When, a few years ago, I agreed to interview the filmmaker Rob Tregenza on the eve of his career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, I did not anticipate it would, before long, lead to a producing credit on his new film. Nor a whole other feature in the time between that he thanked me for helping motivate, or an extended interview on his strange experiences working with Béla Tarr.
This week marks the release of Tregenza’s sixth feature, Fast, a characteristically audacious and formally virtuosic that opens at MoMA on Wednesday, August 12 for a world-premiere one-week run, followed by an opening at Los Angeles’ Laemmle cinemas on August 21, and a preview screening courtesy of Acropolis on August 18 that’s followed by a recorded conversation between Tregenza and Jonathan Rosenbaum. (Two days after that, the same venue will, via Mezzanine, host a screening of his 1988 debut Talking to Strangers that’s followed by a recorded Q&A.)
If you suspect I’m biased in Fast‘s favor, good work; you are correct. But I have as many questions about the movie, its endless particulars and peculiarities, as anyone else. Thus this conversation that I hope you—whether you choose to be the listener or the reader—find as illuminating as I, the interviewer.
Read or listen to our conversation below, and subscribe here:
The Film Stage: How are you? How’s it going?
Rob Tregenza: I think I’m well; I think I’m doing well. I think the main thing is that you push so hard on a film for so long, you know? And then you finally get this close to the premiere, and there’s sort of a mixed emotions, right? You’re glad you’re finally finished with the film, in a sense, and then you also then start thinking about what you could have done and didn’t do. So the hypotheticals or the what-ifs come back and you sort of have to push them away and say, “Well, it didn’t happen. You didn’t do that. This is what you have. This is what the world’s going to get. So don’t worry about it.” But at the same time, there’s always that sort of second-guessing about, “If I would have shot that scene differently, how it would have come out now?”
So you’re kind of in between, right? It’s that moment of being in between things, which is creative and yet fraught, always, with some degree of danger because the in-betweens are where the thresholds, where things change and where I start re-evaluating what I’ve done when you go through it, right? So that’s sort of where I am. I’m sort of on the threshold, I guess you should say. [Laughs] In between.
And this happens with every film?
Yeah, yeah, it does. But this one’s different because it was done so fast. You know, I’ve sort of learned my lesson: now I sort of see the advantage of speed in a different way, you know? I think I’m much more willing just to do something—to do it, right—and not second-guess it as much. To look at the necessity for speed or to be fast as a creative element and not so much as a detriment, you know? Because I think I tend to be more ponderous [Laughs] in my thinking sometimes, you know? So then you get caught in the double binds. So when you just say, “Well, no, we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it now. We’re going to do it fast,” then a lot of the hypotheticals go off real fast and now you’re just on the road.
So that’s a big difference after, literally, the screening in New York of The Fishing Place, I got back on a train going back to my farm with that feeling of, “So what are we going to do now? Wait another 20 years [Laughs] or 10 years?” The clock’s ticking for me; I’m 75. I know I’m not as strong or smart or agile as I was, but I still can operate and shoot. And so to just let time sort of pass away? I said, “No, no, we’re going to see if we can do it. If we can do it fast.” I think that’s one reason why the name Fast was something that I liked, even in the title: it’s sort of a metaphor for the process of making this film.
Well, I watched the movie again two nights ago and it had actually been, somehow, six months to the day since I first saw it. And I was thinking about this thing that you call “a slow event about going fast,” which is an interesting contradiction and friction that I think runs through the movie, in that the film comes from a kind of European art-house, long-take, Miklós Jancsó-esque tradition of the long-take and the philosophy of the mise-en-scène of a roving camera, time-image, all of that. Who knows if we even have time to get into all of that. But I think something about the movie that I find really stimulating is that it has that opulence and that elegance, but it is also not about an exact preciseness or perfection. It’s a movie where you can have the camera shake and you allow the camera to drift a bit and not make things necessarily the central focus of the image.
Right.
Even as the camera vibrates, it’s making me think about there being a human being operating it, and as the image drifts, it’s still finding things in the larger canvas of the image that I can focus on. So if a car and a girl in that car are at the center of the image, and then the camera drifts right, you have the trees, you have the other lane of the road, you have the buildings. Could you talk a little bit about that as maybe a kind of architecture or scaffolding for this film?
Well, that scene in that little street in Virginia, actually was a town called Glasgow, where we go around the block twice where she’s driving the Lotus and then she’s stopped by the police car behind. That’s a good example of sort of maybe what you’re alluding to, which is where you have a scene that is basically visually not-perfect, in the sense that there are drifting, there is different drifts, there are bumps, there are things that if I was being particular in the old days, I would have said “cut,” right? Of course I don’t say “cut,” but where I sort of do find it, “Oh, I mean, that’s problematic—bang.” Right? And so those kinds of things in the past I would probably have worked harder to avoid them, but now I embrace them. Not because of incompetence, but because they are announcing, in the image, the physicality of the place and the actual environmental situation. So as long as it’s not totally disruptive, I think it’s part of the validation of the process.
And then by shooting it in 2.66, which is the widest aspect ratio you can do, you find yourself in positions where you have to use both extreme ends of the frame to be able to get something in the frame. So it’s sort of the Spaghetti Western problem of: where do you put the center action? I mean, you stick it way over here, way over there, put it right in the middle. You know, so you’re always, with that aspect ratio, finding things on the edges that, in a sense, are not “well-framed,” right? Or not intentional. So it tends to open up the physicality of the physical place. In that scene in Glasgow, there’s a lot of stuff happening on the edges, right, that are almost equally as important as what’s in the center of the frame. But that does give the viewer in a theater much more freedom as to situate where your point of view is, you know? Am I going to follow just her? If you follow her, it’s going to take your eyes right to the extreme edge of the left frame and bounce you back to the right. And then when she hits the bumps, you’re going to feel the sort of visceral sense of what she felt when the camera car hits the same bump that she hits.
So those things I would have, at some time long ago, said, “Oh, that’s a mistake.” Right? And now I’ve sort of embraced that, and I embrace the aspect ratio as creating a different kind of relationship physically between the camera and the spectator in the theater. And you feel that bump, you know? It’s something visceral and you lose the sense of where the center of the frame is, where all of a sudden the center of the frame doesn’t matter—you have to go way over here somewhere, or way over there somewhere to follow your desires. I mean, I think I like that part; I like that scene a lot because it gives you an opportunity early on in the film to start thinking about composition, you know? Not in a big flashy way, but in this film, I have to pay attention to the edges. I have to see the narrative, whatever the narrative is, but in the context of the physical place. And if I don’t have the physical place in my head, then the narrative’s [Laughs] not going to make much sense.
I’m, like we said, in between the narrative and the physical reality, so to speak, of the image. And then we’re asking you, as a viewer, to participate in the creation of the meaning of it, right? So the plan séquence is much more open than the montage. But yet, at the same time, in that openness, it gives you a sort of responsibility to make choices. So it’s not just, “Well, just sit back and just let it happen.” You have to happen to let it happen. Does that answer the question anyway or…?
It answers it in a few ways.
[Laughs] I start talking and I go and I have to… too many words, you know? That’s one of my problems, Nick, you know? I think I should shut up but I keep on going on. But to answer your question:
I think it’s the aspect ratio and it’s in the hermeneutic process of physically situating your body in a theater in relation to an image that’s supposedly in the world—requires you to feel, physically, a lot more than we understand that we feel. You know? We often don’t think of our bodies in the theater. In fact, we are sort of told not to think about gravity or not to think about who’s eating popcorn next to you. So it’s like the suppression of your body in relationship to the image privileges an intellectual reading, right? Rather than a physical experience.
And I think it has to be both, right? You’ve got to have a physical reaction, a body reaction to the image simultaneously to a mental reaction to the image. The mind and the body are engaged in cinema simultaneously—just as the sound and the picture is engaged simultaneously.
You told me a story—and it’s time to do a little name-dropping here—about making Inside/Out, and Jean-Luc Godard made a very obscure joke about Ida Lupino. Could you recount that for me?
You know, Jean-Luc has this thing with jokes and double entendre. It goes all the way back. It’s always functioning in his brains. And we were doing pre-production on Inside/Out, and I would get, like, maybe—that was the day of faxes—my fax machine would burn up with faxes from Jean-Luc. I’d get three, four a day sometimes. He was involved in casting, he was involved in fundraising, he was involved in producing, so we would get into these discussions about production that were very valuable for me. His two ideas he gave me, the one we’re going to discuss now, I didn’t really realize the value of it [Laughs] until, like, eight months ago. He said to me right before we went to production, “Shoot it fast and hard and beautiful like Ida Lupino shot Fast, Hard, and Beautiful.” I knew Ida Lupino; I knew she was an actress. I didn’t know she was a director and I didn’t know the film.
But I remembered—this was my instructions, right, as the co-producer telling the director, “Shoot it fast, hard and beautiful like Ida Lupino.” So I sort of thought, “Okay, fine.” I didn’t really process it, you know? I just sort of, “Fine.” So we went out and I shoot fast and I shoot hard, “hard” meaning “difficult,” and I try to shoot beautiful. But I didn’t make those three… concepts. I didn’t integrate them and I didn’t think about them as operating simultaneously. And I didn’t think about Ida Lupino. So finally I’m sitting on location and I realize the name of the film I’m shooting is Fast. And then that thought came back, or the memory came back of Jean-Luc faxing me that this is the way I should do Inside/Out. And I realize I didn’t do Inside/Out like that: I didn’t do it fast, I did it hard, and I didn’t do it as beautiful as I could do it. So the penny dropped and I said, “Okay, make this film beautiful, make it hard, make it fast.” And basically do it.
The fast part is: we shot the whole film in 10 days. We didn’t do any overtime, so there was no day that was more than 12 hours, 10 to 12 hours max in 10 days—so it had to be fast. And it had to be hard meaning “difficult.” The crane shots we’re doing, the production value, the levels of it um and then cognitively, conceptually hard, I wanted it to be thought-provoking. And then I said, “This time, everything, if you can make it beautiful, make it beautiful. Don’t ignore, or if there’s an opportunity for beauty, do it.” That was sort of the memory that came back.
So I think that, in a funny way, this film feels more like Talking to Strangers to me than any of my other films. And I’m not sure, honestly, I’m not sure why. I think, Nick, it’s partly—once again—episodic. In this case it’s a story not of an artist wandering around; it’s a woman who is a type of artist finding herself. So there’s that quest thing in both of them. There’s an episodic structure in both of them. A lot more montage in this one, obviously, but that goes back to Godard, in a sense, teaching me that with montage, you can’t do art without both—without the plan séquence and without the cut. So there’s more editing in Fast, but it’s still slow—back to your other point. I think there’s around 20 scenes or something in there, but the majority, the length of the shots is around 4 minutes per shot, out to 10 minutes per shot. So they’re all in that 3-to-10-minute range and then you have the montage sections, inside, as linkage that Talking to Strangers didn’t have.
Yeah, the sense of montage in the film surprised me watching it again because in my memory the entire film was Talking to Strangers-esque. I’m still reeling from you saying you didn’t make Inside/Outas beautifully as you could, because that’s one of the most beautiful films. But we needn’t dwell on that.
I think there is also the use of color.
Mmm-hmm.
I think when you add the palette on top of the black-and-white, go into the color realm, it all of a sudden accesses, aesthetically and historically, that palette changes up a lot of stuff, right? I think black-and-white is beautiful, yes, but it’s austere, in a way. And when I shoot color, all of a sudden you’re just… your senses are pushed away from the austerity to sort of the opulence of things. I mean, this is why I like color—maybe in that sense. I mean, there’s shots in Inside/Out—like the scene in the swimming pool in the snow where she finds him sleeping in the bottom of the swimming pool—that is just one of the best, most beautiful things I’ve ever shot. But I wonder what it would have… maybe that scene would have not worked even in color. Maybe it needed snow.
So, I mean, I don’t know. I’m sort of in between, betwixt and between. But the austerity of black-and-white drives me back to um the filmmakers that made me look at black-and-white and sort of evaluate it, and they tended—or tend—to be like Dreyer, right? Where you sort of have to look there and sort of strip away the distraction, or in many cases the noise, and deal with the skeleton, right, of the image in a totally different way than the flesh of the color.
Where did you shoot Fast?
It was shot, most of it, in Lexington, Virginia, and then half of it in Richmond, Virginia. So the first week was down in Lexington, which is in the Blue Ridge, which is in the Shenandoah area. That valley, of course, was the valley where the army of Northern Virginia basically operated in the Civil War, and the heart of the Southern Confederacy was through that area. So it has incredible, in my mind, incredible but damaged beauty, right? It has the scars of industrialization that go back to when the Scots-Irish were imported in, basically, as slave labor way back in the early days of Virginia, to put the tunnels in and to lay the railroad tracks. So you have this beautiful piece of land that has a historical connection to the Civil War, and then you have this connection to the migration from the east to the west that came through there. Then you have all the railroads which necessitated the tunnels and the engineering which pushed immigration. And then you have the South as it is today.
So it physically is a location, historically, that has so much memory associated with it and so much history associated with it and so much beauty associated with it and so much paradox in it, I just found the place as equal, if more important than the characters. I couldn’t have couldn’t have wouldn’t have come up with Sterling without having processed a lot of that stuff in my head as well. That’s why she’s Scots-Irish. I mean, that’s why we have the whole cavalier tradition of the Confederate cavalry which goes back, of course, to their idea that they somehow came from England. They came [Laughs] from England, basically, as literally white slaves until they managed to get themselves out of the contracts. But in the Southern mythology, they’re all sort of knights in armor riding around, and that was part of the ethos of that part of the valley and the Confederacy and the cavalry.
I’m playing with all of that, you know? And then moving it into the present day, the cars then come in there, which is another level of the gestalt—how technology changes consciousness and how technology changes human behavior. So they go from the cavalry, they go to the sports car to, in a sense, the stock car to wherever they’re doing now—the pickup truck, right? So they go from the tunnels to the trains to the cars.
The reason I ask is because, despite the rich history that you’re describing and you can kind of describe offhand off the top of your head—it’s interesting enough for that—this is not a part of the country that is usually depicted on screen and even rarer that it’s depicted on screen in this manner: an elegant, formally audacious, art-house context. And I wonder if there was a particular attraction to that distinction and how you kind of work with that area when it, like you say, is so naturally beautiful. You don’t have to dress it up. But there is still that distinction of: this is not a place that is usually shown in such a context, under such forms.
Yeah, and there’s also the whole issue of race that has to be addressed. You know, you can’t have the South without talking about slavery and the consequences of that. I didn’t want to glamorize, you know, the valley, but I wanted to use it as sort of a microcosm for Americana, right? And I think, having done two films in Norway, that was one of the things on the train going back from New York. In my head I said, “No, it’s time to get back to the roots and it’s time to get back to the American experience, right? Time to get back to the American historical context.” So I understood, going in, that I’m making a piece of art, right? That is in some ways alien to the art-house mentality, right? Stock cars, people fighting, and in stock and racing. So I like that; I like the idea that I was trying to make sort of an action film for the art-house audience. And I also was aware that there would be maybe some stigma against Virginia because of Virginia’s historical contributions to some of the—I hate to say, but nevertheless must say—some of the negative aspects of American history. So that’s also there too.
I’m dealing with a place that rarely is, as you said, rarely seen in the art house. Why? Because culturally it’s projected as being alien to the values of the art house, and then because it’s the South, then you have to deal with the prejudices about prejudices [Laughs] in the South. Which is certainly not a top issue in art-house. But at the same time I said, “Well, no, I want to do something that invites a discussion about a whole bunch of stuff that’s rarely talked about, and invites an opportunity for people who, say, wouldn’t go to Lexington, Virginia, wouldn’t go to a stock car race, wouldn’t go to a bowling alley, wouldn’t go to that kind of situation. What happens when they encounter it in an art house?” And we’re about to find out. [Laughs]
I think there’s a sense, Nick, a lot of stuff I do is research, right? I mean, it’s for me and, I think, for culture; I’m trying to figure out why and how things work the way they work, you know? And a lot of it comes out of my early dissertation, really, about trying to look at how culture and history and technology impact the arts. I haven’t completely given up the idea that art is also research in a way—that it is an opportunity for encounter, dialogue, discussion, disagreement, and that when that happens, then there’s an opportunity for, maybe, growth. You’re looking at different people from a different point of view than you would normally think. I mean, I hope that, in a way, when somebody encounters Fast, they are obviously encountering themselves in some ways. And then, secondly, that they’re learning something about America as it exists today based on America, what it was, right? So that historical process of time and place, what changes through time and place, that we’re more aware of it, right?
I think that’s in the art house. The stuff that I like in the art house always has had that sort of engagement with history at a very fundamental level and challenges you to consider what your belief system is and challenges you to sort of say, “Okay, what do I really think about white crackers in the South? What do I really think about some woman like this that wants to be a Formula One race car driver?” When everyone would say she’s got no chance in hell for that to happen, given what we give what’s situated in the narrative. But we’ll figure that out. I mean, I’m curious how… I have no idea how this film’s going to play out. I don’t; I have no idea. But I think, hopefully, it’s a challenge and a joy and a pleasure to play with it. And be played by it. It’s a two-way thing: to play with it and be played by it. It plays you; the film will play you. There’s so many questions, there’s so many unresolved situations, there’s so many paradoxes, that if you’re going to make any sense out of it or some sense out of it, you have to make some sense about yourself relative to it. You have to sort of balance all that in the art theater? [Laughs] I think that’s why the art theater is not completely dedicated to commercial values. Because it says, “Okay, yeah, we are still, at some level, interested in the subject of art and the tradition of it.”
I remember when you and I first spoke—three years ago now, for the MoMA retrospective—and you said something that really resonated with me at the time and I think is a very good guidepost for presenting and surviving as an art house film, when you’re talking about Talking to Strangers and you said that the movie has to be up to a certain level of discourse and that it’s photographed on film, it’s photographed professionally, it has a stereo mix. Effectively, it looks and feels like a real movie.
Right.
And that’s talking also about a movie that is now close to 40 years old.
Right.
Do you still feel that way about presenting movies in whatever kind of environment or ecosystem we’re talking about, which is of course very different 40 years later? Do you think that that has remained constant or, as I feel like you’re getting at a little bit, have the goalposts shifted and certain tenets and certain core values remain but maybe something else has changed?
No. No, because I think that what’s changed is exhibition and distribution, and the actual film event—or the thing, whatever you want to identify it—has to stand over time. It has to be able to function at a certain level where you can compare my work, even though it’s 40 years old, that film needs to be compared today to a film, shall we say, that’s also an equal level of production value. It has to be compared, for example, to something that was 40 years before it. So I want to continue to shoot like black-and-white, for example. I want my black-and-white to be as good as the black and white from Dreyer, black-and-white from Bergman. I want my color to be as “good” as Leone and the Spaghetti Westerns. I want the sound to be as “good” as Robert Altman’s mixes. I want the level of production and the coverage system to be able to stand over time, equal to time.
And that, I think, is part of: if you’re going to make comparisons within “the art world,” you’ve just got to hit a level of discourse; it’s got to be of somewhat equal value, somewhat equal technique. So if I look at Antonioni and something that I really love—like, Story of a Love Affair, which is my favorite Antonioni movie—I look at the black-and-white photography there; I want my black-and-white photography in in Fast to be equal to that. I want my camera moves in Fast to be equal to that 360 shot on the bridge in Story of a Love Affair. So I haven’t changed that.
Now, environmentally, distribution, exhibition’s changed. So people say, “Well, why? You know, you can look at Fast on this.” [Picks up iPhone] You can. I mean, I did the other night, I put it, popped up, and it was perfectly framed, right? 2.66. It worked great, right? And I actually thought, “Well, it looks better than I thought it would look.” I actually watched most of the film on my iPhone just to play with it and be played by it. But I didn’t make it for the iPhone. I made it for the screen and I made it to stand the test of time against or with—not necessarily against, but with—the films that go before and will come after. So that 35mm, which has become an obsession with me, is enabling me to stay with the same emulsion, right, essentially that they used.
I’m doing digital editing now, obviously, within post-production and stuff. We shoot 35; everything’s digital from that point on down, unfortunately. But I don’t do any, for example, optical effects that haven’t been done by Cocteau or haven’t been done by Godard. You know, all the things that I’m still doing, using digital technology, is all within the editing traditions that go back to Méliès, right? And that’s not forcibly changing the aesthetic; that’s adapting to cinema as cinema was. The image I could say, “Well, argue the other point of view: digital image, basic, similar component, pixel. As long as it’s the same focal-length lenses, as long as it’s the 35mm coverage system. That affects the the focal length of the prime lenses, the size of the actual image.” So now they’ve done that, now they’ve changed digital cinematography to the physical chip size as the same size as the physical 35mm-negative image in the camera. That’s why they can use all the old lenses, right, on the digital cameras.
When Sony first started doing all that stuff and with their high-definition stuff, they hadn’t figured out that using the old lenses required that the chip be the same size as 35 for the depth of field to function and for the focal lengths to function. Once they figured that out, wow! I mean, then digital cinematography’s taken off. But I still, even knowing that, I still like the grain. I like the physical pickup pattern, shall we say, of the granular structure rather than the pixel structure. But would I ever shoot a film digitally? As long as I can shoot 35, no.
I want to go back; I still hark back to… the same lenses I used in Fast are all 35mm Scope lenses, you know? Basically the same lenses that I used in Talking to Strangers are all Cooke lenses. So the glass I’m putting in front of the camera is the same glass, in some senses, that Kubrick was putting on his cameras. And I know that. And I choose them to do that.
I want to talk about the black-and-white in the film, which I think looks absolutely extraordinary. And if you’re saying how you know you have this aspiration towards the kind of black-and-white that Antonioni had. Watching it, I was thinking that I haven’t seen black-and-white in a film in a while that looks like this. So in the plainest, least-romantic terms, what are you using? What film are you using? What lenses are you using to evoke that particular aesthetic?
Basically, I used to have a lot of choices when it came to black-and-white 35mm lenses—I mean film stock. Now you’re down to Double-X Negative. That’s the only black-and-white negative in 35 that Kodak at this point is making. So that is very close to the same negative that’s been used since the 1940s, Double-X Negative. They used to have a period of time when you had Triple-X Negative, meaning more sensitivity to light, and they had slower. But Kodak, in its wisdom, realized, “Okay, let’s make it one black-and-white 35 film; that’s all we can afford.” So now everyone in the world, if they shoot real black-and-white film, it’s going to be Kodak Double-X Negative. Ilford’s gone. Ilford was the stock Godard shot in his early films, English stock. Agfa’s gone as a black-and-white film. I’m not sure Fuji color had black-and-white, I think they did, but those are all gone. So the black-and-white films that were shot with Agfa, which is the German film, that stock doesn’t exist. You only have Double-X Negative.
So I shot Werckmeister on Double-X Negative and I shot Inside/Out Double-X Negative. I shot the black-and-white in this film Double-X Negative. So after a while if you only have one emulsion and you have used it over three or four films; it becomes almost intuitive, how to deal with it, because you remember the contrast ratios, you remember how the negative is affected by light over time and it simplifies things. You know, I don’t I don’t have to worry about, “Oh, should we shoot reversal? Oh, should we do this?” No, I have Double-X Negative. That’s the only black-and-white in the world, so that’s the only one I can use. Now you can shoot color film and take out the color, but the grain of color film desaturated or changed is not the same grain pattern as Double-X Negative. The halation, the blooming that occurs in a black-and-white negative, those shapes don’t always occur in color negative. Color negative, if you make it black-and-white, you still have three layers of emulsion, not one.
So there are reasons to shoot color negative and then pull out the color and make it black-and-white digitally, or they used to do that with optical printers, but it’s not going to be the same as Double-X Negative. It’s not going to have the same grain pattern; it’s not going to have the same response to light. So some people shoot color and they digitally make it black-and-white. Well, that’s not going to look like how I shoot. I don’t shoot color and then pull out the chroma. If you have a black-and-white film, you need to know, “Okay, well if it was shot on film, look at the credits at the end. Does it say ‘clapper loader,’ or does it say ‘DIT’?” Digital DIT means that’s a digital operator, digital second AC. If it says “clapper loader,” it’s going to be film stock. If it’s film stock, it’s black-and-white; it’s Double-X Negative.
Then the lenses. Some lenses, I think, are better for black-and-white than others. Because most of the lenses, a lot of the lenses now, have been set up for optimal reproduction of color values and the old black-and-white lenses were not as sharp as the new lenses. So if you want something that’s not pin-sharp, that has a sort of interesting use of light falling off in the backgrounds, then you go get old lenses—Cooke lenses. I use them. Or you get old, anything that’s, like, before 1940s and black-and-white, Double-X Negative is going to look like something from 1940. Whereas if you put a brand-new lens on a 35 camera or digital camera, right, it’s not going to look like a lens that was used in the ’40s.
Whereas the color film doesn’t, the color film doesn’t look like anything that I can easily place. And I think that that’s part of the distinction, is that the color is very vivid but it has a certain level of otherworldliness and surreality. Whereas the black-and-white looks more cinematic. And that juxtaposition, I think, makes the potency of both all the more powerful.
Right. Well, in Fast, when you are timing—when you do the color corrections at the end for the digital master—you can do a lot digitally; you can correct the colors. Tremendous things. Much more than you were able to do in 35 analog. There’s much more you can do digitally. But at the same time, for example, The Arc was shot Fuji, Fuji color. So I tried to, in some of the scenes in Fast, I color-timed them to look like Fuji and not like Kodak, right? So Fuji had a different, Japanese film stock had a different way of recording greens, and because of that it reproduced reds and oranges in a different way.
So I remember, of course, Fuji color, then in some of the scenes in Fast—although it’s Kodak; for the most part, it’s all Kodak; basically it’s Kodak daylight 250 and tungsten 500—but in some scenes I would basically try to push the timing back to what I remember I had with Fuji. And so that’s why it’s a little orange and why the greens look a little funky and doesn’t look like Eastman Kodak, because of what we’re doing in the timing there.
You have some ambitions to keep up this prolificacy. And you told me that you have some other films in mind for the future.
Yeah.
Where are you with those?
I have two ideas right now. One is probably going to hopefully, God willing, be shot in Scotland, Highlands of Scotland or Northern Ireland or in Norway. And it’s a historical picture that’s really not a historical picture, but takes place in the Middle Ages. So that’s option one. And the other one is simply to continue to work in the United States and find more, I hate to say it, but more contemporary situations that are not as “historical” about human beings existing right now, in the United States of America as it presently exists. Once I get done with Fast, I’m going to get on a train and I’m going to go back to my farm and then I’m going to start writing a script. And it’ll be either one: the so-called historical one in Europe or it’ll be something that’s more relational in the United States. Then which one gets made will be which one gets funded.
That’s basically the reality of it. But yeah: I’d like to. I don’t know if I can do it because of some family issues, but I would like to turn around another film as fast as I could and just go and do it. And I think that’s part of what I’ve learned: speed is of the essence. I tend to overthink stuff, right? I mean, maybe this conversation’s proof of that. But once you start down the greasy pole of production, then you are reacting to things in a different way than if you’re sitting in your office or your bedroom for five years thinking about it. So it’ll either be an encounter with the Middle Ages or an absolute encounter with the immediate present.
I remember when we spoke for your retrospective and you talked a little bit about Gavagai—that there’s a weird thing that happens where you’re the young guy and people want to support the new and up-and-coming voice, but then maybe the wheel spins in a weird way where now you’re the old guy and maybe people think you have something to say. And I like that you’ve kind of been in this groove lately, from The Fishing Place to Fast to potentially a new film.
I think that… I hope, Nick, I’ve learned something over the last 38, 40 years. And I think that that’s… I hope it’s some humility about the difficulty of making films and the fact that it’s not inevitable, right? There are a lot of variables that come into play. So you may want to do this or want to do that, but actually for it to happen requires a lot of grace, a lot of… you can, depending on how you want to look at that, either grace or randomness or just things that happen that, if they happen one way it happens, if it happen the other way it doesn’t happen. So you can push “as hard as you can” and you still may not be able to make that film. Or you can lay back and do nothing and it comes to you.
So it’s this weird process of waiting, of being patient and yet at the same time being aggressive. And it’s a contradiction. How can you be patiently aggressive? And then, on top of it, you add just the years, you know? I mean, I’m a different filmmaker now than I was even 10 years ago. And I know it is because I’ve made films more quickly. I mean, to do The Fishing Place and turn around and do another feature in three three years—I haven’t done that since Talking to Strangers and Arc. There’s too much time lost in the middle, so to speak. So we’ll see if I can keep it up. And with God’s help I think I will.
But I think I think it is maintaining the dialogue, maintaining the discourse, having a conversation over time with people in the art house, because that’s where we are and that we’re bringing to bear all these different traditions and all these different questions—all these different voices of the tradition, right? Hopefully towards the end of some revelation or to the end of some announcement of something that matters. And if you’re engaged in that process over time, you’re emboldened by it, empowered by it. You become part of that process and then you’re liberated by it, right? Because at a certain point it doesn’t simply become your ego. It becomes—yes, there’s always the ego, there’s always subjectivity involved—but you see yourself as part of a larger ongoing dialogue of a larger group of people.
It’s not so lonely, you know? You’re not the auteur out here, you know, by themselves with your ego and your problems. You’re part of a collective that is, over time, discussing these things in a meaningful way for the betterment of yourself and for the audience. So that’s got to drive you; that’s got to drive you out of your hole or out of your farm to more direct engagement. So I think… well, I know I’m sort of feeling that, right? But at the same time, I’m knowing that the difficulty of doing it doesn’t get any easier. You know, it’s funny; you think, “Oh, it’s going to get easier to make a movie.” I haven’t found it gets any easier. Maybe it does. But I think part of the difficulty of doing it is part of the process and the reward of doing it. If it was easy, then what would be the value of doing it?
I think the sense of effort and time and concentration comes through in Fast very well. And I’m personally very proud to have my name on it in any sense and to be involved with it in any way. I’m proud of the film, I believe in the film, I’m hopeful for it. I’m hopeful for it in the present tense and on a longer timeline. And I’m very very happy that it won’t necessarily stop here.
I mean, your contribution is significant because it’s another voice, it’s a younger voice, it’s a voice that’s more in the marketplace in some sense. I mean, I sit on my little farm down here with my goats [Laughs] you know? I’m not in New York. I’m not in your world. And your contributions are broadening out, you know, my visions. Even in the casting process, I know we didn’t agree on some things, but just to hear you say, “Well, I think she’s better than that one or this is better than that one”—I mean, all those points are cumulative, right? Because you end up having to say, “Well, here’s somebody you respect, somebody who’s intelligent, somebody who knows cinema,” and they think this and you think that, and then that mediation is an essential part of a process, you know?
If you don’t have it to some degree, you end up insular. And that insularity of just sort of locked-off becomes incestuous and then you have, I think as an artist, to deal with the ego and deal with all this secondary baggage that sort of kind of drives you crazy and you don’t need that. You need to have a number of voices, a collective that is working together towards a common goal of a common good. That’s part and parcel of what portrays you. And the geniuses that have too much insularity, they crash. I mean, like Edgar Allan Poe: you look at that power of that voice and his poetry and then becomes dysfunctional. And there’s a lot of… I mean, start listing the artists that become insular and then egocentric. It’s tragic, but it’s almost inevitable, right? I mean, because then they get like Poe, they get themselves so, I don’t know, alienated from the world and from themselves. It’s just a strange thing.
Let’s work not to do that. I think I’m a bit younger than you, but I still have to work on not being alienated in that way. I think we’ve covered a lot of territory and I think that there’s a lot for people to discover in the movie, so I think that could be a good place to leave it. Unless there’s any parting note that you want to go with.
I mean, I think, for me, Fast is a phantom ride, right? In the sense that it’s working through the origins of the moving camera and it’s working through the idea: what causes the camera to move and why does it move? So it’s starting from a very simple assumption, from that idea of the phantom ride and then from the phantom shot and then, backing into that, it becomes a discussion of point of view and then from point of view, the whole idea of shot-reverse-shot. Aside from the politics or the absence of politics in the film, it really is a meditation on the history of cinema and the history of the technology.
Fast opens at MoMA on Wednesday, August 12.
The post Between the Narrative and the Physical Reality of the Image: Rob Tregenza on Fast first appeared on The Film Stage.
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