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Andrew Bujalski is the writer, director, and
star of two of the most important low budget independent films of the
past three years: Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. He kindly provided
the following reflections on the art and business of indie
filmmaking for posting on the site. I highly recommend his piece. It's slyly funny, as
well as being wise. Just like his movies. - RC
No Trouble with Movies
Andrew Bujalski
The film producers that I know like to remind me
that there is a give-and-take relationship between art and commerce, that a balance must be
struck between the needs of each as in any healthy marriage. I invariably tense up at the
suggestion, not because I don't believe that such a marriage exists - undeniably, art
and commerce are in it together for the long haul - but I am far from convinced that the
relationship ever has been or could be a healthy one. No, I've met too many couples like
a&c; there may well be a genuine deep connection, and certainly there's sweltering
sexy passion, but the pair are essentially incapable of truly caring for and nurturing each
other. I don't mind choosing sides here. To carry
my metaphor surely a step too far, let's say that art is someone I go way back with,
someone, in fact, who I've had a pining crush on since early adolescence. Commerce then is
the boorish boyfriend I've been forced to hang out with for years now and to whom
I've grown grudgingly accustomed. Maybe there was even a weird night or two where commerce
and I somehow ended up sharing a few beers together and it felt like we'd achieved a
fleeting bond. But he's still not right for art. I've seen the way he treats her.
And I've seen him out on the town with plenty of other hot dates, everyone from fashion to
politics, even journalism, you name ‘em. The balance of power between a&c is, for
obvious reasons, at its most grotesquely lopsided in the cinema. We've all been well
educated as to how expensive movies are, and how risky an investment; we understand that when
anything with a semblance of creative spark and/or deviation from accepted commercial formulae
makes it to a screen, the event is roughly equivalent to a prison inmate's successfully
making the dash for freedom without getting taken out by the sharpshooters or torn apart by the
dogs. The bulk of it is a barrage of mediocrity, and film critics who are professionally
employed to receive this barrage seem often to be driven a bit batty by the task. These are
people who have chosen to apply their intellect to analysis of the last century's most
formidable new art form - fair enough - but who therefore end up spending most of their
time on product that, dare I say, does not seem particularly worthy of that level of scrutiny.
Unless we begin from a Zen zero point, and assert that it is the very act of paying out our
attention to films that is holy, and that the object of that attention is irrelevant - well,
any less cosmic view would presumably result in very terse reviews ("There is nothing
worth discussing about this film"). The critics would be left with insufficient word
count, as well as a crushing lack of purpose.  So with all that brain power and not enough to
apply it to, the most exciting critics just go ahead and create the ideas and themes that the
filmmakers may (or may not) have if they hadn't been responsible for returning millions of
dollars worth of investment. I love Brian De Palma and I like Mission to Mars; I
don't know that Armond White is necessarily wrong when he asserts that "It
can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone
like them…[T]he consensus blindness regarding Mission to Mars indicates a cultural
crisis"…but I can't escape the feeling that White is playing at a higher
level - that his criticism is more entertaining and enriching - than the film in
question. The Bernie Mac comedy Mr. 3000 is indeed much better than one might expect it
to be, but if White is correct in his statement that, "It's one of the best movies ever
made about being a black American," then that would seem to speak primarily to a failing
of movies in general.  The plight of the critic seems oddly analogous
to the plight of the actor. Both willingly subject themselves to an industry whose
economics - abetted by unforgiving laws of probability - ensure that they will almost
always be asked to work well below the level of their talents. It is among the most perverse of
movie business ironies that most Hollywood stars are, in fact, almost as gifted as their
publicists would have us believe; but it has been determined that maximum profitability is to be
had by using these gifts as varnish on deliberately mid-range work. Our national acting
treasures practice their craft thusly: Robert DeNiro in Hide and Seek, Meet the
Fockers, Godsend, Analyze That, City by the Sea, etc. Al Pacino in The
Recruit, People I Know, Simone, Insomnia, etc. Dustin Hoffman again in
Fockers, The Runaway Jury, and lending voice talent to Racing Stripes.
Meryl Streep: The Manchurian Candidate, Music of the Heart, One True Thing,
The River Wild. (Perhaps it's to be expected that the titans feel they have nothing
left to prove. What about younger lights of the medium? Denzel Washington [The Manchurian
Candidate, Man on Fire, Out of Time, John Q]? Edward Norton [The
Italian Job, Red Dragon, Death to Smoochy, The Score]?) What if market
research one day revealed that Americans preferred to see their athletes play below their
skills? Now that Lance Armstrong has finally given up these interminable Tour de Frances maybe
we can get him to compete in some shorter, more easily televised races.
"Independent film" was, and is,
supposed to be an arena in which the laws of commercial Darwinism are, if not suspended, at
least a bit less brutal. And to a degree, that is the case. A $10 million film can, literally,
afford to be a bit more adventurous than a $50 million film. The inverse proportion though, does
not hold all the way to the bottom; perhaps you can make a movie for $7,000 like Robert
Rodriguez did, or, even better, $218 like Jonathan Caouette did - maybe you can even set the
new standard and revolutionize cinema for two digits - but unless in your spare time
you've developed innovative new modes of distribution, someone is still going to have to
spend hundreds of thousands to get your film into theaters. (In the
case of Tarnation, hundreds of thousands were necessary before the real work of
distribution even began, just to clear the legal rights to the music and film clips employed
throughout.) Which is to say, unless the film is the breakout hit that everyone sincerely
hopes it will be, or you've gotten away with a wildly overenthusiastic advance,
you're still not going to make your $99 back. The economics of distribution are unfriendly
to all, but most gruesome to the independent.Not that anyone can really tell the
"independents" apart from the dependents; the borders are notoriously slippery. The
nominating committee of the Independent Spirit Awards (indie world answer to the Oscars), rather
than attempting the formidable task of measuring the independence of individual nominees'
spirits, instead generally presumes the limit to be somewhere between $15 and $20
million - films in that range are open to debate, but above it are considered beyond the
pale. Indeed, because of the demands made by people who've given it to you, there does
tend to exist a loose correlation between access to enormous cash and a lack of artistic
integrity, but there is no reliable mathematical formula here. Many, many films on the festival
circuit lack not only the entertainment value but also the aesthetic coherence of, say, Charlie's
Angels.  In the actual trenches of filmmaking, though,
one does try to develop an optimistic view of a low budget, and it's always a comfort to
think of the restrictions one avoids by sidestepping all that string-attached excess money. And
unless you are Charlie's Angels auteur McG or are in his rarefied company, then
there is always a production out there more demonstrably extravagant than yours. As in the
classic Charles and Ray Eames science class film strip Powers of Ten, there is always
another exponent by which you can zoom in or out - the $10 million filmmaker can decry the
decadence of the $100 million filmmaker, the $1 million filmmaker can decry the $10 mil guy or
gal, I can decry them if I feel like, and some kid with a DV camera and Final Cut Pro can decry
me. (And another kid who can't afford Final Cut - who only has iMovie - keeps it
even more real.) Perhaps the most reliable definition of
independence is the one that your parents had in mind when they spoke of encouraging yours. They
weren't talking about your nonconformist fashion sense - they meant that they no
longer want to pay your bills for you. This tightly pragmatic definition applied to film would
mean that either the filmmaker was funding his/her film out of pocket, or, at least no artistic
decision was ever influenced by a hope to return, or grow, the investment capital. This is the
characterization of indieness that has the greatest whiff of truth, but it also ends up
disqualifying the great, great majority of movies that any of us ever see. Most films that fit
this bill are experimental shorts, or student films. Generally you have to go to the shorts
program at a film festival to see them; though as film festivals become a more competitive
sub-industry of their own, their programmers grow more obligated to stack the deck with crowd
pleasers and the horrifying creature known as the "calling card" film (loosely
defined, commercials in search of a product). All art industries are ugly. Painters and poets
and other highbrow folk still have to chase benefactors and often feel demeaned in the process.
But they at least are spared the scenario in which they cannot practice their art at all without
first pre-submitting an overview of all artistic decisions to approval by corporate officers. (A
screenplay is cheap and easy to produce and as such is the currency one uses to try to squirm
past the first several tiers of guardians between filmmakers and financing. As a predictor of
the finished product, it is approximately as useful as sheet music would be toward signing a
rock band.)  Mel Gibson didn't bother submitting his vision to
industry simps. The Passion of the Christ was paid out of his own pocket, and as such he
has a fair claim to being one of America's premier indies. Though the simps are kicking
themselves in retrospect for passing up the mint that Passion ended up becoming, they
cannot be blamed for thinking that its commercial potential was, at least, uncertain, especially
when Gibson was proclaiming his intent not to subtitle the Aramaic in the film. (His
retreat from that thrillingly quixotic decision, even if he hadn't really meant it,
admittedly seems a stain on claims to "independent spiritedness.") Like many people
who were not raised hardcore Catholic, my primary response to the film was
bewilderment - but please let us give the man credit for making a film that he felt he had
to, and one that was at the very least a good deal more compelling than most of what his acting
career was offering him, and us (Signs, We Were Soldiers, What Women Want,
The Patriot).  George Lucas has been promising since at least
1980 to pull a Gibson and make something according to his own idiosyncratic interests, but as of
this writing there is no evidence that such a project is forthcoming. In interviews he
repeatedly expresses some sadness at the ravages of his success and a dream of returning to his
experimental roots à la his debut feature, the marvelous 70s dystopia THX-1138.
Ignorant of the specific pressures of his daily life, an outsider can't help but wonder:
What is he waiting for? Presumably he can afford to self-distribute if he fears his movie would
be too strange for anyone to take on; and if it's still too weird for the exhibitors, he
can just build his own theaters, can't he? And if the films are so experimental
that still no one comes, surely he still has enough money left over to continue his charitable
works and leave a very comfortable inheritance to his children, right? Is it just that he fears
that he might offend his Star Wars collaborators if he turns his back on blockbusters?
Would this be as irresponsible as the CEO of General Motors saying he was sick of cars and
everybody ought to just ride a bike? Maybe it's absurd to look for signs of the
independent spirit in multimillionaires. Perhaps the two are indeed mutually exclusive. Though
still I'm hung up on Gibson; what more can we possibly ask of an artist than that he/she
follow his/her most unpopular passion, or Passion, wherever it leads? To which, I suppose, the
finicky might respond: We should also ask them to produce great art.Well. That's awfully subjective,
isn't it? Where does the conversation go from there? John Cassavetes? Cassavetes, I concur, is the best. His films do
indeed make most everyone else's look like frivolous garbage. There is not much else
useful I can say about him as an artist except to encourage anyone not familiar with his films
to check them out - but even that feels a bit unnecessary and uncomfortable. His films
don't need me to proselytize on their behalf; they are best stumbled upon, by accident, in
a dark cavern, where the movies belong. Indie cinema's JC, like Gibson's JC,
is easily cast as a martyr, having found far greater critical and pop-critical accord
posthumously than he might have hoped for in his lifetime. These days he is popularly
acknowledged as having invented American independents - though other films and makers may
have anticipated some of the specific innovations associated with Shadows, that film
nonetheless appears in retrospect to be the wellspring for all that has followed, much as
conventional wisdom now appoints Robert Johnson's blues as the official, original
progenitor of rock ‘n' roll. While he still walked the earth, Cassavetes had plenty
of critical detractors, not to mention that most of his films were commercial failures. And in a
way this seems a blessing - it's hard to imagine that his work would not have suffered
had it enjoyed consistent success in the marketplace. If studios had believed there was a
reliable way to generate profit from his oeuvre, presumably the result would have been either
(a) work compromised, intentionally or unintentionally, by the pressures of financial
expectations, or (b) an artistic implosion, perhaps on a smaller scale than George Lucas'
22 year withdrawal from directing, but of the same species.It's only recently occurred to me that
perhaps there's a perfectly sensible reason why so many excellent artists are not
appreciated in their lifetimes (filmmakers specifically - no matter how totemic the figure,
Orson Welles, Woody Allen, whoever, extremely few if any go their whole career without having
their work tampered with by middlemen whose names will not be recorded in history, all
the better for them to get away with it). Standing before Van Gogh's paintings, we wonder
how the world could have been so ignorant as to have not lavished riches and praise on the man.
Driving under a billboard for Oprah Winfrey's Their Eyes Were Watching God TV
movie, I can't help but wonder what Halle Berry was paid for her participation and what
Zora Neale Hurston might have done with that money in the last years of her life when she was
working as a housecleaner. But their contemporaries surely had a different, and distressingly
reasonable, perspective: Hey! This Van Gogh fellow thinks that his paintings are
important? I've got a family to feed here! I am ensuring the survival of the species!…I
find it difficult to begrudge that person their lack of enthusiasm for art. Cassavetes regularly
tried to get his films booked into theaters in minority neighborhoods, on the theory that
working class people should be able to identify with his characters far better than the
bourgeoisie - and of course, the exhibitors that he sold on the idea invariably lost money
on it. Does one blame the working class, as a class, for not appreciating Cassavetes? Does one
blame them as individuals? Or is blame rather beside the point here? With Cassavetes the man lost to us and only Cassavetes the
profoundly, unassailably great filmmaker left for our consideration, it is tempting to appoint
him the avenging angel of anti-Hollywood artistry. The Independent Spirit Award named for
Cassavetes is the award given to feature films made for under $500,000 - well under
Hollywood's radar - but the majority of Cassavetes' own films cost more that
amount (and that's before adjusting for inflation). Though he no doubt held contempt for
many individuals in Hollywood and a great deal of their product, it doesn't jibe that he
could have hated the system in toto. Of his 11 feature films, six of them were at least
partially financed by Hollywood studios. The five that he self-financed would not have been
possible if not for his, and wife Gena Rowlands', very lucrative careers acting in
Hollywood movies. (Cassavetes often turned up in just-for-the-paycheck fare like Incubus,
or, a few steps classier, Brian De Palma's The Fury - the final scene of which,
wherein his character meets an extravagantly violent demise, is a particularly potent image,
though I'm not sure what it means. An exploding Cassavetes will stick in a young
filmmaker's consciousness.) There is also the fact he lived in Hollywood for
approximately the last 30 years of his life. No evidence suggests that he hated the most
hateable of U.S. cities. Even George Lucas, who might have been King of Los Angeles, refused to
move there - he's a die-hard Northern Californian. But New York born and bred JC liked
the sunshine, and if he didn't love the sins he still had room in his heart for the
sinners. "Anyone who can make a film, I already love," he said to an interviewer.* Most of film's iconic iconoclasts are/were
well versed in the ways of Hollywood, rather than existing solely above or to the side of it, as
we might like them to be. Mike Leigh, Britain's patron saint of refusal-to-compromise
wrote an article for The Guardian recently about his most recent trip to the Academy
Awards. He says of his predictable loss in the Best Director category, "My immediate
disappointment is for Scorsese, in truth." We can comfortably picture Leigh getting
enthused about Who's That Knocking at My Door?, or Mean Streets, or Taxi
Driver. Maybe all the way to Cape Fear. But is he really saddened here by a defeat
for The Aviator? Has Scorsese ever made a film more contrary to our notion of
Leigh's aesthetics?
Paul Morrissey is a
Leonardo DiCaprio fan. Stan Brakhage loved the South Park movie. There are people on the
planet who only watch obscure experimental cinema, but they are few and far between, and they
are not obscure experimental filmmakers. Filmmakers
who would choose to work in direct opposition to the Hollywood/"indiewood" system
have yet to effect its toppling. Nor have filmmakers attempting to "subvert" the
system from within. Did the oft-discussed homosexual subtext of Top Gun advance the cause
of gay rights? When a movie like Men in Black 2 is lauded by critics for its sly
political commentary, one must ask who exactly is subverting whom. More likely the political
advocacy has been turned into a Taco Bell commercial than vice versa. Again, commerce is very
much the dominant partner in this marriage. And in fact, art is sometimes even a silent third
partner; both Hollywood and indie films are more often designed as cultural artifacts than art
per se, coded signals in a national dialogue, aimed at demographics, rather than items and
experiences meant to be received by individuals.Of course there
are filmmakers who do work entirely outside of either maxi- or mini-Hollywood models. In various
travels with my first film, I had the good fortune to briefly cross paths with guys like James
Benning, Peter Hutton,  the Kuchar brothers, Jon Jost - people whose specific aesthetics are
unique and quite unlike each others, but who share the common bond of having staked out niches
of extremely independent cinema after having come up during the heyday of U.S.
"underground" cinema. (Mike Kuchar was actually able to quit his day job for several
years from income generated by Sins of the Fleshapoids' long New York run, quite
unthinkable these days for a film devoid of niceties like, for example, synchronized sound
recording - and not even full feature length! - in a city glutted by new releases.)
Nearly all of these people support themselves by teaching, as Stan Brakhage did in his later
years. At any given moment, like kids in bands 40 years their junior, they may or may not have
health insurance. When Brakhage died he left significant medical expenses behind him; Sonic
Youth and others performed benefits to aid his family.As paragons
of artistic integrity, these men are all suitable heroes. If "having it all" is more
your style then perhaps your heroes are more along the lines of Steven Soderbergh or Gus Van
Sant, the guys who theoretically have their cake  (affirmatively weird movies like Schizopolis
or Gerry) and eat it too (Ocean's Twelve, Good Will Hunting). The
so-called "one for you, one for me" model seems to be a slippery slope indeed, but
as long as the occasional interesting film gets squeezed out of it I won't object. (I
suspect that this sort of career track, which requires ability to finesse and manipulate many
different sorts of people, may be a manifestation of a mild form of sociopathy; which
isn't to say that more obstinate artists don't suffer from worse psychological
disorders.) At any rate, none of these people were the heroes I grew up with - like the
great majority of film lovers, I only came to the arty stuff after decades of absorbing and
learning the language of the big product.
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Probably the most useful lesson I ever picked up on
the process of independent  filmmaking came from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.In the
first scene, Kirstie Alley, as Lt. Saavik, participates in a simulated battle exercise called
the Kobayashi-Maru. (I liked that, in a Trek universe filled with fake-sounding alien
names, "Kobayashi-Maru" sounded unmistakably Japanese/Earthling, as if to further
drive the point that this story has useful applications on our own planet.) The K-M is a no-win
scenario that is designed simply to test potential officers' mettle under stress; only
Capt. Kirk has ever avoided simulated death-by-Klingons in the exercise. Saavik, after her own
nerve-rattling defeat, asks Kirk how he did it, and he admits:he cheated. He hacked the
computer before the test and reprogrammed the parameters to make it beatable.
For me this
is the most potent metaphor for independent filmmaking. The system, wherein thousands upon
thousands of aspiring auteurs compete against each other for desperately limited resources, is
not designed to accommodate the triumph of an individual vision, yours or anyone else's.
So like Kirk, you've got to pull a cheat, a hack. The easiest and best hack is to have
unfettered access to extreme wealth. Failing that, more creativity and elbow grease are
required, not to mention endless favors from friends and new-friends. The good news is that the
system can indeed be circumvented. The bad news is that, again like Capt. Kirk, you've
still never really taken the test. You may open a door or two in the film industry, but
you still don't know if you can survive once you step inside - and unless your hack is
somehow self-replenishing and/or limitless, you can only avoid that step for so long. Behind the
door lie ugly beasts worse, and more wrathful, than Khan.
Maybe you can just keeping pulling out new tricks, provided you're not too exhausted.
Supposing that you manage not to get ruined by failure, or, far more devastating, success, you
might keep pulling it off. David Cronenberg has said that "at the time you're being an
artist, you're not a citizen. You have, in fact, no social responsibility  whatsoever." Be
aware, though, that living up to that lack of responsibility is a lot of work. Whether or not the extraneous
stuff - learning to act as your own accountant, your own lawyer, your own press agent, your
own distributor - is necessary or not is very much in the eye of the beholder. What
education I've had in these things all occurred grudgingly; I have a deep-seated
superstition that acknowledging the realities of the "biz" only feeds its power.
Willful naïveté is a defense against evil. I may well have invited the devil in by
speaking his name in these pages.So before I make matters worse, here, then, is my
final analysis: the cinema is fine. There's nothing wrong with the art form that the
dismantlement of capitalism wouldn't fix. Or that, at least, would be a good shot in the
arm. Until then, movies shall continue on as most human endeavors. Miracles will occur; being
miracles, they will defined by their scarcity as much as by their brilliance. But some real
light will surely fall through the cracks, onto the screen. Our spirits are dependent on it.
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