One of the best things I saw at South by Southwest wasn’t a movie but a speech—the keynote address delivered by the director Joe Swanberg. Its subject, as Swanberg announced at the start, was money. Its form was autobiographical: Swanberg, whose career started at SXSW when the festival showed his first feature, “Kissing on the Mouth,” in 2005, took the audience through his work, film by film and stage by stage, making specific and revealing references to what his movies cost to make, how he got the money, how much money he made from them, and, over all, what he has done in order to make a living from movies while, at the same time, pursuing his art with the sense of freedom that he considers essential.
Every young or prospective filmmaker should hear Swanberg’s speech. If “mandatory” weren’t a word to make any vigorous-minded artist kick, I’d say that it should be mandatory viewing for everyone in film school and even anyone who is contemplating applying. Swanberg’s remarks are, in effect, film school in a box. Of course, there are many things that film school is good for—it’s a place and a chance to spend four years thinking about movies, watching movies, and practicing making movies. It’s also a place to meet other people with a similar passion, people at a similar age and stage of life who are likely to become one’s first, and perhaps crucial and enduring, collaborators.
It turns out that even these film-school experiences are encapsulated in Swanberg’s keynote. He is the most important filmmaker of his generation (he’s thirty-four). That doesn’t mean that he has made the very best single movie of the times (though several of his films are high on my list for the past decade) but that his ideas about filmmaking are the most powerful, influential, transformative, and exemplary ones of the times. Even though he’s not an academic or a critic, Swanberg is the crucial film theorist of the new century. His ideas are embodied and discernible in his movies, but his speech at SXSW last week joins the lucidity of his experience with the visionary force of a manifesto.
From the start of his career, Swanberg has pursued a distinctive aesthetic world of his own invention. Though the basic idea of “Kissing on the Mouth,” a tale of young couples dissolving and forming (which he made at twenty-three, with virtually no crew and with his friends as actors), isn’t amazingly original, the filmmaker’s approach rings, immediately, with his stylistic distinctiveness. Whether it’s filming conversations in tight yet agile close-ups that veer toward a sort of impressionism, desynchronizing dialogue with action, intercutting different spheres of action in a kind of psychological collage, or mixing documentary-style audio interviews onto the soundtrack as an ongoing counterpoint to the action, Swanberg appears free of cinematic conventions of naturalistic representation—even as he films something like daily life, his own and that of his collaborators, frankly and intimately. He films improvisationally, letting action and dialogue develop from the film’s situations. Looking unstintingly at the romantic and erotic lives and desires of college students and recent graduates, he depicts sex and bodies explicitly but not pruriently, and he casts himself in the role of the artist who does the audio interviews, integrating the terms and subjects of his artistry into the work itself.
Above all, starting with his first film, Swanberg told a story derived from the life he was living at the time that he was living it, and the originality of his artistic methods are a matter of the conditions of the filming—and of his way of life—rather than the product of preconceptions. That’s what emerges from his keynote address. There, Swanberg speaks as a combination of producer and director. Just as his movies are notable for their unity of personal experience and artistic creation, of his working methods and his aesthetic ideas, his idea of filmmaking can’t be dissociated from its financial and social terms.
Swanberg’s importance as a filmmaker is to demonstrate that originality in direction is secondary to originality in production—that a rethinking of the material conditions of making films is, for an independent filmmaker, a more decisive break with the styles and modes of the industry at large than is a particular focus on one’s own artistic intentions. Discovering original ways to make do with the means at hand is, for a creative artist, itself a hallmark of art. Swanberg’s aesthetic freedom and spontaneity, as he details in his remarks, arise from his confrontation with the need to make a living at filmmaking, with the difficulty of finding money to make films. His drastic and decisive reconfiguration of the practical and organizational conditions of movie-making has been the key cinematic discovery of the past decade.
He explained that “Kissing on the Mouth” cost three thousand dollars to make—and, because the DVD market was still thriving, he was able to sell it to a small distributor and, with no theatrical release but the purchases of six hundred copies both by Netflix and Barnes and Noble, he was able to turn a small profit.
Nonetheless, despite its SXSW première, the film was rejected from all the other festivals to which Swanberg applied. His response was “just to want to make another movie” and the next one, “LOL,” an even more aesthetically daring work, played at SXSW and also sold for DVD rights. He met a producer there who helped him make his next film, “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” on a much larger budget—sixty thousand dollars. “I felt like I was making ‘Ben-Hur,’ ” he says, and he found an original thing to do with the money. He rented an apartment, got his actors together, and had them live together for a month, building the personal relationships and sparking the creative ferment that gave rise to that film’s imaginative power. (It’s the movie that made Greta Gerwig an instant star.)
Swanberg developed a relationship with IFC, which released his next film, “Alexander the Last,” on video-on-demand when the notion was new, but he still wasn’t making much money. Around that time, he met the filmmaker Adam Wingard, from Birmingham, Alabama, who asked him to play a role in a four-segment feature, telling him that his segment would be shot in one day. Swanberg admits to taking the role in part to learn from Wingard (who would later become one of his cinematographers) how to film so rapidly. So when Swanberg’s income stream was drying up, he got an idea that was simultaneously financial and artistic:
Swanberg made seven features in a year, shooting during the day and editing at night. (One in particular, “Silver Bullets,” is among the strongest and most scathing films about filmmaking to emerge in recent years.) But here, too, the business changed—IFC wasn’t releasing smaller movies anymore—and, at this point, Swanberg accepted the offer of a Hollywood-based agent who believed (rightly, as it turned out) that money could be raised for Swanberg to work on a larger scale, with well-known actors but on projects that he originated and made with his own improvisational methods. (The first of these, “Drinking Buddies,” starring Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Olivia Wilde, and Ron Livingston, was shot in 2012 and released the following year.) Though working with prominent actors, he explains in the speech, “I didn’t do anything different than what I had been doing on all the other movies I had been doing. It’s just that there were famous people in it.”
In response to a question from an audience member about whether his improvisational methods have changed as a result of his cast of well-known performers, he gives an answer that gets to the core of his art:
When actors protest that they don’t improvise, he says that he responds, “We're sitting here having a conversation; if you can do this with me, you can be in one of my movies."
As the scale of his budgets has increased (“Drinking Buddies,” he says, cost around six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make), he has nonetheless pursued the financial strategy of the first films: to put his own money into them, with the hope of using his earnings from one film as an investment in the next one:
Swanberg’s goal, he says, isn’t great wealth but artistic independence—the ability to be able to go on making films as he sees fit, while also making a living. But, of course, there’s a twist, and it’s the one thing that he doesn’t mention: the element of imagination, of inspiration. Rather than imagining specific stories for films that required some more distant and complex organization, that required travel, specific actors, settings, effects, or crowds, Swanberg has made movies that relate clearly to the specific circumstances of his own life—but his discovery of drama within those circumstances has been nothing less than prodigious.
Everyone has lots of stories; lives proliferate stories, as is proven by most of our conversations. Whatever we tell our friends and relatives and colleagues, whatever we think about our relationships and our work, is a virtual screenplay that, in a thoughtful telling, would fill out a feature film with ease. Swanberg is a prolific filmmaker because he recognizes and extracts the drama from what’s nearest at hand. His keynote speech is a perfect example: speaking extemporaneously, he delivers his words with an almost shockingly plain sincerity, distilling thrills, highs and lows, psychological strategizing and practical action, from the potentially dry terms of the financial conditions of his filmmaking. His speech about the making of his first seventeen feature films also contains the stuff of dozens more. Everyone has stories, everyone has a life; but finding the art in it is the one thing that can’t be taught.
