Interview: Julian Goldberger

Hawks are not easy to domesticate. Some of them refuse to “break”. They would rather starve themselves to death before giving up their freedom. Julian Goldberger, the director of ‘The Hawk Is Dying’ isn’t ready to be domesticated either. Hopefully he will never be.  

He became one of the most acclaimed new young directors in 1998 with his feature film debut Trans, an almost experimental but unforgettable movie that opened at the Toronto Film Festival and quickly became a cult pic. The low-budget movie, about a teenager trying to find his place in the world, became a favorite of the festival circuit, traveling from Sundance to Berlin winning awards and hype for this author. Trans caught the eye of Ted Hope, one of the biggest names of the so called ‘independent circuit’, who offered to produce his next project.

Almost eight years later, on the eve of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, Goldberger second feature, The Hawk Is Dying, based on a book by Harry Crews, became the most talked about film of the festival. Paul Giamatti was the film’s lead, Ted Hope was producing and no one had a doubt about the film’s future: it was a safe bet and everybody seemed ready to pay whatever was necessary to acquire it. That is until… the critics saw it and suddenly, all the buzz that surrounded Goldberger’ movie vanished within the blink of an eye.

His first public screening of the film was almost a catastrophe. ‘Too dark,’ ‘too depressing', ‘too pretentious’, people said… The story of George Gattling (Giamatti), a middle-aged man obsessed with falconry and haunted by the death of his mentally retarded nephew (Michael Pitt), didn’t get the enthusiastic welcome that one would have aspired. Sundance, the heart of the indie movie business, thought Goldberger’ movie was perhaps too indie for them. In comparison to the shiny tune of a Little Miss Sunshine, the dark mood of the film and its different layers of criticism made it a perhaps less commercially feasible.

It took him more than 14 months to get limited distribution deal with Strand Releasing and through a letter published on the blog web page of Filmmaker Magazine, Ted Hope has offered to moviegoers the reimbursement of the ticket if audiences don’t like the film. Goldberger isn’t sitting around promoting the picture, it appears to be preoccupied by other projects these days, but we managed to talk to him when his movie opened at Sundance last year, right after the buzz-bubble surrounding him had deflated. He had some quite interesting things to say about the whole experience. Here’s my Park City interview.

Bárbara Celis D'amico: Is this Sundance different than the first Sundance you knew back in 1999?
Julian Goldberger: It has changed a lot.  It has become more obscene in so many different levels.  

BCD: Why? How?
JG: The idea of celebrating independent cinema and challenging films it is still here. That’s the spirit with which it was created. But this thing called Sundance is obscene now. People come here for the wrong reasons. Of course there are people who come here basically to watch movies but that’s getting overshadowed by how is it covered, how is it written about it. It is about stars, celebrities… we have enough of that!  Our culture is just off the charts, consumed obsessed with celebrities! This festival it’s supposed to be a meeting between art and commerce but I see the commerce outweigh and squashing the art in such an imbalanced way. It is not the programmers fault because they are putting out a bunch of good movies. It is just the experience of Sundance, it is much more about the commerce. 

BCD: Has the buzz surrounding your movie hurt it?

JG: There is always expectation. Did that hurt? I don’t think that hurts the movie but what hurts the movie is the level of expectation in today’s market place. There’s a lot of people that can put out no brainer movies, but it is difficult to find a distributor who has got balls, who has tactics to place movies that need a special touch. There are very few people who can do it and do it well. 

BCD: Is your movie a difficult one?
JG: Honestly, I think so. It is sad because it is the wrong time for it. Movies like this… in a different era… I don’t mean to be nostalgic. I grew up in the seventies and it is easy to romanticize the idea of what it was like back then but we were different. Culturally we were much different. What was important to us was different. It seems that back then audiences went to movies…for a transforming experience or to learn something or to be challenged or to be changed or to be inspired, not for sheer entertainment. I don’t want to knock down popcorn movies because those movies are great too. They are important movies too but you know, I am talking about social movies, movies that are digging into who we are, and what we are doing and what the fuck is wrong with us… 

BCD: So what were you trying to say with The Hawk is dying?
JG: This is a guy who is trying to reconnect with something that is savage, irrational, strange and weird to a lot of people but that it is in all of us. We all have these impulses as human beings but we cover them up in different ways, using different methods: religion, socialization… So, how do you really express yourself? In this movie this guy is connecting with something, through this relationship with a hawk, that it is deeper and darkerer and more savage and more primitive and irrational than anything that he has experienced in his life. The relationship allows for a glimpse of something profound, a glimpse of freedom from all of this crap of this world we live in… He says it at the beginning of the movie: ‘buy a house, buy a car, get a job’… It is all a dead-end unless you have the right prospective: it is not about accumulation of wealth, it is not obsessing with celebrities… 

BCD: I overheard people at the press screening saying The Hawk is Dying it is too pretentious…JG: I don’t find it pretentious, I find it pretty real. If they find it pretentious, I don’t know, I don’t care, as long as they go further and they are willing to keep looking and say ‘it may be pretentious in the surface but what else could it mean?’ Because it doesn’t mean what everybody think it means. It they want to dismiss it and judge it quickly that is the problem of the critics. My premiere screening was vulgar, you know how many people were there with they blackberry’s typing their thing, judging the movie within ten minutes? I hated it. I think this is an original film, it is a rarity.

BCD: Where you feeling the need of criticizing today’s society?
JG: Absolutely. Like the scene in which Gattling sister Precious (Rusty Schwimmer) -obsessed with gossip- reads about Julia Roberts. That is what it fed us as a society, it is all those distractions, and the main character (Gattling) knows it but doesn’t know what to do about it so this hawk gives him some release, even temporarily.
 

BCD: But your movie is based on a book written in the 70’s so, those problems were already there at that time, even if you said before that they were different times…
JG: Yes, I know, you are right. It is true, but we need that, though, now, something has to change. 

BCD: Do you believe there is anyway to go back to live real lives, to get away from this consuming obsession about buying houses and cars and be like celebrities?
JG: Of course, there is a way and that is education

BCD: …which is the biggest lack of this country…
JG: That is right, absolutely. So much money is wasted on the military, on this programs that are short term but we have to think on something larger than that. The only way we are gonna facilitate a positive change is education but it takes a long time. It’s a marathon run. It is interesting that David Lynch has started this program in some elementary schools about introducing transcendental meditation for young kids. I think that’s amazing. 

BCD: Are you into religion or any kind of spiritual path?
JG: Not really, I am kind of suspicious to anything ‘official’. You have to find your own way. Can you live a life that reconciles with the natural world? In this society we have separated from nature so there needs to be some kind of reconciliation. I don’t mean like this ‘hippie tree hugging image’, there is nothing wrong with that but what i mean is that it needs to be an immensely psychological and spiritual evolution. I think the biggest problem with were we are at is the lack of spirituality. 

BCD: Do you think movies can help?
JG: Yes, absolutely, they do. Art helps, art serves to mirror. 

BCD: Is it possible to change things through art?
JG: Yes, I definitely believe that. There is not doubt about it, art facilitates change. If you look at what sort of masquerades as art today, which is a lot of crap…What that does is making society very numb, comfortably numb but… I don’t want to sound like a revolutionary or an anarchist, but… that’s how societies were built in a way… 

BCD: There is nothing bad about being a revolutionary…
JG: I mean… This country was designed in a way to give the appearance of democracy but only a small percentage of the people really have the power… The idea of distracting the population, feeding them things to distract them… giving them O. J. Simpson, giving them pop culture, giving them Paris Hilton… I don’t have anything against her but she is just an example of that distraction. The question is, do we really need that kind of distraction? Are we really that empty? I have this feeling that capitalism needs to play itself out… 

BCD: What have you learn from this whole experience?
JG: I felt in Sundance like if I was in the red light district in Amsterdam. Here you see people walking by, looking at you, judging you and saying, ‘it is not Hollywood, it is not commercial, it is not a product, it is not what we like and are familiar with and therefore get away’. That’s what I find vulgar and obscene about this festival, there is something really fucked up and wrong about it… 

BCD: But the idea of independence has also changed over the years… Even your movie has a big actor on it. It is not Richard Gere but Paul Giamatti is pretty big already. Before it wasn’t so usual but now most of the movies on dramatic competition have a big star in them…
JG: There is nothing wrong on using actors of that caliber or even celebrities for that matter, but I think that ultimately what we have to ask is what does it mean to be independent here at Sundance? I don’t think people really champion true independents movies here. I think that a truly independent movie is more likely gonna get whips. Only the movies that feel like familiar movies, that are almost Hollywood but almost independent, those are the ones that get praised. I am not judging them but I just ask, are they really independent movies? Truly independent filmmakers have a hard time in a festival like this. 

BCD: What is a truly independent filmmaker?
JG: It is an original. A true original. If you make a truly original film, where there is that voice coming out of it. I think that is independent.  

BCD: It doesn’t matter the money, the stars…?

JG: No I don’t think so. It could be a maverick original Hollywood studio filmmaker, there is been a few of those, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, those guys were originals. Coppola was an original. It is all that it matters. I want to see stuff that is original.

Strand Releasing released The Hawk Is Dying exclusively in NYC last friday March the 30th. The film will have a limited theatrical run.