This film, following the pattern set in Bell
Diamond made a few years earlier, is firmly rooted in its setting,
in this case San Francisco, and reflects both time, place, and a very
particular cultural milieu. My friends mostly, and the kinds of lives
they lived there in San Francisco before the dot.com boom and bust altered
the city for a while. Like Bell Diamond and Slow Moves,
this film too was completely improvised, in this case around a basic
idea and structure, around which were wrapped ideas rooted in and reflective
of the lives of my friends, albeit considerably shifted from their real
lives.
For example: my friend Barbara worked running
computers for a liquor distributor, each evening loading up these behemouth
machines which tracked sales, etc. Jon English, who’d done the
tracks for me on two films by then, was indeed a composer and musician,
and while that remained, he also slipped into the shoes of another acquaintence
who worked at the Exploratorium, the hands-on science museum in San
Francisco. Nathaniel Dorsky, wonderful filmmaker - some of whose scraps
are in Rembrandt Laughing (the hand processed blue material,
and sand imagery) - does indeed have a collection of sands from around
the world. And so on: Ed Green did run a frame making business; Jerry
Barrish does run a bail bond business; John Powers is an architect;
Peter Machel did aspire to being a gangster; Kate Dezina had been a
somewhat famous soap opera star - and she gets to be weepy. Most the
people in the film are set in their own workplaces, doing something
close or similar to what they did in real life. The story though was
not theirs, but rather a kind of gentle amalgamation of an attitude,
a way of living and approaching life which reflected their thinking
and feelings.
And so, inserted into a basic structure, and
an idea about story-telling, we improvised. The structure is cued with
the title cards, with dates, perhaps too quickly on screen to be quite
perceived: they run from a Sunday morning, the next day Monday, a bit
later, then noonish on Tuesday; then early afternoon but a week later
on Wednesday; then Thursday later in the afternoon; then Friday evening,
but a month later; then for Saturday we move quickly, a shot for each
character, through the whole day; Sunday morning a year later is the
setting for the last scene. The “story” is told by what
happens, and which the viewer is not given, in the spaces between.
To say we improvised - since many people have
the quite incorrect idea that this means throwing people in front of
a camera and yelling “swim” (and indeed some films I have
seen seem to have such a mode of improvising) - means we talked about
characters, ideas, and in some cases some things were written or nearly
written. For example, in the opening scene a number of the jokes were
conceived and written by myself; Jon English thought up, wrote and rehearsed
his presentation as an Exploratorium guide; the sequence with the “gangsters”
was written and prepared by Peter and John. On the other hand some sequences
were pretty much spun up on the site, during shooting, with ideas shared,
triggered by visual matters, recent little things that might have happened
to one of the participants, a newspaper clipping. Thus the casual and
relaxed manner of the film is derived out of its making, but is firmly
grounded in the reality in which it was set - a peculiar and most specific
cultural island in a particular time. When most people smoked weed;
when the AIDS epidemic was reaching a crest, when many in this milieu
casually skirted around the usual American guidelines of fixed jobs,
of fitting into a corporate life-style. These things, not shown, are
implicit in Rembrandt Laughing and the lives and characters which inhabit
it. It could only be made by being a part of this world, of working
inside it rather than sitting outside. Perhaps it can also only be understood
in some senses by those for whom it presents an accurate mirror.
Need I say that Rembrandt Laughing
is one of my favorites among my own work. It cost perhaps $10,000.
As a little aside, when editing this film, thanks
to Jill Godmilow who let me use her flatbed table in NY, she popped
in one day to see how things were going, and was shocked when she saw
that I was editing the original reversal material (the Fuji 400 I’d
bought a lot of), and that when I made a cut, the “out”
went not to a trim bin, but into the garbage. Like most filmmakers,
simply the handling of original was a virtual sacrilege to her; to edit
with it and throw away the outs was heresy. I’d been working like
that since 1965 when I shifted from negative to reversal film: cut original,
no trim bins, stick with a decision. The same attitude applies to all
other aspects - setting up, shooting, directing: have a clear idea,
make a decision, and go with it.