06/15/09
Text: Kee Chang
Did you get a permit to shoot on the subway or was it shot guerrilla-style?
Totally guerrilla-style. I think Max [Goldman] and I are still on the MTA’s most wanted list. [Laughs]
Do you recall any other roadblocks you faced while you were in production with this project? Were there any technical elements that were particularly difficult to overcome?
Well, just figuring out how to retrofit the Vision Research Miro camera to a place where we could use it handheld on the subway took a bit of technical fiddling around—getting it to run off a battery belt, finding the lens with the right look and speed, how to adapt it to the camera and so on. Max and I did a lot of tests in the subway, and we spent a bunch of time working with the guys at Vision Research and TCS camera to get it all sorted out.
How did you go about casting for the portraits? Are these actors or people you simply grabbed off the street?
Most of the people in the exhibit are real people we came across in the subway. I would basically wander through the trains until someone caught my eye. I couldn’t describe specifically what it was that I was looking for if I had to write a breakdown for a casting director, but it was about trying to find people I was intrinsically drawn to and who also didn’t have any “loud” features. No one is ordinary, but they needed to be able to fade away in a sense for the piece to work—no one with a crazy style or really obvious hair, for instance. This project wasn’t about creating a style survey of New York or even about trying to document in some anthropological way the various faces one might find in the MTA. It’s more timeless and abstract than that. It was fun to break down the typical social barriers on the subway and interact with people.
Creating a sense of "documentary" realism in cinema often requires manipulation. I was always more interested in making moments that felt real and worked as real on a visceral level, whether or not they necessarily were real. The idea was to find and use mostly real people, but each day, I brought about 5 "extras”—people I had cast from faces in an extras book—down into the subway with me. I would shoot them when no one else would agree, and sometimes use them as “bait” so that when other people on the train saw someone else getting their portraits taken, it would be less threatening to them and they would be more open to participating. The funny thing is, in the end, I cut most of the extras out of the exhibition. For whatever reason, maybe only to me, their portraits didn’t have exactly the quality that I was after.
How many people did you end up shooting and from that collective pool, how many are you showing in the gallery?
It’s not something that I’m telling people because I don’t want anyone to feel like they can or should stay in the gallery to see every single portrait. There is no beginning or an end. There are so many portraits that you would have to stay a really, really long time to see them all. I wanted to shoot an overwhelming amount. They’re on these randomized projectors, which mean that you’ll never see the same exhibit twice and the combination of portraits shown will always be different.
Just going back to shooting with high-speed cameras... I think a lot of video directors tend to use slow motion as an effect somewhat carelessly. Why are you personally attached to this technique?
I’m kind of old fashioned in as far as what I think art should do. I love exploring visual ideas as much as the next guy, but I feel that the ultimate purpose of art is to literally change people’s perception of the world. If you change the way someone sees the world, you can change infinite things from human interactions to political power structures. Seeing very simple things in a subtly new way can have a profound effect. As soon as you call something into question, you can call everything into question. My attachment to this technique is about being able to look at something familiar in an unfamiliar way and asking the question, “What does it mean when you do that?” It’s not about the technique, per say—I could care less about that—it’s just a formal means to an end. For me, it’s about the effect that the slow motion technique may have on people. It’s a reminder of how uncanny and infinite our world actually is.
I’ve been posing this question to various video directors lately since there seems to be an intense dialogue going on about it in the community: What are your thoughts on the current state of music videos and where do you think the industry is headed?
Right. Well, there are definitely way fewer opportunities nowadays for artistic expression in videos, not only in terms of budgets, but also in terms of risks that are willing to be taken by labels. As far as where I see it going…I don’t know if I can talk about that right now. [Laughs]
What do you think is attributed to this fear of taking risks on the part of labels?
I don’t really know. I mean, I know that when there is less money and people are losing their jobs, it breeds a culture of fear. It means that when money is spent, people become much more conservative. It’s really sad for me because I feel like music videos are kind of becoming a lost art form. You might have some labels that are willing to take risks, but they also only have like $5,000 to make the video. There are some amazing videos that you could get for that much, but a lot of ideas that you simply can’t produce on that budget. That being said, I love making music videos and Xander and I will keep on writing treatments like a scab that needs picking.
What’s next on your agenda?
I have a few more art projects that I’m working on—a shoot coming up for one of those and another piece that’s more of a public performance. I’m also working with Angie Keefer and Art in General on a book project about The 8 Train exhibit. Of course, there’s a whole roster of commercials and some potential videos on the horizon with Xander as well as a feature project, a road movie that I’m developing.
