hal hartley
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Okay, first the exciting news: Hal Hartley has made a new film!
What’s the “but”? Well, it’s not ready quite yet. It’s in post, though, so it’s close. To help it get to the finish line, Hartley has launched a Kickstarter campaign for its final post-production. He’s also appealingly pitched his campaign as a “DVD Collector’s Edition Pre-Buy.” For $25 you’ll receive this limited edition when the film is finished. And there are other rewards too. For example, for $1,000 you can be a co-producer. That’s right, a grand gets you a very nice IMDb credit.
Here’s what Hartley writes about the project on the Kickstarter page:
It’s like this: though I set out to make a one-hour featurette, like my earlier films Surviving Desire (1992) or The Book of Life (1998), by the time I was done I thought I ought to present it as the pilot for a mini-series. Everyone seemed to think this was a great idea (television being the future of filmmaking and all…) and I had some genuine interest from television companies.
However, finally, it seems Meanwhile (the series) just isn’t what the television industry requires at the moment. But I’m very proud of this one hour film and I’m certain that people who follow what I do will dig it. My friend and collaborator of many years, DJ Mendel, gives an outstanding performance as Joe Fulton—the hardest working unsuccessful over-achiever in New York.
Consider donating to finance the film’s sound mix and the production of the DVD. Watch the film’s trailer at Hal’s site. And here’s how he describes the film’s storyline:
Meanwhile concerns Joe Fulton, a man who can do anything from fixing your sink to arranging international financing for a construction project. He produces online advertising and he’s written a big fat novel. He’s also a pretty good drummer. But success eludes him.
For Joe can’t keep himself from fixing other people’s problems. His own ambitions are constantly interrupted by his willingness and ability to go out of his way for others.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
By Anthony Kaufman
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb was our cover story in Spring, 1995. Consensus was that our cover, which was an illustration by the film’s subject, R. Crumb, didn’t really work. Newsstand distributors mistook the issue for a comics magazine, leading to retail confusion. Also in the book: Swimming with Sharks, Basketball Diaries, My Family, and Berenice Reynaud interviewing filmmaker Lourdes Portillo about her The Devil Never Sleeps. Liza Bear interviewed Atom Egoyan about his Exotica, who spoke of the film and his impending fatherhood:
Filmmaker: You were becoming a father while Exotica was in production. What effect did being an expectant parent have on the orientation of the whole project?
Egoyan: Everyone talks about the joy of the anticipation of having a child, and that’s very much part of it, but there’s also a sense of dread as well, of not being able to fulfill the expectations of what being a parent means. There’s just a lot of fear, I think. And I guess Exotica is a film that really capitalizes on that. The incredible responsibility of leading someone through a life.
And, Peter Bowen wrote about Hal Hartley’s Amateur:
But with this film, Hartley, perhaps, is the most sophisticated “amateur” as he systematically unlearns his knowledge of genre and film editing, refusing, for example, to make a formula thriller or adhere to standard practices of establishing shots and camera placement. Hartley explains, “I thought I could take genre elements – a guy running into a place with a gun or things like that – and have fun with them and still avoid it being a genre piece.” And while Hartley watched box-office blockbusters like The Fugitive and Jurassic Park, as well as generic TV police dramas, as models, he tried to view them through the eyes of a neophyte so that his film could become, as he quipped to Graham Fuller, “a TV cop show made by someone who doesn’t know how to make TV cop shows.” Indeed, even the film’s violence explodes as both too much and too little, so that when
… Read the rest
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Steve James’ Hoop Dreams, Darnell Martin’s first feature, I Like it Like That, experimental filmmaker Eric Saks, and a report on non-linear editing, which was new at the time — those were all in our Fall, 1994 edition. But our big story was our cover — Hal Hartley’s interview of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard was in town for an exhibition of his work, including his new “self-portrait,” JLG BY JLG. Hartley met with Godard at 9:00AM in his suite at the Essex Hotel, and d.p. and photographer Gabor Szitanyi snapped the smoky shot of Godard we ran. Nothing from this issue is online, but we rekeyed it so I could quote from it here.
Peter Bowen’s intro:
In the world of independent film, the element of dependence – whether it be financial or aesthetic – is perhaps as important, if not more so, than the drive for independence. For Hal Hartley, whose fourth feature, Amateur, will be released this Spring by Sony Classics, and by whose cool style and comic irony can now be detected in a new generation of filmmakers, it is the earlier figure of Jean-Luc Godard who stands as a kind of mentor. Indeed it is Godard’s slapstick, critical, and, more often than not, adoring relation to images that so clearly showed the way for Hartley and so many others. In New York for the opening of his new works, JLG BY JLG and Histoire(s) du Cinema, as part of the traveling Gaumont Exhibition of French Film, Godard meets his protégé for the first time. But in the world of dependence these independent filmmakers have certainly met before, if only in the images they take from others and in the ones they leave behind.
The interview started somewhat hilariously with Godard’s reaffirmation of the Gallic love of Jerry Lewis.
HARTLEY: I saw your self-portrait film (JLG by JLG) yesterday afternoon, and I wanted to bring someone with me. As it turned out, I brought my friend Martin Donovan, who’s an actor I’ve worked with quite often. He knows I have
… Read the rest
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
As Filmmaker approaches its 18th birthday, I thought I’d fill the dog days of August with a series of posts taking you through our history. For the next few weeks I’ll be revisiting an issue a day, pointing towards significant pieces from our archive and commenting on interesting correspondences between independent film’s past and its present day.
Of course I’ll start with our debut issue: Fall, 1992. Filmmaker was actually the spawn of two magazines, The Off-Hollywood Report and Montage. The OHR was the IFP’s publication, Montage was published by IFP/West (then IFP/Los Angeles and now Film Independent). The original crew consisted of me as Editor, Karol Martesko as Publisher and Holly Willis as our West Coast Editor, and the IFP and IFP/West jointly published the magazine. (Filmmaker is now solely published by the IFP.) The goal was to create a single new national magazine “by filmmakers, for filmmakers,” one in which content was driven by the voice of people working in the film industry. We also strove for an expansive definition of independent film. Our first issue featured producer Andrea Sperling (most recently, Mark Ruffalo’s Sympathy for Delicious) on no-budget shooting in Los Angeles; me interviewing Paul Schrader about his Light Sleeper; Jeff Scher, in the days before the digital intermediate, interviewing film color timer Don Ciana; and our cover story, a conversation between directors Hal Hartley, whose third feature, Simple Men, was opening, and Nick Gomez, about to debut with his first pic, Laws of Gravity. The two directors would seemingly be an odd couple. Hartley’s work was more mannered in its approach, while Gomez was gaining attention for a realer-than-realism style in which the camera always seemed to be catching up to the action. (Indeed, d.p. Jean de Segonzac became in-demand after this picture; his jittery camerawork would soon be a staple of TV shows like Homicide.) Both directors hailed from SUNY Purchase film school, though, and Gomez edited Hartley’s second feature, Trust. And James Schamus, who had been first the Editor of the OHR and then its Executive … Read the rest
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
In 2004 Hal Hartley released a series of shorts he made from 1994-2000. Titled Possible Films, which is also the name of his web site where he sells his films and music, Hartley has compiled a second anthology that highlights his time living in Berlin, Possible Films, Volume 2. (He recently moved back to New York.)
The five shorts are similar in style (shot on DV) with many of them shot in the same apartment, vary from fiction to non, and were all made within a few years of each other. Exploring small ideas that couldn’t be fleshed out in feature form, Hartley creates intimate works that are honest and feel like they’re done by an artist doing it for the love of the craft, not looking for a quick buck. But would we think anything less from Hartley?
A/Muse (2009) - We follow an aspiring actress (Christina Flick) as she searches for an American ex-pat director living in Berlin so she can convince him that she should be his latest starlette.
Implied Harmonies (2008) – Here Hartley films a behind-the-scenes look at his production of Louis Andriessen’s opera la Commedia in Amsterdam and intercuts it with correspondence to his assistant (Jordana Maurer) back in Berlin about his struggles completing it.
The Apologies (2009) – Having to leave town to salvage his production of The Odyessy, a playwright (Nikolai Kinski) lets a young actress (Ireen Kirsch) use his apartment to rehearse. Hartley also composes the score.
Adventure (2008) – Hartley films he and his wife, Miho Nikaido, on a trip to Japan. There they think back on their 12 years of marriage by turning the camera on each other while shooting beautiful shots of the country.
Accomplice (2009) – Jordana Maurer returns to play an assistant of an artists who wants her to pirate video of an interview of Jean-Luc Godard.
Disc is released today through Microcinema International as well as a remastered edition of Hartley’s classic, Surviving Desire. Desire Disc also includes two short story essays done by Hartley in 1991 and interviews from Hartley … Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2007
PARKER POSEY IN HAL HARTLEY’S FAY GRIM. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.For a period in the 1990s, Hal Hartley was one of a group of directors, along with Jim Jarmusch and John Sayles, who really defined what American indie filmmaking was all about. Hartley’s Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992) and Amateur (1994), set in the suburbs of Long Island but seen from Hartley’s unique perspective, were idiosyncratic, literate films which set the bar high for other writer-directors aiming to portray contemporary American life. Since the mid-90s, though, Hartley has broadened his focus, both thematically and geographically: Flirt (1995) told love stories on three continents; The Book of Life (1998) imagined a meeting between Jesus and the Devil at the end of the millennium; No Such Thing (2001) was a modern take on Beauty and the Beast set in Iceland; and Hartley’s first foray into science fiction, The Girl From Monday (2005) was set in a futuristic world where humans were traded like property.
Hartley’s new film, Fay Grim, mixes old with new: familiar characters return in increasingly unfamiliar situations, and it is written with Hartley’s trademark dry, quirky humor but feels and looks different to anything he’s done before. It is a sequel to Hartley’s 1997 Henry Fool, and requisitions the genre tropes of the espionage thriller to frame Hartley’s take on the state of the post-9/11 world. Parker Posey’s eponymous character, a peripheral player in the first film, becomes the unlikely heroine of the piece as she attempts to get to the bottom of a mystery involving her missing husband Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan), her imprisoned Nobel prize-winning brother Simon (James Urbaniak), and notebooks containing Henry’s memoirs which government spies and international terrorists are desperate to get their hands on.
Filmmaker spoke to Hartley, who now lives in Berlin, about his reasons for leaving the U.S., shooting on DV for the first time, and his unlikely Henry Fool franchise.
PARKER POSEY AND HAL HARTLEY ON THE SET OF FAY GRIM. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.Filmmaker: I’d like to start off by asking how long you’ve been … Read the rest
