Making Movies In the Back Yard

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Andrew Bujalski does not want to start a production company. He doesn’t want to be part of an artistic clique, either. He just wants to make movies, with his friends in them.

While Mr. Bujalski dismisses suggestions that his films — “Funny Ha Ha,” which was released in 2002, and “Mutual Appreciation,” which will open tomorrow at Cinema Village — are autobiographical, he acknowledges that one exchange in “Mutual Appreciation” does come from real conversations he’s had. In the scene, the main character, Alan (Justin Rice), a charming but aimless musician who has just moved to New York, waxes rhapsodic about the city to his friend Lawrence (Mr. Bujalski) and Lawrence’s girlfriend, Ellie (Rachel Clift). Alan, who is slightly drunk, proposes starting a club — “the cool, inclusive people’s club,” where all kinds of people do creative things. Ellie is receptive, but Lawrence, after trying unsuccessfully to get Alan to say what the club will do, delivers a crushing dose of realism.

“You know, my feeling about this kind of thing has always been, if you call me up and you have a project,” he says, “I’ll come down there and do whatever you need to do, in a very specific way.”

Lawrence’s comment reflects Mr. Bujalski’s own approach to filmmaking.

“I’ve known so many people over the years who would get excited about starting a production company,” he said. “And that always drove me crazy, because I’d think: ‘Well, production company? What are you going to make?’ People talk about forming some unit but they never get around to thinking about the project.”

Mr. Bujalski, who won a “Someone to Watch” Award at the 2004 Independent Spirit Awards, can’t be accused of not putting his full energy into his projects. In “Mutual Appreciation,” he continues using non-professional actors — several of them friends from Harvard, where he graduated in 1998 — and improvised dialogue to create a film that explores the self-consciousness and small psychological dramas of 20-somethings.

Mr. Bujalski said that he works with non-professionals because he wouldn’t know how to elicit the same subtle and naturalistic performances from trained actors.

He wrote the lead in “Mutual Appreciation” for Mr. Rice, his friend and former roommate. Asked what inspired him, he said: “It’s hard to describe, but you have a sense of someone’s persona, of a person as a performer, even if they’re not. Just the way a person performs at a social setting, at a party. I just had this idea in my head that there was a funny movie to be made with him in the lead.”

In order to bring out organic responses, Mr. Bujalski will explain the basic situation and plot points of a scene to his actors, then ask them to improvise, responding as they themselves would in that situation. He doesn’t let them read the script or watch the scenes they’re not in.

It’s a technique that elicits some of the better performances you’ll see in self-produced movies. Toward the end of “Mutual Appreciation,” Alan and Ellie have a “weird moment,” as men and women in relationships who are nonetheless attracted to each other often do. Ellie confesses to Lawrence, apologizes, and reaffirms her love for him. In a subsequent scene, Lawrence confronts Alan, saying that Ellie told him what happened between them.

Mr. Rice, as Alan, gets the kind of genuine caught-in-the-headlights look on his face that only Mr. Bujalski’s careful directing could produce. He tries to look blank, but half-grins uncomfortably.

“Andrew didn’t let me see the script for the scenes that I wasn’t in, so I didn’t know that they talked about it, and I didn’t know how much he knew,” Mr. Rice said. “We shot the scene as if it were really happening.”

Mr. Bujalski, who describes himself as “extremely self-conscious,” is very appreciative of the risks his friends take. “They don’t know if the final film will be any good,” he said. “They don’t know if they’ll be embarrassed by it. It’s a huge leap of faith.”

While Mr. Bujalski finds working with friends both a pleasure and a source of inspiration, it also has its difficulties, sometimes more so for the actors than for himself.

“There were moments when I felt a certain amount of hostility toward him for asking me to do these things,” Mr. Rice said. He mentioned a scene in which a group of girls put makeup on a drunken Alan, then force him to put on a dress. “It’s kind of humiliating,” he said. “In the end, you watch it, and it is rewarding. You say, ‘I’m glad I sort of debased myself.'”

Mr. Bujalski, who has another project he hopes to film next summer, feels pressure, he said, to squeeze in these “small, handmade films” before the chance to work this way vanishes.

“I’ll turn 30 early next year, and most of my friends are already in their early 30s,” he said.”It’s not getting any easier to ask people to work for free.” His films have yet to make money. Looking on the bright side, Mr. Bujalski said: “At least we haven’t gotten to the place where you’re complicating your friendship with money issues.”

With his aversion to founding clubs without a purpose, Mr. Bujalski has erred on the other side — throwing all his resources into each project, without reserving some to create a sustainable entity. “It comes from a fear in a way,” he explained. “Knowing how much work these projects take and how much they consume your life, I’ve tried to give everything to them. And there are bad things about that, about not thinking ahead and not thinking of something sustainable like a production company.”

When a reporter recently observed that, for a person who makes films about young people struggling to find a sense of purpose, he seems remarkably focused, Mr. Bujalski revealed a little of what links him to his characters.

“There’s a certain kind of workaholism that, I think, stems from the fact that the person fears that if they stop working, they’ll have no reason to be there anymore. It’s like, I’m addicted to working on these just because I know how lazy I actually am.”


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