
Advertisement
Brent: Oh good!They sort of make me want to eat a bunch of Ambien and think about my ex-girlfriends and dead relatives, but in a really happy way.
Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but I guess it's accurate. I guess the overarching idea in all of them is just that it's going to be fine, you're going to die, but in a real positive way, it'll be fine, you'll be done soon.I guess that's sort of positive. Do you do all the artwork for your films yourself, or do you have some help?
Yeah, I do them almost all by myself.I really like the chalkboard writing in your stuff. It makes my head want to explode from concentrating on the written words along with the speed of your narration. It seems like the writing is supposed to be a character's internal thought but it turns out feeling like my own internal thought. What's going on with that?
Yeah, it's supposed to be the character's internal thoughts. The title cards are designed to put you into a mindset where you're sort of subconsciously letting everything in, but you have to work too. It's just a way to make the viewer more active.
Advertisement
Yeah, it's almost always in one take, I think the only one that's not is Paulina Hollers. I'm not very funny, but there's a part at the end where I made what I think was a joke and it made me laugh, we left that part in and then went back and finished the narration. I said, "You can't just get out of hell, you can't just leave no matter how bad a place you think it is." And I surprised myself when I said that and it made me laugh, but aside from that the rest are just straight through, one take.So that line was a spur of the moment thing?
Yeah, most of them are. I have a tape recorder and I drive around or whatever and I just rant into it.Wow, I thought it was totally scripted.
I mean, it ends up being pretty scripted once the film is done, like the narrations never change when I do them live, but yeah, at first they're just rants. I know kind of what the narrative arch is and that kind of thing, and I'll go through it and piece together different things that I write. Luckily there's usually a really nice microphone in front of me for the best take. I try really hard to impress everyone in the room. I'm often surprised when I'm doing them, and those are usually the best parts, the parts I didn't plan.Are there usually a lot of people in the room?
Well, I usually have my friends record me because I just suck at recording. I live in a barn in Pennsylvania so people come out and they bring some fancy recording stuff so that it sounds good, because when those people don't work with me everyone complains that they can't understand anything I'm saying.
Advertisement
The guys from Califone and Fugazi work with me all the time, they'll set up a real nice microphone and have all the professional stuff and I just sit there and kind of go, more or less.I know you play with bands when you do your live screenings, do you make music aside from your films?
Not good music, no. There's really no comfort zone for me with music, it all just feels like I'm throwing shit at a wall you know? I don't have too much control over it, so it makes it a lot more exciting and I think a lot more freely and subconsciously. It helps when I'm working on a narration, so when I'm writing stuff for the films I'm usually doing something that I have to concentrate on, like driving or playing music. That's probably pretty dangerous though, to be on the road doing that.Yeah, I don't know what it's like in Pennsylvania, but we have pretty strict laws in New York for talking on your cell phone while driving, I can only imagine how long you'd get locked up for composing the narration for a movie while driving.
Haha, yeah, I'm sure I'll get massive fines one day, but my phone is plugged into the wall so I can't take it with me too far. I can probably get it out to my car but that's it. I'm good when I can yell into my little Dictaphone tape thing, but it's terrifying when I have to write it down, like when I have a bunch of paper and sharpies around the steering wheel.
Advertisement
If I don't have my Dictaphone, yeah. It's my job you know, but I try to be safe. I care about people.So you were saying something about Califone and Fugazi earlier, what other bands have you collaborated with?
Those are the most frequent. Brendan Canty from Fugazi does all my shows with me. I work with Howe Gelb from Giant Sand, Vic Chestnutt and I wrote a screenplay together, I've worked with Jeremy Gara from The Arcade Fire. Just people like that, and then all of Califone and The Bitter Tears, just a lot of music people.Do you have different scores that you play for the films at live screenings?
Oh yeah, the scores at the live screenings are always completely improvised, so they're always teetering on disaster. They end up being really good but it's thrilling and I think that makes the people pull for you. Sometimes I feel like I'm single handedly trying to right a ship, but I've only done three shows that were unforgivably bad, and I've done a lot of shows.Is it tough to keep the timing of your words in synch with your films?
No, I know how they go. It usually takes me on average a month of work for every minute of film I have, so when you spend that much time staring at it constantly you know how it goes, I don't really fuck that up.So your feature length film is called Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Are you finished with it?
Well, I won't admit to being finished with it until the IFC Center demands the tape from me, but yeah, it's done. I'll fuck with the narration like right until I give them the file for the tape.
Advertisement
Yeah, so I would map it out, and if the word was like, "every" I would say to the actors, "It's 'eh,' for every, 'ev,' for every." Then they would mouth the words and they'd have to start from the beginning of the word, because you can't just say "vuh" because "vuh" is different when you're saying "every" versus "over," your mouth is in a different spot. So I recorded the dialogue and then sat down with it and flipped through it frame by frame and mapped out what the particular syllables were and roughly where the mouth should be. They had to mouth it out less than syllable by syllable.I'm guessing you don't have ADD. That sounds incredibly frustrating and time consuming.
It was, but it looks unreal, and there are all these things in the film that couldn't have happened otherwise. Like the main characters meet in a car crash, and during the crash Leonard goes flying through his windshield and into the windshield of Mary's car, he lands in her passenger seat and they drive off. And that sort of stuff has to be done frame by frame because I can't hurt or kill anybody by crashing cars in my backyard. We don't have any money either, so if I hurt somebody and they sued us it would be really bad.You built a town in your backyard for this film right?
Yeah, I built five houses.Five full-scale houses?
Yeah.Do you have any background in carpentry?
Um, I build a lot of stuff. I do a lot of woodworking. No, I don't have a background in carpentry but you can figure it out, it's not rocket science. You just have to do the best you can. You could have built this thing too if you had six acres of land. It's all put together with fucking tape and scrap wood. We knocked down two barns for wood and I crashed my own cars, I just wrecked everything I had to make this thing in the backyard. It's incredibly handmade, it's a home movie and it looks like it you know? So I don't have a background in carpentry but I don't need one, all you need is a fucking screw gun.JONATHAN SMITH
