Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. We’ve got some really good stuff up already today, but this might be my favorite of the bunch. I always like Ghostboy’s interviews, but this one in particular seems to me to be the sort of thing any aspiring indie filmmaker should read. And after seeing the trailer and reading this piece, I am dying to see FLANNEL PAJAMAS, which looks awesome.
Howdy folks, You probably don't know Jeff Lipsky's name, but if you've a taste at all for quote-unquote art films, you're probably a fan of his work. As co-founder of October Films, he helped usher the work of Mike Leigh to American shores, helped Emily Watson rise to fame (and an Oscar) via Von Trier's Breaking The Waves, and, with his mentor John Cassavetes, basically helped create the independent film scene as we know it. For better or for worse, he was a key player in Peter Biskind's Down And Dirty Pictures, but these days he's only in the distribution game to pay the bills - and the film he's focusing most of his attention on is one that he wrote and directed, entitled Flannel Pajamas. Flannel Pajamas premiered at Sundance last year. Twelve months later, it's slowly trickling out across the country, under Lipsky's personal care - he's traveling with it, introducing it in to every city it opens in and discussing it with audiences afterward. Check out the official site for the release dates. The film itself is like a grow-up version of The Break-Up - a sensitive and fluid depiction of a young Manhattan couple falling into and out of love over the course of two years. It's one of the most accurate portrayals of a relationship I've seen in a long time; what it gets so right is the way mutual complacency can turn into a slippery slope. It portrays with eerie accuracy the way in which two people who really, sincerely love each other can quickly lose their grip on what made their relationship work. It's heartbreaking not just because it should have worked, but because by the time they realize it's not, they're beyond repair. A year to the day that the film screened for the first time at Sundance, I sat down to talk with Lipsky about making the film, emerging from the distribution game to become a filmmaker, and working with his hero (and mine!), John Cassavetes.* * * GB: You've packed a lot of personal material into this film, but I've noticed on the film's website that you hesitate from calling it completely autobiographical. JL: Well, I'm not shying away from that. It is definitely a story that is rooted in autobiography. The writing of the script was inspired by own short-lived marriage from 1989 to 1992, and in discussing over the ensuing decade with friends who were married or divorced what the circumstance were that lead to the demise or success of their relationships. And it was really ten years after the divorce, and it was as I was looking through an album of photographs from my wedding that I started recognizing how enchanted this relationship seemed to be, from the very first day we met, and I said, "I want to remember these things." It was years before I could face up to the beginning of the relationship. I was jotting down notes and diary entries, and by the time I was finished it seemed like the outline of a script, especially in context of all that I had learned from my friends. I thought there was enough there to resonate with any audience who had ever been in a relationship. And I wanted to be completely honest. I realized that this was exactly the kind of film that was transformative for me. The four filmmakers in my life who most inspired me - John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman - generally made movies that illuminated the human condition, and that were love stories. My mentor was John Cassavetes - I mean, even his film The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie was a love story! It wasn't a departure from his other work. There was a lot of truth, there was a lot of pain, and a lot of love. And you know, I get off on Back To The Future and Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Eraserhead, but they don't touch me the way these other films do. So I thought if I could do semi-justice to these films through my own life experience, it would be great. So, I'd say fifty percent of the film is reality, and fifty percent is total fiction, and one of the things I'm really excited about is that audiences respond most powerfully to scenes that are a complete fabrication, which I consider an artistic triumph. But it's all at the service of the heart of the film, which are two beautiful, flawed, imperfect, sexy, bold soulful people. I think that defines most of the people I know in real life, and I wanted to tell their stories. And I wanted to tell my story. I thought that it contained enough commonality to warrant painting a little picture. You had something personal to say that other people could relate to. Yeah. We had a mother and daughter in the editing room to see it and comment on it, and as soon as it was over they got in a raging argument over which character was to blame. That was music to my ears! At the lab in New York, where we did all our post produciton work, we had a sound glitch and a guy who had no clue about the movie as our sound technician. We had to reels four and five. He sits there with me in the screening room, and reel four starts, and fifteen minutes in - his fine tune ears are supposed to be discerning what's wrong, but he starts laughing uproariously. He says, "excuse me, I don't mean to laugh, but I've had that conversation with my wife." So you know, these are great moments of validation for me. GB: Do you know whether or not you your ex-wife has seen the film yet? JL: I said until a couple of months ago that to the best of my knowledge she doesn't know the film exists. I haven't been in touch with her in six years. But I think the jig is up, because a few months ago, there was a screening at UCLA that I attended. As the professor was introducing the film, a guy on the other side of the theater was waving wildly at me. I waved back, thinking to myself "who is he?" After the screening, I was greeting some friends and this guy walked up to me and extended his hand and said, "oh my god, Jeff, it was so good! You should be so proud!" And I'm wracking my brain, and it finally dawned on me that he was the attorney that handled our divorce! His wife was my ex-wife's friend. So that was the first hint that maybe word would be getting back to her. She now lives in London with her third husband and first child. We're trying to get into a London film festival, the Declaration Of Independence Film Festival. I hope they select the film, because if so it'll be the first opportunity she'll have to see the film. And I hope she comes and I hope she sees it, and I hope she respects what I tried to do, and what I hoped I've accomplished. I'm sure it'll touch a lot of nerves, but I think that in the end it's honesty will resonate with her. GB: You've said that the film would have failed if it were melodramatic. How do you, as a director, avoid melodrama? JL: Well, you do several things. One, you talk to your actors about avoiding the pitfalls of doing actorly scenes. There's a pivotal scene late in the movie where the fate of these two people are determined once and for all, and Julianne Nicholson's instinct was to shed tears. I said, "you have to fight that instinct; it is counter to real life, it is counter to your character." And she did it. It became a much more powerful or real moment, a moment you could interpret in any number of ways. It let the audience get into her thought process instead of being told what she was thinking. Another example is that we have a wedding scene, a funeral, but I never show the couple getting married or the funeral service. One of the ways of avoiding melodrama is to avoid those cliches. I'm not interested in seeing something that we've seen a million time; I want to see what happens behind the scenes. I want to see those moments that we never hear about, that we never see. The unpredictable moments. How their relationship continues to unfold at the most surprising times. GB: I noticed that you did the same thing with the sex scenes. The film has a lot of nudity, but you always cut around the actual sex and focus on the before and after. JL: Humping is not in and of itself fabulously cinematic. I can rent porn if I want to see that. To me, what was critical to depicting the arc of a couple's relationship from the day it begins to the day it ends was embuing that relationship with an utter and total sense of honesty and naturalism. What takes me out of a movie is when you have two lovers in bed together with blankets up to their lower lip, and then one of them decides they have to go to the door or answer the telephone, and they take a sheet with them. It just takes me out of the movie. The other day, at a screening in Seattle I had a woman come up to me and say "I just wanted to thank you, because normally when there's nudity in a movie it's objectifying women, but you show penises!" And I said that's because in real life, that's what you see! And in one of the scenes audiences have been responding to, when Stuart coerces Nicole to undress in a near violation of her psyche, she at least tries to turn the tables on him - about an hour later, after we skip over the copulation to a scene that I think is far more revealing. It's far more explicit, and you have to show him in his complete nakedness or else her line won't have the same heft to it. GB: I understand that the cut which got into Sundance was a good deal longer, and that you then made some trims to it. Was that mandated by the festival, or were you just not finished with the film when you were accepted? JL: It wasn't a concession to Sundance. I don't think there's a definitive answer to that question. The history of it is...I have final cut, but if I have any respect for my collaborators, in this case my editor, before I even set foot in the editing room, she gets eight days to edit the entire movie. We shot thirty five hours of film. It's a 146 page script, and we shot everything in the script. She goes in from page one to page 146 and basically slams a version of the film together. And boy, are young film technicians talented! During the shooting of the movie, I would take my script supervisor and whisper into her ear, "what's the running time of the film so far?" And when we finished and I asked her how long the film was, she said three hours and twenty minutes. So my editor finishes her cut, and I go in and ask her how long it is and she says three hours and twenty two minutes. I don't know how they do it! So we sat there and watched it and were both very excited about it. We did our first edit, she and I, and we cut twelve minutes out of it. And I sat there and I said, "well, I don't know what else we can cut out. It looks done to me!" We got it down to two-forty five. We would bring audiences in, complete strangers, and ninety five percent said it was too long, but no one could agree what should come out! It was a very rich, very complex story, and it was wall to wall dialogue, and there was not one scene where there was not some information conveyed that was important, that was new. It was tough. And we got down to two and a half hours, and then we got down to two-seventeen, and each time I thought it was the final cut. Finally , I took a carving knife and got it down to two hours and four minutes. And then it got selected to the dramatic competition at Sundance, and it wasn't until I was sitting at Sundance watching the film for the first time that I thought, you know what? This is the best running time for the movie. That said, a year after Sundance, I think that two hours and fourteen minutes might have been the perfect running time. Sometimes I look at the scenes we cut out, or describe the scenes we cut out, or talk to people who saw rough cuts and they ask what we cut out...the bottom line is, we cut fifty two scenes out of the movie, and only eleven of them were bad, and that was all my fault. The rest of them contained some of the best acting, the most raw emotional baggage, real insight into the characters... but the biggest most daunting challenge was maintaining a balance of sympathies between the two main characters. But I'm hugely proud of what we ended up with. Some people have asked me about commerciality. They want me to put my distributor hat back on, and I explain that there's a complete bifurcation as far I'm concerned. I wouldn't be able to make good movies if I allowed any of what I learned in thirty three years of distribution to apply to writing and directing. As a distributor and a businessman, there are more questions I have to address before I make financial commitments, but as a filmmaker, I make movies for two people: me, and this woman in Germany. Nine years ago, when I made my first movie, and it was a low profile movie, a lower budget film, and I was very proud of it. It didn't get conventional distribution. Late in the game, I got a call from the Hamburg Film Film Festival. They flew me over and I introduced the film and everyone seemed to respond to the film. The Q&A went very well, and then they had to clear the theater. So I went out to the lobby with the festival director, and we were chatting, and this young twenty-something German woman came over to us and said to me, "Excuse me. I just wanted to tell you that yesterday I saw the new David Cronenberg movie, and it made me so angry I never wanted to see movies again. And now that I've seen your movie, I want to see movies again." And if she had been the only human being on the face of the planet who ever saw my first movie, it would have been worth every dime it cost me to make it. How many people through artistic expression of any kind have the ability to influence the lives of a person halfway across the world? That's why I make movies. For me and that woman in Germany. GB: Do you still watch the film yourself? JL: Yeah. I've seen it two or three hundred times. We shot it for thirty days, and the principal location was the couple's high rise apartment, which at the time was my apartment, and from the time we were in the editing room, when I would watch the two of them, I would never recognize it as a place I lived. They immediately inhabited that place. It wasn't just the chemistry between them - it was the chemistry of all the people that worked on the film that believed in what we were trying to do. And now, frankly, when I watch the movie, I can't even believe that I wrote it. And I'll credit the actors more than anyone else. There was a remarkable triumvirate of trust from day one between Justin, Julianne and myself. But beyond that, with Rebecca Scholl who was masterful as Julianne's mother....I'm sorry, Julianne Nicholson and Rebecca Scholl give the two best female performances that you will see in a movie all year. Helen Mirren, bite me! Just pure performance. I have to pinch myself that I was the recipient of that kind of talent. Not to denigrate the men in the film! GB: You said a few minutes ago that you never think about distribution when you're directing, but was it working in distribution for so long what made you want to be a director? JL: I've wanted to make movies since the age of ten. Listen, we all have shitty childhoods. Mine was, for a variety of largely temporary and tranistory reasons, gruesome Movies were my refuge. It was so easy for me to escape into whatever was on the screen, whether it was a B monster movie or The Legend Of Lila Claire with Kim Novak or The Russians Are Coming by Norman Jewison. To me, that was the real world, and I wanted to be part of it. When I was ten years old, I applied to be an usher at the local theater and was told I was too young, so I wrote a letter to President Kennedy to complain, and got a letter back from the White House, referring me to the New York department of labor. Six years later, I got that job, and two years after that I was assistant manager. Movies became part of my soul when I was seventeen years old and I saw John Cassavetes' Faces. I walked out of the theater in a daze. The following year, when I was a film critic for my college paper, his next movie came out, Minnie & Moskowitz. I didn't like it nearly as much, but I was determined to meet him. I set up an interview, and he befriended me! We spent two and a half hours together, and he quote me in the New York Times! There was Time Magazine, there was Newsweek, and there was Jeff Lipsky of the Nassau Community College. The day I met him was also the day I was invited to a press screening of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. It was December 11th, 1971. It was an amazing day. GB: Sounds like it! JL: I let the correspondence go. I was loving managing movie theaters, and in 1974 I read that a new Cassavetes film, A Woman Under The Influence, was in the New York Film Festival. I bought a ticket and I called him, and was like, "I don't know if you remember me," He was like, "Oh, Jeff, of course I remember you! What are you doing?" I said managing theaters, and as soon as he heard that, his ears perked up. Hollywood hated him and he hated Hollywood, and if they made him offers, they were rejected summarily - by him. So he said, "Come on in, you must know everything about distribution!" I didn't know anything about distribution, but he showed me posters and I met his producer Sam Shaw and he said, "Screw it, let's do it ourselves." I didn't want to be a distributor, but I thought if I could saddle up to John and help him out, it would accelerate the process by which I could make my own films, just like John's. I didn't realize it was going to take another twenty years, but I was determined to do it. And what happened was that a year or two after, we basically invented independent film. There was no independently financed art film that was nationally distributed by the filmmakers before that. A couple years after I started, people like Michael Barker and Tom Bernard came aboard what was then called United Artists Classics - later Orion Classics, later Sony Pictures Classics - and the idea of getting involved in movies was just an inkling of an idea in the eyes of Bob and Harvey Weinstein. And no one wanted to be distributors; we all wanted to make movies. We all became very successful. Sometimes it was because we had great taste in movies, and sometimes it was because we were willing to humiliate ourselves in order to make sure these film played in every nook and cranny in America. But with success, you're making a comfortable living, you get married. Some of them have kids, buy a house, have a mortgage, college tuitions...and I think there's a little bit of resentment in their lives. They're financially secure, and I feel badly about it, because there's no reason why they're not willing to do what I've done and take a roll of the dice. Realize that dream. My film school was being able to know and work beside John Cassavetes. Later, the same was true of Mike Leigh and his producer Simon Channing Williams. And even though I spent far less time with people like Fassbinder or Godard, just having met them and being able to work with them was my film school. They went to film school, too. Michael and Tom have been going to the Pedro Almodovar film school for many years now; there's no reason why they shouldn't do it. It's incomparable. It's a rare privilege. Everyone wants to make movies; very few people get to. I've been able to do it twice, and I do not take lightly the advantages that I've had. I'm determined to do it again, and I'm going to do it no matter how much I have to grovel, beg, borrow, or steal. I have more stories to tell, and I just think of that woman in Germany... GB: It sounds as if Cassavetes hired you the same way he hired his camera or sound people. People with no experience... He would say that the only rule with distribution was that whatever the experts suggested to us, do it the opposite way. With The Woman Under The Influence, Peter Falk plays a blue collar worker, so John said there was a huge black audience for this movie. So we booked it at the Apollo Theater. We're the only art film that has ever showed at the Apollo Theater. We only had two shows, because after the first show with only one person in the audience, the film buyer begged us to let him pull the movie. But that's what we did. Leave no stone unturned. I booked it into a drive in theater, and the theater, because they always showed double features, decided that they would book it with John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara in Machine Gun McCain. I would have loved to see that double feature. Believe me, they weren't doing it to be clever. They were doing it to be dumb. But you know what? It did eleven thousand dollars worth of cars that week.* * * And there you have it. Do check out Flannel Pajamas if it's playing near you - and if you need more convincing, go watch the red-band trailer. It's a beaut. I also want to say that it's really great to see directors taking their films around the country themselves, meeting audiences and discussing their work. I saw David Lynch present Inland Empire at the Paramount in Austin last month. What a night! Until next time, I'm outta here. Ghostboy
