An Interview With Happy Here and Now Director Michael Almereyda.

By Jeremiah Kipp

Liane Balaban as Amelie in Michael Almereyda's Happy Here and Now. Photos: Aimee Toedano, courtesy of IFC / Keep Your Head Prods.

Have we become a world of strangers at the dawn of the 21st century? With human interaction moving toward the computer, one might view the Internet as a wedge driving people into isolation. However, recent films imply that the World Wide Web brings us closer in ways we might not expect. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse and Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou Chou view Web sites and chat rooms as a forum where people's neuroses crash together. They're cautious reflections of our times, where everything might be moving a little too fast for comfort.

New York filmmaker Michael Almereyda, who previously helmed the contemporary Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet, takes a more optimistic stance with Happy Here and Now (which just won a special jury award at South By Southwest and is currently playing the festival circuit). His cybernetic romance/detective story takes place in some unspecified future, or maybe the present, where computer users take on different faces and voices to communicate online.

There's an unsettling implication that one of these characters, Muriel (Shalom Harlow), may have vanished into the mainframe, which sets the elusive plot in motion. Muriel's sister Amelia (Liane Balaban) follows the cyber-trail to New Orleans, that most vibrant, sensual and mysterious of American cities. As she and retired private detective Bill (Clarence Williams III) steer through enticing parts of the city not found in picture postcards, a handful of supporting players emerge—a cross section of New Orleans life.

Suspects? Local color? Random digressions? As Happy Here and Now zigzags from resplendent dive bars to rumpled apartments, from The Mother-In-Law Lounge to Turner’s Tire Repair, characters come and go revealing that there's more to their personalities than meets the eye. The Internet faces don't necessarily match up to those of real people, but likewise the real people aren't easy to categorize. The cast of chameleons includes David Arquette as a termite control expert and would-be video auteur, and Almereyda regular Karl Geary in a dual role as Arquette's brother, a stoic fireman, and the pixelated Internet ghost Eddie Mars. The late rhythm and blues legend Ernie K-Doe plays himself.

The strands of Happy Here and Now eventually weave themselves together, not so much as a philosophical treatise (though the ideas of Blaise Pascal and Nikola Tesla figure in prominently), but as an ethereal romance. That may have something to do with New Orleans, or the playful soundtrack—or maybe with characters who, through their encounters, come to feel less alone in this self-described world of strangers.

Viewers will undoubtedly find their own way through the ambiance, but we touched base with Almereyda as a guide into the wonderful labyrinth of Happy Here and Now. This interview was conducted over the computer, with Almereyda supposedly in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, though after seeing the film one might wonder (not without reason) if we actually spoke with Michael Almereyda or his Internet doppelganger.

David Arquette as Eddie in Happy Here and Now.

Filmmaker: For a movie crackling with references to Pascal, Tesla, and the ambiguity of our technological age, Happy Here and Now doesn't feel overly academic. It rolls along like playful, melancholy, sometimes digressive jazz riffs. Do you think setting your story in New Orleans helped that rhythm?

Michael Almereyda: Doesn't feel “overly” academic?I hope it doesn't feel academic at all. Of course, New Orleans has a great deal to do with how the movie looks, moves, and feels. I guess you're throwing me a compliment to say it's jazzy, but the rhythm — a kind of loose-jointed, off-kilter, even clumsy rhythm — isn't all that different from movies I've directed in New York, L.A. or Wichita. Your question implies that we were improvising, that the picture was conjured up like some free and easy jam session.I’d like to be that agile, to actually improvise a movie some day, but this one was fully scripted. The story may swerve and dawdle, but it had a definite structure, echoing images, calculated pairings of characters —

Filmmaker: Two sisters, two brothers, two Teslas —

Almereyda: Right. But none of this was bolted onto a revving plot engine, hitched to conveyor belts carrying each scene in a single direction toward a single conclusion. It isn't that kind of movie.

Filmmaker: The project was originally conceived as a New York story, so how did it eventually find its way to New Orleans?

Almereyda: A New York version was flung together with a fair bit of desperation and fun — just a few scenes shot on DV, while I was still finishing Hamlet. Larry Fessenden had the David Arquette part, and I cast a woman working in a bakery to play the missing sister. They were both excellent, particularly in a long scene that was cut from the movie as it was eventually finished. But I never even got around to editing that footage. The story felt narrow and dingy, and there was something insubstantial about shooting on video. All the same, the core of it — a missing sister; clues leading to a phantom on the Internet — kept bobbing into my head. I was spending time in New Orleans, and realized that this city, as a character or a presence, could counter some of the pessimism I was feeling about the story and about a good deal of contemporary life.

Also, I might as well admit that this early incarnation was shadowing a classic 1943 Val Lewton movie called The Seventh Victim, which centers on a young woman looking for a sister involved with Greenwich Village devil worshipers. The searching sister is aided by a nice bohemian poet who wears a suit and looks a bit like young Bing Crosby, and the ending of the movie, despite some dewy-eyed romantic promise between the girl and the poet, remains very despairing. It hits a kind of black bottom. Anyway, I was thinking about contemporary correspondences to devil worship, which led me to pornography and the Internet.

As I kept at it, once certain characters were set in motion in New Orleans, the story began to wrap around other issues and ideas. It became sweeter and looser and, perhaps, more harmless. Also, around that time I was offered a crack at Auto Focus, the Bob Crane bio pic, before Paul Schrader got his hands on it. I remember reading the script in one sitting, feeling fascinated and depressed. I realized I was interested in the material but didn't want to spend years of my life with Bob Crane and his demons. I didn't want to make a movie about lovelessness.But the demons lurking in the background of Happy Here and Now, the threat of dark forces gathering, felt related to the torments of Bob Crane. Both stories have something to say about how a person's spirit and body don't always match or fit, and how technology doesn't necessarily help, doesn’t bridge the gap. And there’s a certain anguish in that. There was an attempt, in Happy Here and Now, to address that split further by planting the movie in New Orleans, a city with a dual identity, a flesh capital that happens to be deeply soulful and haunted by the past.

Filmmaker: Can you talk about the film's soundtrack?Alongside Eddie Mars’s pseudo-philosophy, it's a kind of subtext for what's happening in a variety of scenes.

Almereyda: Yeah, the music is key, a conspicuous subtext. The movie, after all, is about being in your body and breaking out of it at the same time, and [so far as I know] music comes in handy for that. We included a fair number of local musicians but the songs are pretty wide-ranging, mostly R&B and funk from the seventies (and definitely not jazz). It's not meant to be quaint or nostalgic music, but a live force in the world. And, in fact, the movie probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the way I was fixated on it.

Filmmaker: How so?

Almereyda: When Jonathan Sehring, head of the Independent Film Channel, read the script, he let me know with some excitement that as a teenager the very first concert he ever attended was a Wayne Cochran concert. I had specified this particular Wayne Cochran song on page 19. Sehring sparked to this and talked about it at length. Then he worked around to saying that his company could provide half the money for the movie and we had a deal. Unfortunately, no one else we gave the script to had the same experience with Wayne Cochran, so we ended up slicing the budget in half, and IFC generously became our sole financier.

David Arquette as Eddie in Happy Here and Now.

Filmmaker: I identified with Amelia as someone who hadn't been to New Orleans. Would you say that the movie is told from the perspective of someone looking out at the world with fresh eyes?

Almereyda: Well, we jumped the tourist track and steered clear of the French Quarter. It's a lush place no matter where you land, and that, along with the music, was meant to inform everything. Whatever else she's going through, Amelia is being confronted with this alternate reality, a heightened reality that just happens to be a true place.But I'm always trying to shoot a movie so that the world — whatever world it is — looks new. Which is also a reason I like working with Pixelvision and super-8. Low-tech cameras can make you see things in a fresh way.

Filmmaker: With the technology in Happy Here and Now, characters can communicate via computer but can disguise their faces and names. Did you have to do any research on this sci-fi-or maybe almost sci-fact—part of your story?

Almereyda: I did enough research to feel the concept was plausible. I watched a few episodes of “The Jetsons”.I mean, we know it’s possible for moving images to be treated, filled in, disguised, through design programs.That's how the Pixar people work their magic, right?

Filmmaker: Yes. There's a lot of sculpting, scanning and three-dimensional layering in what they do. So that was the idea?

Almereyda: Vaguely. When it came time to shoot the movie, there was no money for production design. Ideally, the audience suspends disbelief and accepts that a couple electrodes wired to a person's forehead can accommodate a vast network of neurological transactions. I steered the costume designer to keep the “cyber-suits” simple. Quintron [a local musician and actor in the film who] makes a living as an electrician. He helped us rig little buttons of light at the suits’ cuffs and the backs of the neck. When we tried coming up with more complicated headgear, glasses and a kind of plastic crown, we put the contraption on Clarence Williams III and his noble mug looked suddenly ludicrous. We all had a good laugh and decided that less is more.

Filmmaker: One of the early lines in your film is when Amelia says, “The world seemed too big—full of strangers.”Is it fair to say that the technology in Happy Here and Now helps in some ways to bring those individuals closer together?

Ernie K-Doe as himself in Happy Here and Now.

Almereyda: Actually, the line comes from Muriel, the missing woman, in voice-over. Narration from an absent character—it’s an anomaly that no one seems to register. The line arrives alongside a quote from an Emily Dickinson poem about how, “The brain is wider than the sky.” The vastness of the world is relative.The mind's capacity to organize and contain “reality” is really remarkable—and perhaps more so now of course that our capacity is stretched by computers. Even so, people are, as you say, individuals, and they're mysterious. You can know only a few people in your life really well, and the better you know them the more mysterious they tend to become.So, sure, getting linked to someone through the Internet can make the world seem cozier, can bring people virtually closer, but I'm reluctant to trust it. In some crucial ways it's compromised and it's false.Not the same as really seeing and touching someone.That's a point the movie is trying to score. The Internet accommodates a new species of strangers—intimate strangers.

Filmmaker: I was struck when Bill, communicating with Eddie Mars via the interactive computer program, pretends to be Amelia. He winds up confessing more than he would otherwise. This reminded me of that Oscar Wilde quote, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth.”

Almereyda: That scene is striking, I hope — and the masks prove to be revealing—because these two guys are unlikely to meet or confide in one another in the flesh but, disguised online, they do just that. Strangely, a few people have commented that when Clarence Williams is passing himself off as a young woman he bears an uncanny resemblance to the director of the movie.But I've been reluctant to look into this too closely...

Filmmaker: Eddie makes an argument for video and the Internet as being the future for mass communication. But is it worth noting that you frame his argument within a motion picture shot on film, not digital video?

Almereyda: I've worked extensively with video, and I'll keep working with it, but I'm still mesmerized by the way film looks—the resolution, the depth, the radiance—on a big screen.I wanted to get New Orleans on film. I didn't know how to make the wide shots, the exteriors in bright sunlight, look good in video.So the choice for shooting on film boiled down to that.

Filmmaker: As for Eddie’s earnest theorizing…

Almereyda: I agree with him only up to a point.I'm glad you noted he's spinning an argument for communication, for human contact. He's a character in a movie, after all, and he's lonely. The movie industry will pretty surely succumb to digital technology, that is the future, but I'm not convinced it'll constitutionally challenge or change what movies are.They'll always be vehicles for stories for huge audiences — fables, seductions, dreams projected and shared in the dark and marketed like candy or sex.That's the motion picture business.Why should it change?

What Eddie's talking about is a more wistful, intimate thing, which some of us keep hoping for and aspiring to in movies--that is, a way to consciously track and understand life. The challenge—if you're asking me to read between the lines—lies in how to align a more intimate kind of storytelling with the impatient machinery of the movie business, how to shake up or recharge an audience that seems numb or asleep.I've been wondering about this for a long time. The movie under discussion, in theory and practice, was one rough attempt at an answer. I'm ready for other answers.

Jeremiah Kipp is a freelance journalist based in NYC.