Literary Conversations and Interviews with Filmmakers

The University Press of Mississippi has been quietly putting out an amazing catalog of books for years now. One such set is their Literary Conversations Series (edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw) that consists of interviews and essays with modern literature’s most fascinating authors. I got Don DeLillo, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and Jack Kerouac, but the series also includes Tom Wolfe, August Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, Gloria Naylor, R. Crumb, Audre Lorde, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others.

Ridley Scott InterviewsThey also put out a similar set called the Conversations with Filmmakers Series (edited by Peter Brunette). These include Ridley Scott, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, Tim Burton, Charlie Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam, and many more. Since each of these books focuses on a specific person, but spans the length of his or her career, one really gets a sense of their attitudes, ambitions, processes, career development, career pitfalls, and, of course, personal tribulations. If you’re interested in any of these creators’ work, then the appropriate book here is indispensable. Hell, even if you’re not necessarily interested in the subject, they’re good. I mean, have you ever seen a bad episode of Behind the Music?

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Roman Polanski from 1984:

Franz-Olivier Giesbert: After all that you have gone through, you still look only thirty years old. What’s your secret?

Roman Polanski: My curiosity, without doubt. I’m always trying to learn something new. A language or a musical instrument. Old age is an illness that sets in when you don’t want to learn anything new.

Amen.

So keep an eye out for these volumes. They’re all certainly worth checking out.

How To Draw a Bunny Directed by John Walter

Ray Johnson has been called the “the most famous unknown artist in the world.” He was an unsung Pop Art innovator, collaging, mailing, and performing his way through the mid-twentieth century New York art scene. As artist Billy Name says in one of the interviews in the film: “Rauschenberg was a person making art, so was Andy (Warhol). Ray wasn’t a person. Ray was art… That’s why he’s an artist’s artist.”

How to Draw a BunnyHow To Draw a Bunny documents Ray’s life as best as it could be done. Many were acquainted with him and his work – and many over long periods of time – but no one seemed to know who Ray was. His entire life was a performance. And so too, it appears, was his death (the mystery surrounding his apparent suicide opens the film). He never went to openings, never had his own art show, despised galleries, was meticulous about his prices, and truly worked outside the art system his entire career.

Ray Johnson started or helped start many of the techniques and trends for which other artists are known: the use of copy machines and collaging; using images from advertising, brand logos, and pop culture icons; and mail art, or as he called it, “correspondence art.”

How To Draw a Bunny is a fun collage in itself: a collection of interviews of artists who knew Ray, including Chuck Close, Christo and Jean-Claude, James Rosenquist, the aforementioned Billy Name, and Ray Johnson himself; many great photographs; and, presented mostly in black and white, the film maintains the opening mood of mystery throughout. It’s a fun and intriguing look at an artist about whom one may not have heard, but will certainly be better off with his acquaintance.

Under the Overpass Written and Directed by Gariss

In this short but fascinating film, a wheelchair-bound homeless man, Michael, begins his day when he wakes up under an overpass, slowly maneuvers into his wheelchair, and heads to a local coffee shop. After cleaning up the sidewalk out front, collecting his pay (a cup of coffee), he makes his way to another overpass where he sips his coffee, and pulls out his flute. Unbeknownst to the hurried passersby, through his music, Michael is transferred to a world with able legs: legs able to run, jump, and leap with joyous abandon. Continue reading “Under the Overpass Written and Directed by Gariss”

R.I.P. Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman Directed by Robert-Adrian Pejo

For the uninitiated, Joe Coleman paints meticulously constructed circus-dream visions that often depict serial killers and does performance pieces in which he bites the heads off rats and sets off explosions on his own body. One Chicago performance found him arrested and charged with “possession of an Infernal Machine” (a machine or apparatus maliciously designed to explode and destroy life or property) — a charge not levied against anyone since the 19th Century. Continue reading “R.I.P. Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman Directed by Robert-Adrian Pejo”

Sean Gullette: Faith in Chaos

Sean GulletteMy friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.

Sean Gullette is a very busy man. With seemingly contradictory roles as both a webmaster for KGB Media and a computer skeptic, he splits his time between graphic design work and acting. Gullette has been in ten independent films, including the leading role as Maximillian Cohen in Pi, the winner of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Award for Best Directing. Pi is a film about a brilliant, paranoid mathematician who teeters on the brink of insanity as he searches for the numeric order behind the stock market. Continue reading “Sean Gullette: Faith in Chaos”