Slant Magazine

Slant: A lot of people have called that dream come true "creepy."

HR: Well, sure.

JF: The film is The Devil and Daniel Johnston. This is literally a man's battle with the devil. He's a fundamentalist, right wing Christian, and the Devil is very real to Daniel and his family. It's a metaphor for me but it's not to him. There was a great review last week—what was it?

HR: Blender Magazine called it "the scariest movie of the year," and it is—I was a big Casper fan as a kid but it wasn't until Daniel asked me "How did Casper die?" that I ever thought of it as sad or horrible.

Slant: Did he actually fall in the well?

HR: I think that's Daniel's invention.

JF: The opening line of the film is "I'm the ghost of Daniel Johnston." To me, Daniel Johnston is an enigma, and the film is a portrait of a living ghost, and it's a journey through madness and creativity, whether you like the music or not. Van Gogh didn't tape himself and his mania, but Daniel did. Daniel studied art and the history of art and saw himself in that tradition. And he exploited his own mental illness. A lot of his great songs are about his own mental illness. Like "I Had Lost My Mind." You remember the song he made the animated video for with the blood coming out of the head. Later, he exploits it on MTV, he says, "This is my new album Hi, How Are You? that I recorded while having a nervous breakdown." He's drawn many scenes in which he is the puppet and the Devil is pulling the strings, but he's also the wizard behind his own curtain. [Pause] He used to manage the manager. You should hear the hours of tape that he recorded when he went on the road to New York to record with Maureen Tucker from the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth and Jad Fair of Half-Japanese and Kramer the producer. He is conning every single one of these parties, including [his agent Jeff] Tartakov. And he's working out how he's going to record with all these people, get on the bill of the Village Voice Benefit Concert, how he was going to do all these things and he did every single one that week he spent in New York. Daniel would come in a charming, waifey and boyish way, then he'd make a comic about you and then he'd have you in the palm of his hand. People don't want to look at that side of him. [Pause] We've sat at dinner and Lunch with Dan a thousand times, had countless discussions…

HR: …conversations in which he's as lucid and erudite and present as we are here, right now.

JF: And we'll have these discussions about things he's interested in. Like the history of Marvel Comics and Jack Kirby, or every detail about the animation in King Kong, or Schindler's List, or Kurt Vonnegut. Daniel is a very well read, very bright guy and I always tell people he's the smartest person in the room. But it serves his purpose to appear small.

Slant: I went into the film knowing little to nothing about Daniel Johnston and I expected the film to be about Divine Madness. I felt that in lieu of dealing with the romantic notions we have of Divine Madness, what came up were the realities of it: how dangerous Daniel was to others and himself for example.

HR: There is nothing glamorous about mental illness. It's sad…

Slant: However, people romanticize. Louis Black talked about that and how every art critic or fan wants to know and care for the next Van Gogh and, as Black said, he did "the most pedestrian thing possible and committed him."

JF: He hit his manager over the head with a lead pipe, baptized people in a creek. Imagine if it were you: Here is your dear friend who writes these songs you adore with these achingly beautiful lyrics about unrequited love and then he's doing frightening dangerous things. You want to help him or save him because you can't sit down with him and have a chat. He tried to kill Randy and the woman in the apartment and his father, and many times, he could have killed himself. He was manic. But he also created a lot of great art and music when he was manic.

Slant: There's a beautiful moment in the film where Daniel, in present day, is remembering his muse Laurie Allen, and there's a screen-within-a-screen of Laurie in 8mm with Daniel's eyes sort of looking toward the screen-within-a-screen. It seemed to me that there was something going on with time and memory. Memory isn't always about the past for this film and when Daniel speaks he seems sort of outside of time, as if memory is now: past is future.

JF: We would sit in his garage with him at three in the morning, which has a wall of pop culture, whether it's Frankenstein, or Marilyn Monroe, or Salvador Dali, he's got this incredible montage of these characters and the characters are very real to him. Like Laurie but also the Beatles. There's a party going on in his head all the time. He'd sit there and smoke his cigarettes and draw a little, play some piano, and we'd film him, and then, every so often, he's start cackling under his breath, like he was having this great time and it was all very real to him and it was all happening right then. We could see the characters were happening in his head, he's tapped into something.

Slant: Jeff Tartakov seemed like the patron saint of the film and of Daniel Johnston's career. Daniel threw him such a firestorm but he absolutely staid the course.

HR: Not everybody sees it that way but we do.

JF: Jeff got screwed by Daniel in 1992. He took Daniel Johnston from this cassette phenomenon and created a new phenomenon out of him and this started a bidding war over him and then Daniel fired him. I had a pen-pal relationship with Jeff at the time and all the people who found out about Daniel Johnston, all the tastemakers of the day, all knew about Daniel because of Tartakov, he did all the work, he built this monument to the guy and he still does that to this day. I made this film as much for Tartakov as for Daniel. I thought he was like Andrew Loog Oldham to the Rolling Stones, or Brian Epstein to the Beatles, or Colonel Tom Parker to Elvis—

HR: I think the analogy's getting a little dark.

JF: Okay, well, point is, he's one of the great managers of all time and wouldn't every artist want a manager who is as devoted to his artist as Tartakov? There probably has never been one or has been since. He really is special. The one thing that's not in the film that's really fascinating is that after Daniel fired him and he becomes this Broadway Danny Rose character—a little Jewish guy like Woody Allen who has this big client like Nick Apollo Forte—Tartakov was left penniless and fell into a deep depression and he was left broke. And that was a real tragedy, but Tartakov persevered and Daniel apologized and now Tartakov has launched this art career, which is really incredible and it's happening right before our eyes. The Whitney Biennial just selected Daniel—I don't know if you saw it two weeks ago on the cover of the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times but the Whitney Biennial steps in and a real gallery in Chelsea, the Clementine Gallery, and now all of a sudden Daniel Johnston is exactly what we say in the film he is, a fine artist—not an outsider artist. Even up to a year-and-a-half ago, he was in the The New York Times as this poster child for outsider art and music.

Slant: So your next film is going to be a doc about Chuck Wepner?

JF: "The Bayonne Bleeder," my first New Jersey hero. I've been working on the film for about six months now and now I'm writing the screenplay. I'm merging the two: narrative and documentary into one film. Call it a hybrid. American Splendor did it, and that's what I'm doing for Chuck.