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Bedroom eyes: Govindini Murty is stalked by a terrorist in KALIFORNISTAN.
ML: From watching KALIFORNISTAN, your approach to cinema seems to basically be experimental.
JA: I like speed, and also improvisation. I think the cinema should be a lot faster than it currently is. The key is playing with the audience's expectations, and taking an improvisational approach to filmmaking. Hollywood movies seem so slow and boring these days precisely because they're predictable, and locked into certain genres and ideologies. It doesn't matter how fast they cut them - the films still end up being boring.
It's all psychological, actually. If you play around with people's expectations and take risks, it increases the speed at which people feel things are coming at them. It unsettles the audience and excites them.
I've always been fascinated by things like jazz, and also competitive racing - where speed and improvisation are vital. There's a lot of improvisation in KALIFORNISTAN. Most of the film has a documentary feel to it. Sometimes we address the audience directly, break the 'fourth wall,' etc. I even threw some outtakes into the finished film, just for the hell of it. Anything that unsettles people's expectations, and breaks through the wall that Hollywood sometimes puts up around reality.
ML: In what way does Hollywood put up a 'wall' around reality?
JA: Well, I've come to advocate something I call 'direct cinema.' Years ago Godard was famous for saying, 'everything is cinema.' Nowadays, one is tempted to say: 'cinema is everywhere.'
People are shooting movies these days with little camcorders, with cell-phones, they turn around and upload them to YouTube ... and suddenly what they just shot 20 minutes ago has a worldwide audience. Cinema has become incredibly direct and responsive as practiced in everyday life by normal people. Obviously, the most poignant example of this recently comes from Iran.
At the same time, the Hollywood system has become less responsive, less direct than ever. In the Hollywood system, everything is so incredibly expensive and bureaucratic, so mediated ... and every project has to pass through a gauntlet of political correctness, so that anything interesting or edgy gets ironed-out. There's this huge apparatus that everything has to pass through, an apparatus that crushes whatever truth a project might have.
I'd like to make cinema more 'direct,' more immediately responsive to people's lives. I'm not talking about what's usually called 'verité' cinema, where you're just shooting with a shaky camera. I'm talking about blasting through the preconceptions, the templates that Hollywood puts over everything. I'd like to make the production process a lot faster, so that it can respond more immediately to what's happening in the world. What it comes down to is re-orienting moviemaking around lived reality, rather than the whole Hollywood apparatus.
Bounty hunter John Barrett captures an insane terrorist in KALIFORNISTAN.
ML: Do you consider yourself part of any political movement?
JA: I'm actually a member of SPECTRE. [Laughs.] No, actually, I'm always willing to support candidates whose agenda is the expansion of individual freedom. I'm more adamant about that now than ever. But otherwise I no longer have time in my life for anything other than my craft - which is filmmaking. I have to be extremely focused all the time, and cut out any distractions in order to do my work - because as an independent filmmaker, it's all up to you. So I don't pay much attention to politics anymore. In general, political activism is a distraction that a lot of filmmakers get into. They're out saving the planet when really they should just be focusing on their craft.
ML: Yet you consider your worldview to be very different from Hollywood's.
JA: Well, like most people in their 30's, the Cold War really made an imprint on me as a young person. My father served in the Navy, in the nuclear submarine fleet - so I had an acute sense of the Soviet threat. The stories he told me about where the subs went and what they did were incredible - I'm still not sure what I can say about that stuff, actually. [Laughs.]
We also have a very close family friend , a Jewish doctor who worked in the Kremlin and actually operated on Brezhnev. Armand Hammer eventually helped him get out of Russia. He's been here in America for years now - he even operated on John Wayne once. [Laughs.] He's like family to us. The stories he told me about the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union were almost unimaginable. He introduced me to all these dissident Soviet artists like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the famous poet who wrote BABI YAR.
I also had the chance to visit the Soviet Union about five years before it fell. That was really something. The entire time we were there, we couldn't move an inch without some smiling official watching everything we did. It was sort of creepy and amusing at the same time. I remember being in a hotel in Moscow, for example, and actually finding a listening device behind a lamp. [Laughs.]
ML: [Laughs.] What did you do?
JA: We decided to complain loudly about the lack of towels in the room. And when we returned later, the room was practically covered in towels. I'd never seen so many towels. [Laughs.] These sort of rough, gray Soviet towels. I wish I'd kept one.
All these things made an indelible impression on me as a young person. What I realized was that freedom is a very precious thing, and that it's not the normal state of affairs in life - because usually there’s always some jerk who's trying to dominate somebody else. A punk like the terrorist in KALIFORNISTAN. So you have to fight for freedom tenaciously.
A terrorist hunts another victim in KALIFORNISTAN.
If you want to know what the Soviet Union was like, for example, my best advice would be to watch STAR WARS. Look at the Death Star, and the people on it. Look at those huge Star Destroyers bearing down on people. That's totalitarianism in a nutshell.
ML: How has all this affected the type of films you want to make?
JA: Well, obviously for people of my generation we have a different war to fight - the War on Terror. But I think the principles from the Cold War still apply. You have to stay strong. You have to fight the enemy, and not just roll over. Mostly you have to win.
ML: How would you define your relationship to Hollywood?
JA: I'm an independent filmmaker, so I'm not beholden to the Hollywood system. Beyond that, I identify much more with the Bay Area filmmaking community, and always have.
The interesting thing, though, is that even before I had these experiences as a young person, the movies were already having a huge impact on how I viewed the world. I remember, for example, visiting a Soviet military museum in Moscow. And as I was looking at these huge airplanes and tanks and these gray, stiff uniforms everywhere, I remember thinking ... my God, it's like something out of STAR WARS! All the officials in the museum looked like Governor Tarkin - these sort of cold, bureaucratic people with gray uniforms and gray faces.
And that’s the whole point: the cinema can be incredibly powerful at depicting these things.
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