Hal Hartley

Interviews with Hal Hartley

Interviews with Hal Hartley “The Particularity and Peculiarity of Hal Hartley: An Interview” Interview by Justin Wyatt, 1997. Originally published in Film Quarterly, Vol. 52, Number 1, Fall 1998 (University of California Press). justin wyatt: While all of your films alternate between comic and serious moments, the tone seems to have become much darker with Henry Fool. hal hartley: The tone may be a little more serious, but I don’t really think that Henry Fool is a movie that posits a dark view of the world. I think that it offers an enormous amount of forgiveness and a lot of room for people who are different. In order to render that feeling , I did have to get into specifically dark situations. Henry, of course, is dark, but he’s dark in the way that Mephistopheles is dark in Faust. He’s a character who is a devil, but also foolish, funny, and witty. jw: Were you concerned about the audience having to identify with Henry, who is, after all, completely dissolute, a pedophile, and a drunkard? hh: I wanted people to identify with him because of the ugly parts, to recognize that a person at a particular place and time is capable of either making horrible mistakes or doing heroic deeds. What’s really exciting for me as a reader or as a film viewer is the testing of my allegiance to a character. If I like somebody, and suddenly the text starts giving me clues that I’m being duped with the character—what happens? That emotional connection can be manipulated and toyed with. I wanted a character who was completely perverted and dumb in certain simple ways but, at the same time, brilliant. He says a lot of great things which I pulled out of books along the way. jw: Traditionally, your films seem based around a certain refusal to state certain things, to show certain things. . . . hh: That’s true. I remember that in Amateur, like most of my other films, a lot is not shown. I was more interested in what happens when people talk about something that happened in the past or something that will happen in the future or is simply happening somewhere else. There’s something else going on: the immediate intimate maneuvering of people around each other while they are dealing with information. In the sea change that’s been gradually happening with the work, that’s one of the things that I began to notice and had an urge to do differently. I thought that I don’t want them to talk about what is happening or will happen, I want to witness them doing; I want to look at the actual event. It’s funny, I talk to other filmmakers, and they tell me, “Well, that’s how we got into filmmaking in the first place. That was our first urge.” My first urge was to watch the people conversing or struggling with each other about other things. jw: Are you trying to break through this reserve that has been part of your style? hh: It’s liberating to break through that reserve. Of course, it was dictated by the story. I knew that I had written the story in a way to suggest an ugly, loud, and abrasive environment. jw: Henry Fool is conceptualized on a grander scale than the other films and seems more committed to the lived experience of the characters . hh: I wanted the characters to be more recognizable to general peo72 | Hal Hartley ple. I don’t think I had been so interested in that in the past—although in Trust and The Unbelievable Truth, perhaps so. In the other films, the particularity and the peculiarity of the people were enough for me. In this one, I really wanted more people to be able to recognize these characters and their problems. I wanted to leave a very specific impression of what it’s like to live in America at this point in time. In terms of the scope, at a certain point in my work, I said I really want to tell a big fat story, a character-based story. That usually means recognition—we have to recognize these characters. That’s the fun and the art of fiction, trying to take characters that are patently unbelievable and make them recognizable to us. jw: Were there inspirations for this larger-scale enterprise...