I recently took part in a roundtable discussion with Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the Oscar-winning directors (Epstein made The Times Of Harvey Milk and they co-directed Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt) of the new film Howl, a multi-faceted drama about the making of Allen Ginsberg’s eponymous poem. The film stars James Franco as the young Allen Ginsberg and features supporting work from Jon Hamm and Jeff Bridges, among others. It opens in limited release in Boston on October 1st.
Question:
One of the striking things about the film for me was the visual style and how the film was structured. In what part of the writing / creative process did you come up with that distinct style?
Jeffrey:
Well we knew at the beginning that we wanted to do something that would be formally challenging and adventurous in a way that would resonate in the way that the poem was challenging and adventurous when it came out. So we started from that point and then we just started looking at the poem from different angles and finding different ways of telling the story. We wanted to understand what went into making the poem, and the creative process, and what Allen had to go through as a person to get to a point where he could write the poem. And we wanted the poem to live on its own in the movie, both as imagination, which we did in the animation, and as performance, which was how it was presented to the world, as the first kind of spoken word performance art. And how the world responded to it and the world it was being put into, which we used the trial for, the obscenity trial.
Rob:
We knew we wanted the film to play in the present tense, rather than do a historical documentary when you are starting from the point of older people looking back on themselves. We wanted that particular moment to play in the present tense. So the film takes place in 1957, and then it flashes back to the early fifties and late forties. The flashbacks are in black and white, and the present tense is in color. Metaphorically, the world transitions from black and white to color when howl is launched into the world and Allen finds his creative voice.
Question:
When did you decide that you wanted to make a film about howl? And what persuaded you to go this route as opposed to a traditional documentary?
Rob:
The project came to us from Allen Ginsberg’s estate; they wanted to do something for the 50th anniversary of the poem. We didn’t quite realize that date, but that date seemed kind of arbitrary both to them and to us in the end, until we found a concept that felt like it was complementary to what the poem was in its day. A concept that felt different and unique from a standard traditional documentary. If we had done a documentary, first of all there was no material from that period that we were depicting, so we would have had to create it anyway. It also felt like you all wouldn’t relate to it the same way if you were to see it as a narrative film. Early on, we showed some documentary ideas to students and it was talking with them that we came to see that we had to find another way to tell the story from documentary. And that was the challenge we set for ourselves.
Jeffrey:
It’s a story about young people, college age guys who were creating this new style of writing, and ended up really having an effect on the culture. But it’s very much an expression of youthful, creative, rebellion that we wanted to capture.
Rob:
So then we just had to set it in a period context, and that’s why the trial seemed like an important element to us, because the trial really helped to contextualize it and set the period.
Question:
But you knew once they came to you that Howl was a material that you definitely wanted to…
Rob:
We knew there was something there, but we didn’t really have any notion of how we were going to approach it. We just knew that this was an important work, and that Ginsberg was an important literary figure, and the rest is a process of discovery, as it is with any project. Then that’s your mission as a creator, to figure out what do you want to say with it.
Question:
Despite the fact that many of the beat generation literary pieces are so important, there have been so few succesful film adaptations of outside of, say, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Why do you think that it’s been so difficult to get them to film?
Rob:
Well it’s difficult to do any film, first of all. And it’s difficult to do period films, so it’s not Hollywood bait. So, it takes someone who feels really passionate and driven to get a film like this made.
Jeffrey:
Finding an approach to it that will feel authentic is a challenge. You mention Naked Lunch, and that was a very audacious film. And it’s an audacious book. But it had to be an audacious film. You can see where it came from, but it’s not the book, it’s something very different. It’s Cronenberg’s vision. But it’s mind blowing. It’s very hard to re-create that world credibly in a literal way, which is how Hollywood does most things.
Question:
The animation sequences were really crazy, and unexpected. What was the thought process behind that. I did read that it was the same illustrator who illustrated his poems, but what made you decide to include it in that way? Do you think that it was almost a paradox because in the film itself there were some lines about you can never translate poetry to prose so how much can you translate it into visuals?
Rob:
The poem exists in so many different ways within the movie; it’s performative, with James Franco as Ginsberg performing the poem, so you have an opportunity to experience it as spoken word. And then it exists as an analysis in the trial, when it’s being presented and deconstructed as evidence. And then we wanted it to live as an experience as well, so the animation to us seemed like a way to create a cinematic experience that you wouldn’t have in any other form. You’re never gonna have that in any other form, so why not? We thought of animated films like Fantasia, we looked at Pink Floyd’s The Wall, where it just takes you into a very trippy experience of somebody else’s mind creation. We set it up that it’s emanating from Allen, Allen’s the source, but then you kind of come into a whole other experience of it.
Jeffrey:
We tried to make it elusive but not literal, so that the audience can have their own experience of the worlds as they’re watching the images. But it’s a specific vision, and we thought of it as an adaptation, the way you adapt a novel. You have to make the characters concrete and you have to make things concrete that people have their own ideas about.
Rob:
And an opportunity to bring to life some abstract ideas like Moloch. That we could create a narrative parable about Moloch it seemed like an opportunity.
Question:
Since the poem’s all about finding your own meaning about the work, when’s the first time you read Howl, and what did it mean to you? Working with it every day, did it change throughout the process what it meant?
Rob:
I read it when I was in high school, but I didn’t have any great connection to it. It’s come to mean something much more to me in later life. And I continue to find new things from it, and new ideas within it. One of the reasons why I love the animation particularly is that there are so many ideas in that alone, so many new things to always be discovered about the poem and ideas within it. And themes with in it. And the themes just seem to get more and more resonant. Allen talks about prophecy in the movie, and he in his life talked about how he intended Howl to be a time bomb that would go off for different generations at different points, and I feel like we’re at one of those points right now, and there are so many themes within Howl that I think people can find contemporary resonance with. And I hope they do.
Jeffrey:
I read it in high school, and I also didn’t probably understand most of it. But I got the sense of it, I got the feeling of it. There was something liberating about it. And I knew that there was something groundbreaking.
Question:
How collaborative were the cast members? Did they do their own research?
Rob:
They did. Mary Louise Parker found out that Gail Potter was a blonde. We had no idea. She insisted that she have a blonde wig. Cause there were no pictures of Gail Potter anywhere—she plays Gail Potter, the English teacher witness—so she had a very clear notion of what Gail Potter looked like, and we let her go with it. And James, certainly, did a lot of his own research. We provided him with a lot of research material but he read all the biographies on Ginsberg, and over the course of a year, did a tremendous amount of research on his own. Allesandra Novola, the character he played, was the only living witness. The only witness from the trial who’s still alive, so we had a chance to meet with him, Luther Nichols, and Alessandra had a chance to talk with him before the shoot.
Jeffrey:
James did the most research, obviously.
Rob:
Jack Ehrlich’s pocket square is the real pocket square.
Jeffrey:
Toned down from real life, actually.
Rob:
As documentary filmmakers, our instinct was to do a lot of research. We had volumes of photographs of every situation, and all the departments worked from those.
Jeffrey:
And we looked at films from the period, we wanted to find styles for each of the sections, so we looked at courtroom dramas for the courtroom scenes and we looked at Beat films from the 50s: Pull My Daisy, a Robert Frank film, where you can actually see Ginsberg and Keroauc; how they move. There’s a film by Shirley Clarke called Portrait of Jason which is just this portrait of this one amazing character, this black queen hustler in a room and he’s just monologuing for the entire film and it’s mesmerizing. So we were very inspired by that. What else did we look at? Photos from the period. All of the flashback scenes were inspired by photos that Allen took or were taken of Allen.
Rob:
Even within the movie there’s some real documentary evidence. On the set, the photos of his parents are Allen’s real parents. The real Carl Solomon.
Question:
Was his estate helpful with that?
Rob:
Very helpful, yeah.
Jeffrey:
And they were mesmerized by James’ performance. People who were close to Allen came to the set and they just couldn’t believe it. They were just stunned when they saw it. We were watching on the monitors and you could just see, they were like “that’s Allen.”
Question:
How collaborative was that process filming James doing the different scenes and stuff?
Rob:
It’s very collaborative and very directorial I mean there’s a point which the actor really needs to trust you as an observer to really make judgments about how things are going, and you have to really give that to the actor.
Jeffrey:
We had a year to work with James, which is a real luxury. He signed onto the project before we had financing, and came to San Francisco on his own dime to work with us. We were in New York on another project and we spent a day with him and did some camera tests. We really had time to go through the script line by line and talk about what it meant and where it was coming from, and who he was. He really had time to get that into his being.
Rob:
He came up with idea of pushing his ears out so they looked more like Ginsberg. He was hosting Saturday Night Live and he had a picture of the real Allen Ginsberg on the mirror while they were making him up for SNL and the make-up artist suggested that we push out his ears more. It worked.
Question:
When I think of the beat generation it’s like bee bop, jazz, this very loud kind of like John Coltrane style. There wasn’t really a lot of that in the film, and I was wondering why you made that choice, and why the score, particularly during the animated sequences, tended to be heavy on classical music? Was this your choice, or did the decision come from Carter Burwell (who wrote the film’s music)?
Rob:
When we approached Carter Burwell, who we’re big fans of and who we’ve worked with before on another movie of ours (The Celluloid Closet), he said, “if you want a jazz score I’m not the right guy.”. And we said well, we want you. And then we started talking about his notion of what the score would be, and it seemed like the right take, which is that the voice is the jazz, the performance is the jazz, and the music just needed to be the underscore to that. So we wanted to go counter-punctual to that and have it be more of an understated counterpoint and let the voice be the music.
Question:
If Allen Ginsberg were alive what do you think he would of thought of the film?
Jeffrey:
I think he would have loved the casting.
Rob:
I think he would have loved the animation. I think he would have dug it, the whole thing.
Jeffrey:
Yeah I mean I think he would have appreciated the risks that we were taking.
Question:
My favorite part of the movie was the flashbacks, and I think that you were really on point with the awkwardness of that age, when you’re in your twenties. It some movies it’s not like that. It’s not that easy to make James Franco look awkward.
Jeffrey:
I know, I know. That first scene we had to tell him not to kiss so good. He said “Ah, I’m too good, huh?” And we said tone it down, you’re not supposed to be comfortable kissing that girl.
Rob:
We also did trick him. All those flashback scenes were improv, which was really fun to do it that way. The scene of him and Jack on the park bench when he’s reading Jack his poetry and Jack thinks its garbage. We thought oh, we’ll never use the dialogue, we’ll never use it.
Jeffrey:
The scene where he gets in bed with Peter, that was a really awkward scene to film. We had to try different things and James eventually came up with the idea of something really playful and fun and it was great.
Question:
Now that you’ve done this feature film, are you looking forward to doing more of that, or documentaries, or just whatever the material lends itself to?
Rob:
Well both, definitely the material is important, but we had a great time doing this film and we do want to do more feature films. We had a really great time with the actors, and the crew. You know, there’s so many things that are the same, but so many things that are different. We’ve always, even with our documentaries, thought of ourselves as storytellers first and foremost. Not so much documentarians, but really story tellers, so crossing back and forth doesn’t feel that strange to us. We’ll be doing both.
Question:
On your IMDB page it said that you have Lovelace in the works. Is that still happening?
Jeffrey:
It’s still in development!
Rob:
It’s not the Lindsay Lohan one though. There are two Lovelace projects so we’ll see which one actually gets made first, but yes we are.
Jeffrey:
There were two Ginsberg projects when we started this one.
Rob:
And there were two “Milk”s, when they were making “Milk.”
Question:
Did you guys have a favorite moment in the movie?
Jeffrey:
There was a moment when we were filming when we knew it was just a moment, and it was when James was performing the poem and does the whole section about Carl Solomon and just works up to a crescendo. We could just see in the performance that all of the back story, all of Allen’s back story, was there in the performance. I think that was when we felt happiest and proudest. And that’s what you live for. In any movie, whether it be documentary or feature, you’re always looking for those moments where it’s happening live right then and it’s getting caught on film and you know you got it.
Question:
It must have been cool to, instead of search and search and find it in an archive, you actually got to create it.
Rob:
Yeah, that was really exciting.
Jeffrey:
Instead of trying to draw it out of a real person.
Rob:
When you’re doing an interview, you’re taking a person through their own experience, and you’re trying to get them to experience it as they’re telling it.
Jeffrey:
So it was just really great to work with actors who were just trained to give you what you want, you know? You just have to communicate it well.
Question:
What role did Gus Van Sant have in this film as the Executive Producer?
Rob:
We finished the screenplay right around the time that they were in San Francisco shooting Milk. Gus is a friend, and I had a relationship to Milk from my film The Times of Harvey Milk. We asked Gus to read the script, and he liked it a lot, and we said would you come on as executive producer and he said well, if you think it’ll help. We said we think it’ll help. The first thing we asked him was did he have any suggestions for the part of Allen Ginsberg, and he said, “I think James Franco would be someone to consider.” He asked James if he’d be interested, James said he would be, he read the script, we then met with James. In that first meeting, which went well, we learned a lot about his interests, where he was coming from, that he himself was a student of literature. He’d been reading the beats since he was fourteen. He was exactly the age Allen was when he wrote the poem, so he felt a real connection to the part. We had looked at all of James’ work, most especially the James Dean story that he did for TV, where he played James Dean. And we saw that it was not just a characterization of James Dean, that it was a whole deep portrayal of him. So we just got really lucky and fortunate.
Jeffrey:
James said he always knew he’d do a Beat movie, but he’d always figured he’d play Kerouac. I think he was kind of tickled that we asked him to play Ginsberg, because he really was a Ginsberg fan.
Question:
Do you think that for our generation, there’s anything like Howl?
Rob:
You never know where their going to emerge. Maybe film, maybe digital art, it could be a whole other language now. Hopefully people find this inspirational, I hope. But you never know, I think that’s what makes artists and political figures great. They’re so of their own time. And then that becomes timeless. That’s what Allen was about, that’s what Harvey Milk was about. They emerge from the circumstance of the times in which they live and express something about those times. We’ll see what it is from your generation.
Question:
What’s it like co-directing, co-writing?
Jeffrey:
It’s kind of like this. We just pass it back and forth. We agree on an approach, and then we work together to get what we’re looking for. It’s something we’ve been doing for a long time, so we have a lot of short hand.
Rob:
Sometimes it requires doing it together and sometimes it’s going off and doing it individually and reconvening.
Question:
Do you disagree about anything?
Rob:
Yeah, we do. We have to argue stuff out.
Jeffrey:
That usually makes us find a better solution.
-Adam Burnstine