Ray Pride

Out in the real world, by the glow of webcams and computer screens, the possibility for the average Joe and Jane to chronicle the most intimate parts of their lives happens every night and day. Movies are another matter; studio pictures can't move quickly enough to encompass what happened five yesterdays ago, let alone six months to a year from now at the pace of an iPod-YouTube-BitTorrent world. While the culture of surveillance and self-surveillance has started to prompt and provoke interesting art, one Chicago filmmaker has made the lives of his friends and himself the center of his work.

Joe Swanberg turns 26 later this year. He's shot his fourth feature, a look at long-distance relationships, and his third, the sunny, Chicago-set "Hannah Takes the Stairs," has its world premiere on March 11 at Austin's South by Southwest festival. Swanberg, whose 2006 "LOL" also debuted at SXSW, and whose 2005 "Kissing on the Mouth" played at the Chicago International Film Festival, is cautious to a fault about his working method, with his new movie's "A film by" credit going to eight people, including himself, lead Greta Gerwig, the filmmakers Kent Osborne ("Dropping Out"), Ry Russo-Young ("Orphans"), Andrew Bujalski ("Mutual Appreciation"), Mark Duplass ("The Puffy Chair"), Todd Rohal ("The Guatemalan Handshake") and musician Kevin Bewersdorf. While it sounds like a clever-clever conceit, casting actor-directors whom he's befriended on the festival circuit in a kind of cinematic twentysomething supergroup, it's central to the film's success. Swanberg likes to collaborate, and he likes to work with people he likes, which shows in "Hannah" which, like his earlier movies, captures a tentative intimacy rare on screen but common in life, how two people alone in a room do dances of gesture, with clothes and without, searching for self-definition and happiness, baring scars and kissing for minutes at a time. (While sometimes uncomfortable within the context of the characters' lives, the sexual explicitness of his work is handled with offhanded aplomb.) His second feature, "LOL" dealt with how life spent on the Internet can ruin relationships. Swanberg's also shot the second season of a web series for Nerve.com, "Young American Bodies." Several days spent visiting the set--that is, in cast members' apartments--of the first season showed an incredibly casual and loose-limbed approach to getting through the day's notes.

The writer who's most capably put his finger on what Swanberg's doing with his tentative, tender impulses, is David Hudson, who collates the daily GreenCine indie film blog from Berlin, but who discovered Swanberg's work in Austin. Hudson suggests that the 6'3" director-writer-actor-cameraman-improviser is "one of the first filmmakers who's already proven himself in what you might call the traditional theatrical format, that is, feature length, big screen, who actually seems more comfortable, or rather, seems to enjoy working more within the parameters of the current online viewing experience. It's not just a matter of length, either, whether it's his shorts or his episodic series. The intimacy of the stories he tells, too, seems intensified by the intimacy of what the experience requires at the moment: one viewer, nose-to-the-screen. Personally, my favorite of his works remains the `Young American Bodies' series, probably for these reasons."

Which leads into an uncanny insight that Swanberg offers about his perspective in one of several long conversations about why his process could only work in today's world. With such bold, bright frames in his work, both for the Nerve series and in "Hannah," I wondered what format he composes for: big, small? "I actually am not aware of it and try and consciously unaware of it," the SIU graduate says. "I would say, realistically, I'm always shooting for an LCD screen. The on-camera LCD [screen], roughly 2.5 inches. That's what I frame for, that's what I look through, that's what I've become used to photographing for. So even with the knowledge that Hannah would be showing at festivals in a theatrical setting, I'm still making it look good there and hoping that translates. I'm aware of [future platforms], everything's getting smaller, and certainly part of me feels that I might as well make it look good here because in five years, that's how everybody's going to be watching it."

While Swanberg is an avid filmgoer, citing "Breaking the Waves," "You Can Count On Me" and "Stop Making Sense" as key influences, his films seem to be after something else, more of a calling card to kindred spirits than to financiers. "Yeah, absolutely. Especially with `Kissing on the Mouth,' I got asked that [on the festival circuit]. I always joked that `Kissing on the Mouth' was the anti-calling card. It was basically proof that I would never make any money for anybody and proof that you shouldn't hire me! But at the same time, yes, I think it's a calling card to interesting people who want to make interesting projects that you can come and be safe with us and you can give us all of that and I will do everything in my power to make sure that you're not exploited and that your story is told accurately."

Acting in all of his work except "Hannah," Swanberg's role is usually that of the most naïve or foolish of his characters. It's charming to see what a doofus he plays in the "YAB" series. "Certainly from the beginning I was conscious of the fact that if I was going to ask anybody to do something I needed to be right there with them. I've kept that mentality through all of the projects. I'm not interested in pushing people past their limits or coercing someone to do something. I get no kind of thrill from manipulating a situation to get what I want. If the person doesn't want to give it to me, I'm not going to be happy with it in the end anyway." The style he's developing is akin to what Mike Leigh and others have done, but with a prime difference. "I don't work with actors, though. That's the other thing. I don't put myself in an environment where people want to be pushed. I put myself in an environment where I'm surrounded by artists, people I respect who want to help me tell a story."

While his colleagues, like Bujalski, are interested in the studio system, Swanberg is trying to fashion a living from making work quickly and inexpensively. "If anything, the thing I would like to do within the Hollywood system is act. Because I'm not precious about my image. I am precious about my ideas and where I choose to put them and how I choose to do so, but I'd act in any old piece-of-shit movie and not have second thoughts about it. But as far as writing something or directing something, that means something to me that's too much to give away if I don't like what I'm doing."

He describes his prolific output as "selfish," but explains it this way. "I guess I don't feel bad about being selfish, but I would call it selfish because I'm getting as much out of it as anybody is. I'm insisting on that. If somebody came to me with a project and here's this amount of money to do this project that's gonna pay you but you're not going to enjoy, and somebody else came to me with half as much money, I would do the one that I was going to enjoy. Until there's a reason to change, like, for instance, a family, I feel like I'll keep that [mindset]." He mentions a friend who's making a sequel, and "it sounds like he's in hell every single day. And it's like, why deal with it if I don't have to?"

The indie film and music SXSW festival had just the results a filmmaker would want: an investor who took on "Hannah" with only a drawing on a napkin. "He came to the `LOL' party, said, `I like it, let's talk.' Three weeks later we were in business. We started shooting a few months after that. It was like a short pitch to him over the telephone and he agreed to do it. And then when I presented him..." Swanberg laughs, "Really, I said to him what I said to everybody, which is like, `If you want to help me and you have some money and you want to enable me to make this film on HD [high-definition video] and work with the people that I want to work with, then I love you and I think you're great. But I'm not going to write a script and I'm not going to change the way I make movies. Because I can do it by myself if I want to. So he said, 'What's your idea?' so I told him my idea. What I gave him was a drawing on a piece of paper that sort of looked like a martini glass that outlined the characters and the way the story would progress and potentially split into two different [stories]. That's what he approved, based on the drawing. It never became anything more than a drawing until the film was finished. There's one sheet of paper with all the scenes in the movie written out halfway through the production. That sheet of paper had what we had already shot and what we felt like we needed to shoot. That's all that exists on paper other than that drawing."

So your career could only occur in this precise historical moment? "Oh, I'm positive of it. I don't think..." He sighs, pauses. "Part of what makes me feel like that is I just don't think that I would have the stamina or energy to have taken the time to convince anybody to make `Kissing on the Mouth' had it cost [anything]. `KOTM' still could have been made..." He reverses himself immediately. "No, it couldn't have been made at any other time. Because I would have had no idea what to say to everybody, as to how much film stock I would have needed, how much time it would take, what the editing process would be like and it's not a film that I could have shot all up front and then [go] into an editing room for two weeks and then come out with a finished movie. It had to be a project that was shot a little bit, cut a little bit, shot a little bit, cut a little bit. Unlimited potential for tape stock and unlimited time on my hands to finish it at the pace I need to finish. `LOL' couldn't have been made without the ability to send large files over the Internet to people in different cities to collaborate with me on the project. `Hannah' couldn't have been made if I didn't have the email and cell-phone technology to be in constant communication with people like Andrew and Mark over the course of two years, as my films developed and as their work developed. I couldn't have met the two of them at South by Southwest in 2005 and then called them in the summer of 2006, and said, 'Remember me from a year-and-a-half ago? Well I have this project...' It was something that was totally enabled by an ongoing conversation from the moment we met until they actually came to Chicago to make the film. And [the new film] `Nights and Weekends,' the whole function of this couple is based on a world in which long-distance couples have contact in a way it hasn't been done before. We never see them in long-distance mode. What we did do, which I don't know if it's ever been done before, is that the middle section is a phone call that takes place over the phone and I had one crew here in Chicago with me recording my side of it and I had one crew in New York recording her side of it and we acted over the phone for two continuous forty-minute takes."

Swanberg is also an avid scholar of the literature of the 1980s American independent film movement. "Reading Spike Lee's `She's Gotta Have It' journal, here's a guy who's roughly the same age I am now. Who had to hustle for months and months and months and call up his family members and beg money from them and set up these meetings with investors and beg for money from them and apply for all of these grants, just to do a film with four characters in apartments? It's just like `Kissing on the Mouth.' It's like `KOTM' twenty years earlier. But the amount of work he had to go through just to make the movie doesn't exist now. Reading his journal, I sort of know that I didn't have it in myself to do that. It's not my style to hustle like that. It's my style to say, what tools do I have? What can I make tomorrow?"

Swanberg has managed, but barely, to make this a full-time vocation, if not an especially profitable one, but he believes that the possibility of a modest, sustaining income can be possible as long as you're insanely productive. "I think the way to make that happen is to be productive. I don't think you can exist that way with one movie every two years. In order to do it, you have to have a steady income from multiple small movies a year, which is great, because it's the way I prefer to work anyway. That's not unlike my vision of how that's possible. `KOTM' is available on DVD now, 'LOL' is going to be available at the end of July and 'Hannah' maybe a year after that, 'Nights and Weekends' a year after that. So eventually, if I'm seeing a little bit of money from all of these films, then that becomes viable."

And one last piece of fortune for this lucky guy, an insight into how he maintains a relationship while making myriad films about uneasy affairs: his girlfriend Kris Williams, also a filmmaker, "and I have been together for over seven years, and she has always been the first person to hear my ideas and the one who has to live with me while those ideas occupy most of my time and brain function. She has made tremendous sacrifices to make sure that I have both the space and time that I need to do my work, whether we are working together on something or separately. Most relationships don't have to make these concessions, and I'm so grateful that we have found a way to be together while also being the filmmakers we want to be. Living with me and dealing with me is not an easy thing to do, I'm sure of that, but she has always been supportive and encouraging, even when I'm driving her crazy."

Swanberg is editing a second series of "Young American Bodies"; the first series is available at youngamericanbodies.com..

(2007-02-27)

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