Allison Anders, Director
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5 Allison Anders, director Allison Anders rode the independent film wave of the 1990s with such notable titles as Gas Food Lodging (1992). Although still an indie filmmaker, today she devotes most of her time to directing episodes for television series that range from comedies to police procedurals. Anders discusses the many changes she has seen in the motion picture industries over the last few decades and compares the chal- lenges directors face in film versus television. If you had to describe your work, what do you do? I am a couple of things. I’m a writer. I write for film and television, and personal, prose-y things, too. I also, of course, direct, both film and TV. Writing is pretty self-explanatory. You know what is involved with that, but people have very strong misconceptions about directing. I remember directing a TV episode with a TV writer who was very involved, very controlling. I asked him, “Why don’t you just direct?” He said, “Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. I don’t know lenses, I don’t know cameras, I don’t know shots.” And I said, “Well, I don’t any of that shit either. I don’t know lenses. That’s for the DP [director of photography] to know.” There are some directors who know that, but that’s not me, and that’s not the most important part of the job. When you direct, you are making creative choices. That’s what a director does. Yes, I work on setting up the camera with the DP, but otherwise, directing is decision making. It’s making choices on casting, on wardrobe, on makeup. It’s choosing the paint on the wall. And this writer was very capable of doing exactly that, because without 45 46 Chapter 5 realizing it, he was making directorial choices. The following year, he directed the first episode of his own show. The other thing that directing is about is setting up an atmosphere that is going to achieve what you want. Everybody is different here, but for me, I am going to try to set up an atmosphere of trust on the set, so the actors can give it all up. You want to make everybody feel safe, and then get the hell out of the way and let them do their jobs. Most directors are not like that, but the ones who mentored me are. You guide the process and make a lot of choices, but once you are on set, you’ve already made them and you trust the people who are heads of their departments to realize those choices. Otherwise, you’ll drive yourself and everybody else insane because you’re trying to do everybody’s job. On TV you have fewer decisions to make because your episode has to fit with the tone of the series and stay consistent. If I decide to put my thumbprint on something, it may affect later episodes. So you don’t want too much of your thumbprint on the episodes you direct, which is unlike my own movies, where that’s the whole point. You started out as a filmmaker during the glory days of independent cinema during the 1980s and 1990s, and since that time you’ve navigated tremendous changes in the way movies are made, financed, and seen. Can you talk about that arc of change, and how it has affected your career? It’s been incredible. I started with Border Radio in 1987. Kurt Voss, Dean Lent, and I made that while we were still at UCLA film school. It was shot on 16mm, black- and-white reversal film, with equipment owned by UCLA. After years of strug- gling to finish it, we got two pieces of financing. We got a soundtrack deal that was about $10,000. Ironically that would have been crap in the 1990s, but it would be considered great today, because of the way the music business has imploded. We also got some money from German TV. The incredible thing was that German TV helped finance a lot of films at that time. They financed Jim Jarmusch’s movies at the same time that we were making Border Radio. They had a bigger hand than people realize in the American indie film movement. By the 1990s, when I did Gas Food Lodging, there was another important source of financing, which was Larry Estes. We couldn’t have existed without this man. He had a program at RCA Columbia that was phenomenal. He green-lit Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). He green-lit One False Move (1992). He was a real champion of the emerging Ameri- can independent film movement before we even had such a name. During the 1990s, we had a lot of things in place that are no longer in place. We had had critics whose opinions mattered, so if they championed your film, people went to see it. We had theaters that allowed you to play your film for a while so that you could build word of mouth. We had audiences who went to theaters to Allison Anders, director 47 see the movies that we were making. And we had actors who were interested in doing something different. Now all of that is pretty much gone. That kind of sup- port system doesn’t exist. Are you saying that today people like Estes aren’t in the business anymore? That indie directors no longer have one or two people who can turn the key and make everything else happen? I don’t think there is anybody like that now. There are some people who have sur- vived all of this. Like Andrea Sperling, who produced Gregg Araki’s movies and then went on to produce other young, independent filmmakers. She has managed to stay in there and continues to find financing for independent projects with great success. But these films are being made for a whole lot less than what we had back in the day. Today a film like Gas Food Lodging would need A-list casting attached to all the major roles, which we didn’t need back then, and the director would get maybe $500,000 to make it as opposed to $1 million. By comparison, how does a film get made today? Do you put together the financing and shop it around at festivals? Well, yes, but the problem is the rights that they want in exchange for the financ- ing that they give you. When Larry Estes green-lit our movies, all he wanted was the video rights. When HBO green-lit Mi Vida Loca (1993), all they wanted was the right to air it on HBO and the video. They didn’t want the theatrical. They didn’t want distribution rights for the entire world in perpetuity. They just wanted a slice that mattered to them, and they didn’t care what we did in other distribu- tion windows. We were on our own for that. Now, investors want everything they can get. They expect to get everything back. They also expect everybody to defer salaries and have skimpy budgets for their departments. It’s really harsh. It’s a harsh reality. During the 1990s, there was just enough money to be made in the video rights that things were a little bit softer to negotiate. Likewise with the soundtracks. You could make such amazing deals on your music because in the 1990s that was a huge business. The soundtrack could actually make a lot of money. The soundtrack deal could cover the cost of rights for songs you wanted to use in your film. When did things start to change and tighten up? Right around the millennium, when the music business failed and people could start downloading movies. When people stopped going to the movies and stopped 48 Chapter 5 buying music, we had a real problem. At the same time, magazines and newspa- pers started having problems, so we lost critics, too. We lost everything that was supporting the indie movement. Creatively, we also had a shift, as digital cameras became available. I was one of the first people to shoot entirely on digital and go to Sundance with Things Behind the Sun (2001). It was great, but there are problems with that, too. We were the last generation to shoot on film, cut on film, and screen on film. I haven’t worked on film since Sugar Town (1999). So career-wise, you began to turn to television. Why did that become an important or viable option? In the 1990s there had been some talk about me doing an episode of ER (1994– 2009). I was terrified. I didn’t know what TV was, didn’t know the first thing about it. In the end, it didn’t happen, but it was the first time I started to have a conver- sation about it. Later I met with the people from Sex and the City (1998–2004). I was already a fan of the show, and the producers said they loved my movies, so it was exciting. They wanted to get that “Allison Anders thing” in there. But it was a little harsh, because I came to it with the experience of writing and directing my own stuff. When I direct a movie, it’s 100 percent my vision. People can give input and I can listen or not, but I make every single decision. When I began to prep an episode for Sex and the City, all of the things that make up the “Allison Anders thing” were already decided.