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| Interview--Crispin Glover Explains What "What Is It?" Is. |
by Peter Sobczynski
Crispin Glover sits down to explain the history and meaning of his directorial debut, the decidedly surreal exercise "What Is It?," and his unusual manner of distributing it.
Crispin Glover is sane–saner than you are.
Normally, I don’t find it necessary to proclaim the mental stability of the people I interview but in the case of Glover, it almost seems like I have to do it. Thanks to a series of decidedly off-beat roles in films such as “Back to the Future,” “River’s Edge,” “Wild at Heart,” “Charlie’s Angels” and the remake of “Willard”–not to mention a certain infamous appearance on David Letterman’s show, Glover has gained a reputation as a highly eccentric weirdo. While that may be the persona he cultivates in his acting work, I have to say that I have interviewed him twice now and both time, I have found him to be as polite, lucid and intelligent as anyone that I have even spoken to–more so, in fact, because you get the sincere sense that what he is saying comes directly from the heart and not just from a desire to sell some product.
Besides acting, Glover has also recorded music and written several books of poetry and with his latest work, “What Is It?,” he further expands his repertoire by making his feature film directorial debut. The film is a surrealist vision that so defies conventional classification or description that I am not even going to attempt to summarize it–on his website, www.crispinglover.com Glover describes the film as “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe and how to get home as tormented by a hubristic racist inner psyche.” It is a collection of odd, disturbing and provocative imagery that aligns itself more with the distinct visions of such directors as Luis Bunuel, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Werner Herzog and Jose Mojica Marins than with the average multiplex fare and has sparked a bit of controversy by Glover’s decision to populate it almost entirely with people afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. Needless to say, “What Is It?” is not a film that most people will easily embrace–it is decidedly harsh, strange and filled with the kind of disturbing imagery that is deliberately designed to provoke a reaction in viewers. And yet, while I am not entirely certain that I understand a good deal of the film, I do admire Glover for having the audacity to create such a unique and striking vision at a time when such visions are at a premium. Whether you love it or hate it, “What Is It?” is a film that forces you to respond to what it has to offer and for that alone, I value it more than a hundred films along the lines of “The Santa Clause 3.”
Glover’s method of distributing this self-financed work, which is the first part of a trilogy (Part II, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine” is currently being edited and the conclusion, “It Is Mine,” will presumably go into production soon), is just as unusual as the film itself. He has but one print of the film and has been slowly traveling around the country as part of a multi-media presentation that includes a screening of the film, his “Big Slide Show” that features readings from some of his books of poetry and a post-film Q&A/book signing. (He will be performing the show at New York’s Anthology Film Archives from November 10-12, Chicago’s Music Box Theater from Nov. 17-19, Portland’s Clinton Street Theatre from December 1-3 and Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre on Dec. 8-10.) One recent Tuesday morning in Chicago, Glover arrived at a local screening room to present both the film and an shortened version of the “Big Slide Show” for a roomful of journalists and later sat down with me to discuss his provocative work, his reasons for casting people with Down’s Syndrome and his surprising reconciliation with perhaps the last person in Hollywood that you might have expected him to work with again.
For further information on both the film and the tour schedule, go to www.crispinglover.com
Under normal circumstances, you have been presenting “What Is It?” and your multi-media “Big Slide Show” for audiences of hundreds of fans and curiosity seekers at a time. This morning, on the other hand, you presented the film and an abbreviated version of the show in a screening room for about 20 journalists. Is that more nerve-wracking for you than doing the full show for a much larger group of people?
Of course, when I am doing it in front of a really big audience, there is a different feeling that you feed off of–audiences get very enthusiastic and there is applause and laughter. Actually, for a press screening, this was a fairly lively audience. For the press stuff, that was a very enthusiastic audience but compared to a regular audience . . .if they were like that, I would wonder what was wrong. I have done it for the press a few times and they were relatively polite and enthusiastic–I had a later one where they were very quiet.
I worked with Vanessa Redgrave one time–she played my mother in a “Crime and Punishment” that has never really been released, even on DVD, where I played Raskolnikov. It’s a flawed film but there things about it I like and it was quite an opportunity to play that particular character. She played my mother and I was watching her work. She was great to watch work because I noticed something–when you do off-camera work for other actors, you want to do a good job but there are a lot of technical restraints that make it difficult sometimes to do a good job of that. She was great doing her off-camera work–it was so good that it was almost difficult because you were on-camera and you kind of wanted to just watch what she was doing. What I got from it was that it didn’t really matter if she was on or off-camera, she was really interested in being able to do the performance and getting into that element. I’ve done the slide show so much–of course, that was just a portion of it and it bothers me because there is another flow that comes from when I do the whole hour that is different and has certain ins and outs and nuances–that I know it quite well and I get into a certain natural rhythm of performing it, regardless of the feedback from the audience.
The way that you are handling the distribution of this film is quite fascinating. In recent months, a lot of the talk among independent filmmakers has centered on figuring out new ways to get their films out to the public via such non-theatrical outlets as DVD, video-on-demand and the Internet. With your film, you are going in the exact opposite direction by presenting it as a highly theatrical experience that can’t possibly be recreated with those other formats.
It is something that I have thought about for a long time because there is a difficulty in distributing art-house movies. There is no question that it becoming more and more difficult specifically because of video and DVD and home theater systems becoming better and making for a better experience at home. I’m a genuine cinephile–I like to go see a beautifully conceived cinematic piece in a 35mm projection. That is one of my favorite things but it is very rare for me to go do that now–I usually watch DVDs in my home. Some of that is because my schedule has gotten considerably more busy but the kind of movies that are being made, by and large, are the kind that I am not guaranteed that I am going to get a fine cinematic experience by going to a theater. There are certain directors where I will go to see their movies. I am looking forward to David Lynch’s movie–that is exciting to me and I will go see that for certain.
I think also that for audiences, there have to be compelling reasons to actually go out and see something. I think that I would be able to get a certain amount of people to come out and see the film if I didn’t do this but my experience in testing it . . .I just thought of a question that somebody asked me earlier today and I just realized I gave them an answer that wasn’t completely accurate. I’ve done experiments where I would do the slide show before the film and sell it for that price. Then I would do a Q&A with the film and sell it for that price. Then I would just show the film and sell it at a normal ticket price. The biggest attendance was always the one with the slide show–the one with the Q&A had pretty good attendance but the attendance for the ones without the added stuff fell off quite a lot. The overhead is low on the film, somewhere between $150-200,000. That is very inexpensive for a feature-length 35mm film but for me, personally, it is very expensive and I need to recoup that money. It will take me a couple of years to tour around with the film in this fashion in order to recoup that money but I know that I can in that time period. I put all the requests that I’ve gotten at www.crispinglover.com in a file recently and have about 100.
That’s a lot but it takes a lot of time. Even if I aggressively try to schedule them, I couldn’t even do half of them in a year’s time if I did it every weekend. It is going to take a long time and I need to do about 30-40 venues in order to make the money back. On top of that, the way of making the money back isn’t specifically at the box-office. The film is enabling me to make money doing the slide show and selling the books. The way I have normally been booking it is to do a 50/50 split with the theater on what they charge for the box-office and a 100% overage for what I charge for the slide show and as the book publisher, I take the money from the books. That works out but if I really break it down mathematically, I am really only getting a small portion of money from the films but I just want get back the money that I invest in these things while making my money as an actor. If I can make a film that will be more readily distributable, I am not against that either but for both this film and the sequel, I will definitely have to tour with it in this fashion, specifically because of the graphic sexuality. There are other films I am interested in making that don’t necessarily have these kinds of elements that are in these films that make them difficult for a corporate situation. I am glad to be learning this distribution stuff–there is great value in it and to be able to be in a situation where I am able to make a movie that I really want to make.
Even if it is a lot of work and a lot of struggle, it is worth it to me because I really don’t like what is happening with the corporate control–I genuinely think it is damaging and not interesting. It isn’t that I think that “What Is It?” is a perfect film–I don’t. I still think that the problems and mistakes that I made are more interesting than many of the things I am seeing in movies now. I think most people like to have things to genuinely think about.
One of the striking things about the film itself is in the sincere, for lack of a better term, manner of depicting the characters with Down’s Syndrome. Another filmmaker, maybe someone like Todd Solondz, might use someone with Down’s Syndrome but they would make sure to call attention to it to remind you just how off-beat such casting would be. This film, on the other hand, is not about Down’s Syndrome and it isn’t even mentioned once. Instead, it is treated as just another fact of life and as a result, you don’t even think about that aspect after a while.
Absolutely. It is a very important thing that I emphasize when I talk about the film is that it is not about Down’s Syndrome. When I was initially meeting people when it was just going to be a short film–originally this was going to be just a short film to promote a different screenplay which will be Part III. I had put into the conceptualization this idea of having most of the characters be played by people with Down’s Syndrome. David Lynch had agreed to executive-produce that screenplay for me to direct and when I went to a corporate entity for funding, they were interested but had concerns about working with actors who had Down’s Syndrome. This film started out as a short film to promote that it was a viable idea. When I wrote the original short screenplay, it always had elements that were a bit taboo and there was a lot of violence involving the characters with Down’s Syndrome. The guardians–all the actors are adults but they all have guardians–a lot of them, maybe 80%, you could tell immediately that if they had any concerns, it wasn’t going to happen. The people are in the film are the people whose guardians felt that there was a therapeutic element to being involved in an artistic project and that this was good for them to be involved with. I agree with that–there is a therapeutic element to acting or any art form. I was very clear with those guardians that the film was not about Down’s Syndrome at all. They were concerned that it would be construed that people with Down’s Syndrome were being represented as violent which, by and large, isn’t true. Most people with Down’s Syndrome are really sweet-natured–some may have more aggressive personalities but they are usually quite sweet-natured. I wanted to stress that because this film is about my psychological reaction to this constraint and a lot of that violence is just an outrage of how I innately feel about some things and has nothing to do with Down’s Syndrome.
What works conceptually me for me about working with people with Down’s Syndrome is that when I am looking into the face of someone with it, I do see the history of somebody of someone who has lived outside of the culture. That innate quality somehow gives that feeling to the film itself. I think that is an interesting thing, particularly for this film which is about reacting to cultural boundaries.
Once you found the group that you worked with, how did you go about settling on matching the specific people for their specific parts?
Something that I was looking for in the person playing the main protagonist, and I am glad that I found it, was an angry-young-man quality. Most people with Down’s Syndrome don’t have that quality and are more congenial. He had a sort of fervor to him–he has that line “You are not my friend. No one is my friend.” and you can feel that kind of fervor. Often, I will just work with people that I know but because it was people with Down’s Syndrome, I needed to see what their abilities were. I went to group places that worked with people doing art therapy and while I did find some people but it was hard to get people in that fashion. I did get a casting person that I knew and she brought in a lot of people for me to meet with and I started to change things around once I started meeting with the people. Originally, this was initially just for the short film and there are characters in the film that weren’t there in the same way that they are now. Originally, the antagonism of the film was different–I wasn’t in the movie. I put myself and Steve Stewart in it when it became a feature because I wanted his screenplay to be a sequel to this film–when this became a feature, I knew that his screenplay had some conceptual elements that fit into it.
When I turned it into a feature, I got new people involved with the film. It’s that scene in the graveyard that is more in front of a backdrop. There are two different graveyard scenes–one is an exterior in daylight which was shot in the initial short-film stage and this other one was shot about three years into the process and was the last thing I shot. That was all done on a single day and I used a much higher shooting ratio–I shot relatively little but there is a lot of that in the film. Most of the actors that I worked with from the initial portion were pretty high-functioning people. This is an interesting thing because on some level, you can feel like someone with Down’s Syndrome, if you haven’t been around them a lot, is not going to know a lot of things or be aware of things. When you work with them, it becomes very apparent that while they may not be good at working with numerical things like money, on emotional levels, they can actually be hyper-aware and rather disarming when they approach you with a very direct question.
On this last part, the fellow who wears the orange shirt–the one who feels very similar to the main protagonist as the two sort of reflect each other–he had worked with the fellow who played the minstrel, he’s a publisher named Adam Parfrey. He had met that fellow, Carlos, on Venice Beach–Carlos plays the drums. Adam knew I was doing some more filming and he got the number for Carlos. I went and met with him and he was working at one of these group places. All the people who were in that graveyard scene, which was really shot at my house with a backdrop and gravestones, were in the office when I came in and I asked if their guardians were okay with me working with them and they said okay. Those people were much lower-functioning and you can feel it in that sequence. The way it was shot was much different because it was more about getting people into place and getting the camera going–it almost has a documentary element to it. The others actors that appeared in the rest of the film were quite high-functioning–they could memorize lines or at least repeat what they were told–but a lot of the people in this sequence didn’t speak and you couldn’t direct them that specifically. They had people that they worked with who were instructed to get them to do their stuff. Some of that footage is some of my favorite footage in the whole film.
On another topic, I was surprised to see that you are going to be playing the part of Grendel in the upcoming adaptation of “Beowulf” that Robert Zemeckis is making utilizing the motion-capture technology he used on “The Polar Express.” After all, your previous working relationship with him on “Back to the Future” ended in a lawsuit when you declined to appear in the sequels and he made up another actor to look just like you. How did that all come about?
It is surprising, I know. I would have never expected that I would be working with him again. They had taken another actor and given him a fake chin and cheekbones to make him look like me and interspersed a little bit of footage of me from the original film in order to fool people that it was me. There was a lawsuit about it and because of that lawsuit, there is now a law with the Screen Actors Guild that says that producers and actors are not allowed to do that again. I’ve been making films to fund my own movies, starting with “Charlie’s Angels.” I was actually quite happy with how the character came out in the “Charlie’s Angels” film and that led to “Willard,” which was an excellent role. I’ve really been getting a lot of interesting roles, I’ve been getting paid better and I’m able to fund these films of mine that I am genuinely passionate about.
I was working on an independent film at the time and I heard that they were interested in having me play Grendel and that Robert Zemeckis was directing it. It was quite surprising and I really had to think about it until I realized that it fit into what it is that I am needing to do because I am needing to fund these films that I am passionate about with the money I make from acting. It worked out–Angelina Jolie played my mother, Anthony Hopkins played my father and Ray Winstone played Beowulf and I had an excellent working time with all three of those actors. I had an excellent working relationship on it with Robert Zemeckis as well–it ended up being a very good thing and since it was a studio-type film, I got my studio quote. All of these things are definitely helping me to be able to do this stuff, so it was a good experience.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2008
originally posted: 11/08/06 12:50:31
last updated: 11/08/06 17:44:43
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