By J.T. Leroy

Giovanni Andrade as Charley in Eban and Charley.

With the shakeup of Hollywood by new and inexpensive digital cameras and home editing software, a new kind of film and filmmaker is emerging, one that isn't afraid to tackle new ground in style and content. With benefits unique to digital video, the most obvious of which is low production cost, filmmakers like Thomas Vinterberg and Harmony Korine have paved the way for filmmakers who seem to be more artists than entertainers, more concerned with social exploration than box-office potential.

In his first short film, Growing Up and I'm Fine, James Bolton told a story involving two male friends hustling on the streets of Los Angeles. Made while he was still a teen, the film played festivals around the world and gained him the reputation of a cinematic outsider. Bolton is no stranger to provocative cinema, but in his first feature, Eban and Charley, with its honest portrayal of an intergenerational gay relationship, he may well have directed one of the more controversial films of the year.

J.T. Leroy: Given the subject matter of Eban and Charley, finding people willing to put up money for this film is kind of a miracle. Can you talk about the road from finished draft to securing financing?

James Bolton: Well, a lot of people told me they liked the script and seemed to be genuinely interested in finding money to make it, but then they just never came through. One producer who read the script several years ago was Chris Monlux and he had liked it and wanted to help me with it – but he was really involved in the world of rock and roll at the time. He was managing the Dandy Warhols and promoting concerts in the Pacific Northwest. So we just kept in touch and one day he said, "I think I’ve got a little money for us to do this."

JTL: Was shooting digitally necessary for financial reasons or was it also an aesthetic choice?

JB: It was both really. I had seen Celebration and had learned about Dogme 95 and knew this film would be perfect to shoot digitally both because we had such a small amount of money and because I wanted a certain intimacy with the actors that small cameras really lend themselves to.

JTL: What was the initial inspiration?

Director James Bolton. Photo by Larry Barth.

JB: The story was inspired by a situation involving a friend of mine from years ago. As a teenager, I used to hang out at an alternative music club on the beach on the East Coast, and I had a friend there who happened to be dating someone older. This boy was incredibly sensitive, mature and intelligent; he had been involved in a program for gifted and talented kids at his school and I think he’d even skipped a grade in junior high.  But, at some point, the boy’s older boyfriend began to have a problem with the relationship because of some pressure he was feeling from friends telling him that it was inappropriate, and so he ended it. This was very difficult for the boy, who was very much in love.

JTL: The boy in your film, Charley (played by Giovanni Andrade), is 14 years old when the film starts and the man he falls in love with, Eban (played by Brent Fellows), is 29 years old. How do you feel about underage relationships?

JB: I think they have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.  I think intergenerational relationships, especially those involving very young people, are not understood and therefore feared and demonized.  

JTL: I heard someone came to you under the pretense of getting a job on the film, but was there actually to see exactly what you were doing – to see if you were making a film that endorsed underage relationships, which she was not into.

JB: Yeah, there was this woman who heard about the film and was, I think, a bit worried. She had just graduated from Columbia University with a degree in social work, and she just did not think teenagers should be in relationships with adults. I think she thought what we were doing might be reckless and irresponsible and so she came and asked if she could read the script and so we gave her a copy. She came to me the next day and said she’d spent the night rethinking her ideas on the issues involved, and she ended up working as a production assistant on the movie.

JTL: Regarding the style of the film, which Gus Van Sant has called, "demonically pensive," and "Bergmanesque," it does seem to have this, I guess, European quality to it with regard to pacing, cinematography, and the sparseness of dialogue. How did this style develop?

JB: I’ve always enjoyed European cinema more than American cinema. I knew I wanted the film to be shot hand-held and to have a bit of a documentary feel and that the pacing should be slow, more like real life. I was very lucky to have worked with Judy Irola, my cinematographer. She comes from a heavy documentary background but she’s also shot some terrific narrative feature films including a winner of the Palm d'Or at Cannes, Northern Lights, and Everett Lewis’s An Ambush of Ghosts, for which she won the prize for Best Cinematography at Sundance. After a brief initial talk, she knew exactly what I was going for and just did a terrific job.

JTL: How did she come on to the project?

JB: Judy was someone whose work I had always liked and when we got this project going I contacted her. I just called her up and she told me to send the script. She had been planning to do this film for Percy Adlon and I think they were still trying to put the financing together. So she was available. I told her we only had a little money and she said she was very particular about the projects she chose and it all depended on the script and how she responded to it.

JTL: Had she ever shot anything digitally before this?

Brent Fellows and Giovanni Andrade in Eban and Charley.

JB: No, and she was just beginning to hear about it. She was an advisor at the graduate cinematography school at USC, and the whole digital thing really hadn’t caught on yet. She found it fascinating and wanted to know more about it and I think that was a part of the overall attraction to the project. Since doing our film she’s done digital features for Lucas Reiner and Betty Thomas, and now some the biggest cinematographers in Hollywood are doing digital features and calling her with questions.

JTL: Would you have left out the score to try to get Eban and Charley made through Dogme 95?

JB: No. I really appreciate what the Dogme 95 manifesto represents, and I thought they might be into helping with this film, but I’d heard it was this long process to get approved. And, really, as soon as I decided to shoot digitally, we had the money. Plus, I felt the film needed a score. Music is very important to me and it is important to this movie.

JTL: The score is really trippy and cool, but it’s not your usual film-score music; the music is used very sparingly. How did you hook up with Stephin Merritt, lead singer of a band I dig, The Magnetic Fields?

JB: I used him because his record got a ten out of ten in Spin. Seriously, the older character in the relationship is a singer/songwriter and I wanted someone who could write some brief pieces of music, as the lead character might. The lead character is very sensitive, and though a bit older, his maturity is more in line with the young boy with whom he is romantically involved. I wanted the music to mirror the tenderness of the personalities and some of the situations, but I also wanted music that would offset this very romantic story with a specific dissonance that is anchored in Eban’s repressed maturity. Stephin is a very prolific songwriter and exceptionally talented and very quickly identified what kind of sounds would work in the film.

JTL: Eban and Charley is set to be released in the U.S. and Canada later this year by Picture This! Entertainment. How did you find a distributor?

JB: I got really lucky in a way. The head of the company came to our first public screening in San Francisco, with his mom, and he met with Chris and me the next day and made us an offer. It was our first screening and it really came as a surprise.

JTL: So what are you working on now?

JB: I’m working on a feature film that deals with growing up gay in the south that I plan to shoot in North Carolina.

JTL: Given that you’ve directed films about gay hustlers and underage, intergenerational relationships, somehow I know there’s much more to the story than that.

JB: You can count on it!

Links:
Picture This! Entertainment www.picturethisent.com/home.html

Cinematographer Judy Irola on www.usc.edu

Composer Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields, stephinsongs.wiw.org

Additional links for Eban and Charley:
www.filethirteen.com/reviews/eban/eban.htm
www.seattlequeerfilm.com/00/films/L04.htm
Review on www.findarticles.com