SXSW 2009: “How Did We Get Away With That?”

A guide to breaking the rules from Haynes, Linklater and the "Observe and Report" crew.

Questions from the crowd ranged from the unusual (“Who is your favorite film philosopher?”) to the typical “how do I become a filmmaker?”, though the latter was asked by a fedora-wearing young man who took the extra step of going up on stage to give the two filmmakers his reel. As Linklater said later in the panel, it never gets easier to make films (with his last two in particular being “the most difficult I’ve done”), which Haynes agreed with and added a quote he attributed to Robert Altman, who said that he felt he started from scratch every time, after which Haynes emoted a long, gutteral “Fuuuuck.” Someone also managed to get Linklater to discuss his 12-years-in-the making film about childhood, which follows a boy from first to 12th grade and has been shooting a couple days a year for six years now, with Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette playing the child’s parents. But mainly, Linklater and Haynes talked about their love of melodrama as a genre and at the end, Linklater expressed relief that they didn’t talk about the less than positive state of their industry right now.

On Monday, Robert Rodriguez and Henry Selick spoke to at least a little bit of the future in a panel discussing the future of 3-D. As University of Texas film professor Charles Ramírez Berg said in his introduction, both the Austin-based Rodriguez and the Portland-based Selick “work independently and away from Hollywood and they both remember what it was like to be a kid.” Although too much of the panel was spent showing clips that are widely available — Rodriguez showed a making-of special feature from the “Spy Kids 3D” disc while Selick showed clips from “Coraline” without the benefit of having a 3D-enhanced screen or glasses to hand out — they did demonstrate their extensive knowledge of the format. In fact, Selick told the jam-packed Convention Center crowd that his mutual friend, “Ratatouille” director Brad Bird, put him in touch with Rodriguez before deciding to make “Coraline” in 3D and credited him for pushing him to take on more creative roles on the film to make it his own, though Selick, a pioneer of the famously slow stop-motion animation process, lamented, “it didn’t make things go faster.” As for Rodriguez, he was ready to shoot in 3-D as early as 1995 and admitted he initially designed the bar-set second half of “From Dusk Till Dawn” to play in the format, after the idea came to him in a dream. Yet when his fans swarmed the open mic to ask questions, they were far more interested in his future, which he ran down like a checklist: the kid’s flick “Shorts,” “opening August 7th” and he didn’t cast his son Racer in it, despite his pleas; “Sin City 2,” “right around the corner, but it might be a long corner”; the sci-fi thriller “Nervewracker,” “shooting it in June. This is ‘Blade Walker’”; and the full-length version of his “Grindhouse” trailer “Machete,” “I’m not going to bullshit you. We’re making ‘Machete.’ The script’s written and Danny’s in town.”

And as the awards of the SXSW Film Festival were being handed out to up and coming filmmakers at the Convention Center on Tuesday, the festival welcomed two revered veterans to introduce off-the-beaten-path films from both. In the case of Tobe Hooper, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” director was back in his hometown to present a special screening of his debut film, “Eggshells,” which was the first time in 40 years the film got such treatment. Please don’t ask me to explain the plot of Hooper’s very experimental 1960s movie that centers on a hippie commune in Austin, complete with a psychedelic sitar-scored sex scene that Hooper later said was shot through mylar and a scene of a nude man running away from a car he set on fire. But although “Eggshells” might be confusing at times, it’s certainly never boring, and Hooper’s work with editor Robert Elkins is particularly striking, with many fascinating scenes where the frantic splicing results in something that seems revolutionary even today. (One application of this is in a scene where one character picks up a sword and fights himself through the magic of brilliant editing.) Hooper admitted after answering one question about where the film was shot that his memories of the film were “vague,” but as a historical footnote, he talked about how the limited release of “Eggshells” in Austin, Houston and Florida led him to watch “Night of the Living Dead” when he was thinking about going in a different direction for his next film, which in turn led to making “Chainsaw.” The film is about six months away from its first release ever on any kind of home video, thanks to the dedication of Watchmaker Films’ Mark Rance, who also recently restored the first feature of another Austin auteur, the late Eagle Pennell’s “The Whole Shootin’ Match.”

Spike Lee has also gone in a different direction for his latest film, “Passing Strange,” a permanent record of sorts of the Broadway musical of the same name. Not only did the film afford Lee his first trip to Sundance, but it also brought him to SXSW for the first time where longtime friend and festival producer Janet Pierson introduced him. Known to not suffer fools lightly, Lee made it clear that for his after-screening Q & A, he wanted only intelligent questions — when a woman in the crowd asked about the musical’s co-creator and narrator Stew’s past work since she hadn’t heard of him before, Lee shot her a death stare and took a pause before answering, “The Internet’s a beautiful thing.” Still, the crowd gave Lee a standing ovation and he couldn’t help but playfully add after the last question that referred to his upcoming ESPN documentary about Kobe Bryant, “One last thing, once the Knickerbockers get LeBron James, it’s over.” Though not necessarily connected, the Knicks’ owners, the Dolans were probably happy to hear such enthusiasm — Lee took the opportunity to announce the Dolans’ other company (and our sister company) IFC Films would likely be distributing “Passing Strange” in late July/early August before PBS airs it on television.

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