excellence in the moment. You are second guessing yourself. Even if youre not spot on you can fake it with other angles.
DRE: I just saw this Danish film called Brothers with Connie Nielsen in it. It was shot on video and Connie told me that she loves that because it gives her freedom to move anywhere she wants. I would imagine you dont do that kind of thing.
HH: I dont. We move the camera around on a tripod and its all rehearsed.
DRE: That must be a tough thing to rehearse.
HH: The one thing that makes it different for motion picture photography is that there is no focus ring on these cameras. On 35mm and even 16mm you would have the assistant camera person pulling focus. The camera operator just makes sure the movements are right and hopes that the AC makes sure the focus is correct. You cant do that in this cheap form because there is no ring. Luckily we had a monitor to all look at. I call it jazz cinematography because you have to have a looseness built in and all that it is endemic to video. I dont want to ignore the qualities of the medium.
DRE: How many of your films do you own?
HH: Well ownership means different things. I am the worldwide sales agent for four of them, Flirt, Henry Fool, Trust and The Girl from Monday.
DRE: How is having to watch the older films for the commentary?
HH: We did one for The Girl from Monday DVD but audio commentary bores me. Nothing excites me less than hearing directors or actors talk about whats going on. But The Girl from Monday DVD is going to have something really exciting, that 20 minute making-of documentary. Its us working on set intercut with interviews.
DRE: How was it working with people like James Urbaniak and Edie Falco again?
HH: James is a really great actor so it was great. Edie came in for a day and she is a lovely woman who knows she is famous but that we all started out together. One of the things about the making-of documentary was how much I learned about myself. I really am alive when I am making movies, which is one of the reasons its so hard for me to have relationships but Im lucky enough to be married to a woman for ten years who is the same way. To see us laughing, having fun and coming up ideas while we were up against so much adversity was really wild.
DRE: For many years there was a certain kind of person who liked Hal Hartley movies, somber
HH: Really? I wouldnt know [laughs].
DRE: Skinny
HH: Is that true? Did they happen to be skinny and somber?
DRE: Somber yes, skinny might be me making fun of them. But they listened to PJ Harvey, which you helped out with. Were you ever like that at all or were they just imitating the characters in your early films?
HH: Yeah I think they were imitating a bit. My memory is that over the years a lot of the people who would come up to me and express admiration for my films were often younger college age women who were really into Martin Donovan and somber younger men who felt they were misunderstood and really into Adrienne Shelly. There were many others but as far as younger people, they were the somber ones.
But really even the early films came from a place of a real optimism about people, except that me and the actors were hardheaded. We wanted to look at life with our eyes wide open and we were wiling to argue and be turned around. The one thing we all had in common was that we hated fake happiness which is what a lot of the world is like.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
But before that Hartley has written, directed and released The Girl from Monday. This latest digital feature is a science fiction film set in a world where people and their sexual activities are traded like stock options and where the counter revolutionaries arent even sure why they want to overthrow the world. Bill Sage plays an employee of the mega firm Triple M who encounters a leftist alien woman from the constellation Monday.
Check out the official site of The Girl from Monday
Daniel Robert Epstein: Since you shot The Girl from Monday on video, did you have to use the regular amount of lights?
Hal Hartley: This was not casual filmmaking so it was very much lit. We had a small lighting kit that could be moved around because we didnt want to have to use a truck to move the lights around. We wanted lights and grip equipment that could be moved in bins. We had two big bins we would push down the sidewalk. Video doesnt like a lot of lights because then it will start to look like bad British television.
DRE: Did you steal any of the New York City street shots?
HH: The one thing we stole was a shot of Sabrina [Lloyd] on the cell phone with Jack [Bill Sage] the morning before they go to the insurance meeting. We had permits for everything but we happened to be standing in front of the Hitachi building and they were just being assholes. She was doing her lines while we were being screamed at.
DRE: Did you write this script and then decide to shoot it this way or did you write it to be shot this way?
HH: I wrote the script to be a small 35mm movie. But when we decided to shoot it on digital video there were no changes to the script. Even if I shot it in 35mm I would have done it the same way.
DRE: And edit it the same way?
HH: Maybe not. I think the ease of it being on the computer made it so more post work could be done. I might not have done certain things if I knew it was going to end up in 35mm.
DRE: Was No Such Thing financed by a studio?
HH: Yes it was a studio movie.
DRE: Its interesting that you did a movie where people are considered commodities after working for a studio.
HH: [laughs] A little bit.
DRE: Was it a coincidence?
HH: It is because I wrote No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday at the same time in 1999. I was writing No Such Thing and getting ready for the production when a producer friend suggested we do a small movie that had to do with sex. But I dont really think that much about something unless Im writing it so I wrote it very quickly. The two films have things in common like the uses and abuses of media and competing moralities.
DRE: Its such a clich to say this but The Girl from Monday felt a bit post 9/11.
HH: People also said the same thing about No Such Thing because it had the terrorist element in the beginning but it was shot before 9/11. No Such Thing was delayed by MGM until 2003 because of that.
DRE: In The Girl from Monday soldiers are running around the streets of New York City, so was 9/11 a direct influence on it?
HH: Most people think the world is very different after 9/11 and I dont think that. The kind of world The Girl from Monday comments on was the world before and after 9/11. I do feel that before 9/11 I felt a large police presence in the United States and also I did feel the effects of the super pressurized advertising world and media saturation as well. People seem to draw a line between pre and post 9/11 too easily.
DRE: Thats because Time magazine tells them that.
HH: People dont really want to think for themselves so they are happy to read Time magazine and feel that is the language they are supposed to use to discuss the world. That has given The Girl from Monday a meaning and resonance I didnt mean for it to have but I am happy to have it. The only thing I added after 9/11 was Jacks voiceover after the Triple M break-in where he is sleeping on the couch and its a poem expressing his profound ambivalence whether he wants to be on the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary side.
DRE: You never make it exactly clear in The Girl from Monday what the world is like. There are a lot of boardrooms talking about people as commodities but boardrooms sound like that today, they sounded like that 50 years ago, they sounded like that 1000 years ago and it will probably sound like that tomorrow. That idea has been forced on you because 12 years ago you were being touted as the filmmaker thats going to change the way American movies are, did you ever feel any pressure about that?
HH: I dont involve myself with that. I forget about it. If its something I can use to make a movie or more importantly to get people to keep going to see my movies then thats good. As a working artist it would be the kiss of death if I let that affect me.
DRE: Thats interesting that its more important for you to have people see your movies than for you to make them. It seems like a lot of filmmakers might feel that way but they would never voice it.
HH: There is this dynamic that any creative person works with every single day. Its making the work, damn all the torpedoes and dont give a shit about anything. But on the other hand it must be seen. No one just wants to make their work then just put it on the shelf and have no one see it.
DRE: I think Jim Jarmusch said that movies dont really work if no one sees them.
HH: I think so as well. They have to be seen,???? so there is this give and take that I like very much. For me making movies is the only way Im good at communicating with people.
DRE: [laughs] Would your wife agree?
HH: Yeah, shes the same.
The thing to remember is that doesnt mean that you have to give audiences whatever they want. Thats easy and I think I know how to do that. Lots of people know how to do that.
DRE: Do you know how to do that because youve done it?
HH: I definitely did it at least twice. When I made The Unbelievable Truth I knew people would want to see it. Thats not where I started from but I convinced people to give me money because I was able to say with complete confidence If we make this movie for this amount of money its going to be a success and it was. I did it again with Henry Fool which was my biggest grossing film. I was writing Henry Fool for a year and a half and all of sudden I got the feeling that it would be a hit. It had all the things like topicality, gross stuff, sex and scandalous stuff. All the things that popular movies usually have. The fun of doing this is sticking to your guns and doing what you need to do as a creative person and making sure youre not too obscure. To make it accessible enough but still not pander to the population.
DRE: What did MGM/UA want out of No Such Thing?
HH: They wanted whatever [executive producer] Francis Coppola wanted. Francis loved the script and wanted to do it. I dont really have any complaints about it except they were dumb corporate people. Francis read the script, gave it the go ahead, Francis then liked the film and passed it onto MGM. MGM never read the script and most of them didnt even know who I was. They just trusted Francis so they didnt do their own homework.
DRE: They were probably like This is isnt Jeepers Creepers!
HH: Exactly. So Francis tried to tell them that I wasnt the kind of guy who makes Jeepers Creepers and why didnt they watch my other films before they gave him the go ahead. They were terrified of the film but were also contractually obligated to release the film in the United States but it wasnt specified when. Of course everyone gets fired at these studios every six months so No Such Thing lost all its steam by the time they released it. Usually I have more control over my movies but my friends and my lawyer were advising that since I was getting a paycheck, which I needed at the time, I wont have any say. So I did it.
DRE: Is that why you had such a break in-between No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday?
HH: No I wasnt trying to fight MGM. I was doing other things. I was teaching, I wrote a lot of Fay Grim which is the new movie were going to do, I wrote some theater. Also we did the American production of my play, Soon.
DRE: How was the production of The Girl from Monday?
HH: It was fast and super hard. Its funny because in 1988 when I made The Unbelievable Truth in 11 days at the age of 28. At that age you really can live on beer, pizza, bagels and shit like that. Over the years I said I would never do that again because as you get older you get slower and my standards are higher. Then I found myself doing it again at 44 during the 12 coldest days in New York history.
DRE: Did shooting that fast energize you or were you like My joints hurt?
HH: For the past couple of weeks Ive been watching Richard Sylvarnes edit together the making-of documentary for The Girl from Monday for the DVD. I cant believe. When I see this footage, I see how much joy there was on set. Just how funny we are with each other and how we are like children playing in the sandbox. Its so gratifying and encouraging because it was physically hard. There were a couple of nights I didnt even get out of my clothes. I even slept in boots because we would finish the day at 11:30 at night and I had to get up at 5am the next day. I was so fucking cold that the thought of getting undressed was just too painful.
DRE: Did you know Leo Fitzpatrick before he was in The Girl from Monday?
HH: No, I didnt but I knew his work. Since then weve become very good friends, hes fascinating and were definitely going to work together again.
But the agent who represents Bill Sage also represents Leo Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Lloyd. That agent sent Leo to be put on an audition tape. My assistant was doing the auditions while I was teaching at Harvard so when I came back there would be a stack of audition tapes. When I saw Leo I was the only one who knew who he was. He just came in amongst 25 other guys.
DRE: I never thought he was going to be a great actor until I saw Storytelling.
HH: Thats the one where I realized he wasnt just charming and weird but also a great actor.
DRE: Im not sure if I would call The Girl from Monday an actors piece.
HH: I dont know. When you say actors piece it could mean a lot of things.
DRE: I guess Im saying that because there is no static camera.
HH: Thats more about cinematography. The actors are doing the same amount of work whether Im shooting in 35mm in static frames or video. In the making-of documentary Leo has a very funny interview where he says, "I come to this film and Hal has one camera and I thought that since it was on video there would be cameras everywhere. So I was angry at first. A lot of movies made with DV are causal and overcovered so the actors do have to work less. That to me means that as a filmmaker you arent committed to excellence in the moment. You are second guessing yourself. Even if youre not spot on you can fake it with other angles.
DRE: I just saw this Danish film called Brothers with Connie Nielsen in it. It was shot on video and Connie told me that she loves that because it gives her freedom to move anywhere she wants. I would imagine you dont do that kind of thing.
HH: I dont. We move the camera around on a tripod and its all rehearsed.
DRE: That must be a tough thing to rehearse.
HH: The one thing that makes it different for motion picture photography is that there is no focus ring on these cameras. On 35mm and even 16mm you would have the assistant camera person pulling focus. The camera operator just makes sure the movements are right and hopes that the AC makes sure the focus is correct. You cant do that in this cheap form because there is no ring. Luckily we had a monitor to all look at. I call it jazz cinematography because you have to have a looseness built in and all that it is endemic to video. I dont want to ignore the qualities of the medium.
DRE: How many of your films do you own?
HH: Well ownership means different things. I am the worldwide sales agent for four of them, Flirt, Henry Fool, Trust and The Girl from Monday.
DRE: How is having to watch the older films for the commentary?
HH: We did one for The Girl from Monday DVD but audio commentary bores me. Nothing excites me less than hearing directors or actors talk about whats going on. But The Girl from Monday DVD is going to have something really exciting, that 20 minute making-of documentary. Its us working on set intercut with interviews.
DRE: How was it working with people like James Urbaniak and Edie Falco again?
HH: James is a really great actor so it was great. Edie came in for a day and she is a lovely woman who knows she is famous but that we all started out together. One of the things about the making-of documentary was how much I learned about myself. I really am alive when I am making movies, which is one of the reasons its so hard for me to have relationships but Im lucky enough to be married to a woman for ten years who is the same way. To see us laughing, having fun and coming up ideas while we were up against so much adversity was really wild.
DRE: For many years there was a certain kind of person who liked Hal Hartley movies, somber
HH: Really? I wouldnt know [laughs].
DRE: Skinny
HH: Is that true? Did they happen to be skinny and somber?
DRE: Somber yes, skinny might be me making fun of them. But they listened to PJ Harvey, which you helped out with. Were you ever like that at all or were they just imitating the characters in your early films?
HH: Yeah I think they were imitating a bit. My memory is that over the years a lot of the people who would come up to me and express admiration for my films were often younger college age women who were really into Martin Donovan and somber younger men who felt they were misunderstood and really into Adrienne Shelly. There were many others but as far as younger people, they were the somber ones.
But really even the early films came from a place of a real optimism about people, except that me and the actors were hardheaded. We wanted to look at life with our eyes wide open and we were wiling to argue and be turned around. The one thing we all had in common was that we hated fake happiness which is what a lot of the world is like.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 11 of 11 COMMENTS
I caught The Girl From Monday at the Clinton St. theater in Portland a couple weeks ago... pretty sparsely attended, unfortunately. It was a lot of fun, though, and Sabrina Lloyd is a perfect addition to Hartley's "stable" of actors.
And that's pretty funny that Hartley fans are supposed to be somber & skinny. Ever since I saw Trust when it was released back in 1991, I've foisted Hartley movies on my friends... but nobody who knows me would consider me somber, and nobody who's seen me would consider me skinny...