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A Conversation With Filmmaker Alison Maclean
From: Columbia University
| By:
Alison MacleanDavid Sterritt |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Following the success of her first feature-length film, Crush, in 1992, filmmaker Alison Maclean (below) moved to New York City from New Zealand and expanded her directorial work to include episodes of television shows such as "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Sex and the City" and music videos for singer Natalie Imbruglia. Maclean visited Columbia University to talk with Professor David Sterritt of Columbia's School of the Arts about her latest film, Jesus' Son, a fractured, cubistic narrative about a young man's journey through drug addiction and confusion toward a state of illumination and grace. |
Highlights from David Sterritt's interview with Alison Maclean. "I just believe in following what excites you and not trying to second-guess what people want to see or what would be successful or popular or will get financing."
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David Sterritt: Can you tell us what attracted you to the story of Jesus' Son? |
Alison Maclean: Well, I can't take credit for having the idea. It was one of my favorite books, and I used to give it away to friends as presents, but I never thought of it as a film, because it is a collection of short stories that have no connection beyond the fact that one main character runs through the whole book. |
I contacted Denis Johnson in relation to another project, and we sort of exchanged work. Then, about three years later, I got a call from the producers who had just bought the option to Jesus' Son. They'd seen Crush and they thought it was a good match and they asked me if I was interested. I was a little bit skeptical; I mean, I wasn't sure how you would adapt that book, but I started having meetings with them, and then they just gradually convinced me. At one point it really clicked for me that there was a way to do it, and they had some great ideas about how to approach it. But it was a long, difficult process to adapt the book. |
Sterritt: Can you tell us a little about that? I'm really very interested in exactly this aspect of it, because there was so much creative opportunity to do so many things with this original material in crafting the film. |
Maclean: Yes. I guess their main idea was to keep the discrete parts with the story headings. But the main change was that they expanded the character of Michelle hugely. In the book, she's a presence but there aren't any real scenes between her and FH. They were all written from scratch, and that became a kind of connective tissue and a reason to get from one story to the next, but hopefully keeping some of the discontinuity as well. We wanted to keep the way FH revises himself constantly in the stories, where he'll start telling you a story and say, "I forgot to tell you about the two men" and take you back. So we wanted to keep all of that in the voice-over. There were the usual pitfalls where you are overly faithful to the book. At first we were overly in awe and respectful of it because we love the book so much, and then, over about four drafts, we started to take some bigger leaps and make changes and have things that happen to one character happen to somebody else and combine stories and that sort of thing. |
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| Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton in Jesus' Son. | |
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Sterritt: The movie seems to me to have such passion in it from a directorial point of view that clearly you really engaged with it. I'm wondering if you can tell us what it is about the movie that meant the most to you in terms of expressing your ideas as a filmmaker? |
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| Billy Crudup and Dennis Leary in Jesus' Son | |
Maclean: That's an interesting question. I guess I was interested in it as a memory piece, and that it is not realistic in the sense that it is someone telling you stories about their life. He's looking back at these events in his life and he's telling the stories in different ways. With a story like "Emergency," it's as if he's told that story many times and it's exaggerated, like a tall tale. And then in other stories it is kind of raw and unprocessed, and he has sort of lost it in the telling, and is maybe confused. So I like the idea that the individual stories would have their own sort of tone and style. You felt like they were sort of filtered through his mind. |
In a way, I think the film is going back and forth between inside and outside his head. But that was the part that excited me as a director, I suppose--to be able to create these different styles for each of the stories. And yet hopefully they would hang together as one film. It was definitely scary in the editing room, when it felt like that might not work. It kept threatening to fall into pieces and not hold together. |
Sterritt: Nowadays, film critics are always writing about redemption movies. I think that Jesus' Son in some ways is about redemption, and yet you've avoided all of the pitfalls of movies that can be written about and thought about in that way. Do you see it that way yourself? Do you see it as a movie about redemption? |
Maclean: It's funny--I almost decided that I would never use that word again, because it is so overused and I'm not sure what it means anymore. |
Sterritt: That's why I framed my question the way I did. I couldn't agree more. |
Maclean: But it is about somebody going through a time of chaos and despair and getting lost and then coming out the other side. And in some ways you see him waking up to the world in the last story and you also see him opening up in a way you haven't seen before. But I don't know if I would use the word "redemption." |
Sterritt: The reason that I jumped into it is, like I said--you avoid the pitfalls of it. It is so easy for those movies to be sentimental or facile or at least leaning towards an ending that we all know is going to come around sooner or later. And it seems to me that partly through the peripatetic nature of the story and also through the extraordinary performances you avoid the pitfalls very successfully, which I think is quite a triumph. |
Maclean: And there are so many gaps in the story. That is something that I found exciting, and I would like to carry that into another film--that you can have this giant hole and just leap right over it into something else. I guess that one of the transitions that I am most happy with is at the end of "Emergency," where he's squashed the dead bodies and then, next thing, he's in the abortion clinic. They are such different scenes and yet somehow one explains the other, although in a kind of very indirect way. So that was a complete tangent. |
Sterritt: A lot of the things that you're saying don't spell Hollywood's idea of surefire box office. You challenge the audience to think about this movie in an active way that so many Hollywood movies don't. As an independent filmmaker, to what extent are you willing to challenge audiences, and when does that become a possible real problem? |
Maclean: Well, it's definitely a problem in the sense that it was the very reason why we couldn't get financing for this film. We sent it to every company, all the usual people in America and Europe, and we couldn't get anybody to put any money into the film whatsoever--even with the cast that we have, which I think is not insignificant. The only reason Jesus' Son was made is because we got private money. So it is definitely a problem. The films that I'm interested in making, it is tougher to get them made. It is hard to compare the films we do with other films, and so that makes it harder. |
Sterritt: Can you tell us something about the casting of Jesus' Son? To start with, how did you hit upon Billy Crudup? |
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| Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton in Jesus' Son | |
Maclean: Well, at the first meeting I had with the writers and producers we talked about Billy. One of the writers and producers had been through the NYU graduate acting program with him, so she knew him, and we had a way to get to him. We sent him the book right away and he loved it, but again, he couldn't quite see the movie in it, and he said come back when you have a script. He also did three films back to back and wasn't available for a long time. So we waited a long time for him. |
Then some of the other bigger cast came in at the very end. We saw Samantha Morton in this great film Under the Skin and we were just totally knocked out by her. I just thought, She's the best thing I've seen on film in a long time, and we sent it to her and she just loved the script. She had never heard of me or Billy or anything, but she loved Michelle and she wanted to play her. Holly Hunter just read the script by chance. She was reading with a young actor who was in a play and came to an audition for us, and she read it one night and she knew Denis personally. So she called us up and said, "I want to play Mira." Dennis Hopper didn't know the book and didn't read the script. He just read that one story and knew he wanted to play Bill, and was interested in working with Billy Crudup as well. So we were very lucky, and a lot of that just came together at the very end. We spent a lot of time on the smaller cast, about six months, full-time. |
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| Alison Maclean with Billy Crudup and Dennis Hopper on the set of Jesus' Son. | |
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Sterritt: How do you like to work with performers? Do you like to do a lot of rehearsal, do you like to really refine things, or do you like to see what they can come up with? |
Maclean: Well, with this I didn't really have the luxury of rehearsal. Samantha and Billy had three days together to do their scenes and the rest had no rehearsal at all, so we basically rehearsed on set. Sometimes we would do a read-through, like when Dennis Hopper came the day before and we read it through together a few times. But apart from that we just worked on the set. |
It was hard, because it was a pretty grueling schedule. Everyone was under a lot of pressure, and I did not enjoy that way of working. I prefer to have more rehearsal. It is sort of a truism, but I think most of the hard part is casting it--getting the right people--and then once you have the right people you can sort of trust them. There was some improvising with physical behavior, blocking and things, especially between Sam and Billy. But I was almost anal about the script, and everyone followed it pretty closely, because the way Denis writes dialogue is very specific, and the rhythm is very specific, and if you try to add your own words it doesn't work. |
Sterritt: So did the movie at the end come out pretty much the way you expected it would when you started the whole project? |
Maclean: Well, it's funny, because you get used to the changes as it evolves. I guess so. I would say that "Beverly Home" wasn't perhaps everything that I wanted it to be. But apart from that it is pretty close. |
Sterritt: To shift gears a little bit, let's go back a ways. How did you become a filmmaker? Is this something you always wanted to do? |
Maclean: No, definitely not. I wasn't even a cinephile or anything. I went to art school and was interested in being an artist in some way. I was doing sculpture and started doing installations and performances with slides and video and sound and performance, that kind of thing. Then I got a job as a trainee in my first summer holiday on a feature film and I was like the third assistant director and the assistant in the art department, and then just got really excited about making films just on that job. And that's when I decided that I wanted to do film. |
In my last year in the sculpture department, I managed to persuade them to let me do a short film, with the proviso that I would do everything myself. So I shot everything with a 16-mm Bolex and edited it myself and learned things that way. New Zealand was a great place to get started, because there is a very generous grant system there. So I got money to make four shorts that were completely financed by the government. That was a great training ground: I basically wrote and made shorts. Kitchen Sink was the fourth short that I did, and after Kitchen Sink I spent two years on Crush and got money again from the government to make that. I feel pretty lucky; it is a lot easier than getting funds here. |
Sterritt: No, I don't think our government hands out money. You said you were working in sculpture, but you also worked with slides and sounds and performance. It certainly sounds like you were tending away from the static, and I always feel in your films a great sense of motion, to put it broadly. Was it something that you wanted to get beyond, what you can do with static art in terms of motion and development in time? |
Maclean: I guess I was getting frustrated with the fact that the work was fixed and wouldn't evolve, and film seemed to combine my interests in the image and working with people and sound. There's something about visual arts that I got disenchanted with--making work for a very, very tiny audience, whereas film seems to address a bigger audience. |
Sterritt: And yet, when you move into an area like film, or even through performance and making short films, you give up the possibility of creating something that is entirely out of yourself, and you become a collaborator. Was this something that you saw as, "Hey, this is great!" Or was there a sense of losing something at the same time? |
Maclean: Well, I didn't feel I was losing something until I moved to America, because I was working in a little cocoon there. When I made Crush, I literally could cast whomever I wanted. I pretty much had complete freedom, and there was nobody telling me to change the script. So in some ways I was very privileged to make a film under those circumstances. |
Jesus' Son was different, because there was no studio. But, in its own way, it had its own challenges. Where was I going with that? I suppose what I'm really saying is that, even in a film that was financed in that way, there's a great deal of pressure to cast name actors, because everyone is thinking about how you're going to market the film. So the same kinds of pressures are there. |
Sterritt: Even though there are quite a few female filmmakers working in various national cinemas and in Hollywood, it is still such a tiny little percentage of the people who are making films. How does one cope with this? It has been a male-dominated industry for a century, and it still is. |
Maclean: I feel that, too, and it disappoints me. I often ask myself why it should be that way. I don't feel it in an obvious way, but I do feel that perhaps when I come along with a script or an idea, and particularly if the character is a woman, the fact that I'm a woman director introduces a note of caution, like, "Have we seen it before, and do we know it will be successful?" It's just one other reason for there to be a question mark. Do you know what I mean? |
Sterritt: Yes, I think so. Have you felt resistance? Have you felt that somebody would be saying things or having different meetings with you or this or that if you were a man with the same material? |
Maclean: I don't feel it overtly in that way. I think it is more hidden than that, but I think it is also sort of pervasive. |
Sterritt: Do you feel, consciously or not, that you are bringing a feminist sensibility to the work you do on the screen? |
Maclean: Yeah, definitely. It is hard to put your finger on it, but I think that men and women think about things in different ways. There are certain huge overlaps, and sometimes you can't tell if a film is made by a man or a woman, but I think there is a difference. I don't know how many of you saw the film Beau Travail, but that is a film which is completely about men, but when I saw it I knew that a woman made that film. There is a female sensibility and a way of looking at men and the way they relate to each other, and there's a certain kind of tenderness and objectivity that I think is a very female point of view. So yes, very, very much so. And the project that I'm writing now, that could only be written by a woman. |
Sterritt: Very interesting. Beau Travail, I agree, is a fascinating piece of work in many ways. |
Maclean: That's my favorite film over the last couple of years, actually. |
Sterritt: It is one of mine, along with Jesus' Son. Seriously. Can you tell us about some of the projects you would like to do? Are there dreams for some point in the future? It doesn't have to be specific; it could just be sorts of films you would like to make as your career evolves, that you think need to be made and you might like to do. |
Maclean: Right. Well, for a long time I've wanted to make a version of Moby-Dick where Ishmael was a girl. That's sort of like a fantasy project. But I'm not really thinking that far. I'm going to have a couple of projects right now, and I'm not really thinking beyond them, because I think that my ideas will evolve as I work. |
There's another script that I wrote that I would like to make. It's kind of an action film set in Thailand, but there's a transformation that happens where a character goes from being a man to a woman. It is inspired by those sorts of Chinese ghost stories where there's a certain sort of transformation that happens. That's a film I'd love to make. |
Sterritt: Can you tell us what the project is that you're working on now? |
Maclean: Yes, I have two. There is one that is an idea of my own called Iris, and I've been working on it for a very long time. It's kind of a thriller, horror film, I suppose, and it's basically about a woman who begins to remember some things from her childhood that may or may not have happened. It's about how the stories that we tell create our reality. I'm trying to finish that script right now. |
Also--and this is a kind of new departure for me--I'm doing a documentary, although not a conventional documentary, about a very interesting architect called Rem Koolhaas. The idea is that he is a visionary thinker and maverick who has a number of very interesting architectural projects. He has this project at Harvard called Project on the City, where he'll go with a group of students and they'll study these areas in the world which to our eyes would be considered somewhat horrifying, highly congested, chaotic situations. Right now they're studying Lagos, Nigeria, and before that the Pearl River Delta in China. |
The idea is they go there without an agenda beyond immersing themselves in the city and really trying to understand how it works, and they produce a book at the end of this process. So this is a project that I've just begun, and it will be an ongoing thing for the next couple of years. It is called Yes, which is a formulation Koolhaas came up with based on the symbol for the yen and the euro and the dollar and is his idea for the symbol for the global economy. So that's the name of the film. |
Sterritt: Let me ask one more question, and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience. Have you ever for one fleeting moment wished that you had made a film where the main character was not named FH? Have you felt completely comfortable with that? |
Maclean: Oh, yeah. Completely. |
Sterritt: I was hoping that you would say that. Questions? |
Question: You made some really interesting, unconventional choices with the split screen and the fast motion in the "Emergency" scene. Could you expand on the visual style of the film and your conception of it, particularly the unusual aspects of it? |
Maclean: Well, some things like the split screen were in the script. I loved that as an idea because it seemed motivated by the story, in that you were seeing two people doing exactly the same thing--getting high at the same moment, with two completely different outcomes--in a sort of capricious way, because one person happened to be saved and the other wasn't. But then, some of them like to speed it up, and the stuff in "Emergency" was actually something that we found in the editing room. But we looked at different films for each section and tried to have a different set of vocabulary and color palettes. |
With "Emergency," I tried to find as much visual humor as possible and push it towards being cartoonish without going too far. Like when they squash the rabbit and you see the rabbit's ears standing up like that, or the cross-eyed charts. So it was like a Tex Avery cartoon or something. We just tried to find visual humor wherever we could. And with "Dirty Wedding," the idea of that was completely handheld and we used stronger colors like red, and much darker, and more jump cuts. And I was looking at films like Nicolas Roeg's Performance and the way that he edits that film and the way that he'll move forward in time and then suddenly jump back to some moment where he'd thought you'd laugh--like in Jesus' Son when he goes back to her screaming in the abortion clinic. You don't expect to go back there. |
Some of the early stuff was more about wider frames and groupings, and we looked at Badlands and the farmhouse. And the visual effects with the kind of visions that he had--we tried to treat those in different ways. We weren't quite sure how to do things like the cotton balls and we tried to do those just physically and then we found this company, Blue Sky, that was willing to do CGI basically for cost. They did a great job, I think, of making it subtle and real and not looking too cartoony. |
Sterritt: When you do television and music videos and that sort of thing, are these pure acts of commerce, or is it possible to be an artist even in those contexts? I'm sure there is with music video; I guess I'm a little more curious about big-time television. |
Maclean: I had a great time doing the television that I did. It's a blast to do something like "Homicide." First of all, their scripts are wonderful, they're really well written, and to go in and to have the chance to work in a genre you've never worked in before and learn that language is completely exhilarating. That show was fun to not storyboard anything. You go in there, you work the DP and it's handheld, you light it so you can shoot in every direction and you shoot every scene in its entirety, and you do one idea and then you change the camera position for a new idea. You'll do another pass and another pass and there's a great sort of freedom about that. You're really making it up as you go, and I love that. |
It was great to do "Sex and the City," because it was fun to learn more about comedy and timing, and to work with those actors and see what works and what doesn't work. And definitely music videos--I did three for Natalie Imbruglia, and it really inspired me, actually, because it was interesting to think about doing something in that tiny length of time that's more abstract but that also kind of plays with narrative in certain ways. Like I tried to do some ideas where I sort of deconstruct with that tiny little time frame, and then working with music. I think that actually came into Jesus' Son in certain ways, like the scene where he does a kind of a dance with the residents at the end. I wouldn't have thought of that idea if I hadn't done music video. |
Sterritt: Any advice for aspiring filmmakers that you would like to leave us with? |
Maclean: If you make a short film, make it very short. I've been on the jury of a number of short-film festivals and generally what I feel about short films is that they are too long. I made that mistake with my first short film, too. I mean, it would have been twice the film at half the length. |
I guess I just believe in really following what excites you and not trying to second-guess what people want to see or what would be successful or popular or will get financing. That's the economy of making something short and sweet: if you really have a strong idea of how to do it, that will shine through and reach people, and that will attract attention and help you make your next one. |
Sterritt: Sounds good to me. Thank you very much for your film and for being with us here. |
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