An Interview with Ray Carney about the Digital Revolution
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Doing It

What does the future hold for indie filmmakers with the rise of desktop filmmaking? Do you see any interesting filmmakers out there working in digital video?

All of the young filmmakers I know are working in digital, since they can’t afford film! Well, maybe not all, but most of them. I think Andrew Bujalski is a hold-out. The obvious advantage of digital is that you can massively over-shoot. I just got off the phone with a friend who told me he had thirty hours of footage to work with to build his new movie out of. It would have been out of the question to buy and process that much 16mm film.

The downfall of most low-budget indie work is the acting. By necessity, young filmmakers usually have to use students, relatives, and other non-actors in their work. If they are limited to one or two takes because of the cost of film and processing, the results can be embarrassing. Massive over-shooting allows them to compensate. They can shoot until their actors are too tired to “act” or put down their actorly mannerisms, and start being real. My friend said he even shot some stuff like a documentarian, filming his actors when they weren’t acting, when they didn’t realize they were being filmed. Cassavetes did the same thing. It can make a real difference. As Renoir said, the whole scene is saved when the girl playing the servant thinks the shot is over and lets out a sigh.

When you don’t have to worry about an eleven minute mag, you can do a scene over and over again. You can take chances. You can improvise. You can have fun, play around, experiment. Chaplin shot this way and it’s always good for the work.

Having a smaller crew and more portable equipment can also make things less intimidating. The mood is different – not so scary and formal and unnatural. The camera and crew aren’t as obtrusive. And, of course, the PC has revolutionized editing, to take away a little of the time pressure and cost from that part of the process as well.

Technology Does Nothing

The new Sony and JVC HDV cameras are amazing. (A mid-2005 postscript from Ray Carney: The Canon XL2 HDV Camera is the one I would now recommend. It has exceptional video quality, great audio input capability, a 24-fps mode for transfer to film--be sure any camera you buy to make a feature has this, comes with a 20X zoom standard, and can be used with a wide range of other Canon lenses, prime and non-prime. It sells for less than $5000 as of the date I am writing this.) Near 35mm quality in a $5000 camera. Commercial high-definition TV-station quality. And Avid has a new editing program that you can work on it with in post. So anyone can really make a feature film now. A high-quality feature film at used car prices as Rick Schmidt puts it.

But, but, but… no matter how cheap filmmaking becomes, there won’t ever be a glut of masterpieces. Technology does nothing by itself. Did composers write better music or music criticism suddenly improve when cheap recording and playback methods became available? Did film criticism suddenly improve because of the invention of the VCR and DVD? Did architectural design programs result in better buildings being built? If technology made people smarter and more sensitive, the second half of the twentieth century should have seen the greatest flowering of creativity in the history of art. Instead we know most music, painting, architecture, and film got worse.

Better, smaller, cheaper cameras don’t make better films; better filmmakers do. The digital revolution will probably quadruple the number of feature films shot and edited in a given year, but most of them will still be garbage, just like most of them are now. Look at the first video revolution ten or fifteen years ago – when Beta SP and Hi-band 8 became cheap. What is its legacy? Porno flicks. There won’t be any more artists born in a given year just because movies become cheaper to make. That particular form of insanity is in your DNA, and you either have it or you don’t. Pen and paper are the ultimate low-budget technology, but how many great novels and plays and poems are written every year? I don’t see a stream of Shakespeares being produced just because writing is inexpensive. Emotional clichés still lurk like land mines waiting to destroy you.

As a violinist friend used to say, it’s a poor musician who blames his instrument. A real artist can use whatever is available. Picasso could have created masterpieces with a burnt stick and a piece of chalk. In fact he did. They’re called charcoals. Cassavetes could have used a cheap, old-fashioned VHS camera and created scenes that were worth watching. In fact he did. In the last ten years of his life he filmed scenes that way at home just for the fun of doing it. Michael Almereyda made three amazing movies with a Pixel-cam, a sixty-nine dollar toy video camera for kids: Another Girl, Another Planet, The Rocking Horse Winner, and a documentary about the Sundance film festival.

It’s a faulty analysis that locates the problem in the cost of the production. The harder nut to crack is distribution. How does a young, unknown filmmaker get a movie into a theater or onto mainstream TV – the internet doesn’t count; the internet is a joke – no matter how it is made? The rub, of course, is that the more original the work, the harder it will be to sell it to the corporations that run those enterprises. It might not be “entertaining” enough. It might require you to think a little. It might be different. Or the worst sin of all in our culture of complaint: It might offend someone – another name for forcing them to think.

The life-or-death struggle every artist fights is not with technology but with our commercial culture. The businessmen, the accountants, the advertising guys always want to get their fingers in the pie – suggesting cuts, trying to speed up the pacing, pandering to some imaginary demographic – and if you let them convince you to make a single change, it’s the death of personal expression. If anyone ever tells you to do something because someone else won’t understand what you’ve done, you know they are talking nonsense. Generic truth – what “they” want, need, or feel – is not truth anymore. Truth can only be what you feel. The more personal your work, the more idiosyncratic and eccentric, the more truth there is in it. What’s the Emerson quote? “Speak your most private, secret, personal thought, and you speak to all.” When you try to speak for everyone, you speak for no one.

The distribution problem won’t go away and I don’t have a solution for it. If I did, I could go on TV and sell “how to get rich quick” kits. [Laughs] All I can tell you is that every week I get videos in the mail that are better than anything on HBO or PBS, accompanied with painful, personal letters describing how the filmmakers can’t get them screened or distributed. The indie films that get lucky, the ones you hear about, are almost always picked up for the wrong reasons – not because of their intrinsic merit, but because they deal with some flash-in-the-pan topical theme, have sexual content, or appeal to a special-interest demographic – blacks or feminists or whomever. If you don’t play to a special interest, forget it. When an edgy indie film about the Ku Klux Klan or middle school sex or high school violence gets picked up, it’s not a vote for art; it’s a business calculation of how many talk shows the distributor thinks the director can get onto because of the hot button issue. That’s why most of the people who claim to want to help the indie movement are actually part of the problem.

What do you mean?

I’ll give you an example of how screwed up the support system for indie film is. I already mentioned Andrew Bujalski as an artist whose work I admire. Well let me tell you the story of how I first came across his work and what happened after that. I got a tape of his first film, Funny Ha Ha, in the mail a few years ago, along with a note saying that he couldn’t get it screened anywhere. Nobody was interested. It’s not that uncommon a story. I hear it all the time. Almost exactly the same thing happened with Caveh Zahedi’s Little Stiff, which I got it in the mail with the same kind of note attached to it: “Please look at my movie. I can’t get it screened anywhere. Nobody is interested in it. Can you help me?”

Well, I looked at Funny Ha Ha and thought it was wonderful. It’s a study of emotional clumsiness and imaginative confusion among the young and aimless, but better than Harmony Korine, because it was not about Diane Arbus gargoyles but recognizable people. The characters were just as twitchy and odd as Harmony’s, but less exaggerated, in other words: closer to life, truer than Harmony’s. And to make it even more interesting, the main character is a young woman and Bujalski really understood and appreciated her point of view. That’s almost unprecedented for a male filmmaker – and totally beyond Harmony’s capability.

Anyway, just as I had done after I viewed Caveh’s tape, I went into action to try to help Andrew out. I sent him a quote to use on his web site; I made a few phone calls; I sent a few letters and emails to theater and festival programmers. Now this is where the story gets interesting. Remember nobody but nobody wanted the film to start with, but a few weeks later the buzz has gotten going and everything has changed. Now everybody wants the movie. The funny thing is that many of these people are the exact same ones who turned down, or refused to look at, Bujalski’s film six months earlier, before I wrote or called them and told them how great it was. And now they love it. Isn’t that funny? Critics and programmers are such sheep. They just need to be told what to like. You just have to tell them, and then everything is OK. Isn’t that sick? Anyway, back to the main story: Now that everyone has changed their minds about his movie, Bujalski calls me and tells me he suddenly has three offers to screen it in Boston and one in another city. But guess what? Each programmer wants him to turn down the others. Each one says he doesn’t want the movie unless he can be the first to screen it. The argument is the usual one about the smallness of the audience for indie film and how hard it is to sell tickets and how this particular programmer needs exclusivity to cash in on any reviews that appear.

Do you see how sick that is? The programmers claim to want to help the indie, but the only person they really want to help is themselves. They act like the filmmaker owes them something for showing the movie he poured his blood into and they didn’t put up a penny for. This goes on all the time – at Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Cannes. They all want you to give them your movie first so they can get the glory and the reviews. And most indies end up agreeing to their terms. The theaters and festivals have the filmmakers, who are absolutely desperate for a screening, over a barrel and take advantage of it.

So what is a filmmaker to do?

Every indie has to resist this kind of squeeze play for the good of all of the others in the future. I told Bujalski to tell the bookers that none of them could have his movie unless they agreed to his terms, which would include playing it everywhere he wants to, whenever he wants to. If all of the independent filmmakers did that in a given year, the indie theater and festival bookers would have to cave in. What are they going to do? Not show any films that year? I’m sure he didn’t dare take my advice.

Bujalski’s situation also illustrates the futility of paying an entrance fee and sending a video as a cold submission to a film festival. It’s like sending an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher. Almost no one gets published or screened that way. It’s practically all done by word-of-mouth recommendation. Only chumps play by the rules and pay the fees. But of course the festivals will be the last ones to tell you this. Right up to Cannes and Sundance, they maintain the pious fiction that anybody can get in. It just ain’t so. You have to be known to them or your film has to come with a powerful recommendation. Ask me sometime about the student Academy Awards screenings I’ve been on the jury for. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about how they are run.

This page contains a short section from an interview Ray Carney gave to filmmaker Shelley Friedman. In the selection above, Ray Carney discusses the limitations of Hollywood filmmaking and the fallacy of thinking of art in financial terms. The complete interview covers many other topics. For more information about Ray Carney’s writing on independent film, including information about obtaining three different interview packets in which he gives his views on film, criticism, teaching, the life of a writer, and the path of the artist, click here.