The Time We Killed - Interview with Filmmaker Jennifer Reeves
During the Vancouver Film Festival, Catherine MacLennan spoke with Jennifer Reeves, director and screenwriter of The Time We Killed.
Catherine MacLennan: The use of 16mm film is important to the film - both for its visual and emotional effects. At the Q&A session after the film, you said 16mm is gong to be gone soon. When? Why? Is there anything that can be done about that?
Jennifer Reeves: I think it's a debatable point. However, basically, 16mm used to be a medium for lower-budget films, for artistic filmmakers - it still is - but it was for more truly independent filmmakers, and as video has sort of taken over as a more portable, more affordable format there's just been a drop in the industry's investment in 16mm as well as the fact that when artists, filmmakers go to video, they invest in video equipment so they stop using 16. So, essentially over the past, maybe five to ten years, labs have begun closing down because they don't have any business anymore, Kodak has discontinued a lot of 16mm film stocks. They stopped manufacturing 16mm projectors; you can't get new ones anymore. There are all these signs that it's being phased out. I think that it will always be sort of kept alive by a few people but it becomes more and more expensive. Labs also have to raise their prices to be able to survive. So I don't know how long it'll be. I'm continually told, 'Why did you make a 16mm film? That's crazy, you know, most festivals don't show 16mm anymore,' and that's, I've actually not found that to be true. Most of the festivals I've shown at showed the film, do have a 16 projection, but, like Mark [Mark Peranson, introduced the film at the Vancouver Film Festival] said, this is the only 16 feature showing here. Things are, I think, either Digi Beta video projection or 35mm.
CM: Do you plan to keep working with 16mm or do you plan to switch to one of the others?
JR: Well, I think what I will do is choose the format based on what film I want to make. I think 16 is really...I'm doing these film performances where I'll use two projectors and overlay images on top of each other and 16mm is kind of perfect for that. Video projection doesn't work in that way. So, I think for these more abstract film performances 16 will be great and I have a 16 camera, I have 16mm projectors. I've sort of invested in that format and hopefully for at least another 20 years I'll be able to get it processed. But I think if I was going to do a feature again, I probably would not shoot it on 16, I would probably spend more time raising money to be able to do 35. And if I was going to do a documentary, I would shoot it on video. So, I'm actually at this point where I'm not completely sure what I'm going to do next, but I feel like I'm going to try to widen my scope with the different formats, and just use the proper film format for the actual project.
CM: In the blurb for the film in the Vancouver Film Festival program, the main character is described as being "mentally disturbed." Is this character meant to be perceived as mentally ill, or is she just stuck in an emotional state, which is compounded by the events of the period (9-11, the Iraq war)?
JR: You see that this character is...She has her emotional problems from a young age because she, you learn in the film, that she basically tried to kill herself by jumping off a bridge at seventeen - so you know that this is a character that has been struggling with emotional turmoil, but to the point that, you know, some would call her "mentally ill" - I don't approach it like, ok, there's distinction between who is mentally ill and who is healthy. That label sort of implies that there's this boundary between the two, and the way I approach the character is to show her kind of "irrational behavior" to be very connected to a large human experience but also being aggravated by a fear of her own country, in a sense, like what is happening with the build up of arms towards Iraq. She's frightened to be around these people in a sense and she feels very powerless. But I feel like, you don't have to be mentally ill to feel powerless and afraid of what's happening in the world. I try to approach as normalizing, you know, what could be seen by people as being mentally ill.
CM: Before the film, you said, "it's ok, you can laugh" at certain lines in the film. Have you encountered audiences that weren't sure how to react?
JR: Yeah - it's funny, because when I was making the film, dealing with a character who is very isolated, potentially could make a film very difficult, and heavy, and boring - a character that doesn't leave her apartment - and depressing. When I was editing the film, I basically felt that, for me, even the just the experience of editing it, I sort of folded in these different jokes, or absurdist dark humour where the character is kind of laughing at herself for her own - just the absurdity of her situation. So, when I've shown the film, sometimes people see this absurdity that I'm trying to bring out as just more heaviness instead of seeing that it's meant to be laughed at. Some people have taken it as, like 'oh, jeez, you know, this is so heavy.' So, I actually feel when I hear people laugh that they're with me because laughter is one of the ways that you can actually hear an audience responding. When the audience is really serious I can't always tell if they're with the movie or not and some of these audiences that didn't laugh that much were extremely positive about the film, but in the moment, you know, as a filmmaker, you can't feel that the audience is with you because all you know is that people are quiet and not moving and there's not a lot of...So, I think, people don't have to laugh to appreciate the film, but I feel like it makes me get a sense that they're with me at those moments.
CM: Lisa Jarnot, the poet, and the character that she plays is central to the film. Did you create the film with her in min?
JR: I did not. However, I basically chose Lisa because I felt that she could get into character well and, two, I feel that she has intelligence and a presence that is very compelling to me. As a friend, her work, her poetry work is amazing. She's a brilliant person. And I felt like - one, she's not like a typical actress-model type. She's a person I feel is more of a real person, but what's compelling about her are her thoughts and her ideas. I mean, she's just a brilliant person. So, for me, I wanted to sort of draw that out. And her voice, actually, one of the reasons I chose her is, the way she reads her poetry is, I think, really beautiful and there's a good amount of voiceover in the film. But, another answer to that is, I think, she's - I enjoyed working with her with improvisation. Even though I had planned the film around her, once I was shooting with her, I allowed her to improvise at times and I would just capture what she was doing. So in that way she left her own personality on the film.
CM: Yeah, because it's kind of a mixture of, sort of, her personality and there's a lot of visual elements to the film, obviously, with a lot of back and forth in time, with memory and the use of the texture of the 16mm. Did you know how much voice over to use or how much to keep it with the visual element? Did you battle with that decision?
JR: Yeah, balancing the visual and the verbal - it was a big challenge - because it's a very complicated story. Because it's going into her psychology and it's going into her history and her fantasy, and so, there's a lot of different themes that I wanted to flesh out in the film. But film is a visual medium as well and you can have too much voice and you can have too little voice. I had to cut out a lot of content of the story because there was just too much. I needed to let the viewer just live in a visual moment for a while. It was actually a really big challenge - how to balance the story, how to cut it down to be more efficient, however, to fill in the gaps. So, yeah, that was a big challenge. A lot of people say, 'oh voiceover in a feature is terrible' - but for me, because the film is about someone's internal mind, either you're going to have the person talking to themselves or you can just have a voiceover and I thought the voiceover was more intimate.
CM: What are your thoughts on the current state of independent cinema?
JR: As far as American independent cinema...I'm really not happy with it for the most part - though it seems like there's always a few really good films that get made despite the abundance of bad formulaic features. What I think is really discouraging is the economy of distribution and advertising and the money culture of independent film. That it has become almost as hard to make an independent film as it is to make a huge budget industry film.
CM: How did it get that way - just because of the popularity of certain films?
JR: I think that on one hand - I mean, I don't know completely - some people think that you have to have themes that are really simple and dialogues that are very simple that can translate into any culture and it's not too specific. The idea that certain independent films made a lot of money sets up this expectation that you can make a lot of money on an independent film but so many of them don't that it's just this effort of people that are investing, they're gambling in a sense, and they're gambling based on formulas that have worked in the past. So, if for instance, my film is totally unique and different, it doesn't follow a formula - you can't say 'this is like...' you know, a particular film - so the distributors don't know what to do with it because they can't fit it into a place and it probably wouldn't make a lot of money. But I feel like, you know, the films become less and less original as you're trying to sell it as a product and it becomes less artistic and less of a personal statement. So I think that's part of it. And people have told me, 'Well, if you had a name actress in your film'...so that's another part of the formula, if you have people that are already famous in your movie, that all these independent films have, you know, these famous actors and actresses, then that's how they're able to raise the money because that's part of the formula. If there's recognition, or something, then the audience will go see it because there's this culture of celebrity. So yeah, I find it discouraging...
CM: Is there any way that that could be changed?
JR: I feel that different people could do different things. For one, audiences should go out and support films that seem more original, that they don't have these formulaic things about them. Go to theatres that are showing work that isn't showing in multiplexes. So I think the audience can help in that way to prove that the numbers will show. But then, I think, for me as an artist I have to just keep being true to my work and things change over time and you can't know where, how things are going to change in the film culture. There are good signs - like, certain cinemas previously were harder to see are becoming more available, they're getting more popularity, like documentaries, and Asian films. Iranian cinema over the past few years, they've gotten more prominence in at least - I mean I'm talking about a very, you know, liberal America, and that's where I see movies, that's what I'm responding to, I guess I don't know the conditions in other countries.
CM: Do you have any upcoming projects?
JR: Yeah, I'm doing this film and music performance, with a couple of projectors, you know, that I was telling you before. I'm working with a musician named Schoolly Sparasin, so it'll basically be a live performance where I'm projecting 16mm images, layering them on top of each other and it's a study of abstraction and landscape. It's really beautiful; the whole piece is like an audio-visual chamber ensemble. It's going to be a really lovely but intense visual-musical piece. I'm going to open that at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in January, and it's called "When It Was Blue." And so that's in the works, but that will be finished soon enough. After that I want to write a script for another personal narrative, but not personal meaning my personal story, but using, probably working from an autobiography of a female political activist who was around in the teens and twenties in New York. She has some really fascinating stories. I'm thinking of writing a film based on her autobiography.
The Lamp, October 2004