Are We There Yet?

In November 2019, during the first effort to produce Where to Land, Hal Hartley was interviewed by members of the cast and crew. The interview took place in the offices of Possible Films, directly across the hall from Hartley’s home of ten years.

Q: Was there a single event or idea that inspired the writing of this script?

A: There were a few. Firstly, from 2012 till 2017, I was working intermittently on what I thought might be a novel. I even referred to it sometimes as Where to Land. But more often it was called Our Man. The script for a film grew out of a few ideas contained in that novel-in-progress. And though they’re very different, both the novel and the script were inspired by having to make my own last will and testament, the experience of caring for my dad in his last few years, and the desire to, and the curiosity about, changing my vocation late in life.

Q: What should new and returning audiences be looking forward to in this film?

A: Let’s see what I can manage to do. I think you’ll see a lot of hilarity about people having more than one conversation at the same time, carefully constructed verbal chaos. Things I’ve done before but differently. Over the years I’ve grown more confident in how I move people around and how I direct their language, how we shoot it. And that, too, often leads to trying out new things. I like crafting stories out of the regular events that come up in life. So, this thing about the last will and testament immediately became a project all its own. And it was happening during those years when I was helping out with my dad, when death was sort of within arm’s reach but not a threat. The kind of conversations you find yourself having at times like that with your parent, your siblings, your aunts and uncles, discussions about the simplest, most practical, mun- dane things, it all becomes rich with ultimate concern. And is often quite funny.

Q: And you feel like now is the right time to be making this par- ticular film, for you and for the world?

A: For me? Sure. It’s unavoidable really. Even though it’s not autobiographical it is personal. It’s what I’m interested in right here and right now. There’s lots of overlap, of course, between the personal and the general but there are some funny dissonances too.

Q: Is the world ready for this kind of film?

A: Oh, I don’t think it will do the world any harm, provided the world notices. But, yes, I think it is. It would be hard to make work if I thought there was no one in the world who would respond to it.

Q: Do you think this will be your final film?

A: It might be. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing. My urge for a long time now has been to give myself to writing prose. But I am good at making films and if an opportunity came up where I’d be paid and its good work to make, I’d do it—for as long as I have the energy. I hope I’m going to live a long time and so that’s con- nected. I’m no fun to be around if I’m not busy making something.

Q: Talking about filmmaking almost always has to do with the business of it, how people raise money and how things are fi- nanced.

A: That is a very real part of it.

Q: How have you been able to adjust to the changing trends and assumptions, the expectations? What was considered indie back in the nineties seems to have been something else than what it is now. How has all that affected the way you think about and the way you continue to make your art?

A: I think I must have had the mind-set, a particular disposition, even as a teenager. I don’t remember ever feeling frustrated back then that I didn’t have the materials I needed to make work, whether that was music, drawing and painting or, a little later, films. I was happy making work out of whatever I had access to. And I think when I began making films professionally a lot of that attitude remained, even as I was learning new things and had much greater resources. DIY. Do it yourself. Or do it yourself with your friends! Because I always needed help. But anyway, I tried to focus on the work, my aims, and not be too swayed by all the labels the business attached to it. I still try to maintain as much control over the making of a film and its distribution as I can because it’s not just a job for me, it’s my work and my life, the main thing I can contribute to this world I find myself in. I don’t want it needlessly compromised. Because there’s all kinds of compromises I have to make anyway. But it’s me who decides which compromises to make and how to make them. Nevertheless, I don’t aim to be obscure or difficult, though I seem to be thought so by some. There’s nothing I can do about that. It’s just that my entire creative life, even when I was a child in some ways I think, has in one way or another sought to be a kind of resistance to complacent jargon, the dumbing down of complex realities into opinionated sound bites. And so I have this knee-jerk reaction, not always correct, about any supposedly proven market viability or whatever, any accepted wisdom, ideologies. I kept my ear to the ground about business, though. And technology. No one wants to make work no one sees. Economics and aesthetics are related in filmmaking. And that’s true all along the way from writing, to the editing, to how I deal with distributors and marketers, promotional people. I got a bit of a reputation for being difficult in a quiet kind of way, self- indulgent, naïve, pretentious, even arrogant. I don’t think I was. But I trusted my instincts and I’m glad I did it because that’s how I still have the business, the business of advancing an awareness of my work, all of it, from the beginning to the end, because it’s all part of the same thing.

Q: Has all that changed your approach to filmmaking?

A: I don’t think so. Not in terms of what I’m writing or how I make pictures and edit them. Once we get the projects financed, I go about making the films the same way I always have. It’s the method of finance that’s different. I saw opportunities in new technology that allowed for a drastically different way of creating scenes. In 2011, for instance, I designed Meanwhile, a quite modestly budg- eted film, around avoiding set dressing, because the equipment was so much smaller and lighter, requiring less lighting, and the lights we did have did not get hot any more. This changed my ideas about production design. Finding places that are perfect the way they are. You’d be surprised how that both relaxes pressure on set and suggests creative opportunities we hadn’t thought of. We did a lot of that on Ned Rifle too.

Q: Yes, we didn’t really build or change very much.

A: There’s a certain kind of fun in applying a strong aesthetic, a compositional rigor, to what you find already existing in the spaces you walk into, imposing a consistent design sense upon everything you look at.

Q: The way you’ve written this script, Where to Land, is also very conducive to that, I think.

A: With this one perhaps it’s more obvious. I really wrote it for this neighborhood and for my apartment, spaces I walk through every day. So I had the time to just pace through the scenes on my own and decide how to see the action. I had to laugh when you read the script a few months ago and worried about all the people in some of the scenes in such a small apartment as mine.

Q: How are we going to fit them all in there!

A: Right. I know. Which is why it’s good to go back and look at Theory of Achievement from 1991. That was an even smaller apart- ment out in Williamsburg where my friend Steven lived and we had all those people in there too with much heavier equipment. But we found fun solutions like forcing people into these tiny little spaces where they’d talk back and forth, just moving their heads and their hands, creating these hilarious little crowded tableaus with a lot of fast, small movement.

Q: So you let the space and the surroundings effect your writing?

A: In this case, yes. But generally, no. Where to Land can happen in any apartment, of course. But having a concrete example to walk around in helped me imagine conversations, their rhythms, their cadences, how possibilities for action would provide an oppor- tunity for shifts in attention. Staging, really. As I’ve said a lot of times, my films are dialogue built and performer driven. If the performers and I understand the dialogue well, we can stage it anywhere we find ourselves and let the environment effect it. And that’s fun—if sometimes risky.

Q: Have you always had a clear idea of who the audience for your type of work has been?

A: In my own mind, yes: anyone who’s interested. But that wasn’t much help back in the old days. Neither was the input of the pro- fessionals hired to determine such things. It’s only now that I distribute my work directly that I know who and where the audience is. Though none of this contributes to the way I write.

Q: But it must be reassuring to know that this audience is out there.

A: Of course. One has to believe, if not actually know, one has an audience, whatever its size. But unless you’re making manufac- tured product for a known market you have to imagine your audience as those who want to see what you’re going to do next, how you might change, how you’ll develop—so they’re an audi- ence, not just customers.

Q: In recent years you’ve been creating this archive of your films, presenting them as a library. How has that felt as a creative exercise?

A: It is very much like a design firm around here these days. There’s the selection of films, of course, but also the photography, texts, music, arranging all these in a cohesive and accurate manner. It’s satisfying work. And the audience is there for it. I’m lucky to have all this material. But the archive, the library, is nearing its completion. I’ll need to make something else before too long. It’s been interesting as a creative editorial effort to reconsider this whole body of work carefully and a little at a time, like I said earlier: cohesive and accurately.

Q: Not many other artists might be good managers of their own archives, though.

A: I have my inner librarian. If I make something, I like to know where it is, protect it, have a copy of my own, study it, improve upon it if possible. Also, it’s helpful to come back to earlier work while making new things. You can see you discovered a good solution to a similar problem in an earlier piece, whether it be in the writing, directing or the editing.

Q: Does going back and looking at the earlier work make you think about how your process has changed? Do you notice choices you made earlier that you might make differently now?

A: Yes. I see things that change and others that stay the same. The grammar of the dialogue and the physical activity of the actors, though it does evolve, is pretty consistent over the years, at least since I really began to grasp that this was fundamental to my desire to make motion pictures in the first place.

Q: In your own words from the crowdsourcing campaign: “the unbelievable truth of it all is one keeps changing. I’m asking myself the same questions I asked at twenty. What do I want to be? How do I want to achieve that? When, if ever, will I know I’ve arrived? Where will I land?” Do you feel this script has brought you any closer to landing or knowing where you will land? And will it help us, too, to figure it out?

A: I think the script manages to convey feelings and thoughts I’ve had rattling around inside me for twenty or so years. It’s probably the most conscientiously and uncompromised writing I’ve done. And I took a long time with it. I never felt like I needed to rush this into production. So that must mean something. I was trying to work something out for myself. As we’ve discussed, it started out as a novel. And that was an early effort to really cross over from my lifelong vocation as a filmmaker to the pursuit of writing fiction in prose. And whether I’m successful at that or not, it will probably be how I spend the rest of my working life. So, yes, all this has brought me to at least seeing a direction I can take. The irony of the title, of course, is that we never land. We’ll always be at sea. Still, we always have this urge for completion, resolution.

OUR MAN (excerpt)

Reading again the message he has been composing for three weeks to the talented, lovely and famous actress in Brooklyn, he decides what yesterday sounded sophisticated and self-effacing today rings affected and stiff, too formal. So he starts all over again and gets right to the point: Saw your new film. You were great in it. I’m more anxious than ever now for you to like the script I sent you. Hope to hear from you soon. Yours, etcetera.

Good enough he thinks and sends it off. This will lend him some moral heft at his two o’clock coffee meeting with his agent, Edward, who insists he doesn’t make enough of an effort to be famous and influential. He changes into a fresh shirt and heads to the subway, still preoccupied with his newest fleeting ambition to become a manufacturer of designer USB thumb drives and retire in peace. On the way he passes the three-hundred-year-old ceme- tery he often sits in to read and pauses to watch a man, a man a little older than himself, the groundskeeper, bundling up a clutch of fallen and broken branches, confident, knowledgeable, humble, at one with the materials he works with, from the twine, the shears, the brittle twigs he tosses in his wheelbarrow, the wheelbarrow itself, and his rake, his well-worn work gloves. As he moves off to other spaces requiring his attention, this groundskeeper caresses the nearest tree like a brother.

Our man discovers he’s crying and reaches for his handkerchief. There were no Career Opportunity titles in the train station book- store earlier in the day about how to become a groundskeeper. But right now, it’s all he wants to be, to tend, to neaten, to protect, to be subject to the weather, to have his hands calloused with honest labor, to be able to look out at the end of the day to a swath of the world well managed, to be justifiably fatigued as opposed to just aggravated and beat. He remembers reading about Islam in his youth, discovering the word meant submission, and that this sub- mission entailed a stewardship of nature, a responsibility to assist and protect, to nurture. As he descends into the garbage-strewn, urine-soaked subway he feels small. What has he done with his life? Is the talented lovely and beautiful actress in Brooklyn really essential? Does he need to continue this mad race for last place in the estimation of the entertainment business? How long would he be interested in manufacturing sexy little USB thumb drives anyway?

—Hal Hartley, circa 2013