Funny Ha Ha introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Andrew Bujalski.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Audio Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

November 26, 2012. The Harvard Film Archive screened Funny Ha Ha. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are filmmaker Andrew Bujalski and HFA director Haden Guest.

[APPLAUSE]

Andrew Bujalski  0:19 

I haven't been here in a while. It's been a while. I feel very old. And you'll see me on the screen, I used to be very young. Then something happened, I'm not sure what. Anyway, I think, just eyeballing it, I think I see at least two people in the audience who are in the movie. I hope you guys didn't pay for your tickets.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  0:45

And I just want to thank all the familiar and unfamiliar faces for coming out. It's a real thrill for me to be able to bring the film here. It was certainly a thrill to have been lucky enough to have had Haden and the Archive work with us on making such a beautiful print. It's a real, real honor to have it taken such good care of. I'm going to go away. I'll come back when it's over, and look forward to chatting with you guys then. Thank you for coming.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  1:20

And now Haden Guest.

Haden Guest  1:22 

Please join me in welcoming back Andrew Bujalski.

[APPLAUSE]

Andrew Bujalski  1:31 

In 10 years, it's never gotten any less awkward to make people sit through completely silent credits. And it's a joy every time.

Haden Guest  1:39 

So Andrew, it's been 10 years. This was in fact your idea, which I applaud you for, and thank you for, to have this anniversary screening, an event which has taken place in a number of cities. Now, I was wondering, what does it mean to you now to see this film? I mean, also, you know, here? Can you offer some sort of reflections on looking back 10 years later?

Andrew Bujalski  2:08

Well, it's very good. I mean, you know, I watched the movie again. There was another print, which you guys paid for, that I watched in Berlin earlier this year, to take notes on the color of the print. And that was the first time I'd seen it in a few years. And it was surprising, at the time that we were making it, it never occurred to me that—I thought I was telling a very straightforward story in a very straightforward fashion, and it never occurred to me that anybody would have any trouble getting into it, or understanding, or finding their way into the world. And to watch it 10 years later, it seems so specific. And such a personal—almost in a kind of private language, I'm amazed that it had the life and the traction that it did. Obviously, you get older, too, you get more concerned about what people think of you or what you're doing. I mean, I think you become more and more self-conscious. And in a way, as much as I was a highly self-conscious human being at that age, I think as a filmmaker, I really wasn't that worried about, certainly, how I was gonna fare in the market or anything like that. Or even, just, I could never have imagined somebody getting frustrated and walking out on the movie. I never knew that was possible until I saw it happen.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  3:30

And now I know that. And, you know, that has affected the way I make things, both for better and worse, I'm sure, as any artist learns from how. But this was, in that sense, the purest thing I'll ever make. It's the purest. It doesn't mean it's the best thing I'll ever make. I hope it isn't the best thing I'll ever make. But it's certainly the purest, in as much as it's pretty unfiltered. I mean, it's just where I was at that time and what I felt like I needed to see on screen. So I'm so glad I got to do it when I did, because I couldn't do it again now.

Haden Guest  4:07 

I mean, this film, just to remind those of you, or to remind ourselves also, it took a long time to actually—so it was in fact made without a conscious effort to secure distribution and such. And for that reason, it did take a long time. But once it did, and achieved this sort of slow-burning success, it was taken as evidence of a movement. Of, as they say, a “new voice in American cinema.” And I was wondering, as you think back about the film itself, maybe, I don't know if you have any thoughts about independent cinema, where it's gone, over the last 10 years. You know, the sort of promise that was felt to be expressed and embodied by this film and by the work of other filmmakers—the Duplass brothers, Joe Swanberg, and others, with whom you're often grouped. I mean, I don't know, do you have any thoughts about where independent cinema has gone over the last 10 years?

Andrew Bujalski  5:18 

Well, I don't know. I fear that it's—I was such a classic—I grew up fascinated with movies and obsessed with movies. I spent many, many, many, many hours sitting right here, watching great movies of that time and of the past. And the evolution has been so—so much has evolved in the last 10 years. That's nerve-racking to me, just because I start to—I mean, this is like anybody who starts to feel like an old fuddy duddy. You just think, “Well, I'm not sure if I recognize all the stuff anymore.” But you know, as far as the specific sub-genre, “mumblecore” stuff goes, there's so much of that work that I really do—I have this strange dissociation from that word. And when I read it in The New York Times, at first I laugh that I'm reading that word in The New York Times, but then, I know what they mean, I know what they're referring to, but I don't really associate that with anything that I've done or that I've loved that some of those people you've mentioned have done. I mean, I think like any label that tends to—and maybe in particular, that label tends to ignore the differences between the good works, that make them good. I'm not answering your question at all, because I don't know how to answer it. I don't know where it's gone, or where it's going. But I think it's always been a challenge. You know, since the birth of cinema, it's all been shaped by commerce. And light has had to fall through the cracks, which it's been doing for—and maybe those cracks are getting smaller and smaller. But there's great work being done every year. And I'm just grateful for that. I'm not answering the question at all, I'm sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  7:05 

You touched on many things. I mean, I'd like to go back, though, back in time, to when you were a student here, in VES, and watching films here. And I was wondering if you could talk about your sort of formation, your training, if you will. You know, you've started out studying in a department that's really known for documentary more than anything else. And I was wondering if you have any thoughts or reflections on how that may have shaped your work as a narrative filmmaker, and this film, in particular, your first feature film.

Andrew Bujalski  7:36 

Hugely, tremendously. And I've always been extraordinarily grateful to this department, and the people who teach here, for that. I do strongly feel that any filmmaker, any kind of film you're making, even if—I think this is probably true if you're building a CGI universe on your computer, too—that it's still incredibly valuable to have some sense of documentary filmmaking, in as much as that's what filmmaking—I mean, I think of narrative filmmaking as just a kind of strange form of documentary filmmaking. I still approach it very much as, we've got to get out there and we've got to train our eyes to something and try to make art out of our act of observing this. Try to make something beautiful out of just being there, and watching it, and seeing what we get. And shaping that and forming that. I mean, I do think of myself as a documentarian who is too lazy to follow real people, and just, you know, makes people do the things I want them to do. But, I mean, what documentary, above all, teaches you, which is so relevant to every kind of filmmaking and probably every kind of artistic endeavor at all, is that you don't always get the material that you thought you were gonna get. And this is where the worst of student—in both my own student filmmaking and when I've taught filmmaking—the worst student filmmaking you see comes from just how difficult it is to come to terms with the fact that what you got is not what you thought you were getting. Because filmmaking is such a big job and so difficult to wrap your head around all of it at the same time. What very often happens is you have an idea of what you want, you go out, you work so hard to get it. And then you get something else. And it's really hard to admit that to yourself. And documentary really forces that issue in a way that I think is a tremendous lesson for any kind of filmmaker. It teaches you to work with what you've got, rather than what you thought you had.

Haden Guest  9:46 

It’s interesting, just in getting ready for tonight, I was reading a number of reviews from the time when the film came out in 2002. And at least a few reviewers said, you know, “I walked out of that film—the difference between that film that I saw and the real world outside, there was no difference.” Like this was this authentic document of a generation of a time. And I do think that is very true. So I think it's interesting to connect this to your documentary training. A very specific question though, is, you also worked, in addition to the renowned documentary filmmakers here—at least a couple are here in the audience—Rob Moss and Ross McElwee—you also studied with Chantal Akerman, and what was your—the great Belgian filmmaker who was teaching in VES for two years, I believe. You know, what kind of relationship did you have in terms of—how closely did you work with Chantal Akerman? That is to say, what kind of influence did she have upon your work?

Andrew Bujalski  10:54 

I adore Chantal. And I think, when I think of her, she's obviously a brilliant filmmaker. And there’s so many of her films that I was very enamored of at the time. Je tu il elle is a movie that I love. And I remember her saying to me once—I think, somehow I said something about Jim Jarmusch. And she said, “Ah, he stole everything from me.”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  11:19

I'm trying to do the smoker’s accent. And I thought that was rather boastful. And then I saw Je tu il elle, and then I said, “Oh, yeah, no, that’s right. He did.”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  11:29

But I may be misquoting. Don't hold that against her. You know, so she's a brilliant filmmaker, she was a great thesis advisor, but I also just was so enamored of her personally. And I think, for me, to be a kid from the suburbs, just to be around a real European artist meant a lot to me at that time. And in some ways, as much as I am a fan of her work, when I think of the Chantal Akerman influence, it's much more the personal things I think of. And she told me that I should dress better, which I haven't done.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  12:16

She gave me a lot of advice that I have not been wise enough to take yet.

Haden Guest  12:23 

There’s still time.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  12:26

Now, in terms of European cinema that you've often referenced—Rohmer and others as important to your—

Andrew Bujalski  12:32 

Well, I don't. I get tagged with them. It’s because I have this compulsion about actually only seeing—I don't really watch DVDs. I see things that—when I lived here, I would come here and see whatever was showing here. So, by whatever circumstances, somehow I've only ever seen two Rohmer movies, which is very embarrassing.

Haden Guest  12:49

Well you've been misquoted many times then, it seems.

Andrew Bujalski  12:51

Probably, I'm sure. Yeah, no, that got—I'm happy to have that. You know, I'll take it, but I haven't earned it.

Haden Guest  13:00 

But in terms of the films that you were also viewing here, and in terms of the cinema that was important to you at the time that you were finding your voice as a first-time filmmaker, what were some of the more important influences to you? Some of the more important films that maybe you saw in a class here. And I ask for just sort of curiosity, as well.

Andrew Bujalski  13:28 

Sure. Well, I get, in addition to Romer, I get tagged with the Cassavetes thing a lot, as do, you know, anybody who goes out—

Haden Guest  13:35

Is that true then?

Andrew Bujalski  13:37

It's true. Oh, for the first time tonight, I'll admit that I love Cassavetes, and that he meant a lot to me. Certainly, when I was here, and was starting to discover him. And not so much in the particular. I mean, I think usually, when they try to fix that tag to you, they're trying to say, you know, like, “You shot handheld, you must be Cassavetes,” or trying to ape Cassavetes. And what I think the thing that I took from him, more than anything, or the feeling I took from him, was to come into his movies for the first time, never having seen them and not knowing much about them, to have this incredible sense of a guy writing his own rules for how movies could work. That was the real thrill that I took from his movies, and I thought, “Wow!” It just made everything else I was seeing—and of course, this isn't true of everything else—but it felt like “Okay, everybody else is playing by a certain set of rules. And he's got his own rulebook and it's working.” And that was something that's a dream. That's something to aspire to. And certainly, going into this, I think that built some of the confidence to—Lord knows, we did not follow too many rules on this thing. Again, I mean, we were talking before we came in about the fact that, maybe 20 to 25% of people can actually understand the last line of dialogue spoken in the movie. I'm not saying it's a good idea to have an unintelligible final line of dialogue.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  15:11

Lord knows, I wasn't that concerned with it at the time. We were trying to do things our own way. And yeah, so that was a great inspiration.

Haden Guest  15:23 

I'm glad you mentioned Cassavetes. I mean, one thing that I think about in your films, in this film particularly—rewatching it very recently, I was struck by just the sort of rawness of the emotion in this film. You know, this is often taken to be a sort of expression of twenty-something angst. I'm struck, in re-watching this film, by the certain latent, like, tension  and almost hostility in the film. All these sort of cruel jokes, like mocking those guys at the end, calling them dorks. And characters are constantly being humiliated and just like going too far. And I was wondering if you could talk about this idea of the sort of tenor of the film, the sort of tone of the film, the sort of this tension, this angst, and how it was that you decided to actually sort of channel this, or to capture this, or to represent, express this in film? Where did this come from?

Andrew Bujalski  16:27 

Just from, you know, my own tortured psyche. I mean, there was no conscious attempt to—it was a very interesting—it's like, to make any piece of work, but to make a film and have it go out in the world and then read reviews of it, I think of it as like having the worst psychotherapist in the world.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  16:45

It’s like, because you're getting—because everybody, every blogger is analyzing you, and your psyche, and sometimes they hit the mark. And sometimes it's totally ignorant and horrifying. But it was a very interesting experience for me to bring this out in the world and see how people reacted. And, of course, a lot of the writing about it was this kind of ethnographic, you know, “Here's this portrait of this generation and their mores.” And all of that's in there. None of that was how I was—I was not thinking ethnographically when I made it. To me, this was, I think—I don't want to give the impression that this all just came, that I just plugged direct into pain and suffering, and that was the movie. I mean, you know, I wrote a script, and I tried to be a good dramatist, and build scenes, and have things add up to something. But that was just the place where I found drama. I mean, that was the place where I saw my version of low frequency drama in daily life was in these ways that people communicate with each other. I just thought it was a ripe vein. But again, that was also just in the air around me, that wasn't something that I invented in any altered, cerebral way.

Haden Guest  18:11 

And, which leads me to think of the casting of the film. And I'd love to know how you connected with this series of just really quite mesmerizing performances in the film? Just so we could talk a bit about how you defined the characters, how closely you worked with these actors. And how you decided to cast yourself in the film, and the sort of challenges that might have posed.

Andrew Bujalski  18:36 

Well, I think I didn't really—when I cast myself, part of it, I thought—I mean, we made this film, of course, very cheaply with minimal resources. So one honest thought was, “Okay, I will show up. And I will show up on time, and I don't have to pay myself.”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  18:53

And that was a big part of casting myself. Although, of course, there's still a few male roles. And for whatever reason, I knew I would be good as the desperate guy.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  19:09

But yeah, I think I'd learned from the work I did here, from the student work I did. My thesis film had a mixture of friends who I had plugged into a couple roles and then more conventional actors who had headshots, who came in for auditions. And the real actors were good. And I was happy with them, and they worked hard, but it was very clear that I was interacting with them in a very different way and getting very, very different kinds of performances out of them. And I think I took a valuable lesson from that, which was just that I was very interested in working with the non-professionals. I'm very interested in what—I thought I could get something a lot deeper out of them. Or, that was the thing I was interested in. That's what I'm still interested in. I love working with non-professionals. And it's a very different ball of wax trying to work with professionals because they're trained to do specific things, which I'm usually trying to avoid. Mostly to do—I think professionals are generally trained to bring clarity, to bring—a lot of what professional actors do is help the audience understand the scene. And I'm always trying to make it a little more difficult for the audience to understand the scene. I don't want the actor clarifying everything. And obviously I don't mean to disparage professional actors. Obviously, the great ones can do brilliant things with the right director. But, I guess I just saw a certain kind of shortcut in what I wanted to get at with working with these non-professionals. And so a very large number of people in this film, at one time or another, were roommates of mine. Or classmates, I mean. And I think a third of the cast are Harvard grads. There's a lot of people I knew. And then other people who I didn't know so well, but found through friends. I mean, there was some semi-conventional casting with at least asking somebody who I didn't know very well to come in and do a screen test. But it was all people who I could relate to on a language of just direct rapport, not on a language of craft. And that's how that came to be.

Haden Guest  21:32 

Let's take some questions from the audience. And we have audience mics on either sides. If you could raise your hand. Wait for a microphone. And I have a question right here, in the front.

Audience  21:51 

I'm fond of—is this working? I'm fond of the 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio.

Andrew Bujalski  21:57

Thank you.

Audience  21:58

Not particularly fond of mono sound, but I'm curious to know—

[LAUGHTER]

Audience  22:02

What made you choose those two aspects of your format?

Andrew Bujalski  22:06

Oh, that was my training, too. That was what I knew how to do. We shot on a regular 16 camera, which maybe now the truth can be told, I still fear—don't get Pete in trouble—but we used a Harvard camera, which we should not have had access to.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  22:25

Take this man away!

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  22:33

And so, and again, it's just—and the first prints I had were regular 16 prints, which, even in 2002 was quite archaic, and nobody wanted to show it anymore. All the more so today. So, just didn't—and I never thought—there was no reason to think we'd ever be able to afford a 35mm blow-up. And, more or less the same for mono. I mean, I was thinking in terms of finishing to 16, as absurd as that was. But I love it. You know, I've become very attached to that aspect ratio now. I'm finishing my fourth movie now. And three of the four movies I've made have been 1.33. There's something about it. And the one that we did that was wider screen, I felt very nervous all the time. I was like, “What am I supposed to put? I put the face here—”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  22:22

“What am I supposed to do with all that?” I'm mostly just interested in watching the faces, anyway. I mean, I love that I got used to the wider screen. And it became a lot of fun to work with it. But I don't know, we played this at a theater in Los Angeles, at the—I think it's closed now—but the Sunset 5, on Sunset. And the old theater manager, a great crusty old theater manager, was laughing at us the whole time. Because he just liked laughing at independent filmmakers who nobody was gonna come to see their movie. And he was giving us such a hard time. And we were talking to him about, you know, like, “Well, so when the movie shows next.” He's like, “Yeah, you won't be here next week.”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  24:02

But then he saw, somehow, he walked into—as they were testing something, he walked in. And he just realized the movie was 1.33 and he got really excited. And then he liked us. He was like, “You know, the greatest movies ever made were made in 1.33.” And then he started listing all the classics of the ‘30s. “Yeah, that's right. And us too. So—”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  24:20 

“Respect us.”

Haden Guest  24:21

And you played more than a week.

Andrew Bujalski  24:23 

We moved to Santa Monica, but yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

Audience  24:24

So he actually had the set-up for 1.37? Or 1.33?

Andrew Bujalski  24:29

Yeah, good question. These prints are native, which god bless the Harvard Film Archive, these are native 1.33 prints. I think, for our release—

Haden Guest  24:38

They were hard matted?

Andrew Bujalski  24:40

Yeah, they were. They call it pillarboxing, like letterboxing but—which is not ideal, but they were fine.

Haden Guest  24:50 

Other questions? Comments? Yes. Actually, you'll be next. Oh, actually, go ahead, that’s fine. Go first.

Audience  25:00

Were there some professional actors in this movie?

Haden Guest  25:02

Were there some professional actors in this film?

Andrew Bujalski  25:06

I don't think so. Yeah.

Haden Guest  25:08 

You’re professional now?

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  25:10 

I guess. Yeah, huh. I mean, I'm trying to say, I’d have to do a full inventory. I can't remember, if anybody's—Justin Rice, who has a little role—I don't think he thinks of himself as a professional, but the guy who plays the roommate who comes in, who's covered in dirt. He's done a bunch of indie movies. But again, yeah, he's a musician. And that's how he thinks of himself.

Audience  25:35

I was wondering how much the film was made for? And, if you don't mind me asking that, and—

Andrew Bujalski  25:42

Well, everybody—10 years ago, everybody asked that every screening, and then it went away for a long time. And this is also a blast from the past—the old budget question.

Audience  25:49

And with that budget, like, how’d you go about attaining that budget, being your first movie?

Andrew Bujalski  25:57

Yeah, well, you know.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  26:01

Of course, that's the one part that's gotten a little easier, I guess. That I can—these days, there's more places for me to go and more people that know me. Although it's still very, very painful and horrible. But that money, I think, to get it—a lot more money has been spent since then, certainly on things like 35mm blow-ups, etc. We've probably spent about a little over 30,000. And this was shooting 16, printing 16. All these things that if you're—I mean, a huge fraction of the budget went to that, which obviously, these days, if you're not shooting 16 you can work a hell of a lot cheaper. And of course, that money came from people I was related to. I have no good advice about where to get money. You know, I'm a lucky person in many ways. And that's one of them.

Haden Guest  26:57 

If you could just wait for the microphone, which is right behind you.

Audience  27:01 

Okay, so it's your first movie. First feature. It's a little bit out of your head and out of your life. And you made the main character a woman.

Andrew Bujalski  27:12

Yeah!

Audience  27:13

And it's brilliant. And she's wonderful. One of the great women characters ever. How’d you get to that?

Andrew Bujalski  27:18

Well, that was a great kind of breakthrough, in a way. I graduated here in ‘98, and I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker and make movies. It was the only thing I ever really dreamed of doing or cared about. And so, but I didn't know what it meant to go out and make—and, I knew I'd have to devote my life to whatever film I was gonna make. But I wasn't really sure what that entailed. I just had my student experience working with two or three other people. And frankly, this is very much a student production, in a lot of ways. It's just a half step up from a student production. So I'd been writing screenplays, wanting to make one. And the ones I was writing, I thought, “You know, I don't know if this is worth devoting my life to trying to make this. It's okay. But I don't know if this is worth it.” And so Kate Dollenmayer was my roommate. I moved down to Austin, Texas, where I'm living again now, in ‘99. And Kate was one of my roommates there. And for whatever reason, it struck me, “I think Kate would be great in a movie.” You know, I just had the image in my head of her performing on screen. And I thought she would be wildly charismatic. And she is. And so I started to build around her, or I started to write the character with her in mind. Not as a biography of her, but just as a character who I was inventing who somehow had her voice. Who I could hear the lines, and hear what she was doing, see what she was doing. Imagine her delivery and imagine it working. And this was a great shortcut. Obviously, the conventional way of doing things is you write a script, you have no idea who's gonna play the part, then you go out and look at a lot of people who are wrong, and choose the one who's the least wrong. And this was a great way of—she was always going to be more right and better than whatever I could write for her. I always had that advantage. And as I started to write for her, it was so clearly better than everything I was writing before that, I think because I was writing for a woman. And because it did allow me—when you're 22, 23 years old, and you're writing a screenplay, it's very difficult to not have it be straight autobiography, because you don't know anything else. And you're not that interested in anything else. And so to write for this woman character, it couldn't just—I mean, of course, it is about me—but it couldn't just be about me. I had to have some half-step of critical distance. And it just made the writing much better. And then of course, having her come and do the role and really, really bring it to life, that is the raison d'etre of the movie. It's why anybody comes to watch it 10 years later, is because Kate does something really magical there.

Audience  30:13 

I'm curious to know how true the performance was to the script. And if there was any improvisation with the actors.

Andrew Bujalski  30:22 

Oh, plenty. Yeah. I think if you had the script open in your lap, as you were watching it, I think you would be able to follow along. Everything—the scenes all follow the structure as written pretty, pretty closely. But within that, there's plenty of room for improvisation, plenty of room for a little ad lib. Certainly, I think most of my favorite moments in the movie are things that were not necessarily strictly from the page. And again, that was part of the—I think, to work with a professional actor, they would focus and commit to trying to do justice to what you wrote, which can be nice. But I always enjoyed having people who were gonna run ramshod over what I wrote and just give me something better.

Haden Guest  31:14

Gerry? Is that what that means? Oh, I should—if you could just wait for the mic. Here you go.

Audience  31:21 

If I had to show a class, you know, what mumblecore is—with all those invented afterward—yes, this is mumblecore. Yes, it is.

Andrew Bujalski  31:29

Okay. Okay.

Audience  31:31

That's the scene with Alex making the phone call to Kate, in which he doesn't know what the fuck he's going to say.

Andrew Bujalski  31:36

Right.

Audience  31:37

And doesn't say anything. And says it thousands of ways. He says, “I don't know what—um, I don't know.” Yeah, I don't know, can you talk about that scene? What was written?

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  31:50 

That was pretty good, Gerry!

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  31:53 

No, I don't, I mean—

Audience  31:55

And that's a mumblecore question. That’s a mumblecore question.

Andrew Bujalski  31:56 

I don't remember exactly how it's written. But I will say, it's fun to cut. I thought it'd be really easy to cut phone scenes, because I thought, “Okay, you don't have to match anything. You know, I can use whatever I want, whenever.” And that’s not really—it is more difficult than I thought it would be. So I remember struggling a little bit with that scene. But I think if it works—Kate has, over the years, got plenty of attention and plenty of great reviews, and I feel like Christian Rudder’s performance has always been under-appreciated. You know, I love that performance. Christian, who plays Alex, I felt at the time, and still feel like I'd never seen anything quite like what he does in the movie. And I remember, the first day we shot with him, the cinematographer—Matthias Grunsky—who I've worked with on everything since, who I love, who has the better part of my brain at this point—but I remember as we started to shoot with Christian, which was about halfway into the shoot—for whatever reason our schedule was—Matthius pulling me aside and being like, “Is this okay, what he's doing?” You know, it’s just—even in the room I think it kind of popped and felt odd. But I said, “Yeah. No, no, it's great. I'm pretty sure it's great.”

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  33:18

And so that's my answer to what's happening in that scene. It’s just, “Christian is doing great.”

Audience  33:23 

And you hear that at the moment. That is a very weird scene. Like maybe nothing else in the history of cinema.

Andrew Bujalski  33:30 

Let's go with that. Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  33:35 

We had a question in the back.

Audience  33:40 

I had a question about locations. I'm not sure if I'm right. One of the reasons why I came tonight was I read that a lot of the locations were in Allston. Is that—

Andrew Bujalski  33:52

Yeah. Well, we were all over the place, yeah.

Audience  33:54 

Okay. One of the things is that I got the impression that I couldn't recognize anywhere. And, partly because things were shot very low to the ground.

Andrew Bujalski  34:10

Right.

Audience  34:11

There wasn't any place—and then when I looked at the credits, at the end, I recognize some of the locations. But it came very fast, so I couldn't read the whole list.

Andrew Bujalski  34:22

Sure.

Audience  34:23 

But, yeah, I was curious about that. It seemed intentional.

Andrew Bujalski  34:29

Yeah, well, I'd be curious to know how—my experience, traveling with the movie, would always be that people who were not from Boston or hadn't spent time here would say, “How come you never name—how come they never say what city they're in, in the movie? Was this an intentional choice to make it Anytown, USA?” Whereas, the people from Boston would always come up and say like, “Oh, dude, that was so Boston.” You know, that there was something instantly recognizable. Like, that everybody who had been to that party, in that apartment in Allston, knew it.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  35:03

So, to me, it certainly feels very Boston to me. Although, of course I've never, in any of my movies, gone out of my way to go get the shot of the landmark, which is maybe indicative of this general strategy, which is commercial poison, but it's how I like to do things. I never want to situate the audience. I always want you guys to find your own way in. So both physically and in terms of the story, I never really want to tell you where you are. But it's Boston, for sure.

Haden Guest  35:42

Hand up over here. Yes.

Audience  35:46 

Yeah, I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about the process of working with non-actors. Maybe just what kind of conversations you have with them, in leading up to the shoot or even on set? Like how you interact with them? Or how much you talk to them? Or what some examples of that might be?

Andrew Bujalski  36:04 

Well, it's all so collegial. I mean, most—I haven't done the—again, I'd have to look at the full list, but there aren't all that many people in the movie who were over 30. We all just spoke the same language, in some way. And it was all very much everybody showing up to—I mean, nobody had any sense—another thing that I will never be able to recapture is this sense that nobody had any idea of when or where it would ever be seen. You know, there was no sense of any eventual audience. So we all just communicated with each other just however we would have communicated with each other about anything else. I mean, I think I did some version of directing. But the same way I would, I don't know, ask a roommate to like, “Hey, do you mind, I don't know, washing the dishes?” Or I don't know if we told each other to wash dishes. I don't think we did. But it was all—it didn't feel like a work relationship.

Audience  37:06

[INAUDIBLE]

Andrew Bujalski  37:08

I mean, maybe it's a little. Well, this last thing I did was a very different experience in many ways. Because we had a bigger crew than I was used to. I'm also—I have a kid now, and a wife, and a mortgage, and all these things I didn't used to have, which really changed my—it made me have to approach the thing a lot more professionally. There was a way, when we did this movie, at the end of the day I had to be working as late as anybody, and it was important to me. It has always been important to me to be working. Nobody on the crew works later than me—”I'm going to be there doing stuff if you guys are doing stuff.” Which was just not the way things went this time. Now it was like we wrapped the last shot of the day, everybody else has work to do. And I say, “Goodnight, guys, I'll see you in the morning. I gotta go try and see my kid before they go to sleep.” And that was really different. So in many ways things have—but it scares me, every time things feel more professional. And this movie was also—there were way more people around, because it's a period piece. So we needed more people and more stuff. And, so there would be crew members whose names I was still learning on the last day. And then that freaked me out. I don't like big machinery. This movie was made with a crew of—I think the most people we ever had, I think we had maybe six people or maybe there was a day we had seven. But I think six was where we maxed out for crew on this movie, who were all people that I knew very, very well. And so I don't know—and yet, I will say that even as things kind of inevitably have to get a little more professional feeling, I'm always resisting that. And I'm always—when we get in the room, when we get down to the real work of me and the actors talking to each other and having fun with it, it's still about us trying to invent something together. I've still never spoken, really, in the language of craft. It may be getting too late for me to learn it.

Haden Guest  39:07

Pacho?

Audience  39:12 

Andrew, I was just wondering when we're going to be seeing Computer Chess?

Andrew Bujalski  39:16 

Oh, soon. Thank you.

[LAUGHTER]

Andrew Bujalski  39:19

Soon, soon. That's my new movie. It’s called Computer Chess. Mr. Gerry Peary is in the movie. He's great. And I'm finishing it. It'll be finished any minute. It will be premiering sometime early next year. And we'll see what happens. I mean, I'd like for it to get seen as widely as possible. But hopefully, somebody out there will be brave enough to bring it to the masses. I don't know. It's a very strange movie. Maybe stranger than the one you watched.

Haden Guest  39:49 

We’re intrigued. Please join me in thanking Andrew Bujalski.

[APPLAUSE]

Andrew Bujalski  40:00 

Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you again, Haden.

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