Screening of The Builder
Wednesday, November 10
7:00pm to 10:00 pm
Rawles Hall room 100
Following an Irish immigrant carpenter from coastal Queens to the Catskills and beyond, The Builder is an American existential portrait that explores the gulf between the idea of a thing and the thing itself. The Builder is the first full-length feature directed by R. Alverson, a carpenter and musician from Richmond, VA. It features music by Bon Iver, Gregor Samsa, Pan American, Robert Donne and Spokane.
In addition to the feature, the label will be offering a collection of songs, Music For The Builder, on the Jagjaguwar web site.
Live Buzz writer, Taylor Peters talked to Director, R. Alverson about the differences between releasing a movie and releasing an album, his influences, and more. R. Alverson will also be doing a Q&A after the screening of the movie, so don't miss out on this unique opportunity.
Live Buzz: The Builder has been released on Jagjaguwar, which usually just releases music. How did you get involved with releasing a movie with them?
R. Alverson: I've been in a band on their roster called Spokane and have had a musical relationship with them since 1996. They are close friends. I approached Chris Swanson, one of the owners of the label, about investing in The Builder when what little personal funding the project was running on evaporated and I felt the process was going to be too protracted to serve the artistic integrity of the movie. He and the other three label owners, Ben, Darius and Jonathan came on board for New Jerusalem, my second project, and ultimately distributed The Builder on DVD.
Live Buzz: What was that like in terms of being able to do the things that need to be done to release a movie that are perhaps different from releasing an album?
R. Alverson: It's a learning experience for us all, that's part of the creative excitement of the whole enterprise- on both the business and artistic side.
Live Buzz: I've read a lot about the influence you draw from John Cassavetes as a filmmaker. What sorts of things about his style appeal to you?
R. Alverson: The apparent chaos of the compositions: the relationships between individuals, the cinematography, the feeling of impending collapse and suffocation in his films. These are the murky ambiences of the everyday, they don't fit neatly into the cinematic mold, they seem flawed- as they should.
Live Buzz: What other filmmakers or movies have had an influence on you? One in particular that I thought of while watching was Andrei Tarkovsky, is he at all important to you?
R. Alverson: The first foreign films that I was exposed to were Bergman and Tarkovsky. Seeing Stalker was a singular event for both myself and Colm O'Leary, my writing partner and the lead in The Builder. There was so much unexplained- there's something anemic about American audiences, the kind of media I was exposed to as a child. We have become addicted to spoon-fed cinema, both emotional and factual. The realization that filmmaking could be an essentially exploratory art was groundbreaking for me.
Live Buzz: One thing that really stuck out to me in the movie was the sound design, particularly how sounds from different shots would sort of blur through the fades to black and into others. What lead you to set things up this way?
R. Alverson: Maybe a strong feeling for the resonance of an image and for decay in sound. It seems to me memory acts that way. I'm interested in what happens to us when we watch movies, in, kind of, the social science of it. Movies become part of memory, but how quickly, how removed are they? It's all hearsay in a way. I think the black punctuations in The Builder were an impulsive method of simply wanting to consider the individual sequences of the picture, as though I wanted a moment to meditate on what was occurring- not that there is any excess of action, there's sometimes very little that would typically be considered narrative. I wanted to bracket those inconsequential moments because they are so important to the way we live.
Live Buzz: How did you start working with Colm O'Leary?
R. Alverson: Colm and I met in New York City in 1990, we both worked at a restaurant on St. Mark's Street. He and my sister Katy starred in my first film, a 17 minute, 16 mm picture called I Lay Barren. He's been one of my closest friends since. When I approached him about being the protagonist in The Builder he was initially skeptical of the looseness of the project and, naturally, being a non-actor, concerned about the intense scrutiny of the camera and all the related complications of putting oneself "out there". I wanted non-actors, but I needed to comprehend these individuals' social selves in order to utilize that innate acting that is accessible and particular to each of us. I felt he was the perfect subject, someone I could literally watch with interest and scrutiny and question with that scrutiny the way both he and the character attempted to define themselves in the world of the film.
Live Buzz: What was the filming process like? A lot of the shots seem to be done on hand held; did you need to have a big crew when filming or did that enable you to work with fewer people?
R. Alverson: I shot the entire movie, as I did New Jerusalem. Sometimes I would setup mics in the room, other times have whoever was available hold the boom. There essentially was no crew, which allowed both Colm and me to have a lot of space to consider and question the thing as it went along.
Live Buzz: Could you tell me a little bit about your band Spokane? What's the current state of affairs there, are you working on anything new?
R. Alverson: We had a record, Little Hours that was released in 2007. Then I was immediately at work on The Builder. Haven't had much time since then. I do miss it.
Live Buzz: How did you get involved in filmmaking, has it always been something you've been interested in or is it a more recent development (I ask in the context of the knowledge that it seems that you've been doing music for quite some time)?
R. Alverson: I took some film classes at NYU in the early nineties and was dead set on becoming a director, but it was a different climate back them, and the medium was much more inaccessible, as we all know. When I saw some of the images coming out on HD with 35mm adapters I felt it was time.
Live Buzz: So you've got another film coming out called New Jerusalem. From what I've read it seems like it might be dealing with at least a few themes that are similar to those in The Builder. Did you carry anything over from film to film, or do you see them as wholly separate?
R. Alverson: I have 2 other movies in development, one shooting this spring, and all 4 films seem to me concerned with the physical body's place in the world- they center on individuals whose minds and bodies have become disconnected, for whom the simplest things have become emotionally inaccessible, for whom the social world has become a conundrum. I have always been taken by Samuel Becket's characters, whose worlds and minds necessitate that they take stock of the most rudimentary things, unsure at every turn, building on improvised facts. That seems to me the way we live.
Live Buzz: In New Jerusalem you've got another person in Will Oldham who started out with music but has moved to film, albeit in a different way than you have, do you feel like that's a common tendency in certain types of artists- to get involved in a lot of different media? And if so, why do you think that is?
R. Alverson: Not much equipped to speak for others, but for me it has always been a matter of what tools are accessible and which are not, what routes are tired and which are not.
Live Buzz: Is there any relation between the film's title and Palace Music song "Old Jerusalem" from Viva Last Blues?
R. Alverson: Not consciously, though I have tremendous respect for Will's music. The title is essentially a synonym for religious utopia, a fixed, certain heaven that will arrive at some uncertain date, and all the expectation that either fuels or burdens that waiting, hopeful person.
