Interview: Michael Almereyda on Escapes and Marjorie Prime

Filmmaker Michael Almereyda is a poet of emotional concision, expressing recessive human textures through a pared sense of editing, staging, and collage. Almereyda’s two superb new films—Escapes and Marjorie Prime, a documentary about Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher and a sci-fi-tinged chamber drama, respectively—both rely on the sorts of intricate juxtapositions that have formed the bedrock of the filmmaker’s cinema. From his modern-day Dracula cover, Nadja, to the prescient corporate machinations of Hamlet, to the profoundly neurotic power of Experimenter, Almereyda has followed his own idiosyncratic interests, uncovering fleeting glimpses of the concentric patterns that unite all art as well as life. We talked about the origins of Escapes, the visual influences behind Marjorie Prime, and a bit about the stories that hide in between the lines of art.

I’m curious about your interview process with Hampton Fancher. How long did it take to record him for Escapes?

The original impulse came in 2012, and I’ve known Hampton a long time. We’re pretty good friends, and it was like extending a conversation rather than having a series of interviews. It was just me and usually one other person visiting him in his apartment, and it was kind of casual. We had a few sessions over maybe three or four years.

Did the project initially have a different intention? Did it grow out of something else?

It did. I don’t know if you’ve seen a short film I did called Skinningrove. Did you, by any chance?

I’ve seen it, yes.

Well, Escapes came out of that, because that was done with another friend, someone I knew well. Skinningrove came out of a slide collection and, even though it took two hours to shoot, it took practically a whole summer to edit because it was so distilled. I learned something from that film about measuring or pairing images with commentary. In some ways it’s an obvious thing, but Skinningrove felt more open-ended and more revealing than I expected. The thing is, of course, when you look at a photograph of a person there’s a lot that you can’t know. Even if you consider it a great photograph, there’s a lot of missing information, narrative, and emotion. Of course it’s the same or even more so with the moving image.

There’s a movie that Hampton’s girlfriend from some time back did called Blue Hawaii. Joan Blackman and Hampton were involved for a while and she’s the one starlet that didn’t sleep with Elvis after starring in one of his movies. Hampton told a story about Blue Hawaii, which has this breezy, idyllic quality. But to recognize what was going on while these images and scenes and happy musical numbers were being filmed was pretty remarkable, and I thought I could make a short film with Hampton’s commentary and scenes from Blue Hawaii. When he told that story for the camera, maybe because it was the first time that we were doing it, it just wasn’t as alive or as interesting as I imagined. Another story he told about Teri Garr felt more vital, and more personal in a certain way—in a way that began to connect to other stories.

You know from seeing the movie that there are a series of episodes, almost each one involves something that could be called a near-death experience. Something that Hampton emerges from and has to survive, and there’s usually a woman involved too. So there’s a kind of symmetry that, of all the stories he’s told in his life and can continue telling, the stories I chose to film are heading toward the improbable arrival at the point where he writes Blade Runner. That became the structure, and that was something that was discovered rather than preordained.

I love how the personal is shown to yield something that everyone’s familiar with and takes for granted as another pop-cultural given. In less certain hands, it could have felt as if Escapes was entirely about the Blade Runner climax. Instead, it almost feels, as you said, as if Blade Runner arose, inevitably, out of these intense Hollywood stories.

Things happen to Hampton and he also makes things happen. He’s almost like a figure in a Philip K. Dick story where reality bends around him, and Blade Runner is one of the more public and accredited triumphs of his life. But there’s a lot of lucky circumstances that built up to it, and they seemed as interesting as the writing itself. I’m glad you appreciated the balance. That was what we were attempting to do.

Something else that struck me, near the end of Escapes, is when Hampton says that he feels his life is governed by fear. Because this man appears to be rather distinctively fearless.

Hampton’s also very honest, and I think we all have degrees of fear. He was partly talking about himself when he was young. I hope it’s threaded into the film that he was measuring himself against these macho images, which he was able to emulate and mirror but didn’t necessarily reflect who he really was. He was acting a role, and I think he’s moved past that. He still has fear, but it’s now a different sort of fear—a different measure. That was one of the later interviews, where I wanted him to talk about how his life and images of men [that he saw] as he was growing up were related. He doesn’t go into the obvious thing where he wanted to be Humphrey Bogart, which he already said. He talked about fear, and I thought that was pretty pointed.

I would look at someone like Hampton and would probably feel the admiration for him that he feels for his own heroes, and so you think about these nesting dolls of neuroses and admiration that abound in pop culture.

[laughs] That’s a good way to put it. I thought you were going to say something slightly different. There are nesting dolls, yeah. Almost every kind of great actor reveres great actors from the past. There aren’t actors who don’t buy into, on some level, the glamour and the craft that we all, as fans, respect. And you’re right: Neurosis is part of it too.

The editing has a punchy, succinct, pop-art rhythm to it. Were there longer versions of the film? What was the process of arriving at this particular cut?

I’m glad that you like it. It’s really me and two different editors, both young women in their 20s. One of them had to go back to Estonia because her visa ran out. But they’re both students. This, as you can guess, is a handmade, homemade film. Escapes wasn’t funded by anyone, it was patched together. And so I had the leisure of building it gradually. But I also had the luxury of showing it at a couple of film festivals as a work in progress, which allowed us to recognize, through audience’s questions, if something was missing, or if something was tantalizing and wasn’t clear. The film gathered steam in a way, getting tighter and more dimensional. And also, when I started, half the things that are on DVD now weren’t then. It’s a kind of a weird loosening or ripening of the goods. We were lucky. There’s a still good amount of things that Hampton’s in that I didn’t get ahold of, but it’s amazing what came to light.

Did you have any issue with clearing the footage that you used?

Well, you’ve probably seen Thom Andersen’s great Los Angeles Plays Itself, which touched on that issue of fair use. I got the same law firm that he employed, and they reviewed Escapes in a scrupulous way, and there’s something about the nature of fair-use law that allows you to make a mosaic like this, to make a collage. We can’t use any of the footage in the trailer [laughs], but we can use it in the film.

There’s precise matching between Hampton’s voiceover and footage of him in various films and shows. How does one go from a blank canvas to such intricate juxtapositions? The task sounds impossibly vast.

Well, it was organic. And it was really about me discovering these old shows. Hampton was in a handful of movies, but mostly shows. In an incremental way, I’d watch and rummage, and then I’d meet with the editor [Piibe Kolka] and tell her where things should go because I’m technically inept, but I have a good memory. It was like a collage, and most of my movies, including Hamlet, configure collages, where you bring disparate things together in a way in which they speak to and inform each other. It’s maybe the way that I think, so the process didn’t feel daunting but fun.

Each chapter of Escapes has a distinct concept. The first piece is a merging of voiceover and archive material, and, of course, the film eventually opens up to show Hampton entirely on screen. Was this reveal arrived at instinctively? Or did you always have it in your mind a particular point in which we’d actually see Hampton?

Well, the initial film was just that short anecdote with Teri Garr and Hampton’s career resuscitation, being brought back from the dead when his Bonanza episode aired. So that was self-contained. By the time it was done, I’d already been meeting with Hampton and filming him some more and recognizing that there could be more episodes, with each named after something he was in. I didn’t want to be schematic, but I knew that each episode would have its own internal logic, and that Blade Runner would be the conclusion.

Did Hampton ever look at Escapes as a fellow filmmaker, or did he remain purely a subject?

He’s been encouraging. He talks with a reasonable degree of humility about how he was afraid that he wouldn’t like it because who in their right mind wants to look at themselves holding forth? Who, beyond a real narcissist, wants to submit to that and indulge it? But he’s a great personality and storyteller, and I think he was compelled to recognize that the film works and has power and charm. Escapes was really built out of distillation. At one point, I think he said that [ex-girlfriend] Barbara Hershey was willing to be interviewed, but I realized that it really was meant to be Hampton’s voice. To get back to your question, he was never critical. He was always encouraging.

I enjoy the purity of the project. Talking-heads documentaries tend to feel impersonal, but when you make a pointed, pared choice to spotlight one person, it can lead to something idiosyncratic and revealing.

I’m haunted by a John Updike story, where he, the narrator, is at a baseball game and he’s watching the crowd drain out and he focuses on an old Chinese man eating rice out of a takeout container, and the protagonist fantasizes about following the man home and writing a novel about him. Even though the Chinese man is kind of nondescript and not anyone’s idea of a hero, you could make a novel, or a film for that matter, about him or about anyone. It might take a lot more work, imagination, empathy, or depth of feeling to pull that off with someone who’s not as vivid as Hampton, so I was lucky to have him. I don’t know that I have the energy to follow the Chinese man home and make a movie about him, but Hampton made it seem easy.

Across the body of your work, you take these emotional subjects and approach them with a kind of matter-of-factness. A lot of directors, particularly in America, really sell emotions, though you allow emotions to have their own lucid, irresolvable grace.

Wow, that’s eloquent. I can’t say anything more than “thank you.” That’s a good way to put it. One component, I’m curious to know what you think, because I don’t know how to measure myself against other filmmakers, but I do know that there’s a lot of filmmaking where the music is trying too hard. The films could almost be twice as good if you stripped away the music. I’m conscious of that. I’ve been careful about music.

I wish more directors were attuned to the music and space of silence.

My Skinningrove movie is about the only one that was good enough to have no music. [Both laugh.]

It struck me, in watching Escapes and Marjorie Prime back to back, that both are about people looking for alternate worlds. Is that just an accident of art?

Well, it’s hardly an accident, but I think they just overlapped. You become obsessed with certain things. Marjorie Prime is based on a play written by Jordan Harrison and I embraced it and I think I respected it. The movie is pretty close to the play in most respects. I added a fair amount too that I hope distilled what was achieved in the play. It’s a very human thing to want to reach beyond what you’ve got, and in terms of alternate worlds, anyone who’s alive is aware that inner and outer reality don’t always correspond.

The images in Marjorie Prime aren’t simply of people talking. They have a hard, succinct clarity.

I spent some time with [cinematographer] Sean Price Williams. You might be acquainted with Sean. He’s a powerhouse of a younger generation of independent filmmaking. He’s fast, deeply knowledgeable, and very charismatic. I’m sure he’ll be directing soon on his own, and I couldn’t have made the film without him. He’s light on his feet and he carries the intensity with him. I don’t think he ever used a dolly as much as he had in Marjorie Prime, but he’s a great soldier. And we watched enough films together and talked them over. This is maybe an exaggeration, but I don’t know anyone who’s seen more movies than Sean, except maybe Scorsese, who’s got a few years on him. So that comes in handy, and it’s not just a critical or schematic knowledge, because he cares about what he sees and internalizes it. So we watched a fair number of Renoir movies. He was dazzled that I could show him something that he hadn’t seen. And Renoir’s the expert at managing large casts, allowing to you feel like the inside and outside of a location that is being revealed and explored. And [Ingmar] Bergman is probably the master of people in a house.

Do documentaries and narrative films scratch different expressive itches for you? How does the process differ from one kind of production to another?

I don’t know how to answer that without being glib. The glib answer is that I like making movies. I tend to do my best work when I’m not being paid to do it, and it’s easier to not be paid to make documentaries. My documentaries and short films may turn out more humble and personal. It’s hard to make feature films without having more of a kind of heavy apparatus: funding and all the machinery that’s necessary. I like the idea of making films that no one else has made. The films I like best from my contemporaries or my friends are films where you feel they’re in the films. Olivier Assayas is good at doing that. I try to use that as a measure. Trust your instincts and go where your interests lay. I’ve been lucky lately in that I’ve been cutting corners and making things that aren’t expensive to make, and I know it’s getting harder and harder to make independent films. It’s always a bit miraculous, but I tend to be kind of willful about it. And somehow that makes it a pleasure. [laughs]

Before we go, I must say that your Hamlet is one of my favorite treatments of Shakespeare.

Well, someday, if we’re eye to eye, we’ll talk about why Cymbeline is a little better than you thought it was, but I appreciate it. [Laughs.] I hope to do more Shakespeare and keep that conversation going. I’m grateful. I’m working now on a little film with John Ashbery and we met partly because he likes that Hamlet. You’re in good company, in other words. That, as you may know, was shot on Super 16 for a little over a million dollars with famous people who were paid minimum wage. So the movie got made and I was able to have final cut because it was made for so little. And that seems to be the paradigm: how I manage to put one foot in front of another.