AVC: You could take any of the long monologues in Gates Of Heaven and say, "This is what the movie hinges on," but the one that sticks is the one by the older brother at Bubbling Well, who's spouting all this business lingo about the path to success, while he's only an assistant at a pet cemetery. An assistant to his younger brother, no less. It's not quite funny and not quite sad.
EM: I would call it hopeless. There's a perverted hopefulness that runs through Gates Of Heaven, and you have to wonder... hope for what? Life after death? Reunion with our loved ones? Hope for some kind of love, mortal or otherwise? For business success? For meaning? Hope for anything! In a sea of utter hopelessness! [Laughs.]
I saw Gates Of Heaven again about a year ago, at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival. I sat next to Roger. I hadn't seen it in probably a decade. And I thought, "This is fucked-up!" That's the nicest thing you can say about a work of art. Usually, the interesting ones are nuts. In literature classes, no one points out that Moby Dick is written by a madman, who probably makes Ahab look like a piker. You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but. I kind of liked watching Gates Of Heaven. I thought, "This is nuts!"
One of my favorite guys, the guy I did the Miller High Life campaign with, Jeff Williams, paid me the greatest compliment that I've ever heard. The first day that we worked together, he looked at me in a kind of funny way and said, "You know, when the director has everything set up perfectly, my job is to come in and fuck it up. But with you, Errol, I don't have to come in and fuck it up, because it's fucked-up already!" [Laughs.]
AVC: Once you completed Gates Of Heaven, what were your best hopes? To get it on PBS? Play the festival circuit?
EM: I don't know. If one thought clearly about what one's prospects were, one wouldn't do anything. [Laughs.] One would just go home and live with mom.
There was no festival circuit, really. There were a couple of festivals here and there. It went to Berlin. It went to London. In Berlin, there was a very small audience. It was not translated into German. There were no subtitles. I didn't want to watch the movie again, so the guy from the festival said we'd go out and get a bite to eat and come back 10 minutes before the end of the movie, because they had announced that I was going to be there. We get back—and this was a very, very sad spectacle for a filmmaker—the theater was empty. The film was playing to no one. [Laughs.]
So that was the festival circuit.
AVC: How are the festivals different from what they were 20-odd years ago?
EM: Everything has changed. There was no independent-film movement in those days. Today, I suppose you'd say that Gates Of Heaven is an independent film, but in those days, there was no such animal. And it wasn't necessarily an art film, though I suppose that's what it was pegged as. There was no nomenclature for it.
Documentaries in the '70s had become mired, in my view, in kind of vérité retreads. What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary." To call a documentary any one thing would be a mistake, when it includes Chris Marker and Georges Franju and Fred Wiseman and Ross McElwee. But it had become—and this is something I really don't much care for—a form of social work. The documentary filmmaker was a social worker, exposing the perfidies of the world and offering possible solutions and guidance.
AVC: There seems to be a new wave of that with the recent string of low-budget "issue" docs, like Outfoxed.
EM: Well, in a certain sense, I'm sympathetic to that. The fact of the matter is, there's always been an element of agitprop to documentary filmmaking. And let's be clear. Right now, we live in bad times in this country, and the fact that there are filmmakers addressing political and social issues is to me a good thing. I look at them as different from stories about the wheelchair Olympics, or retarded people who are really just like you or me.
AVC: Hey, Best Boy is a fine film.
EM: [Laughs.] I like Best Boy too. But my fear is documentaries becoming just one thing. Early on, I would take complaints from audiences. When you see Gates Of Heaven in a theater with an audience, people are laughing, and I would get complaints. Which came as a surprise to me. Complaints that I had just set people up for ridicule, that it was mean-spirited, that the movie was somehow cheap for that reason. But I kind of love the characters in that film. I find many of them ludicrous, but it doesn't mean I don't like them, or feel sympathetic with them, or compelled by them in some way. Quite the contrary.
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