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Tarnation (2003)
Starring
Jonathan Caouette, Michael Cox
Produced by
Jonathan Caouette, Stephen Winter
Executive Producers
John Cameron Mitchell, Gus Van Sant
Distributor:
Wellspring
Official Website:
www.wellspring.com > Tarnation
Source: IMDB
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We're not generally in the habit of suggesting products, but what the hell, maybe you’ll make the next "Tarnation."
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(Continued from Page One)
This movie only cost a couple hundred bucks. You must have answered this question 800 times, but how'd you pull it off?
Very carefully. The budget was derived from the amount of hi8 tapes that were used to make the film. Everything else was gifts: the camera was a Super 8 camera that my grandpa bought me from a pawnshop, the computer I edited on was a gift.
The only budget that came into it was when I went into the drug store and bought the tapes. That, and the angel wings that the girl in Blue Velvet wore.
[Ed. Note: In what might possibly be the best idea for a high school play in the history of secondary education, Caouette put on a theatrical version of David Lynch’s creepy classic Blue Velvet]
That was tight by the way - how did you ever get your high school to allow you to do something like that?
That was actually a high school assignment that we did. We had three days of rehearsal and we performed that for the kids as they left the lunchroom. It turned out great.
You spent years filming yourself and experimenting with your camera. How did you end up deciding to put it all together?
The film really sort of wrote itself. I had been experimenting with various forms of montage when I got the computer and I ended up doing these 10-15 minute segments of Kenneth Anger-esque shots, with music intercut with these frenetic flashes of photographs.
It was all completely non-linear until about 3 weeks before the Mix Film Festival in New York, when Stephen Winter, who became producer on the film, gave me a deadline and said "whatever you're doing - this is amazing - but give it a story. Give it a beginning and a middle and an ending."
It really took that kick in the butt to get me to deliver something.
You combined something like 160 hours of footage into this film. Don’t you ever throw anything away?
Not really. I'm just a diehard packrat, so I've been able to keep all this stuff over all these years. I always knew that somewhere, in the back of my mind, all this footage would come in handy someday, so I just held on to it.
The thing that got me right away with this film was the use of Low in the opening sequences. Have you contacted them about clearance?
I love Low. Aren't they great? We have contacted them and they're psyched about the film and it looks like it's going to be one of the songs that we’re going to be able to clear.
One of the songs it's going to be really hard to clear is the Bob Dylan / Johnny Cash stuff. That's going to be a bitch to clear. Hopefully Bob will like it and the estate of Johnny cash will like it. It's just sort of a tragedy though, because it just so happens to be on when I'm filming my mother and my father.
And of course, when I was doing that I had no idea I'd be making a movie and that I'd have to be worrying about clearance. It just kind of is what it is.
How are you dealing with the reaction?
I'm so overwhelmed that I can hardly talk as you can see. Absolutely speechless and dumbfounded. When I started making this film it was definitely more of a cathartic sort of an exorcism. It was just this thing I was sort of doing for myself and to get this sort of notoriety is sort of daunting.
'Cause the Q&A's – they're not the normal kind of Q&A's that you’d have with a film. They're almost like therapy. Every body has their own issues and it’s very personal, it's very difficult.
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006: Jonathan Caouette
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