Guest Post: Derek Hill on Sofia Coppola's SOMEWHERE

Today I am so happy to welcome one of Moon in the Gutter's oldest friends and greatest inspirations back, the incredible Derek Hill, author of the essential Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters.  This guest post is a particular treat as Derek's book, which included a large section on Sofia Coppola, was published before the release of her Somewhere so finally getting to read Derek's thoughts on the film is really exciting.  Enough of my rambling though...let's get to the good stuff!

                                                         Nowhere Man by Derek Hill, 2013

 

 

An actor aimlessly roams through the affluent, insular rooms and hallways of an upscale hotel, searching for any kind of stimulus to relieve him of his emotional stasis, some kind of diversion to occupy his time before he is whisked away to yet another press junket, another photo shoot, another interview that he glides through with practiced charm and ease. The actor is bored. Although comfortable within his cocoon of luxury and unreality, he is starving for a real emotional connection with someone. Anyone.

 

 

 

You wouldn't be reprimanded for thinking I was talking about Bill Murray's character from Sofia Coppola's extraordinary second feature Lost in Translation (2003). Coppola's underrated fourth movie, Somewhere (2010), also contains a similar character, action star Johnny Marco, played by Stephen Dorff. Stylistically and thematically, both movies are fascinating compliments to one another, although the earlier movie is more incisive about human nature, dreamy, and quietly poignant. Lost in Translation also contains one of Murray's finest moments on screen and a (so far) career-best performance by Scarlett Johansson, two difficult acts to follow. But regardless of the similarities between the two movies, and there are many important ones, Somewhere is its own distinctive, vital creation and not an artistic regression. It's also the first time that Coppola attempts to burrow into the male psyche for the majority of the movie, establishing the story's point of view through Marco's eyes. For a director whose movies tend to billow with images and emotional states that can conveniently be contextualized as delicately feminine, this change is significant.

 

Viewers invested in the three-act structure, clearly delineated plot points, and in characters that must undergo some form of dramatic change, will only be frustrated with Coppola's movies. That's not to suggest that Coppola's methodology is superior to classic Hollywood storytelling (it's not), but for her, the rudiments of commercial screenwriting 101 don't interest her. Not all movies need to chart a direct path through the wilderness of narrative. For some adventurous filmmakers, the detours from narrative are the most worthwhile moments of the trip, and it's in those strange, seemingly unnecessary deviations from the throughline and tyranny of plot when the cinematic poet blossoms. It's when the cinematic poet relates how the world really appears through their eyes, offering us a moment of reality beyond the artificiality of the screen.

 

Coppola, so unlike her father Francis, doesn't approach story in broad strokes. She is interested in the subtle nuances of character and visually lyrical epiphanies, allowing her actors to reveal the nature of their roles through the slow accretion of significant details. In Somewhere, we go roughly 15 minutes before any real dialogue is spoken, and even then, what is heard is banal and hardly illuminating. However, what we see is provocative and precisely revelatory. It's in the visual where Coppola and her cinematographer, the late Harris Savides, get down to business.

 

Although still gruffly attractive, movie star Marco wanders through the legendary Chateau Marmont like a hollowed-out relic of his better days. He's still on top of the Hollywood food chain, but only for the moment. Age is slowly settling in and it doesn't take a fortune teller to point out that the golden boy is going to show signs of rust within a year or two. But he still goes through the motions for his fans, colleagues, and entourage. Marco the party boy lazily roams through a late-night party, lazily flirts with women (his pickup lines consist of either "Hi" or "Hi, I'm Johnny"), and lazily watches two twin pole dancers listlessly perform their routine for his arousal. He falls asleep and they in turn pack up their gear and exit to entertain another happy customer. Later, Marco pathetically (and hilariously) conks out with his face buried between the thighs of his latest conquest. The man is psychologically and physically spent. He's an emotional zombie.

 

It would be easy for Coppola to eviscerate her characters, lampooning them for their absurdities and plunging the venomous blade of satire deeply, then twisting it for maximum audience ridicule. This world of hermetic affluence is one Coppola knows well, but she holds off tormenting her characters. She is not filled with self-hate. Instead, she observes her characters and their milieu with a sharp, cool perspective, but never at the expense of their humanity. Humor undercuts many scenes, particularly when examining celebrity culture, and there is a strong sense that Marco's inner life is non-existent, or at least deadened, from his steady diet of nothing. Coppola, however, is not a moralist. Her observations aren't jaundiced, even when she does poke at the pretensions of celebrity.

 

Although their approach to filmmaking and storytelling are very different, she does share with Antonioni and Fellini that ability to dissect the world of privilege without murdering it. It's no accident that Coppola has referenced Fellini's brilliant La Dolce Vita twice. In Lost in Translation, Murray and Johansson watch the movie on television. In Somewhere, Marco puts his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) on a plane after their night in Las Vegas and yells to her that he's sorry he's been absent from her life, she unable to hear his confession because of the roar of the plane's engine. The scene is reminiscent of the finale of La Dolce Vita, when a haggard Marcello Mastroianni slumps on a beach in the morning sun after a long night of debauchery and engages a young girl he met earlier in the movie. Her agonizingly touching expression of love for him goes unacknowledged because he can't understand what she's saying over the crashing waves and he's too bleary-eyed to comprehend the look on her face.

 

Coppola does not elevate the scene between Marco and Cleo to the profound emotional heights that Fellini went for, instead opting for her usual low-key preciseness. Later, when Marco self-pityingly calls up a woman and cries on the phone to her, she cuts him off and our wonderboy is literally left spending the night floating in a pool alone.

 

But Coppola does opt for a happy ending of sorts, albeit tinged with ambiguity and a trickle of Hollywood sentimentality. Marco has the hotel pack up his belongings and he hops into his sports car, taking off for the open road. What gives some advantage to reading this moment as optimistic for Marco, is that stylistically Coppola and Savides shoot Marco's car rigidly in the center of the frame as he drives further away from Los Angeles, our perspective always moving in a straight line… forward, forward, forward. Jump cuts accelerate the passage of time as Marco heads out into the desert. This is in direct opposition to the provocative opening shot of the movie, which is a long uninterrupted take observing Marco driving his car in a loop at a desert racetrack for several minutes, the camera stationary and only picking up a portion of the roadway. The shot selection at the end, with Marco breaking free from that interminable endless circle, and his life in Hollywood, feels exhilarating.

 

The question remaining, however, is whether Marco is truly up for the challenge. Marko finally pulls his car over to the side of the road. The desert surrounds him. He looks tentatively aware walking away from his abandoned car. But it feels like a movie moment, as the music slowly gains piercing urgency. It feels like a moment from a Johnny Marko movie, instead of the dead end it really is.   

 

***Thanks again Derek!***

31 Performances Ripe for Rediscovery (13) Theresa Russell in BAD TIMING (WITH A GUEST CONTRIBUTION FROM DEREK HILL)

"I'm not ambitious, not an artist, not a poet, not a revolutionary."

Of the most baffling and head-scratching bad reviews Roger Ebert ever gave a great film, few are as perplexing as his panning of Nicolas Roeg's 1980 masterpiece Bad Timing.  Of course, Ebert wasn't the only critic who hated this incredible film but his critique of it was extremely harsh.  Despite his deep hatred of the film, even Ebert couldn't deny the brilliance of Theresa Russell's performance for Roeg and he ended his review with this:

"If there is any reason to see this film, however, it is the performance by Theresa Russell (who was Dustin Hoffman's lover in "Straight Time"). She is only 22 or 23, and yet her performance is astonishingly powerful. She will be in better films, I hope, and is the only participant who need not be ashamed of this one."

Bad Timing finally got its due a few years back when Criterion released their tremendous special edition of it, a move which finally allowed the film to find the audience it had so long deserved.  The film's re-release also served as a reminder to the astonishing talent of Theresa Russell, as daring and provocative as any actor we have had in English film in the past several decades.  While it is quite tragic that Russell has spent most of her career languishing in roles not suited at all for her considerable talents we can celebrate the few filmmakers who recognized just how special she is, with Nicolas Roeg remaining the artist who gave her the most memorable roles of her career.

I was initially going to write more on Theresa here but honestly the guest contribution that my friend, author and film-historian, Derek Hill sums up so much of what I feel and think about her I will just go ahead and leave you with his stirring words.  Hopefully some of you remember the Q&A I did with Derek awhile back here at Moon in the Gutter, and hopefully even more of you have read his marvelous book Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion Into the American New Wave.  Thanks so much to Derek for writing these lovely words for Moon in the Gutter about one of our mutual favorite actors:

Derek Hill on Theresa Russell in Bad Timing, 2012-

Theresa Russell's performance in Bad Timing is as formidable and memorable as anything Brando gave us. Now, bear with me. The two are obviously different in their approaches to acting. Their methodology, technique, and range are wildly dissimilar. Brando was trained and Russell wasn't. She seems awkward in front of the camera at times, unsure of herself and she sparks with naturalistic rawness. She's combustible and we're never sure what she'll do next. That's exciting in a movie like Bad Timing, where she plays a character, Milena, who is pure chaotic attraction. She's the mythic femme fatale, but Russell thoroughly humanizes her, stripping her from the trappings of cliché and making her identifiable to anyone who has ever been consumed by a woman like her or to any woman who is her. Roeg isn't interested in sustaining genre conventions (the story incorporates elements of the spy, mystery, romance, and noir genres) and Russell has no interest portraying Milena as a traditional vixen anyway. Russell is fearless in the role, and in that respect, she's brave. As brave as Brando in Last Tango in Paris. As brave as any actor who risked it all for their craft. She remarkably makes acting heroic, and that's a rare thing because relinquishing one's ego for the good of the movie is easier done in theory than in actuality. 

Bad Timing isn't an easy movie to experience. It shouldn't be. Although it's entrancing to watch, we are ultimately observing a story about an intense sexual relationship fraying and destroying the two people involved in it. We are watching a personal apocalypse. Roeg has quite a few brilliant movies on his resume—Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Eureka. For me, however, this one cuts the deepest, the one that has embedded in me with a fierce, mysterious power over the years. Much of that is due to Russell. 

I love to watch actors take a leap into the unknown. I love going into the mystery with them.  

--Derek Hill

My List of 13 Favorite Horror Films at Sinescope

My friend Derek Hill recently asked me to submit a list of 13 of my favorite horror films over at the awesome Sinescope to go along with this years Halloween celebrations and it is now posted for those interested. This is kind of a companion piece to my list that I submitted to Rupert Pupkin Speaks earlier this week, with just a few overlaps. Always hoping to suggest perhaps a new title to someone, I tried not to include any of the big ones that I love (and I know everyone else does) like Rosemary's Baby, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead. I also kept it pretty centered on the seventies and eighties and a definite European vibe prevailed, although there are some exceptions. Anyway, hopefully the list is enjoyable and I appreciated being asked to submit one.

Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon: Derek Hill on There Will Be Blood

***Hopefully Derek Hill won't need any introductions to my readers here but just in case...Derek is the author of one of the great modern books on cinema, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion Into the American New Wave, and the author of the terrific blog Detours. Derek is one of my favorite writers on the planet, my friend and now co-conspirator (as I was honored to have some of my work appear in a book he was featured in as well). I am honored to present this brand new and powerful new piece on There Will be Blood that Derek wrote specifically for our blogathon and it's a real doozy...overflowing with the same passion, fire and intelligence that all of Derek's work contains. So, enough of my intro...read the article!***



There Will Be Blood: Into the Void
Derek Hill

“They were sold out. Fought and died down there in that desert and then they were sold out by their own country. “
--Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”
--Naked Lunch

"Property, the whole fucking thing is about property."
--The Thin Red Line

Seeing There Will Be Blood in the theatre for the first time was a revelation. Nestled in my seat, the lights lowered, the auditorium filling with light as a wash of strings threaded into my ears... a bleached landscape appeared that could have been today, 200 years ago, or at the beginning of time. Visually and aurally I was immediately reminded of Kubrick and Ligetti respectively... 2001: A Space Odyssey. Daniel Day-Lewis methodically wielding the pick-axe in the confines of the earth, searching for silver within the rock but finding evidence of oil instead, snapped me back to the present... the past? It was hypnotic. And when this silent creature fell to his certain doom down to the depths of the mine shaft, but somehow clawing his way back to life with a broken leg and across the cracked earth of the desert floor to... to what? So that he could make sure his claim of oil was certified. I was stunned and hooked. The opening 15 minutes are extraordinary in that no dialogue is spoken--a perfectly hypnotic synthesis of sound and vision that is the most riveting pure cinema that Anderson has ever directed. When we do first hear voices, it comes in the guise of a rational sounding business offer. It’s a con. And we are seduced. The rest of the film continues at this same brilliant artistry. Though as it went on, I realized that this was no straight period film, no mere historical Western. This was a horror film—an apocalyptic American fable that could have only been birthed with such savagery during the devolution of the Bush reign when big business and religious mania entwined to make global policy.

Each generation gets the monster it deserves. The Depression era received King King. The Atomic Age got Godzilla. The 1980s saw a mob of faceless, personality-vacant slasher killers dominate the screens. And the 1990s saw the rise of intellectually brilliant sociopaths like Hannibal Lecter charm audiences. In the Bush era--an age of rampant stupidity, greed, open political corruption, illegal wars, and religious/political demagoguery—we get Daniel Plainview.

It’s debatable whether Plainview is actually worse than the religious hypocrite Eli Sunday, his nemesis and moral reflection. He is a con man and a murderer after all. But he is honest with himself, unlike Sunday who will be revealed as a fraud in the end and pay for his pretensions with his own blood. Plainview is nevertheless a hulking monster of a character. As personified by Daniel Day-Lewis, Plainview slopes powerfully through every scene he is in with a domineering physicality both horrifying and entrancing. This is a truly great actor at work. But like all classic monsters, we can never console ourselves that we are watching something purely inhuman. The best horror films are never consoling or entirely escapist. They reveal and force us to explore our darker natures while always reminding us that the line between us and them is not always as clear as we’d like. For what’s more human than unbridled ambition, alcoholism, madness, thievery, and murder as a solution to vexing problems? As strong and resilient as Plainview is, he is also tragically weak and deluded.



It’s a brilliant, dare I say masterful performance. There is genius in Day-Lewis that is extraordinary to watch—a mix of gruff charisma, nuance, aggressive theatricality, and complete verisimilitude to his character. It was also fitting that Day-Lewis seemed to be evoking the vocal cadence and slightly stooped posture of director John Huston for the role, although in interviews the notoriously private actor claims to have not done so intentionally. Regardless, Huston makes for a proper template for Plainview. Huston was a charmer on screen and off, but also bullying, rebellious, intimidating, and fearless--attributes that could describe Plainview as well. All one has to do is remember Huston’s turn as the real estate tycoon Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s masterpiece Chinatown, a character who charms his way through the film until he can no longer hide the sickness inside. When Cross slowly wraps his gargantuan arms around his granddaughter/daughter at the film’s conclusion, his mammoth hand shielding her eyes from the site of her mother’s corpse, we are repulsed because there is no recourse for morality or justice. The “bad guy” gets away with it and we feel helpless because the movies, which usually protects us from the truth of matters, has betrayed us in a whole different way. There is no punishment for the wicked, no moral recompense for the innocent, no reassurance or comfort for the audience. It’s a vile, thoroughly nightmarish cinematic moment and unforgettable.

Plainview moves to the same satanic rhythms as Cross, and Paul Thomas Anderson strives to deliver a killing blow at the end of his film to match that of Polanski. That Anderson doesn’t quite pull it off doesn’t lessen the film’s overall impact for me. Plainview’s murder of the hypocrite evangelist Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano, is ludicrous in its blackly comedic grotesquery. But in the film’s headlong plunge into the black hole of Plainview’s madness, perhaps it’s an inevitable finale for a character who symbolizes America at its worst and most ruthlessly pragmatic, much as Cross did and Charles Foster Kane/Orson Welles did before that. To look into the eyes of these men is to see the architects of the United States and... perhaps the agents of its destruction as well. Perhaps Anderson had been right to end the film on such an acidic, incomprehensibly absurd note after all. When the center can no longer hold... there’s always laughter.



I left the theatre shaken, but excited. Anderson evoked the time period with exquisite realism, and with his editor Dylan Tichenor, allowed us ample breathing space to think, to let our eyes explore the frame in a manner I haven’t experienced in a major American commercial film since Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line or The New World. It was exhausting, but an experience I wanted to have again.

It would be months before I got a chance to see the film once more. By that time, I was living in a small, rural village in Ireland and the poison of Bush’s America felt a bit more distant, although with the 2008 elections looming and practically every Irishman wanting to talk about them, the bad aftertaste was still heavy. And that beastly shadow of Plainview’s stretched far as well. He had crept inside me like no other fictional character in recent memory. Seeing it for the second time was an even more challenging experience for me. Yes, Plainview seemed to personify the ruthlessness and delirium at the heart of the so-called American Dream. Though this second time around his humanity oozed out more as well—the tenderness he displays to his son H.W., the way he laughs and plays with him, and even confides in him as a trusted business confidant. But Plainview’s destruction is also embedded in his relationship with H.W. For me, the moment comes not in the red herring of him “abandoning” the boy on the train—Plainview is clearly troubled by doing it--but when he leaves his son, who has been seriously injured during a well explosion, in the tent and goes to stand guard at the well to watch the flames rage into the night. Plainview seems to step into the void at that moment, never to return. He is majestically satanic, prideful, and intoxicated by the dream of vast wealth that will soon be his knowing that “there’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet! No one can get at it except for me.” It is in front of the red furnace that he has forsaken his humanity. He is weak. And in return for all of that wealth he will be rewarded with alcoholism, wrath, sloth, and madness. “I have a competition in me,” Plainview states at one point. “I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.” If that’s not humanity and contemporary America at its most raw, vile, and tragic, then I don’t know what else is.

Directory of World Cinema: American Independent (Now Available for Pre-Order)

I am very pleased to announce that a book I have contributed quite a few pieces to is now available for Pre-Order. The American Independent Edition volume of the ambitious Directory of World Cinema is being published by England's Intellect Books and it streets in May. It will also be available in an identical American edition that can be pre-ordered from Amazon for those here in the States. I am particularly excited about this, as my work here represents the first time I have appeared in a book. I am honored to be part of the collection, which features some truly fine writers like Derek Hill and editor John Berra, and I am excited that I was able to contribute pieces on some of my favorite filmmakers.
I will continue to post more details on the book as the street date comes closer, but for now I just wanted to provide the link in the hopes that some readers here might pre-order a copy. Many other volumes in the series are forthcoming and I hope I have the opportunity to participate in some of those as well.

Reading The Movies (A Meme)

I’ve been tagged by the always terrific Dancing Image in a meme going around focusing on the film books that have proved inspirational in the way I think and write about films. It’s a terrific idea for a meme and I am more than happy to participate. I’ve selected a dozen or so of my favorite books on cinema that have proved invaluable references to me throughout the years, and I would recommend any of them to any fellow film lover. While these choices definitely show me as a cineaste more interested in film history rather than theory or criticism, I could have easily selected any number of critical works from a Kael, Rosenbaum, Ebert or Sarris that I have left off here…I just went with my gut though and these were the books that jumped out at me as I was constructing the list.

In alphabetical order by title:

Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision: Brad Stevens penetrating look at the films and career of Ferrara is one of the great film studies I have ever read. Carefully balancing history and criticism with one of the sharpest pens around, Stevens finds the depth and complexity in Ferrara’s work that so many others miss.

Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters: Derek Hill’s wonderfully perceptive book on a movement most haven’t even noticed yet will continue to resonate for years to come, especially when the work of folks like Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson have had time to really sink into film history’s collective psyche.

Double Lives, Second Chances: Annette Insdorf’s tremendous book on Kieslowski’s life and career is my favorite on the much-missed Polish director. As with her studies on Truffaut, Insdorf brings an equal amount of passion and intelligence to her look at Kieslowski and her thoughts will make even the most seasoned watchers notice something new in his films after reading.

Flesh and Blood Compendium: Flesh and Flood was a daring British film magazine that stretched throughout the nineties. This massive best-of collection features many of their best interviews, reviews and studies. Just like the magazine, it is a truly ambitious and quite astonishing look at the outer edges of cinema history.

Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner: Paul Sammon’s extremely exhaustive and entertaining book on the making of Blade Runner remains perhaps the finest single look at the making of a film ever written.

Greta Garbo: A Cinematic Legacy: The ever popular “Films of” type book has been done time and time again but never has it been so meticulously researched or as beautifully presented as Mark Vieira does here.

Immoral Tales: I have written of the profound effect this Tohill and Tombs book has had on me, and it has lost none of its importance in the near fifteen years since it first hit American shores.

Mario Bava: All The Colors of The Dark: Tim Lucas’ monumental book is not only one of the great biographies ever written on a filmmaker, but it also stands as one of the great film histories ever published. Tim’s ambitious work will make you rethink not only Mario Bava's place among the great filmmakers of the 2oth Century, but also the history of film itself.

The Exorcist: BFI Modern Classics: I love these little BFI film books and Mark Kermode’s look at William Friedkin’s much-misunderstood classic is a great read.

The New Wave: James Monaco’s book had a huge impact on me when I discovered it in high school, and I still think it is the best thing ever written on the films of perhaps cinema’s most influential movement. I like it so much that I am choosing it over another favorite, Godard on Godard.

The Other Hollywood: Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osbourne's extremely entertaining and informative work on the part of film history so many like to ignore is important stuff. The first half of the book covering the earliest days of the adult film industry up through the early eighties when video take over is always eye opening and at times jaw dropping.

Truffaut by Truffaut: I have an entire book shelf dedicated to books on Truffaut and this gorgeous coffee table collection is my favorite. Told through his own words and including hundreds of rare documents and photos, this is my favorite book on my favorite director.

I would love to see the lists of the following...so consider yourself tagged, but don't feel any pressure to join in if the timing isn't right:

J.D. at Radiator Heaven.

Kate at Love Train for The Tenebrous Empire.

IbeTolis at Film for the Soul.

Amanda at Made for TV Mayhem.

Brandon Colvin at Out 1.

A Moon in the Gutter Q&A with Author Derek Hill on his Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers

Today I'm very excited to present another exclusive interview here at Moon in the Gutter for my readers to enjoy. This week I have the honor of sharing a Q&A I recently did with a writer I greatly admire named Derek Hill. Many of you will be familiar with Derek's work in print via publications like Video Watchdog and Videoscope, as well as his online activities which includes his terrific blog Detours.
This Q&A is mostly concerned though with Derek's new book, one of the first major publications centered on a very special and unique group of modern filmmakers. Entitled Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers, Derek's new book focuses on filmmakers like Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell and of course Charlie Kaufman among others. It promises to be an important work and I am thrilled to help promote it here. The book is already out in England and while the release date in the States wasn't supposed to be until September, it appears Amazon is already shipping it. Damn my luck for pre-ordering it from Deep Discount.
A big thanks to Derek for taking the time to do this. As I read over his answers, I realized we have a lot in common in our history of loving film as well as our shared admiration for this special group of filmmakers.

Moon in the Gutter: Derek, thanks for agreeing to do this. I greatly admire your writing and this is a real treat. Can you start out by giving us a little background on your life and work?

Derek Hill: Thank you very much for inviting me and thanks for the kind words. Briefly, regarding my background, I was until recently a resident of my native Portland, Oregon. Travelling has always been a vital element of my life, so I've uprooted again and I'm currently living in cloudy, rainy, rural Ireland. Hopefully, for the foreseeable future. As far as my writing background is concerned, I've been working in the trenches, so to speak, since 1989. Started reviewing books and movies (and getting paid) for small genre periodicals. But since 1999 I've written for a number of publications (print and online) such as Images—a Journal of Film and Popular Culture, The Third Alternative (a UK magazine now known as Black Static), Video Watchdog, VideoScope, among others. I was a regular DVD reviewer for the All Movie web site for a couple of years, and a book reviewer for Mystery Scene magazine. A little bit of everything, I guess. Oh, and then there's blogging, of course.

MITG: Who were some of the key influences that got you into writing, specifically writing about film. Was there a pivotal moment for you in your youth that captured your imagination?

DH: I wouldn't say there was one significant person who influenced me initially. I always wanted to be a writer and since films were ever-present in my life from an early age, I'd do things like "adapt" various novels into screenplay form. This was when I was eleven or twelve. At one point, I "adapted" a storyline from Creepy magazine into a script thinking if I could only get it into the hands of the right person, it would get made. My screenwriting ambitions sort of dimmed not long after that. My teens were pretty lost and reckless and for a time I didn't do much but get into trouble. I don't want to be melodramatic about this, but film became this sort of lifeline for me during a particularly bad couple of years in my late teens. I started engaging with films on a deeply personal level. Serious readers and music lovers do the same thing and it changes you, marks you, and there's no turning back after that.
In my early twenties I did what many film lovers (cineastes, cinephiles, obsessives) do, which is work at a good video store. It was either that or get a job at a good second-run cinema and I couldn't manage that. At the time, the store was one of the best, if not the best video store in Portland due to its extensive foreign, arthouse, and classic collections. I started filling in the gaps and furthering my own film education. Although I later took some extended studies film courses through Portland State taught by a great teacher (the film critic and writer Shawn Levy) that made me even more serious about writing film criticism, I soaked up more about cinema in those five years at the video store than anything else. Just to have access to so many different kinds of film was a great opportunity. Definitely a pivotal moment in its way.


Other than that, the most important film moment that happened to me was probably being taken to see Apocalypse Now during its original theatrical release when I was ten years old. I have no idea what my mom was thinking, but I'm glad she did it. I was changed from that moment on—or scarred depending on your viewpoint—and it was then that I realized that a movie could be more than a just a story, something to soothe you from daily reality. It completely warped me. I couldn't entirely go back to "kid movies" after that. It was like this weird rite of passage. Sure, I still watched what all the other kids were watching (The Muppet Movie, The Black Hole, Rocky II), but I was also supplementing it with stronger, more adult fare like Stanley Kubrick films and Mad Max and Monty Python films. So yeah, I can blame Francis Ford Coppola for my film-going degeneracy… as well as my mom.

MITG: Onto your upcoming book, first of all congratulations on it. I am greatly anticipating reading it as I think it's a fascinating idea and I believe that it's the first major book written on this important group of young American filmmakers. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired the book initially?

DR: Thanks. I just thought that there was a level of shared sensibilities at work. Defining these filmmakers under an "independent" film label or a "Sundance" label or what have you, seemed much too broad and erroneous for what I wanted to do. The through-lines connecting these filmmakers on thematic, character, and stylistic levels were more important to me. All of these filmmakers have distinctive approaches to storytelling and style, but I found that they were, for the most part, all attracted to angst-filled characters essentially in spiritual or existential conundrums. The majority of the films were essentially comedies, but there was a level of underlying seriousness or melancholy or philosophical soul searching that appealed to me that felt completely antithetical to everything else coming out of Hollywood… or anywhere else for that matter.



MITG: According to the reports I have read, the book is mainly concerned with the careers of Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater and Sofia Coppola. It's an inspired group and I was wondering what the challenges were isolating this particular group at perhaps the expense of leaving out other modern major players like Paul Thomas Anderson?

DH: It was difficult. I wanted to add more filmmakers to the mix, but for the sake of some semblance of thematic consistency and the fact that I had a word count limit, I had to keep it focused. Certainly, filmmakers such as PT Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love is examined, though, in the last part of the book devoted to singular films by other directors that have similar angsty/surreal/comedic themes) and Quentin Tarantino could be legitimately argued for, I guess. Using Linklater as a bridge between the independent filmmakers of the 1980s and early 1990s and the post-Tarantino independent film scene, my intention was to localize it to a group of American directors (Michel Gondry excepted) that were blurring the lines between drama, comedy, fantasy, science fiction, what have you.



It made sense to me to focus on Charlie Kaufman as the center of it all, due to the impact his screenplays have had on audiences, critics, and other screenwriters. In the latter case, I wouldn't say that other screenwriters are necessarily influenced by him in an imitative sense--story construction or narrative themes, though that one Will Ferrell movie seems awfully Kaufmanesque in a blatant, watered down way--but Kaufman has raised the bar for what you can do within the constraints of a seemingly idea-barren Hollywood commercial system. Kaufman is perhaps not a household name (I'm not sure that could ever happen in this day and age) but he is the first real screenwriting "superstar" we've had since Robert Towne, judged for his actual talent and not for how much money he's being paid. And now that Kaufman is directing, we might see a fully-fledged great filmmaker emerge. I thought about putting Alexander Payne in the book, but again, I wanted to focus on filmmakers that had shared comedic sensibilities in many ways or who were latching onto similar strange thematic currents or tonal ones. So in that respect, having narrowed it down to those parameters, I was able to pare it down.

MITG: Of the main filmmakers the book covers do you have a personal favorite? I must admit that I love the entire group, with probably Coppola being the one I admire the most. Outside of a personal favorite, is there one that kind of stands out to you as being perhaps the most important culturally?

DH: When I started on the book, I was partial to Linklater and Coppola. Still am. But I really fell in love with Wes Anderson's work. I had always liked his films, but I felt distanced from them to a degree, shut off from their emotional core until I saw Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou back in 2004.



Everything shifted after that point and I'm a great admirer of all his films now. I'm not sure if any of them will influence other filmmakers in the manner that the nouvelle vague or New Hollywood did for subsequent generations. Perhaps on a superficial level the influence is there, with advertising and other films (Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Juno, Stranger Than Fiction, Shopgirl) appropriating stylistic mannerisms and such. But I don't see anyone racing out to become the next Linklater, Anderson, or David O. Russell. What I hope is that young filmmakers will be inspired by their work and simply forge their own paths, find their own stories to tell. On that level, I hope that these filmmakers cast a larger role within the culture.



MITG: I strongly believe that time will someday recognize the mid to late nineties as a key period in American film history. Without giving anything away from your book how do you think this period compares with other already noted movements such as The French New Wave and the various independent movements in American cinema from the late sixties and early seventies?

DH: It's an unconscious movement to be sure, but I think there's a strong philosophical and thematic connection between these filmmakers and New Hollywood and to the earlier nouvelle vague. I think the playfulness, from either a narrative or stylistic standpoint, that shapes many of the films in my book is directly tied to the nouvelle vague. That sense of experimentation--albeit on a much more expansive and expensive level than anything Godard or Truffaut had access to—was a defining feature of the earlier French wave. The desire to ground many of the stories within the framework of gritty, "everyday" reality, but then shifting the parameters into something more theatrical, absurd, or outright fantastical seems to me linked with the French directors, specifically Godard. But it's definitely more of a "spiritual" influence, I think, than some kind of direct correlation. Same with the New Hollywood influence. It's there, obviously, especially in the sense that all of the filmmakers in my book (except for Linklater) are routinely working within the constraints of the Hollywood (either with the major studios or with one of their "independent" divisions) machine. There have certainly been problems, failures, missteps along the way, but they're still getting their visions out there intact. Film movements are a romantic notion. I'm not sure cinema is capable of moving us on the same expansive cultural level that it did decades ago. There are simply too many other distractions for our entertainment cash. But whenever you least expect it, another wave comes crashing down. A Dogma 95 emerges fully formed or a "mumblecore" or something strange and beautifully unintentional like the directors in my book. The medium is always changing, so I guess the expectations should as well.



MITG: The book is already out in Britain. How has the reception there been? Do you find, in general, that these filmmaker's more provocative works have been more accepted outside the states?

DH: The worst I know of was from some woman reviewing for a UK daily tabloid who hadn't read the book, didn't understand the title (which is a play on John Pierson's book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, something she obviously didn't get) and asserted that I'd written the book as an excuse to trawl through my DVD collection. I only wish I'd thought of writing about films I already owned--it would have saved me a lot of expense and research time tracking down all the films! Then again, I guess making things up is part of the training for tabloid writers. But other than that the book is doing well over here and I've received some very nice email from readers who were familiar with one or two of the filmmakers but maybe didn't know anything about the others or the nouvelle vague. Now they're exploring the work of Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and others. That's extremely gratifying, since those filmmakers are unjustly relegated, I think, to the pantheon of the unapproachable for many people… when they're anything but. So, I couldn't be happier. And the reviews have ranged from the good/decent (Total Film) to the great (Empire).

MITG: Can you tell me a bit about your research methods in writing the book? Is it a specifically critical guide or were there any interviews conducted for it?
Also, did you have any trouble securing a publisher for it considering this isn't a movement that has reached universal acceptance?

DH: I had no problems with my publisher. My editor at Kamera was immediately receptive to the idea and enthusiastic and supportive through the entire project, so I was left alone. There were interviews planned, but not everyone answered my interview requests and the ones that did eventually had to drop out due to their own work commitments. I was disappointed, but I honestly don't think it hurts the book. Hopefully, if I get a chance to do a revised version in years to come, we can finally get those interviews in there.

MITG: What are your hopes for the book and are you happy with the way it came out?

DH: Yeah, I'm happy with it. There are perhaps things I would do differently now, but I think it reflects what I set out to accomplish. I wish it could have been longer… though maybe no one else does.

MITG: Finally can you tell us about some of your future plans?

DH: Well, I'm writing a book on Alex Cox's film Repo Man for Wallflower Press' Cultographies series, though it won't be out for a few years. Also, I'm hoping to write another book for Kamera on contemporary dark filmmakers—directors such as David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, Guillermo Del Toro, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noe, and Park Chan-wook. I have a couple of proposals with publishers at the moment for other books, one being on a specific director and another on a specific film. And I would certainly never say no to working on a longer book focusing on any of the directors I just dealt with. I get a feeling that I haven't yet heard the last of them. I'm also working on a crime novel while waiting for one or more of the above projects to come through, so I'm trying to keep busy.

MITG: Thanks so much Derek for taking the time to do this...I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

DH: You're welcome, Jeremy. Thanks again for inviting me to your great site. Cheers!