Film Show 038: Hal Hartley
An interview with the New York filmmaker about Irish ballads, the musicality of language, hating opera, and the influence of Joni Mitchell on his works
Hal Hartley
Hal Hartley (b. 1959) is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, composer, and novelist born and based in New York. Throughout his decades-long career, Hartley has crafted over a dozen feature films—and more than a dozen shorts—that are highly attuned to the musicality of language, bolstering his dialogue’s deadpan humor and amiable charm. He first came to prominence with his debut feature, The Unbelievable Truth (1989), and released multiple critically acclaimed works throughout the following decade, including Trust (1991), Amateur (1994), and Henry Fool (1997). Hartley would continue to evolve with shifting technologies, moving from 35mm to video—as seen in the PJ Harvey-starring The Book of Life (1998)—and then to digital with films like Meanwhile (2011) and Ned Rifle (2014). He also directed music videos for various artists such as Yo La Tengo and Everything But the Girl, and would compose soundtracks for his films under the name Ned Rifle. More recently, he published a novel, Our Lady of the Highway, in 2022.
The Criterion Channel is currently holding a largely comprehensive retrospective of his works. Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, Hartley once noted in an interview that what he most admired about the French filmmaker was how his diverse films were all of a piece. Appropriately, this 30-film collection is an opportunity to approach his filmography in a similar manner, offering a chance to see short films such as 1997’s The Other Also (his most visually abstract work) and 2004’s The New Math(s) (a collaborative project with composer Louis Andriessen) alongside better-known classics like 1992’s Simple Men. The Kickstarter for Hartley’s upcoming film, Where to Land, is available now. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Hartley on September 2nd, 2023 via Zoom to discuss his love for Neil Young, his distaste for music videos, and various films from throughout his career.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: In an interview from 1991, you said that the most inspiring thing for you as a filmmaker was seeing Neil Young at Brendan Byrne Arena. In another interview 13 years later, someone asked what you were listening to and you mentioned Neil Young again. I’m curious, who is Neil Young to you? Why was that concert so important?
Hal Hartley: I don’t remember that so well but I’m sure I said it because I remember that concert. I grew up with Neil Young. In the ’70s, growing up in Long Island—among me and my brothers, my cousins, my friends—a lot of us were aspiring rockers. We paid a lot of attention to him. I think by 1991, when my career was starting, I might have been very impressed by how the man could reinvent himself. Not totally reinvent himself, but take his own regular talents and interests and, in a sense, repackage and reshape them for an audience that was always changing. And he was fresh. He was an older guy—as far as we were concerned, he looked like an old man (laughter). But he had an energy and a focus and conviction that I didn’t really see much of in my own generation.
What did you see in your own generation?
At that time? I think I was probably fairly typical of it. A lot of carefulness about how we were perceived and what we could say. There was a certain amount of self-censorship that went on, because part of naivety is not trying to cover up anything. We were kind of careful about what we wanted to say publicly. I think it was a more conservative time, the ’80s and early ’90s, compared to the ’60s and ’70s.
I am interested to know about the musical aspect of your life, early on. Were your parents really big into music? Did they foster that?
Definitely. There was a lot of singing. They came from Canada, way out of nowhere in Newfoundland, so they grew up without a lot of stuff. But the whole larger community of their brothers and sisters and cousins immigrated in the late ’40s, early ’50s. Any sort of family thing, whether it was a barbecue in the backyard, a funeral, or a christening, we usually wound up in someone’s kitchen and they would sing ballads without instrumentation. They all knew these songs—a lot of Irish songs. We weren’t Irish, really, but there were a lot of Irish songs that came through, and a lot of English ballads that were just Canadian. There was always that. As a child, I think I responded to the storytelling in it.
Are there any particular songs that struck you in terms of that storytelling aspect?
“The Black Velvet Band,” a very classic Irish ballad. I used it in a recent screenplay… that will probably not get made (laughter). It’s a song about a pretty criminal (laughs) who takes this man for a ride and steals all his money. There were these sea shanties. Apart from the other things he did in the off-season, my grandfather was a sea captain. He had a fishing fleet. All my uncles and my dad grew up with that. There were always these sea shanties, things to sing while you’re working, hauling in nets.
Were you on boats with your family singing these songs, or were they mostly sung at home?
No, I actually hated the ocean, as did my dad. My dad was the youngest of this huge family of mostly boys—twelve boys between two moms. He was never really out on the ocean professionally with his dad. He hated the sea because he was on the dock cutting up fish, and he hated fish to his dying day (laughter). By the time he and my other uncles got to Long Island, they had put the past behind them. They liked to remember being young back in Newfoundland, but they didn’t want that kind of life for themselves and their families. They were very happy, union-organized ironworkers by the time they got to Long Island in the ’50s. Only one of my uncles, my uncle Dick, who just passed on two years ago, stuck with the seafaring.
Was there a point when you went off on your own and found music outside of these things that you had inherited?
Yeah, it was very immediate. I was born in 1959. So in the ’60s, by five or six years old, the radio was playing all this great stuff. TV was there. My mom, who grew up in Newfoundland as well, loved the Supremes. When we were grouchy kids she’d make us laugh and shut us up by singing the Supremes in the kitchen (laughter). That was really great. We always had this singing kind of thing. But as a kid, you know, it was the Beatles. By five or six years old I thought the Beatles were the coolest thing in the world—every kid did. We knew all those songs. And then the Rolling Stones came in. I have two older brothers. The eldest—Jack, who’s 70 now—was six and a half years older than me and he was already buying what was cool at the time. All these bands you probably wouldn’t even remember now. Who did “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”?
Iron Butterfly.
Iron Butterfly, yeah. This kind of stuff. Probably by the time I was about 10 or 11, I was buying my own things. My first album was, I think, Paul Simon’s first solo record with “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” And then Cat Stevens (laughs). For me, it was still very much about songs. The words… I liked harmony and melody, but didn’t really think about it. But by the time I was 12 or 13 I was playing guitar seriously and taking lessons. I had made friends with other kids in the neighborhood who played guitar. Most of them would go off to actually study music but I didn’t. I had some natural faculty with the guitar, though—I was a pretty good classical player. I was physically good, but I didn’t really give it the mental attention that music requires.
Was there a specific reason you were drawn to the guitar?
Oh, just because George Harrison played guitar. That was the early ’70s. It was that simple. And to meet girls. Where I came from, that was a big plus. If you weren’t a hockey player or a basketball player, you better play the guitar or no girls would talk to you.
Was there a girl that was interested in you because of that?
Oh, yeah. I mean even if it didn’t lead to anything, girls would talk to you. They’d always want you to play some Jackson Browne. I have a tremendous amount of respect for his work. But in ’72, ’73, ’74, the girls really swarmed over you if you played Jackson Browne, even if you weren’t singing it and just playing the chords.
You mentioned your family was a singing family. Were you singing in addition to playing guitar?
No, I was incredibly shy. I don’t ever remember feeling comfortable singing—I never felt comfortable with my voice. I was shy for all kinds of other reasons, and I was just a shy kid. I never wanted to be in the spotlight even if it was just our own kitchen with family around—I didn’t like that. Back home, even now, it’s the biggest joke that the shyest person in the neighborhood is the one who’s in the entertainment business (laughter).
Something I really admire about your work is this attention to detail with language. I rewatched Surviving Desire (1992) earlier this year and the opening scene reminds me of different post-hardcore bands with how they talk over their instrumentals and how the different pieces of dialogue function as elements in the overarching soundtrack. In a film like Ambition (1991), the sound of a kiss works like an accent in a musical melody. How did you come to approach filmmaking with this musicality in mind?
You’re absolutely correct. Ever since I first began thinking about making films and then started really making films, I was drawn to this musicality of language—rhythm, cadence. There is a kind of melody. That probably started with the childhood experience of hearing people sing a cappella. But they were also a very verbal family, the way they spoke. My parents and my uncles and aunts had this kind of maritime lilt—it was a brogue, almost, coming from the northern seaboard of Canada. My friends will say I drift into it sometimes.
So I inherited that, but a key thing was that I discovered the plays of the 17th century French playwright Molière. I discovered them through the translations by the American poet Richard Wilbur. It really lit a fire under me. I had been making films already, I had made three short films since I finished film school. I was still probably trying to find my voice, trying to find how I wanted to make films. I was definitely playing around with rhythm in terms of editing, and the beginning of moving people around in, for lack of a better word, a dance-like way, which had something to do with the words.
It was discovering Molière and his wit and his insight, and how much the dialogue could do. Those plays, when you read them, it’s just the dialogue. There may be an exit and an entrance indicated, but otherwise the entire environment and the social surroundings are all indicated in the dialogue between one or two people. I had seen some of those plays when I was at college, and I had seen a great film about Molière by Ariane Mnouchkine, which was made back in the mid ’70s, so I knew about him. I was probably reading the Molière plays at the end of 1987. I was reading with a greater awareness than I ever had before, and I was really ready to hear this.
I’m lucky. I came away from a whole night spent reading three or four plays and I just said, “I can do this, I know how to do this.” I mean, in my idiom—in English—and in an American suburb like this, I can do this. And maybe not what he was doing with language, because he was a poet and they’re written in verse, but in terms of everything he was interested in, I could do this. There was a kind of musicality that the dialogue could deliver, which I had also been hearing since the ’70s through the ’80s in the songs of Joni Mitchell. She was very important. And, in a totally different way but equally important way, Elvis Costello. That’s the triumvirate: this 17th century French poet, Joni Mitchell, and Elvis Costello. And a host of others. By then I had developed an ear to hear what dialogue could do, and that was fun and compelling all on its own.
This makes so much sense. To me, Joni Mitchell is the best songwriter of her generation—she’s always in a mode of storytelling that understands the musicality of language. Like, even if there’s a chorus, it doesn’t feel repetitious.
Yeah. She’s a great composer. That’s what keeps it fresh from stanza to stanza.
There’s a liveliness. You can hear Jaco Pastorius’ bass across Hejira (1976) and the way she navigates through the arrangement.
There’s one or two places that I remember, definitely on Hejira, that stand apart where the end of the line is clearly going to be a word that rhymes with the previous line, and she withholds it because she doesn’t have to say it—you hear it anyway. She lets Pastorius move in with the bass to complete the phrase. She’s that alert.
I’m now thinking about The Book of Life (1998). I love the moments in that film where you have, for instance, a drum ‘n’ bass song playing but then it’ll suddenly stop. You don’t allow the song to persist long enough for the audience to get into a passive mode of listening.
Ever since I was at film school, really learning how to cut films together, I was careful not to let music be the overriding emotional or dramatic tool. I always thought that was a cheap, weak way of making a scene. By the time I was making The Book of Life in 1997, I wanted them to be sort of energetic. The music would interject to create a sensation, but only briefly, so then we get back. I didn’t want it to be the cool thing, I didn’t want it to become a groove. I knew David Byrne from an interview we had done a few years before, and he actually lived in my neighborhood. I asked him if he wanted to be the music supervisor on that. He couldn’t as he had too many things of his own that he had to do, but he said, “Just come over.” So I’d go over to his house and he would just load me up with different kinds of music, a lot of music that was associated with Luaka Bop.
You mentioned that you don’t want music to form the overriding feeling of a scene. Can you speak further on that?
I’m assuming that the movie, more specifically a particular scene, wants to be driven by character. If I rely too much on music to make us feel the situation, or the emotion, I think that’s weak.
I grew up thinking that music videos were the stupidest thing ever (laughter). And I still basically do even though I’ve made them for friends. I always try to subvert that expectation. I try to avoid lip syncing—it’s just the fakery of it. The fact is that a good song is a good song because you hear it. By the ’80s, all this really poor music was very popular because the advertising was popular, because the MTV music video was provocative in some way. No one would even remember some of these songs if it weren’t for the advertising.
I empathize with that. The thing I enjoy most about music is that, at its core, it’s only interacting with your sense of hearing.
Your sense of hearing and your imagination.
Once there’s a visual, you sort of limit what the music can mean.
Exactly. It’s the worst thing you could do for music. I’ve staged opera and had to watch a lot of opera over the years, and it’s the same problem. It’s been the same problem for hundreds of years. I couldn’t stand the opera I was watching. I would think, “God, they have to do something entirely different.” Having these singers act was impossible. They just can’t act—they’re singers. They have to sing Verdi or Beethoven, and you’ve got to have chops that demand a training that has nothing at all to do with acting. It’s physical, you’re turning your body into an instrument that could make those noises. I always tried to subvert that when I was doing staging.
I had heard that you didn’t like opera, and that you weren’t deeply familiar with it when you were initially asked to make one. What led you to make something like Soon (2001)? I never saw the actual production, of course, aside from what’s in Excerpts From Soon (2004).
Soon came about because I didn’t want to do an opera. Soon’s not an opera, it’s a play written in meter. It’s the first extended piece of poetry I wrote. It’s a dramatic, poetic, acting piece. But four or five years prior to that, there was a great guy who’s passed on now named Gerard Mortier, who was Belgian but was the artistic director of the Salzburg Opera Festival in Austria. That’s a big thing for the opera world. When he got that position, what he wanted to do was to introduce younger people to this great history of music that he knew so well and loved so much. And not just opera, but classical music.
Of course, Salzburg is the most stodgy place imaginable. He came in and tried to liven it up. He regularly invited younger, unusual choices for staging opera. Werner Herzog, for example. He asked Pedro Almodóvar, but he couldn’t do it. He asked me and I gave it some serious thought. They flew me twice, at least, to Salzburg for the whole season to study opera, to watch, and to think about things. I could talk very frankly to Gerard and say, “I really don’t like this.” I stated it pretty plainly. That was the first time I really felt like I needed to write it down. This, ultimately, is why I don’t like MTV and classical opera: It’s depriving the music from the audience’s imagination, from their ability to approach it individually. You’re forcing an image on them. He heard me loud and clear, and he didn’t disagree with me, either. Robert Wilson, for instance, had done some operas that I thought were exactly what you should do. I can’t get into much fine detail on what exactly he would do, but he would cause that de-emphasis. He’d make pictures of the singers singing. It was just simply that. He didn’t force a story on it, or an interpretation. It worked really well because the music is extraordinary. It doesn’t need this plot. And they’re always cheesy, stupid freshman-effort plots (laughter).
Gerard then came up and said, “Why don’t you write something yourself?” That’s one of the reasons he asked me to consider all this in the first place, because he admired how I wrote and how I moved people around on camera. He, I’m sure, just like yourself, felt there was an innate musicality to what I was doing, visually and rhythmically. So I said sure. I spent about a year and a half writing, and then we performed at Salzburg in 1998.
How was the response to it?
Pretty awful (laughter). I shouldn’t say that. It was divided. Opening night was like, fisticuffs in the audience. People hated it, and people loved it. I got good reviews but I think the big news was how vocally against it a lot of the more stodgy opera people were. They were very protective of their festival and the heritage that it seemed to represent. They didn’t like the idea of an American coming in, an American filmmaker who is known for a kind of rock and roll which he puts in his movies. And some of it was rock and roll music—I had to contend with that—but there was a whole other contingent of older and younger people who were just like, “Wow, this is fresh. This is fun.”
I feel like that’s, in some way, an ideal response. The worst would be for people to have no response.
Yes. I’ve been in houses like that, not so much with my stuff. I have some friends who are really great artists and, once the show ends, no one knows what to do, to clap or just get up and leave. It’s weird.
In Regarding Soon (2004), the film about the performance, you mention that religion is almost like an art form. I think it wasn’t until your late 20s that you gained an appreciation for religious sentiments, because you started to know more people who were religious in a way that was different from who you knew growing up. On your website, you include a Mondrian quote: “The natural does that require a specific representation.” Are those two things linked in any way?
I don’t think they’re too close. I think they come from two separate aspects of my interests. Mondrian and the painters of that generation were very helpful to me during the mid-90s when I really wanted to embrace and do something different with the imagery. Back then it was standard definition video. Which, sadly, a lot of people kind of picked up and tried to make it look like 35mm motion picture film. It could never do that with any degree of confidence. I was drawn immediately to what the new, smaller technology could do that had its own authority. It’s electric. It’s not motion picture photography. What can I do with that? The various buttons: frame rate, exposure, compression, all these things. There are things that are germane to this technology. What I was looking for was to find out what this particular technology, this camera, this tape, could be made to do that was interesting—and of its own material—rather than trying to pretend to be 35mm.
Reading a lot about the painters from Mondrian’s generation, they’re always talking about representation, because that’s their Salzburg audience (laughter). Their audience would say, like, “How dare you paint like this? That’s not what people look like!” They had to do a lot of thinking and speaking about that. I found that helpful.
I think the key thing, regarding the stuff about religion, was that it was historical. In 1993, when I was about 32 or 33, there was this terrible thing that happened down in Waco, Texas, with the Branch Davidians, who are essentially the radical fringe of the Seventh Day Adventists. I knew nothing about the Branch Davidians, or most Christian Protestant sects, but I really wanted to know about this tragedy as something I felt was intrinsically American, a place where you’re allowed to believe whatever you want to believe, and you’re also allowed to stockpile semi-automatic weapons. That’s America (laughter). I started doing research, reading a lot about it, and it became very important to me. I really began to see the country differently, to see how much the Christian religion is tangled up in the roots of the nation from its very beginnings. Even though there was this popularly advertised separation of church and state, it was still an extremely Christian religion-based outlook.
I had always been interested in expressions of spiritual belief of some kind without adhering to anything. I still don’t adhere to any particular religion but I always responded to the language and the poetry of monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I always felt much more Buddhist, though. The more reading I did, the more investigating I did, and the more traveling I did, I always felt much more like a Buddhist. That spoke to me very clearly. I think to this day, it’s really the spiritual discipline that gets me through the day, through the week, through the year.
What specifically about it?
Just the lack of dogma, really. The lack of a need to posit a universe that’s organized by somebody or something that knows what he’s doing. To me, Buddhism seems to say, like, “Who cares? How’s that going to help? What you have to do is not cause pain and try to live well, and here are some tips we’ve worked out and they’re pretty good.”
Shifting gears, you mentioned earlier that you don’t like music videos. You’ve made a few—for Yo La Tengo and Beth Orton, for Everything But the Girl and PJ Harvey. Did you just approach these as a job?
Pretty much, yeah. All of them understood that I wasn’t a fan of music videos, and none of them were either, but they knew it was part of their job. They knew that making music videos is how you sold records. So they trusted me to do it in some manner that wouldn’t offend their taste. I tried to avoid lip syncing, for instance, which I always thought was the stupidest thing. But they would dramatize things. The one with Polly [Jean Harvey] and Josh [Homme] was interesting because the two of them had worked out this activity on their own. It was almost just like documenting it in a kind of rough, glossy way.
I like the one we did for Beth Orton very much. That was right after we all came back from Salzburg and Antwerp with Soon, so we still had those microphones. Miho [Nikaido], my wife, and D.J. Mendel were in Soon, so they knew how to operate these things. Beth liked that lot. She did do the lip syncing, the record company insisted on the lip syncing. I said, “Maybe we could do something to underscore the stupidity.” (laughter). And therefore, maybe we could do something beautiful and fun and interesting.
I do want to ask about the composer Louis Andriessen. What draws you to his music? Something like The New Math(s) (2001) is interesting to me.
That’s how it started.
Can you talk more about that? You incorporate the music, but that’s one of your most outright slapsticky films. It seems like you’re influenced by dubbed kung fu action films in some sense.
Yes, definitely. We were looking at old Buster Keaton films, too.
Could you talk a bit about that film and working with Andriessen?
Louis passed away just a couple of years ago, by the way. He was pretty old. But Louis had read, of course, about what was going on in Salzburg with Soon. That really excited him. He was about 20 years older than me. The BBC and Dutch television had approached him to make an original piece of music for this TV show that they had, a BBC series, which was really quite good. It would pair contemporary musicians with contemporary filmmakers, usually on the experimental side of things, to create these short films. They could be ten or fifteen minutes long and they would try to do two of them in a program. I had seen some of these, and I liked them a lot. They’re not narrative but they’re very fun. They took what music and filmmaking have in common. You could almost imagine that in filmmaking, a shot is like a musical note and three shots together are a chord. Some of them were that frank about it.
So I heard that there was this guy in Amsterdam, Andriessen, and that he would like to work with me. I knew something about Louis’ music and we started to fax each other. He had his publisher send over a whole stack of his CDs. I became very interested in that because it was very different from anything else I heard. A contemporary might be Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but it was more jazzy. He grew up in the late ’40s and ’50s and was really hit by American jazz. It’s very modernist, often cold, automatic, but mathematically-based, intellectually rigorous music that’s got this swing to it.
Eventually, I went over to Amsterdam for a weekend. I met him, we got along great. I had all these ideas about how we would work together in an experimental way, but he had no time for that at all. He was like, “I think I should just make some music, and then you just make pictures to the music.” So I was like, “Alright.” They were paying us handsomely. I waited some months and he sent me the music. Some of the ideas that I had kicked around when I was in Amsterdam involved kickboxing movies and kung fu things, and Buster Keaton. He was a great fan of silent comedy, as well. So I said, “We’ll do something with what we have.” It wasn’t a huge budget, so I just got my regular gang together. I could always trust Miho to move. She’s a great mover. D.J. Mendel again, and David Neumann, who is actually a very accomplished choreographer, had worked with me on various films in the ’90s. Whenever I needed movement. The three of us put that together.
It was kind of a hit—it was the hit of that series. And then Louis asked me to consider staging an opera. You know how I feel about opera. He said, “Yeah, I know, I think it’s stupid too.” But he was telling me that that’s where the money is if you’re a classical musician. There’s nothing commercial about this music. It all comes from government subsidies, city subsidies, and stuff like that. What they really want is opera. That’s what the people spend the big money to go see, shit like that. He told me he was working on something and he thought it was going to be his last big piece. It was. I worked on that for like, four years. I moved to Berlin in 2004, and we couldn’t perform it in Amsterdam until the summer of 2008. All that time, once every couple of months, I would spend a week in Amsterdam with him. It was right from the writing stage, sitting at the piano, working on the melodies and stuff. That was a tremendous education for me about music. Seeing a big, full orchestral piece come together from the stage where it’s just pencil on paper sitting at a piano—he’d be playing and say, “These are horns. Da da da da da.” That was great.
There were lovely parts of that experience and… other parts. We were able to do some really good staging there. I would say 60% of it. But the other 40% was always just badly done, badly performed by the technicians. It required the technicians to really be on the ball. I kind of resented that. It got good reviews, some negative stuff. That was a big learning experience. The night of the premiere, I was standing in the wings with Andriessen when he said, “Now listen, when we go out there on stage, there’s gonna be a lot of people screaming bad things at us. You ready for this?” I was like, “Is it that bad?”
It doesn’t matter, even if everyone thinks it’s perfect. He told me about a time when he was 18 or 20, himself and a hundred other young composers used to start clapping their hands in the middle of a Mozart concerto, or blow tin whistles and stuff like that, to protest that all the money was just going to this old music and none of the government money was going to the newer composers. Him and his gang were ultimately successful at that. He was talking about the ’60s, early ’70s. But he said, “A lot of those people are out there, and they run banks, and they run insurance companies, and they’re going to give me hell. So it’s not about you. It’s about me.” When we went out on stage, it was exactly like it had been at Salzburg. One half of the house was screaming insults and cursing, while the other half of the house was out clapping loudly and stomping their feet trying to drown them out.
You’ve shot on film, video, and digital. I’m curious if you feel like there’s an innate difference to how you work with them in terms of the music. I feel like digital, for example, can have a flatness to it that might affect the musicality you’re looking for in your editing.
A flatness in terms of image? It doesn’t have to. I very much like working in 2.5k HD because it’s as close to 35mm as I think you can get without being 35mm. There are certain things you have to be aware of, but you can introduce shadows and light in just the same way we would have working with 35mm, it’s just much more responsive. That’s one of the reasons why it just feels to a lot of people, who are probably mostly interested in the story anyway—who don’t really care that much about what the image looks like, that it’s just convenient—that it doesn’t require as much light.
The same thing happens a lot now with, “We’ll fix it in post.” Back in the old days, when we were recording audio with analog machinery, that would be what the insensitive producer concerned with time and schedule would say: “Just get it recorded! We’ll fix it in post.” As if you could fix all audio problems in the studio, which you could not. You could fix audio better than you could fix the image in those days. With film, pretty much, what you’ve shot is what there is. You could do a little here and there in post at the lab, but really, you had to commit in the moment and know what you’re doing when you’re shooting. But now in video there’s a lot more latitude. You can discover a lot more material in an image that looks totally underexposed. You can even take certain sections of the shot and expose it more than the other sections of the shot.
I wanted to bring up The Other Also (1997), which is one of my favorite short films you’ve made. What was the inspiration for making that film? I know James [Urbaniak] is reading sections from the Sermon on the Mount, but I’m curious what Miho is saying.
I think Miho is reciting part of the Beatitudes in Japanese. That was a gallery piece for the Pompidou Centre in Paris. They were doing a whole piece based around the idea of love, amour. They asked various people to do things and they asked me if I could do something in video for them. I was working off of this idea of taking that part of the Beatitudes, to turn the other cheek, which spun out of the writing I had done on Book of Life. I don’t think it had been shot yet. They came out together, around the same time—in 1996 or 1997. I just took the words and kind of made some music out of it. I shot different things. There was other imagery, which isn’t blurry, that was still dancelike. It was Elina [Löwensohn] and Miho doing these dance moves that are almost aggressive but then gentle. I didn’t feel really strongly about it. We had lunch and sat around and I said, “I’ve got another idea. Why don’t we do this?” We did that one shot. I think we did two takes of it, and let it go about seven or eight minutes. I liked it very much.
I also wanted to ask about The Sisters of Mercy (2004), which has footage from the production of Iris (1994), which came out a decade beforehand. I really like how The Sisters of Mercy illuminates your approach to working with actors and finding the right rhythm. You’ve mentioned this one quote before: “Trust the rhythm and melody of the dialogue and the scene will come together.” You can really see that there.
I always took those smaller commissions. In that case, I very much wanted to contribute something to the No Alternative project, which I had a lot of respect for. David Byrne was involved, and Paul Heck and all these guys. I just thought it was important to contribute something to that. I was very interested in Parker [Posey] and Sabrina [Lloyd] for roles in whatever was coming up next. It might have been Amateur (1994). I allowed myself to be inspired by the lyrics in the song [The Breeders’ “Iris”], taking little bits of it and imagining situations. Not so much situations as just moments, interaction between these two girls. I put that together. I don’t know what Kim Deal and her sister thought of it when they saw it. They used to do some work at the editing company that I was part owner of. My editor, Steve Hamilton, was the boss but me and my producer Jerry Brownstein put up the money to start the company. A lot of people came through there, Fugazi and whoever. I know Kim and her sister saw it there, but I didn’t get much of a response. I didn’t get into a conversation with them.
Other people liked it a lot. There was a lot of notice in the music press and stuff like that. I came across the footage again a decade later, when I had Final Cut Pro on my laptop and I was teaching myself this new app. I said, “Wow, there’s so much good stuff here of these two.” I just spent time with it and discovered some other kind of poetry, which is really whatever it was I was investigating before the song came into the picture.
There’s such a big difference in time period between these two things being released. I think about how you also have many returning actors. In working with these actors throughout your career, have you felt a need to change their approaches to rhythm in dialogue?
Yeah, it’s subtle. Not much. There are changes because a person’s physicality changes. The way you breathe and certainly the way you move changes. As I kept learning again and again, certainly by the late ’90s, early 2000s, I really understood that what I was after was a concert of the rhythm and melody of the dialogue with the rhythm and melody of the physical activity. Parker is probably a better example, in Fay Grim (2006). She kind of did this anyway. She would never talk about it in the manner I’m talking about it now, but that’s what I’m looking for—this perfect intertwining of what people are saying, how they’re saying it, and how they’re actually moving and what they’re doing. Jeff Goldblum was actually tremendously adept at this too and saw it right away. We never had to talk about it, really. The first time we met each other he said to me, “I like what you do. You move people around and have them talk.” I was like, “That’s about as simple as it is, yes.”
I’m wondering now, there’s this other Mondrian quote, “I don’t paint pictures. I just want to find things out” that you like. Do you feel like what you’ve been trying to find out has changed over the course of your film career?
Yeah, definitely. Like I said before, when I started working in standard definition video in the ’90s, that was the issue. What am I going to do with this new material? By the time things became HD, finally, that wasn’t so much of an issue anymore. I just started thinking the same way I used to think in 35mm.
But nevertheless, there are other things about blocking and staging and editing that have attenuated, not a full on change. I think if you see something like Meanwhile (2011) and things that precede it—The Apologies (2010), Accomplice (2010), and A/Muse (2010)—those were films I was making entirely on my own, just with a crew of like, two people while I was living in Berlin. I was really trying to discover a different manner of making scenes that were a lot simpler, but rich. Sparse, but rich. By the time I came back to New York in 2009, I felt ready to do a larger exercise in that, and that became Meanwhile. By the time that came along, we really did have HD. There had been some half-assed versions of HD before (laughter). But now everybody really had normal HD. That led to Ned Rifle (2014), which I think is probably the most confidently executed of that cinematic language.
I would say so too. I know you started making music for your films for economic reasons. Listening to the soundtrack for Flirt (1995), the music has an almost stock-music quality to it, but there’s a real pathos, like you’re trying to communicate emotion. The result is a sort of distancing that allows the viewer to focus on what the soundtrack is trying to do, and it’s communicating in a way that’s similar to the dialogue. Have you considered your music in this way?
Certainly. We were talking earlier, in a different sense, about how I don’t want anything to just be behind anything else. I want all the component parts of the experience of watching the film—the aesthetic experience of watching the film—if not to be equal, to then be working in concert, so the viewer and listener can see this dance of elements. The dialogue, the image, the music, the sound effects, the rhythm of the cutting. Ideally, that’s what I would really like. I think by the time we made the Tokyo section in Flirt, we had really achieved that. Flirt was a real exercise. I felt like I made some missteps in the earlier sections, but I kept going on because I figured, “Let’s have these missteps be visible. I’m not ashamed of them.” I wish I could have done that better. But by the time we got to Tokyo, I think I had done my best work, period, up until that point. That was the filmmaking I was most proud of.
I remember you saying in an interview around that time that you felt like Flirt was the best thing you had done.
And it was the least popular (laughter).
That’s one of my favorites because there’s such a hyperfixation on language that I really admire. I do want to ask about “Tavasz Tavasz,” the Márta Sebestyén song on the soundtrack. She’s one of my favorite Hungarian artists. How did you find out about her work?
I think that came through the people at Matador. Flirt and Amateur were almost made at the same time. The New York section of Flirt was shot in the early part of 1993, then later that year we made Amateur, and then only when I finished Amateur did we make the Berlin and Tokyo sections. Matador went into business with us to provide music for Amateur. I got a truckload of new stuff that they turned me on to—they were very generous. Years later, they were always giving me music to listen to. That’s how that came about.
I do want to mention Adventure (2010), which calls back to Flirt. There’s one thing that Miho says that I really appreciate: “I realized if I didn’t get married, I don’t know if I would have become a fashion designer.” She’s talking about this idea of destroying something you’ve built, and then having enthusiasm for the future. I’m curious if you have felt the same way about, maybe this marriage or any sort of big decision that required a sort of destruction and rebuilding.
I can’t say I do. In retrospect, I totally agree with what she said and I appreciate it. But I can’t say that I was thinking in that way, of destruction to make something new. In an abstract way, just aesthetically, I would sometimes think, “Hey, we have to break something down.” I’m sure I said “creative destruction” or something like that. It’s not a term I made up, it’s an old modern art thing, but it helps creatively to just throw your tools out and have to work with a new toolbox for a little while, to find a fresher way of approaching the same old thing. Because none of us are so terribly original (laughter). We’re talking about being a human being with other human beings in one way or the other. You’re just trying to come at it fresher, because you think that if it’s fresher, it’ll be more sincere. I think that’s as far as I ever got about that.
Are you able to share anything about the filming of your upcoming film Where to Land?
Yes. Probably when this interview sees the light of day, there will be a new Kickstarter going on, to see if I can raise the money again. I had to give all my money back once the pandemic shut down our production. So many of the backers, most of the big backers, were saying, “Just hold on to the money, just keep it until things get better and make the movie.” I said, “I can’t because if I hold on to this money, I can be taxed on it as income. That’s gonna be a really major hit for me.” So I had to give everybody’s money back, which costs a lot of money, just to do that (laughter). I had to slow things down for a little while and wait for the pandemic to recede, and to get on with my life a little bit, and work on some other projects. We’re hoping that, coming off the heels of the newfound popularity of whatever is happening with the Criterion Collection, it might be a fortuitous time for me to get it back. If I can get it, then we’ll shoot in the spring.
I have a friend who lives in Long Island who really wanted to know this: Do you have a favorite Long Island farm stand?
No (laughter). Farm stands are way out east. We were way west, in Suffolk County. The closest thing to a farm stand we ever saw was a strip mall.
I was always curious. Did you know Miho from Tokyo Decadence (1992) prior to meeting her?
I did. I had seen Tokyo Decadence and thought it was a very good film, and I really thought that her performance was outstanding. We knew we were going to go to Tokyo to scout and meet a production company to start the preliminaries of casting. It was a little hard to find her but our friend, a very elderly woman who had worked with Kurosawa, knew everybody. She had this book of telephone numbers, addresses. She couldn’t find her. The Kurosawa company was saying, “We don’t know where she is. She’s not really an actress.” They were really against anybody who had anything to do with Tokyo Decadence. But she was a really cool old lady who was involved in the Kurosawa company from the ’50s on. She just went out, and it took her like three days and she came back to the hotel and she said, “You’re a genius. She’s unbelievable and she’ll be here in half an hour or so.” That’s how we met.
Is there anything that you wanted to talk about in this conversation that we didn’t get to?
No, it’s been a very good conversation.
I’m glad I got to ask you about a bunch of films that you’re usually not asked about. Thank you so much for talking.
Thank you, Joshua.
There is one question I do end all my interviews with. This is a question I ask my high school students. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
It has to be something to do with being stubborn (laughter).
Why is that the thing you appreciate?
Well, for instance, I can keep a long view. This Criterion Collection thing is a perfect example. Companies like the Criterion Collection are great and prestigious and stuff. But there are many other companies that have been trying to license my films, for nothing, for 25 years. I’d always say, “No, you can’t. You can’t just tell me that it’s good for me to be associated with you, and that that’s worth it, and you’re not going to pay for a license.”
So I stuck out the changes in technology, all this jazz. It’s been three or four big upheavals since the early ’90s with different technologies. I kept hold of all of my films. I took care of them, I upgraded them to HD. Now it’s helping pay for my senior years (laughter). That was being stubborn. I was often uncertain, and I had friends who were telling me, “You’re being crazy. Everybody keeps saying, ’Where’s Hal Hartley? I can’t get his films on Netflix or whatever.’” I just felt like I was building something and I wanted it all together. It’s all equal, you know—Accomplice or Ambition are just as important as Trust (1990) or Henry Fool (1997). For me, they’re all part of the same thing. I can see that. I couldn’t understand why other people didn’t see it. That’s okay, but it’s important that I see it. Maybe I love that about myself. The older people in my life, who have loved me a lot since I was a kid, have said, “You’re stubborn.” (laughter).
More information about Hal Hartley’s work can be found at his website. The Criterion Channel is currently presenting a retrospective of his films, which can be found here. These films will stay on the service through February 2024. Hal Hartley’s music can be found at his website and various streaming services. His 2022 novel, Our Lady of the Highway, can be purchased at the Elboro Press website. The Kickstarter for Hartley’s upcoming film, Where to Land, is available now.
Thank you for reading the 38th issue of Film Show. Let your stubbornness drive you.
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