He
turns up in the Moving Pictures office early one evening,
equipped with an evil-looking kebab-burger and an
opinion on most things. Even the Potsdamer Platz,
which he really likes. "It's beautiful, the way it's
so crazy," he says. "Every corner is entirely new.
I get lost every time I turn around."
This
strikes me as an odd reason for liking the place.
Also, most of what Green says suggests he likes controlling
things. That's why, even when he was eight, he wanted
to work on film, not video.
"I stayed away from video because it frightened
me," he says. "There's a lot more latitude in film
stocks that gives you more contrast with the lighting
schemes. And video always seemed so flat."
Did
you know this even when you were eight, I ask?
"I've
never known anything else," he says.
"Were
you a lonely child?" I ask.
"Yup,"
says Green. "I was my own best friend. Me and the
camera. I just let it watch the clouds go by and the
sunset. Boring things for most 10-year-old kids, but
something I've always been attracted to."
Then
he saw Terrence Malick's Days Of Heaven.
"I think it deals with so many subtleties of emotion
in a natural and yet dramatic and visceral and surreal
way," he says. "I saw it when I was probably 14. It
changed my life."
It
was Days Of Heaven that determined his
approach to making films, even when the budget was
as low as it was on his Forum feature, George
Washington.
"We
shot 35mm anamorphic, because we really wanted to
set ourselves apart from every other low-budget movie
we'd ever seen," he declares. "I wanted it to be as
unlike Clerks and Slacker as I could make it, you
know films that I just find no inspiration
in at all, except for financially and economically.
"But
that did help a lot: I figured if they could do
it, I could take the next step and make it glorious
and beautiful. Instead of spending the money on
whatever they spent the money on, I spent it on
the camera department, getting just the right lenses."
The
second reason I'm surprised he likes the Potsdamer
Platz is that, whatever else it is, the place is
urban the epitome (not to say the nadir)
of urban. And Green's inspiration is rural. The
rural south, to be specific.
"A
lot of it is my past, growing up in the rural south,"
he says of the themes of the film, which has emerged
as one of the real out-of-left-field buzz titles of
the first few days of the festival the sort
of movie film festivals should be about. Everyone
to whom I mention I am talking to its director says
"Oh yeah? I've heard that's really good". And there's
no better test than that.
It's
not an autobiographical film. Green is white (if
you see what I mean) and he grew up in Texas, whereas
the kids in George Washington are
black and live in North Carolina, where the director
went to film school (the North Carolina School of
the Arts).
But
the rural bit is important. "Life hasn't changed all
that much in the last 50 years as far as the landscape
of the towns is concerned," he says. "There's still
the old train station.
"The
textures are the same, the smells are familiar.
So, for me, it initially had a comfortable feel,
because those are the locations I knew, locations
I could infiltrate confidently as a director and
bring an authenticity to them."
Green
chose the NCSA partly because of where it was
in Winston-Salem, far from the traditional film-making
environment. "It's outside of New York and LA, which
I like," he says. "I'm not comfortable in those
kind of cut-throat environments. And also they were
into promoting the kind of films I'm intending to
make."
Not
surprisingly, Green has a game-plan. "We're in the
process of trying to hustle some bigger money, find
some people that responded to George Washington
and that would be interested in taking the next
step," he says.
For
all his rural horizons, Green ain't no country boy,
as the way he funded George Washington shows. There's
no industry money in it, just private funding that
he raised himself from "people that weren't in the
movie business just people with money that
I'd met in New York who wanted to get behind some
kid that sounded like he knew what he was talking
about and loved movies and could hold up a good
conversation."
That's
for sure.
