Interview: Filmmaker Andrew Bujalski
By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 4, 2008 5:00PM
We interviewed local filmmaker Joe Swanberg recently and so we figured that was a pretty good excuse to talk to his sometime-partner-in-crime Andrew Bujalski. The two have been fountainheads of enthusiasm for the recent explosion in microbudget filmmaking. Bujalski has two features under his belt, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. Both are painfully hilarious (or hilariously painful) and startlingly lifelike: it's impossible to tell where the screenplays ends and improv begins. Pretentious comparisons to John Cassavetes and Richard Linklatter are hard to avoid, and like the latter, his honest handling of the foibles of youth are a billion miles away from Hollywood.
As you'd expect from someone profiled by the New York Times and every indie film magazine known to mankind, Bujalski was hesitant to do another interview. But in the end he agreed...on the condition that we talk about anything except his own films. It made for an interesting email exchange (we've kept his eccentric punctuation intact), and included discussions about summer reading, the pleasures of deep dish, and a mini-dissertation of Friday the 13th Part V.
Chicagoist: What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Andrew Bujalski: As a very little kid I told my mother that I wanted to be a scientist, & when she asked what particular branch of the sciences I planned to go into, I told her that I was going to be a master of all of them & that the name for this generalist job that I was inventing was going to be "nemester." Don't know how I came up w/ that word. But around age 5 I saw Rocky III & I think from there on out was pretty set on making movies. I often wish that I had had another childhood ambition, it usually seems that the most interesting people are the ones who change course at some point in their lives. Certainly Matthew Barney's football & modeling careers makes for a more compelling bio than if he had just diligently worked his way toward & then through some arts graduate program.
C: What's your earliest memory involving music?
AB: Oof. I have a very poor memory of childhood. I am good with names & dates etc, but poor at recalling sensory data, which I think is why I'm stuck being a filmmaker instead of, say, a novelist. I get to work w/ actual live sensory data as opposed to having to pull it all out of my fried synapses. I have a vague memory of sitting in a bathtub and looking at some kind of leaflet/newspaper/??? that had a picture of Ronald Reagan on one side and Jimmy Carter on the other. But that doesn't involve music. Off the top of my head I'd probably just have to fast forward all the way to Rocky III again and "Eye of the Tiger"...?? Singing it in the hallways of the mall while punching & kicking the air?
C: Do you have a method for writing? A preferred time or day or a place you like to be? Music or no music while you write?
AB: My preference is not to write at all. I have been meaning to set a rigorous schedule for myself, but, uh, thus far have failed to get around to it. Writing, like editing, only occurs after lots & lots & lots of procrastination. So usually I spend the day pacing around & writing e-mails etc etc & then maybe if I'm lucky & I don't have evening plans I manage to get blood from a stone somewhere in the 5pm - 2am range. In younger days I'd go later. I don't think music is usually helpful for writing but because I am desperate for distraction I very often have it going, yes. Of course, if & when I actually manage to hit a groove, I cease to be aware of the music. Never a good idea to listen to music that you don't know very well when you're trying to get something done.
C: What are your favorite places in Chicago?
AB: Up until about age 13 I would go to Chicago every year for 4th of July as my dad grew up there & there were a bunch of aunts & uncles & cousins & grandparents there. So I only ever saw Chicago through the prism of family stuff, & Aunt Barb's place was really the only scene I was familiar with. Then I went about 15 yrs w/o setting foot there, & suddenly a flood of visits, 4 in the last few years (a birthday celebration for Barb, a film festival, working on a friend's film, & a wedding). Revisiting it as an adult has been slightly surreal, as it turns out there is a whole big diverse city there that I'd never noticed before. My favorite place is presumably anywhere that serves quality deep dish. I fuckin love deep dish. Whenever people tell me they're visiting Chicago I implore them to have a slice for me, & when they come home I ask them if they did & the health-conscious fuckers always concede that they didn't & I always feel like, Geez, I asked you to do *one* stupid thing ... Visiting from Massachusetts as a kid I always found it bizarre that my cousins referred to soda as "pop" but somehow it ended up rubbing off on me & it's the one Midwesternism I've carried w/ me in my travels.
C: Does a person's character determine his or her fate?
AB: Maybe in a more elegantly designed world than this one, a frictionless environment. I think this is the kind of question that's best addressed by somebody who's survived combat, or nearly froze to death climbing Everest. Not that the people who've been shaped by extreme experiences are necessarily right about everything, but they're certainly given the gift of conviction & gravitas. The more good luck I have, the more it feels like luck.
C: What books are you reading these days?
AB: I have I think 44 unread books on my shelf waiting for me. When it was most under control a few years ago I think I had it to about 20. But they come in faster than I can read them now & I'm afraid that once I cross 50 the situation will be unrecoverable. (I have a compulsive system in place which is that, exceptional circumstances aside, every second book I read has to be the one that's been on the shelf the longest. So that right now I have no books up there that were acquired before around Jan. '07; everything up until then has been cleared.) The moment finds me reading a sort of pop academic text on bisexuality & its cultural evolution that only came into my possession because circa Jan. '07 I had a roommate who was moving out & was getting rid of some books & though I would not imagine myself seeking out or purchasing this book, for free I guess I was compelled enough to keep it. Strangely, the first page of the first chapter features a quote from someone I briefly dated. Before that I read Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place which was apparently the definitive Austin text pre-Linklater; it was exciting to see how much of the Austin character that surrounds me here now was already fully formed when that book was published in '61.
C: What's your favorite black & white movie?
AB: This isn't all that much different from just asking "what's your favorite movie?" & it's a question that I've never been able to answer, certainly w/o a whole lot more context & qualifying. This weekend I was at one of my Chicago cousins' wedding & my Uncle John asked me "what music are you listening to these days?" & that is in the same family of questions-to-short-circuit-the-brain for me, even though that one seems to be factual rather than judgmental in nature; don't know why I find it so difficult.
C: Tell us about a movie you absolutely hate, and why.
AB: A slightly easier question but I've got to beg off on this too. The world don't need any more hatred! The most upsetting movies to me of course are the ones that somehow hit home, the ones that *could* have been good but either got intentionally sold short or just bungled in a way that I secretly fear I might have done myself given the chance.
C: What do you think your past romantic relationships have taught you?
AB: It's not as easy as it looks.
C: If you had to do it all over again, would you?
AB: Pretty sure I would, yeah. What would my other option here be, death?
C: As an eleventh question, please ask yourself a question you wish you'd been asked and then answer it.
Q: What's so great about Friday the 13th Part V anyway?
A: The same twist that makes most of the fans hate it is naturally at the core of its power. While not necessarily all that effective as a thriller qua thriller, ultimately it ends up being a treatise on the nature of evil that pulls the rug out on everything the other films sell us; whereas I-IV, VI? suggest that evil is more or less contained within a Devil, V seems to kill off Devil & God in one fell swoop. It also, I believe, features the only truly random act of violence in the entire series & it is by far the most shocking.