in t e r view with jim mcbride
ERIC HYNES: From direct quotations to mementos in the apartment, your character David surrounds himself in cinephilia—Godard, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Minnelli. Was that the case for you as well?
JIM McBRIDE, writer/director of David Holzman’s Diary: They are certainly touchstones for me in my life. These films were in the air, in the world that I inhabited in those days. It was an exciting time in New York. It felt like a movement of these fans who love movies, who were thinking about all these ideas and different kinds of experimentations. One of the things that was partic- ularly interesting to me was the whole idea of cinéma vérité. L.M. Kit Carson, who is the actor in the film, and I shared that. We had some gig to write a monograph about cinéma verité, which we never published, but did spend a lot of time interviewing everyone who was try- ing to deal with this idea of reality and truth. A lot of these people, particularly the documentary filmmak- ers, were involved with the invention of the technol- ogy that made it possible to go into people’s lives and record what was going on without altering things too much. They felt as if they were really onto something, that they were approaching a kind of idea of proof. That was a stimulating concept but it was also something that was slightly missing the point. Over time I actually came up with this idea that if a filmmaker thinks that he can figure out proof about something, then the actual filming of it undermines the idea. It proves him wrong.
EH: But was there proof in your film? Was any aspect of what you were filming documentary?
JM: Oh yeah, a lot of it was just, you know, we would go out on the streets and film. There was a lot of stuff that just happened. Then there’s the other stuff that you create.
EH: What’s fascinating is that even in those docu- mented sequences, there’s a voiceover that fictionalizes things to some degree.
JM: I don’t know quite how to put this, but when you’re making a movie you’re constantly, whether it’s fictional or factual, you’re constantly sort of looking at what you’re doing as you’re doing it. You’re real- izing what you have, how to incorporate that into a master plan, if there is a master plan. In my case there wasn’t—or not much of one. But there was an idea.
EH: Even films that purport to be direct cinema docu- mentaries have master plans. They just don’t want you to know about it.
JM: After the fact.
EH: So you had an idea that took shape as things went along?
JM: We never really had a script or anything. But I did have this idea about a guy trying to make a film about himself, and through that to better understand his life and what the point of it was. Kit Carson and I basically sat in a room with a tape recorder, and I would give him a certain broad outline of what I wanted to happen or
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