Crispin Glovers Big SLUG Interview
by Scott Farley
Issue 217 / January 2007 More from this Issue
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Hollywood treats actors like dogs. When they're good, they're rewarded, and when they're bad, they get their noses rubbed in shit. Crispin Glover has been a bad dog. He's bought a castle in Prague, and now he can make movies any way he wants-cheaply and far away from Hollywood. Which is what he has been doing in Utah for the last decade, anyway.
Photo by Scott Peterson
Crispin Hellion Glover was born April 20-the same day as Hitler and the eponymous high school massacre, Columbine: a day of rebels, world changers and pot smokers. At this year's Sundance Film Festival, he introduces his second film in the hugely controversial What Is It? Trilogy: It is Fine. Everything is Fine. On the surface, it's a film noir starring a guy in a wheelchair; but underneath, it's a psychosexual exploration of what it is to be the guy in the wheelchair.
The first film in the trilogy is What Is It?, has been touring as part of his road show for several years. The second installment It is Fine. Everything is Fine will premiere at Sundance this year and the third installment is yet to be released. During the tour of the first film his audiences in the question-and-answer periods seemed responsive to its particularly difficult material. However, even after Glover entered his film in the Sundance Film Festival, he was doubtful that it would get in. However, he felt he owed the film the opportunity to compete. Much to his surprise, it was accepted. A provocative film featuring a controversial cast, it debuted to terrible reviews at the 2005 festival. Crispin went to Sundance knowing that in comparison to the other films, his film would stick out like a taxidermist at the mall: everybody would want to see it, but nobody would want to buy it. His expectation was that he would be able to show the film in a similar way at the festival as he did on the tour.
"When I showed What Is It? at Sundance, for whatever reason, I'm not quite sure why, I requested to have a press screening for it and I requested to be present at that screening and to have a question-and-answer [session], and for whatever reason, they did not want me to do that. I wasn't allowed to go to the press screening. And people saw it and I know people had questions and thoughts, and I know I didn't get responsible reviewer types reviewing it. What I got were gossip-columnist types sort of finding any salacious element about it that they could and listing it off and saying negative things about the film." In spite of the negative press he received from the festival reviews, Crispin felt that Sundance itself was the best possible place to premiere his film.
The tour of the first film, which has been going on for more than a decade, always includes "Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Slide Show" featuring odd stories and art which Crispin has created. For several years it featured various embryonic incarnations of What Is It? These showings gave Crispin the basis for his final edits of the film, and, for the last two years, it has been headlining the final version. The film is followed by an often-emotional question-and-answer session.
Crispin's most recent tour finished with three sold-out show at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles and wrapped up a national tour that included a set of sold-out shows at the Castro in San Francisco and sold out houses at the Northwest Film Forum. The New York Anthology Film Archives showings were rave successes. Shows at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago were so successful that a third night had to be added. Almost 2000 people attended each of the various Los Angeles and Chicago runs.
So, what is it about What Is It? that is so sensational that it requires a touring explanation? What Is It? begins with a whole cast of actors with Down's Syndrome. An experimental film about snails, murder and a warring gang of kids who sublimate their violence into repeated, graphic little snail murders; it seems calculated to outrage and mystify. They plot to kill one another over a mysterious pipe. Curiously, it is placed in a romantic landscape of thick grasses, dramatic temple grounds, fantastic weathered landscapes and rain. The fact that such disturbing images are presented with such visual poetry is deeply unsettling.
In spite of repeated graphic snail salting, dismemberment and other visceral images of disgust, there are moments of surprising beauty and cinematic vision. Uncanny events take place that transcend reality. These actors, who in the actual world are relegated to being oddities with Down's syndrome, get a chance to engage both the terrible and the angelic ends of human behavior. They become, if just for a moment, divine.
Borrowing structure freely from the Greeks by way of Freud and the modern tradition of the subconscious, the alternate part of the movie takes place on cavernous sets of bleak throne rooms and antechambers. Visually primeval and stylized sets created by David Brothers on his Salt Lake City sound stage were used to represent the subconscious of one of the children we see plotting in the real world. In this world, Steve Stewart plays a king borne by elephant-headed women from a clamshell to a mating dance of monkey-headed nymphs, and is pleasured by a character played by a porn star. He appears later, in the nude, on a stone throne, to punish Crispin's mutinous character and to banish him. Crispin plays the antagonist in the subconscious of the actor whose head we're in, and more actors with Down's syndrome populate the scene. Also, there is a character that is using injections to try to become a snail himself.
There is probably more that could be said about the individual elements in the film. But What Is It? affects each viewer differently; it acts as a probe, poking at the viewer's anxieties and fears. It is a direct assault on the unconscious. And the many snails are page numbers on a catalog of personal anxiety. If Rousseau and Freud had pulled an all-nighter with a bottle of absinthe and a canister of ether and then made a film, this would be it.
And so, what is the motivation for making a film that seems designed only to confuse and offend? Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made a film that had a similar effect: Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog), It was a collection of shocking and controversial images connected by a thread of rage against a mechanical age and a world torn apart by war and religion. When it first screened in Paris, the audience hated it so much they destroyed the cinema lobby and rioted in the streets. It has since become one of the touchstones of twentieth-century culture and its images are among the most famous in cinematic history.When asked if there had been any reactions to his film on par with the famous riots in Paris, Crispin replied, "There often are aggressive questioning sessions. Nobody's ever slashed paintings in the lobby. I've had people get upset and I've had people cry. And ultimately, it's about the snails. Its a visceral element which exists in the film."
But there are justifications for what we see in the film-the elements are intentionally outside the realm of good or evil, either because they involve people whom we are not sure how to judge, or they involve situations which we are completely at a loss to place into a moral context.
Crispin's concerns in this film amount to a tacit criticism of contemporary corporate filmmaking. Conventional commercial film tells you what to think, what is bad or good, and how to feel about it. Or if it doesn't tell you how to feel about it, it punishes the bad thing in the story, or elevates the good. Films that don't follow this simple rule don't get made in Hollywood.
There is a tradition of great cinema, which flouted these puritanical conventions. For instance, Glover said "Luis Bunuel, Stanley Kubrick, Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, [were] filmmakers that throughout their careers would consistently visit themes and ideas that are in the realm of that which is beyond good and evil, and these are great filmmakers."
And it is with this group of artists in mind that Crispin set out to make a film that would be outside the realm of the easy answers, the realm of what one already believes. There is no template one can use to place these images in a moral order. One is taking risks by simply having opinions about a film like "What Is It?" There is more to this notion than simply a contrarian instinct or a desire to break metaphorical windows. Crispin sees a real value for the individual and for society in a cinema that doesn't indoctrinate, doesn't remove the audience's own judgments from the experience. Glover says he wants to make a movies where the "film doesn't tell the audience...how they should feel about the thing, the audience can have a conceptualization themselves about the thing, they can have a genuinely educational experience."
Crispin agrees, however, that though the elements in What Is it? are all relevant and can be intellectualized on some level, "the one element which is not as intellectually removed and is extremely visceral is the snail element. So it is the one I can understand when people argue, and there is the moral idea...what gives one the right to torture or take the life of an innocent being? I agree with that, ultimately. I like animals...but, ultimately, I would make the decision to do it [the snail scenes] again. In this film."
And on that level, What Is It? is a remarkable success. What Is It? is not an outrage, but to some extent, like Une Chien Andalou, it is rage.At the same time What Is It? was being shot in California, Crispin was also bouncing ideas off Utah friends and collaborators, Larry Roberts, and David Brothers. And he also made friends with one very determined handicapped-rights activist and writer, Steve Stewart.
Born with cerebral palsy, Steve Stewart had been getting in the face of the Salt Lake City council and advocating handicapped rights since the sixties. An aggressive fighter for handicapped rights, he was instrumental in changing laws and zoning ordinances in the city. David Brothers remembers him tearing around the city full speed in his wheel chair, determined not to be intimidated or ignored. He was friends with David, who introduced him to Crispin. With David's encouragement he had also been writing screenplays. And there was one David wanted to help make.
A folk-arty-styled story, it was written from a firmly outsider's viewpoint and with an outsider's sense of storytelling. It was nave and personal, and it would make a great movie. David, being a fan of outsider art, saw at once that it had possibilities; he convinced Crispin to help produce it.
While What Is It? was in its editing process, Steve's film, It's Fine. Everything is Fine, was being produced and funded by Crispin with money he received from acting in the Hollywood film Charlie's Angels and the smaller independent film Willard.
Crispin calls It's Fine. Everything is Fine. a "narrative drama with humor." With David Brothers directing, it was shot on his new, larger sound stage, over the course of three sessions during six months It began filming before editing of What Is It? had completed, and was pushed up in schedule when David revealed to Crispin that "they had better start shooting the movie, or there might be no movie to shoot." Steve's health was failing. And his decline continued while the film was going into production. Early in the shooting of the film, Steve's lung collapsed. There was discussion that he might take himself off of life support and he asked Crispin from his hospital bed if they had finished. When Crispin told him that there was still much that needed filming, he found the strength to pull through and continue the film.
Steve's screenplay is about the world as he saw it. As Crispin says, "It wouldn't be a film about prettified, puppetized people in wheel chairs. For him, this film would be a declaration of his equality". Essentially, it's a film about fucking and killing, and by extension, it is a film about being a powerful person in the world-sexual, capable and vital.
About a month after the third session of filming had finished, Steven's lung again collapsed. A friend of Steve's called from the hospital to ask whether they finally had enough footage to make the film. "It was this sad thing," said Crispin, "to have essentially to write a goodbye letter...saying there was enough to finish the film. It became evident that he had stayed alive just to finish the film. He could have taken himself off of life support the first time his lung collapsed. He was being persistent; he kept wanting to finish.'
In the last year, Crispin hired a publicist for his film and slideshow tours and found an audience of appreciative admirers and enthusiastic fans for his entertainingly strange and difficult show. The performance of the "Big Slide Show" is a bravura event and after the film, Glover answers questions earnestly and at length. The evening ends with a book signing where a crisply dressed yet vampirish Crispin autographs each book with a generous yet cool formality.
Since its unlauded opening at Sundance, What Is It? has gained genuine praise from such important outlets like when Laura Kern of the The New York Times wrote, "Crispin Hellion Glover, auteur, is a force to be reckoned with." And the Chicago Sun-Times', Bill Stamets wrote, "Glover...puts impenetrably odd and tender poetry on the screen." The film has also won awards, most notably Best Narrative Film at The Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Maverick Award at The Method Film Festival, and the Midnight Extreme Film Award at the Sitges Film Festival, in Spain. And of course, What Is It? was an Official Selection for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
The second installment It's Fine. Everything Is Fine will premier at Sundance this year. It will be shown on Tuesday Jan. 23 at midnight and on Friday Jan. 26 at 3pm at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City. It will play at the Broadway Theatre in Salt Lake City on Fri. Jan 26 at midnight.
Photo by Scott Peterson
Crispin Hellion Glover was born April 20-the same day as Hitler and the eponymous high school massacre, Columbine: a day of rebels, world changers and pot smokers. At this year's Sundance Film Festival, he introduces his second film in the hugely controversial What Is It? Trilogy: It is Fine. Everything is Fine. On the surface, it's a film noir starring a guy in a wheelchair; but underneath, it's a psychosexual exploration of what it is to be the guy in the wheelchair.
The first film in the trilogy is What Is It?, has been touring as part of his road show for several years. The second installment It is Fine. Everything is Fine will premiere at Sundance this year and the third installment is yet to be released. During the tour of the first film his audiences in the question-and-answer periods seemed responsive to its particularly difficult material. However, even after Glover entered his film in the Sundance Film Festival, he was doubtful that it would get in. However, he felt he owed the film the opportunity to compete. Much to his surprise, it was accepted. A provocative film featuring a controversial cast, it debuted to terrible reviews at the 2005 festival. Crispin went to Sundance knowing that in comparison to the other films, his film would stick out like a taxidermist at the mall: everybody would want to see it, but nobody would want to buy it. His expectation was that he would be able to show the film in a similar way at the festival as he did on the tour.
"When I showed What Is It? at Sundance, for whatever reason, I'm not quite sure why, I requested to have a press screening for it and I requested to be present at that screening and to have a question-and-answer [session], and for whatever reason, they did not want me to do that. I wasn't allowed to go to the press screening. And people saw it and I know people had questions and thoughts, and I know I didn't get responsible reviewer types reviewing it. What I got were gossip-columnist types sort of finding any salacious element about it that they could and listing it off and saying negative things about the film." In spite of the negative press he received from the festival reviews, Crispin felt that Sundance itself was the best possible place to premiere his film.
The tour of the first film, which has been going on for more than a decade, always includes "Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Slide Show" featuring odd stories and art which Crispin has created. For several years it featured various embryonic incarnations of What Is It? These showings gave Crispin the basis for his final edits of the film, and, for the last two years, it has been headlining the final version. The film is followed by an often-emotional question-and-answer session.
Crispin's most recent tour finished with three sold-out show at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles and wrapped up a national tour that included a set of sold-out shows at the Castro in San Francisco and sold out houses at the Northwest Film Forum. The New York Anthology Film Archives showings were rave successes. Shows at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago were so successful that a third night had to be added. Almost 2000 people attended each of the various Los Angeles and Chicago runs.
So, what is it about What Is It? that is so sensational that it requires a touring explanation? What Is It? begins with a whole cast of actors with Down's Syndrome. An experimental film about snails, murder and a warring gang of kids who sublimate their violence into repeated, graphic little snail murders; it seems calculated to outrage and mystify. They plot to kill one another over a mysterious pipe. Curiously, it is placed in a romantic landscape of thick grasses, dramatic temple grounds, fantastic weathered landscapes and rain. The fact that such disturbing images are presented with such visual poetry is deeply unsettling.
In spite of repeated graphic snail salting, dismemberment and other visceral images of disgust, there are moments of surprising beauty and cinematic vision. Uncanny events take place that transcend reality. These actors, who in the actual world are relegated to being oddities with Down's syndrome, get a chance to engage both the terrible and the angelic ends of human behavior. They become, if just for a moment, divine.
Borrowing structure freely from the Greeks by way of Freud and the modern tradition of the subconscious, the alternate part of the movie takes place on cavernous sets of bleak throne rooms and antechambers. Visually primeval and stylized sets created by David Brothers on his Salt Lake City sound stage were used to represent the subconscious of one of the children we see plotting in the real world. In this world, Steve Stewart plays a king borne by elephant-headed women from a clamshell to a mating dance of monkey-headed nymphs, and is pleasured by a character played by a porn star. He appears later, in the nude, on a stone throne, to punish Crispin's mutinous character and to banish him. Crispin plays the antagonist in the subconscious of the actor whose head we're in, and more actors with Down's syndrome populate the scene. Also, there is a character that is using injections to try to become a snail himself.
There is probably more that could be said about the individual elements in the film. But What Is It? affects each viewer differently; it acts as a probe, poking at the viewer's anxieties and fears. It is a direct assault on the unconscious. And the many snails are page numbers on a catalog of personal anxiety. If Rousseau and Freud had pulled an all-nighter with a bottle of absinthe and a canister of ether and then made a film, this would be it.
And so, what is the motivation for making a film that seems designed only to confuse and offend? Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made a film that had a similar effect: Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog), It was a collection of shocking and controversial images connected by a thread of rage against a mechanical age and a world torn apart by war and religion. When it first screened in Paris, the audience hated it so much they destroyed the cinema lobby and rioted in the streets. It has since become one of the touchstones of twentieth-century culture and its images are among the most famous in cinematic history.When asked if there had been any reactions to his film on par with the famous riots in Paris, Crispin replied, "There often are aggressive questioning sessions. Nobody's ever slashed paintings in the lobby. I've had people get upset and I've had people cry. And ultimately, it's about the snails. Its a visceral element which exists in the film."
But there are justifications for what we see in the film-the elements are intentionally outside the realm of good or evil, either because they involve people whom we are not sure how to judge, or they involve situations which we are completely at a loss to place into a moral context.
Crispin's concerns in this film amount to a tacit criticism of contemporary corporate filmmaking. Conventional commercial film tells you what to think, what is bad or good, and how to feel about it. Or if it doesn't tell you how to feel about it, it punishes the bad thing in the story, or elevates the good. Films that don't follow this simple rule don't get made in Hollywood.
There is a tradition of great cinema, which flouted these puritanical conventions. For instance, Glover said "Luis Bunuel, Stanley Kubrick, Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, [were] filmmakers that throughout their careers would consistently visit themes and ideas that are in the realm of that which is beyond good and evil, and these are great filmmakers."
And it is with this group of artists in mind that Crispin set out to make a film that would be outside the realm of the easy answers, the realm of what one already believes. There is no template one can use to place these images in a moral order. One is taking risks by simply having opinions about a film like "What Is It?" There is more to this notion than simply a contrarian instinct or a desire to break metaphorical windows. Crispin sees a real value for the individual and for society in a cinema that doesn't indoctrinate, doesn't remove the audience's own judgments from the experience. Glover says he wants to make a movies where the "film doesn't tell the audience...how they should feel about the thing, the audience can have a conceptualization themselves about the thing, they can have a genuinely educational experience."
Crispin agrees, however, that though the elements in What Is it? are all relevant and can be intellectualized on some level, "the one element which is not as intellectually removed and is extremely visceral is the snail element. So it is the one I can understand when people argue, and there is the moral idea...what gives one the right to torture or take the life of an innocent being? I agree with that, ultimately. I like animals...but, ultimately, I would make the decision to do it [the snail scenes] again. In this film."
And on that level, What Is It? is a remarkable success. What Is It? is not an outrage, but to some extent, like Une Chien Andalou, it is rage.At the same time What Is It? was being shot in California, Crispin was also bouncing ideas off Utah friends and collaborators, Larry Roberts, and David Brothers. And he also made friends with one very determined handicapped-rights activist and writer, Steve Stewart.
Born with cerebral palsy, Steve Stewart had been getting in the face of the Salt Lake City council and advocating handicapped rights since the sixties. An aggressive fighter for handicapped rights, he was instrumental in changing laws and zoning ordinances in the city. David Brothers remembers him tearing around the city full speed in his wheel chair, determined not to be intimidated or ignored. He was friends with David, who introduced him to Crispin. With David's encouragement he had also been writing screenplays. And there was one David wanted to help make.
A folk-arty-styled story, it was written from a firmly outsider's viewpoint and with an outsider's sense of storytelling. It was nave and personal, and it would make a great movie. David, being a fan of outsider art, saw at once that it had possibilities; he convinced Crispin to help produce it.
While What Is It? was in its editing process, Steve's film, It's Fine. Everything is Fine, was being produced and funded by Crispin with money he received from acting in the Hollywood film Charlie's Angels and the smaller independent film Willard.
Crispin calls It's Fine. Everything is Fine. a "narrative drama with humor." With David Brothers directing, it was shot on his new, larger sound stage, over the course of three sessions during six months It began filming before editing of What Is It? had completed, and was pushed up in schedule when David revealed to Crispin that "they had better start shooting the movie, or there might be no movie to shoot." Steve's health was failing. And his decline continued while the film was going into production. Early in the shooting of the film, Steve's lung collapsed. There was discussion that he might take himself off of life support and he asked Crispin from his hospital bed if they had finished. When Crispin told him that there was still much that needed filming, he found the strength to pull through and continue the film.
Steve's screenplay is about the world as he saw it. As Crispin says, "It wouldn't be a film about prettified, puppetized people in wheel chairs. For him, this film would be a declaration of his equality". Essentially, it's a film about fucking and killing, and by extension, it is a film about being a powerful person in the world-sexual, capable and vital.
About a month after the third session of filming had finished, Steven's lung again collapsed. A friend of Steve's called from the hospital to ask whether they finally had enough footage to make the film. "It was this sad thing," said Crispin, "to have essentially to write a goodbye letter...saying there was enough to finish the film. It became evident that he had stayed alive just to finish the film. He could have taken himself off of life support the first time his lung collapsed. He was being persistent; he kept wanting to finish.'
In the last year, Crispin hired a publicist for his film and slideshow tours and found an audience of appreciative admirers and enthusiastic fans for his entertainingly strange and difficult show. The performance of the "Big Slide Show" is a bravura event and after the film, Glover answers questions earnestly and at length. The evening ends with a book signing where a crisply dressed yet vampirish Crispin autographs each book with a generous yet cool formality.
Since its unlauded opening at Sundance, What Is It? has gained genuine praise from such important outlets like when Laura Kern of the The New York Times wrote, "Crispin Hellion Glover, auteur, is a force to be reckoned with." And the Chicago Sun-Times', Bill Stamets wrote, "Glover...puts impenetrably odd and tender poetry on the screen." The film has also won awards, most notably Best Narrative Film at The Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Maverick Award at The Method Film Festival, and the Midnight Extreme Film Award at the Sitges Film Festival, in Spain. And of course, What Is It? was an Official Selection for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
The second installment It's Fine. Everything Is Fine will premier at Sundance this year. It will be shown on Tuesday Jan. 23 at midnight and on Friday Jan. 26 at 3pm at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City. It will play at the Broadway Theatre in Salt Lake City on Fri. Jan 26 at midnight.
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