Hey folks, Harry here with this wonderful interview with the makers of AMERICAN MOVIE... a film that... well needs to be experienced. Imagine if you will if a documentarian got ahold of Ed Wood and decided to follow his filmmaking process. In a lot of ways... that's what this film is like. You see a man possessed with the will to make a movie at all costs... And... you follow him as he busts down all the obsticles in his path. It also happens to be both funny and sad as hell. Here's Smashingworth to conduct the interview....
Interview with Chris Smith and Sarah Price (filmmakers forAMERICAN MOVIE) on 10 Nov 1999.
SMASHINGWORTH: How did you two start working together as filmmakers?
CHRIS SMITH: We met in film school, In Iowa.
SARAH PRICE: In 1991, about eight years ago.
SMASHINGWORTH: And do you work for a company or . . .?
CS: We started doing our own thing and eventually started our own company and started working that way, but it’s not a company in the sense that we get paid yet. It’s just that we formed a company for legal reasons to handle making the movie, but still during the whole time we were making AMERICAN MOVIE, we worked for other people. I did camera, and Sarah did sound for Michael Moore’s last film THE BIG ONE. I shot a few things for the BBC, I did a lottery commercial, we both edited different things for television commercials. So, it was really that we made money outside of what we were doing to support what we were trying to do.
SMASH: How long have you been working in this business?
SP: Ten years since 1988. I graduated High School in 1988 and then moved to New York and got a job there working craft services on GHOSTBUSTERS 2—
SMASH: Oh, yeah?
SP: I wanted to try and do something with movies, but I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how to break in. So I did that, and it was really awful. Really good money, but really really sucked. So then I decided that I wanted to go to college and applied to Iowa and started taking film classes there. And that’s when I met Christ in film classes. Basically, you just learn how to make movies—with what equipment you need and what ideas—and I had been doing sort of experimental documentaries, and Chris had been doing a number of things. I graduated and started free lance working around Iowa, doing grip work and Iowa public television and anything I could do. That’s when Chris directed a film called AMERICAN JOB, which is playing on the Independent Film Channel right now. Towards the end of that I came in and helped edit a little bit. Then we both moved to Milwaukee, and that’s when we started making this film.
SMASH: Now, Chris, AMERICAN JOB is not a documentary?
CS: Right, it’s a narrative film. Have you seen it?
SMASH: No, I think I heard about it once. That makes me wonder how did you decide to do a documentary?
CS: We never had the idea to make a movie about, you know, a documentary about the process of independent filmmaking. After AMERICAN JOB, I had plans of doing narrative films. I was working on a few scripts, one that went to the Sundance Writing Lab, and that was my whole trajectory. It was purely just meeting Mark and kind of getting excited about what he was trying to do. Sarah and I thought we could just do this film real quickly, it would be a six month project, Mark told us NORTHWESTERN was going to take six months, so we thought we’ll quickly make this film, and by the time AMERICAN JOB is through Sundance and ends up where it’s going to end up we’ll have this other film done, we’ll quickly edit it and then we’ll move onto other things. So that’s how it started and that’s why we went to it, but I never wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. It’s just that I saw an interesting story in Mark’s life and wanted to follow that. But Sarah’s is a different story . . .
SP: Well, I had been making sort of smaller experimental documentaries and was interested in documentaries a lot. I’d studied it in school and was really interested in it, and when I went up to Milwaukee and started filming another documentary which I shot and Chris did sound on. And then Chris asked me to help on this one, so I did sound on AMERICAN MOVIE and he shot it. So, to me it just seemed like a natural progression into doing a documentary, but, again, I only thought it would take six months. I didn’t think that it would take 4 ½ years. I mean, that’s sort of where it started. Chris considers himself just a filmmaker first, whatever project seems like a good project is the one to do whether it’s narrative or documentary. For me, I’ve been doing documentary most of the time, but if something presented itself, like a narrative, I would try to do it, but that hasn’t really happened yet.
SMASH: When the making of AMERICAN MOVIE went over six months, and Mark decided not to do NORTHWESTERN and do COVEN instead, what made you decide to stick with it? Did you keep thinking that it was only going to take a little bit longer or were just unable to let go?
SP: Yeah, I think we were both taken by Mark. He’s very charismatic and energetic, and he’s got a goal and a vision focused, and he’s exciting to be around. We were committed after that six-month point. We’d committed ourselves not only to him, but to his quest. He stopped filming NORTHWESTERN, telling us it would only take two weeks to finish COVEN—that he would just do it real quickly and then he’d get back to doing NORTHWESTERN. We believed that that was what was going to happen, so we just stopped filming for a couple of weeks. And then when we realized that he wasn’t finishing COVEN up that quickly and we were starting to miss things, then we decided to start filming again, and then that’ what took another year and a half. But I think that we were committed at that point. We really decided that we believed in him and what he was trying to do. We’d shot already a lot of footage, y’know film isn’t cheap, and rather than sort of abandon it, I think we just felt dedicated to it and to stick with it. Again, at that point (at the six month point), nobody said, “Well, this is gonna take another year and a half." I think you just tell yourself that it will wrap up as soon as it wraps up. We didn’t really see an ending in sight. But we thought it would be taken care of soon because Mark was always saying this is gonna happen right now! (laughs).
JOE: Did you feel any pressure to help Mark in any way? There are times, like when his Mom is filming that scene and he’s getting frustrated . . Didn’t you just want to hold the camera for him or something?
CS: Yeah, but there was an understanding when we started the film that he was doing his movie and we were doing ours, and we both understood that. It’s not like he was drowning or something, y’know? He was trying to make a movie. It’s like if he didn’t get the scene that day, he’d get it the next day. Our film was about the difficulties that he encountered trying to make his film, so if we started getting involved it would have tainted what we were trying to do.
SP: The other thing is, yeah, I mean, he never asked us for any help. I think it would have been insulting in a sense because he feels like he is the director of his own film. You know, we weren’t better, I mean, ANY better off. It was just two of us doing this: putting up lights, and trying to get the sound, trying to shoot stuff . . . we were running out of film all the time, y’know (laughs) we were having our own problems! Cameras jamming, things not working out well. We’d have our good days and our bad days. I mean, you don’t see any of that. You just see Mark and his struggles.
SMASH: How did the families react to y’all coming in? Was that kind of weird at first?
CS: Well, it was so gradual. It never was awkward because, again, Mark comes from an environment where a friend of Mark’s is a friend of theirs. They’re not passing judgment on you. It’s just like, “Great, you guys. Nice to meet you!” It’s just the way that their house is, so it was never strange at all. But, definitely, there was a period of the first eight months where we weren’t filming quite as much we got to know everybody. I think that really enabled us to get these more intimate moments because there was a trust that was developed, and a friendship that was developed over those eight months between myself and Sarah and Mark and his friends and his family. And I think that was a natural evolution in the sense that we really enjoyed their company, and they felt that, and they enjoyed our company. So, I think that, you know, after we were done shooting for a day we wouldn’t just pack up and take off. We’d actually stick around and hang out with everybody, and we got to know everybody. It helped us get a sense of what we were going after in the film. It all just kind of worked together. It was a natural progression in that sense, and if that bond or relationship hadn’t of developed I don’t think we would have tried to make that type of a movie.
SMASH: When you made AMERICAN MOVIE, and you’re putting it together, did you have a certain story that you wanted to tell? What was the goal to put together with this film?
CS: I think that the goal was just to get it together and see what it was. That was basically just cutting out all the scenes, or all the days that we shot into scenes, and putting them together in chronological order and kind of getting a sense for what it is. But, I think in the end, what guided us was trying to make something that we felt was fair and accurate as possible to what we went through in those two years, and that the audience could come out of the theater having gone through a similar experience in a hundred minutes to what we went through in 2 years. Then we thought that would be a success.
SMASH: I have to wonder, did you ever doubt that Mark was actually ever going to finish COVEN?
CS: Oh, yeah.
SP: Yeah.
CS: But that didn’t matter for our film.
SP: That’s part of the story.
CS: If he’d given up it would have been fine with us. On a personal level, we wanted him to succeed and we wanted him to finish. But if he would have just walked away from it, it would have been a different movie but it would have been a movie nonetheless. In the end the guy would have given up, and you would have seen, “Wow, this guy tried and he got broken down by society or whatever and just gave up on his dreams.” So that would have been a different movie, but luckily it has a temporarily happy ending, you know, but again I think—
SP: Well, because it worked well.
CS: He hasn’t really achieved his full dream of making NORTHWESTERN—
SP: Yeah.
CS: So it’s kind of like it’s happy, but it also leaves you thinking that will he actually go on to make NORTHWESTERN?
SP: I mean, we started filming him filming NORTHWESTERN, you know, but then he told us that he quit that. And so what was next? We stopped filming, thinking that that was our film and eventually he would come back to it. But then realizing that with COVEN his life had changed and COVEN was his life now, and that’s when we started resuming filming. Had he quite COVEN, there would have been something else that would have taken that place, or that focus. I don’t think he would have just sat down on the couch and just given up.
CS: But either way it would have been fine for our movie.
SP: Yeah, either way would have been fine because it did happen, he did quit, and that was what is in our movie. And then he got back to doing something else.
CS: Yeah that’s true. NORTHWESTERN was a quit, and you see what happens when that happens though (laughs).
SMASH: Right.
SP: Yeah, so, he did do that. It’s just encompassed.
SMASH: And, the, um . . .
CS: (laughs) We’re buzzing through these.
SMASH: The other thing is, how are y’all enjoying the tour with the success? Is this something that you’re not used to? Is this kind of a new thing?
CS: Yeah, it is.
SP: Well, we’re not used to it.
CS: It’s, um, it’s exhausting. It’s great. It’s exhausting, and . . . well, I mean, I did press for AMERICAN JOB and stuff.
SP: But not to this extent.
CS: Not to this extent, no. I think that people have ideas that it’s kind of glamorous, y’know, because you stay in OK hotels, and you fly to a different city everyday. It seems, it has the appearance of being glamorous, but you realize that it’s just work. And it’s full days of work. It’s very exhausting, and it takes you away from your personal life. You’re out on the road. It’s interesting, the best part about it are screenings where you actually show the film and you do these question and answers, and you get to interact with the audience. That’s the highlight because that’s what the movie was about, but then everything else, it’s like it’s nice having interactions with people, but, again, it gets so exhausting, that it, um, I don’t know . . .
SP: It takes it’s toll.
CS: It takes it’s toll.
SP: It’s just very intense, but it’s good because it shows us that Sony is behind the film and they’re trying to push it. There are some friends we’ve had that had, like, three press dates. They went to three different cities and that was it.
CS: And their film got bought under the same conditions that our film got. And you can kind of tell when a distributor decides to kind of dump your movie.
SP: Yeah.
CS: It’s frightening to think that, y’know, you could sell your film, and then you’re going to New York, LA, and San Francisco, and those are your markets. For us, it’s flattering that they believe in the film enough to send us on this press tour, but at the same time it’s been completely . . .
SP: Wearing.
CS: Yeah, wearing. Tiring.
SP: Just because for an average day, we had like about an 8 day stretch where usually we’d go to a different city every couple of days or something, but we have full days, like today we have a 10 to 12 hour press day, and last night we had a screening and everything. But there was a stretch where we would literally get up at about 4 to 5 AM, go to an airport, fly out to a different city, we’d get there, get picked up, and then we had about an 8 to 10 hour day of press ahead of us. Then, that night we’d have a screening with a Q&A—
CS: With a party afterwards.
SP: Usually, there’s a little party. Then we get back to the hotel, go to sleep by, like, 2 AM because we have an office, but we don’t have anybody managing it right now. We just have us on the road, so we have to deal with our emails, catch up on everything—bills and stuff. Then we’d go to sleep, and then about 3 hours later we were picked up again to go to another airport, to fly to a different city to do the same thing. That was like an 8-day stretch in the middle that we finally called Sony and said, “Yeah, you’re killing us (laughs). You’ve gotta let us stay in a city for more than 24 hours.”
SMASH: How much longer are you going to be touring?
SP: About another week.
CS: Yeah, just to the middle of November.
SP: November 15th.
SMASH: And then you’re going to back to Milwaukee?
CS & SP (at the same time): Yeah.
SMASH: Well, the final question then is about the AMERICAN MOVIE website. How did this come about? Is this y’alls idea?
CS: Yeah, we had been doing it since before Sundance. Y’know, this movie really lends itself to a fun website. Y’know, in the narrative film you’re confined by this script, and, y’know, if you have actors how much more do you need to know about Julia Roberts that you don’t get from People Magazine or from television? But, with something like a documentary, you have so much more that wasn’t in the film about who these people are, and you have photos from when they were younger, and then . . . People get to know who these people over the course of the film, and they want to know what’s going on with them, so it’s a perfect opportunity to kind of keep updating them, y’know, on what happens as a result of this press tour, as a result of the film opening and all those things. It’s been great in that sense. Also, with a documentary we shot 70 hours worth of film, so we have so many great scenes that almost made the movie that got cut. It gives you a great forum start putting out this extra material that you weren’t able to use before. There’s a Mike line, so you can call Mike (Mike Schank). . .
SP: Have you seen it?
SMASH: Yeah, I checked it out, but I didn’t get to fully go into it. I had to leave to come over here.
SP: Oh, yeah. There are some good scenes that weren’t in the movie. We wanted to put them in, but they just wouldn’t have been . . .
SMASH: I wanted to see some of Mark’s old films. Are those up yet?
CS: They will be very soon. They should be up today actually.
SMASH: Do you know, is the website working? Is it pretty much a success?
CS: Yeah! Yeah, Sony did a bunch of ads for the website, and the traffic’s been doubling every couple of days.
SMASH: Yeah, I saw an ad in Premier magazine, I think.
SP: Yeah, exactly.
CS: No, the website’s been amazing. Not really from the ads, but the word of mouth has been through the roof. The website’s doing great. So, I don’t know, it’s nice to see that there is interest out there.
