I had the pleasure of conducting this interview with Greg Harrison, director of NOVEMBER at the press office of the 2005 Seattle International Film Festival, at the W Hotel in Seattle on Tuesday 5/31/5.

EINSIDERS: Why do you make movies?

GREG HARRISON: I have discovered over time why I'm making movies. It comes down to a pretty personal reason. Like trying to figure out how to make things that somehow feel personally connected to me, that I can show to an audience, and have them feel that. And I feel like I haven't begun to make the movies that have been in my mind when I decided in high school, that I wanted to make movies--and had a vision of the kind of movies I would make. I feel like I'm just beginning that process. So it's taken a long time.

But I feel like, more and more… Once I did GROOVE, I got an agent, I got in the system, I'm working in Hollywood, I've got some projects developing at studio. But I find it so hard because in L.A. a lot of people approach it as a business, and in many ways it is. And there's a certain pragmatism to getting a project off the ground you need to have, depending on the kind of project. But to consistently work within that system there's a certain pragmatism.

I think I'm discovering how personal I think filmmaking is to me. I'm kind of surprised that it's that personal, but I think my creativity was developed in an very insular personal way. I spent a lot of time alone when I was a kid. I taught myself to play the piano, I taught myself how to program a computer. All my creative endeavors took place in isolation. And that same spirit is in me even in these larger scale features, as they grow. I still think it's a very personal, introspective process for me. I'm shocked and amazed at how personal movie making is to me.

EI: And that can be dangerous, can't it?

GH: And painful as hell. (laughs) It's really fucking hard.

EI: What constitutes success for you?

GH: I used to think success in film was having a huge release, making good money, and being well-reviewed. But there's something idealistic in that too. And the problem with that is if you're not well-reviewed, or you don't make a lot of money, then you must not be successful. There's a trap in that too. That's not to say there isn't some real success in those things, but I want to believe that success is some sort of personal satisfaction with my work. But unfortunately, I rarely achieve that either. So there's a real tension, and constant frustration, and striving, and wanting to do more, better.

EI: At this point in time do you look at yourself as a success?

GH: It's been a struggle inside myself to give myself whatever success I have had, while still trying to maintain aspirations, and drive to expand and grow as an artist. What I often find in myself is "If I could just make a movie, I'd be happy." "If I could just make a movie, and get into Sundance, I'd be happy." "If I could get into Sundance, and SELL the movie, I'd be happy." But you always knock whatever you have down to zero. I see it a lot among my filmmaker friends, and I certainly see it in myself. And more and more, as I grow older, I realize that if I'm going to survive, and have any kind of happy life, I need to balance some sense of satisfaction with the stage that I'm at, while still feeling like there's places to go.

EI: Are there any filmmakers that you can cite that taught you something you needed to know on a personal level, who reached you?

GH: I'll go through a couple. Some of the top ones. There's been something about his films, but more his personal view of his own work that has really informed my own development, and that's Steven Soderbergh. His films have actually been rather inconsistent for me personally. I think there have been some great things about his work, and then there have been some things that I haven't liked, but overall his perception of his creative growth I've related to profoundly. Maybe because he's an American filmmaker, closer to my age, working within the system, having a certain pragmatism, a certain technical aptitude, combined with struggling to find films that are personal to him. He has an interest in that combination of things. I have seen myself in his struggles, and I've found his commentary, and his perceptions of his own work, and his own path, really helpful. And it has made making films in Hollywood, and hopefully good films, and interesting films in Hollywood, more reachable as a goal. Just the way he has done it. And the way he speaks about doing it.

But I think just purely artistically, I would say Nicholas Roeg and David Lynch have both been filmmakers that have taught me a lot about the power of film to express something much more visceral than an intellectual idea. Let's just take Lynch's ability to transmit direct experience, rather than showing me something about an experience. I feel like I walk away from his movies, and he's just gone straight into a part of my brain that subverts thinking. I find that is the true power of cinema. If you can create something that's that visceral. And I feel that is a good tonic to a more intellectual approach to filmmaking that I began on.

I came up through the technical, the craft. I was an editor, I worked in marketing, I did trailers, and there's a real strong craft, and grasp of the technical. And that's a way into film. But I think once you're in film, and once you understand how to make a film, it's about what you're going to be a filmmaker about. And I think that's the more challenging, scary, difficult, thing to mine in yourself--what will your films be about, what will they say, what emotional impact will they have. And I see someone like Lynch being able to work on such an interesting, visceral level that's so different than how I would think, and yet I think it's inspired me to see the potential for what's possible in film. And Nicholas Roeg in that sense, particularly coming from an editorial background. Feeling his really inspired juxtapositions, and approach to editing, transforming how a narrative can work in film. And it's funny that Soderbergh was very much inspired by Roeg.

EI: When you talk about the question of what you are going to say in your films, is it really a question of a decision, or is it a discerning? Do you really have a choice?

GH: If you make a choice there's something self-conscious about it, and very often I look back on my films and I see things that I couldn't have intended consciously, but yet there's something of me in them that you realize afterwards. And that's the more lasting, real aspect of what you've made. But I still feel like I'm trying to freely create from the heart, without self-consciousness. I think it's just a long process, but I feel like I haven't yet started to make films the way I envisioned how I wanted to make films, or how I envisioned the filmmakers I respected making films, which was a freedom of thought, or freedom of heart, that makes films more expansive and complex, and broader. I can't fully describe it yet, but it's definitely something that I've been feeling.

EI: What is the best purpose to which the cinema can be put today?

GH: An often underrated purpose of the cinema is to truly entertain. Entertainment has been transformed into stimulation. And I find that exhausting, and actually really empty. And so therefore entertainment has gotten a bad name. But I think that to artfully entertain people can be rejuvenating. Simply to purely entertain somebody can be very virtuous, and really fulfilling. And I really do think that when I go see a Hollywood movie that's a big summer movie or whatever, I feel stimulated rather than entertained and it feels much more like something much more base, and chemical. There's nothing in that grander, more subtle, idea of entertainment. So that would be one thing that I would aspire to-to make intelligent, true, entertainment.

But I think that if you can make a piece of entertainment that actually carries a theme that's relevant to actual human behavior… I joke with my friends that when I go to the movies I don't recognize any of the behavior. (All this is me speaking about the machine of Hollywood.) It's not impossible to truly entertain or show human behavior, but it doesn't seem the trend right now. So, in terms of aspirations: to entertain, and hopefully in that entertainment contain something about humanity that people relate to. Maybe then I would be happy. (laughs) Finally.

EI: To simply show human behavior that is recognizable?

GH: It's far more interesting than people will trust. Maybe that's a part of it too: a) learning what that stuff is, and b) having the balls and the trust to just film behavior. Hopefully that's my future. To learn how to go further in that direction. Because when I see movies that have the trust in just real human behavior, and know how to nurture that in the actors, the simplest thing can be fascinating-if it's true. And that's the thing that's delicate and ambiguous, and is easily crushed under the machine of filmmaking. It's just someone getting out of a chair, it's someone just saying "I love you." Truly, I think that the thing that's so difficult to mine is that thing that is unmistakably true. And if it is unmistakably true--that person pouring a cup of coffee, or looking at someone in the eyes-it's absolutely fascinating.

I still feel that I have yet to understand fully how I will make those films, and yet I yearn to do it. So therein lies the point I'm at in my career. Finding both the material and the skills within myself to go in that direction. Because I feel that those are the films that I see, and want to have made.

EI: You mention LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD in the press materials.

GH: I was inspired by how bold it was for Resnais to move the pieces on the game board so drastically, and just sort of experiment with identity in that regard. And I feel that for me, in the end, it's an exercise. I think that even he admits it's an exercise. I remember his quote, "Even I don't know what it means." That doesn't interest me. That part of it. But I think that with NOVEMBER in front of me, I just love the boldness of something like LAST YEAR AT MARIANBAD, and I felt like Ben's script had some boldness in that regard-shifting what happened at the store so radically 30 pages in--all of a sudden Hugh is not at the store, but this other character is at the store, and which one is real? We both spoke of the movie in terms of its narrative experimentation.

EI: Do you see that as being one of the things you succeeded in doing in NOVEMBER? That level of boldness?

GH: Yes, that was the hope. To at least experiment with fragmented narrative, experiment with ambiguity, experiment, very personally as a director, how to translate the point of view of a traumatized memory, or traumatized character. How could I translate that visually and editorially into a tonal experience? Those three elements were at the fore.

Stephen Les