Don Hertzfeldt
At the almost absurdly young age of 24, filmmaker and animator Don Hertzfeldt had what many in his field would spend the rest of their professional lives chasing: an Oscar nomination, for his 2000 animated short Rejected. His style of shaky, stick-figure drawings and overtly dark humor found a niche with cult audiences, marking the young Hertzfeldt as an icon to his fans, some of whom tattoo themselves with his more known characters. In recent years, Hertzfeldt has continued to animate films in his preferred mode, by hand and without computers, but has expanded stylistically with longer, moodier films like 2006's Everything Will Be OK, the first of a three part series tackling issues like mortality and mental illness. After two long years of late-night animating, Hertzfeldt has completed the second in the series, I Am So Proud Of You, which screens at the Music Box Friday night. Decider recently spoke with Hertzfeldt about film technology's slow death, public speaking, and watching his audience absorb a film.
Decider: Because you have this preferred mode of making your films with a camera and without computers, it seems like you sometimes get painted into this Don vs. technology argument. Do you feel that?
Don Hertzfeldt: Yeah and that's not true, at all. And I've been talking about this a lot to students. It's whatever you're most comfortable with. Technology is completely irrelevant. Whatever winds up on the screen is the most important thing. We shoot on film and I animate on paper, but I edit digitally and I do my sound digitally, and there's no reason that these technologies can't work together like that and make hybrids. The real drag is just for students who maybe want to try 16mm or try doing some of these techniques, because it's harder and harder, if not impossible, for them to do that. There's really no options anymore except for using these same few pieces of software that are available in most schools now, and that's just too bad. I just keep going back to the idea that, shouldn't we have 100 years of film technology to work with? Like, why throw anything away? We should just have this giant toy box of cool film toys to play with. Like, I want to see Technicolor again, and it just seems like we're more limited now than we should be in strange ways.
D: Like in the case of music production, there's a whole market for collecting and utilizing old musical technology, but not so with film.
DH: Right. Wasn't there a White Stripes album that came out and they actually said in the liner notes that it was all recorded in analog? And if you compare it to music, it's kind of like if it was the '80s again and everyone was using synthesizers and they put down their guitars. But it's not just that they're putting down their guitars; they're destroying every guitar in the country. [Laughs.] They're saying, "It's only going to be synthesizers from now on. It sounds just like a guitar, more or less, and it's easier to do it because we don't have to learn the chords." But then they just smash them and there's a big bonfire of guitars.
D: Forcing you to embrace the future.
DH: Yeah, that's what it feels like and, well, I like guitars. [Laughs.]
D: You must be quite a professional public speaker at this point with all the years of touring for films and audience Q&As, right?
DH: You know, I don't wear my glasses onstage and so I just can't see anybody and that's really the trick. It's so less terrifying to be staring out there when it's just† a big amorphous blob.
D: How has the reception for I Am So Proud Of You been so far?
DH: It's just so amazing to talk to people at screenings, especially about this movie. Even only having seen it a few times with an audience, I can already tell, kind of how Everything Will Be OK was, that one night a line will get a big laugh and then the next night, in a different city, the same line gets a gasp and it's just up to the audience here and there to decide whether it's a comedy or a tragedy. The thing is, when you release a movie on DVD or on TV, obviously, it's going to reach a lot more people, but you can't actually be there to see it happen. You can't, like, hide in the back of the room under the last row of chairs and actually see it work or not work and unfold for people. After two years of working on this thing in a vacuum, it's just so rewarding to hear people laugh or then, afterwards, to just talk to everybody. I really enjoy that. I'm a little surprised that I enjoy it as much as I do. [Laughs.] But its nice to just finally get out of the cage and run around with this thing after so long.
