FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
FILMLINC.COM HOME
9. ART & INDUSTRY
by Amy Taubin
EXPOSED NERVES
Two choice cuts from Tribeca's
American indie lineup
John G. Young's The Reception
Two of the most alive U.S. fiction films in the Tribeca Film Festival are by filmmakers who, perhaps not so coincidentally, graduated from SUNY Purchase in the mid-Eighties. John G. Young's The Reception is a four-handed relationship narrative that executes one small surprising turn after another, in part because none of the characters are exactly who they pretend or desire to be. Tim McCann's Runaway is a harrowing psychodrama, taking place within the disintegrating consciousness of a 21-year-old (a haunting performance by Aaron Stanford,) desperately trying to escape a past that has damaged him more gravely than he can comprehend. Both films have an emotional rawness and refusal of sentimentality, unusual in recent American films. In different ways, they place their characters in situations where layers of denial and self-deception are peeled away and they're forced to confront buried desires, hopes, fears, and furies. I talked with Young and McCann separately during the first days of the Tribeca Film Festival about their work in general and what part their college film education had in shaping their perspective.
John G. Young's The Reception
Although there's a gap of seven years between The Reception (opening this summer from Strand) and the release of his debut feature, Parallel Sons (98) it's clear that Young continues to be preoccupied by issues of sexual and racial identity. In Parallel Sons, an alienated teenage boy, totally identified with American-African culture, discovers the more complicated source of his feeling of "otherness" when he falls in love with an escaped black male convict. Parallel Sons was a coming of age film, in regard to both the central character and the filmmaker. Peopled with adults and oscillating between melancholy and anxiety, The Reception is the work of a mature filmmaker. The setting is a comfortable old farmhouse, where an attractive, alcoholic, middle-aged French woman lives with her companion, a gay African-American painter. The two have settled into an easy domesticity that serves to keep their worst fears at bay and gives them an excuse not to take the risk of pursuing what they really need. Disruption appears in the form of a visit from the woman's long estranged daughter and her new husband, an African-American, Ivy LeagueÐeducated, law-school student. Or so he claims to be. But from the first, we sense that there is something slightly off about this pair. Mother and daughter try to keep their long-simmering anger with each other under control, but the heat is turned up by the growing attraction between the two men. The claustrophobic situation and the hostility and mixed motives evidenced by the characters will likely evoke comparisons to Edward Albee or Neil LaBute. But Young's muted, nuanced writing and direction makes the work of those more celebrated artists seems like billboards.
Is this just some off the wall idea I have about SUNY Purchase being such a special school is terms of filmmaking? A startling number of talented directors Ð you, Hal Hartley, Nick Gomez, Tim McCann, Elias Merhige, Todd Graff Ð were all there during the Eighties, along with a bunch of actors who now work all the time, not to mention the film critic Manohla Dargis
I graduated from Purchase in 1985. I was in a freshman film production class with Manohla. I was this boy from the sticks, and I remember being so impressed by how experimental the film she made was. Purchase allowed for the creative process. Yes, you learned the tools and the craft, but there were a whole cadre of teachers encouraging you to take risks and put out stuff you might not be completely clear about. Mimi Arsham who taught my senior seminar was a dominant force. She had a way of calling you to task on the subtext of your film. Young filmmakers can be afraid to make a film about what they really care about, but she had a way of saying, "Your film is really about this. Now go make it." I have to keep allowing myself to do just that. All my scripts, even the arguably more commercial ones, have the same kind of subtexts.
It has been a long time between Parallel Sons and this new film.
Ten years from the time I began Parallel Sons to the release of The Reception. I wrote six or seven screenplays. People seemed to be really interested in some of them. They'd call me up saying, "I'm going to make this film, I really love it," but then the money doesn't come through, it never quite got together, even though they were all quite modest projects. And I had my own life journey. I made a home. Houses are great projects. With a film, a year or two, that's short. The nice thing about a house is that there are always projects to do and you can complete some of them in a few days.
Was the house in the film your house?
Yes, and it also was the house in You Can Count On Me.
Lets talk about the production. How much did it cost?
Five thousand dollars, but now that Strand has picked it up for theatrical release, I'm using the advance to do color correction, redo the mix, and pay the actors something. So it will come to about $20,000 all together. We shot it in eight days on a P24, a little Panasonic DV camera.
How did you work with the actors? Was the script locked before you began, or was there improvisation?
The script was finished, but the actors would come up with suggestions. When you're working at such a frenetic pace, you rely on your actors to understand the scene that they're in and you listen when they say they want to try this moment or that moment again. We didn't have a great deal of rehearsal before we shot Ð about a week Ð but we rehearsed a lot during the shoot. We'd rehearse, shoot, rehearse some more, then shoot again Ð particularly the big ensemble scenes. For example, Pamela Holden Stewart, the actress who plays Jeanette [the French woman], wasn't clear at first about why her character erupts so viciously in the dinner party scene Ð it couldn't just be that she's drunk again. That would be boring. No, it's because she sees something that makes her understand that there's a relationship developing between the two guys and she's threatened by it. That's the kind of thing we'd work out between takes.
One of the things that makes the film so fascinating is how the layers of defense the characters have built are gradually peeled away through these subtly abrasive interactions.
I'm fascinated by the idea of the dysfunction people will put up with to maintain their lives even if they're unhappy in them. People will put up with a lot of pain in relationships to keep the things they think they depend on. The characters do a lot of pretending but there's also that deep sense of denial.
I kept thinking how, compared to your film, Edward Albee and Neil LaBute are making these blown-up caricatures.
I think so much more can be achieved when the characters aren't mouthpieces for the filmmaker or the narrative. I'm empathetic with all the characters. I don't see them as intrinsically this or that. Even Jeanette Ð she does bad things but she's not a bad person. There's a difference.
Tim McCann's Runaway
A spare, taut psychodrama about a nice, quiet young man trying to escape a lifetime of sexual abuse at the hands of his father, Runaway induces the queasy, anxious feeling that one remembers experiencing in such great, scaggy noirs as Gun Crazy and Detour. I still prefer McCann's debut film Desolation Angels (96), in part because it's his only film in which a woman's perspective matters as much as a man's, but there's no denying the skill, economy, and intelligence embodied in this exploration of a fragmented, imploding consciousness.
I asked John Young about the lasting influence of Purchase on his work. Was it an important experience for you?
I was supposed to graduate in 1987 but they expelled me and Elias Merhige for a performance piece we did at graduation. I played a preacher and Elias played Jesus wearing a large fake phallus Ð you know "Jesus is back and bigger than ever." But I've been teaching in the film department there for the past three years. The faculty is wonderful, but I think the impact of the school has more to do with the kind of students we get. They have an anti-establishment, counterculture bent. A pool of those people can nurture inclinations to focus on the heart of the matter and to develop a personal style and expression.
Tim McCannÕs Runaway
Your first film, Desolation Angels, was a social drama that involved the conflicting points view of several characters. They each have a different way of looking at the sexual incident that's at the core of the film, and that seemed to be central point you were making. The three films you made subsequently Ð Revolution #9, Nowhere Man, and now Runaway - are all psychodramas, in that they're each largely filtered through the disintegrating psyche of a single trapped male character.
I'm not good at taking the long view of my work, but yes, Revolution #9 was a departure from Desolation Angels in that it went very internal. When I made Nowhere Man, I was feeling very frustrated in my attempts to make films, and I wanted to do something that went against the prevailing culture. People have a difficult time with the tonal changes in Nowhere Man, but it's my sense of humor, and, in that way, it's my most personal film. It's also utter confusion.
Is Runaway the first film you've made that you didn't write yourself?
Yes, Bill True had seen Revolution #9. He liked it so he sent me his script for Runaway, and a year later we were in production. He already had the financing and the producer is place. Once we started to work on the script together, we developed a backstory for the character [the scenes told in flashbacks]. Originally, the script was more like Taxi Driver. We didn't know who Michael [the central character] was before or the background that leads to him cracking up. But we helped fill out what the film is about by creating the backstory. It softens you up and then gives you a kick in the stomach. Even when we were in production, the script kept developing collaboratively. I knew the beats I needed in each scene, but Aaron Stanford wrote some of his scenes and so did Zack Savage, who plays his father.
Since you don't have a theatrical distributor, I know you're going to be reluctant to say how much the film cost, but can you tell me something about the production?
Let's just say, it's under $2 million. We used the Panasonic DVCPro HD camera. It's pretty high-end Ð a $60, 000 camera with a $30,000 lens. We shot for three weeks with a week of rehearsal beforehand with the lead actors. We mixed just a week before we screened at Tribeca. We bumped it up to HD Cam, and showed it on that. We're going to see whether distributors and other festivals go for it in this format or if we have to transfer to film. The digital projection at Tribeca is state of the art. It looked just great.
© 2004 by Amy Taubin
