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4. ART & INDUSTRY
by Amy Taubin
FUNNY HA HA, PART 2
Christian Rudder as Alex in
Funny Ha Ha
Do you have a desire to make films for hire?
For the most part, I know myself well enough to know that it would be really hard for me to chase that and it would require me, certainly at this point, to chase it. Certainly if a studio came along and said they wanted to pay me a lot of money and put a contract in the mail, I'd probably do it because I'm broke, but I don't think that's going to happen.
Do you have an agent or a manager?
No. What I've been doing is utterly unsustainable, so it will be interesting to watch what the film industry makes of the new film. A great but not entirely useful piece of advice Ray Carney gave me was: "Everyone will figure out how great your first film was after you make three more." Which, of course, is nearly impossible. But if you just hang around long enough people will get used to you and want to help out. I do have a producer's rep for the film - a guy named Huston King. I've been very happy with him. He has been out hustling for months. He got the Sundance Channel deal, and although the film is old now, he's been going through some possible theatrical distribution. I think we'll also have a distributor for the DVD, but right now we're selling it direct from the Funny Ha Ha film website.
When I saw the film at the Pioneer, I was afraid distributors would be put off by the technical glitches, particularly on the soundtrack. But when I looked at the DVD, the glitches were hardly noticeable.
When you saw it at the Pioneer, you saw my 16mm print, and 16mm sound isn't very good. And all because of the status of 16mm today, people aren't keeping their projection gear in shape. From venue to venue, it varies so much. Sometimes it sounds great and sometimes it's awful. That's my biggest frustration. One of the reasons that I would like to get some kind of theatrical distribution is that then we could make a 35mm print.
Funny Ha Ha
How much did Funny Ha Ha cost?
That's something I tend to be cagey about. Whatever someone would guess wouldn't be far off. Of course, the costs go on forever. I haven't finished sending money out, although, because of various screenings, I'm about even. And because of the IFP Award, I was able to pay back a little bit of the investment and a little bit of the cast and crew deferments.
So you used the IFP money to pay off the last film, rather than using it for the new film? That's very honorable.
I'm not in such dire straits right now. Otherwise, maybe I wouldn't have been so honorable. But because I'm the bookkeeper as well, I try to be honest.
Even if you don't tell us how much Funny Ha Ha cost, it would be helpful to know how you financed it: credit cards, personal savings, grants, investors who are friends and family, investors who are professional film people, some combination?
Some personal savings, a lot of friends and family cash.
Did you finance the new film in the same way?
Very similarly. In addition to private nonprofessional investors we've also received some grant money from the LEF Foundation, a fantastic New England organization, toward postproduction. And I'd also received a personal grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which paid my rent for the period of preproduction and production. With Ethan Vogt, the producer of Funny Ha Ha and one of the producers of the new film, I spent a few months pounding the pavement talking to various production companies and phantom rich people trying to raise cash for the new film, all of which was predictably fruitless, until essentially the money fell out of the sky at the last minute. Of course people are always understandably interested to know how these things happen, and I'm always rather embarrassed to discuss it, as our methods thus far in this regard have a lot more to do with luck than anything that is repeatable or sustainable.
Do you have a day job, and if so, is it film-related?
Because the IFP award recouped my personal cash investment in Funny Ha Ha - though not nearly the total budget of the film - I've been able to live off of that money and devote the last couple months to editing full time. Previous to that I've done a bunch of different jobs, most recently teaching Kaplan SAT prep and substitute teaching at a charter school in Cambridge. I've also done all sorts of temp work: data entry, moving, stocking supermarket shelves, two weeks in a plastics factory, etc. Commitments to the previous film and the current one, and of course my own inclinations, have made me hesitant to get any sort of real job with a proper full-time schedule. I've been able to get away with it for a surprisingly long time now, largely because for nearly two years after shooting Funny Ha Ha, I was living in my mom's house.
This is survival information for uncompromising filmmakers.
I've been fortunate in the last few years to meet a lot of underground or avant garde
guys - George and Mike Kuchar, Peter Hutton, James Benning, Jon Jost - who, several decades along, are still making films exactly the way they want to. Hearing Jon Jost tell a story at a Q & A about how, lacking health insurance, he'd managed to diagnose himself with a hernia and fly to somewhere in Europe where he could get operated on free of charge, I was acutely aware of what it means to be a truly independent filmmaker. I don't know if my commitment is that extreme, if I'll be willing and able to live so scrappily when I'm in my sixties. I suppose it's not something I have to decide on too soon.
It seems like the avant garde guys inspired you in terms of a way of working. But in cinematic terms, beside
Star Trek, what kinds of films influenced you? Do you have models?
Partly because Ray Carney was interested in Funny Ha Ha, everything that's been written about it invokes Cassavetes. I have mixed feelings about that. I'm a huge Cassavetes fan. I cherish his films and I've learned a lot from them and stolen some ideas from them. But I also think that's not the whole story. As far as my taste, I think it's as varied and eccentric as anyone's. I guess cinema verité is a genre I'm fond of. But in any genre or type of film, there are always a couple that stand head and shoulders above the rest. I hope I'm open to a variety of stuff and there are commonalities that are always instructive. But this is a question that I always go blank when I try to answer.
Let me take you off the hook a bit. On the website for Funny Ha Ha, you have a director's statement.
I'm completely embarrassed by that. I keep meaning to take it down. When I wrote that, it was certainly a different time for the film. I was just trying to get it shown. But you get to a point where you feel your words can be used against you.
I thought what you wrote was pretty clear and unassuming. There's that bit where you say that in films you like, you have the feeling that the world of the film would continue around the corner from what's on the screen. That made me think you're a real Bazinian.
With the stuff on the website, I was thinking about Mike Leigh. I paid a lot more attention to my film production classes than my academic film classes, so I don't think I thought much about Bazin.
Was the end of Funny Ha Ha always so abrupt?
I think in the very earliest cut of the film, there was another shot of Marnie.
So there was this beat of contemplation.
I cut it partially because I thought it was more interesting without it, and also because I didn't like the shot. But this goes back to stories I wrote in high school. I've always had an affinity for abrupt, unresolved endings. It's hard for me to analyze that completely, but I don't recognize a lot of endings in life, so I'm resistant to traditional endings in something I've written. I hope it works as a cinematic ending. I realize it won't for everyone. I feel like the story runs its course. I remember seeing [Mike Leigh's] Career Girls where the ending is not quite as disruptive, but it's similar in that the film runs its course and then it ends. I remember feeling a certain disappointment at that moment, but it didn't take long to realize that was the right ending. A lot of pressure gets put on endings because that's supposed to be where you deliver your ultimate message. But maybe if you don't do that, it puts the meaning back in the film as a whole.
The structure of the film is really interesting and much more considered than I realized when I saw it the first time. I didn't understand on the first viewing how important the opening scene in the tattoo parlor is, and how it's a metaphor for this moment in these people's lives where any decision they make could determine the rest of their lives, which is why they can't bring themselves to commit to anything except when they get drunk out of their minds and do something like Marnie does - go to a tattoo parlor. As far as the ending goes, the same metaphor came into my head when I watched it last night as when I saw it the first time: slice of life, because the film seems literally sliced off at that point.
I do feel that everything that needs to be said has been said by that point. The thing that's left hanging is the question of her life in general which you could spend many more movies on.
But what happens at the end is that the desire the film has instilled in the audience and which is Marnie's desire - that Alex stops being this passive/aggressive tease - isn't fulfilled. You simply don't know if he's ever going to work it out or he's just going to keep playing this game with her. That's what you refuse to let us come to any conclusion about.
It's another thing that you could spend two more movies on, if anyone had the time and energy to watch them. But in so far as the film is filtered through her, it would be something of a deux ex machina to resolve the narrative by having Alex change in the end. It has to be filtered through her and her perception. And there is some small degree of change in her, although it's not what Hollywood would call a character arc.
I think the film's strength is that it cuts across generational lines and historic periods. It really gets at that time in people's lives when they get out of school, and, unless they're driven to do something like make movies, they are terrified about what they're going to next because whatever they're going to do in terms of work and relationships could just turn into being a drag for the rest of their lives. It's hard at that moment not to think about the future as an unbearable compromise. Everyone makes films about the liminal state [the romance of adolescence], but this is the post-liminal. Not many filmmakers work with the post-liminal. Richard Linklater is one of the few.
And I'm a tremendous fan. Kate was an animator on Waking Life when we were living in Texas. And my DP on Funny Ha Ha and the new film was a camera assistant on Before Sunrise.
Did 9/11 have an effect on the film?
Sure. I was syncing up footage at that time, and I remember days when it seemed absurd to work on the film, not only because how can you work at all but because the film seemed so terribly inconsequential. It seemed inconsequential enough already when we shot it in August. But there was that period when it seemed utterly like a different world and I wondered if the film would play as a period piece.
But then things went back to being the way they were before - much more than anyone imagined they would.
Yes, and I don't think anyone has ever said to me Funny Ha Ha feels pre-9/11. I don't know if it affected the way I cut the film. Probably not much.
© 2004 by Amy Taubin
