Hey folks, Harry here... Last Sunday here in Austin we hosted Crispin Glover and the folks behind WILLARD to a special benefit screening at the Alamo Drafthouse to benefit the Cinemaker's Co-op here in Austin. Before the event, I set up an interview between the resident AICN Crispin Glover expert and that strange tall thin man we all adore. Quite an interview, and quite a wonderful movie ta boot! Here ya go...
It’s March 2nd, and a cool and damp evening in Austin, TX. Outside the sky is gray and foggy, while inside the Driskell, Austin’s reputedly haunted grand-poppa hotel, it is a quiet Sunday evening. Easily this is the perfect atmosphere to prepare for tonight’s screening of Willard at the Alamo.
To that end, Crispin Glover has kindly agreed to sit down and share his
thoughts on Willard, his own film projects, and the future of counter
cultural film.
So it goes without saying, I’m hitching up my garters and oh-so eager to hit
the record button.
What follows I’ve done my best to transcribe faithfully for you here...
Have you visited Austin before?
I was here when I was filming What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?. I can’t
remember now if that was late 80’s or early nineties.
Did you like Austin?
Yeah I did. It’s nice. It’s a pretty city.
You haven’t been to the Alamo though. There’s a rumor going around that Tim
had been trying to get you to do an appearance at the Alamo--
That’s right. Yeah yeah yeah. And that is tonight where the film’s going
to play? Now, Tim, is that who’s bringing this here tonight?
He’s the owner of the theater.
Oh, so good. So I’ll meet him in person and talk to him before--
I’ve talked to him before about showing my film What is It? Here before—and
I want to when it’s completed…
About Willard, what did you think of the original movie?
I’d never seen the original film before, ah before the film was offered
to me. I knew about it—I knew basically what the idea was, but I’d never
seen it--you know I was offered the –my agent called me and told me there
was interest in me for this film and wanted to know if I was interested in
the movie and initially it sounded interesting to me. And then I read the
script and it was a really well written script. A really great character-a
great part to play, so I said yeah, I definitely wanted to do this. So then
negotiations started and then I got the movie Willard and watched it at that
point—but I already had a really strong idea of what the character was
before because the Glenn Morgan script was pretty vivid. So watching that,
I already had inside my mind what was, what seemed…different to me than what
…
Than what you ended up seeing when you finally watched the movie?
Than when I saw Willard, the original Willard—well it seemed different a
lot than what this script was in terms of the character of Willard and so I
wanted to see what the original actor had done and it seemed different than
what I had in my mind. But of course there’s a lot of similarities as
well.
Some of the stills that I’ve seen, some of the facial expressions, there’s
kind of a similar quality…
To what?
Stuff that Bruce Davison would do that he was well remembered for as that
particular character, --
Oh really? That’s funny. And and I looked similar in certain scenes?
That’s interesting because—
Yeah, like a way that he would raise an eyebrow --I haven’t seen the movie,
so I’m not trying to suggest you were like channeling him or something—
Oh no no no, but it would be funny if that happened because I watched it
once and it wasn’t something that was on my mind so much. I mean
his—there’s a drawing of him, at his age now as the father of him, and I’m
looking at pictures of him—there’s a suicide scene where I’m contemplating
stuff about my father’s suicide, but um, I wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking about
that particular performance. I know there’s some of the same lines, because
there’s some good lines in there …in that, but you know, I just wanted to
see if there was something that I should be influenced by or not and then
just kind of, then, put it out of my mind basically. But who knows what
will be similar or dissimilar. I don’t know-- I’d have to sit and watch
them side by side…
You’ve done a bunch of characters where there’s not a lot of dialogue—where
it’s almost all physical—obviously like the Charlie’s Angels stuff—but
others—are you attracted to characters that are mostly physical?
Well, I like, I do like, silent film a lot and, so it doesn’t deter me at
all with the amount of lines or things that are said and I do like that
quality about Charlie’s Angels. And Bartleby—I didn’t say a lot of
different things, I said –I didn’t speak a lot, so yeah I like that element.
Even in Willard I speak more, but it’s not a terribly verbose
character. So, yeah. But silent film is a fairly, it’s a pretty different
art form, with getting rid of the dialogue. But I find it’s really powerful
if something is just visually done, and it’s done well. A really good
silent film is really powerful.
So Ain’t It Cool goes into all genres—they’ll talk about silent film?
Yeah. It’s um—a lot of the stuff that comes up as a topic is stuff that’s
coming out, and so occasionally if there’s a DVD release or something like
that. But Harry is like an encyclopedia of films, so silent films get
discussed in reviews when they come up, for historical placement or
comparison—
At this point, Crispin asks different questions, including the history of
Ain’t it Cool News, which I won’t trouble you with here. Besides, I’m sure
Harry wouldn’t be satisfied with my version of the story unless it started
"In the beginning there was the word, and the word was HARRY, and it was
GOOD…"
So Quentin Tarantino’s involvement helped get it to be known? What year
did he do that?
That was—
After Pulp Fiction?
Actually it was a little bit after From Dusk til Dawn, so that was –
Before he did..
…Jackie Brown…
Yeah, okay… so good. Yeah, Quentin Tarantino seems to have a good
cinephile element to me—he—it seems like he studies films kind of after a
certain period but at least he really is genuinely into cinema as ah, as an
art.
He’s fun to listen to. There’s shit that he notices that’s just amazing.
Yeah. He’s good. I like that. He’s a nice fellow or seems to be helpful
to cinephile types…
He’s done a bunch of film festivals in Austin, there’s something about the
community in Austin that he seems to respond to—
It’s a nice community—I remember it was kind of a very youthful orriented
and you know, it’s not like there’s a big counter cultural movement—in fact
there isn’t a film counter cultural movement—but you can feel that there’s
interest in that type of thing—which is good. I’ve noticed Minneapolis is
like that, Seattle is like that.
I’ve also heard that Minneapolis has a big revival house that’s similar to
the Alamo.
I think so. What is it called?
I don’t know the name of it.
I have a lot of them written down because of my films-- What it It? I’ve
also shot a sequel to What is it? Called Everything is Fine—that’s also
another reason why it’s taking so long, the fellow, this fellow, Steve
Stuart who wrote the sequel, had cerebral palsy and he was 62 and I was
getting -–really becoming concerned that his health would deteriorate and it
was right about the time I did Charlie’s—right before I did Charlie’s Angels
I knew I needed to basically do that or something wrong might happen. He
was in What is It? As well.
What did you say the name of the sequel was?
It’s called Everything is Fine, and he wrote the screenplay and he’s the
lead actor in it. So right after finishing Charlie’s Angels I did a small
independent--Fast Sofa. And then I went to Salt Lake, which is where Steve
Stuart lived, and then we shot it from the end of that year--the year I was
in Charlie’s Angelsthe spring of that year and he died
within a month of the completion of the filmmaking. But I think that film
is probably going to be the best one I’ll ever be involved with in my entire
career. Not that it’ll be the most expensive film you know or the most
money it’ll have—but just because Steve Stuart—it’s kind of an
autobio—semiautobiographical—well I guess it’s an autobiographical,
fantastical retelling of his experience of his life. It has this naivete,
kind of like folk art that we tried to keep the naivete of his writing
style—but he was a good writer at the same time—it’s really interesting.
There hasn’t been a movie made quite like this before because there’s this
documentation of him enacting this fantasy, and yet it’s about real issues
and things that you can tell he’s feeling. Yet it’s this fantasy as well,
because he’s enacting these fantasies, and Steve Stuart really was a hair
fetishist, and that kind of comes into the film but it’s a lot of stuff
about stories of him with women. I shouldn’t go into too much detail, but
that element is fantasy, but you can tell what he was really thinking
about.
It’s really interesting. And I’m really excited about that movie. But
that’s -- so I finished shooting that and then I was able to get a bit of
work done on What Is It?, which is the prequel and Steve had died—got some
of the work done and then—it was difficult—It was right after Charlie’s
Angels came out there was a lot of interest in me so I was confident in
things coming about, but I wanted to take the time off and make that film,
and then there was the writer’s strike, the actor’s strike and then the
911—you know the big strike on the World Trade Center, and it was like the
worst year and I’d put all of my money in this thing, and then luckily,
there was, I got three movies in a row. I really was in the worst financial
situation I had been in in my life and then I did Like Mike, Willard and the
sequel to Charlie’s Angels, and so now I’m in like the best financial
situation—so that’s good—I have all of these places written down in my
computer—I am planning on going around and to distribute this--
How many places did you do the Big Slide Show?
I think I’ve done it at least—somewhere between 15 and 20……Not that huge,
but not small either. So I know the kind of stuff –audiences I can get and
that was before Charlie’s Angels came out and before Willard—
Yeah, I thought it was primarily the people who read your books—
Yeah, definitely, and I would get good sized shows from those things and
I think that’s also why there’s interest from these local theatre’s where I
think they know that financially they’ll do well as well. So it’s a good
thing because I can’t show either one of these films in anything but art
house theatres. If they were rated they would be rated NC-17, and you can’t
show those in cineplexes, so they’re made specifically to be played in these
types of theatres, and I’m all for that. I know that’s the kind of people
that will enjoy these films anyhow.
You said earlier there was no film counter culture to speak of right now—
Well, there’s not a counter cultural film movement. Which I think there
are, I mean, I know that there are people that are interested in it, and I
know that maybe independent film makers that try it, but it is difficult.
It’s difficult to get distribution and I think that I’m in a good situation,
because I have an acting background that people can advertise—but you know,
for an independent film maker to just walk into a movie theatre and say
well, I want to show it—maybe it’s different in this kind of place-
referring to the Alamo
But it’s expensive. Film is expensive, even when you do it
inexpensively, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve done these things very
inexpensively. I’ve paid a few key people on the Steve Stuart film. I’ve
got Margit Carstensen from Germany, she’s one of Fassbinder’s main
actresses. I paid her a very small amount of money. It’s one of the first
films she’s done in the United States—you might not be familiar with her if
you’re not familiar with Fassbinder--
I’ve seen a lot of his films—
In Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant---she played Petra von Kant and in
Chinese Roulette she was the mother, and if you saw Martha, she was Martha.
She was great, and it was interesting because Steve Stuart’s writing has
something about it that—something about Fassbinder’s work is very…I don’t
like the word melodrama because I think Fassbinder’s great and melodrama
sounds kind of, ah, not a nice term for something… But there is something
about Fassbinder that has to do with human emotion, drama—it’s great stuff,
it’s really psychologically true and intelligent and it’s only within the
last, I don’t know, 5 or 6 years that I’ve really started watching
Fassbinder, and he’s really become one of my very favorites. But watching
Margit Carstensen—even though it’s 20 years later she’s older now, but she
still looks like herself. She’s an interesting looking person, and watching
her do this stuff I—Steve Stuart’s writing is different that Fassbinder’s,
but there’s certain similar things. It’s very human drama oriented and
watching Margit Carstensen do this stuff I was just feeling like I was
watching a Fassbinder movie. I asked her what he, how he worked her because
you know you read all these things about Fassbinder, and I could tell why it
was the way he worked with her. She told me that he didn’t tell her to do
anything—he really didn’t direct her much at all. And I could see that she
was telling me the truth. She was a really nice person. A great
actress—just because she worked so hard and she really had everything
perfected. And I’m sure that some of the people he was directing needed to
be worked with, because he worked with a great variety of people, but she
was a very competent stage actress. And so just sitting there watching her,
that’s why I felt like I was watching a Fassbinder film because she would
just do it. I wasn’t telling her to do these things. She would do these
things. It was really interesting. Margit Carstensen and the other
ones--I get two names mixed up—the one that was in a Merchant of Four
Seasons... Those two are my two favorite actresses of Fassbinder. I really
admire him. Yeah, I’m so excited about that, that Steve Stuart film.
Oh yeah, but how I started talking about it was that I make these things
very inexpensively, about counter cultural filmmaking, consequently I’ve
been concentrating on working in…I’ll call it the pro-cultural film market
basically, and I’ve had dificulty with it for years conscientiously. It’s
why I haven’t worked as much, maybe as I could. I’ve turned a lot of things
down and not done things just because I found difficulty with them, but it’s
come to the point where I know I need to make money in order to finish these
films. And so Charlie’s Angels came at a perfect time. If I hadn’t done
that film, Steve Stuart would have died and I would have never made the
movie and I know the film’s going to be really good. And consequently
though, I’m getting really interesting roles. I was very pleased with how
Charlie’s Angels came out—I really liked my performance in that and I’m sure
that if I hadn’t done that film then I wouldn’t have gotten Willard. And
Willard is one of the best parts I’ve had in my career, so it’s interesting
that I a very strong interest in counter cultural film and you know if there
had ever been a counter cultural film movement—that’s what I’ve always
wanted—sign me up. I want to be a part of it. You know, but there isn’t,
there isn’t.
You don’t thing that some of the filmmakers —well there doesn’t seem to have
been a movement, but there’s different people who seem to have gotten a
force behind them—I mean John Waters was doing what he wanted—
There was a counter cultural film movement in the 1970’s, but that’s
about when it ended. In the late 70’s, yeah. And when I say that, I also
mean that you can get funding by a corporate film makers that understand
that there’s a movement that can be advertised and utilized, and there is no
such thing now. And the validity of… Some of the counter cultural films or
so called counter cultural films from the 60’s or 70’s had hippie influence
and if you look at those counter cultural films, they’ve lost their validity
in the current culture. Whereas Fassbinder, Werner Hertzog, Luis Bunuel,
Stanley Kubrick, who all had counter cultural interest during that time, and
well, Buenel before and Kubrick before, their films still have valid
counter cultural integrity. But there are people sometimes that do get
films made that have that instinct and that are hitting on certain things,
but it’s really rare, and that’s why I say that it’s not a movement. And I
don’t think there’s going to be one for quite some time to come, with just
the climate of the market.
But with digital video and that the media itself is becoming more accesible
and less expensive--?
Well, the difficulty is about distribution and funding. And certainly
good films can be made that way, but then—
--What do you do?
Yeah. You know corporations have to get behind something to really push
it in a big way. It’s difficult. You know, I’m not planning for either of
these films to have corporate backing for them. So I know that’s why I have
to make them very small budget and why I have to be careful in my post
production—why I’m continuing to to do it myself. There’s really only a
small amount of work to be done, and then if I go and pay someone to do that
amount of work it could very well get to the point of where I’m starting to
lose money on the film, so I’m being very careful about that. I mean, I
probably, it may very well be that I will, just because at a certain point
it just gets so fustrating—there’s just such a very minimal ammount of stuff
left that I need to do, but like this whole last year I wasn’t able to work
on either one of them at all. I’ve just been busy acting—which is good—but
then there’s part three, it’s a trilogy of movies, these films, and I have
some money right now, and it’s like on one hand I could just go put a lot of
money into those films, and on the other hand there’s a part three that I
need to shoot. And I want to build things on sets. All of the Steve Stuart
film was on sets, and some of What is It ? was on sets, but the third one
which is called It is Mine is also going to entirely be on sets and I want
to have a very large space to shoot, so I’ve been thinking about buying a
property that I can make some kind of sound stage on, but if I do that I’ll
be back in the same situation of not having cash and needing to go out and
work again. But I don’t mind being patient as well. I know these films
that I’ve made are good and it’s okay if I take a little bit of time.
They’re not something that are reflecting what’s going on right now in
cinema, so they won’t become dated rapidly. I mean, I do need to get them
out it’s just it’s taken so long, especially for What is It?—that I’ve just
got to do it as it comes along and it frustrates me, but at the same time,
I’m really glad I made all of those movies last year, especially Willard,
I’m really excited about.
This is for the web site, right? Well it seems like the web site is the
kind of place that this kind of stuff—like if I talk about Fassbinder to
most journalists—
They don’t know?
But something tells me that Ain’t It Cool, that they will know what I’m
talking about. There will be people who know Margit Carstensen is and feel
like that’s an exciting thing—because to me it’s amazing. I think she’s one
of the greatest living actresses, and to have worked with this tremendous
filmmaker and being one of his very main actresses and to have never even
made a film in the United States—I’m the first person she’s ever made a film
with in the U.S.! It’s weird! I mean she speaks English, and she’s a great
actress. But you can tell that there’s just not an appreciation necessarily
for that kind of thing in the United States.
But it doesn’t seem like film criticism had been…I hate to use catch
phrases, but it really seems like there is a dumbing down in criticism and
journalism--
It’s true. It’s because there isn’t—and I am certain of this—it’s
because there isn’t a counter cultural film market or movement, and so
propaganda works, and we have in the United States basically a very large
propaganda machine that feeds off itself. So people watch movies—and it’s
vague ideas, it’s vague notions, but people pick up on these things, that
they are supposed to think certain ways-or that they’re not supposed to
think, basically, and they don’t. And then it’s like, if you do any thing
that’s thoughtful, they think, "Oh that’s weird…"
And labels, like saying that something is weird or that it’s this or that—
It’s dismissive. Exactly. As opposed to thinking. And you know I talk
about counter cultural—and I feel like there’s steps that it needs to go in.
First there needs to be something within the counter culture—something
that’s like a slap in the face. Something that just says, "This is vitally
incorrect." And the next step is something that opposed to being counter
cultural, it’s something that needs to be thoughtful and truthful, because
right now there seems to be a lot of films made that are neither thoughtful
nor truthful. But it’s almost like the slap element needs to be first and
then the thoughtful, truthful things, because a lot of truth can be denied
because it isn’t in the propaganda element. You probably know what I’m
talking about and it’s a little bit obtuse in a way, but there’s certain
things that you can’t—that are not supposed to be made, that aren’t made
because they don’t seem right by corporate backing because they’re afraid to
offend anybody. And that’s, that’s what you’re talking about—the
stupifying—and everybody starts to think that way—everyone—because they are
all watching movies and there’s that feeling—
They’re looking for what they expect to see—
Yes and then if it doesn’t fit in with that then it’s, "That’s weird.
That’s wrong." I’ve thought about it a lot. I went to see a bunch of
German films from World War II. Which of course, in the United States,
that’s the Nazis, and Nazi Germany is kind of considered, I guess maybe up
until now, it’s the ultimate enemy…the ultimate
The quickest way to say "monsters"—
Yeah, the ultimate monsters, and so—But they had a show of them years ago
at UCLA, and I was really curious to see these, you know that’s what they
call propaganda—and that’s when I started thinking about all kinds of
propaganda. Because the movies that I saw that they showed at UCLA were
love stories, and it seems like maybe most people would think it would be
about racism or stuff that’s thought of about Nazis—but it wasn’t. And they
were interesting films. I thought a lot of them were quite beautiful to
look at, but they were love stories. Now it is true that there was a very
strong moral behind each of them. That was something that the Nazis, or the
Ministry—the Ministry of Film really understood was that story structure is
effective. And the story structure behind—I think I only saw eight of
them—I wish I’d seen all of them. But of the ones that I saw it seemed that
the morals to them were: Stay true to your love, or you’ll be laughed at,
ridiculed, ousted from society and ultimately killed. Some of them didn’t
get to the point of killing. There was an Emil Jannings one called The
Broken Jug—I think he may have co-directed it. That one wasn’t a love
story, but he literally played a states person who was a judge, but he ends
up getting ousted from the culture because he does something against the
state. So the idea was stay true to the state or we’ll kill you. So there
were creepy things about it, I mean no question, but it was subtle. I think
it was Joseph Gobbels said, propaganda ceases to function when people realize
that it’s propaganda. And that’s the thing of it. The United States has
it’s own propaganda, but it’s very effective because people don’t realize
that it’s propaganda. And it’s subtle, but it’s actually a much stronger
propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it’s funded in a different way.
With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States,
it’s funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen
that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is
considered okay and good, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it really serves
people’s thinking—it can stupify and make not very good things happen.
I wouldn’t say "it can." I’d say it does!
Yeah, it does, and you know, maybe I feel spoiled a little bit, because
I’m sitting in a nice restaurant, or a nice hotel and it’s pretty here, but
there are things that are wrong. It needs to be addressed, and it isn’t
being addressed in the film community. There are people that do, and films
that get corporately funded that skirt so they are not necessarily
pro-propaganda movies but there are none that are definitely anti-propaganda
movies. There are some people that kind of get away with—
It often feels like a kind of pretend hipness… But anyhow, it’s obviously something that I’ve thought about a lot, and I feel like these films that I’ve been working on go into these things a little bit. The third one is actually a much more direct parody of something. The other two are less tangible. Particularly, What is It? is less tangible. But Steve Stuart is very specific and the third one is a different kind of specificness, a parody of something that needs to be addressed—
Now did Steve Stuart also write the third one?
No. He only wrote the second and I basically incorporated a pre existing
script into this trilogy. What happened was, I had written the third
script, the one that hasn’t been made yet first—well Steve Stuart wrote his
first and I’d known about it beforehand and I didn’t think of it as being
correlating to the first one, which is called It is Mine. I co-wrote It Is
Mine, and that had people with Down’s Syndrome in it, or I wrote people
suposedly with Down’s Syndrome into it and then David Lynch said he would
agree to executive produce it with me to direct. So I went to one of the
corporate independent studios and showed it to them and they said, well,
they had interest in it, but they said we’re concerned about the Down’s
Syndrome elements. So I started to make the short film to kind of show that
this was a viable thing to do and that was What is It? and that ended up
turning into a feature film itself and I put Steve Stuart in it and I
realized that as that was a feature film, that was—well, first I realized
that I was going to make a feature film out of What is It? and then I
realized I was going to have a the sequel be It is Mine, but then I thought,
well, there’s certain elements of that Steve Stuart thing that can somehow
fit into it, so if I put Steve Stuart into What is It?, I can make this
trilogy. So I put Steve Stuart in the first film and it took me a number of
years, and he started to get older cerebral palsy isn’t
degenerative, but he would start to choke on his own saliva, and his lungs
were colapsing. I’m convinced though that if we had not made EVERYTHING IS FINE! he
would have stayed alive until we had made it. I know that he really wanted
to make the film, but I mean, now I know how much he really wanted to make
the film. He got what he wanted to have made done and then it was time for
him to die. That one’s going to be really powerful.
The main thing is that I shot these things and I don’t mind if it takes a
while for me to do them.
I can hardly wait! Thanks again to Mr. Glover for sharing his thoughts
with AICN! (/I)
Dorothy Parker and her satisfied circle!
