FILMMAKING SPLENDOR: An interview with American Splendor writers/directors Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini. By Warren Curry 1/7/04

After making a gigantic splash at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini's (who previously directed the documentaries Off The Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's and The Young and The Dead) American Splendor has turned out to be one of the big indie success stories of the past year. The film, which was released last August by Fine Line Features and HBO Films, has made an appearance on numerous critics "best of" 2003 lists and is also the recipient of 5 Independent Spirit Award nominations. Starring the magnificent Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar, the Cleveland hospital file clerk who detailed his observations of everyday life in his underground comic book American Splendor, the husband and wife filmmaking duo have made a movie that experiments with a variety of narrative techniques, yet always retains an honest emotional depth at its core. It's perhaps one of the most original biopics ever made.

American Splendor also stars Hope Davis as Pekar's wife Joyce Brabner and Judah Friedlander as Harvey's inimitable friend/co-worker Toby Radloff. Also playing big roles in the film are the real Harvey, Joyce and Toby.

I had the opportunity to speak with the New York-based Berman & Pulcini one-on-one (I suppose it would actually be one-on-two) when they were recently in Los Angeles (just after the Independent Spirit Award nominations were announced, and the morning following their attending the Lord of The Rings: Return of the King premiere).

(Read the review of American Splendor)

(Read the interview with Harvey Pekar)

Is a biopic the logical next step for documentary filmmakers when making a narrative film?

Robert Pulcini: It was the logical next step for us because we've had a pretty schizophrenic career. We started writing together and came into documentaries kind of by accident. While we were making documentaries we continued to work as writers, but most of the stuff we were writing happened to be true stories and biopics for the studios. We wrote a screenplay about Esquivel, the bandleader, and then we wrote a screenplay about Michael Romanoff, who was one of the world's great impostors. Most recently we wrote a screenplay about Sam Kinison for Tom Shadyac. Ted Hope, the producer, was familiar with our writing, really loved our documentaries and had the rights to American Splendor, something he's always wanted to make. He thought we'd be the right people for it.

Shari Springer Berman: I think it is logical, at least for producers and financiers, if you are a documentary filmmaker and you're trying to make a narrative film, it is a logical leap. Our next film is probably going to be a straightforward comedy about someone who isn't real. I think just to make producers and financiers comfortable. They'll feel like, "Okay, they worked in documentaries so it makes sense that they'd make a narrative film based on someone who was real."

Coming into American Splendor did you feel that you were known in the film community as "documentary filmmakers"? If so, what sort of stigma is attached to that label?

RP: There is a stigma attached to it. Some people have no interest in making the transition to narrative filmmaking, but if you want to make the transition, it's difficult. For some reason if you're a commercial director or a music video director, you're more likely to have the opportunity to direct a feature. But if you're a documentary filmmaker people have trouble envisioning you being able to direct a narrative film, which doesn't make much sense to me because you've crafted a documentary with a beginning, middle and end out of raw footage. To be able tell a story with documentary footage is, I think, much closer than to shoot a minute long commercial.

In a way, we had a different reputation in the filmmaking community than we had in the Hollywood system as writers. We were able to make a decent living as writers while we got to make these passion projects as documentary filmmakers, so there's nothing I can complain about.

SSB: Definitely, I agree with Bob. I think it's starting to change, because there have been a few documentary filmmakers in the last few years who have made the transition into features successfully. But I was told by studio executives that if I was a commercial director or music video director, I would have a better shot of getting to direct my own scripts, but because I was a documentary filmmakers it's not going to happen.

It's sad because I think documentary filmmakers are very resourceful at telling stories, ultimately. There are a lot of different kinds of documentaries, as well. There are very journalistic, sort of political documentaries and then there are character-based documentaries. Character-based documentaries are about storytelling. If you can do it in that one medium, you have a good shot of being able to do it in another.

Had either of you ever heard of Harvey Pekar prior to this project being brought to you?

RP: I had heard of him. I had a vague recollection that he was associated with R. Crumb, and I think maybe I had seen the American Splendor comics, but I didn't really remember them very well. When Ted called about it, I said, "Doesn't that have something to do with Crumb?" Ted said, "Just read them," and he sent them to us out of order; he just started sending us these comics. We really discovered Harvey's work in making this movie. The first thing that struck us while reading the comics is that there were so many different artists that drew him. In fact, I got confused when I first started reading them as to whether or not it was the same character, and then I realized it was as I got further into the stories. I thought that was strange, but then we talked about it and realized that's what's really interesting about these comics is all of these different perspectives on this one person. We thought there must be some way to make a movie that had that same feel, which is why we have animated Harvey, Paul Giamatti Harvey, real Harvey, stock footage Harvey -- we have all these different Harveys.

There are many different storytelling elements that make up the film. Of course, it's a biopic, but you also incorporate documentary/interview footage and animation. What was the key to keeping the movie cohesive?

SSB: It was really a challenge in the editing room. Bob edits all of our movies, so I think if we had thrown all of this material at an editor who wasn't in from the very beginning of the conception, it might've been even harder. Luckily, we envisioned this mish mash from the time we scripted the movie. The script is very true to the movie. Of course, we didn't know what the documentary moments were going to be, because we didn't know what people were going to say. We would write little, sort of imagined documentary moments as placeholders in the script, so at least we had a structure and it wasn't just a big guessing game. We scripted the animation as well, but we didn't know how it would look, we didn't know how it would interact. There were so many possibilities and pitfalls.

What happens is Bob, as the editor, it's his vision, he takes the stuff together, and then I become the director in the editing room. I boss him around, but it doesn't work -- he never listens! We have this shorthand; we don't have to go through that process of trying to express this vision we have of the movie to someone else. From the time we pitched this movie -- we pitched it to HBO -- to the time that we wrapped was a year, which is incredibly fast. It got greenlit on a first draft, but then it took a full year of post-production. That was where a lot of the creative process happened.

Being that you're both Columbia film school graduates, how do your philosophies and sensibilities mesh with Harvey Pekar? It would seem that, at least to a certain degree, Ivy League college graduates are the epitome of what someone like Harvey Pekar would stand against.

RP: The truth is that Shari and I come from kind of working class backgrounds. Shari was born and raised in Brooklyn in a very working class community, my father was the first person in his family to ever go to college, and I was raised in the Army. I took a long time out of school before I went to film school, worked a lot of dead end jobs and things like that. I think I really understood where he was at in his comics. That feeling of being a creative soul trapped in a dead end job and wanting to express yourself or wanting to make some kind of impact on the world or culture. With Harvey, comic books happened to be there. It could've been anything, I think, but comic books were available to him and he seized the opportunity.

Harvey was very relieved when he met us that we were from ethnic backgrounds -- I'm Italian and Shari's Jewish, and he was really into that. We never had any kind of conflict that way. Harvey's self-educated. I might have a degree, but I can barely keep up with him if I discuss literature with him. He's much better read then most people I've ever met. His awareness of music and jazz…

SSB: He's a real intellectual. He's a working class intellectual. He's not afraid of intellectual things, he embraces it, he just couldn't get past his own personal issues to get a college degree. He was in college but he dropped out because of a required math class, which is in the movie. I have that in me, because I hate math. I could've done that -- if I allowed my biggest insecurities to take over I would've dropped out because I had to take a required math class, but I fought it.

What's interesting is that Paul Giamatti is a graduate of Yale -- both undergraduate and he got a Master's from the Yale Drama School His father was the president of Yale, A. Bartlett Giamatti. Most people don't know that about Paul. His father was quite an incredible man, a scholar, the commissioner of baseball, and Paul is so intelligent -- he's a lot like Harvey in that he's an avid reader. He consumes books, he knows so much, he's a brilliant guy. Yet he also has a very unassuming, almost working class, down-to-earth attitude. He grew up in New Haven, which is a very poor, kind of depressed town. Even though Yale is there, the rest of the city is not like that. He really hit it off with Harvey. They talked about books and literature; they love to collect books. And a lot of the crew on this movie; it was a weird meeting of people with very similar interests -- collectors, music fanatics. It didn't matter if you went to Yale or Princeton or didn't get a college degree, because there was this weird, sort of psychic connection.

Aside from Harvey and Paul, how did the other actors get along with the people they were portraying? Obviously, they were on set together.

RP: Hope and Joyce had some trouble. I think it was just the process. Paul liked having Harvey around, and he got a lot out of it. Joyce is a very different person than Harvey; she's very intense and an unbelievable observer. I think that intimidated Hope, or she felt like she was being judged. She had trouble acting around Joyce, so we had to create a comfortable environment for Hope. Joyce would come to set, but when Hope was doing a scene, we would try to not have Joyce watching the monitor. It's not that they ever had any conflicts, it was just a matter of making the set a comfortable environment for Hope.

SSB: Hope said she felt like a fraud whenever Joyce was around. I guess this was the first time Hope had ever played someone who was alive and present. Paul had experience -- he had played Bob Zmuda on Man on the Moon, and Bob Zmuda was incredibly involved in the process and was there all of the time.

RP: But they both nailed it -- that's the amazing thing. They both found their process and nailed it, I think. When I watch it, I'm just amazed at how Hope captured the essence of Joyce in such a clean, simple way. Paul had a lot more physical stuff to do.

Was it difficult for you to have Harvey and Joyce there on the set? Or was your relationship with them already developed to the point where it felt comfortable?

SSB: Harvey's so funny. He's unlike any person who would have a movie based on them. He really didn't care. It wasn't that he didn't care, but because he writes comics about real people he understands in the creative process that you have to remove yourself from reality a little bit. He gave us so much freedom. He never tried to influence the movie, he never tried to tell us what to do. The only thing he asked us is to not whitewash him, which is so unusual. Usually people are trying to make themselves look like saints, but Harvey was like, "Please don't make me into some perfect Hollywood guy with Tom Cruise playing me. I want something real."

So on the set, Harvey just wanted to eat -- he just wanted the free food. I'm not kidding. The first time he came in, he saw Paul for like two minutes, knew Paul was perfect and that was it. He didn't have any more questions about it, he trusted us -- we had developed a really nice relationship over time. All he wanted was doughnuts, craft service, lunch and to hang out. There was a lot of good feeling amongst the crew, and everybody loved Harvey. Harvey was sort of an inspirational figure when he showed up. He would talk to people about movies and books. He kind of came as like a mascot more than to influence the movie.

(To Robert) And you felt the same way?

RP: Yeah, definitely. It was kind of refreshing. We've worked on other true stories where we've had issues with the people trying to steer their character in one direction or the other, and Harvey was so not about that.

That's interesting because you would expect that Harvey would be the toughest critic.

RP: Well, he is a tough critic. If he didn't like the movie, I think he would've been very vocal about it. He's collaborated with enough people where he knows that you have to respect peoples' process. He let us do what we did, and he didn't try to get involved.

SSB: When he says in the movie that he didn't read the script, that's a real moment. I realized that was the voiceover. We were actually filming him doing the narration, and as we were doing it, I noticed the way he was reading the script -- and I'm like, "You didn't read this." And we gave it to him to read. And he said, "Yeah, not really." Harvey loves attention for his work, but he doesn't have a huge amount of ego. An ordinary person would care about the way they look or the way they're represented, but Harvey just wanted something that would be truthful and honest.

Because you include interview footage with the real Harvey, Joyce and Toby, you're very clearly calling attention to the fact that the rest of the movie is your interpretation of Harvey's story. Given that, what sort of relationship do you want the audience to have with the film?

RP: It felt appropriate to call attention to the artifice of the filmmaking in American Splendor, because it just seemed really in spirit with the character and the rebellious nature of the comic book. Harvey would sometimes write stories where he would just address the reader directly. He would write stories that had no dialogue and just wordless pictures. He had no rules about how he put together this comic book. He's just restless creatively. Whenever you read the American Splendor comic, it leaves you with this bittersweet feeling. I feel like to capture that feeling that we felt, why we fell in love with the comics, was what we wanted to convey to the audience. Sometimes he's horrible, sometimes he's angry, but other times this guy can be incredibly sentimental. He just bares his soul.

I think we were kind of playing with our own experience of making documentary films, and what's real and not real. What happens when you frame someone and eliminate part of the frame, and the decisions that you make. We decided to have the documentary footage in the movie be the most artificial. That's the "real" parts of the film, but he's sitting in what looks like a comic book panel with a few well-chosen objects. I guess we just wanted to play with those issues, and ultimately the comic books are about so many artists drawing Harvey, and just how close can you get to really knowing someone. When you're doing true stories, you're really struggling to get into the brain of someone, and how close can you really get to that?

SSB: Also, because Harvey writes a comic book about real life, he's already created this myth of Harvey Pekar through his own comics. And then we're coming along and making a movie about this myth, and then there's the Letterman footage. It actually brings up issues of the nature of cinema, the nature of storytelling, and the nature of creating a myth or a persona vs. the real person. In the end, all of that stuff doesn't matter if there's a kernel of truth about life and what it is to be a real person struggling in this world and make something of your life -- that's what is ultimately the most important aspect of the filmmaking process.

RP: In a lot of Harvey's comics, he's struggling to represent himself as truthfully as possible. It's an impossible thing to do, ultimately. I think he comes to this place in the film where he starts realizing that the character he's created is a character and will it go on without him and what will it mean when he's gone. I think there are a lot issues of identity in the movie.

How close is the real Harvey Pekar to the character you see in the comics?

SSB: What's interesting is that I actually think that Harvey represents himself a little bit more negatively than he is in real life. He is a curmudgeon, he is a pain in the butt, cranky, but there's an incredible humanity. He's a lover of people; he's an observer and loves being around people like Toby. He can't repress a smile when he's around Toby, because he loves Toby. There's a very sentimental, sweet side of Harvey, a very genuinely loveable side of Harvey, and he doesn't always show that side in his comics. I think that the character that Paul was playing was informed a little beyond the comic by what we knew about Harvey, and by what Paul wound up knowing about Harvey.

A lot of people are familiar with Harvey Pekar because of his appearances on David Letterman. You include a lot of this actual footage in American Splendor, but you chose not to use the real interview footage during his much publicized and very volatile final appearance on Letterman. Why?

RP: We didn't show the footage because it was immediately restricted after broadcast, but we had a bootleg copy of it and we did edit with it. When we showed it to a few people, they were really confused because Harvey and Letterman are really screaming over each other, and no one understood what they were saying, and they really wanted to know what the fight was about. Harvey was naming a lot names up the corporate ladder that really wouldn't mean anything to people today. We also felt that it was such an interior sequence with Paul Giamatti -- he thinks he might have cancer and Joyce is away. It's part of this long sequence where he's spiraling, and we thought it was better not to break with the Paul Giamatti Harvey at that point in the film. There were a few reasons.

Could you two ever have anticipated that this film would make such a big splash at Sundance, and that it would go on to be very successful critically and commercially?

RP: It's funny because when we originally decided to make this film, we were putting together independent financing to do it. We had some interest and we knew it was going to take years, and then Ted convinced us that we should bring the project to HBO, who had just started this independents division. We knew the tradeoff was that we're not going to get a theatrical release, it's going to be for HBO, but be we were assured that we'd have complete creative freedom to do what we wanted and we'd have the money to make the movie. We decided, let's just make the movie, let's do it exactly the way we want it, let's do it with HBO, let's not work for years to put together the financing. In the process of making it, HBO got this theatrical bug. They released Real Women Have Curves, which did quite well. They let us know that they were open to releasing American Splendor depending on how it does at Sundance, and it did very well. It was all an incredible surprise to us. We didn't know when we were making it what kind of life this movie would have.

SSB: When we were making it, we didn't even know if would really work. We didn't know until it played at Sundance, because that was the first screening. We were one of those people who had a wet print; we worked until the last minute. We didn't have any pre-screenings for audiences or test screenings. It was all make or break at our premiere at Sundance. There was a good chance the audience wasn't going to go with it -- we just didn't know. This has been a very shocking experience.

What does Harvey think about the success of the film?

RP: He's doing really well with it. His biggest thing is that he wanted to turn it into work for him. He loves the movie, which is great. When we first showed it to him, he had a lot of issues -- we showed him a cut without the animation, and he really had trouble wrapping his head around some of the inconsistencies with time that you have to do when you make a film. He didn't really meet R. Crumb at a garage sale, he met him a record swap basement sale. (laughs) It's like, "Well, Harvey, we wanted to shoot an exterior, we didn't think it was that big a change." Stuff like that he really had to wrap his head around. And then when he saw it at Sundance with the animation and the way we put it together, he was thrilled because he had never seen anything like the film, and that really excited him. He retired, so since that time his obsession has been, "Can I turn this into work for me?" He's been getting a lot of writing assignments and doing a lot more comics for publications. It's been really good for him and we're really happy for that.

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