Interview

Creative Nonfiction is my first feature-length film, made while I was a student at Oberlin College. It's shot on mini-dv, with fantasy sequences in Super 16mm. The mini-dv stuff was done quite casually in my dorm room, but the 16mm was shot during two weeks of travel around the Tri-state area in a rented van with three of the guys from Red Bucket Films. It was sort of like a Real World/Road Rules challenge. The men of Red Bucket are highly creative, hyper-skilled technicians–my time with them served as film school. I am eternally grateful, as my pre-shoot director's repertoire was somewhat lacking.  I had a few panic attacks in the woods because I felt like a seven-year-old hiding inside the body of a moviemaking adult. Also, I wore a lot of wigs and my head got hot.


Photo #1

This camera brace makes Brett Jutkiewicz (the cinematographer) look like a Starship Trooper. Brett noticed this abandoned chair in the woods in Roscoe, New York and insisted on filming it. I was doubtful. Of course, when we got the footage back, the shot was stunning, practically a still image save for the subtle swaying of the ferns. All doubt was erased. Sorry, Brett.

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Trailer for Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same

Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same is a laid-back documentary about a decidedly more aggressive subject: the process of mixed media artist Brock Enright. The enfant terrible first courted controversy in 2002 with VIDEOGAMES Adventure Services, a project that consisted of "designer kidnappings" that Enright and a gang of toughies staged for victims who were willing to pay the price-both in dollars and humiliation. A reporter from the London Times chronicled the harrowing experience.

 Jody Lee Lipes' directed the documentary, which records the lead up to Enright's 2007 solo show at New York's Perry Rubenstein Gallery. To make his scattershot sculpture and video , anarchy-inspired found-objects and scenes of Vaudevillian horror, Enright traveled with his then-girlfriend (now wife) artist Kristin Deirup to her family home in Mendocino, California. The resulting journey is rife with creative and inter-personal frustration. In short, the film captures the archetypal conflicts that arise when a mad scientist must face a world that doesn't see it quite his way. Enright's behavior—sly manipulation, fits of hypnotic rage, and a particularly memorable semi-public defecation—is at best shocking and elsewhere despicable. But in the hands of filmmaker Jody Lee Lipes, Enright is also  a tender character, one that inspires a surprising empathy in the audience. Indeed, Lipes turns what could have been a sensationalized satire about contemporary art megalomania into a delicate portrait of an enigmatic creator. The film premiered at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, and this week it's a part of BAM CinemaFEST. Both filmmaker and subject sat down with Interview to discuss their predestined connection and complicated collaboration.


LENA DUNHAM: I wanted to ask about how this collaboration came to be. Brock, it seems like you'd have to know someone pretty intimately to allow this.

BROCK ENRIGHT: Want me to start way back?

JODY LEE LIPES: Yeah, way back.

BE: I met a girl at some party and we started hanging out and apparently, she'd just broken up with Jody. And then she and I started dating, and I didn't know him but I always heard about how much he hated me, but I had always heard so many good things about him. I said, "He doesn't even know me, why does he hate me?" But I understood. He liked this girl and they broke up and now I'm with her, so I'm the enemy. But I always wanted to know him. I had a party at my place and I wanted him to come, and he came. And we talked. There's something about Jody, something I can't explain. This connection or trust I've always felt for him. Later on I started working on certain projects that I wanted to have filmed, to have his Jody-ness on. The thing is, the way he shoots is not abrasive. He really blends in, and he also shoots it well. He has an eye. I knew I was asking questions, and the way he would shoot would answer some of those questions.

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Stella Schnabel in Ry Russo-Young's You Won't Miss Me

Ry Russo-Young and I attended the same middle-school, high-school, and college, and her reputation as a creative chick with tireless theatrical and artistic output preceded her in each. She was five grades ahead of me, which for schoolmates would seem to make friendship an impossible dream.  But last year our filmmaking pursuits brought us into extra-curricular contact, and I had to fight the seventh grade awe. It didn't help my girlish anxiety any that at the age of 27 she has already made an award-winning experimental short, "Marian" (2005) and two remarkably sure-footed feature films. The first, Orphans (2007) is equal parts Bergman and digital DIY, a chilly drama about two twenty-something sisters on a disastrous retreat to their childhood home in the country. The second, You Won't Miss Me, is a merciless yet beguiling character study of a New York misfit named Shelly Brown. The films stars Stella Schnabel as a confrontational free-spirit looking for a home in some of downtown's darker corners, and it premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. This week, it will make its New York debut as part of BAM's CinemaFEST. Russo-Young sat down with Interview to talk about Fairytale females, her collaboration with Schnabel, and the fuzzy line between reality and fiction.


LENA DUNHAM: It doesn't really lend itself to a concise logline, so tell us a bit about the film.

RY RUSSO-YOUNG: You Won't Miss Me is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a person named Shelly Brown, seen in many lights, and on many formats. She's just been released from a psychiatric hospital. You're not sure exactly how long she's been there, but you see her reintegration into society. It all takes place in New York-it's a very New York movie, about the juxtaposition between how we see ourselves and how we operate in the world.

LD: It is very New York, populated with old-school downtown character-types. Can you talk a little bit about the casting, particularly Stella in the lead?

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At the tender age of twenty-eight, Ti West has written and directed four feature films that resurrect the tired horror genre. The Los Angeles-based director's work has consistently straddled the line between genre kitsch and realism; witness his diverse filmography: West's first film, The Roost, is a campy bite on vampirism as a group of stranded twenty-somethings are terrorized by homicidal bats. His follow up, Trigger Man, offsets a terrifying masked-gunman plot with a bleak naturalism that would make Gus Van Sant proud. The precocious West has also dipped a toe in the Hollywood waters as director of the as-yet-unreleased Cabin Fever 2, the much anticipated sequel to Eli Roth's gross-out hit. His latest, The House Of The Devil, premieres on April 25 at the Tribeca Film Festival. HOTD is an early-Eighties period piece about a broke college girl who wants to move out of her dorm and takes a babysitting job to make some extra cash. When her eccentric employers turn out to be members of a satanic cult, terror ensues. Interview sat down with West to discuss the appeal of the 1980s, how horror is like porn, and what it means to be a "difficult" director.

LENA DUNHAM: It's interesting that you made a film set in the Eighties. You're really more of a child of the Nineties.

TI WEST: My teen years were certainly in the Nineties, but being an only child and kind of a weirdo, my formative years were when I was much younger. Much of the stuff I relate to is from the Eighties, at least cinematically. I get a little off-put when people see The House of the Devil as an homage to the Eighties because I consider "homage" to be sort of like parody. Would you say Zodiac is an homage to the Seventies? No, it's a movie that takes place in the Seventies. HOTD is a period piece, so everything takes place in the Eighties, but it's not kitschy, video-killed-the-radio-star Eighties. It's brown, feathered hair, wood-paneling Eighties.

LD: Formally, what about the films of that decade appeal to you?

TW: There was just a different pacing and a different style of filmmaking back then.  All of that ended at the beginning of the Nineties with MTV editing. The Eighties were the last decade where the actual filmmaking was still treated with some respect, even if it was horror.

LD: How would you describe the state of horror today?

TW: Horror is really unfortunate now. It's like porn. What seems to have happened is that everyone decided the horrific stuff is what makes these types of films successful so there is no time spent on the "real life" aspect anymore. It becomes just one kill or cum-shot after another. Mainstream horror is only about titillation. That, to me, is the same as pornography.

LD: And a good horror film?  TW: People always ask what makes a good horror movie and it's essentially one big thing-contrast. All of the stuff in the film that's not horror is what makes all of the horror stuff work. I make regular movies that turn into horror movies. Because that's what life is like. Right before a home invasion you would probably just be sitting around watching youtube or texting someone and then suddenly your life becomes totally horrifying and beyond your control.

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