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.

Photo #2

When I decided to make Creative Nonfiction, I had no understanding of budgetary constraints or practical logic. In true Cecil B. Demented fashion, I planned to take my crew to Joshua Tree to shoot a desert scene. When I announced this to my father, he tactfully pointed out that flying four people and a bunch of equipment to a remote, parched locale would cost at least five grand (nearly half of what I was working with) and would raise all sorts of problems (sand in the camera, burns on our faces, general "where the fuck are we?"). There was only one scene that took place in the desert, anyway. Sam Lisenco, art director and get-it-done man, proposed rear-screen projection and rigged up this beautiful backdrop. My father allowed us to use his Brooklyn painting studio for the job–and later came to regret it. We dumped at least 200 pounds of sand from Home Depot on that floor. My clean-up job was half-assed, to say the least, and my father finally shop-vac'd it up himself (although he did inform me what I had done was the cinematic equivalent of wrecking someone's car and then returning it to them, acting as if nothing had happened). A saint!


Photo #3

Here we are at my Great Aunt Doad's house in Hamburg Cove, Connecticut. The guys were utterly convinced it was the house from Badlands, but Doad has lived there since she was born and assured them that Terrence Malick has never rolled through. In this shot, Sam is taking a light reading of Doad's face. She appears briefly as a character called "old woman." In reality, she's very spry-she lifted the dining room table herself to make room for our generator.

Photo #4

In a motel in the Catskills, Sam is tying me to a chair for a Misery-inspired scene about a captive poetess. The room is made infinitely creepier by Brett's Lynchian bathroom lighting. The motel owners didn't seem to care what was happening in the room, just so long as we stayed relatively quiet (and paid for ice).

Creative Nonfiction screens tonight at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca at 8 PM. Th2 92md Street Y is located at 200 Hudson Street in New York.