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It was hard, and it's still very hard. My biggest fear was that someone was going to pick up my film and say, "Look at this 'director', this 'found art' that we discovered and now we're going to exploit the fuck out of it!" There have been other documentaries and films by or about indie or outsider filmmakers that make people out to be buffoons. And the subjects don't know they're buffoons. I was scared of that. But I think that ultimately people get it; they get the whole package. People who grew up in the '70s and '80s will probably relate to footage of you as an adolescent. At one point, you have a bi-level haircut and are lip-syncing to "Frank Mills" from Hair. Yeah, but older people get it too. I was at the Roger Ebert Film Festival and I was anticipating that it was going to be mostly college kids because it's a college town. Well, I walked into the auditorium and the majority of the people were eighty-year-olds. I was like, Oh my god, they're going to walk out and they're not going to get it, because the editing is so frenetic. But people came up to me in tears and began dialogues about their sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles, some of whom had overdosed on Lithium, like my mother did. It was just a really bizarre way of meeting people. Bizarre and beautiful at the same time. Well, it's an extremely personal film. I never realized as I was making this that people would come up to me and say, "I feel like I know you already." Nothing I was doing about this was preconceived at all. I was really reluctant at the beginning to actually sell the film, because it's so fucking personal. It's an incredible story. I think my family has collectively always known that we've had a pretty poignant story to tell. I definitely wanted to tell my story regarding my mother, but it was originally going to be by way of narrative — like a reverse Lolita, where a twelve-year-old boy seduces older straight men. I'm actually still thinking about doing that. Was there a conscious moment where you realized that this was the story? I had auditioned for his movie and in my audition tape I slipped in some footage of my film. I was like, "Hi! I'm Jonathan! I'm a filmmaker! And here's me when I'm eleven in drag! I'm sure you'll love it!" But just after I had auditioned for John's film I had to break away for about six months to go and basically rescue my mother because my grandfather was inadvertently allowing her to overdose on Lithium. I brought her back to live with me and my boyfriend in New York. I continued to work on this thirty-five minute thing that is now the beginning of Tarnation. What motivated you to finish the movie? I met somebody who was an intern at the MIX Film festival. He was the new roommate of a friend of mine. Totally by accident they came over and I just popped a tape of the film in. I didn't know who he was or what he was affiliated with or anything. He was the first person that I'd shown it to, outside of my nuclear family and some film-savvy friends, that said, "I think you're a filmmaker." And then he said, "You should finish it because there's a deadline for the film festival in the next few weeks." I went on this editing marathon and finished the movie in about three weeks. The whole thing. I would stay up for three or four days at a time, on just tons and tons of cigarettes and coffee. With a film like this, do you feel like it's actually finished, like it's ever really done? Every time I see it I'm like, wish I would have, could have, should have … There's so much that's left out, so many subplots that are gone. I have a nine-year-old son, actually. My mother had a second failed marriage, I have a half-brother from that marriage. There's a baby that appears with my grandmother in one sequence and that's unexplained. So it kind of lends a mystique to this cut, but there was a lot that was left out. I think I might just inevitably save that for Reintarnation or Tarnation 2.0 or whatever. There's a sequence in the film where you and a friend stage a musical version of David Lynch's Blue Velvet with your high school classmates — have those people seen it? Or the people from your clubbing days? We had a screening for all of the ones I could locate but most of the club people are just nonexistent. The boy that I fell in love with that looks like Nick Drake is nowhere to be found. I actually went back to Westbury High School where I went with him and I sifted through six or seven yearbooks trying to find people to sign personal releases and he wasn't in a single, solitary page of any of these yearbooks. It kind of creeped me out because I was like, did this guy even exist? How does your family feel about the film?
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onathan Caouette's film, Tarnation, has been categorized as either a
documentary
or
an experimental film, when in fact it is something else entirely. To me, Tarnation is
to indie film what Nirvana's Nevermind was to indie rock. Working with
a $200 budget and iMovie software, Caouette made the first cut of his
film in three weeks. Set
to an almost continuous soundtrack, Tarnation combines the quick-cut aesthetics
of MTV, the experimental tradition of nonlinear narrative and the compassion
of the documentary filmmaker to create something wholly original yet hauntingly
familiar. | featured personal | ||
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