"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
DAVID GORDON GREEN
by Peter Sobczynski

October 25, 2004

David Gordon Green has not yet turned 30 and has only made three feature films to date but he has already received the kind of acclaim that suggests that those following his work will be following the development of a major American filmmaker. His debut feature, 2000’s "George Washington", an atmospheric tale of a group of kids in the rural South and how they react and respond to a tragic accident, became a festival hit throughout the world through a storytelling approach that simultaneously paid homage to his heroes (chiefly Terrence Malick) while remaining an utter original. His 2002 follow-up, "All the Real Girls", in which a womanizing young man is thunderstruck to find himself genuinely falling in love for the first time in his life, demonstrated that he was no one-hit wonder-the atmosphere was still there but he now demonstrated a keen eye and ear for nuanced character behavior as well.

With his third, and most ambitious film, the current "Undertow", Green has come up with a film far more plot-driven than his earlier exercises. Borrowing liberally from such sources as Faulkner, Twain and "Night of the Hunter", he tells the story of two young boys (Jamie Bell and Devon Alan), living in virtual isolation with their traumatized father (Dermot Mulroney), as they are chased throughout the backwoods by a psychotic ex-con uncle (Josh Lucas) who is pursuing them to claim a family treasure in their possession. However, while "Undertow" shows that Green can tell a more conventional narrative, the most fascinating moments are those when Green pulls away from the story and once again demonstrates his unique ability to create an authentic sense of time, space and atmosphere; although his films do not look and sound like the work of anyone else working today (especially in regards to some of the dialogue), they still feel completely realistic-as though someone just happened to pick up a camera and follow some random people around for a few days. (In this case, that "someone" happens to be Green’s longtime cinematographer/collaborator Tim Orr and the results are ravishing.)

"Undertow" has been playing the fall festival circuit (it is now currently in limited release) and when Green hit Chicago, he sat down to talk about the film, his influences, Malick’s b-ball skills and his surprising picks for his favorite films of last year.

THE INTERVIEW

Do you find that the concerns that drive you now, as a director who has completed his third feature, are still the same as those that got you interested in film in the first place?

I’ve got the same drives but I have a different attitude about it now. I think I am a lot more confident about what I like and don’t like about the business. After three movies, my taste has gotten more specific about what I think is appropriate and inappropriate and what I enjoy and don’t enjoy about the business. I know how to deflect and divvy up some of the responsibility of the process. I have a team that I am really confident in-a collaborative team of artists and technicians that I work with-and with every project, we inspire each other to work in new ways and try new things. We remind each other about what we love and what sucks.

How does the fact that you are gradually becoming a better-known filmmaker affect that? When "George Washington" came out, you were obviously an unknown quantity and when "All the Real Girls" premiered, it, like most second features, was looked at primarily in terms of how it compared to the earlier film-whether or not you were simply a one-hit wonder. Now that the phrase "a David Gordon Green film" actually means something to people, how does that change things for you?

It is odd to have a level of expectation about your work-that is something that I never really thought about or anticipated. If you think about it, any artist or craftsman is doing their job to the best of their ability, hopefully. It is interesting that there are people are interested and expect-rather than just letting you do your job to the best of your ability, they are there to either judge and criticize you or to put you up on a pedestal and praise you. All of them are odd to deal with.

I am very satisfied with the manner in which I work. I may not always be satisfied with the results of my work but ultimately, I am trying to dodge the 9 to 5 clock-in, clock-out job and I am doing a pretty good job of it, so I am happy. As long as I am happy with that and as long as I am fulfilled with my life outside of the movies, then I am okay. You have to tune the world and their expectations out at some point so that you can be happy and not trying to outguess a critic or predetermine an audience reaction. I didn’t think anybody would ever like "George Washington" because that was the most self-indulgent thing-me saying "fuck you" to the industry and making the kind of film I wanted to make that others weren’t. The fact that people would like it and pay money to watch it...it is so weird to be successful. Even on the minor end of the scale that I am successful on, it is still kind of baffling.

It seems as if in each of your three features to date, you have focused on a different area of the storytelling process. "George Washington" was dedicated to creating a specific mood and environment, "All the Real Girls" concentrated more on character and with "Undertow", you have stressed a genuine narrative drive for the first time in your work. Has this been a conscious decision on your part or have these approaches simply grown out of the material you have chosen to tell?

I am so not interested in narrative drive-if it is in there, it is because I had a good script to work with that I wasn’t involved with as a writer. Joe Conway had written this script that I liked but I didn’t feel invested in it or understand these characters. I got in and took the bones of what he had done and brought in atmosphere and characters and things that I am interested in as a filmmaker. If there is narrative drive in there, that is great because it will give people something to latch on to that. I personally don’t need that but for a lot of people, it helps them to digest the movie and stick to the story so that they don’t fall asleep. If it is there and it doesn’t bother me, that is great.

Right at the start of the film, there is a scene in which Jamie Bell and Kristen Stewart are talking in the woods in a way that looks and feels exactly like a scene from your previous films. However, once you have lulled viewers familiar with your work with that approach, it immediately slams into an extended chase scene with a drive and momentum that is the complete opposite of what you have previously done.

Maybe it is dabbling in genre that makes an unconscious connection. Right before making this film, I thought it was going to be like a normal mainstream thriller-I really thought that for about a day. Then we started shooting and I thought-fuck that, this is going to be so much more fun if we improvise and let it loose and throw the shot list away and don’t bring the script to the set. This was helpful in redefining certain elements of genre films and playing with certain clichés. There is nothing unique or remarkable about a search for gold coins, good versus evil and a chase down a river. What is unique is having qualities of humanity within the good and evil-qualities of redemption and revenge that are looked upon on a human and realistic level-rather than to make it absurd and play stereotypes against each other. When you are working with clichés and traditional story devices, maybe that is where narrative drive works its way in and maybe that is why there is such a thing as narrative drive.

Where you consciously looking to do a film written by someone other than yourself when you came across "Undertow" and what was it about the script that attracted you to it as a potential project?

Initially, it was brought to me by Terrence Malick-it was a project that he had developed with this writer who was on his basketball team-and of course I was interested in that! It was a subject matter that I hadn’t dealt with and a style of filmmaking that I hadn’t done before. I had always been a fan of things like "In Cold Blood" , "At Close Range" and the other true-crime domestic thrillers, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to broaden my horizons and try new things. It was just a question of figuring out a way of doing it in a way that fit my process most comfortably while bringing a distinctive touch to something that is accessible to an audience.

Two questions. Since Malick is as famous for his low profile as for the quality of his work, how does one go about being contacted by him? Additionally...a basketball team?

Exactly. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but that is exactly why he is so great. He isn’t a strange, reclusive man-this is a guy with a lot of things in life that he likes to do and he doesn’t want any of them to infect the other. In order to keep a healthy family and relationships and interests, he has to isolate them so that his profile as a filmmaker doesn’t get in the way of his routine. The guy is not recognized walking down the street and it allows him to live life in a comfortable way-and he loves to play basketball.

Was his calling you completely out of the blue or had you previously been in contact with him?

When I was on the festival circuit with "George Washington", even before it was released, I was contacted. He had just started a company with Ed Pressman and when I heard that those two guys from the "Badlands" days were doing something, I was thinking that was pretty awesome. Shortly afterwards, I got an e-mail from them saying that they had somehow seen "George Washington"-this was before it had come out and that sounded a bit odd to me. We developed scripts for two years and then made it, down-and-dirty, last year.

You have collaborated with cinematographer Tim Orr on all three of your films and each one has had its own unique visual style. Can you talk about the approach that the two of you chose for depicting "Undertow"?

Tim and I, as well as the whole production team, have worked together since film school and we have a kind of shorthand-it is interesting to see the movies that they do with other people to see how they are stylistically similar and yet kind of different. With this movie, our concept was to approach it as if it were a contemporary setting, but pirates still existed and there were no cell phones. >From there, we decided to watch and reference movies that were along the lines of 1970’s drive-in movies-the ones that came in the wake of "Walking Tall" and "Billy Jack". We watched "Macon County Line", "Electra Glide in Blue", "Eat My Dust", "Grand Theft"-a lot of those hell-raising movies. That was stylistically what we were going for.

In "Macon County Line", there is the part where the title jumps out on a freeze-frame of the guy’s naked ass as he jumps over the banister. I wanted to take the humorous and campy element of that and try to make it serious and bring an artistic design to it. Even the grainy quality...I could watch "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" every day and we watched that a lot to try to figure out how they got the camera to feel so intimate and horrific in confined spaces with natural lighting. I wanted to shoot it on 16mm because I loved the look of that movie but it would have required too much lighting to be able to expose some of the dark, dingy places that we were going to shoot in.

Like your other film, "Undertow" has its share of oddball dialogue that looks strange when you see it written down but which manages to sound halfway plausible when the actors actually say it-I am thinking of the moment when a character says that they are "organizing my books by the way they smell". What inspires dialogue like that?

That specific instance comes from a friend’s brother, who actually does organize books by smell-he’s an obsessive-compulsive and knows how to find his books by smell. I thought that was amazing. I think the style of this movie-of all three of my movies-is a kind of dream-like naturalism-I write things that are appropriate but maybe not the most natural or ordinary way that you would word it or phrase it. It brings a sort of poetic quality to it, even if it is somewhat manipulated. If the performance is strong and the character is really invested in what they are saying, then it can sound natural and if we couple that with a lot of improvisations and hesitations and imperfections of speech, it hopefully sounds believable.

It is certainly asking a lot to get away with some of the shit that I have coming out of people’s mouths sometimes, but some of the stuff that seems the most fabricated or writerly is the stuff that my granddad says all the time because he is weird. In a way, I try to take the writer out of it as much as I can-one thing I hate when I see movies is seeing the screenwriter show how clever he is. I don’t want to see writers or actors-I want to see the interaction of the characters.

There is one scene in the film that I really wanted to ask you about-the scene in which Dermot Mulroney sits alone in the kitchen eating a piece of cake while watching a gospel performance on television. It doesn’t really drive the story along and it is the kind of scene that would be the first to go in a more conventional film. However, even though I couldn’t explain why, it struck me as an incredibly powerful and moving image and I cannot imagine the film without it.

I talked to Dermot a lot about having this character be really isolated and I was trying with a way to show how that character had totally resigned from the world around him and has taken his sons out there because he feels that everyone who has come into his life has somehow abandoned him. I was thinking about the most empty thing a person could do and eating birthday cake-eating gray birthday cake-by yourself while watching church on television, I think, is really sad and really did illustrate his loneliness.

That choir was one that I had heard on the radio driving from Austin to Dallas one day. It was Lester Roloff, this one 1970’s televangelist, was on and at the end of this sermon and music, they announced that for cassettes of this sermon, call such-and-such number-I skidded over to the side of the road and wrote down the number because it had this haunting, soulless and robotic quality to it. These people can say "Jesus" and "God" all day but the look in their eyes is so empty and hollow that there is no religion for real there. I thought that said a lot about him-him sitting there watching and judging them while they are staring at him, there was a sort of communication going on between them there. It exposed a lot about the character without any expository dialogue.

There is an interesting contrasting going in throughout the film in that while it does focus, to a large degree, on the isolation of these characters from themselves, each other and society in general, it is easily your largest-scale work to date in terms of size and scope.

The first half and the second half of this movie are completely different movies and we approached them completely differently-psychologically, artistically, stylistically. I wish we could have opened it up to widescreen and shot the film with anamorphic lenses for the second half of the movie-that would have been great because that half does open up the scope of the world around them-these places that have been unseen and unexperienced. A lot of the film is these characters trying to discover themselves and it kind of turns into a road movie. They go from people who don’t know too much because of their own little routines to people who realize that there is a big world out there. For me, this movie is Jamie Bell’s quest for love and trying to find nourishment. He is a kid who grew up without a mother and without love-he can’t hold onto a girlfriend for whatever reason-and he is looking for any kind of comfort, even a cow’s tit.

Can you talk about the casting of the two central roles of the kids? Viewers may be familiar with British actor Jamie Bell but few who saw him in "Billy Elliot" are likely to recognize him here and Devon Alan is pretty much an unknown.

With both of them, it was the physicality that I was drawn to. I saw "Billy Elliot" and I saw a character that performed physically throughout the entire movie and could suck you in through his energy and the way that he carried himself. I needed that for this movie and I knew after meeting him for five minutes that he would work his ass off to get the accent right because he wanted this movie. He knew this character and he wanted to express this story.

On the other side of the coin is Devon Alan, who grew up in L.A. and has never been dirty and who has never ridden a bicycle and didn’t know how to run. To take a kid like that and throw him in a hog pit, you are going to get all of those anxious tendencies and physicalities. It could have totally backfired-he could have just freaked out-but it worked really well for the progression of the film. We tried to shoot it in order and he went from a kid afraid to get his hands dirty to having him eating dirt and paint and getting intimate with his environment and the elements. The end of the movie where you see him in his underwear on the beach and jumping around in the swamps-that was his idea because he had that primitive instinct kicking in after a while and he realized that there is more than beige strip malls and gated communities to be explored. This kid had never had a mosquito bite and didn’t know what a chigger was. I heard him with the medic asking about chigger bites and when I overheard that, I said "Stop. Whatever we have planned-forget it!" and we filmed him talking about chigger bites because he was just learning about them and it just an odd, inconsequential tangent that said a lot about him and it brought the awkwardness of his physical conditioning together with the anxious peculiarities of his character.

Of all the various phases of the filmmaking process, which do you find the most personally satisfying?

Location scouting. I just love an excuse to waste a tank of gas and drive down back roads, get lost and ask people where I am. I’ll wind up on someone’s private land and they’ll come out with guns and start shooting at me or they’ll bring me cookies that they baked and ask me to shoot in their yard. Location scouting is a great excuse to knock on a lot of doors and experience the world through travel.

What were you specifically looking for on your scouts for "Undertow"? I suspect that if I were out there, for example, one place would pretty much look the same as the next.

I find locations and then I adapt the script to fit those locations. The scene that takes place in the junkyard was originally set in a forest with a treehouse. Once I found this very distinctive junkyard, I knew I had to shoot something there. Locations and places are very specific to me-the more they stink, the better. The more dangerous and precarious, the better. The more lawsuits that can potentially fall in our laps after we’ve maimed crew members, the better. I just like places that people don’t want to go and that aren’t "production-friendly". When you have Mother Nature and six property owners looking like they are going to kick your ass, it is a great feeling knowing that you are getting something special and unique.

You’ve spoken earlier about your admiration for filmmakers like Terrence Malick-of the current crop of films and filmmakers, which are the ones that have particularly caught your eye?

I haven’t seen "Sideways" but I really like Alexander Payne-I know that one is out of his region, but to take Omaha and take an insiders perspective that has a sense of humor as well as a sense of courtesy and make films as intelligent and sophisticated and funny and dumb as his movies are is great and really admirable. I like the more self-indulgent filmmakers-last year, my two favorite films were Gus Van Sant’s "Gerry" and Michael Bay’s "Bad Boys 2"-those two films, at opposite ends of the box-office charts, were the most incredible films of the year. They said "I’m a guy who is going to make a movie balls-out and with no excuses-my way".

Do you have anything that you are currently working on now? I know that the adaptation of "A Confederacy of Dunces" that you were scheduled to do finally fell apart a little while ago.

That has been shelved until someone dies or gets paid off. That one has a lot of political and financial baggage on it that has unfortunately weighed it down and brought it to a creative standstill last winter.

How far along did it get?

I had cast it-I’m living in New Orleans now. We cast it and found all the locations. It was not a healthy creative atmosphere for that movie and it won’t be until someone puts their ego aside-or several people put their egos and checkbooks aside. It was unfortunate because it would have been a great opportunity and a great story. I’m just doing a lot of writing now and trying to decide what is next.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
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