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Initial Public Screening: A Web-based Co-Op Climbs out of Its Box
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Daniel Gamburg
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Daniel Gamburg is the founder of Bare Witness, a co-operative of Bay Area actors turned digital moviemakers. After producing nearly thirty short movies for their eponymous Internet venue, the group set out to make a feature using skills which had been perfected in their shorter work.
In early 2004, director Gamburg began touring film festivals with the group's first feature-length effort, IPO.
The following interview was conducted at Cinequest 2004, where IPO played to a capacity crowd of over five hundred.
IPO is available for rent through Netflix. |
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Bare Witness: The Drawbacks of Democracy
BRAINTRUSTdv: How did Bare Witness come about?
Daniel Gamburg: We've been together for three years now. I can't believe we made it.
Let me start from the beginning. My background's in documentary. I love documentary film, so that's what I started in, and my first documentary film was about my grandparents, which went on to win awards and do really well.
BTdv: The Michael Moore Award in Ann Arbor.
DG: Yeah, right. But in the process of making a documentary, I said I want to work in the narrative form. So, to work in narrative, I need to know what acting's about. So I dropped all film and went straight to the stage. I'm kind of hard core about that kind of stuff. So I immersed myself in the theater, and I dropped film. I didn't do film for three years. In the process of immersing myself in the theater, I created a company and started working with actors because I realized that spontaneity is what cinema is—it's not the words, it's not text, it's just life unfolding and you're capturing it. I realized that's something I want to explore, so I combined my documentary background with my theater work. Of course I used digital video because it's the only format and the only technology that would allow me to do that. So that's where Bare Witness came in.
BTdv: What was the role of the Phil Bennett Theater Lab?
DG: Bennett retired and went to Palm Springs. He handed it over to me, and I took the name of the school and changed it to Theater and Film Lab SF. And I've had it for about a year and what I do is I teach the System as it's taught in Russia and in Europe, not the way it's taught in the U.S. None of the actors here studied Method. They're all active analysis and the System. Nothing against Method acting but it can become self-indulgent and it can become very destructive if you go too far into it. There are arguments between the acting schools—there's Stella Adler, there's Strasberg, right? And then there's Meisner. And they're all battling about the System and what does it mean. And Strasberg did all of the Method, total Method. That's why you have Shelley Winters, who's an alcoholic and the rest of them have committed suicide. Part of that is because he went too far. And then there's Stella Adler who studied with Stanislavski back in the thirties and forties after he left the United States and then continued studying with him. And in continuing to study with him, she realized the Method wasn't the thing. It was much more than that. And somebody like, for example, De Niro studied with Stella Adler. Notice when he was interviewed on Inside the Actor's Studio, he said, it's just actions. Just pursue an action and fulfill it honestly and truthfully. None of this hocus-pocus my-doggie-died-and-I'm-going-to-cry. Because then you can sustain a performance. You can do it over and over.
So this philosophy and this idea of understanding what acting is all about—that's how I started, and in doing so I created this group, Bare Witness. I said, what are you guys doing now that you've graduated? "Nothing, I work for a medical firm, or for Bank of America"—because it's impossible to get in unless you're good looking and young and hot and you go out there and you push yourself and you sell your body, you know, whatever it is to get the job. So I said, why don't we empower ourselves and tell a story, tell stories that we care about, that we can explore and take time to do without the pressure of having to achieve something for the goal of making a profit. And in doing so it freed us up and we got creative.
BTdv: I understand that membership in the group was by invitation only?
DG: Right. Partly because the nature of working with a group is hard. So if somebody left the group and we had an open spot we would take somebody that we've worked with. It's hard. The problem is once you get a lot of people then there needs to be work for them to do. And it needs to be managed, and if you don't manage it properly it becomes a free-for-all. Actors are great because they love it. "Oh, great, I want to be part of your organization!" But we don't have enough material; it becomes this huge thing; it's non-profit. That's why I stepped down from being artistic director. Because I wanted to make films, I didn't want to manage an acting troupe.
BTdv: Was there any tension while you were in charge?
DG: I was always pushing. And when they'd fight against me I'd just say, okay. I couldn't do it anymore. We all went to counseling together. I couldn't take it anymore and said, "Look guys, there are certain issues that need to be expressed and talked about because otherwise, if you don't talk about it, we're going to explode and we're going to scream and yell at each other, which is not what this is about."
BTdv: Was this prior to making the feature?
DG: No, this was after. After [co-founder] Michael Wohl left for L.A. there was just a meltdown. And I was upset and I brought the group in and I said I'm going to tape this. I'm going to ask you to tell me what you don't like about me. Each and every one. I did not say anything. And I heard what they didn't like and it made sense.
BTdv: Did it have to do with pushing them too hard?
DG: Pushing—my wanting things done a certain way and getting them done. You know they wouldn't get done. I'm very efficient. And no, they don't like it because they have their own life. "I have this problem with my wife and my kids, and I have to be home." "Well, okay, then don't come." "But I'm part of the group." We got things taken care of, and today we're all friends. There's no animosity.
BTdv: So how does the co-op work in practical terms?
DG: Basically, my cofounder, Michael Wohl—one of the developers of Final Cut for Apple—and I said, "Hey, look, you've got the technology, I've got the know-how, why don't we get together, create a group, post [our work] on a Web site and do these little short films and we'll just have fun." "Great, let's do it." And so we had meetings every Monday. We'd get together, we'd have rehearsals, we'd discuss something we were interested in. I'd ask an actor, "What are you going through?" "I'm not doing well because of the economy, my wife is..." "Well, do you want to do something about that?" "Sure!" It just opens up a whole other thing, and the creativity starts to run. Like Kerry [Gudjohnsen], the girl that played Susan [in IPO]—she's never been in films before. That was her first major role. They hadn't worked in front of a camera. But the idea was to empower them, to give them the freedom to do it. When I direct I don't say, "That was wrong." I say, "Try something else." And we just roll, roll, roll, and suddenly they're so involved they don't know the camera's there. And you get spontaneous magic when that happens.
We're going on a retreat two weeks from now. We're going down the coast and one of the actresses has a house and we're going to do another project working this way—through improvisation, developing stuff. But I'm a little bit personally tired of working this way. I want to explore something else. I want to explore writing a script, doing a workshop, and working through trigger technique which is a technique I learned—spontaneity and the moment, incorporating documentary, how do you apply that to scripted work. Because when you watch a movie, you can see the script going by.
BTdv: So you're still an active member of Bare Witness?
DG: I'm still a member but now we vote on things and there's not as much pressure, and they like that. I said, "You know guys, we're not a production company. We're a co-op. We're just a bunch of guys who like to get together and do this stuff and that's it." And they didn't exactly agree with me, but that's what it is now. And I don't know what's going to happen later, but that's what it is now and I'm doing my own thing. I'm working with each and every one of them individually or I bring them in on a project. It's relaxed me. I've totally lost all of my wacko, angry, got-to-do-it-my-way thing because they're not going to do it my way. Why push it?
BTdv: Did any of the actors get involved on the technical side?
DG: We taught the actors how to use the camera because then they can actually know what I'm gong through when I'm recording. And they started doing this for themselves and were like, "Oh, this is what this means. Oh, this is why if I move this way the light falls off and I'm out of focus and I need to move." Somebody in the audience said my camera work was smooth. The actors allowed it to be. They knew what I was going through, so when they moved, they moved a little bit slower than in reality. Because they knew what I had to go through as a camera operator. So there was a synergy between the camera operator and the actors. Very rarely does that happen because standard procedure is you come to the set, you have no rehearsal time, you have your page, you come in, you do it, you leave. I can't work that way. But in here it was like a kibbutz, everyone did everything together, and everybody cared about everybody else, and everybody got time to say what they feel. It was a little bit of a therapy session, and in the process I made the film for thirty grand. Which is pretty good.
BTdv: You didn't want to talk about the budget after the screening just now.
DG: No, I didn't. Because I feel that question is counterproductive towards what the purpose of making the film is. And of course if that question was asked to me in private I would tell them. But it's the selling point of a film now: people sell films that way. You know, I'd rather talk about the subject of the film or what the actors went through than the budget. So I skirted the issue.
BTdv: How many short movies did the group produce before moving on to the feature?
DG: We shot about sixteen short films.
BTdv: I saw figures upwards of thirty in your press materials.
DG: Yeah, there are more, but some of them weren't edited or some of them were just experiments. And a couple of them went to festivals, like The Egg That Wouldn't Hatch.
BTdv: And you did a lot of local screenings?
DG: We've done a bunch. We have a couple a year. That's how we raise money for the Web site, and it's great. We have three or four hundred people on our mailing list now and have got over 500,000 hits. There's a little community. That's what the technology does: it allows you to create a community, to create communication without having to shell out a lot of money, and I think that's really important. Only in America.
BTdv: The Bare Witness mission statement originally emphasized that the group was making movies exclusively for the Internet. Do you still see the Internet as relevant to Bare Witness, to its new directions?
DG: For Bare Witness, yes, it is. Myself as a filmmaker is a whole separate issue. I stepped down from being artistic director about a year ago. I was very hardcore. I would say, "This is how we work, this is the mission statement." Our co-founder Michael Wohl left and moved to L.A. partly because he didn't agree with my philosophy. We just disagreed theoretically. We went to film school together, and we argued film theory a lot, and it finally came to a head. I like what Dogme does, and I believe in spontaneity, and he believes in control. We had these amazing, totally amazing arguments. If you would videotape that, just recording us talking—fascinating. And his film played at Cinequest last year. We both made our own films using the group, and he made a film called Want. Very different from my film. Also dealing with the subject matter of technology and start-up companies and all that. But in his, everything was locked down. There was a script and a script supervisor. It was digital video because we bought two cameras for his film and my film, and we shared. But our films are very different. The terminology and the theory behind our work was absolutely and totally different.
From Tsipa and Volf to IPO: Sculpting in Real Time
BTdv: You've taught film theory, I understand.
DG: Yeah, I taught. I'm Mr. Too Much Theory. Now I'm trying to take it out of my work because people don't want to listen to that. They want to see a good film.
BTdv: You mention Dogme 95 in the press materials for IPO, and you mention Mike Leigh. I actually saw a lot of affinity—at least in texture—with Timecode.
DG: It actually started out that way. I have a version of the film where it's like Timecode.
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Gamburg at Cinequest 2004
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BTdv: I sensed a lot of that same energy, yet I think IPO is much more convincing than Timecode. Figgis was beleaguered by so many technical limitations in doing it that way.
DG: There were moments where it was just great. But then it was like, okay, got it, I want the story now.
BTdv: Gregory Solman, in a Film Comment review, said the technique of Timecode demonstrates that a movie really does need a director: someone has to make the decisions.
DG: The decisions—right, right, right. And that was the most challenging part with this film. Because at the same time I'm giving them a lot of freedom but then I have to sort of bring them to the story, and that was the difficult part of the film because I would not have them in [the editing room]. It was just chaos. "Oh, how could you cut that? That was my story, that was my life!"
BTdv: As I was watching this I thought, second to the performances, which obviously are the theoretical foundation of the movie, was the editing. A lot of movies strike the viewer as directorially brilliant, but here it was really about deciding what would remain in it. And so many movies are condescending in that they show the beginning, middle, and end of every single scene.
DG: Oh God, thank you very much. I totally agree with you.
BTdv: And you come in right in the middle of something that's already happening, and you have to figure it out, you have to back up a little, and then you move on. There's a lot of truth in that, and it's intelligent filmmaking.
DG: That's what comes from doing documentary work, because in documentary, there's a subject, and you want to do it justice. You want to be honest with it, and there's spontaneity, and you just sort of let it unfold without telling the audience, "This is what you need to feel, this is what you need to do, this is how you need to see." I'm a huge Tarkovsky theoretician. People at film school would come up to me and say, "Daniel, what does that mean?" Because I'm Russian, and I speak Russian, and I understand Tarkovsky stuff. You know, it's a locked camera, people are falling asleep left and right, and I'm like, "It's poetry, you don't understand." Sculpting in time—it's about life unfolding in the moment, and you've got to go with it. It's about mother earth, it's about passion and love, and they're falling asleep. Okay, that's where I come from. But then you see my film—chop, chop! If I could make a Tarkovsky film, I would. I'm a big fan of avant-garde, you know, Maya Deren and all those filmmakers, and that's what I wanted to do, and that's why I live at home. Because I can't afford it.
BTdv: You keep going back to the importance of documentary. Tsipa and Volf, which won the Michael Moore Award, was incredibly well-received. Tell us a little about it.
DG: It's very simple. It's about two people who made a commitment to one another after World War II, after their families died in the Holocaust, that they were going to make it, and they were going to survive, and they were going to get married and have children. And when you make that kind of choice, you kind of are locked in a certain relationship, and you start defining love in a very different way. And I realized that a film needs to be made about that because we don't have that today. So I made the film. It's a film that took me six years to make. I didn't shoot all the way through, but it's broken down time-wise. The film is only twenty minutes, and you see in twenty minutes six years of these peoples' lives change and transform.
My grandfather has Alzheimer's, and my grandmother has to take care of him. Her children die, and she has to continue to take care of this man who married her, had sex with her, and they made babies. Where is the passion and where is the love? It's a weird relationship because there's a lot of humor between them and a lot of love but it's not the same love we have. It's a love that's about commitment and survival. And that's been sort of drilled into my family. Throughout this film I asked my grandmother, "What does love mean to you? What is the definition of love?" For six years, periodically, I ask her. She said, "Love is conscience and commitment. Not about passion. That stuff passes and sex passes. In the end it's about conscience and commitment to the person you're with." After six years she's still telling me the same things, and my grandfather's hilarious. There's a point where I tell Grandpa, "She cooks for you, she cleans for you, what do you do for her?" He says, "I eat." That's all. He's hilarious, and people are laughing, and as the film moves along he has Alzheimer's and he forgets, and she continues to feed him throughout the film. She puts a spoon into his mouth and I ask the same question, "What does love mean to you?" "Conscience and commitment. Conscience and commitment." And my grandfather passes away in the film.
But at twenty minutes it was kind of intense. That's one of the reasons people connected with it. I did not make the film to be intense, to get any hoopla out of that, but people connected with it somehow and I thought, wow, documentaries can be really powerful. And life-changing. And I said, why don't I apply that to narrative? And it went a little far and that's why it became comical—because through improv you can't control it too much. And once they start—because it was all shot in chronological order—once you start, you can't back up, so I had to keep it at that sort of satirical level.
BTdv: Do you think that approach has cost you any critical recognition?
DG: When I went to Slamdance, the jury picked Homework. Shot it with the same camera I used. (Here's the irony and what Michael's and my debate is.) Shot it with a PAL PD150 and [Kevin Asher Green, director of Homework] had two name actors in his film, it was shot like film—I mean we're talking sticks, long lens for video because video doesn't like wide angle, nighttime because video doesn't like daylight, shot really well—and he won the prize. Very simple story about a young girl who has anorexia and cannot have sex with her boyfriend because she doesn't like her body image and she has to be a ballerina and in her dance class she hears an African dance troupe and she's seduced by this other, very exotic, very beautiful, very physical dance, and she falls in love with the teacher, an African-American guy, and basically she seduces him and they make love and he reawakens her. Very simple story. And [Green] won the festival. And when I watched this film I said to myself, he's got a simple story, he's got good camerawork, he's got two name actors, and it works. There's no way I'm going to win because there's no way someone can categorize my film. My film is uncategorizable, it's unsellable, nobody's going to want to work hard to sell my film because it's not genre, it doesn't fit any genre. A lot of Dogme films didn't make it because of that.
BTdv: A Film Threat review of IPO notes that the movie offers a good laugh or two, and then it shifts into serious fare, and then it goes back to tragicomedy mode, and the only thing that keeps it from being great is this lack of focus. So my question to you is: wouldn't that just be a natural result of working democratically—not just improvisationally but within the confines of an enforced democracy?
DG: Absolutely. That's very good, that's very well said—much better than I could say it. That's what I think, and that's what life is like. You live in a democratic state of mind. The consensus between all of the cast—we read that [review] and said he must have really quickly glanced over it and right away tried to package it. And that's what they do. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? If it's not a comedy or a drama it won't sell.
BTdv: It surprised me because it's Film Threat. Of all people to take issue with uncategorizability...
DG: But you know it all depends on the critic. Because there are other critics at Film Threat who have a totally different opinion than this guy. It's kind of how the cookie crumbles. You're lucky to get a good critic. I want to say a good critic is not an angry critic. Because a lot of critics I don't like write from anger. Like they'll write really mean reviews like "You shouldn't be a filmmaker." Why are you so angry? And sometimes the anger comes from a place of "This is how I would have done it if I was there." But it's not your film, it's not your story, it's somebody else's. So there needs to be some balance. If you didn't like it, fine. But you don't have to say it's horrible and the filmmaker should never make another movie. This guy in Variety was pretty extreme. He was much worse with other films—thank God he didn't go as far with me as he did with other filmmakers. He was on a mission to destroy. I used to criticize film, I was film studies guy, but I would never write from anger. For example, The Passion [of the Christ]. I couldn't write from anger, like, "Oh, it's horrible what he's doing." I feel empathy for any director anybody who has a vision and wants to express themselves. And [Mel Gibson] definitely had a very strong one. And I've got to give it to him that he went all the way. In a therapy session that's what I would tell him to do, go all the way, you have to get it out, and he did it. And he created a dialogue. No matter how good or bad the film is, people are talking, people are talking about religion, people are talking about anti-Semitism.
BTdv: You mentioned the discipline of documentary and transferring that to narrative. You shot Tsipa and Volf on DV as well?
DG: No that was 16mm.
BTdv: Why was it a logical conclusion to move to DV when you decided to be improvisational?
DG: It was a logical conclusion for me when I was going through rehearsals and I was saying, "Why don't we just put them on camera and see what happens?" "Oh, that worked." People watched that and they liked it so why don't we just keep doing it? You know The Egg That Wouldn't Hatch—I still get letters to show it at festivals. I don't respond to them anymore because there's no money in it. But it was shot in one take. I didn't cut it. I literally just went Camera A, Camera B, Camera A, Camera B, and it's done. Put it in the mail and sent it out, and people loved it, and I was like, "You fools!" And we shot it on a one-chip!
BTdv: And your other Web stuff?
DG: That's all one-chip.
BTdv: So the PD150 came later?
DG: Yes. There's one film that actually Kerry [Gudjohnsen] just finished, one shot, she's good. Her piece was shot with a PD150 that I rented out to her and she's very, very good. All the actors—they're all making their own films.
BTdv: Ed Hooks' column in Callboard Magazine in 2001—he mentions that your film IPO is in the can. That was almost three years ago.
DG: We started shooting it in '01. I mean, we finished shooting it. Well, eighty-eight hours of footage. One of the downfalls of this production is that the timing is a little off. I've heard that from several critics. They say, "Hey, it's a great film but the timing is off."
A great film will always be really good because you will always be able to measure it through the social perspective of when the film was made—if it was done well. A documentary captures life in that moment and it's like wine. As time passes it becomes a historical document. That's why I love documentary. That's why I love to shoot [narrative] in that style, because you feel like you're capturing the time even though it's fake, even though you made it up. Like when you watch a Cassavetes film—his films last because they captured a time that is uncapturable any other way.
BTdv: What technical choices did you make in order to optimize IPO for digital projection?
DG: You have all the filters and you can make it look like film if you want to. For example this film was shot in PAL, so we just de-interlaced it and let it go. So you're basically watching twenty-five frames per second, which that's why it looks like film when you watch it up there. If we shot it NTSC it wouldn't look the way it looks. I've seen films projected like that and I was like, "Oh, it looks like home video." All you do is you just de-interlace it, and part of it is because of the way we shot it. We shot wide angle, no light, the light at night to give it depth. Very cinematic. We tried to be very cinematic with the way we used the camera because the movement and all that created that sense of film rather than video. Video is very flat and the last thing I want to do is put video on a tripod and have one of these shots that looks very video-like.
This [Cinequest] was amazing projection. I was blown away. I've never seen my film projected like that. Why even transfer it to film? You don't need to do that anymore. I don't understand why I'm getting calls from Seattle saying, "Hey, congratulations, contact us, we do a really good job of transferring your video to film." I'm like, why?
The Internet: Promise and Compromise
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BTdv: The Internet, DV fests, local screenings, major festivals and then the DVD market—how do you see the distribution hierarchy of the modern independent filmmaker?
DG: This is a new thing that's coming up right now, a place called Cineclix. They offered me a deal whereby they buy the rights to rent my film out on the Internet. So what they would do is full-length download. It would take fifty-five minutes to download a feature for five bucks. So I get fifty percent, they get fifty percent. I get $2.50 per viewing. A hundred viewers—that's pretty good money. Then they're a start-up company so they're doing their own thing right now, and it's |
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Gamburg and crew shooting IPO
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interesting—they're already changing the contract because they're already finding issues and problems. This is happening in L.A. also, this is a whole new thing that's starting up. And if you take a look at what these guys did for the festival here? They compressed the film and download it and it's DVD quality. I went on the computer yesterday and I looked at my trailer and blew it up on my computer screen and was like, "Oh my God, this is DVD quality." That's the future. Why even go to a video store? Netflix is another good example. Netflix contacted me and they're thinking of doing that, too—buying my film and then just licensing it and renting it out through the mail.
BTdv: If it were a perfect world, and everything were available to everyone, would you do Netflix or would you do the Web? Do you believe in a home format experience through a television, or are you pro-computer?
DG: What I believe in is: I have the film and you call me and say you want to see it. "Can I download it?" And I say, "Yeah, go ahead, send me five dollars." And you download it and I give you the license to see it. That's it. That's the way it should be.
BTdv: What about an equally direct marketing in which a DVD changes hands? Do you see that as the same thing?
DG: Same thing. This is a very heated debate right now. There was a great Slamdance roundtable discussion with people who just marketed DVDs and rented DVDs, and then there was the guy from Shooting Gallery and he was saying, "Are you guys nuts? You guys are little fish! You're not making money. How much did you make? How much did you gross? Fifty thousand?" And the DVD guy says, "No, we made ten thousand, I sold 150 copies of my DVD from the trunk of my car."
It's all about marketing. No matter how well you can market your film, no matter how well you distribute a DVD, you still need that infrastructure, you still need to market your film, you still need to cover certain demographics, and the only way you're going to do it is by having a huge company back you up. If Sofia Coppola made Lost in Translation and she wasn't Sofia Coppola, we all know that she wouldn't be where she's at. But she can still try and sell her film on DVD, and we'd watch it.
But it's hard. If I had a choice, if I had a good film and somebody from Shooting Gallery came to me or from Focus Features—who by the way came to see my film and walked out a third of the way through, right in my face—and they said we want to pick up your film, I'd say yeah.
BTdv: So theatrical release is still the ultimate goal.
DG: I don't want people to sit there and watch it on a monitor. I really don't. But I know that as an artist you have to express yourself and you have to have people to come out and see your work, so I'm willing to do a DVD.
BTdv: Well, longevity is either the Web or DVD. A movie has a theatrical run and then it has a shelf life. So my question is whether you prefer the Web or DVD for longevity.
DG: DVD. No, no actually, I would go Web. You download it, you can watch it, you can send it to another person, buy the license, pay another two dollars. It's like a DVD, the quality is the same. But how do you make money? That's a big question mark.
One of our next projects that we thought about is to solicit story ideas, short one-page treatments from all over the world, that we will take as an acting/producing group and then produce and place on the Internet for everyone to see. There is a rule that it has to be socially relevant to where you're at in the world. So somebody from South Africa can write a one-page treatment of a story and we would try to adapt it into something we could show. The idea behind that also is to give voice to people who don't have it. We'd charge like one dollar per submission, so if we got a hundred submissions we got a hundred dollars. We go through them and find something that we can do, and the idea also is to do a fast turnaround so you get the one page and then you do it in three or four days using digital technology. And then you send it back to the people and they can send it to their friends and it bubbles into this huge thing. It will be filtered through our consensus of what's good and what's not, but that's a powerful use of the Internet and digital video.
BTdv: And potentially commercial.
DG: Yes, but commercial and social value. I don't want to just make films to make profit.
BTdv: But it has to be sustainable.
DG: Right, and that's why we have screenings to make money to pay for the Web site. We have no equipment, literally. Our equipment is a computer at home. And that's the powerful part about it. And that's what we're developing right now. It would bring us some revenue.
BTdv: And you're able to generate funds from the screenings?
DG: Definitely. When we went to Slamdance I couldn't afford to pay for everybody's rooms, so we just had a screening of the film and we raised like $1200 and that paid for our hotel rooms. We have a network of people that watch our stuff and work with us.
BTdv: The potential of the Internet is that it could become the new distribution: FTP it to the Web, and there it is where everyone can see it.
DG: But you know, actually, in America not everybody has a computer. That's the problem. Go out there, do the research, find out who has a computer. Okay, and find out if they have 56K modems or if they have DSL, and then you'll realize it's a very narrow margin. I totally agree with you, though. The day that happens is the day I can have people see my film and make a profit without seeing a distributor, but when is that day going to come? And notice how it's being co-opted until it becomes a place where—whoa, where can I stick my film? You can't.
iFilm used to be great. I had several of my films on there, and they gave me a little award for The Egg That Wouldn't Hatch. Look what it turned into. They couldn't keep it up because they couldn't keep up the financial end of it. They had to sell it because it wasn't making any profit. Plus, when the [dot-com] bubble burst, it was like, we need money.
I was talking to this guy who was setting up the network for Cinequest using satellite dishes to throw Internet connections, right? And it's faster than DSL. And what he's doing is this company makes sure that you can get Internet without having to have a cable modem or satellite. It's a local thing, and it's three times faster. You could download my film in real time. And I was like, well, that's the future. As long as the big cable companies don't get to those remote areas first you're okay. What they're doing is charging a hundred dollars instead of fifty dollars, but they're giving you the speed of a business T2 line at a hundred dollars versus three hundred. How long are they going to last? Not long because the big guys are going to chop them up. Little guys like me, we're just at the whim of the big folks.
BTdv: What do you think of minor DV festivals, like small-town microcinemas, as a way to exhibit work without having to deal with the big folks?
DG: Absolutely totally support them. I cannot support them more. It's very important to get your film out there no matter how good or bad it is because you make films for people to see, otherwise you just make a diary and keep it at home. So it's giving a venue, it's giving a voice to people who don't have that. There's so many films out there that will not get seen because of the subject matter—breast cancer, women's issues, minorities.
I come from Russia—Riga, Latvia. They had little film clubs in Russia. You go see a Godard movie, you see a movie that was not allowed, but they'd watch these films and they'd talk about them. My Dinner with Andre. I ran into Wally Shawn at Slamdance and we were standing there and I was like, nobody's talking to him! Wally Shawn! And everybody's like, "Oh, some Woody Allen actor," and I was like, Wally Shawn! So I ran up to him—any European would do that—and we started talking and he says, "Yeah, I'm thinking of getting together with [Andre Gregory] and doing it again."
This is the kind of stuff you should watch. That's the kind of exposure you get when those films are in little film festivals. And I totally support them but I don't have time to go to any. More power to them. Five years ago we were going to project a film through the satellite and we were going to show it in Seattle and we were all going to watch it at the same time, and it was great. But is it happening anymore? The technology's too advanced. So keep it small, make little tiny festivals.
When I went to Slamdance these little microfestivals popped up. I go upstairs and there's this biker-surfer fest. I went in there and people were sitting there with major heavy metal music watching a surfing guy. There are as many audiences as there are films; there are as many films as there are filmmakers; as many voices as there are opinions; and everybody's got one. I think microcinemas and minifestivals are where it begins.
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