going on tour

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new interviews with don

EXCERPTS FROM MERGE MAGAZINE, AUSTRALIA
June 2008

After watching the documentary 'Watching Grass Grow' on the Bitter Films DVD, a time lapse film showing you drawing your film 'The Meaning of Life', I was almost ready to rip my own hair out. How many more years have you got in you making this kind of painstakingly laborious animation before you go crazy?

at the end of each movie i'm drained and hollow and seem to always go through an angry "i'm never doing this again" sort of phase, but that usually wears off after a couple weeks and i go leaping blindly right into the next one. i've got a pretty bad memory and maybe it helps reset me to a happy blank slate at the start of each movie. i'm not sure if that's depressing or not. i've got no patience for people, people wear me out fast, but i seem to be a good personality match for this kind of slow-motion patient work. i don't feel especially self-discplined. if anything i usually feel really lazy and wish i could get more done. but i still get excited by the ideas, and so far it's been enough to carry me through as all the months pile on. i've started building some larger projects that will eventually need a crew of artists and other new elements for me to play with and shake the process up. but at the end of the day the freedom of doing the shorts is what i've always wanted to do, you're making the movies you want on your own terms, and the constant fear of losing that is a good motivator to hurry up and make as many of them while i still can.

Your most recent film, 'Everything will be OK', is the first in a trilogy. The second part, 'I am so proud of you' is due to be released this year. Is creating the final chapter a priority or will you begin work on something else and shelve the final chapter somewhere towards the back of your brain?

it's something i'm figuring out right now, i'm not sure whether to leap right into chapter 3 this year or put something else in front of it first. i've been developing a new thing for tv that was supposed to come up next, but we're looking at delays now that have kinda jumbled my calendar. so i'm not sure... chapter 3 is still mostly unwritten other than a broad outline, so there's a lot for me to do there before i can pick up the pencil again. i was thinking of maybe just relaxing and doing a few quick dumb cartoons like the three i did between "rejected" and "meaning of life", though i don't know exactly what i'd do with them. but who knows, everything could change in a week. just today i had an interesting idea that would open the door for doing further chapters beyond part 3. on the other hand, i'm surprised at how much i like the end of "i am so proud of you", and in a way i think it could actually serve as a satisfying end to everything if chapter 3 somehow never wound up happening.

As a film student, have you ever been close to pushing aside animation and just picking up a video camera to create your films?

i had the opposite experience, i actually had every intention of being a live action director in school but i never realized how expensive that was, i just couldn't afford it. i also found that no matter how much money the kids poured into their live action stuff they always just looked like student films. even if you found a really good crew, you could still never get around the fact that you had to shoot it in some kid's backyard or on campus somewhere and all your actors are 19 years old. i had made dozens of little VHS cartoons years before i got to university, but i don't think it dawned on me right away to carry that over to film until i realized how much more control i'd have. and animation was all i could afford to do there anyway, because you needed to buy less film stock and could conceivably work alone. in my first year there i remember being a bit surprised that i could actually animate my student films for credit, like i was getting away with something.

One fact about you that blows me away is that you have never had a job before. Obviously you're fortunate to have carved a career where you can survive on your art, but have you ever felt that perhaps having a horrible, spirit crushing 9-5 position may be beneficial artistically to your style of comedy?

no, independent film is plenty spirit-crushing. i work much harder on the films than i ever would in a 9-5 position, it's seven days a week with no holidays.

I've been a dedicated advocate of your work for some time now. I think i've sat through "Rejected" and "Billy's Balloon" three or four hundred times just spreading the good word about you to people. A lot of artists are always quick to dismiss their past work, how do you feel about your previous films? Do you still get a kick out of watching them or are you done with them as soon as you've finished making them?

i like them, i don't think i've ever been able to view them the same way other people do, but i would never dismiss them. they've mostly held up really well for me. they're not all necessarily the same movies i'd make today, but you sort of appreciate them as time capsules of your younger self and maybe the stage of life you were going through then.

Don, you're a good looking guy with a skill in story telling way beyond your years. You make me completely jealous with your success. How did you get so good looking?

nightly i bathe in the virgin blood of lesser animators.

EXCERPT FROM "FILM IN FOCUS"

Any idea what a second of your films costs to make?

i actually haven't got a clue. i work from a low budget, but i work alone and pay for everything out of pocket so i never really have to keep track of exactly how much i'm spending during a project; and i don't want to ever think about it while i'm working, and risk letting money affect any decisions. and my costs get pretty abstract and meaningless anyway... a minute of my finished footage on paper might only cost as much as the film stock did, but it doesn't take into account all the months spent pouring images into it.

EXCERPTS FROM CHRIS ROBINSON'S UPCOMING BOOK
May 2008

How useful was your [film school] education?

it was huge... studying the guts and language of movies, the history, the theory, all of that shaped my flailing energy into clearer ideas. it's maybe strange in hindsight that all my education was in live-action film, but i think any well-rounded animator needs to understand editing, camera, sound, directing, acting, writing... you can't make a movie if you only understand how to draw.

Can you talk about the background/evolution of these films? I'm looking for the roots of the film, how it evolved and if the final film met your expectations:

Ah L'Amour

the bar was set real low for this one, so i guess expectations were pretty easy to meet. this was the first cartoon i ever shot on film.

Genre

i was 19 when we made it, my second year in school, and was still following this kind of setup-gag-punchline formula. but it was fun to make and at the time i was just excited to learn how to pull something off as long as 5 minutes.

Lily and Jim

really happy with it, even though in hindsight i could probably comfortably cut out a full minute. this was a real lucky match of casting and on-the-fly writing. i had the actors improvise a lot and they performed many miracles that we cleverly blended into my script. but once that was all locked in and the dialogue was handed off to me in giant stacks of exposure sheets, it was one of the more boring projects to sit down with and draw every night. and i'm still not sure how i was able to fully animate a 12 minute movie while going to school full time.

Billy's Balloon

i was 21, i think i turned 22 by the time it was finished. i remember it partially coming out of a dream about a boy in a field who begins to fly. i think i produced it relatively fast, maybe in 9 months, since "lily and jim" had been such a long drag to animate. i originally had a dumb sort of punchline gag for the ending and quickly decided against it. otherwise i think it was pretty straightforward and didn't change drastically from start to finish.

Rejected

every stage of it was experimental. maybe this was my sgt pepper phase. chunks were swapped around, re-animated, dialogue scenes were animated without the dialogue having been written yet, it was my first time screwing around with in-camera effects; but the sound work might have played the biggest role, with 11th hour improvs, very strange ideas, seemingly every other line being played backwards, more rewrites, i think almost every scene was thrown up against the wall, re-recorded and torn back down again a number of different ways. one day something plays funny one way, the next day it's totally different dialogue with experimental cow noises over it. i remember several weeks of fun nights in the sound studio saying, "louder! louder!"
and just getting to the first step of production was weird and uncertain... fresh out of school i'd just bought my big animation camera but hadn't found a place to edit yet, or even project my dailies. so i think i animated and shot the whole thing without being able to watch any footage.

The Meaning of Life

i didn't write the ending until i was two years into animating it, but other than that i think there was relatively little that changed from the first ideas to the finished product. i'm happy with the movie but not having a pliable structure that i could play with and rewrite or shape as i went along made it frustrating and difficult to work on and stay interested in, almost as though i was sentenced to carry out someone else's movie. it took almost four years to make.

Everything will be OK

the story came about slowly in fragments and half-scenes that i eventually made sense of and found ways to weave together. it started as 6 or 7 strange comic strips in 1999 and a few years later i thought for a little while that i might make a graphic novel out of it. i can't remember how much of the writing for that made it into the movie, but i think by then i'd put together the idea that bill was possibly very ill. once i decided it should be a movie and i invented that method of shooting it through the moving holes, those visuals really broke down the dam and then i had the most satisfying time writing the rest. i used bits of the older material, dreams, new scenes that came out of nowhere, and sort of fleshed it all out into a blueprint that i rewrote as i animated and shot, and rewrote a bit again when i went back in to narrate. and "i am so proud of you", has come together much in the same way. each of them took a little over a year and a half to make.

Are you considering a TV series?

yeah, for the last few months i've been putting together my first project for tv. it's the first time i've had an idea that i'm interested in going the distance with in a longer, episodic format. it's not related to any of the short films.

Your films are getting longer. Is this leading to features?

features are a horse of a different color. i animate in 1's and 2's so if i were to tackle a feature alone it would probably take 20 years. so i'd need a studio's help and financial backing, like i'm doing now for tv - but i don't think anybody in those feature film positions are really interested in doing hand-drawn animation anymore.

It seems that increasingly we're seeing more and more feature animations. Is this something you feel you want/have to do?

yeah, it used to be. "something you feel you have to do" is a good way of putting it. in the late 90s i commuted back and forth to LA to meet with every studio under the sun to get a feature film going. i eventually had a deal set up to develop an animated feature, but the whole process was frustrating because my heart just wasn't in it anymore, and it became one of those things that you know in the back of your head is going to be fruitless, but you sort of pursue it anyway because you think you're supposed to. and the studio shot down all my ideas anyway. i was slow to realize that i already had all the creative freedom i wanted in making my own short films without interference, they had a great audience, i could so far make a living doing them, so why bang my head against the wall trying to conjure up something to please these people? just last week i read a great martin scorsese quote: "don't make the movies you can make, make the movies you want to make".

Tell me about Bill Plympton's influence (if any). It seems to me that you've followed his model of creating indie films. You don't rely on grants or studios and instead generate revenue from your work which you then pour back into your work.

i saw bill's first few shorts when i was 12 or 13 and yeah, it was invaluable to realize there was somebody out there who's regularly able to do this for a living, and do it on his own terms (and who doesn't draw backgrounds either!). think he's been a guy that a lot of people have pointed to and said, "well if he's figured out a way to do this, maybe i can too". there's a famous quote about the velvet underground's influence in the 60s and 70s: although they didn't sell millions of records, everyone who did buy one of their albums went out and started a band of their own. i think the same could probably be said about bill's influence on indie animators in the early 90's.

How has the animation landscape changed since you started making shorts? Has it become easier for you? Are there more opportunities?

i guess, but opportunities is kind of a tricky word. there may be a thousand websites now who'd love to show your movie for free, but in many ways that would be taking several steps backwards for a filmmaker. artists need to be more careful and aware of their rights than ever. new opportunities bring new people out to take advantage of you. and a lot of these new venues, like watching movies on ipods and phones, are just dismal ideas to begin with. there's no kid anywhere in the world right now dreaming of making her own movie someday and premiering it on a fucking phone.
new and more convenient often means one step forward and two steps back... instead of nice stereo systems, most people listen to music now compressed into mp3s through crummy computer speakers and ear buds. and anticipating all those weak new sound systems, bands are compromising by crushing the dynamic range of their albums down into these louder, shallower mixes with no dimension. so music's more convenient now, but for many people it sounds worse than it did ten years ago. i'm still getting used to the new disposable-media universe. companies want to compress, shrink, and beam my movies into all these strange new places. and meanwhile i'm finding that some film festivals won't even project 35mm prints anymore - it's too much nuisance now in favor of "digital projection" - which to them just means taking compressed consumer DVDs and horribly blowing them up 30 feet to fill the screen.

People (including me in an old article) talk about violence in your films (notably "Billy's Balloon" and "Rejected"), but it seems to be that fear and anxiety are more consistent themes. Are these your own concerns as well?

very little of what i write is consciously mapped out and calculated, i'm often animating a scene the same day i wrote it; and by "wrote it" i mean it came to me from nowhere while i was washing dishes or asleep. so sometimes it's only when i take a step back from everything after the movie's finished that i start noticing some of the themes or double meanings and stuff that other people point out. so it's hard to say. on the surface "rejected" and "ok" and "life" and "lily and jim" and "billy" are all very different from each other, but thematically i think they're all speaking the same language and coming from the same place.

Does articulating the fears/anxiety through film help ease your mind at all or is it less about unloading your baggage and instead just dumping the bags on the screen... like, "look this is how I feel." Is it about helping you overcome your 'stuff' or just hoping that your audience will find comfort in seeing films that might reflect their own fragile psyche?

i don't know, that sort of thing never really crosses my mind. i think there seems to be something inherently therepeutic just in the act of animating. you sit all alone for months and patiently build something bigger out of thousands of almost invisible movements. doesn't that sound kind of tai chi or something? and it's very good to be forced to be alone with your thoughts, which animation requires in spades. too few people are truly alone with their thoughts anymore.

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current events: june

The first exclusive screen shots from Don's next movie, i am so proud of you, have been posted in his journal.....
The film, chapter 2 of everything will be ok, is on track to make a special tour through theaters this fall! Production is close to being finished now, with more news on the way soon...

For the month of June, use coupon code GRAVITY to get $5 off any order over $40

Use coupon code OPERA to get $10 off any order over $100

For any order over $30, the shop will throw in an optional one year subscription to ROLLING STONE

Three beautiful new museum-quality everything will be ok art prints are now available in the shop, each one personally signed by Don Hertzfeldt. These are in very limited supply because Don does not like writing his name over and over and will not be reprinted once they're gone:

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october interview with don

Your latest work, Everything Will Be Okay, is an absolutely wonderful film.  To me, it recalls that rarified sense of pure magic felt in a Wes Anderson movie or at a Flaming Lips concert, in that it is a unique and fully-formed world unto itself that can truly reach and affect people.  From where did you get the inspiration for the bittersweet beauty of Everything Will Be Okay?

thanks... it's hard to say, so much comes from different directions. the roots go back to bill's original comic strips i wrote in 99 and while i made the other movies it's gone over continued changes in my head. spare parts come from dreams, conversations, memories, people-watching..  the worst thing i can do as a writer is sit down and stare at the blank page and torture myself. the best ideas come when i'm not expecting them, when i don't know why or how they popped in.. i seem to catch ideas more than i come up with them. and then i just go find the common threads of all these stray moments and half-events and start fitting them together. rewriting and swapping things around through the whole production. i don't think i've ever written a piece straight from A to Z... i might start animating a project with only R, S, and T and as i go i'll slowly fill the rest of those blanks in as they come. animating takes so long, i've got more than enough time to wait for the story to complete itself as i feel my way through. OK was a little further along and had most of its major points figured out by the time i really dove in, but there's still some profound differences between the first draft and the final thing.

I understand you are working on, if not a proper sequel, a direct follow-up to Everything WIll Be Ok.  How is that coming along?  What exactly are you working on now?

yeah if i can get a little more motivated i could be done with photography and animation on chapter 2 of OK maybe around the holidays. i'm not sure what the differences are between a proper sequel and a direct follow-up, but it takes place both before and after the events of OK. it's a bit ambitious. of course it will help to have seen OK, but i think it will be strong enough to stand alone as its own movie too. 

a year ago i had most of chapter 2 written, with a few leftover ideas and story threads laid down for chapter 3... but last month i couldn't help but cannibalize them and merged everything i had into this one. so right now chapter 2 has the ending that was originally intended for chapter 3. it raised it up to a new level and i'm just beginning to find its final shape now... but of course left me with a new blank slate for whatever's gonna happen in part 3, which is exciting and a little terrifying. most people probably don't write trilogies without knowing quite where it's all gonna end up. or maybe they just don't admit it. i have a few ideas of where the arc will eventually take us in 3 but of course it could all change again tomorrow. but so far so good, 1 and 2 are the strongest things i've ever written. and my jaw dropped at a couple of the shots i've gotten back for this one. so it's shaping up to be my favorite of everything so far and right now i just have to not screw it all up before reaching the finish line.

i should also mention i've very recently meanwhile officially started something new for television..  it's one of those things where even if it's a complete failure it should be a really interesting one. just beginning to write that and looking forward to seeing how that whole world is gonna work.  will be able to roll up my sleeves with it as soon as chapter 2 moves out of the house.

Everything Will Be Okay won top honors for short film-making at 2007's Sundance Film Festival.  Have you at all sensed that the animation community seemed to feel a personal victory for your perceived "win over live action?"  If so, how do you feel about that?

yeah i don't know how often that happens.  i try not to place a lot of stock in awards but it's always good to see those minor victories happen for animation.  and i do get tremendous satisfaction from crushing all the other filmmakers, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentation of their women.

Your work seems to have matured at an almost alarming rate - - to go from the devilishly crude humor of Billy's Balloon and Rejected to the epic existentialism of The Meaning of Life to wetting audience's eyes in Everything Will Be Okay - - how did that journey through film-making develop?  Had your desire to touch the audience beyond making them laugh at bleeding anuses always been there or did something change for you?

i don't feel like i've changed very much. maybe just gotten more comfortable and well-oiled on the technical side of things, but the basic ideas for the meaning of life and those earliest OK-related comic strips all date back to when i was doing rejected. if anything i think i just didn't have the experience or confidence yet to know how to put those kinds of ideas on the screen. they're more complex with more deeper notes to hit. but i think all the movies are basically speaking the same language.

How important to you is it that the audience "gets" your films? 

i don't worry about it. if a movie has any depth at all there will be more than one way to "get" it.  it should speak to different people in different ways. 

 

Do you test them out?  What happens if something doesn't get a laugh or some other response you're hoping for?

i can't remember but i don't think i've really tested anything out on friends since billy's balloon. it's not as though i don't value other people's opinions but i'm rarely uncertain anymore about exactly what i want to see on screen, so i don't find myself in that position very much. and it's impossible to make a movie properly if you concern yourself too much with how it's going to be received. it's going to cloud and poison every decision you make. in the end, you're really the only one who knows what in the hell you're trying to express. i've always figured that if you want to make a movie based on what you think other people want to see, you should just give them the camera. 

OK is the sort of movie where a scene might get a big laugh one night and the next night the same scene might draw a sad gasp. and i can usually see how either one would be the honest response. you have to leave room in there for the audience to work things out by themselves and let go of the reins a bit.

otherwise you're constantly barging in on them with "by the way, this is how you're supposed to react right now" and every note's going to feel false and clumsy and forced. i think that's true of both comedy and drama.

 

Have you sensed that your audience has grown with you?  Are you ever afraid you might lose them?

you'll probably lose an audience faster by getting predictable and doing the same thing again and again. that's probably the fastest way to becoming irrelevant. and i think a number of artists tend to underestimate their audience, and how deep an audience is actually willing to go with them. so many movies sort of flinch and pull away, right when they should be pushing further.

You've carved out an unrivaled career as an independent film-maker, in which you bear the sole responsibility for any decisions made in plotting the course for Bitter Films.  Are you satisfied with the paths you've chosen?  Any regrets?

i've been really lucky. i think so far my only regrets have been female related.

As one of the very last generation to be educated in traditional, non-computer-based film-making, how much of your success as well as the success of Bitter Films has been due to good timing, if any?

i don't know. but there's still definitely too much emphasis being placed on hardware. i wish everyone could find the cameras or animation tools that best serve their individual movies and then just shut up about it.  there's still this nasty atmosphere where someone creates a new digital toy and then feels compelled to piss on all other existing methods and declare all of film history dead.  the problem is, the whole thing has been spun from the beginning as  "film versus digital",  or "traditional animation versus 3D", or whatever...  it's all this "versus" bullshit. we should be using all these tools, adding to an amazing collection to choose from, not turning it into a stupid cage match. 

What is it like for you to watch your films?  

it depends. i can enjoy them but i usually still can't help but to study for flaws. the number of cringes increase the further back you go. if i'm in an audience i can feed off their energy a little and relax a little more about it.  i tend to have very few memories from my time animating... hundreds of blurry repetitive nights sort of blend together. so sometimes i almost feel like a fraud, like i'm taking all this credit for someone else's hard work that i can't really remember doing. while on the other hand i sometimes feel like this detached mass abstraction called "don hertzfeldt" is out there taking credit for the hard work i do remember, so i guess it all evens out.

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"EVERYTHING WILL BE OK" now on DVD

::::: EVERYTHING WILL BE OK is NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD, exclusively in the BITTER FILMS SHOP!
	what to expect: the DVD features a restored and remastered high definition film transfer, with a brand new 100+ page archival area of never-before-seen deleted scenes, sketches, production notes, alternate takes, abandoned ideas, embarrassing asides, and all the usual nonsense... plus a special hidden feature and an exclusive little booklet