Hal Hartley And Henry Fool

While his work streams on Criterion, the first of several looks back

Hal Hartley in the 1990s..

The 1990s were the go-go-years the great, fertile time for American independent filmmaking, and also for writer-director Hal Hartley. Hartley's near-complete filmography is streaming on the Criterion Channel. (The Criterion link to Henry Fool is here.)

A version of this interview appeared in Filmmaker magazine in 1997, editor, Scott Macaulay.

Relationships and romance: trouble and desire.

Thematically and visually, Hal Hartley's seven features and handful of shorter pieces, are remarkably consistent in tone and mood. In vaudeville, they called it shtick. Film critics see a signature style and are quick to dub the unwitting filmmaker an "auteur." But the Long Island native is aware of the process, prefacing the Faber paperback of the Flirt script with a few words from Jean Renoir: "Everyone really only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it into fragments and makes it again with just a few little variations each time." With one of the most immediately recognizable styles among directors working today, Hartley began developing a small but devoted following with his 1989 debut, The Unbelievable Truth and on through Trust, the mid-length feature Surviving Desire, Simple Men, Amateur, and Flirt. Henry Fool, his seventh feature, moves beyond the deadpan despair of his well-groomed heartsick romantics into a kind of intimate epic about the convergence of reticent Queens garbage man Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) with Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a vagabond and charming braggart who wanders into the lives of Simon's family, preaching the virtues of the artist's life, cadging loans for six-packs and bedding members of Simon's household.

While the Faustian comedy of Henry Fool resembles Hartley's earlier work in formal terms—spare, geometric frames commonly captured in natural light; extremely good-looking actors uttering aphoristic comic dialogue in the driest of deadpan; all underscored by melancholy guitar pop—its engagement with a larger world of concerns marks an interesting turn for the almost forty-year-old director.

Did anyone expect the sleek, cosmopolitan surfaces of a Hartley film to reflect back a garbage man would storm the world with a book-length pornographic poem? Where a gruffly entertaining character would admit to statutory rape and offer up his side of the story? Or where a riff on the most notorious scatological scene from Dumb and Dumber would bloom into a moment of deepest tenderness?

When Hartley says, "What I want... is for people to reassess their assumptions on a moment-to-moment basis," he is speaking not only of his work but of the world outside his lustrous, often-hermetic world. Hartley's independence comes through as forcefully in economics as esthetics. Great popular success in the larger world has been elusive for Hartley's movies, but he has been able to maintain his career by working from diverse financing and with comparatively small budgets. Hartley is willing to pursue his work in forms other than theatrical features, whether smaller-budgeted films or even video, the format of his most recent work, The Book of Life (1998).

You've been on the festival circuit with Henry Fool for a few months, but what else have you been working on? I understand you shot something on digital video.

Yeah, I shot a film called The Book of Life on digital video back in February, a one-hour film for French television. It's one of a series of ten films, each directed by a filmmaker from a different country. The stories are all different, they just have to happen on the last day of the century. Mine is The Book of Life, and it stars Martin Donovan, PJ Harvey and Tom Ryan, who plays Henry Fool.

At the time of Flirt, you told me one reason you had gone and made the short, the first section of that film, was to learn how to use the computer editing equipment, to become more proficient with that. Have your plans shifted after originating Book of Life on digital video?

Well, not much really. I just have to learn how to use computers. The medium I work in is no longer a mechanical medium, it's largely a computer medium and an electronic medium. I'm not that computer savvy, so I have to educate myself in learning how to edit. Unfortunately, every time I get a grip on the technology, it improves and gets much better and the machinery is all different and I have to start all over again!

In the American independent realm, if you take the idea of director assembling a body of work with similar concerns, an identifiable, idiosyncratic look and sound, you could almost be considered the "last auteur." Some filmmakers seem so ready to conform, as if their first, small films are minor league tryouts for studio pictures. I remember you saying once that an agent said to you, "Do you want to make real movies instead of these little things?"

Yeah.

Do you have some concerns about how you can go further with the kinds of movies you make? You've talked about being emboldened by the idea of working on a smaller scale than Henry Fool, even.

Well... I don't really have any fears. I've always been the type of person to think of my work, not as a series of presentable items, y'know, products, but as a continuum. I have certain interests as a creative person, and I'll probably spend my entire life pursuing an investigation of them. I think that that's what leads other people to call it "auteur work." Sensible budgets, not necessarily little, but sensible budgets, provide me a degree of freedom that I see others losing because they take more money from outside sources. I don't feel constrained by small budgets. I don't feel that the things that I want to make films about or the way in which I want to make them are necessarily constrained by a lack of financing. I think a consistency of momentum is more important in one's work, if one thinks of one's work as a lifelong commitment to a particular type of creative activity. The little films, like Book of Life, made for $350,000 on digital video, are certainly just as significant to me as Henry Fool, which was made for $1 million in 35mm. It's important to think that way because it puts the right thing first, which is the work, not the career.

A surprising number of friends who enjoy your work consider Surviving Desire their favorite, a smaller, shorter film.

It's true that some of the smaller, what I call lighter, projects, for me, are usually the most obviously entertaining. As an entertainer, I'm much more accessible and I have a lot of fun with those films. I think Book of Life will be the same way.

You were talking about losing control, and a larger budget can lead to horrible compromise by some filmmakers. They then think, I have to make a certain kind of film, it has to be seen in a certain light. Do you think then it's less the work than how is the work and how am I perceived?

Yeah, apart from the complications that arise from just dealing with larger degrees of finance, there's also just the desperation that a nice, responsible person will have if someone gives them a bunch of money. They are going to want to promise these people certain things, and they are going to work hard to get these people these certain things, because that's their promise.

Whereas it could be much better to explore more, to have the opportunity to discover while you are making the film, not just going out to make illustrations of what was written in the script, but to actually discover things in the shooting. On the other hand, I must say that I've made movies in which it's been a real pleasure at times to just say, you know the scene here is written well and I really do just want to just make pictures of what I've described here. And that's a pleasure, too. But it's different kinds of work, and you have to know at bottom, you have to know what you want to do.

How have things changed since you began? It seems like you had, if not the cushion, the advantage for your first few features of finance from sources such as American Playhouse and certain foreign companies. There's no foreign money apparent in the Henry Fool credits.

Well, things have changed with American Playhouse going out of business. We never had that much money. If you put it in perspective, none of the films I made were a quarter of the budget of most of my contemporaries. We're talking about getting maybe $200,000 or $300,000 from American Playhouse. That's still extremely small. What has made it difficult [today] is that European investors are more reticent about putting money into an American art film without some American money being put in first. And [executive producer] Lindsay [Law] and American Playhouse really functioned in that capacity for a lot of people. [Law supervised forty or more features during the "American Playhouse" moment.]

It seems almost analogous to a lot of films not even getting a video release unless they get a cursory release in five or ten cities.

Yeah. Yeah. Everything is connected. And not only that, it's constantly changing. The methods by which films get financed and how distribution contracts are impacted by video release. It's always shifting.

Taking a larger producer credit was something that Ted Hope
suggested to me a while ago when we were working together.
Ted and I had this really effective and comforting production association when
we were producing my films. And he would do, really, all the business,
and I would do all the production work that would allow him to do that business.
At a certain point we decided when Good Machine began to get so successful and busy,
that we had to have that conversation, you know, he can't take time
out of Good Machine to come work for me.

In looking over the press notes for Henry Fool, there's almost a car crash of ideas. There's first the concept of an intimate epic, how the story stays very close to its characters but brings up so many concepts, and then the influence of stories such as "The Devil and Daniel Webster," the Faust legend, the story of Kasper Hauser, the example of how James Joyce was a mentor to Beckett. On a second viewing, the fact that we never see Simon's controversial manuscript is kind of like the tease of never finding out what's in the little box in Belle de Jour. I thought I was straining, then I realized that Henry's parole officer is named Officer Buñuel. I'm sure I was straining too much when I starting to see Susan Sontag's stripe in Simon's mother's hair, that gray stripe down the middle.

[Hartley laughs] That wasn't intended!

Henry Fool has its own gravity and humor. But I wonder what a younger, contemporary audience would see of this and indeed how important these influences are to you. Someone who's in their early fifties might say, oh this is a hodgepodge of cinephile stuff from the sixties, 1960s art film influences. A true contemporary audience will probably see it all as, 'Oh, this is what Hal Hartley's world is like.'

No, I don't think about that, really. You know, people are free to make whatever they want to make out of a piece of work. Those things that influenced me in writing it are for me. I didn't want to make an intertextual movie where one needs to know the mythology of Faust and "Paradise Lost," or whatever other things people think I'm connecting to. Those elements were just helpful in crafting a story. My desire was to make a contemporary story that said in broad strokes, sketched in, an impression of the culture we live in now. I wanted it to be sufficiently universal, sufficiently mythic in that regard. And so I usually go to the classics, because if I'm going to try to steal stuff from anybody, I'm going to try to steal it from the big shots.

Ideally, it's archetypal, that's why it's lasted so long.

Yeah. It's archetypal but it's also personal. That's how the classics were described to me when I was in college. They said there are things that speak of their time, but for one reason or another, or for many reasons, they speak to all time. Why do Chinese people perform Shakespeare? Something has crossed even that barrier of East and West, an entirely different history and kind of philosophy. Whatever. As for the other kinds of things people see, I just hope they see a compelling story in which they can see something of the culture that we all share right now, and certain ideas that may not be the most contemporary, popular ideas but I think ideas that are relevant to our time and place.

Seeing it in a film festival context, what stood out were the elements new to your movies, particularly the vulgar stuff, the vomit scene, the violently loud eruption of the diarrhea scene. I saw it the other day and [a middle-aged colleague] who was a big fan of Dumb and Dumber was not responding well to that scene.

Well, a film like this is absolutely attacking what [those critics] stand for and everything he represents in our culture. I mean, I unapologetically am out to piss those kinds of people off.

That scene uses the Dumb and Dumber level of contemporary culture, the little-boy scatology, yet you use it in a sustained take where a later gesture is taken by the Parker Posey character as something deeply romantic and life-changing.

It's there for a reason. Our culture is infatuated with this Dumb and Dumber stuff. And I said, well, I want to talk about some more serious things, but I don't want to talk about it in an academic atmosphere. I didn't want Henry and Simon to be wearing tweed coats and have Ph.D.s. They needed to be, to a certain degree, disgusting. It was important that Henry just be disgusting and that we experience a lot of disgust around him. I think, y'know, that the shit scene is one of the most sophisticated comic things I've ever done. I mean when she comes in and kneels down, there's a complexity that keeps the sophomoric scatological humor legitimate. It's a legitimate laugh when people crack up at that. In New York, a journalist had to be ushered out of the screening because she was literally hyperventilating, she was laughing so hard her friends had to walk her out of the theater.

I knew it was coming and I didn't want to be snorting in the cultured environs, yet I couldn't help it, I had to snicker at it. It's sound, again, it goes back to your use of sound to do the work, it's a sound gag as well as a sight, the sight is very stately.

Yeah. It's built on the sound. It's actually playback. We just made the tape and Tom listened to it all morning—

I don't think you can exactly call that lip-synch—

[Hartley laughs] But essentially he had to react to the sound rather than try to anticipate the noise. So it really is a sound gag.

When we talked before, you talked about movies being the only medium that you can consider that you are done with it in only one go. Like a piece of music by Beethoven you may know really well, but that doesn't mean that you don't listen to it again. There's also Peter Greenaway's idea of a kind of "infinitely viewable cinema."

As it applies to films and literature, I assume it's a modernist thing. The idea that what keeps us compelled to continue watching is not the expectation of being surprised but that a piece of work is conceived of and crafted in such a way that the excitement of watching it does not evaporate after going through it once. Music is the best example. We go back to a piece of music anticipating, like, I can't wait for that shift from major to minor to happen. It's an appreciation of the structure and form of art. Painting, too, you can go back and look at a particular painting. But in film it is popularly reversed. If it doesn't reveal itself all in one go it is somehow perceived as a failure.

Henry Fool.

Film is one of the few arts where that is the common approach to experiencing it, that once you've seen it, it's dead. I'd like to make films that get past that. I think that fiction is perfectly capable in any medium of achieving this musicality. That's not what I was after in Henry Fool. It was what I was after in Flirt. And a little bit more in Amateur, perhaps.

How is Henry Fool different, then?

This is just consciously more emotionally obvious. It just wants to be that kind of movie, that kind of story, that gets people excited in a more [accessible] way. I myself, as a maker, felt the desire to make something like that. And I haven't really done it since Surviving Desire or Trust.

Is it putting more attention and time into foregrounding the pleasures, making them immediately graspable, instead of layering and layering?

Yes, that's part of it. It's letting the audience know exactly how to read a scene. You lead them a little bit more. To a degree, you leave out the opportunity for them to make of a scene what they will. There's always that dynamic in telling any story. In Henry's case, the entire conceit of the movie is a little bit like that. I mean, I really wanted to create a situation where the audience was constantly engaged because, I hope that their moral assumptions are challenged by this guy. Like how far, if we're enjoying Henry's company, so to speak, if we are enjoying him being loud... And arrogant... And disgusting.

Right, and when you get to that point, do you still want to continue liking him? I think that's a totally legitimate response to say, I can't go with this movie anymore, because they're not judging this guy. We're still expected to like him. That's legitimate. But I see people watch it and they're challenged and they're upset. But they keep watching because there seems to be something important about that challenge. What I want in a movie like this is for people to reassess their assumptions on a moment-to-moment basis.

He tells stories like being in some remote jungle, ready to rip somebody's eye out and after that, any absurd he says could be read as mania or a lie. Yet when he says that, about the girl, partly because you've underlined it in the way it's shot, but at that moment, you assume that someone who admits such a foul transgression, it must be truth. Whereas other stuff he says usually seems gaudily embroidered, as his book turns out to be, that's a fib, too.

Well, we don't know, we don't know what the book is. All we know about the book is that Simon doesn't like it. Simon has had that kind of experience, too. People have told him that his book stinks. Then a month later they want to publish it, and tell him it's going to be the most important thing in the world. Yeah. Henry is compelling because we can't really trust him. We don't really ever know if he is lying or not. I suspect he is not. I don't think he's lying, he may be embroidering and I'm certain that this book he's written, "The Confessions," is probably unbelievably pretentious.

It's there in the wild-eyed brio of the performance, everything has to be big and loud for Henry Fool. It's not a direct comparison, but Henry's in league with that wonderful character of Alan Rudolph's, the Keith Carradine character in Choose Me.

Oh yeah! Exactly.

Everybody thinks he's the biggest liar in the world and it turns out he can't lie and that's why they put him in the asylum.

It's exactly that kind of thing. There are also characters in literature, the tricksters, people who are necessary precisely because they can't be trusted, like they keep everybody else on their toes. Without that kind of constant, insidious challenge, people might just slink off and become sloths or something.

Henry Fool.

How did you arrive at using masters of two characters, both facing the camera, usually one standing behind the other, and getting very intense with each other? Joseph H. Lewis, who made a lot of low budget films noir like Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, used that style, and he told me he was simply looking for ways to avoid doing two re-lights in one day, and then he realized that it was great because the person who is looking at you or looking away is denying what the person is throwing on them.

I'm sure Lewis is right. There's a dynamic that happens that's terrific when someone refuses to look at someone else, or when even they're not refusing. When you're trying to figure out how you want to play a scene, trying to figure out the mise en scene, it's often like that. What are people doing and what is going to add another tension between the people besides what's just written in the script. And so I'm always looking for those types of things. Nothing bores me more than a two-shot of two profiles of each other. It even gets boring to do two singles and cut back and forth. I'm very interested in the choreography of the actors in the shot, and to be aware of how the shot will start out as one thing and end up as another. And so that often leads me into a way of thinking about a scene, even if I don't move the camera or the actors don't move. It leads me to create a strategy like the one you're describing. I came to this funny question in Henry Fool that I used to ask myself all the time, What would cinéma vérité be like if you weren't allowed to move the camera in any way. You had to choose an angle and you had to live with it.

There's a lot of Woody Allen shots like that.

Yeah, Woody Allen actually does a lot of really beautiful work that way. But I contained it a little bit more. I wanted a kind of lively feeling of almost uncontrolled activity in front of the camera. I would find an image that I thought was appropriate and beautiful to some degree, and just start choreographing the actors through it. And remind Michael Spiller, my cameraman, I said, Let's not worry about the fact that somebody goes out and they're standing there, and their head is above, I mean, we'll look for more or less conventions of appropriate framing that will root it, so that people will know we're not just fucking around, but a lot of things will be, like atonal, there will be tonal stuff there, but then there will be atonal stuff as well.

You've talked about, and it's apparent in the films, something about being direct and honest in finding fresh angles or a new view of things. And there are two interesting quotes that kind of collided when I was assembling questions. One is the great thing that Bresson said about make visible that which without you would not be seen. You used some phrase when I talked to you about Flirt about not beautiful images but necessary images.

That's Bresson, too, pretty much. I think I might have paraphrased him.

Yoshiyo Tamaguchi, the architect who has been hired to modernize the Museum of Modern Art said something interesting. He was asked, "Is your style Japanese?" and he said "It's just architecture." And then later, he said, "Architecture is just like wearing clothes or eating." A bland but poetic way of saying, it's something you walk through, you live with.

But it's also a way of not succumbing to preconceptions too much. Architecture is supposed to be comfortable. Architecture is supposed to reinforce our idea of beauty. That blandness, for lack of a better word, is important for getting to the fundamentals.

How do you keep your eye alert and not fall into conventions or what some critics have called "Hartleyisms"?

Well, I've never understood what the "Hartleyisms" are. I've found that one very practical thing that is easy to talk about and is useful, is that I really don't want to build a set ever. I don't want to do too much artwork on a preexisting area. I find myself in Henry Fool really just finding places, getting to know those places and getting to know what I like or what intrigues me about those spaces, and then thinking about the activity in there. And not changing too much. And Henry Fool, because of budget and scheduling, we decided okay, let's build a room, we found an empty store and we made a World of Donuts. It would have been more fun to be a filmmaker if we hadn't built it. If they were really in the delicatessen, even if I wrote it in the script that there were forty-five kids milling about by the counter, and they said, look you can't fit ten people. I mean that's the fun, that's the challenge. I mean, the reason I said forty-five is that I needed it to be a crowd, I needed it to be hectic, to be spooky and scary, and then you try to make the actual place work, to make it integral to the film. So that's what I find myself doing more and more, using less equipment, using a smaller crew. Not adjusting the reality around me so much, but just taking the time to find the right highly designed image in the actual location.

Is this a practical philosophy that's been arrived at through experience. You could go back to Bertolucci who says he can't storyboard because he likes to walk around on the set and feel what it's like when it's dressed or what the location is.

It's certainly something that's been borne out of experience, and again, keeping it fresh. You want to challenge yourself. It's easy in a certain way if you want to solve problems, to build a set. But I want to, to constantly keep putting myself in the position of greater vulnerability so that my instincts and my sensibilities and my skills are always challenged. Because at that kind of moment, that moment in that room you are really paying attention, you are really looking hard. And it just feels like there's a lot at stake. And you think more clearly. You think more creatively.

Going back to how someone would loosely or lazily say, 'Oh , this is a Hartleyism' because it is a definable or recognizable style, it seems a number of people who like your films will somehow assume that they are somehow more cerebral, that they're more intellectually derived.

You should never forget that a lot of people don't think that movies are made by people. A certain kind of moviegoer resents being reminded, resents feeling the artifice, which I can't even apologize for. Certain people are like that and others aren't. I don't see the point to disguise the artifice of art. It all grows out of practical creative ambition. It's like, I mean, you desire. Desire is the first thing, you want to see a certain thing, but you also want to see it a certain way. You want to create beauty out of things that are around. That's the way I want to do it now, simply from things that are around.

You have all these things about trust and misunderstanding and forgiveness that still seems to be there in Henry Fool, but it is a different world.

I really wanted to make something in this kind of broadly sketched way, that showed aspects of common contemporary experience. I never really made a list of what's contemporary, what's topical. You know, like two years ago when the Congress was still threatening the presidency, that particular kind of right-wing verbiage that was so common. The internet. Even things like the particular type of child abuse that is indicated in movies. I really was reaching for basic generalities. I didn't want anything too specific or too obscure, or peculiar. It's funny when people tell me this is an odd film, because this is our world. I mean, I really think this is a realistic movie. [laughs] But as you get older and you have more experiences, your attention gravitates to different plateaus. Not necessarily higher, the defecation scene and the vomiting is certainly lower. But that's another thing getting back to one of your questions from before, I was very excited to try to pit my skills and my sensibility against those things because I often try to avoid them, consciously or unconsciously, because there's a particular kind of labor that I never wanted to involve myself in. I think that the vomit scene is like that. I watched a lot of gross-out films and I really wanted to see how the editing was done. Theoretically, I knew how the editing would be done, but I wanted to compare. And so of course, I went out there and that's something where I didn't storyboard but I had my list of the kinds of images we had to get, you know, close-up of Simon with the vomit coming out, close-up of Warren shoving his head down, whatever. But ,you know, I didn't get the image of the girl's face looking on in disgust, because by the time we were getting to that shot, the girl was so upset by the craziness that I just caved in and said, fuck it, yeah, let's get out of here, let's finish. So it's kind of a half-assed scene but it works because it's general gesture is so irreverent and outrageous that it's effective anyway.

What about your more prominent production credit this time around?

It was something that Ted Hope suggested to me a while ago when we were working together. Ted and I had this really effective and comforting production association when we were producing my films. And he would do, really, all the business, and I would do all the production work that would allow him to do that business. At a certain point we decided when Good Machine began to get so successful and busy, that we had to have that conversation, you know, he can't take time out of Good Machine to come work for me. I was concerned but he said, you know, you can do this. Just be the producer, you'll get associate producers to take care of all this stuff. It's not easy to find people as gifted as Ted. I got three people to do what Ted does by himself delegating very well.

Do you smoke? Is there any particular reason you are fascinated with the gesture of smoking?

Probably for the same traditional reason movies always do. Because it's something people hide behind, and they use as an expressive gesture. If you think about, like, when I was a teenager, all the kids who wound up smoking were, on one very simple level, just trying to be cool, trying to be older, trying to be more sophisticated, so it's something that when you are making characters, it's just fun. I like it, smoke is something that's beautiful to photograph. [laughs] And a lot of the actors I've worked with have smoked.