Michael Almereyda in the Real World
BY
Nick Newman
An interview with the NYC-based filmmaker on three of his most defiantly independent—and deeply personal—documentaries.
Three by Michael Almereyda is streaming now on Metrograph At Home.
The question most often circling around Michael Almereyda is some suitable description of his films. It’s difficult from a distance, observing his CV’s dense mix of genre fare (a vampire movie starring Peter Fonda; a haunted-house picture featuring Christopher Walken), excursions into sci-fi (Marjorie Prime, 2017) or something like it (Happy Here and Now, 2002), remarkable Shakespeare adaptations (2000’s Hamlet and 2014’s Cymbeline), unconventional biopics (2015’s Experimenter, 2020’s Tesla) and numerous documentaries on artists. You might try piecing them together—you may even succeed—but that’s not nearly so pleasurable as watching the work itself.
Between 2017 and 2021 I had the great fortune to release three of said documentaries: Escapes (2017), an experimental portrait of his friend and Blade Runner scribe Hampton Fancher; William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), a study of the acclaimed American photographer; and Paradise (2009), a diary film somewhat styled à la Jonas Mekas but made more mysterious for its lack of voiceover or, by most counts, context. I find it somewhat hard to believe they’re all works of the same man, let alone one who would later direct Milla Jovovich singing an ’80s Dylan song over a slow-motion montage of gang violence.
Almereyda, however, is quick to disagree with that assessment—so begins our conversation on the occasion of Metrograph streaming this trio, wherein he reveals secrets of these films I’d never known. (Sometimes all you have to do is ask.) These are inexhaustible works, far larger on the inside than they appear from the out, and a suitable window into—but not, finally, a full portrait of—Almereyda as an indispensable, unquantifiable figure of modern American movies.—Nick Newman
William Eggleston in the Real World (2005)
NICK NEWMAN: William Eggleston in the Real World, Paradise, and Escapes seem to me three different types of documentary: fly-on-the-wall portrait, diary, and personal history. How early into a documentary do you realize what shape the subject benefits, or even demands?
MICHAEL ALMEREYDA: Sorry to disagree, but I’m grateful to the programming genie at Metrograph for grouping these films as a threesome, because I think they have a lot in common. They’re handmade micro-budgeted projects conjured out of nothing. They’re all personal, observational, unscripted, and collage-like. And they were made in defiance of commercial conventions or rules. Paradise and the Eggleston film are particularly related, practically brother-sister twins, shot with the same Sony consumer camera during the early 2000s. And there’s a shared quality of intimacy, I’d like to think, that binds these films and sets them apart. They’re not the work of a fly on a wall—who wants to think of himself as a fly?—but maybe more like what you’d get if a particularly curious cat could figure out how to operate a handycam and hold it fairly steady.
NN: In that case, how did these films find a shape, a structure?
MA: Each film was tightly edited, and the editing took a long time in each case—a slow (intermittent) process, with the structure evolving as footage was added and sifted. The slowness was also due to the fact that I was routinely trying to make fiction films, an effort that can easily derail everything else in a person’s life.
NN: What motivated the archival-narration sections of Escapes? There’s a (somewhat) obvious comparison to make with Thom Andersen’s films, but ultimately this has a different quality—you yourself didn’t write the voiceover we’re hearing, and so it feels like your role is in illustrating, underlining, even occasionally subverting a tale.
MA: The archival material in Escapes is almost entirely drawn from movies and TV shows that Hampton Fancher shows up in as an actor, plus movies and shows featuring appearances by his various paramours. That was the basic conceit, going in. Here is a man who had been occupying several dimensions of alternate reality as an actor while trying to work up the nerve and energy to become a writer. And so, sure, the basic idea was to illustrate his narration but also to exult in the fact that his life has been refracted through a particularly outlandish hall of mirrors. It was fun to discover how many bad or mediocre TV shows he’d been in, routinely cast as someone hapless, overwhelmed, unheroic. I felt these alter egos could serve as a kind of off-register cartoon of Hampton, providing a picture of his inner life while echoing the stories he’s telling about himself.
NN: How did you go about finding just the right footage? It’s dizzying to think how much work might’ve gone into finding a few seconds from some rarely aired television episode or out-of-print movie that hits the notes of Hampton’s stories.
MA: It’s just a matter of being patient and open-minded. Like piecing together a mosaic by picking bits of colored glass out of the trash. Or maybe more like what a bird does to build a nest. All three of these films can be considered documentary bird nests.
Escapes (2017)
NN: I could listen to Hampton tell stories all day, but were there fears of how to make someone talking at length interesting?
MA: Well—no. Hampton Fancher is as compellingly talkative as William Eggleston is reticent and cryptic. Hampton makes storytelling a spectator sport. And Escapes grew out of a common complaint among Hampton’s friends: he refuses to write his memoirs, to set these stories down. So I wanted to correct that, to catch him in the act—the act of storytelling—even though he’ll tell you the stories in this film are like lint in his pocket, not his best stories, hardly the true measure of the man. But I chose them because they connect to the bigger story, and themes and ideas whirling around in that story—which I’ll leave viewers to discover in due time, if they care to.
NN: Paradise screened for two weeks at MoMa in 2009 and was otherwise unavailable until Grasshopper Film’s release in 2021. The 2021 edition is actually an amended cut—some elements added, perhaps others removed. What motivated you to do this?
MA: A few people in the film—three, to be exact—were not happy in Paradise, so I complied with their wishes, ejected them, recut the film.
NN: Ejected from paradise. I’m assuming you’re not going to talk about who these people are.
MA: Correct. But you can also assume they’re people I once felt very close to, and when I realized the feelings weren’t mutual, the film had to change. One of the excised scenes was replaced with footage shot in Austin, Texas, during the filming of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010). That’s the last episode I shot, though it doesn’t come at the end of the movie. At any rate, this Metrograph revival has led me back to Paradise’s MoMA press release, which still feels accurate: “a gathering up of intimately shared moments with friends and strangers… less a self-portrait and more of a panoramic group portrait of children and their adult counterparts.”
NN: How much of Paradise was shot with the mind to create a filmic diary—some, none, all? I imagine reams of hard drives with unlabeled video files, but maybe it was more organized than I’m suggesting.
MA: It was mini-DV, so you can imagine a metal filing cabinet, drawers crammed with tapes, most of them labeled with dates and locations. The early 2000s happened to be a fallow time for me, and it was consoling to think big while gathering footage with a little camera. Magical things were always materializing, flashing by, almost as if the camera were inviting them to happen.
NN: Is Paradise a film you could see yourself revisiting another time—perhaps a 2033 edition?
MA: I can’t pretend to see into the future but—no. Our iPhones have made the impulse to record everyday life more common and inescapable, but I’m less inclined to track private experience this way, to be so obsessive. I’ve followed Paradise with a trickle of self-photographed, self-contained shorts, and I intend to keep fumbling down that road, but the idea of linking fragmentary lyrical scenes across an epic canvas—the kind of thing Jonas Mekas did repeatedly and so well for so many years—doesn’t seem to answer the questions I’ve been asking myself lately.
Paradise (2009)
NN: Is there any takeaway you encourage with Paradise? There’s fun in trying to connect the film’s many pieces, but it also feels like drawing these lines would undo something more natural and mysterious—like trying to alter one’s memories for the sake of a greater story.
MA: I had very specific ideas about the structure, thematic threads, but I think it’s best to bury all that and quote the press release one more time. The movie is built around “the idea that life is made up of brief paradisiacal moments—moments routinely taken for granted, and always slipping away.”
NN: What input, if any, did Eggleston have on Real World, especially in-the-moment documentation?
MA: No input. But plenty of complicity. He looked me in the eye on the first day and said, “I trust you.”
NN: Did you find anything in the visual shape of Real World influenced by its subject’s work? I can’t tell if the film is of a piece with his photos or a great divergence on a moment-by-moment basis.
MA: I doubt anyone spending time with Eggleston’s photographs, anyone looking with attention, can help but be influenced when you pick up a camera yourself. So sure, there’s a kind of alignment, of sensibility and sympathy, translating into what you look at and how you frame things. That’s implicit and natural. The hard part about making the movie was in determining how much narration to braid into it, measured against how to let scenes speak for themselves. I still have nostalgia for a version of the movie with no narration, something closer to Eggleston’s own video work, Stranded in Canton (edited in 2005, using footage shot between 1973–74). But friends who saw that version felt uncomfortable and unmoored. All the same, a few years later, I scratched any thought of narration in Paradise. Paradise, I decided, would be an unmapped, open-ended, narration-free zone.
Nick Newman is Managing Editor of The Film Stage, an occasional actor and programmer, and exceedingly available for a nine-to-five job.
William Eggleston in the Real World (2005)
