to see. He would then put it into his own words, and we would listen to it and he would say, “Oh that was pretty good,” or “That’s bad,” and we would end up with something that we thought we wanted. Then we would move onto the next thing. So over the course of, I don’t know, two or three days, we essentially had “written the script” without writing much down. When we shot it all, we tried to know pretty much what was going to happen in each moment because we didn’t have very much film. We had enough to do one or two takes for each scene. Even after we finished the main body of shooting, there were things that we went back and shot to make the whole thing work. So that’s just basically how it happened. It wasn’t about having a master plan. It was more just executing.
EH: It’s interesting that you were working with so little film, because you get the sense that the camera’s just rolling.
JM: We had talked to [Richard] Leacock and those guys, and actually worked in the vérité world, so we knew how liberal you have to be with film, how pre- pared you have to be for anything to happen. It’s not that I imitated that approach, but I was informed by that approach, and was able to create a film that looked like it was shot that way but wasn’t really.
EH: This was one of the first films to take on, as its sub- ject, the new mobility of filmmaking. Was there a general sense at that moment that this was a turning point in terms of what was possible?
JM: I think that was at the heart of a lot of what was going on in moviemaking at that time. This was the
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early to mid ’60s, the time of the French New Wave, when those guys, particularly Godard, were get- ting at some sense of what real life is like on film, rather than the sort of confectionary way that tra- ditional Hollywood movies would portray life. There was also what we called at the time the American Underground, which had all of these interesting film- makers working with the most primitive kind of equip- ment—like Stan Brakhage was shooting Super 8. So people were coming at it from different ends, from different angles. There was a whole world to explore. Some of them did it in a very journalistic way, others in a more poetic way.
EH: I love how David refers to the equipment as his friends. And obviously by the end of the film, he’s talking to the camera as if it’s a different person.
JM: Not only is it a person, it’s a person who’s control- ling him.
EH: And then he attacks the film, too, the actual cellu- loid. I love how everything is visible—all of the material that goes into this film is in front of you. In a sense you’re demystifying the process even while you’re mystifying everything.
JM: We loved all that stuff. This generation of film- makers were all interested in the process. We were all really just learning about it. Loving the feel of the film and how to make a splice, how to run a projector and how to keep something in focus. All these basic things, the physical, practical aspects of filmmaking, were part of the aesthetic.
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