Brent Green and Donna K

“You know Lincoln’s head was as tall as the hat inside it. It was to make him look electable. Lincoln’s hat was actually to cover his enormous four and a half foot tall head and he had carnies follow him to do his bidding.”

For some reason, Brent Green telling you how Lincoln employed carnival folks to help him put on his hat doesn’t seem strange in the least, not if you’ve experienced his animated films. There is a raw sense of wonder when watching his work that recalls the joy of seeing the inspired madness of Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams for the first time. Flowing beneath his work are recurring themes of creation and a world both real and fantastical that reaches out to us. His newest work, Gravity Was Everywhere Then, is his most ambitious to date. It is the story of Leonard Wood and how he built a strange and beautiful house as a healing machine for his cancer stricken wife and continued this labor of love even after his wife’s death. We sat down with Green and girlfriend and building cohort, Donna K., to discuss the film and his work. But before you read the interview, here is the trailer:

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then from Brent Green on Vimeo.

29-95: So how did you come across the story of Leonard?

Brent: He lived in Louisville, KY. Brendan Canty the drummer from my films, but also Fugazi’s drummer, does these films called Burn To Shine where a whole bunch of bands from one town play one song each over the course of a day in a condemned house and then the house gets knocked down or burned down. It’s kind of a snapshot of a scene and he’s done these in D.C., Chicago, Portland, Atlanta…and so someone called and said “We have a house for you in Louisville.” So they set up a Burn To Shine in Louisville and I just went along just to hang out and keep Brandon company on the drive to Louisville. We got there a day before everyone else did and we’re just wandering around and found all of Leonard’s stuff like his bank statements and the box of tapes playing crazy people’s church music and we just stumbled into this story.

29-95: So the tapes. Is that something we hear in the movie?

Brent: No, his music was horrifically bad. That "Appalachian Theloneous Monk" thing is a lie. So, no all the music in the film I wrote except for the two songs by the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers. I wrote it trying to be what I wished he was.

29-95: So what did his music sound like?

Brent: Like a lot of whole notes strung together…I mean first he would announce the song and they all would have great titles like “Redeeming Commandments” and then he’d be like (singing a loud note) BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG! (Brent dramatically pauses and then produces an even louder lower note) BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG! And I’m sure he was hearing other things that went with it, but he just didn’t realize that you have to put down those other things for other people to hear them.

29-95: Did you ever get to meet him?

Brent: Yeah, once. He was out of it and in a nursing home. He knew his house was coming down and he was pretty broken up about that, but he wanted to talk about this fiddle he wanted to give his church that got stolen... that’s what he was obsessed with.

29-95: So then the film is your extrapolation of his story. Were there any diaries or anything for you to work with in writing the story?

Brent: No. I mean he had some letters. There is a letter in the film. All of his letters he was writing to his wife after she died to try to get her to come back or communicate with him. One of those appears in the film but I have to be careful because they start showing it in documentary film festivals. The framework of the story is real.

29-95: So you have the blueprints to the house?

Brent: There are blueprints but nobody knows who has them. Brendan thinks that the people in Louisville have them and the people in Louisville thing Brendan has them. So I just built my version of it. I got all the key things right, but it had to look good on film. So while it’s my version of it, it’s in the same spirit.

29-95: What drew you to Leonard’s story?

Brent: The first thing that drew me was that you have to build your own world. Everyone does it - from the richest Wall Street investor to some guy throwing fish into a deep fryer. I see a lot of people live their lives like they wish that somebody was driving it, but you are driving it and Leonard is the literal interpretation of someone building his own world.

Then while we were making this Donna was getting sick a lot and being hospitalized. That was something I was confronted with as I was trying to write this story. That isn’t explicit in the film but it’s inherently in the story. So I relate to Leonard in that I think what is valuable is what you do with your hands and then, story wise, dealing with an illness and somebody you love.

Another thing that drew me to it is that looking around at the things that make our society interesting, those are things we often completely ignore or we celebrate them after they are dead. I mean nobody waited until 1950 to give the 1927 Yankees their trophy, but we do that constantly in real life. So that was important. Leonard was alive while I was making this film and I was thinking about celebrating somebody making our society an interesting place.

29-95: When you talk about working with your hands do you make distinctions between say a scientist or a painter?

Brent: I’m not saying there is any distinction in the sense that you need to find what you value - what makes you important – and work on it. But at the same time there is a distinction. Like one of my art collectors is working on a treatment for a disease that affects millions. I’m not clueless; I realize that what he’s doing is much more valuable than what I am doing. So it’s really whatever you can contribute to elevate the world around you.

29-95: That same theme appears in Paulina Hollers. Where there is this awful child who goes to hell and the mother kills herself to try to rescue him. At the end you go into a long segment about how “We are always forgetting beauty and hopeful cacophony.” But that’s a huge leap from the story about an awful kid who shoots rabbits and puts their heads under buses. I mean what is the wonder in that?

Brent: I see wonder in that. The basic thing with that is that when you are miserable – when you are the dude putting the rabbit’s head under a bus – it’s because you are forgetting to pay attention to the world around you. I can’t imagine seeing a guy beating his wife while “Innocent While You Dream” is playing. That would be the most psychotic thing I could imagine. It changes you when you have something that reminds you of a sense of wonder or something beautiful is there, the likelihood of turning around and wailing on the person next to you is pretty slim.

29-95: In one of your short films, Carlin, you have an Aunt who is being destroyed by diabetes. How autobiographical is your work and how much is fantasy?

Brent: It’s true my aunt Carlin moved in with us and she really had diabetes. She really wanted to die, she got it done, and she got amputated piece by piece. But then there is stuff that isn’t real like where she sees Virginia Woolf – that’s not real. But it’s a strange territory. Like Sundance called me and asked if they could play Carlin in the Documentary section and I was like (smiling) “Yeah, whatever you know.” And I was all excited because, I made a “documentary” and my mom saw it - Carlin is my mom’s sister - and she was like “You spelled her name wrong.” So, I’m not that good at the documentary thing.

29-95: For the Cinema Arts screening you are playing live music. How is that?

Brent: We show the film with live narration, improvised soundtracks, and live Foley. The feature is about 85 percent improvised. Like the theme song we know it and we play it in particular parts but the rest is improvised and each show is drastically, drastically different. Some shows are quiet to the point where it sounds like chamber music and others, like the last show we did, was like a Nick Cave show – like a Rock and Roll show.

29-95: Do you have different players for each performance?

Brent: No, It’s the same band. The only person who is in and out is Howe Gelb of Giant Sand who plays with us when he can and he’s in Europe right now so he won’t be playing this show. I think the shows change because of the audience. Like the Rock and Roll show was at Arizona State University and…it was all these students and…I think it just had to be louder. It plays off the audience’s energy and how they are reacting.

29-95: So how did you get into animation?

Brent: I was always writing stories and songs and I just wasn’t getting across the whole idea…like it wasn’t quite good enough really. So I decided that if I could do an animated film, I could control everything. I could control each picture, the focal point, the music, the lighting, like every single thing I could control and so I could get across what I was lacking in storytelling or in understanding how people respond to story. So this was a way of skipping that and figuring it out later.

29-95: I love the rough hew nature of the films – like how you can see the tape and the cells – which gives it this nice rustic tone. Is that by design or necessity?

Brent: Originally it’s from delusion because I thought I was making Disney movies. Now I realize that I wasn’t but at the time I really thought I was – like the cut outs and the tape and stuff weren’t really there. But I love the handmade-ness of it. I like that it’s accessible. I love Pixar movies but I’ve never looked at a Pixar movie and thought “I could make that.” I actually couldn’t. But I like that, in my films, you can look at this and realize you can do it. I like that in things. I like Thomas Edison more than Nikola Tesla because Tesla was this otherworldly thing that no human can relate to, but Thomas Edison just went at it and, with the same work ethic and knowledge base, anyone could be Thomas Edison. I like that.

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (exhibition) will be at Diverse Works Nov. 5-Dec. 18, 2010.  Brent Green and Donna K (who plays the wife, Mary, of Leonard Wood in the film) will be doing a special performance at the opening reception on Friday, Nov. 5 at 7:30pm

Brent Green will be giving a lecture about his work on Tuesday, November 9 at the Mitchell Center for the Arts from 1-2:30pm

Cinema Arts Festival Houston, Nov. 12 & 13, 2010 at Frenetic Theater
Screening of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then accompanied by a live music performance featuring Brent Green, Donna K, Drew Henkels, Brendan Canty (of Fugazi) and John Michael Swartz.