“I wanted to make a farce about consciousness”: Talking with Hal Hartley About Long Island, the Changing Indie-Film Landscape, and The Unbelievable Truth at BAM
The use of off-screen space points to the unusual relationship between dialogue and image in your work: you cut in unexpected ways and often the most important lines are delivered from outside the frame. In Trust for example, there’s a great scene when the three women are talking about abortion and Adrienne Shelly is offscreen for most of it. Does the dialogue drive the images or is the other way around?
Well, whatever I’m going to be filming are these dialogue-built movies. The dialogue will drive the story and shape the character and that can free me up to look at the less-than-obvious thing. That scene you chose in Trust is a good example: that worked out pretty well. That kind of dynamic—I think audiences feel that, provided they’re interested in cinema in that way. They can feel that there’s some kind of importance, I think the viewers respond to that. To use a writer’s analogy, one writer might be saying the same thing as another but they’ve constructed their sentence or their paragraph differently, so that the stresses can be totally unique.
The cadence and the rhythm to the way your characters speak is also hugely important—often more important than the actual words they’re saying.
Yeah, that came later. It was there when I was doing The Unbelievable Truth, but I can’t say I was able to talk about it that much. It wasn’t until later that I was able to say, ok, what I’m really trying to do here is take the rhythm and melody of the dialogue and weave it together in concert with the physical activity of the people. But I learned from the actors. Obviously they were the ones who were first aware of it and they were frustrated sometimes, like, “Why am I looking this way if I’m talking this way?” And I would just say, I don’t know, it just looks good! But years later, there was a reason for it.
A lot of your actors just seem to take to it naturally; they feel so perfectly suited to this specific world—this particular way of moving and delivering their lines. Adrienne Shelley, of course, Parker Posey is another. You seem to have found it again in Aubrey Plaza in Ned Rifle. I know you have your stock of regular players but what’s your casting process like for finding newcomers to fit into your world?
Well, it’s different when you’re finding someone who’s already established, like Aubrey. I usually spent an enormous amount of time, I do the casting myself with a casting director because I know the kind of performer I need. They need to be able to move and they need to be able to talk and they need to be able to do those things at the same time. They also shouldn’t be performers who require everything to be naturalistic. Because although I deal with real things, naturalism is not a tool I used a lot. So Aubrey was great—but it took her a while. I didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time with her and I didn’t audition her. I watched her other movies and I decided she would be good in this role. We had a conversation on the phone and then we met a week before we started shooting. We talked and we read through the script. But she did her homework. She talked to Parker Posey about what she was going to be expected to do and Parker just said, “Know your dialogue top to bottom and trust him when he tells you to move in certain ways.” I think Aubrey was a little wary on the first day but she got over it. It always feels good to the actor once they find it. It might not be obvious or natural why one is moving or talking in a certain way, but once it’s up on screen the blocking becomes clear.
The Unbelievable Truth was Adrienne Shelley’s first role. Can you talk a bit about that casting process? I understand you found her via a headshot.
Yeah. I know I put an add in Backstage for that one so we had thousands and thousands of photographs coming in over the course of a month or two. I always assumed that Adrienne had come in that batch but she used to say that she sent it out in a mass mailing of her own. In any event, she came in and auditioned—she came in about three or four times. I found her very funny right away. But she’s very petite and the role is for a model, so I had to adjust and made her a foot model instead [laughs]. There were three or four other actresses in the running; when it came down to it I just thought she had the right sense of humor.
Her physicality works so well, too. In both Trust and The Unbelievable Truth she’s playing opposite these rather hulking men that tower over her in the frame and can lift her with ease.
Yeah, I really don’t remember directing her that much in The Unbelievable Truth. She just had it. She knew the character. She knew the attitude. Like I said, my directing there and my making of images there were as simple as possible. I was just happy that she was in charge and was taking care of her work. We shot that whole film in something like eleven days. By the time we finished this film and I was editing, I was like, “Yeah, I want to work with her again.” I already had Trust written.
I read in another interview that you were cringing a bit while re-watching this film. Do you feel differently about re-watching your later work?
I’m happy with this film generally. I recognize the guy who made it and yeah, if I cringe it’s really just at stupid little mistakes, like forgetting to turn a light on [laughs], like, “Why is that thing so dark?” But I look at it now and I’m fond of it. It’s interesting to see how a lot of the themes and challenges of living in this world which still preoccupy me were evident there. A lot of the same attitudes about the individual and society. I wanted to make a farce about consciousness. But many years later that’s easier for me to talk about. I was kind of just shooting from the hip and I wrote it very quickly too. But I’m glad I didn’t reach too far for subject matter. This took subject matter that was there—perfectly evident around me. That was the society I lived in and that was their evaluation of the dollar.
What really struck me when re-watching the film was the constant negotiating between the father and daughter—I had forgotten about that—this kind of bargaining they do over very serious life plans. The idea of communication and relationships as deal-making resurfaces in a lot of your later work, if slightly less overtly.
Yeah, back then and probably still sometimes now, I’ll use that. Taking something like an intimate love conversation and putting it in the terms of a negotiation of some sort. I did that in Trust, when Adrienne and Martin are by that wall. It’s a negation: she wants him to say he loves her, but she wants him to say it in a certain way. Negotiations are fun to watch because they’re active. Each side wants something and they have to figure out how to get it.
As we’ve already touched upon, your early films are set in Lindenhurst and there’s a regional specificity to the American-ness of these movies. Midway through your career, you shot a lot overseas and expanded to an international audience. Meanwhile and Ned Rifle both find you back in New York. Were these geographical shifts driven by practical or creative reasons?
Well, I try not to separate the practical and the creative too much. When I made my first two films I lived here, I was local, I had never really been out of the tri-state area. But then I saw the world and that changed my world. It’s true now I’m getting older, I don’t want to go too far to make stories [laughs]. It was interesting to me to come back to the United States, because I lived with my wife [actress Miho Nikaido] for five years in Berlin. So when I made Meanwhile I very specifically wanted to make a film about the city I have always called home but hadn’t lived in for a long time. Something happens when you live in somebody else’s country, you see the space around you differently—in a certain sense better—and I wanted to bring the eyes of a foreigner back to my hometown.
There seems to be a little wave right now of young indie filmmakers suddenly being hired to do these big studio blockbusters after just one or two features. Jon Watts with Spiderman and Colin Trevorrow with Jurassic World, for example. In previous interviews you’ve spoken about being offered more mainstream work and turning it down. How is it that you’ve managed to maintain such a strong sense of artistic independence for going on 25 years now?
Yeah. Those kinds of offers happened back then, too. Some of my friends went that route for lots of different reasons. I didn’t… first of all because I was having success. It wasn’t a huge success, but I was able to make the kinds of films I wanted to make the way I wanted to make them and make a living—that’s a big deal! [laughs] Or, it felt like a big deal to me when I was 29 years old. And then year-by-year it just kept getting better. I pretty much just didn’t stop making films for ten years and by that point I had savings and a place to live. Then I slowed down and wanted to study up a bit and do other things.
When you made The Unbelievable Truth you were green about all things to do with distribution but since then you’ve had an active role in the distribution and marketing of your own movies. Something like Meanwhile, for example, which was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Does the way you approach a project creatively change according to your distribution strategy?
I don’t know if it’s changed that much. It’s a big question. What I said before about it being a different world: I could never have imagined then being where I am now, with HalHartley.com where anybody can go and watch my films right there. There’s absolutely no intermediary between me and the audience. That’s interesting and fun—it’s not as lucrative as it was back then. It’s harder to make a living that way. I’m looking forward to different ways of working; I’m interested in episodic television—or whatever they call it now [laughs]. After writing stories for 30 years, when I watch some of these television series, I’m like, “Wow that’s really a five-hour movie!” and that’s fun. I think the same thing happens with novelists, the feeling of, “I’m ready for my big novel, a thousand-page novel.” I guess I’ve been flirting with that with the whole Henry Fool-Fay Grim-Ned Rifle thing. It took me eighteen years, but I was thinking about this big, big arc and whether or not I could possibly pull that off.
You already mentioned some of the influences on your early work; does anything get you particularly jazzed up that’s out there now? And alternatively, do you recognize your own influence in the work of young indie filmmakers?
Not because I don’t see things I like, but it’s different when you’ve been doing this for so long; you don’t get “jazzed up” the way did when you were younger [laughs]. But I see lots of good work and I see it all over the place. I see it in episodic television, which is why I have to watch a lot now because it seems to me that’s where the future or my work will be—it seems to be where the money is. And my influence on other people? A lot of people over the years have said that to me, like the young indie filmmakers are following in your shadow or something like that, but it’s not as easy for me to see. I copped things from other filmmakers too—whatever you can use, you use, if you can make it your own somehow.