Indie Film Vets Ted Hope And Hal Hartley Pledge Allegiance To Fandor By Dade Hayes July 11, 2014

Hal Hartley and Ted Hope are standing on hallowed cinema ground: the basement of the old Waverly Theatre in New York’s West Village. For decades this was a downtown cultural landmark, screening the likes of Fellini and Truffaut before segueing to interactive shows of less exalted titles like Night of the Living Dead and Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Waverly was renovated and re-opened as the IFC Center in 2005. It still shows a prime slice of new and repertory work, and on this humid July night it was hosting a screening of a film Hartley directed and Hope produced called My America. Consisting of 21 monologues written by a range of American playwrights (among them Neil LaBute, Danny Hoch and Marcus Gardley) and commissioned by the Center Stage theatre in Baltimore, it is the 11th project in a collaboration between Hartley and Hope that began with the enduring feature The Unbelievable Truth in 1989. Hartley is a widely admired auteur known for character-rich titles like Trust and Simple Men. Hope has forged a distinctive path by producing the likes of American Splendor, 21 Grams and The Ice Storm as well as curating, writing and speaking.

A scene from Hal Hartley’s ‘My America,’ a film available only on Fandor

The pair has reunited to promote My America (which Hope is distributing but not as part of yet another charge up Indie Hill. Rather, they are plugging the release of the film on the two-year-old digital subscription film service Fandor, of which Hope is now CEO. The nature of My America, which shows a range of provocative takes on the country performed by actors in a plainly lit rehearsal space, arguably makes it well-suited to a start-up provider like Fandor. With a few thousand titles ranging from greats like Andrei Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog to more contemporary indie and foreign fare, Fandor costs $7.50 to $10 a month and aims to be a place where work of all kinds can be discovered. After presenting their work for discovery at IFC Center, Hope and Hartley pulled up chairs in the basement for a wide-ranging discussion. They spoke about the film’s mission, the road ahead for Fandor, cinema vs. theatre and the radical changes in the film business they have both experienced over the past quarter-century. Here is an edited version of the conversation.

Dade Hayes: How did the planets align so that you guys could work together again?

Hal Hartley: Ted got to Fandor and was interested in a lot of my back catalog and I believe I also said, ‘Well, I also have this new thing…’ I didn’t know what its commercial prospects could be.

The cast of Hal Hartley’s 2006 film Fay Grim: Liam Aiken, Chuck Montgomery, Saffron Burrows, Jeff Goldblum, Parker Posey and Hartley.

Ted Hope: He’s a unique specimen as far as the industry goes because he continues to make shorts and experimental work. Up until recently, there hasn’t been much of a home for that. Because this was a commissioned work it didn’t have the kinds of financial barriers that other work does. It’s hard. Everyone has hope that the digital world will make up for what’s disappeared on DVD, but the revenues aren’t really there for anyone yet. But for this, it could be perfect.

DH: Is it an open-ended run on Fandor, or will it move on to other platforms?

TH: We hope to have it for eternity, but basically we can have it until Hal wants it to stop.

HH: It’s exclusive for a while.

TH: We have it exclusive for three months and then it will go to other places. We hope to be able to show filmmakers that we bring a lot of value.

DH: And the hope is that with titles like this Fandor will become a destination for all different types of films in that first window?

TH: I think there’s a real place for something online that’s the equivalent of what Criterion was in the home video world.

DH: Mubi has been one site trying to be that, hasn’t it?

TH: When it was known as The Auteurs [until 2010], Mubi had more of a focus on the canon. Then they lost a lot of their library. So now they have a much different model, where you get 30 films, each one for 30 days. We have 5,000 films [to stream] for a flat rate. We’re not going to be a Netflix where we have 20,000 films up there because we share all of the revenue 50-50 with the filmmakers. The reason I’m doing this is, I hadn’t been getting paid the way that I was since 2008. You have to be able to build a model where filmmakers can earn a living. And if they can cross-promote each other across social media, they can achieve a network effect. That has real potential to create a community of film lovers and filmmakers.

DH: Netflix uses algorithms. Does Fandor?

TH: No, we use humans. We found that taste is a unique human quality.

HH: That isn’t a zero-one kind of thing.

DH: Had you both been involved in any detailed way with digital services before Fandor?

TH: Hal has been one of the most innovative and business-minded filmmakers for a long time. He’s an artful guy, so you see that side of it. But I think while he may be [metaphorically] wearing a beret, I think deep down he has aspirations of a three-piece suit and suspenders.

HH: Early in my career or probably before, it was clear to me that if you wanted an artistic life, you were going to have to fend for yourself and you were going to have to learn to do the business to protect and foster your artistic life. There are plenty of examples going all the way back to Moliere. I learned a tremendous amount seeing how Godard negotiated the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s in his career. And there are plenty of others.

TH: Hal set up a post-production facility, a sound facility, was one of the first filmmakers to cut on an Avid. Over the years he has re-licensed most of his material, re-mastering it and adding extra materials. That approach is super-rare. And so he gets to make movies like this now.

DH: We spoke earlier about the sense of community in the film world. With fewer critics writing serious criticism and old movie houses like this one gradually starting to give way to digital, has something fundamentally been lost in the experience of cinema?

HH: It’s morphed. Of course, yeah, when it was a pre-digital world, people congregated in spaces and lifted actual newspapers and read. They were in the bar reading the same New York Press review and arguing about it. Now it’s all happening electronically and faster, and so many more voices involved. You don’t necessarily have to earn respect in order to write. It gets a bit cacophonous. As a filmmaker, I tend to turn it off.

TH: One of the things that’s thrilling to me is that it used to be that if you wanted to see My America, you would have to be at the IFC Center to see it. Now, it’s not like we have hundreds of thousands of people signed up to Fandor; it’s a startup. But wherever you are in the U.S. or Canada, you can watch the movie. You still have to make the choice between this film and 50,000 others. When Hal and I got started, there weren’t tons of other movies like ours getting made.

DH: One thing that stands out about My America is how rooted it is in theatre. That’s a striking quality that you don’t see often in features. Does that come from your love of theatre?

HH: I am not a theatre person. I don’t go to the theatre. I actually don’t like a lot of theatre. I wish it could be more like cinema.

DH: But you chose a really spare approach that heightens the sense of theatricality.

HH: Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily theatrical. It’s a particularly cinematic thing to do, to choose how to look at something. I’ve done theatre and choreography. The whole point cinema gives you is, wow, we’re all watching it from here. I can cut, I can not cut. So, it’s funny. But that is an issue I’ve had since my first film. Because my work is dialogue-driven, people tend to think it’s theatrical. But talking movies can be very cinematic as well.

TH: I remember the second day of shooting Unbelievable Truth and you were doing speed-line-readings with the actors. And I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Somewhere in that, it jelled to me the way you foreground performance. You have always been interested in performance in your work.

HH: Right. There’s less of a requirement or necessity or respect for naturalism. You want the artifice of performing, of people committing themselves to the text. That, to me, is a kind of realism that is much more valuable than naturalism. That’s cinematic for me.