BOYS AND GIRLS, MEN AND WOMEN: An interview with XX/XY director Austin Chick.
By Warren
Curry
4/9/03
Part 1 of 2
XX/XY director Austin Chick
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BOYS AND GIRLS, MEN AND WOMEN: An interview with XX/XY director Austin Chick. By Warren
Curry Part 1 of 2 |
XX/XY director Austin Chick |
The film stars familiar faces Mark Ruffalo (You Can Count On Me) and Kathleen Robertson (Beverly Hills 90210), and relative newcomers, Maya Stange and Petra Wright. After premiering at Sundance in 2002, XX/XY went on to play at numerous film festivals and will be released in New York and Los Angeles by IFC Films on April 11, 2003 (it will expand to more cities in the following weeks).
CinemaSpeak had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Austin Chick at the film's recent Los Angeles press day. See XX/XY and witness the beginning of a filmmaking career with enormous potential.
XX/XY is your first film, yet I've noticed your name has popped up quite a bit in the past year or so. I suppose the logical first question is where did you come from?
Originally, I'm from New Hampshire. Well, I was born in Connecticut, moved to Vermont and then New Hampshire -- we moved around a lot. I went to Sarah Lawrence for a little while in the early 90s, took some time off, traveled and then decided that I wanted to study film. I went back to school at SUNY Purchase for film, graduated there in the late 90s, managed a restaurant while I was in school, and then got out of school and wrote this (film) and directed it. That's sort of the thumbnail sketch.
You have a few projects in development right now, one that is set up with producer Casey Silver at Universal. Did that come about because of XX/XY?
Yeah. That is something that I've been thinking about writing for a while, and then after Sundance last year -- XX/XY was there and sold there -- I came out to L.A. for a bit. It was a project I was thinking of doing and talking to people about, and Casey was interested in it.
It's really rare to see a movie about people in this age range -- young adults -- that isn't a romantic comedy and tackles serious matters. I'm not sure how much the development process affected you while making this film, but was there ever any pressure to skew the movie toward something more lighthearted?
Yeah.
How did you deal with that?
Slowly and painfully. I didn't always see eye to eye with the executive producer-- the person who was putting up the money -- but it didn't become obvious that we had different opinions about what the movie should be until after it was all shot and we were cutting it. We went back and forth over that question. He really wanted to turn it into a romantic comedy. I don't think there's any way to cut this movie and make it a romantic comedy. Somehow, we had some sort of miscommunication and it wasn't until it was already shot that I realized that's what he was thinking. It took a long time to work that out, but in the end it's very close to the movie I set out to make. A lot of the changes were made because we didn't get scenes due to lack of time. There are all sorts of reasons why a movie changes in the shooting, this being a really low-budget film and my first film, we encountered a lot of problems along the way, but I still say it's very close to the movie I set out to make.
You've said that the movie isn't autobiographical, but you did attend Sarah Lawrence. How much are these characters based on people you knew during that time?
None of them are based on any specific people, but certain aspects of them are based on people. The Thea (Kathleen Robertson) character, for instance, is maybe an amalgamation of 3 or 4 people that I've known. There's not anyone who the Thea story is based on, but that type of person is somebody who is similar to the people I met at Sarah Lawrence or Bard.
You claim that you think of yourself as a director more than a writer. When you're writing are you always visualizing scenes?
Some scenes I conceive of visually, but some of the more dialogue heavy scenes -- and there are big sections of this movie that are very talky -- when the writing's going well, I'm not really thinking about it in terms of filmmaking. I'm just hearing the characters and writing what they say. It's just a matter of trying to get it to flow, which doesn't always come that easily. When I'm "on" and I'm writing, I can get into a scene and I can sort of hear the characters and just write what they say. A scene like the flossing scene, for instance, I probably wrote that way, but then when I saw the actors read the scene, I knew that I wanted to try to shoot it all in one shot. It's a process.
The dialogue is really well written in this film, in that it's very interesting to listen to, but not in any way overstated -- the characters' conversations are so natural. Do you just have a great ear for listening to people? What do you attribute this talent to?
I really don't know -- thank you for saying that. I'm a bit of an observer type as a person and a little shy. In social situations, I often find myself listening and I'm sort of fascinated by the way people talk. It's something that's always interested me -- the way people choose to put words together and the odd juxtapositions of words that can tell you so much about who a person is. That all sounds really cerebral, but I just sort of wrote it. In general when I'm writing, I try to find the unexpected or the way to bring something unexpected into a scene, whether it's an unexpected twist in a scene or something unexpected about a character. To try to find a way to let the characters live and breathe and be as complicated as people in real life, and I think a lot of the time that comes out in the dialogue.
Because this is such an intimate, dialogue-driven, character piece, the first time I saw the film, it didn't register with me how interesting it is visually. It wasn't until I saw it a second time that I appreciated, for instance, the hand-held tracking shots and the great two-shot of Mark (Ruffalo) and Petra's (Wright) reflections in the mirror during the flossing scene. Talk a bit about your visual scheme for the film.
I wanted to give the first half of the movie a claustrophobic feel and just by the nature of the locations, the first and second half of the movie have a very different look. There are a number of movies that I was looking at and that I watched with the D.P, Uta Briesewitz, and the production designer, Judy Becker. Some of them were these films by French filmmakers shot by Agnes Godard, who shot The Dreamlife of Angels and shoots all of Claire Denis' movies. So it was those films and this early film by Wong Kar-wai called Days of Being Wild, shot by Chris Doyle. The Agnes Godard films are often shot, not necessarily hand-held, but with a very loose camera -- it's usually on a tripod, but it's moving and sort of creating this landscape of faces, and that was something I wanted to try to do with the first half of the movie, partly because, initially, I'd conceived of (the film) as something to shoot on D.V. When we switched over to film, there were things that made sense to change, but I still felt like this subject called for a lot of close-ups and that kind of intimacy and, in the first half, that sense of claustrophobia. The other thing that we tried to do is control the color to a certain extent. I didn't want it to look overly designed, but we tried to control the color palette. In some of the exteriors, it was impossible to do that on the budget we were working with -- which still annoys me a little bit -- but in the interiors, we worked a lot with blue and yellow in the opening of the movie. As it sort of moves towards the second part, it becomes more of this green -- we start mixing in this pukier green. We shot a lot with fluorescent light and we didn't take the green out. In some cases, we even put more green on it to give it this really pukey look. In the second half it just made sense to open it up -- it's a more "mature" palette. It's all grays and beige and off-white -- this Pottery Barn sort of thing. The world they're living in and the spaces are bigger, and it's mostly in daylight. The first half, a lot of it's at night and is very dark, and in the second half we open it up and create a sense of grander space. Whenever possible I tried to come up with a design that didn't feel forced; that didn't make you necessarily aware of the design and tried to create a homogenous world.
The second half of the film is much different than the first, which is clearly the intention. In the first half, the characters are so abusive toward one another and so unlikable in spots. Do you fear that some people might give up on the film a bit too early?
The first half is definitely challenging, and there's no way around that. A funny thing has happened over the last three years, since this process started, which is that initially it was supposed to be this very small D.V. movie. It was my first film and I wanted to do something that was in a scope that I could handle, and the fact that it has gone as far as it has is great, but it's also a bit of a surprise. Mark's career has really taken off. We set out to make a small arthouse movie, and I think that this movie is about something that is universal and I think it does speak to people, but I knew from the start that it was a challenging film, especially the first half. I think in watching it, people who make it to the end generally feel like it pays off. But that's become more and more of a fear for me -- that as the movie has become bigger than I expected it to be, the first 35 minutes are not as commercial as they could be. They are what they should be, given what the movie is -- that's just the type of movie it is. The first half of the movie is like Mike Leigh's Naked -- it's not fun to watch. The second half is like a Woody Allen movie -- it's funny at times and ironic. The juxtaposition of those two different things is what interested me, but it's a challenge.
Claire (Petra Wright) calls Coles (Mark Ruffalo) "spineless," and in some ways he is a despicable character. But I also found his confliction to be somewhat sympathetic. My personal feeling is that anyone who's been in a serious relationship, whether they want to admit it or not, has felt the emotions he feels. Having said that, is my interpretation of Coles' character something you were intending?
Definitely. I think the extent to which
you're able to forgive him is totally subjective, but I don't
see him as all bad. His struggles are pretty common -- this idea,
whether or not you succumb, that maybe everybody has someone in
their past that they wonder about. Whether that means you sleep
with them 10 years later when they show up is a whole other thing,
but I think that question, "Is there someone who may have
been the one who got away?" is something that I think is
universal. It's something that people think about when they're
about to settle down with the person they're about to be with
for the rest of their lives.
Click
for Part Two
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