Hal Hartley comes to the Festival do Rio

Published in 10/07/2015

1989, USA. American independent cinema is thriving. Enter Hal Hartley, a fresh-faced, 30-year-old cinema school graduate from Lindenhurst, New York. His first feature-length, The Incredible Truth, is marked by self-conscious humour, a highly stylised, almost theatrical, mis-en-scène, and stilted dialogues pondering philosophical and ontological truths. This is the start of a prolific and impressive career and he begins as he means to go on: creating a distinctive style of filmmaking that will become, for cinephiles the world over, synonymous with the great director.

Since then, Hartley has made twelve feature films, including Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992), Surviving Desire (1993), Amateur (1994), Henry Fool (1997), No Such Thing (2001), and Fay Grim (2006). He has won awards at Cannes and Sundance, and has had his work screened at numerous retrospectives globally.

With that in mind, it is not surprising that excitement levels reached their peak so far at the festival with Hal Hartley’s arrival. The filmmaker, writer, director, producer, and composer has come to the Festival do Rio 2015 to share his cinematic experiences with dedicated fans and aspiring filmmakers.

His latest film, Ned Rifle, is the long-awaited final part of a trilogy that follows the lives of an ill-fated, intellectual and dysfunctional family, beginning in 1997 with Henry Fool and continuing in 2006 with Fay Grim. Ned Rifle centres on the eponymous offspring of Henry Fool as he searches for his father and hopes to find closure to a family saga that has spanned almost two decades. We caught up with Hartley at the festival’s headquarters for a quick chat about his latest work.

How did the final part of the trilogy come about? Was Ned’s future planned out from the very beginning?

Well, it was a little haphazard: I wrote and made Henry Fool in 1996 and I wasn’t planning on making a sequel. Then, as we were filming the idea occurred to me. At first, it was just a little joke with the cast, but, even then, I saw this triangle forming: Henry, Fay, and … their son. After I filmed part II, Fay Grim,I was already thinking about the third, but Liam [Aiken] (who plays Ned), was only about 16 or 17 at the time and not entirely sure he wanted to pursue a career in acting. So I kept in touch with him, meeting up with him every year or so to see how he was doing and once he’d decided to stick with acting – real, serious acting – then I knew I could shoot the film.

I was certain I wanted the classic story of Ned setting out to kill his father, and being interrupted – or saved – in some way. What I didn’t know was how this was going to happen. It was only after walking around the idea for about three years that I eventually came up with it. After that, the writing process was extremely quick – the whole thing was finished within a couple of weeks.

Earlier in your career you composed music using the pseudonym “Ned Rifle” – are we right in assuming this is not a coincidence?!

No, I don’t throw anything away. Going right back to the early eighties, when I was studying at film school, I was always good at making up names for characters. My old teacher used to get us to write little sketches, just for practicing techniques, like characterisation. I always used this same guy, this “Ned Rifle”. It was more or less similar with my music: I was just experimenting with sound, nothing official, so I used this name Ned. In fact, the first time I actually credited my own music was in Henry Fool. The naming of Henry and Fay’s son “Ned”– that was a coincidence, I mean, it’s a common name. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to call the film Ned Fool or Ned Grim, it had to stand up on its own, so Ned Rifle just seemed to fit.

What do you think are the most valuable “lessons in cinema” you can pass on to future generations of aspiring independent filmmakers?

I’m going to wait and see what people want to ask me. Once the questions start coming, wherever you are, whether its Rio, USA or Japan, it tends to be usually the same line of thought. I often get queried on more practical concerns because people don’t really need help thinking about complicated ideas or emotions – in cinema, they’re a given. Luckily, I like talking shop, discussing how to take those emotions and turn them into a film. I’d like to explain what I consider the journey between three main stages: writing, taking what you’ve written to screen and then taking what you’ve filmed to editing. What I don’t know about is making big movies – motion graphics, that sort of thing – so if people ask about that, I’ll have to admit I’m not qualified to answer!

Are you feeling optimistic about what lies ahead for the independent filmmaking industry?

Filmmaking these days is so inexpensive that everyone seems to be able to do it. It might even be like the 1950s in America, when practically everybody you met was writing a novel. You could sit down in a diner in the states and, guaranteed, the person sitting next to you was working on their masterpiece! So now that filmmaking is becoming more accessible, the real challenge is to create a public that is going to want to watch those movies. Personally, there’s no future for me in making independent feature-lengths. I need to move on from that and focus on a different area, like, say television. But I don’t want to discourage any newcomers from taking their turn at it.

Catch Hartley presenting this newest work, and two earlier films, Flirt and Simple Men, at various screenings over the next three days. The director will also be offering not-to-be-missed chance to glean insight into the process of filmmaking at his Cinema Lessons with Hal Hartley, taking place today, Wednesday 7^th October at 3pm, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil.

By Gill Harris