Paul Gordon

The Happy Poet

Interview

JL I thought the humour in your film was so good, I thought it was really clever, delicate humour – I’m British and don’t find a lot of American films very amusing, but yours was.

PG Thanks

JL They screened your film far too dark so you couldn’t actually make out the faces in it – what happened?

PG Yeah I think people would of liked it more if they would have been able to see people’s faces. There were important scenes where the face was totally black.

JL But you could imagine people’s expressions so in a way it didn’t matter. I just felt sorry for you though

PG Yeah, we’ve had two screenings like that: our big screening was like that and the press screening was like that so I guess maybe we will have our one small screening left…hopefully that one will look okay. But we’ve played it at other festivals and its looked great

JL You premiered it at South by Southwest didn’t you?

PG Yeah and then we played it at Michael Moore’s festival, and it looked really good there

JL  I just wondered…what makes you laugh?

PG Just in general of making me laugh? I find just I guess very human….individual people’s idiosyncrasies funny I guess. I think when someone takes themselves really seriously but they’re obviously saying things that are a little bit ridiculous, that’s generally funny. Do you want me to mention any movies I think are funny?

JL  Yeah

PG I like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, I think that’s funny. It’s an early Tim Burton film. So I like all different kinds of humour; I feel like.  I like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Blues Brothers.

JL  Do you like British humour? Because your humour is quite British  Have you seen a show called The Office?

PG Yeah, I do like The Office. I love the British one, but I can’t stand the American one.

JL  I thought yours was really like that kind of humour. Do you find it easy to direct yourself? How do you direct yourself?

PG It's’s hard to do, because acting is kind of the opposite of what you’re supposed to be doing when you’re directing, like you don’t want to be on the outside of yourself looking at yourself, so I think when I’m acting in scenes that I’m supposed to be directing, I just kind of act, I just forget about the directing. It’s exhausting. We did a lot of rehearsing so we kind of got the rhythm of the scenes before hand, but it is exhausting because you are aware of what the other people are doing while you’re trying to act and I think there were probably times in scenes where there might have been pauses in my speech, personally, because I was thinking about five different things.

JL Oh God. That’s really tough.  Bloody hell. Why do you act in your films, do you think?

PG Well, I don’t know if I’ll do it again. This film came out of another film which we were trying to make for like a year. And we go a little bit of money but we just couldn’t get quite enough money so… I just really wanted to make something and I wanted to make something fun and this was originally just going to be a short film that I wanted to make with some friends and I thought of the food stand as just a cheap, easy, mobile location. And then I thought it would be funny to have Johnny Mars and me; our contrasting personalities – put together where I was kind of his boss, it would be a funny dynamic. That’s really where it came from. It was going to be a short film and then this whole story just came really easily and I wrote it in like a month and that’s how I ended up acting in it. I wanted to do something fun. And I thought that my personality and Johnny’s personality would be funny.

JL Do you think that there are autobiographical aspects to it, and if there are did you find those bits difficult or embarrassing to direct?

There are autobiographical aspects but I always thought of myself as being a character so I never really get embarrassed, its sort of autobiographical but way exaggerated, sort my awkwardness. And I would like to think that the Bill character is a little bit more clueless than I am in real life.

JL Yes. It would seem that way. But just in terms of emotions you have experienced, even if you’re directing something where the character’s totally different it can be potentially a bit embarrassing. But you didn’t find that?

PG I don’t really find it embracing. I think that’s part of what I enjoy about making things; making art, making films, is its sort of expected, and people appreciate it when you reveal yourself and it’s kind of a safe place where you can do that. And especially on our set with the group of friends that we made it with, we were all just having fun and it was such a supportive atmosphere that it wasn’t…Maybe sometimes watching it with people who don’t know me, especially if someone seems bored in the film or something, I do feel very vulnerable when I’m watching the film with people who don’t know me, but in the process of making it, I never felt embarrassed. But, I do feel embarrassed sometimes when we screen it. Especially when I don’t feel like…when what people saw projected was not completely the film, how it was projected. I should stop talking about that.

JL No, for me, I was just really shocked by that. It was like film school! I was like, why have they screwed this up so badly? Do you see yourself as being part of the mumblecore movement of filmmakers in America?

PG No, I don’t really. I can see how the acting style in my film, some people might compare that to the acting style in mumblecore movies, but my film is actually not very improvised, there are some moments that are improvised but its mostly all scripted and mumblecore movies are mostly improvised. And also the way that I like to shoot stuff is very different from mumblecore movies.

JL Definitely. I just wondered because there is a slight similarity, how much you saw yourself as being included, or wanted to be included in that movement.  So I was interested in that. What are you most proud of in your film?

I think the storytelling is strong. And I think the acting is good. And I like the survival versus idealism theme, Bill being the idealist and Johnny being the realist.

JL I thought it was very truthful. It was almost uncomfortably truthful.

One thing I’m proud of is the genuine style of acting. The performances are not at all ironic. I feel like the performances are all very sincere, they aren’t like the deadpan humour you see in a lot of movies, for instance like in the American version of The Office, you can see that they don’t actually take on the character and care about the character. They are sort of making fun of the character. And just sort of being funny. I don’t think anyone in The Happy Poet in like being funny.

JL I think that’s what’s so true about it. You can kind of see the sadness in people’s eyes while they are being funny which I think is why it is so powerful. I thought that scene where they are all playing around in the swimming pool was really good somehow. You got this sort of creeping awareness of what is going on.

PG Thanks

JL What films have you cried in?

PG There’s the movie where Robert de Niro plays the priest. It starts with a ‘B’…what’s it called? It’s from the 70s. It’s the one where they’re out with some native people, and the Spanish military is taking over this area, and they basically slaughter a bunch of people. Or..what’s a more recent movie? I don’t know. I can’t remember. I’m trying to remember a recent movie…. What are some recent movies that would make a person cry?

JL I don’t know. It’s so individual, that’s why I think it’s quite telling. What might make me cry might really not make you cry.

PG Well… It does happen occasionally. I could probably try to think about it…

JL What films have you walked out of the theatre in or turned of the DVD of, or just generally had enough of?

PG I remember walking out of Batman and Robin.

JL Really, why?

PG Because it was just… it just seemed like a waste of time, and when a movie is bad and the script is bad, when the movie is not even trying to be good it’s just kind of depressing to me, because it makes me not want to make movies, it somehow makes me wonder if my movies are like that or something. It just depresses me about movies when I see movies like that, where they aren’t even trying

JL How much do you agree with Robert McKee’s ideas of storytelling? How much don you subscribe to that school of thought?

PG I haven’t read his book. Is it basically the three act structure?

JL Yeah, basically.

PG I think that you can make original unique movies in whatever narrative structure you want. Like, the other film we were trying to make for a while doesn’t have a conventional narrative structure. This film has a very conventional narrative structure but I feel like there are a lot of other things about it that are original and unique and in fact doing it in that structure and in fact almost comedy or romantic comedy sort of structure, to me, I felt I was commenting on those kinds of films.

JL What sort of comment do you think that you were making?

PG Well I guess the main comment is…well, the happy ending is totally ridiculous, and in a way I suppose…I don’t know if I would say that the ending is ironic but…hopefully it doesn’t undercut the film

JL No, I don’t think it does, because I think you’re quite emotionally involved with the character and so you want him to be happy, and when he does become happy then you know that that is good.

PG I think it was hard to see a lot of the stuff in the ending but my intention was that everything was too perfect and a little bit off, a maybe the Bill character is a little bit cocky and things are too perfect. At the very end, what I was going for was that he thinks that he is really happy because everything is supposedly so perfect, but he’s not really happy. Did you notice that there were a lot of pregnant women in the ending?

JL No

PG You don’t even see that.. All the women at the end are pregnant. Oh my God, that’s really funny. That’s really good. All the extras and everyone is pregnant at the end.

JL That’s wicked!

PG But they… you can’t even see it in the screening

JL That’s such a shame… but some people will notice, it will be one of those things that some people will notice.

PG It just plays like some cheesy happy ending now.  That’s like the big joke of the movie. No, I did half get it, but I was also really emotionally involved with the character so I was pleased that things were working out. I also feel like when things do work out for you after periods of everything going very wrong, it does feel a little bit like that – that everything’s incredibly shiny and happy and everyone’s pregnant…it does feel a bit like that, so I thought it was quite realistic, because his life with pretty unpleasant before. A lot of people still appreciate it as a happy ending

JL I think it was very enjoyable as a happy ending because I thought it was realistic. I thought it he was realistically unhappy before and I thought it was realistically funny. I totally bought into it, so the happy ending was satisfying. Why do you make films?

PG I used to write stories, I’ve always been into writing. Mostly I just like working with people, I enjoy that it is much more collaborative a process than writing and its really cool that you can sit and write something and work on it for a while and then show it to a bunch of other people and then work on it with them and make it something else, and see it come to life with other people.

JL Do you think you’d ever return to just writing or do you find making films too enjoyable to do that?

PG I would like to write, I could see doing that for a little while, but I would probably always have the urge to make a film, you know? After a couple of years.

JL Do you find it easy to edit your own work? Because I can’t imagine how difficult it must be having scripted it, having acted it and then having  to edit it. I think it’s a massive achievement. How did you do that?

PG It was exhausting and I wouldn’t recommend editing yourself, especially if you act in your own movie.

JL I don’t think I could do that

PG It wasn’t fun having to watch myself every day for hours

JL I can imagine. Because generally in the edit suite everyone criticize all the actors and I suppose if you continually criticize yourself you start to feel like…oh god. It must be like being in a hall of mirrors

PG And then at the end of the process I start showing rough cuts to people and then having to take feedback from people, its like taking criticism on every angle

JL How do you deal with criticism? You must be quite robust to put yourself through that process. Do you feel like that-s the case? If someone gives you a bad review how do you deal with that?

PG Well, if someone sees the film and it’s presented properly, and I feel like they actually see the film, as it was shot, I don’t have a problem with someone having their own opinion about the movie. And I don’t think that my stuff or this movie would be for everyone. Everybody has their own taste.

JL Have you put it forward for London Film Festival?

PG I did. They’re not going to play it. It’s playing at the Cambridge Film Festival in a couple of weeks.

JL Did you go to film school?

PG I went to the University of Texas in Austin.

JL Did you enjoy film school and find it helpful

PG Yeah I did, I had a lot of fun in film school. It was mostly just the group of people who I met there, getting a group of people that wanted to work on my films, and then I could work on their films. That’s the main benefit of it.

JL What kind of films were people into there?

PG I feel like in film school people do dramas, like serious dramas…or….yeah, people were mostly making serious dramas at film school.

JL Who do you show your work to when you write?

PG I show stuff to the people I want to act in it. When I write, I have a few good friends from film school who I’ll get feedback from. Its really valuable to have people who will read your stuff and give you feedback and we all do that, I read their stuff.

JL Do you feel that you can be honest with each other?

PG Yes, we are pretty honest with each other because we know that it doesn’t help not to be.. Yeah, you’re really kicking someone in the face if you say a script is good when it’s not.

JL What are you working on at the moment?

PG Well, we have that script that we were trying to do before this one. I don’t know if we’ll do that. Basically I have that script and another script that I have started. I want to rewrite both of them, and I’ve started re-writing both of them but now that we've been getting into festivals it’s hard to have time to write. But once we’re done with the festivals I want to get back to writing some stuff.

JL Are you going to act in them as well?

PG I dunno. Maybe not. [laughs] Probably not unless it seemed really necessary or if somebody for some reason wanted me to act in it. If somebody wanted to put money into something.  But I don’t know if that would happen.

JL It might happen. I wouldn’t bank on it not happening!

PG I don’t know.  It seems like, to get funding for films, at least in the United States you have to have famous people in them

JL Yeah in the UK it isn’t entirely like that, but then they give you enough funding to go and buy some food, you know, ‘Here is 2000 Euros, go away and make a fifteen minute film! It’s yeaaah! That’s going to be FUN! How are we going to do that?” Well that was all the questions I wanted to ask you so thank you very much.

05:09:2010