I was a teenager, I hadn’t directed a frame of film.


A basic, primal, old-school technology that I’ve used in other movies, though it’s decidedly prominent in this one. And how do you ever know if something is going to work? Any man who makes dreams is bound to feel a little inaccessible, especially the soft spoken Almereyda, who tells me beforehand he isn’t very good at interviews. It was a momentous encounter for me. Acknowledging that became part of the story, an essential part. The historical record is in many ways obscure, unreliable, incomplete. I dropped him off at the airport, and I had to pay my way back—I remember that—which may constitute a sort of metaphor for my early attempts at getting into the film business: you need to be willing to go out of your way. He seems very mercurial at times but you still get why people want to get to know him. My version just happened to be the best I could come up with under the circumstances. It’s both simple and complicated. The approach makes actors a little off-balance because, obviously, the backgrounds aren’t real, but unlike green screen, where you’re surrounded by blank nothingness, the actors are aware of the projected backgrounds and can confidently interact with them. I think this was the best possible approach because I think it’s only too possible for a more literal historical drama would kind of miss what makes him so interesting. Anyhow, I wish I could say Makavejev was more directly inspirational, but I only really rediscovered him last year, after "Tesla" was shot. So much so that Tesla is pretty daring, taking some strange risks throughout. It would have been incredibly expensive to produce, but it was optioned by Jerzy Skolimowski (director of "Deep End" and "The Shout") and I flew to London to work with him on revisions and, soon enough, the money fell apart. I’d been thinking about him, after meeting someone who knew him, and I was going to reach out. People speaking to camera, presenting modern signifiers as a way in to the story.

It’s all coming back to me. But he was so busy the only time he could spare was if I shared a cab going to the airport with him. He died last year. I remember almost nothing from our conversation, there wasn’t much of anything practical to carry away from it, except this encouraging, sardonic spirit. Thankfully he proves himself wrong right away, able to talk at length about heroes, the production of his movie, and the special alchemical processes that made it so endearingly singular. But before that, actually, Manny Farber had gotten the script to Tom Luddy (film producer and co-founder of the Telluride film festival) and Tom was generous enough to get it to Dušan Makavejev, who was installed in San Francisco working on various projects with Coppola and American Zoetrope. You just have to be willing to take risks. He had a rough time, nurturing a career—he was sort of a gypsy, not unlike Skolimowski, who’s still making movies, wonderfully enough. That felt like part of the necessary texture and meaning of the movie. We’ve actually met once before. That’s what he does and I recently highlighted one such beautiful vision of the impossible meeting the possible in a video essay, which Almereyda confesses to have watched ("A friend of mine sent me your Unloved column about my movie and I was both charmed and horrified by it and suddenly here you are!") There’s no way to match what they’ve accomplished—what Godard continues to accomplish—but they’re strong, essential reference points. OK, it’s kind of flashing back to me. Directed by Michael Almereyda.

We went through Rooftop Films—might as well give them a shout-out—they provide you with a big screen, a projector and a projectionist. Almereyda studied art history at Harvard but dropped out after three years to pursue filmmaking. I did a video essay on "Sweet Movie" in the same series where I talked about "The Eternal." Also, more and more, I appreciate, and am haunted by, the extent to which films can be openly or furtively political, though the best of them aren’t schematically or stridently political. He lit up when he recognized the freshness and fun of it. I suggest a Tesla subgenre!

And I felt it was worthwhile to bring in a character asking questions I continue to ask about him. How did you decide what information to give your audience today? Almereyda frequently uses the same actors. His first film as writer/director was a self-financed, black-and-white short featuring Dennis Hopper, A Hero of Our Time, based on Mikhail Lermontov's novel of the same title. [laughs]. I’ll try answering the question by deflecting it. Early screenplays include Cherry 2000 (1987), the first draft for Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991), and uncredited work on Total Recall (1990). Shot in 1985, it was finished in 1987 and screened in the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. He was a gruff bear of a man, sardonic, but abruptly sweet when he smiled. Michael Almereyda (born April 7, 1960) is an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer. The performance you describe—I’m glad you were able to define it so well, but I have to credit Ethan himself more than any magic in my calibration.

And what I ended up making, 40 years later, was closer to Makavejev than to, say, Malick. Well it’s not particularly consistent, but it was an attempt to get inside Tesla’s head, and to acknowledge how, in a historical movie, we’re always inheriting images and ideas from the past, collaging history out of random sources.

Almereyda edited and contributed texts for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008, and William Eggleston: For Now, published by Twin Palms in 2010. What was the impetus for the approach? I feel like Michael Almereyda doesn’t live on this planet. I feel like Michael Almereyda doesn’t live on this planet.
The filmmakers I like most tend to be brave in that way. What do you imagine the film would have looked like if you’d made it when you first wrote it?

As you probably know, the movie came out of the first script I ever wrote, so I was rewriting myself and in a way annotating myself. By playing with ideas like vampire movies and Shakespeare plays, you were to me the next logical step after Orson Welles.

With Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Eli A. Smith, Josh Hamilton. I knew you as someone who had what I assumed were irreverent takes on classical ideas before learning first-hand that they were more seriously considered than that. "Binge Watch This: Director Michael Almereyda is the Avant-Garde Historian and Storyteller We Need", 'Brokeback,' 'Capote' Get Gotham Award Nods, "Creative Capital – Investing in Artists who Shape the Future", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Almereyda&oldid=978795414, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 17 September 2020, at 00:15. I give most of the credit to Ethan, because it’s sort of an impossible character to play.

His latest film, "Tesla," based on his first ever screenplay, is among the best movies in a career full of adventurous highs ("Nadja," "Experimenter," "Hamlet"). It’s a good question, and a bit overwhelming. Scout Tafoya is a critic and filmmaker who writes for and edits the arts blog Apocalypse Now and directs both feature length and short films. I went to the launch event for the book on Manny Farber you compiled last year (Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings). He has worked more than once with Suzy Amis, Karl Geary, Jared Harris, Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Isabelle Gillies, John Leguizamo, Lois Smith, Hannah Gross, and Jim Gaffigan. It fused the imagery and atmosphere of two of my favorite movies at the time: "The Man Who Fell To Earth" and "Days of Heaven." A more off-balance, questioning approach allows you to get at contradictions. Makavejev had a playfulness and an anger that feel absolutely valuable. In 2004, he directed an episode of the HBO series Deadwood, His most recent work has mainly involved documentaries and shorts.

When you wrote the film you were young and still getting to know the ins and outs of the film industry. I wouldn’t say that—I’d like to see more Tesla films.

Limits Don't Exist: Michael Almereyda on Tesla, Video Interview: Aaron Sorkin, Eddie Redmayne & Frank Langella on The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Sparse World-Building of Hulu’s Helstrom is a Failure of Imagination, Never Make Rules: Director Rachel Talalay on A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting, Netflix's Social Distance Struggles to Sum Up the Ordeal of 2020. In 2015 Almereyda received the Moving Image Creative Capital Award.[6]. It’s funny that you feel close to him.

The film charts Nikolai Tesla's part in what has become commonly known as … Even as Tesla has become more of an icon over the years, he remains a mystery, a mythological beast—but I didn’t want to yield to mythology. His first feature, Twister (1989), based on Mary Robison’s novel Oh, was a comedy about a dysfunctional mid-Western family. There was a retrospective at Anthology Film Archive, and it was amazing to get reacquainted with his movies on a big screen, to experience how great they are. Why should there be limits? He acquired a Hollywood agent on the strength of a spec script about Nikola Tesla[1]. I schooled myself in the art of screenwriting by reading the collected scripts of James Agee. I list his name in a big block of Thank You’s at the end of "Tesla." Anyhow, I’d be keen to watch a more studious, sweeping epic, with more money and spectacle and realistic sets. He has written criticism and commentary for The New York Times, Film Comment, Artforum, Bookforum, The Believer, and Triple Canopy. He’s done work on Manny Farber, Hampton Fancher, William Eggleston, Andrei Codrescu, Stanley Milgram and now Nikola Tesla. "Sweet Movie" was a very important film to me, I revisit that once a year. Almereyda studied art history at Harvard but dropped out after three years to pursue filmmaking. How do you play “brilliant” and “mysterious” and “unknowable”?

Hamlet (2000) was shot on Super 16mm and featured Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber and Sam Shepard. It’s how he’s been able to catalogue some of our most interesting creators with such grace and curiosity. And I think rear-screen images happens to look beautiful. The visuals have to go between these paper sets and more concrete ones and keep a coherent visual palate. Why not be open to the widest range of experiences and references? I love the gentle, confessional nature of "Tesla." Nadja (1994) was a comic vampire film shot on 35mm with Pixelvision inserts. At any rate, I met [Makavejev]—this is a tangent, but I haven’t told it to anyone else, and he was inspirational to me. You took things of which the public had an iconic understanding and ran with it and a deliberately non-classical, very contemporary direction. Yeah, he was a master at collaging documentary elements with fiction.

You mentioned the Manny Farber book I helped put together last year, Manny was an essential prompt for me, and continues to be important, as someone who acknowledged how interconnected movies can be with all the loose ends in your life. Marjorie Prime (2017), a philosophical science-fiction film based on Jordan Harrison's play of the same name, again screened at Sundance and won the Sloan Feature Film Prize. He has recently returned to fiction film with a 2013 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a spiritual successor to his earlier Hamlet. At 192 books? I don’t know how close he got to making his Tesla film, I knew of about a half dozen Tesla projects never happened, and I feel very lucky that this one worked out. This film, written, produced, directed by Michael Almereyda, seems to be hellbent on avoiding the sappy, Oscar-baiting biopics that start to spring up this time of year.

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