Film Show 034: Kurt Walker
An interview with the Canadian director about online communities and capturing their spirit in his films
Kurt Walker
Kurt Walker is a Vancouver-born, Toronto-based filmmaker. His first feature, 2014’s Hit 2 Pass, is an elliptical documentary and road movie, concerned nominally with a combo demolition derby/road race in Prince George, Canada that gives the film its name. His next major work, 2020’s s01e03 is less grounded in the real world, taking place—according to the film’s credits—in Vancouver, New York City, and Vana’Diel, the fictional realm from the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI.
The film is elusive, at first. It’s light on explicit plot and spoken dialogue, allowing a love story between a group of friends to unfold ambiently across on-screen depictions of digital communication (emails and video game chat logs, mostly) that recall silent film intertitles. It’s meditative and minimal, but rich with life, showing the meaningfulness of these small gestures of communication—and the way that real connection and community can form in digital spaces. His newest film, 2022’s I Thought the World of You—streaming now on Mubi—continues pulling at some of these thematic threads. It is, in part, a biopic of Lewis, the mystery-shrouded musician responsible for the foggy love songs housed on the unearthed 1980s records L’Amour and Romantic Times.
But it’s just as much a document of the online community that formed around the music made by a man we now know to be named Randall Wulff. When his music first resurfaced in the early 2010s, the desperate search for any information about the artist spawned a devoted cult of amateur sleuths on forums like Hipinion (posts from which appear in I Thought the World of You). Lewis was eventually tracked down in Vancouver, seemingly bemused but not altogether interested in the new attention about his old music. Walker captures all of this in his film—both the ghostly romance in the music and persona and the sense of wonderment among those who searched for him. It’s a love letter to a beloved musician, but also to a particular era of the internet. It was still a place where curious nerds could gather together to solve a mystery. On September 2, 2023, over Zoom, Colin Joyce spoke to Walker about his earliest days on the internet, and both the practical and philosophical struggles of capturing this sort of energy on film.
Colin Joyce: I wanted to talk about your relationship with the internet. Can we go back to the beginning? Do you have any early memories of being online and finding friendships and community on the internet?
Kurt Walker: My earliest internet memories are of joining a Final Fantasy message board, which was pretty predictable of me. I must’ve been nine or ten. I didn’t have a PS1 or PS2, but I was obsessed with Final Fantasy. I didn’t have access to play it for a while. My cousins had a Japanese student living with them who brought a Japanese copy of Final Fantasy VIII, and that was my first encounter. I was just obsessed with those worlds, but couldn’t play them. I would partake in these message boards and vicariously kind of experience these games. Those worlds became especially boundless sandboxes when you couldn’t actually play the thing.
Do you remember what was so appealing to you about it as a kid?
I think just the worldbuilding and the unique approach to sequelization. It was like, oh, it’s a new world and whole new aesthetic every time. And that was exciting to me. The games were very romantic and had these really rich, nuanced themes of friendship and connection realized not only in their narratives but within their mechanics. It was the kind of fantasy world I had always been looking for but hadn’t found up until then. Then Final Fantasy XI came out somewhere around that time and that was a game that you had to be pretty wealthy to play.
The MMO right?
That was the first MMO and, from my perspective, the best MMO. For that game, you had to have a PS2 and the $150 hard drive, or you had to have a really powerful computer. And I had neither; I had a PS2 at the time, probably, but I couldn’t afford a hard drive and convince my parents to pay a monthly subscription or what have you. But again, I found myself dreaming of that game but had to settle for RuneScape instead.
As you know, Final Fantasy XI would find its way into my films with s01e03 (2020), that’s where that movie’s partly set. I also remember using AOL and MSN Messenger. AOL was for talking with my friends I met in various fandom communities, and MSN Messenger was for actual friends or people from neighboring schools who you want to be friends with. I think a lot lately about how kinda shitty the internet is now. For the first time, I’m really questioning its value in my life. And I don’t know, I’m admittedly romantic about it, but that was a period of just what felt like infinite discovery.
Anyways, eventually when I could play MMOs beyond the free-to-play ones, I would make my first film, a machinima movie shot in World of Warcraft.
Especially for the purpose that you were using it for as a kid, it was access to magic. When you were on those forums as a kid, were you just reading about lore?
Yeah, reading lore… role-playing. God, to think that people used to roleplay on message boards publicly on posts that are saved there forever. Thankfully, this forum is long gone. There were Final Fantasy-oriented fan flash games on this site, and it was gamified, so you could level up through posting. So that excited me because for that period where I couldn’t play Final Fantasy, well, I could post on the message board and grind by posting.
I think that makes a lot of sense with some of the stuff that comes up in your films, that you’ve spent your life making friends online.
And a lot of those friendships would actualize in person. I moved to New York when all these online filmmaker friends moved to New York, and that’s kind of what I was trying to embody with s01e03, to give cinematic form to this friend group converging in the IRL.
I feel like that’s a unique thing to try to capture in films, or at least in more mainstream films, that you might have this digital side to your life that’s just as sincere as what happens in the real world.
I guess I go to s01e03 to answer that, and with that film, I was very much responding to just the lack of what seemed like a lack of young people’s experiences being conveyed through cinema. With that, I was excited to just chart that territory and express what I think a lot of young people’s lives are today, and that’s being in front of screens. That’s hard to film, and that’s why the movie took so long to make. How do you make that exciting and how do you film the internet? “How do you film messaging?” was a big quandary. I really wanted to find my way past visual clichés, like the go-to formalization of iMessages appearing in frame—that’s not really how texting feels, it’s not conveying the experience at all. And I didn’t exactly know how I was going to resolve that when first embarking on making s01e03. Later on, I started to realize this is a kind of ambient, silent film. So I decided to look to the past, to silent cinema, and find a way to revive the syntax of intertitles and weave it with online communication, which then I extrapolate on, or maybe just repeat with on I Thought the World of You (2022).
Part of what was so striking to me about both films is how seriously they take the idea of these relationships being really meaningful.
I think that a film’s production and production model will more often than not imprint itself on the movie, and thus I think I embraced the whole “making movie with friends” ethos to the furthest degree. At the same time, I was also trying to channel these friendships and how they felt—what they meant to me—into this lightning-in-a-bottle tribute, as I knew I only had one shot to get this right. The film kind of came out the way it did because it’s also a participatory film. I didn’t have that language at the time, but a lot of friends worked on that movie in various capacities. I think of it as a kind of mosaic.
In practical terms, part of the movie was kind of staged as fiction and not traditionally scripted, but still loosely written. And then there was the party at the climax of the movie which was an actual event in which we handed cameras around and invited a bunch of people. Some filmmaker friends—from Austin, from the Bay Area, from Winnipeg—all came up to Vancouver for that. Then we projected Tinychat on a screen and it had a live camera going because Tinychat was this medium we were using as like a proto-Discord at the time.
It just made sense to weave it into the movie because so much of it was hashed out and accumulated from the vibes of hanging out on Tinychat. And so yeah, there were just a lot of people contributing shots to that sequence. There were also times when I hadn’t moved to New York yet, and I had people shooting stuff for me while I directed over FaceTime.
In this new film, a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about is reflected in the forum posts that flash on screen. Can you talk to me a little bit more about how your relationship with forum culture played into your desire to make this film?
I first discovered the music and the phenomenon of Lewis back in the summer of 2014, which is when it all went down. And I think a friend turned me on to the Hipinion message board where there’s a thread where all of the big Lewis heads were, and they were actively investigating Mr. Randall Wulff and just doing a lot of online sleuthing and just sharing their love for the music as well. I was immediately enveloped by the whole phenomenon. I didn’t post much, but I actively lurked on this thread and followed all its updates as they were kind of figuring out who he was, and where he was. And I think in this period, I hadn’t used a message board in a long time, so it was nice to be back. This was a unique internet happening. It was just this positive, beautiful thing.
It almost felt like an ARG.
Yeah, just like an organic ARG. And people were saying this was all a hoax, that this was just Light in the Attic trying to create Rodriguez. There were a ton of people saying that right up until they found him. I think people were still saying it afterward too, and I just became obsessed with it all. I mean, I grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries every Thursday. And then how it unfolded was just amazing. I think, if I remember correctly, a second album was found, well, he was kind of, people figured out that he was probably from Calgary or the very least Canadian, and started finding his paper trail, which there’s not much of. And then he was found. Through the collaboration of the record label, who hired a private investigator, and the online sleuthing, he was found in Vancouver, where I was living at the time.
You could have been walking by him and never known.
Totally. The trail led to Vancouver after the online fans found this video of him recording at this studio called Fiasco Brothers outside Vancouver in New Westminster, and I called up Len, who runs that studio, and who makes a cameo in the movie. He shared a bunch of wild stories with me, which I in turn shared with the forum, but then they, or “we,” collectively in tandem, found him. The rest is history. At that point, I had just finished my first feature, and I was very compelled to do this next, but there was a lot of interest in the story, and there was news of a bunch of documentary filmmakers coming to town trying to make something of it, you know, trying to do another Searching for Sugar Man (2012) type of thing. It just seemed out of my grasp. I’m not a commercial filmmaker, I’m not a documentary filmmaker, really. So I just kind of moved on. I started working on s01e03, and just when I finally emerged from that six years later, it was like, “Well, no one’s done this yet. I think I know how to do it now.”
I think what your film gets at is the actual excitement of the story to me, which is not just about him, but about the collaborative element of how everything unfolded.
It was important to express that. I was trying to channel my experience and that initial encounter with the phenomenon and the excitement around it all into the film’s form, particularly expressed with those intertitles. But I think my excitement around the subject matter emanates from those speculative scenes, which are partly my speculation or even knowledge, but also of a piece with the online mythmaking aspect of it all.
Watching it for the second time, I realized it feels like a ghost story.
Yeah, for sure. I mean… should I say this? My next movie is a ghost story, so yeah, that’s all there, I think. I think I had high hopes and maybe even came close to meeting him while making this movie, right up until the first shooting day, and that didn’t happen. I had plans for if I met him and he wanted to participate. And when that didn’t happen, it was a real bummer. But at the same time, I think the film even benefits… I had to embrace just structuring it around his absence and my lack of certainty around a lot of things. Lewis remains a ghost to me, and I think that’s there aesthetically in the music too. So yeah, I don’t know if it occurred to me during the shoot, but at least while editing, it occurred to me it has shapeshifted into something of a ghost story.
There’s a scene where the music finally plays and it’s to an empty studio. That was where it hit me that the absence is the point.
Yeah it was certainly a structuring principle. I think also shooting in that space—Fiasco Bros Recording Studio in New Westminster, where Randy actually recorded music sometime in the early 2000s—left its imprint on the film and guided my hand.
It’s almost hard to imagine him being involved in any film about himself. Any amount of demystifying feels, like, wrong at this point.
Totally. Yeah. It wouldn’t be true to the music, to the story, to the myth. So again, it’s good I didn’t meet him. I mean, who knows? We might still meet, fingers crossed for that. But yeah, it instead became about embracing the enigma of it all and harnessing enigma as a meaningful affect.
Can you talk a little bit about how the music weaves into the film? It seems like the spots where it’s deployed are so purposeful.
You don’t really hear the studio version of a track losslessly until the finale and I wanted to withhold his music as much as possible because I’d watched a bunch of music biopics leading up, and I think a common mistake with those films is just kind of indulging too much of the artist’s work to a point of oversaturation.
It becomes like karaoke or something.
Yeah, and it poorly frames the work because it’s just a playlist. That Todd Haynes, Bob Dylan movie has like 30 Dylan track cues, and in a roundabout way it’s unfair to Dylan. So it was really about being economical with the music. I’d initially planned to not cue the music pretty much at all until the final cue, but that wasn’t sustaining things. So I indulged just using a bit more, but I was still trying to find ways to undercut them to make the final cue this kind of big, cathartic thing.
I was constantly inspired by the music itself to inform the overall visual texture. The film’s melodrama speaks through the music, and L’Amour’s whole elliptical murmuring vibe guided not only the cinematographic texture but also the blocking, the flow of the montage, etc. And Ed Colver’s album cover for L’Amour was our north star. But yeah, I mean, I listened to the music incessantly leading up to the film and would listen to it on set and stuff too, to just inspire and guide me.
Can you tell me about what it was like to hear his music for the first time?
I think it’s just that it was just the music I had always wanted to hear. It was the stuff of dreams. The gentle weaving of synths with the grand piano in tandem with his beautiful soft voice with these elliptical lyrics that are like trying to grasp sand. Your brain registers some words, but not others. And cumulatively, it just really got me.
Another thing that I was curious about that’s kind of come up a couple of times, both in s01e03 and the new film, is there’s obviously very little spoken dialogue. Can you talk about the choice to use text to carry the emotional weight of the films?
I don’t know if I really knew what I was going for when I first started forming this aesthetic, but I think I arrived at just valuing ambience and trying to find a way to tell stories in an ambient form, a form that forgoes too much plotting or character in favor of just composing this kind of audiovisual flow that hopefully the viewer can just fall into. I think both films, particularly s01e03, have a story, but I’d like to think it’s almost optional. You can opt in and follow the story or you can just kind of vibe.
It also comes from a practical place too. I don’t have much confidence directing actors, and I’ve seen a lot of filmmakers when first starting out just slip and fall when directing actors. They have this whole feature that’s great on paper and really well staged and blocked and composed, but the acting’s not quite there. And I suspected I would make similar mistakes, so I kind of went this other path. I hope to challenge and complicate that with my next film. But with these films, it really made sense. And it’s also just exciting to me. I don’t know, I’d like to think as much as these films are about the internet, it’s pulling from the past as well and carrying reviving traditions of silent cinema. It’s just an exciting challenge for me, of how to meaningfully revive old forms without being fetishist either.
Are there things that you’d watched that made you want to recreate that mode?
Yeah, for sure. I discovered this filmmaker Franco Piavoli while I was making s01e03, probably after I’d shot a portion of it, but it was this eureka moment. He made this movie called Voices Through Time (1996), which is in part about lifetimes: it starts with an infant climbing up a staircase in summer, and then it ends with a man on his deathbed in winter. It’s a very ambient film and is maybe documentary, but is very precisely, expressively composed. Every image has a breath of life to it, which is really kind of a rule to my filmmaking. I work hard to try and ensure every shot really has emotion to it. I think more narrative narrative filmmaking requires perfunctory shots here or there, coverage and inserts, and things that are just sometimes inherently lifeless. And so yeah, when I encountered Piavoli’s work, there was just something so alive and beguiling about every shot, and the overall shape of his films, that was really inspirational.
Another thread of your work that I see is this fixation on connection, whether that’s through the internet communities or with the race in Hit 2 Pass. Can you tell me what draws you to those sorts of subject matters and groups of people as well?
I think connection is the keyword here. It is this kind of governing force in my films, partly also because I’m just very interested, frankly, in love and expressing love in its various forms. The first film was platonic, this bromance thing expressed in an abstract slapstick form. And I think s01e03 is at once about a community of online friends converging, but is also a love story between two people in a long-distance relationship. And with I Thought the World of You, well, all of Lewis’s songs are romantic love songs. So I knew it was my duty to make this love song of a movie with it, and even though I pretty much literally know nothing about Lewis and Karen, their love story, I just speculated and tried to make this kind of old-school Hollywood melodrama love story, but with a few updates to the form.
I like the idea of love as this animating force, even in a non-literal way.
I think it’s the primary kind of quandary when I’m shaping a film. Just like, how do I express this kind of love? This impetus in tandem with my intuition has resulted in some long-winded and confused productions, but I’ve been lucky to have made them all exclusively with good friends and very talented collaborators up to this point. I think I’m starting to figure things out. I’m eager to make some more movies.
Kurt Walker’s newest film I Thought the World of You is now streaming at Mubi. His 2014 film Hit 2 Pass is available to view at Vimeo. His 2020 film s01e03 is available to view at Kinet.
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