to entirely devote yourself to honing your craft. And finding your peers, and discovering mentors. Here at CCA we’re lucky to have such a wide range of expertise and specializations among the faculty, so the students are exposed to numerous different ways of working and creating—not just traditional narrative—as they find their individual paths. kota ezawa , for example, has a totally different view of the construct of “narrative.” Plus he’s a brilliant, worldrenowned artist. lynn marie kirby and jeanne finley are also highly respected artists in the fine arts world, making work for the gallery and museum context. Jeanne sometimes works in collaboration, which is good for the students to see. We try to instill a solid knowledge of historical context, too. brook hinton ’s Film Language course is about the grammar of filmmaking and the making of moving images. Students come out of there much more literate in the medium. You’re a busy guy. We’re lucky to have you teaching at CCA. What keeps you here?
The students keep me fresh. They challenge me, in the best sense. I feel fortunate to have found a match in CCA. It feels like home, and I think we all hope for that, in all aspects of our lives. I hear you study acting? To be a director, you have to understand the acting process.
You have to learn to speak the language of actors and appeal to their psychology if you’re going to help them with their characters and give them useful direction. I’ve taken classes for about 15 years now, including with Judith Weston, who is a well-known coach. You just optioned the novel You Deserve Nothing as a new project for a film. What’s the book about?
It’s about an American teacher at an (American) school in Paris and his relationships with his students. Sort of a Dead Poets Society with sex. You say you often take a particular past film as an inspirational starting point for a new project. What was that touchstone, for Lovelace and for HOWL?
Sometimes the relationship to the precursor is obvious; sometimes it’s more elusive or obscure. For HOWL, it was Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason. For Lovelace it was Klute. In Klute, Jane Fonda plays a prostitute who’s being stalked. There is something about the economy of the directing in that film that puts all of the focus on the performances. That really struck a nerve with me in terms of how to direct Lovelace.
CCA has launched a new MFA in Film program co-chaired by rob epstein and brook hinton. The filmmaking landscape today is undergoing constant changes in its modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, and these changes offer an amazing opportunity for creative and agile filmmakers to discover powerful new modes of cinematic expression and supportive infrastructures. Many important industry luminaries have come to campus in the last few years as part of the Cinema Visionaries Lecture Series. The series launched with a grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is now made possible thanks to the generous support of carla emil and rich silverstein. Each visitor gives a public lecture and leads a master class while he or she is here. Some highlights:
michael moore
barbar a hammer
werner herzog
john waters
barry jenkins
What are you reading for fun at the moment?
David Byrne’s recent book How Music Works. He’s really brilliant. Humble, yet brilliant.
gus van sant
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