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There is a mark of pride among artists, writers in particular, who could fill multiple volumes with their employment histories. I remember reading a novel by a sci-fi/fantasy/pulp author named Steve Perry (The Man Who Never Missed — highly recommended, think Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha in outer space with guns and kung-fu), who, in the bio at the end of one his novels listed the variety of jobs he’d held previous to becoming a professional writer. At least a dozen were listed, everything from hospital gift show cashier to martial arts instructor. C.J. Henderson, a New York based hard-boiled horror author and film critic (and an acquaintance of mine), lists nearly thirty different jobs he’s held on the bio section of his website. The thing about writing is that it usually doesn’t pay very well, and it takes a hell of a lot of hard work and time to write anything worth reading, let alone publishing. Jobs are just something to pay the bills so that one can survive to write more. But jobs, especially lousy ones, can often times be the source of great literary material. Stephen King (who’s had his share of low-pay jobs as well) notes in his memoir/instructional On Writing the strange phenomena that people like to read about work, even though the majority of us aren’t ourselves happy at work.
Pick up any book written by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) and you get the idea he had a lot of lousy jobs as he came up through the ranks of obscurity to worldwide literary fame. Art imitates life, and work is a major part of his fictional world, along with drinking, racetrack betting, poverty, desperation, sex and violence. His characters live on the edge, walking a fine line between keeping it together for another day or falling into total destitution. Poignant and insightful, savage and often times bizarre, Bukowski’s writing has an infectious quality about it, and he is rightfully considered one of America’s most influential and significant artists.
Factotum is adapted from Bukowski’s 1975 novel and stars Matt Dillon (Crash, Drugstore Cowboy, this summer’s You, Me, and Dupree) in the role of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s literary alter-ego who narrates many of the author’s novels and short stories. Factotum (noun: a man who performs many jobs) opens with the narrator working for an ice company, breaking up blocks of ice with a jackhammer. Asked to fill in for an absent delivery driver, Chinaski finds himself delivering ice to a bar, where he sits down for a drink. His boss arrives (because Chinaski drove away with a hose still attached to the truck) at the bar and fires him. This is the first of a series of short-term jobs Chinaski will work during the film, quitting or being fired after only a matter of weeks, days, sometimes only hours. At times he will collect unemployment and make money gambling. He will also drink heavily and find distraction in the arms of Jan (Lili Taylor) and Laura (Marisa Tomei). And, more than he will do anything else, he will write.
The film is directed by award-winning Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer (Eggs, Kitchen Stories), who also serves as a co-writer alongside producer Jim Stark (Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Cofee and Cigarettes, Greg Araki’s breakthrough The Living End). Hamer’s approach is similar to that favored by Jarmusch—objective camera, long takes, minimalist editing. However, Hamer’s style is distinctly his own. Unlike Jarmusch, Hamer abandons objectivity during certain scenes, giving appropriate moments in the film an added jolt. Also unlike Jarmusch, Hamer uses voiceovers, for indeed at times the film takes an appropriate backseat to Bukowski’s prose. Particularly there is one shot where the camera pulls away from Chinaski as he stands at a window high up on a red-brick building, smoking and gazing over the city, becoming smaller and smaller in his world as the camera is drawn back and a particularly philosophical piece of Bukowski’s poetry is spoken in voiceover. It is a moment of enlightenment, Chinaski such a small insignificant piece of this world, but able to see the complexity and scope of it with such clarity. Dillon’s baritone voice is a perfect match; he faultlessly captures the strength and weight one feels reading Bukowski’s words from a page—he speaks with total conviction, we do not doubt him for a moment.
Dillon is a perfect fit for the role, and a wise casting move by the filmmakers. He has an obvious grasp on the material, and carves a phenomenal performance out of Bukowski’s world by not going over the top, and by seeing not only what Chinaski has in common with Bukowski, but perhaps more importantly, the differences between the fictional character and his creator. His dark eyes that were filled with madness and vehemence as he fought his way back into a burning SUV in Crash now act as gloomy portals, absent of the intensity, but filled with a perception and sympathy for the world they watch.
Factotum is not the first of Bukowski’s works that have been translated onto celluloid. Bukowski wrote the screenplay for the 1987 film Barfly in which Mickey Rourke portrays Henry Chinaski. Numerous short films have been made based on his stories. Ray director Taylor Hackford made a 1973 documentary, Bukowski, which followed the author on a trip to San Francisco for a poetry reading. Hamer does well with the material by toning down the dark elements of the story and finding the same humor and honesty that Bukowski found when he wrote it. The result is an intelligent, entertaining film, true to the work from which it was inspired.
I had the chance to sit at a round table discussion with Bent Hamer while he was in New York promoting Factotum.
Bent Hamer
Question So why do you think it is that Hollywood seems to be drawn to the sleazy world of Charles Bukowski? What makes him interesting?
Bent Hamer: Well, it was even hard for us to finance the project. It’s so easy… I think with him it’s so easy to speak to the cliché after the myth, it’s just down and out, and it concerns nobody, except the one living this kind of life, which I think is very wrong. That was at least one of my ideas. I tried to speak to his universe, be true to his universe, but still try to avoid the cliché, try to show some warmth among the people who are living on the edge. Maybe you think his humor, which I think is outstanding… the lines are great, the sharp dialogue. And for me the humor is also a way of surviving this struggle. But also it tells me there is a difference to what he is doing, it’s much more complex than just retelling the story… he’s just down and out and excluding all the other people living on the edge, and that’s where you’re wrong.
Q: Was there a point at which you wondered if this guy was too dark for the audience to embrace?
BH: No, I don’t think so. For me it’s a strong smell of human being in way. And even if you don’t like what he’s doing sometimes and certainly you don’t want your children leading that kind of life, it’s saying something in general about human beings I think. Especially also if you… First of all you have to finish it on the first level, it’s very… but to give it a depth I thought was a brilliant opportunity to bring in his poetry, which also defiantly giving a depth to his writing and his life, if you can say life in this kind of context.
Q: Can you talk about the casting, and getting Matt Dillon for the role?
BH: Matt was not the first to say… For me the references to Matt, the earlier Matt… the stars were cast through friends… Or like Jim Stark has been working with Lili before… it was [unintelligible] who brought in Matt and said Matt is really looking for a role, and for me it was the first time he had been mentioned. And then Matt read it, and I met with Matt, and we had very much the same feeling about the challenges. And Matt was really scared about doing it also, which comforted me a little bit. I mean it was derived without approaching him. I think one of the keys is also… He was not going to play Bukowski, it was his alter ego Henry Chinaski, which I think was easier for Matt to do. To go in like that would have been an easy trap to fall into, to try and be like Bukowski. And you could always say Matt was too handsome, and all of these things, but I thought it might work, but there was use of flirting potential and the humor, and all that, I could keep it as much down as required to make it truthful. And today I can’t really see another person doing this part so well as Matt… his body work and everything…. I didn’t direct him to do it, he found it himself. I think it was a good balance between the European approach and the American actor.
Q: Was it Matt’s idea to change his appearance physically for the role? The beard, the extra weight?
BH: [laughs] Ask him about the part… No, I mean it’s kind of obvious where you don’t shave everyday… and we did a little bit with his hair, put a little more in the front so it… I don’t know the word in English…
Q: Receding hairline?
BH: Yeah. A little bit like that. But… I mean we tried to find a reference of how it would be if… how he was out there doing these things. I mean it comes automatically in a way. We didn’t try to do to much about that.
Q: Did you consider leaving out the scene where Henry hits Jan? Because you’re really with Henry up until that point, but then you step back and you’re like, okay he might be charming, but he’s not such a nice guy.
BH: No. But I mean like I said, there’s a lot of things that both Chinaski and Bukowski are doing that I don’t respect or like, and that’s the case in real life also. And it’s a lot of real life in his writing. So I think it was required to do it. And for me it’s kind of balanced… but in the end I like the guy, when I read it and when I see the film, I really do in the end. But it doesn’t mean that… I mean you love your husband, I love my wife, but you don’t like everything they do every day. I mean it’s part of life. So why drop it? That would be kind of a poor way to try and achieve something else.
Q: Bukowski obviously has a literary legion of people who admire his work, do you think that’s going to translate over when they see this in the theater?
BH: I don’t trust too many of the disciples. What I learned is there are several categories, which is kind of interesting to approach, maybe as a journalist as well. But it seems like more dark is better, that’s what it seems like when I talk to these people sometimes. And that’s a total misunderstanding of him I think. It’s so easy to speak to that part of him. But that is certainly not what I wanted to explore with this film.
Q: There were some period touches, and some very old-school looking bars, some things that looked very old-fashioned, but then there are modern cars. Were you trying to create a sense of timelessness about it, not setting it in any particular era?
BH: Yeah that’s right, that’s what we tried to do. And I mean even the book is hard to get hold of the… the time in the book is at least from the fifties up to the late sixties, something like that. I don’t know, maybe if we had enough money we would have tried to make it as a period piece. But the essence of it is that it’s timeless. I mean some people who read the script said that you have to be into dope these days and this and that and people don’t drink anymore. I think it’s totally wrong. So for me it’s timeless, what he’s doing, but also the environment was something that we tried to make timeless. We moved out from Los Angeles—the book is set in and around Los Angeles, more or less—to Minneapolis. First of all that was because it was too complicated and expensive to shoot it in and around LA. And when we moved up there the film board was very supportive and we had a producer up there that wanted us to come. But that was by the date we had already arranged to find these working places. Like a good example is in the book it’s a dog biscuit factory, I mean, that’s hard to find…. Actually there was a girl who said she could make it for us, but that was a bakery, I don’t know if… [laughs] strange story…. But we found a pickle factory, which fit very well into that scene. And there were a lot of old factories there, so I think it was a very good choice, but I wasn’t really there when they did it, in the beginning. And also in the city you can find the houses which are not restored, and it was nice and very easy to shoot it there. People were very supportive. The police, we got all the offices I think from the police, they were next to the police station.
Q: Now Bukowski is probably the most extreme example, but do you think every artist has a self-destructive side, do you think being creative comes with self-destruction?
BH: Then I think you have to go before the artist I think, you have to go to the human being. So maybe.
Q: Do you have a self-destructive side?
BH: [laughs] Probably.
Q: Henry is so un-repentant about his actions, like Bukowski was, he kind of goes for it all the way. Was there ever any pressure from the outside to make him more likeable in that sense, make him feel a little more regret?
BH: We struggled to finance it and that’s obviously one of the questions. It’s in the book. Like the humor, it’s in the book. I know that Linda Bukowski, she always—don’t dare tell her—she always kept up the myth that he was very popular with the ladies. But was he that popular? I don’t know, but the flirting potential, as I predicted with Matt, I think mainly that the female readers totally bit about it, but when we reached Linda and we reached a consultant, they said he has to be a little attractive at least for the women, so it was a subject, we talked about it. But we were free to do whatever we want to do to make the film we wanted.
Q: How long did it take you to get financing?
BH: [laughs] Seven, eight years. We were very close a couple of times, I probably could have done it, but we were patient, and I made Kitchen Stories in between. But so yeah, we struggled with it… like you said it’s hard, impossible to make this kind of film in Hollywood. Maybe you could make it, but it would not look like this film. Like the scene, I think it’s a good example, with a five and a half minute with Matt and Lili waking up together without any cutaway shots. I mean you probably wouldn’t be allowed to do it, and I mean in my view, it’s maybe my favorite scene in the film.
Q: When did you first discover Bukowski and what drew you to him?
BH: When I was not that young, but when I was in the beginning of my twenties maybe. Yeah I started out in law school, I read him there. For me, I’d read a lot of writers, but for me he was an outstanding American writer dealing with this kind of subject. A lot of alliance to other European writers that I admired. So he was kind of an obvious choice to read. But I didn’t read him with a film in my mind.
Q: Did you read him in English?
BH: Yeah, except for… one book, I think. Yeah…. Except for Ham on Rye. That was in German, I don’t know why. But I read it.
