The Path of the Artist, Part 2 (Text Only)

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Excerpts from
The Path of the Artist, Part 2

I am an artist. It is the very opposite of saying "I know all about it. I've already found it." As far as I am concerned, the word means "I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved."

– Vincent VanGogh

My roommate in my Freshman-year had a weird habit. Every time he came across a thought-provoking idea in a novel, poem, or essay, he would print it in big block letters on an index card and stick it up somewhere in the room. Putting a slice of bread in the toaster, I would be faced with William Blake's "Energy is eternal delight" taped on the side. Shaving in the bathroom mirror, I'd have to scoot down a little to see myself underneath Clement Greenberg's "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first." Climbing into bed, I'd see Marshall McLuhan's "When first proposed, new systems of knowledge don't look like revolutions or breakthroughs–but like chaos" posted with a stick pin on the opposite wall. The nuttiness only lasted a couple of months. As the semester wore on, he got busier and busier, and ultimately discontinued the practice sometime around Thanksgiving break. The funny thing was that though I had begun by hating them, when he stopped doing it, I missed those index cards with their mysterious, inspirational ideas.

That was a long time ago in a galaxy far away, and to tell the truth I forgot all about it until recently. But something from those days must have stayed with me, since I've now become an inveterate keeper of my own lists of aperÁus, insights, and quotes–though I don't write mine on note cards, but scribble them on dog-eared tablets thrown in the back of drawers. A lot of them are on ratty scraps of paper stuck in the folders behind my lecture notes, because they are prompted by something the students in my Boston University film classes say. At least once a week, in the middle of a discussion, someone says something so thought-provoking that I stop the class for a minute to write it down before I forget it. Those comments (and the counter-observations they frequently provoked in me) were the source of many of the following aphorisms. All of the others came from puzzling over films I've seen.

This is the second of a three-part article. The final installment will appear in the next issue of MovieMaker. For those who missed the first, short of requesting a back issue from Tim Rhys, the best summary I can offer is the quote from one of VanGogh's letters that is at the top of the page (which was given to me last year by one of my students, and is just the sort of thing my roommate would have tacked on the wall).

The unreality of Hollywood movies is not geographical or sociological. It's emotional. The problem is not that the characters are rich and beautiful, and live in Beverly Hills, but that no one was ever motivated by such simple, unitary emotions. Hollywood spends millions getting the automobiles and haircuts right, but gets the feelings all wrong.

* * *

Get real feelings into your movie–our insecurities, our uncertainties, our confusions, our discouragements, our laughter at ourselves for being stupid, our constant changes of mind. People's feelings don't stand still the way they do in Psycho, Red Rock West, Reservoir Dogs, or L.A. Confidential. They continuously shift and change. And we aren't clear about what we are doing or why we are doing it, but mixed-up with mixed motives.

* * *

Outer space is much less interesting than inner. The world that matters is the world of the spirit. Opera and ballet understand that. Because your heroine wears cotton underwear and a T-shirt instead of a silk nightgown does not make her any more truthful than Jean Harlow. Mark Rappaport's The Scenic Route is one of the truest movies ever made, and not a shot in it looks like the world of our eyes and ears.

* * *

In Marianne Moore's words, the real wars are always inward. Conflicts between figures are far less important than the conflicts within any one of them. What goes on inside us is more dramatic than the mere events of the Holocaust.

* * *

The horrors of horror movies are too external. The real horrors are inside us–our need to have others support our fantasies of ourselves, our desire for praise, our idiotic quest to be successful, our bottomless emotional neediness.

* * *

Slasher pictures are too tame. Emotional violence is far worse than physical. Casual remarks cut more deeply than Freddy Kruger's blades. The masks we wear are scarier than Jason's–and don't come off. The irrationality of our doubts and despairs is more frightening than any monster's rampage.

* * *

Hannibal Lector is too logical, too rational. His actions make sense. Ours don't. He knows what he wants and how he will get it. We are only fooling ourselves when we think we do. There's a man next-door to me who mows his lawn every single day, sometimes twice a day, and a man across the street who sits in his car by himself listening to the radio almost every night without going anywhere. Their actions are far less rational, and their emotions more mysterious than anything in Nightmare on Elm Street.

* * *

Film important emotions. The Blair Witch Project is full of emotions, but trivial ones. Our flight-or-fight responses are the least interesting part of us. They are our reptilian brain stems. Make a movie about what makes us human, not what we have in common with a crocodile.

* * *

If there is an act of physical violence, an assault or attack, a single instant of Hitchcockian "suspense," "terror," or "shock" in your movie, you might as well quit. Speaking personally, I change the channel the instant a gun appears in a film. I know nothing interesting can follow.

* * *

Make your characters at least as complex as your self-deluded former boyfriend. In John Cassavetes' Love Streams, every time Robert Harmon opens his mouth, he thinks he is saying one thing, while a viewer hears something different. In Caveh Zahedi's A Little Stiff, every time the main character thinks he is making one impression on a girl, the viewer comes to the opposite conclusion. (But be subtle! The subtlety of our unawareness of ourselves is the only thing that separates Dumb and Dumber from Uncle Vanya.)

* * *

Forget sets, props, costumes, locations, lighting. Acting is what matters. You can make a whole movie in your living room if the emotions are complex enough. If there is enough movement in the feelings, no one will notice if your actors are sitting still. If you think that's an exaggeration, look at the living-room conversations in Gertrud, or the living room scenes in John Cassavetes' Faces and A Woman Under the Influence or Tom Noonan's The Wife. No car chase was ever more thrilling.

* * *

Ask your actors if there is a single word or feeling in your film that would not occur in their own lives. If so, strike it out, or get a new actor. Ask them if the events were really happening to them in their lives, if they would do anything differently. Ask them if they think their character is true to their lives.

* * *

We are so deep in the culture of salesmanship that we can no more see it than fish can see water. Everyone is selling something. Mainly emotions. Television commentators sell sadness when an airplane crashes. Politicians sell their honesty and sincerity. Peter Jennings sells his sensitivity and Dan Rather sells his intensity. But like any product mass-produced for mass consumption, to be hawked this way, the emotion has to be pulled up by the roots, killed, freeze-dried, dyed, and processed.

* * *

Watch out for actors and movies that try to sell you canned, synthetic feelings. Real emotions are too small, delicate, and unpredictable to be shouted up and traded on the stock market.

* * *

The more experienced the actor, the greater the tendency to pull things out of a bag of tricks. Jack Nicholson mugs his way through every movie he's in; Meryl Streep tenses her way through hers; Nick Cage clowns and showboats. Fancy acting is too easy–and too false.

* * *

Beware of "star performances." Actors like Keitel, DeNiro, and Cage do it only to justify their ridiculous salaries. Great acting is about interacting–not dominating, but responding; not getting everyone to look at you, but listening to them. In both life and film, a solo flight is always easier and less interesting than a collaboration, an ensemble performance. The critics who sing Jack Nicholson's or Robert DeNiro's praises will never understand this.

* * *

"Star-system" understandings of life are everywhere–on television, in the newspapers, in movies. We crave a story with a superhero, a Princess Diana, a Bill Gates at the center of it. But that's what's sick about our culture. If your movie has a star–a superb, powerful, strong actor who dominates scenes–treat it not as an asset, but a problem to be dealt with.

* * *

What happens in life when someone wants to be the center of attention all the time? How do they lose their sensitivity and responsiveness? How do they make everyone around them feel?

* * *

Life is the opposite of the star-system. Experience is never reducible to one person's drama. Your point of view doesn't dominate or absorb mine, but endlessly jostles with it, and ours bumps up against everyone else's.

* * *

Every time a character starts to dominate a scene or sequence, make sure you remind the viewer of another character's point of view. Every time one character launches into a solo riff, remind the viewer that there are other ways of understanding and being, other dramas going on. Look at Grand Illusion or Breaking the Waves or The Celebration.

* * *

If you have to deal with a hammy actor, mess up his rhythms a little, catch him off balance. Secretly change the blocking or a couple of the other actors' lines just before the big scene so that he'll have to think on his feet, actually listen to them, truly respond to what they say.

* * *

You can also use amateurs and real situations to force a little truth in. If an actor is put in a partially real situation (with a child, animal, or nervous nonactor), she may be forced to play a little truer than if she were in a completely predictable, staged situation. Film in a real house with a few real family members. Include a real grandmother. There's a chance a real tone of voice might sneak in. It worked for Jim Jarmusch–brilliantly–in the second half of Stranger than Paradise.

* * *

A strictly personal aside to any actor reading this: If you are a famous, established actor–if you are Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Robert DeNiro, or Meryl Streep–volunteer to work for free in some real indie's no-budget production. Why be a whore all of your life? Do you really believe that The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Terms of Endearment, Apollo 13, Saving Pvt. Ryan, and Cape Fear are the greatest expressions of which the human spirit is capable? Nicholson in particular hasn't taken a risk with a really daring project since he appeared in Five Easy Pieces thirty years ago. (And that wasn't that daring then anyway, since he couldn't get anything bigger at that point in his career.) It was his last decent performance. Jack, do yourself a favor. Act in one honest, experimental, artistic, non-entertainment movie before you die. What are you afraid of? Accept a script by a no-name director. Take some chances with projects that take some chances. Ones that might be just dreadful, but could be great. Work with Caveh Zahedi or Gordon Erikson or Mark Rappaport or Tom Noonan or Charles Burnett. And, to all the big-name actors who think you are already doing this: If you think that movies like As Good as it Gets, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Taxi Driver, Blue Velvet, The Shining, and Fargo are art, get an advisor who can tell the difference. I'll do it for you if you're really desperate. You've been reading Pauline Kael, Stephen Holden, Anthony Lane, Janet Maslin, and David Denby too long. These movies are kitsch. They are knock-offs of the real thing, promoted by journalists (they don't deserve the title of "critics") who don't know the difference. At the other extreme, if you are a novice, unestablished actor: vow that even if you become as rich and famous as Jack Nicholson you'll keep doing something for art, to explore what we are, not just for the money and to protect your career and box office image.

* * *

Chewing the scenery is bad for both the movie and the scenery. It's easy to "make a scene" by throwing a fit, but temper tantrums belong in Kindergarten. If your big scene is one in which your actors shout, gesticulate, or cry, there's probably something wrong with your understanding of life–or theirs.

* * *

As Carl Dreyer said, life's greatest dramas are usually played quietly. They take place in silence, off in a corner somewhere. When you get really bad news, you are usually left speechless. It may be days until you can talk about it.

* * *

A great scene is not when the actor cries, but when the viewer does–which is frequently in response to an actor's refusal to. The fact that Dreyer's Joan of Arc doesn't weep is why we do. The fact that Inger stays cheerful no matter how bad things may be is why we love her.

* * *

But don't confuse this with what Todd Solondz does. A character in Happiness may not cry in a painful situation either, but not because she is patient, sensitive, and wise, but because she is a fool. It is the very opposite of Dreyer. Dreyer loves his characters, which is why we love and care about them so much. Solondz–like Robert Altman or Neil LaBute–has contempt and scorn for his, which is why we do too, and ultimately have every right to feel contempt and scorn for their creators

* * *

Satirizing limited characters is too easy, anyway. Art is not about judging, but understanding. We judge, judge, judge most of our lives. It's the worst part of us–the smuggest, most petty, self-congratulatory part. A work of art exists to allow us to be better than that: to see even the saddest or most doomed figures sympathetically, lovingly, caringly.

* * *

If you don't, in some way or other, love your characters, believe in them, and hope to redeem them, you haven't entered into their points of view deeply enough. You're still trapped in your view; you haven't seen them the way they see themselves.

* * *

All of the greatest works of art are about characters who–notwithstanding their flaws and shortcomings–are in some respects better than we are. Oedipus, Lear, Cleopatra, Othello, Sonya, Joan, Inger, Gertrud, George Bailey, Mabel Longhetti, and Sarah Lawson are stronger in the face of adversity, more persistent, more trusting, more giving, more self-sacrificing, and more daring emotionally than we are. That's why they justify our time and interest. Because they are better than we are, is why their struggles touch us so deeply. Their refusal to feel sorry for themselves when confronted with greater obstacles than we will ever face inspires us.

* * *

If possible, prevent the viewer from being able to make any moral judgments. Of all the fashionable forms of knowledge in our culture, the most pernicious, most limiting is morality. If anything in your film can be understood in terms of right and wrong, as being moral or immoral, you don't understand your characters deeply enough.

* * *

If your narrative poses ethical questions and choices, you are asking the wrong questions. All of the most interesting parts of life are too complex to be reduced to morality.

* * *

The "bad" characters in the movies (the kind Chris Walken plays) tell a lie about life. They set out to do wrong, and know they are doing it. No one intends to do wrong in life. No one. Ever. Not even Hitler had bad intentions or thought he was doing anything wrong. As Renoir said: "Everyone has his reasons." At the very instant someone is treating you most cruelly, most heartlessly, most insensitively, he genuinely, sincerely believes he is doing something good. He thinks he is acting out of principle. He thinks he is doing it to help you or to make you a better person. He thinks he is doing it to get the task done efficiently.

* * *

An actor should defend his character from criticism the way he would defend a lover. As you write, find some way for your character to defend his point of view–no matter how screwed up it may be. Find the inner logic that makes what he is not only reasonable, but, in his view, virtuous. Let him present his side of the story. Let your characters genuinely justify themselves and their actions the way we all do in our imaginations, the way we all want to be justified–and inwardly believe we are justified.

* * *

The most flawed characters in Mike Leigh's work–Peter in Bleak Moments, Beverly in Abigail's Party, Keith in Nuts in May, Stan in Home Sweet Home–are doing the very best they are capable of. Like Mama Longhetti, even as they wreak havoc everywhere they go, they are sincerely just trying to help out.

* * *

Make sure there are no "good guys" in your film either. Allow your hero's good intentions to miscarry. Let him drop the lifeboat on the heads of the people he intends to save. Make him deeply flawed. That's the only way he can have any relevance to a deeply flawed viewer. Leave the pure, noble, romantic souls to Judy Blume. Study Astrov in Uncle Vanya to appreciate how much more moving human fallibility is than inhuman perfection.

* * *

You can make the same mistake in the opposite direction, of course. Hollywood upside down is still Hollywood. Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz make their callow figures too callow. They give us Sad Face Balloons in place of John Hughes's Happy Face Balloons–but a balloon is still a balloon. Show real nobility, real intelligence, real wit, and humor on top of the selfishness or insecurity and you have created something like life.

* * *

On the other hand, if your characters are in hell, keep them there. Resist the impulse to sweeten them at the end or give them a narrative reward. Vincent Gallo negated everything he had achieved in the first hour of Buffalo 66 with the film's final twenty minutes. His hero went from interestingly annoying to tritely sentimental.

* * *

The goal is not to get your point of view in–as a screenwriter, a director, an actor–but your characters'. The point of art is not to turn the world into a lot of little you's, but to create a world of genuine "others." Put aside your own view of the character. Don't look at him through your eyes, but his eyes. Think about him the way he thinks about himself.

* * *

To watch a Hollywood movie is to see ourselves as seen by ourselves–in other words, blinded in layer after layer of self-delusion. Real art is about seeing ourselves as others see us. Leaving our own views behind to explore different ways of thinking and feeling.

* * *

Make your characters at least as different from the viewer and as resistant to being made over in his image as people are in life. We can't color real people in with our personal emotional crayons. They are already filled in. We must learn to see their colors, rather than impose ours on them. The place you want to get your movie characters to is where they resist the viewer, fight him, defend their own independent identities. A challenging relationship–in life or in art–is the place of growth.

* * *

Brecht said drama should be performed with the house-lights up. If the viewer "falls into the story" and simply "becomes" the character, he loses his ability to think critically about the character. He doesn't learn anything. Create characters sufficiently different that the viewer can't identify with them.

* * *

Hold the viewer just a little outside the action, as when he is watching a documentary. (Needless to say, run the other direction away from all forms of flabby Hollywood romanticism–all subjective editing, all point-of-view shots, all emotional mood music, all soulful shots of eyes looking into eyes!)

* * *

Figures who defeat imaginative appropriation force us out of ourselves to confront genuine "otherness" (in a sense far deeper than is dreamt of by the multiculturalists). For a MasterClass on the subject, look at Todd Haynes' Safe, Paul Morrissey's Trash, or Mike Leigh's Sense of History.

* * *

Real art is not about yanking the viewer around, playing with expectations, showing how ingenious you are, but reverentially exploring something you don't understand. It's the product of humility, not cockiness. Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential, and the complete work of the Coen brothers are to filmmaking what the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball. If we had as high an opinion of film as we do of sports, we wouldn't sit still for them.

* * *

Any art that can't reach the viewer with real emotions can use surprises and shock tactics to simulate them: violent, unexpected, astonishing, or outrageous narrative events or cinematic tricks. If you can't be Picasso, you can be Salvador Dali. You know its a trick when a striking cut, shot, sound doesn't tell you how much the filmmaker knows about life, but how much he knows about film.

* * *

Why do you want your film to look good? Perfection repels; flaws and roughness invite. The smoothness of a mirror holds us on the outside; the bumpiness of a cloud allows our minds to discover unexpected images. The meanings in Norman Rockwell are complete; those in Picasso leave room for a viewer to do something to them and with them. Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep would be a lesser picture if the photography were prettier.

* * *

The fragmentation, the incompleteness of a Matisse pencil sketch is far more interesting than the perfection of a Technicolor postcard photograph. The mystery, the openness of life is left intact. There is more power in evocation than argumentation. More can be suggested than can ever be spoken.

* * *

Look at the barbecue scene in Rick Schmidt's Morgan's Cake or the weight-lifting scene in Harmony Korine's Gummo to appreciate the vitality of roughness. Precisely because the acting and shooting are not polished and smooth, but hesitant and uncertain, they capture the awkwardness of real (not to be confused with reel) life. As with a barbecue, it's better to err on the side of being a little raw than overcooked.

* * *

We know the world we live in is in extreme rough-draft state–in half-illegible hand-writing, severely dog-eared, crinkled, and curled; why do we want our cinematic world in a gilt-edged, Moroccan bound edition?

* * *

Our culture is obsessed with appearances. We are devoted to looking and sounding good. If your main concern is with how your movie looks, you're part of the problem.

* * *

Hollywood films are devoted to quick knowledge: See this? Yep. Get it? Got it. Pauline Kael's whole life was a druggy addiction to snappy pleasures and Dog Yummy quick-treats. A series of seismic wows, pows, zaps, and yikes in quest of orgasmic, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am insights. But her orgasms were fake–because they didn't involve knowledge, acquaintance, trust, sincerity, living with something, or letting it into your heart. No experience that really matters yields to a microwave heat-and-eat presentation.

* * *

In Hitchcock, Tarantino, Stone, Dahl, Hanson, or the Coens, knowledge comes in flashes of insight, in revelations and discoveries–for viewers and for characters. But any experience that can be communicated in a glance, a cut, a witticism, a narrative twist is a superficial one.

* * *

All the important knowledge we acquire in life is slow, tentative, partial, and subject to revision. In Elaine May's and Barbara Loden's work, you watch faces and listen to voices for a long, long time before you understand even a little about them. You know things only by getting to know them. It's the difference between knowledge as insight and knowledge as acquaintance.

* * *

The time in our films is too shallow, too abstract, too merely "indicated." Our films are too fast. We need calmer, slower movies that give us time to think and feel–that allow us to live with and live into a situation the way we do in life. Jeanne Diehlman, The Taste of Cherry, Umberto D, and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, in their different ways, offer the experience of "lived" time.

* * *

Movies like Casablanca, Back to the Future, and Four Weddings and a Funeral have deadlines, but no sense of duration. Watching Tarkovsky, Ozu, or Kiarostami you feel you live with their characters and their experiences for a long time. You get to know these people and experiences the way you get to know people in the world.

* * *

Ultimately, what you must provide the viewer with is not knowledge but experience. Experiencing is far greater than knowing. To know what something means is too easy, too relaxed, too passive a relation to it. The point of art is to force us to undergo longhand experiences that are too complex to be reduced to the shorthand of meaning.

* * *

Harmony Korine said that he wanted the characters and situations in Gummo to have the status of objects in the world. The viewer wouldn't be able to judge them, wouldn't be able to identify with them; would just encounter them. That's a far more complex and challenging relationship than when we bring the image down to our level by plugging our little pet emotions into it and making it over as an extension of us and our trivial belief systems.

* * *

There are too many brainy movies and brainy filmmakers. Too much film school thinking and theorizing behind them. We need films that don't come out of ideas and that defy being translated back into ideas by critics and viewers. Films which don't make us think, but feel–that don't tell us about something, but let us live through it. Movies that tell you what to think and feel are part of the culture of salesmanship.

* * *

We have misunderstood the maxim that art should imitate life. It doesn't mean that art should imitate the appearance of life, but the experience of it–the turbulence, concreteness, turbidness, uncertainty, and immersion of what life feels like.

* * *

We need movies that force viewers to scramble, to work, to climb through the barbed wire resistance of unanalyzed, uneditorialized experiences. Rouse your viewers from the slumber of thought. Challenge them. Force them to become active. Your goal is not to tell them something, but to stimulate and invigorate them, to bring them back to life.

* * *

"One must not be afraid of going wrong. One must not be afraid of making mistakes. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity."–Van Gogh

* * *

"Truth is what is–not what should be. Truth is what is."–Lenny Bruce

* * *

"Film what you are. Not what you want to be. Not what people want you to be. Film what you are. And what you are is good enough."–John Cassavetes

–Excerpted from "The Path of the Artist–II," MovieMaker, Vol. 8, issue 37, (Fall 1999).