5 Questions #1: Hal Hartley
How better to launch a new feature, than with my first regular collaborator?
If you follow along with my Substack Chat, you know that I’ve been looking for ways to expand what I am doing here on HopeForFilm. I’ve believed I mentioned this in posts too. I was considering both a “5 Questions” and a “Project Of The Month” or “Crowdfunding Highlight” column. So I decided, at least this time to do all at once.
When one of your first collaborators is also on the last days of a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for their latest movie, you can’t waste time. I met Hal Hartley when I offered Rich Ludwig a pull on my pint of Jack when he was driving the grip truck and I was a PA. The axel had busted on the truck, and we couldn’t do anything for a couple of hours until help arrived, so I thought we should drink. And talk. About movies. He told me about Hal. And later gave me one of his early scripts, Bad Hero. I tried to find funding for Hal’s films for about three years unsuccessfully, until Hal found funding for his first feature in the form of a couple of home computer loans, and The Unbelievable Truth was born. We’ve since done 10 films and a couple of music videos together, I think. And I got distribute one when I was a streamer too…
Hal’s currently working on the funding of Where To Land. There are three days left in the crowdfunding campaign, and you can make a huge difference. Hal had a successful campaign for this three or so years ago, but then Covid hit. Perhaps you’ve been digging his films this past month on Criterion. 30 films — albeit many of them shorts. But you can make it so that next year there is one more. Please do. I did.
So as it currently stands, the “5 Questions” Hope For Film interview, is I throw 10 questions to someone and they answer half of them. Let’s see how it works out.
Today’s 5 are:
Could you tell us about a collaborator you’ve worked with and why you respect them?
What was a hinge moment in your career where everything changed, when you saw greater possibility or you felt you upped your game?
What did you think the film business and film culture would be like today back when you thought about it fifteen years ago?
How do you finish a making a movie well? What does that mean? What are the typical & most unique struggles that you face at that final stage?
Was there a moment where things changed or improved for you professionally? Can you unpack that it a bit? Why do you think it worked?
Could you tell us about a collaborator you’ve worked with and why you respect them?
Mike Spiller, who is of course for a long time now a very accomplished director and producer, was my director of photography from my junior year at film school in 1983 until No Such Thing in 2000. Starting out, through working with Mike, I learned the practical implications of my blocking and framing ideas as well as discovering whole new ways of filming action. To this day, Mike likes to remember me as a young man who was bad with tools! But I disagree. I loved tools: hammers, saws, a level, rope! Even a guitar, for me, was a tool. However, I was, in fact, hopeless with machines. Everything from my car, ten-speed bikes, to motion picture equipment. Machines frustrated me. Mike taught me, through practice, a poetics of machinery! He loved machines, everything from his own car which he needed to start with a screwdriver to, say, a cigarette lighter. He was fascinated by how things functioned. He taught me patience and the importance of procedure.
What was a hinge moment in your career where everything changed, when you saw greater possibility or you felt you upped your game?
Well, the first was rediscovering the plays of Moliere (1622-1673) in the winter of 1987, nine or ten months before we shot The Unbelievable Truth. It changed how I wrote. I grasped what I’d been buzzing around but not seeing clearly: that what I wanted to do was make dialogue-built / performer driven vehicles! The second game-changer was Simple Men (1992), where, though it was still precise dialogue, I decided to move towards quieter or non-spoken physical activity interspersed with the dialogue. This was a little bit of a crisis and took a couple of months of worry in the cutting room to finally sort out for myself. But, in the end, it produced work I was very happy with and which laid the groundwork for, say, Flirt/Tokyo (1996), which I consider the best work we did in 35mm. Meanwhile (2012) and Ned Rifle (2014) follow on from the things I learned there.
What did you think the film business and film culture would be like today back when you thought about it fifteen years ago?
I understood it would be about electronic delivery and the internet. But I didn’t grasp how fast the ease of streaming would be achieved. Even when Steve Hamilton and I produced The Girl from Monday in 2004, the idea was to make a small film and have it available from my own website. But the technology wasn’t there yet, at least for a small company trying to do it alone. But a few years later it was. I certainly envisaged the proliferation of cinema curating like we see a lot of now.
How do you finish a making a movie well? What does that mean? What are the typical & most unique struggles that you face at that final stage?
There comes a point late in the editing, often well into the sound cutting and scoring, when I can stand back and look at the film as an object that has nothing to do with me. It’s just a constructed thing, a piece of sculpture. And I exercise my critical judgement and practical skills on it. It involves imagining myself to be not me but someone kind of like me who is approaching the film for the first time. Day after day, I do this. Of course, the most common struggle is to allow myself to admit something I’m quite attached to has, through good work, become superfluous in the course of the film coming together. But that gets easier with practice. I think “finishing a film well” means accomplishing what you intended without, finally, being too personal.
Was there a moment where things changed or improved for you professionally? Can you unpack that it a bit? Why do you think it worked?
Grasping the logic of crowdsourcing made it possible to establish a business model that suits my temperament and aims. My aims are to make work that grows out of my own evolution as a person and as an artist, not simply and always to manufacture anticipated product for a known market. That can be fun too. But I’m not the go-to guy for that. But, also, it’s important to me to earn my living from my creative work. It took me a while and I had to be talked through it by my younger friends, but I saw with crowdsourcing, particularly Kickstarter, the possibility of financing my work by, in effect, pre-selling it to the people who were actually interested in it rather than trying to convert the unknown masses. But, for instance, Kickstarter, which is a kind of curating platform too, does introduce the work to a wider, curious public.
Please consider making a donation to Hal’s Where To Land. It’s make or break time and he needs our support!
Hal is selling CDs and DVDs to get his film made? I don’t understand how that’s an affective strategy these days anymore. Hope I’m wrong or maybe someone could swoop in with a bucket of cash? He is Hal Hartley after all and this isn’t his first rodeo. I’m curious about the crowd funding strategies that are getting movies made by directors who don’t have name recognition but just a great project. The most I’ve been able to successfully raise for about 5 projects in the past has been under $10k. It was successful but it was a lot of work. Not sure I’ll do it again. Someone once told rising 10k could be just as much work as rising 6 figures. I believe them.
Using crowdfunding to assist in getting a film out there can work (I've done it myself,) and over the years I've figured out what alchemy works best to determine which approaches will likely succeed. I've helped fund around 100 projects through various platforms of crowdfunding, the majority of them film related, and have about a 95% success rate picking projects early in their offering that end up being successful. (I'm hoping that success rate won't take a dip with Hal Hartley's latest re-attempt. I funded it the first time round and re-committed to this one. I'm completely baffled by the numbers he's getting this time around, though.)
The key for all of the successful campaigns I've backed is the personalization and full attention given by the filmmakers to the separate goal of the funding campaign itself. Personalized in, you get to know the filmmakers who are behind the project and what drives them. More importantly than the film they're trying to make, I end up backing filmmakers I can believe are driven by the right motivations towards their goals. If I can ferret out their personality and feel like they'd be successful in life, I have no problem in giving money to get them over this current hurdle. Most of the time, I've been proved right, often backing a second or third funding project or watching the filmmaker go on to bigger and better things, no, longer needing the crowd's assistance to get the next on in the can.
As for the question of notoriety- or lack thereof- in raising sufficient sums, I've seen the following in the projects I've backed on Kickstarter (I think you can look at my profile on there and see the list of previously backed projects.)
Unknown (or known for something else) short films can get $50,000 to get their films done. Several I've backed have reached those levels and they were unknown to me before I saw their campaign. Some short films have hit incredible highs (e.g. Kung Fury short film - $630K)
Feature documentaries done by unknowns (or those not known for docs): Several have reached the $80K+ range of funding, and gone on to produce wonderful, award winning fare. (e.g. Be Natural, the story of Alice Guy Blache raised $219K and contributed to a resurgence in the early cinema maven's work recognition.)
Feature narratives from those branching out their notoriety in other ways: I've backed people's first features who've come from other areas to much success. Some like Zach Braff's first film Wish I Was Here ($3M raised) set him up as a proven director with a great eye and he's gone well beyond the Kickstarter funded realm for his latest film works. And the Veronica Mars movie was funded by fans (to the tune of $5M) as a proof of concept that there was still interest in the old TV show when there wasn't as much financial interest in it without that display.
Of course, anyone can pick apart crowdfunding and say, "But when you consider this [insert some single point that, for them completely nullifies the crowdfunding benefits]", or "They could have done it through traditional means," it misses the point that, those of us that traditionally are part of the "crowd" of crowdfunding know all those aspects. What we're traditionally funding is a belief in the people themselves that want to do something and need a bit of help. That's why the personalization of the campaign carries such weight. If you show yourself and why you are passionate about your project, people will click whether you're famous or not. And if the campaign is structured properly (a whole other long post would be need to go into how to do that,) to make the funder feel appreciated in helping out, then anyone can have a good chance of being successfully funded, whether it'd be for the full film production, or any specific part needed to get to the finish line (finishing funds, festival campaign funding, etc.)
Hal hits a lot of the marks in campaigns I have no problem funding and so I have. I'm anxious to see whether my previous experiences are still valid. Time and people's proclivities do change. And if the goal posts are moved, then I'll have to do more research and re-evaluate the strategies I recommend for future crowdfunding, including my own.
Fingers crossed.