JUNE 2001 INTERVIEW WITH DON by IAN BARKER FOCUS film journal (excerpts): "Can we meet at night? I’m kind of nocturnal now." I agree to meet with Don Hertzfeldt on his turf and under the cover of darkness. We settle on an anonymous strip-mall coffee shop with quiet outdoor tables. He has arrived early and I find him sitting quietly in an easy chair by the door. Wearing an orange and black striped wool cap, a jacket, and several layers of clothing, he is obviously prepared to stick it out until the chilly early-morning hours. I order a large coffee and ask what he wants—I’m buying. He is concerned by the $3.05 price tag on the Naked Juice that catches his eye. I try to reassure him, telling him I’m feeling extravagant having found a 20 dollar bill on an I.V. street yesterday. As the tape recorder rolls, he speaks quietly, not wanting to disturb the fellow coffee-shop dwellers. He leans over and asks a man and a woman sitting at a table ten feet away, "Would it bother you if we’re talking over here?" A few minutes into the interview he cringes slightly and signals for me to lower my voice as I loudly praise his filmic achievements. It’s hard to believe this humble, seemingly innocent human being is responsible for a series of darkly comic, sometimes disturbing animated films featuring decapitation, mayhem, child endangerment, eye-stealing aliens, and gratuitous cruelty to bunnies. Don Hertzfeldt, a graduate of UCSB Film Studies, has received numerous awards for his work, including an Academy Award nomination for his latest animated short film, Rejected. The following is what the tape recorder captured on that fateful night of May 2, 2001. When did you first start doing creative things like animation and filmmaking? I got a video camera when I was fifteen that had a frame-by-frame motor on it. You could shoot animation on it as long as you watched it in fast-forward to get a sense of the motion. I’d been drawing since I was really little and have always wanted to make movies, so it was just kind of a logical marriage. When you’re in high school and even when you’re a freshman in film school, everything you shoot live-action is going to look like a really low-budget student film, despite your best efforts. You can’t control the weather, you don't have much time, you probably don’t have the best equipment, and you’re spending four times as much money than if you were animating, where you have complete control over every element. So it was just a marriage of convenience and in high school I made a lot of strange video animation. I’ve got tapes and tapes full of that old stuff. I probably made a cartoon every weekend, all of it self-taught, trial and error. When I was off to film school, all of that self-taught knowledge just carried over logically into shooting on film. Did you take an animation class, or anything like that? No, not a traditional one. I’ve never taken an art class, never taken an animation class. [UCSB] is very theory based and history based, that’s kind of where my outlook on film comes from. Would you say that UCSB changed the way you look at film, or was it a natural development, the way you were already thinking about it? Really, the stories matured because of film school—finding new ways to say something through film. Certainly taking the analysis and history and theory classes makes you a better storyteller without even knowing it, from learning the relationship of a film to its audience, how sound works, how time and narrative works. Would you describe yourself as an animator, or a filmmaker that works in animation? A filmmaker who works in animation, absolutely. How would you describe yourself as a filmmaker: as a thinker or as a feeler? Animation is kind of misleading because a lot of people see it and it’s just a bunch of drawings and they think it’s just pure feeling, pure art form. But when you’re literally constructing every frame with your hands, there’s a lot of math involved. There’s a lot of technical stuff to worry about that you don’t worry about in a live-action film and it’s easy to get bogged down when you’re literally looking at comic timing as math and numbers and something’s funnier when you subtract or add. It’s a very strange way to create something. those animators who do get bogged down in the technique get very wrapped up in the drawings and get very wrapped up in the animation itself and the visuals, without paying that sort of microscopic attention to the story. So what we try to do instead is not have to start a film with a completed script. We improvise as much as we can to have the sort of freedom to keep things fresh, to keep things moving—and to play. And that way, despite all the technical thinking you’ve still got freedom to move around and you’re not tied down by anything. I’m sure a lot of people have asked you about the "deeper meanings" in your films. Do your films have deeper meanings, and if so, who puts them there—you, the viewers, the critics? Sure they do. They’re there, but they’re not always the ones people see, and that’s fine. Every festival I went to that Billy’s Balloon played, people would just grab me by the lapels and demand, "What does this film mean?!" We’ve gotten the most random, and great, interpretations of that. Somebody thought it was about alcoholism. Somebody thought it was about children in America and their place in society—all these great deep meanings. Of course there’s something going on there, there’s always a metaphor, there’s always something represented. But one of the things I’ve always hated, if I can go back to the music analogy: let’s say you have a favorite band and you have a favorite song and you grew up with this band and you love this song and you’ve heard it all your life and you play it over and over. It means something to you. Maybe the lyrics are a little obscure and you’re not sure what it meant when it was written, but over time it’s grown on you in its own way. I hate it when you then read an interview with the writer of the song and he says, "That song was about the struggles of amputees in South America," and it completely invalidates the whole song for you. And all of a sudden the song that meant so much to you is just meaningless. I’d hate to do that, on any level. I never talk about what’s behind it. I think it’s not for me to say after it’s done. It’s something that once the film’s out there, it is its own animal and your interpretation of the film is going to be just as valid as what I meant. Ideally, what I meant might come through to you, but I don’t like to say anybody’s wrong, so I just don’t say anything. It’s the critic’s job to find that stuff and the audience’s job to feel that stuff, but it’s also something I’m not always totally conscious of, either. I’ve never met a director who puts every little meaning in there intentionally. A lot of it is intuition and a lot of it is accident. I can tell plenty of stories about little accidents that happen on a production or things you have to compromise on and it ends up seeming really profound. And you have to go with it because it makes sense and it feels right. And after the fact people read into that and you don’t want to burst their bubble about it. So other people find something that wasn’t really there? Well, it’s a little of both. For instance, you can start with the stick figures. When Lily and Jim came out, a lot of critics were said, "It’s so ingenious about how they use these crude little stick figures, yet they’re having these really adult conversations and adult situations, etc, etc, ...the childishness of dating," and all of that. Like ironic juxtaposition. Yeah, of course, that’s there and it obviously helps the story along and it makes it more charming. But that’s also just the way I draw. Stick figures are the best I can do. It’s hardly an artistic intent; it’s more of a necessity. With all of the work you put into making each of your films they must have a personal value to you. Are they autobiographical to a certain extent— Lily and Jim, Rejected, Ah L’amour? Yeah. You have you write what you know, obviously, that’s what everyone tells you. Even if it’s not something obvious, everything has something to do with me. Ah L’amour, I mean everyone goes through that, especially when they’re a freshman in college. Genre is very much coming from improvisational theater; I used to do a lot of theater. You acted? Yeah. There’s certain improvisational games you play where you have actors on stage. You’ve seen these comedy shows. Like Who’s Line is it Anyway? Right, and you yell out a line and they have to adapt. They have to change what they’re doing. And that’s where [Genre] came from. Lily and Jim: everyone’s been on that date before. Billy’s Balloon is probably a lot deeper and I’m afraid to go into it. Rejected —half of it’s true and half of it’s lies. So did you really send something off to the Family Channel or the Family Learning Channel? No. I was approached to do commercial work like that, I don’t remember what station it was. But "You’re watching…" whatever it was. I would never do commercial work, it’s against every bone in my body. So you rejected them? No, no, no. [Laughing] I got together with my friend and we just kind of joked about the whole situation. This would only be fun to do if I could literally do whatever I wanted—and just f*ck around and send them really bad stuff and see if they’ll take it, see what we could get away with. And so we kind of just screwed around and came up with some of the worst commercial bits we could come up with, the most offensive, terrible things. It just kind of escalated to the point where these were pretty funny bits. I didn’t even need a real corporation, I could just make up my own and we had another film here, and I could make fun of myself at the same time. That’s kind of where it started, and, again, we don’t start with a completed script. I had no idea how I would end this thing; I didn’t know where it would go. I started with that premise and let it kind of grow on its own. Into chaos. Complete chaos. We completely lost control of the film. It wasn’t until midway through production, actually near the end of production, that I finally figured out how I would end it: with this escalation. What would happen if this guy keeps getting rejected, if starts getting frustrated and he starts hurrying himself and starts losing his mind? How would that affect the work and the things that live in the work? It all kind of built, and that’s where the ending snowballed from. The film was complete improvisation; it was a crazed, crazed period. I already forgot what your question was. I just wanted to know whether there was a literal rejection... I hear there was a lot of effort that went into the sound work on Rejected. Yeah, we spent over eighty hours mixing sound on a short, which is really just unheard of. I don’t know how much time is spent on indie features. The first half of 2000 was in a sound studio, getting really…groggy. [Laughing] The thing is, we made the film completely backwards: usually you want to start an animated film with the sound first, and the dialogue first. Because we wanted to keep this so fresh and be able to improvise with it, I just animated mouths moving and I didn’t know what they were going to say until the eleventh hour when I put purposely out-of-sync voices over it and say something funny then. At that point, I knew the voice actor really well, and I knew we were funny, and I knew there was no problem getting the humor there. So I didn’t really want to focus on that yet, I just wanted to get the structure there. That’s really where we lost control because day one of sound mix we had a completely silent film, and a lot of those scenes you can make them funny in an infinite number of ways because they’re so abstract and they’re so open. It was all about working and re-working through it all. It’s funny this way, then we tear it all down and experiment some more and now it’s funny this way. It just got to the point after so many hours that it began to be funniest when we played the dialogue backwards. "That works." And we started to lose it. So it was an experimental film? Oh very much experimental. Experimental comedy, in the sense of, "Is this going to be funny at all?" just to see how far we could push it. Did you test the humor? Did you have any sort of focus group? It was me and my sound mixer Tim [Kehl] and our voice actor Rob [May]. If it made us laugh after the fifth time we watched it, that’s a good sign. We can really only tell by ourselves. We kind of let the sound go and the images go, and our job was to make sure it all stuck together. It’s kind of silly to talk about going over-budget on a film so inexpensive, but we were way over-budget and way over-time. You received the Academy Award nomination for Rejected. Would you say that validates the film by having that recognition, or alternatively, would say that it kind of tarnishes it by being co-opted by the mainstream? The best thing about it - - because the film is so out there - - is no one can ever say it’s a "bad film" anymore. It’s kind of silly, but something like the nomination, like it or not, validates it as Art to Joe-on-the-street. So now when Joe-on-the-street sees the movie and he absolutely hates it he can’t say it’s a bad movie, he just has to say, "I didn’t get it." We were laughing about that for a long time. How is your animation technique different from other animators? ...if you picked up any traditional how-to-make-a-cartoon manual, I do everything categorically wrong. Number one, I’m completely self-taught, so I still cling to all the stuff I did seven years ago, just because it’s what I’ve grown up doing, and I’m comfortable with it. It may be backwards, but it’s the way I work. I don’t use cels; everything is just ink on paper. Cels are just really messy to me, they’re expensive and you’ve got to paint them; they’re sloppy. And I just don’t like the look of them when something is just sitting on the screen, static. Cels just aren't organic to me. Everything is pen and paper and I just draw everything on the screen over and over and over again and that lends them that jitter, I like the kinetic look of the jitter. But that’s really time intensive, isn’t it? Oh extremely. It’s the wrong way to make a cartoon if you’re on a schedule. But it creates a tension. In Billy’s Balloon, the grass is constantly wiggling. It’s really tense, really suffocating. Could that be achieved through computers? Sure. I’m sure you could simulate it. Would you ever do that? No. It’s just another tool. It’s not necessarily easier or harder. Personally I think they’re inferior, but that’s just me. I like the look of paper, being able to wrinkle it. I could never make a film just sitting in front of a computer screen; it would just drive me crazy. I don’t use cels, I don’t use key frames. We don’t use computers for anything but sound mix. All of that frame-by-frame animation must be an excruciating process. The weird thing is - - it sounds very strange - - is that they often don’t feel like my films. The process of animation is really kind of spooky. Do you get distanced from it? You get distanced during production. When I work I’m drawing everything over and over again and there’s a lot of inking and just busy work involved. When you animate tens of thousands of drawings, I get into a mindset and it’s very hypnotic. And I turn on music. Right now I’m in production and I animate until like five in the morning; I’m completely nocturnal now, because it’s quiet at night, there’s no distractions. You just start animating and your brain turns off and you’re just inking and you’re just working and you go through pages and pages and pages. The best way I can describe it is: if you have to make an eight-hour drive and you get in the car and you turn on the radio and you just start driving. After a while your brain kind of turns off and you just kind of get stoned on the road, and eight hours later you get there. You don’t have very clear memories of the trip. You remember maybe the pit stop you made and you remember a couple sights, but you can’t remember the whole eight hours at all, it’s all gone to you. So it’s kind of like autopilot? Very much. Lots of times I’d wake up in the morning and I’d go through what I did last night and I’d only vaguely remember doing it. It’s like the shoemaker and the magic elves doing the work for him as he sleeps. And so when I’m actually done with the film, there’s still that odd sense because I have a lot of blank memories from making it. And also, when I get really into a production, all I do is the production and my life itself is really boring. The days and the nights become identical and there’s no way to distinguish when I did what on the production and it’s just a big memory-loss blur. It’s really odd. I look at the pencil tests and think, "Oh these are great!" And I feel really proud of them, but I don’t feel like I did them, I feel like someone else did them. People always make fun of me because when I watch the films in the theater with friends, I laugh just as hard at the films as everyone else does sometimes. People think it’s really strange, but to me, it’s almost as if they're not mine. The other side of it is, once the film is done and it’s out there, film is for the masses anyway. It really isn’t yours anymore; it’s everyone’s, it’s everyone’s that watches it. You kind of cut it loose. Do you think you have some kind of instinct for animation timing and visuals? Yeah. I try and minimize editing. Part of the reason I don’t have a script is because we like the freedom. The other part is, I don’t need a script because I’m not submitting the script to anybody for approval, so I don’t need to write it out. It’s all in my head. The film I’m working on right now is completely, start to finish, plotted out in my head. It’s the first time, actually, that I have an ending so early in the process. It’s all timed in my head; it’s all worked out in my head, and I just let it out a little bit at a time while I’m animating. When we edit, it’s really just instinct. It’s amazing how two frames over or two frames under in a scene can make something not funny anymore. It’s really just a lot of fine-tuning and watching it over and over again. It’s just a gut feeling; I know when something’s done. You can over-edit a piece, and you can over-work a piece and after a while it just says to you, "stop f*cking with me." It’s done; you just let it go. So, are you a perfectionist? Yes. That’s where it comes back to your question about feeling versus thinking. It’s all gut instinct, feeling your way through what works and what doesn’t work, but getting to that point it’s really technical—it’s a lot of math and logic and science. Yeah, I’m a real control freak. It’s scary. You’re pretty particular about how you like things to turn out. You’re a perfectionist; you like to have control. What if you had the choice between changing your style, giving up a little control to get a mainstream, big-time, high-paying job, versus staying independent, making less money, maybe even getting a 9-to-5 job, but maintaining the control of your projects? Well the most important control is creative control. I can loosen up with technical control, and I can let some technical errors fly. But creative control and storytelling is the most important aspect. The question kind of doesn’t work because I can support myself without having to get a 9-to-5 job already. Yeah, I didn’t mean to give you a loaded question… Changing the style, I’m not so much stubborn about that. Number one, it’s just the way I draw things. It also serves the stories. Lily and Jim works because they’re stick figures. Rejected works because it’s minimalist; it’s supposed to be drawn badly. It’s whatever serves the story best. If I write something tomorrow that would be better told if it was live-action, I’ll do it live-action. It’s really just a means to getting a story across—whatever elements can tell the story the best way. What about something like Pixar? Would you ever think about joining a big animation powerhouse? Well there are so many variables. It really depends on control, again. If I had complete autonomy to do whatever I wanted to. I’m not opposed to the studio system at all. I think there’s an equal number of god-awful indie films as there are god-awful Hollywood films; the presence or absence of money just makes them god-awful for different reasons. So it’s not really the romantic image of being independent as it is just finding the right project and having the autonomy to do what you want to. In the end, like it or not, film is the art form for the masses; your film doesn’t exist unless it’s being watched by somebody. In turn, filmmakers should want their films to be seen by as many people as possible. So there is a popular angle that you need to think about? Yeah, it’s the medium. I’ve always thought it was silly for these hipster indie-film kids, with the goatees and the hand-held cameras, who will only show their movies to the right audiences in a coffee shop with their buddies on a Friday night. They say, "Oh I’m not going to sell-out and I don’t want my film to be seen by these people." It’s kind of defeating the purpose of the making the movie, because the whole point of the medium is that it’s a mass-media thing. They’d be better off painting a picture for a private gallery, getting into other forms of art. So I’m not opposed to [mainstream media] at all. I think any audience anywhere is a blessing for a film. Is there any truth to the rumor that you’re participating in an upcoming studio feature-length animated film? Ooh, rumors. [laughing] Yes and no. I’ve been writing an animated feature for a few years. It was at one studio for a little while, and they kind of imploded on themselves, and then it was at another studio for a little while. It’s still being written and it’s still bouncing around a little bit. It’ll happen. The problem with animated features right now is there’s a giant dichotomy. Everyone still clings to the stereotype that animated features are for kids, and you’ve got to have Phil Collins singing songs. And the other end of it is, adult animation must be pornographic or "sick and twisted"; there’s no intelligent middle ground on a theatrical level, like The Simpsons on television. There’s nothing that you and I could go to and not be embarrassed to watch. Honestly, a regular movie that happens to be animated. Take a well-written Woody Allen comedy that happens to be animated. Animation is still stuck in the Middle Ages of it’s got to be for kids, or it’s got to be for a niche audience; it’s not for everybody. So do you think you could find a middle ground? I think it’s slowly happening. Pixar is pushing that. Aardman is pushing that a little bit. Their kids films are getting a little more intelligent. It’ll happen one of these days. I’m young enough; I don’t feel rushed. I’m really lucky to have all these other creative outlets to do the stuff I want to make, independent of the studios. You know, I don’t have to depend on them green-lighting every sentence. Yeah, I really want to see this feature made. So right now you’re working on your next short film? Yeah we started production on the next short before Rejected was done. Ironically, I was joking with the crew way back then that this next one was going to be our Oscar nomination. It’s a little less risky than Rejected and it’s not going to offend anybody like Rejected might. So it’s a little safer and it’s going to be really something to look at, but it’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life—it’s a tough, tough project. Can you tell us what it’s about? The subject? The title, so we can look out for it? I can’t tell much about it yet. I just like to keep these things close to my chest as much as possible. Number one, they change while we’re working on it, and, number two, I don’t want to jinx it. [laughing] Are you ready for the Theory Test? What’s the theory test? With whom do you sympathize more, Andre Bazin or Sergei Eisenstein? Bazin, being a realist, said that cinema should capture reality, as it exists. Eisenstein, a formalist, said that cinema should create its own reality out of artistic raw materials. I never bought into the theory in the first place that there is such a thing as an objective reality. That doesn’t sit well with me. Really, any film needs both. You need some form of realism, even in a cartoon, to draw the audience in. They’ve got to be able to identify with something and recognize something and be ready for the formalism that comes in to take them on a trip and to tell them a story. Even the most straightforward documentary—like newscasts—are full of formalism, and they require formalism, because without it there’s no story, there’s no syuzhet. [laughing] It’s just newsreel footage without any construction to it. You really need a marriage of both. With cartoons, the drawings are completely reflexive and formalist. But if you look at a film like Lily and Jim or Billy’s Balloon, the soundtrack is quite realist. They’re very raw and they’re very harsh and it’s a nice marriage. They’re just stick figures, but you can watch two stick figures because they sound like real people. With Lily and Jim a lot of people thought we actually recorded candid people talking—like in a documentary—and just happened to animate them. In Billy’s Balloon, there’s no music, there’s no release. It’s just very minimal, gritty, real sound effects that we went out and Foleyed, and it’s a nice marriage. I think that any film needs a bit of both. That’s a good answer. I think you’ll make [UCSB Film Studies Professor] Ed Branigan proud with that one. I got an A in theory! I love theory! return to the articles page