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By Jennifer Preissel
Could you talk to me a little bit about the films we will be screening at the Festival? I know these are recent projects, correct?
Yes, We’re screening scenes from four new pictures now in post-production. Two of them are from the Tenderloin yGroup project, which ran weekly workshops and made feature films down there for 14 years. There are nine feature films in this series—nine films that start at 9:00 pm about 40 to 50 different fictional characters on the edges of society—the homeless, cops, drug addicts, petty criminals and prostitutes, denizens of the Tenderloin. The roles are all played by members of the Tenderloin yGroup Players’ Ensemble who attended our weekly workshop sessions.
How did you get involved with the group? Were you involved in its creation?
It was originally called the Tenderloin Action Group, which I created with Rand Crook and Ethan Sing, two young producers who produced our first Tenderloin film called Chalk. Later I called it the Tenderloin yGroup and carried it on further. I got interested because my brother had been a homeless man for many years and had been missing for ten years so I got interested in the folks that were down on the Tenderloin corners—the brown bag people and the shopping cart ladies and all the folks one sees driving through but doesn’t know anything about. I decided to go down there, thinking about my brother, thinking even that I might find him down there. The original project we were going to do was called Hope for the Fourth Ace, a screenplay I wrote living in a transient hotel down there. We had a number of well-known actors signed up for that, including Danny Glover, Samuel Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg and Peter Coyote. Meanwhile, we had started an acting workshop down there for all comers, professional, amateur, street people, inner city residents, homeless—it didn’t matter. Then when we couldn’t find financing for that project, our workshop became the foundation for ten films—the nine 9@Night features and Chalk. We have a couple of known actors sprinkled in there, but mostly we worked with folks from all walks of life including the ranks of the homeless, professional actors, street people, anyone who came through the door. It’s been quite an eclectic mix of folks which banded together to do the workshops and make these films.
I know that you were part of a filmmaking collective earlier in your career.
Cine Manifest, yes.
How would you say that experience informs your current output?
In Cine Manifest, our mandate was to make films about people close to the pavement, close to the ground, everyday men and women, if you will—to think about them with a sense of empowerment. People have varying political ways to put that, everything from a populist empathy to doctrinaire Marxism. We had a lot of debates and wrote a lot of position papers in those days to try and figure out what it was we were trying to say and accomplish. The main thing I took from it was to pay attention to the everyday common denominator. You and I and the others. Real people in the real world. Not actors—players, people with presence and passion. Trained actors may be enormously talented and all, but they don’t interest me as much as finding a way to mine the natural eloquence of people who can become players in their own drama. And so I worked on techniques to accomplish that.
Are you enthused about the prospect of your films being projected in a very public place during the Festival?
Our films have played around the world to all sorts of audiences. I think it’s great. To me our films are important works which should be seen in every theater in every country because they come from a closer, rawer place than industry style work. We try to carve human empathy, the human experience and the human heart right out of the pavement. I work with powerful people, not just the ones most people choose to praise. But we’re working to change that.
Could you briefly discuss the concept of direct action filmmaking and how you conceived of it?
The basic idea is that the films are all around us; they’re constantly cropping up and can be tapped into. Where does poetry come from? Where does the artistic impulse come from? From my point of view, it simply arises out of the slipstream. You discover it by doing it. I think of it as a jazz performance. You state a theme, some particular spine of a thought, and then you move according to impulse, instinct and varying circumstances into other themes and variations, some of which you would not have imagined would come from that original starting point. It starts with the idea that we’re all inventing our lives at any given time—none of us know what’s going to happen the next second, so why not use that as the central idea of drama? We have to prepare players to be emotional and to learn how to listen and how to interpret and how to speak, but not too much. Relaxation is a big part of it. Conquering fear is another. Then we have a script scenario, a model, a road map, and finally use editing to discover the real pearls and gems. You do that anyway when you’re working from a script, but freedom in the production leads to more interesting editing choices. You wouldn’t want to do Shakespeare this way, but you get my point. I’m not trying to encourage people to become chameleons, to be able to play any role that comes along. I want them to become triumphantly engaged in their own inner lives and to work from there. Narrative is the least of it. We’re talking about a way of being in a zone in order to play the richest parts of yourself. Direct action is first of all a way of preparing players. Then it’s a kind of set procedure with hand-held cameras working with character and circumstance. Finally, it’s a search for the “miracles of the ordinary” through editing. Some thing of it as a documentary way of doing fiction, but I think it’s a way of working closer to the way we live. Cinema doesn’t interest me much unless I feel that pull of the ordinary, that thrill of real behavior leading, I hope, to those cathartic moments which seem to be the point of it all. |
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