Oblivious To Oblivion
I have a theory about funny people. Humour is not something you turn on and off, like a faucet or an indifferent lover. Humour is about how you see and interact with the world; it is a way of life which only partially manifests itself in funny writing or comic films. Some proof for this came from Tom DiCillo, writer/director of Johnny Suede.
There is a startling image in that film, which seems to come out of nowhere, where Johnny comes upon a mannequin's hand sticking up in the middle of the street. According to DiCillo, "In my wanderings around New York, I tend to find a lot of objects. I found a number of those hands as I just walked down the street. I never really reached down and shook a hand like the way Johnny does in the movie, but I've seen them, and I have them in different places around my apartment. And it just struck me that it would be time to work that into a film.
"At one point, I threw one out the window at a truck driver who was revving his engine and scared the hell out of him. I'll never forget seeing that. This guy was sitting in his truck, revving his engine. I was sound asleep. I picked up this hand -- this mannequin hand -- and threw it, and it went right into the cab window of his truck and bounced off the seat, and he goes 'Aaaah aaah!' He saw this hand come in -- it was hilarious."
Truth is funnier, right?
DiCillo's latest film, Living In Oblivion (which he describes as "the Marx brothers meet Kafka" -- a good tag line, although not the sort you're likely to find on a poster) is about the shooting of three scenes for an independent film where every conceivable thing that could go wrong does. Lights explode in the middle of a tense scene. The line producer and the cameraman have difficulty working together because their relationship just ended. A boom mike slowly drifts into a shot. An actor loses her energy as she has to do more and more takes, and when she finally gives a deeply touching performance, the cameraman is off the set and can't capture it.
And so on, and so on...
"Much of what's in Living In Oblivion came from Johnny Suede," DiCillo explained. "Literally every day, something bad went wrong. I said to myself, 'Alright, at least it can't get any worse than this.' And, invariably, it did."
DiCillo's initial reason for making a film about filmmaking was that he was fascinated by what really went on on the set. He believed that "very few people have been able to see it and process it in some of the ways that I have." There is probably a lot of justification to this: as well as the two films he has written and directed, DiCillo has been a cinematographer on many low-budget films, particularly those of Jim Jarmusch (including Stranger Than Paradise).
"I have an utter fascination with what it takes to get a moment of beauty on film," DiCillo claimed, "the endless amounts of repetition, of frustration, of feeling as if the most beautiful moment in a take will inevitably be fucked by the technical shit. The more you say, 'Oh, look how beautiful that moment is,' the quicker the light will explode."
This fascination with the minutae of filmmaking led DiCillo to include a scene where the room tone is taken, the first time, in my memory, that it has been captured on film. A room tone takes place at the end of a shoot at a specific location; everybody is asked to remain perfectly still and silent for 30 seconds so that the sound technician can record the acoustics of the room.
"The very first time it happened I stood there -- and it usually comes at the end of a shoot, when you're exhausted after a 15 or 16 hour day -- and I distinctly remember looking at all these people who, just moments before, had been rushing around in utter, frantic chaos, and were now living statues," DiCillo said. "Without getting too heavy, it evoked to me the whole process of life and death."
As well as a fascination with the process of making a film, Living In Oblivion gave DiCillo the opportunity to throw off the constraints of getting the perfect shot or performance. "There was a part of me that deeply enjoyed sticking the microphone into the shot..." he admitted. "You're always protecting the sanctity of the frame, and I love sticking things in the frame. Some part of me feels that making this film was anarchistic and sacrilegious, and I like that."
Living In Oblivion came about "very, very quickly." According to DiCillo, he initially conceived of it, "and almost literally two months later, we were shooting it." (Anybody feel a little production envy?) The feature was shot in 21 days; it was financed largely by family and friends.
The actual events which take place on the set of his film within a film seem at odds with the general public's impression of filmmaking as highly glamourous, a fact DiCillo is quick to acknowledge. "I had a desire to deflate this bullshit that surrounds the whole image of filmmaking today," he claimed. "I said, 'I'm sick of that. I want to tell it as truthfully as I see it.' For instance, as a director, many times I have felt that I am despicable, that I don't know what I'm doing, that I have to lie in order to get what I want, that I'm betraying not only myself, but my best friends."
For this reason, DiCillo decided to let Steve Buscemi go far with the character of the director. And run with it he does. Buscemi is by turns manipulative and easily manipulated, firm in what he wants but swayed by the opinions of others. He occasionally rants and even gets into a fistfight. "It's a very exaggerated situation," DiCillo stated. "Everything is exaggerated, therefore the human behaviour is exaggerated."
Despite the many extremes of human behaviour portrayed in Living In Oblivion, DiCillo shied away from what he saw as the most destructive aspect of filmmaking: when people actively work against the film. For the most part, when there are problems in the film, they are technical.
The character of Chad Palomino (played by James LeGros) comes closest to somebody who undermines the production for personal reasons. Palomino is an actor with the handsome blonde good looks of a star who comes onto the set claiming he wants to cooperate to realize the director's vision, but who slowly, hilariously twists things around to his own benefit.
"But I wouldn't call it evil, what he does," DiCillo insisted. "I've been on many sets in which it is evil, what people's egos are doing. They are intentionally trying to screw you up." DiCillo didn't push that as far as he could have, he explained, because he didn't think he could make it funny.
(When the film first appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival, rumours swirled, as rumours will, that the character of Chad Palomino was based on Johnny Suede star Brad Pitt. DiCillo insisted that that wasn't the case, that the character was a composite of a number of actors he had seen work on a variety of different films. In fact, Pitt was set to play Palomino, but had to back out at the last minute when had to do some additional work on Legends of the Fall. DiCillo argued that the fact he agreed to play the part indicated that Pitt didn't see a lot of himself in it.)
DiCillo claimed that the title Living In Oblivion is not a comment on independent filmmaking, although the connection seems obvious. According to DiCillo, he wrote the words on his bulletin board eight years ago: "I liked the way it sounded. Living In Oblivion. The vs and the is went together really well, I thought." When it came time to name the film within a film, it came to him in an instant.
Naming the entire film was a little more difficult. "I think Truffaut took the best title," DiCillo said. "Day for Night, that's a beautiful title."
Eventually, he decided to use the phrase for the entire film. "It struck me, Living In Oblivion, these people were working so hard in their own world of reality that only existed for them. That state of forgetfulness was what they were in, that state of being forgotten was the state they were in. It just seemed to apply to this particular group of people."
Perhaps, but one suspects a lot of independent filmmakers can relate to that feeling. In order to remove themselves from that isolation, a lot of independent filmmakers are moving into the mainstream, going for bigger budgets and stars who can open a film big. Is that the secret dream of all independent filmmakers?
"It seems to be that way," DiCillo admitted. "I don't want that for myself, but it does seem to be that, for the most part, that seems to be the direction people are taking. I think that the whole term 'independent film' has now taken on a whole different meaning, and I think it will become time to come up with a different term to call the other films that are really, truly independent films."
DiCillo linked this tendency to the widespread popularity of film. "Filmmaking has become the profession of the decade. Everybody wants to be a filmmaker. And everybody wants to be the filmmaker whose face is on ever magazine. At times it's ludicrous, at times it's tremendously depressing. But that's the state of it at the moment."
This article first appeared in Reel Independence, Volume 3, Number 7, November/December 1995.
