Feature: Surf and Spunk: An interview with Andrew Kidman on Last Hope.
I. THE SPUNK CONNECTION
Andrew Kidman and Aaron Curnow’s Last Hope is a feature length collection of short subjects inspired by the ocean. Kidman, a noted Australian surfing filmmaker and musician-photographer-writer-hyphenate, collected a posse of directors to make one or two short films each, all set to music from Curnow’s label Spunk – including tracks by such excellent artists as Sufjan Stevens, Dirty Three, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.
The end result is something like a Fantasia for surfing, with each film providing a seductive, and occasionally surprising, accompaniment to its chosen song – although the film itself is less like a concert-hall program than a really well structured mix-tape.
I spoke with Andrew Kidman about the creation of the project, its distribution, and the life of an independent artist.
Screen Machine: So tell me how this project started.
Andrew Kidman: Well, I’ve known Aaron probably around ten years now. He runs the record company [Spunk], and he’s just been a friend of mine, and six or seven years ago I put out a film called Glass Love and Spunk put out the soundtrack for it, and they actually released the film as well, after the fact. And he always talked to me about how it’d be great to do some sort of collaboration with his artists. So that’s how it originated.
SM: And how did you come to the decision of making a compilation film?
AK: Well, the original films I’ve made have been more feature films, and he [Aaron] came to me and started talking about doing a collaboration with his artists. I thought it might make sense to – rather than me having to make all the different films to the different music – I thought it might be really interesting to get a group of independent filmmakers. Aaron has thousands of songs he’s constantly going through and listening to. The first stuff he sent me when we were thinking about doing the project, I really wasn’t sure about it. I like the sort of music that I make and that I’m interested in, and when I started hearing some of the original stuff he was sending me I wasn’t sure about it, but I was completely open to it, because I thought, you know, I trust his judgement and I thought it would be really interesting to then go and send this out to the different filmmakers just as a project, just to see what they would come back with.
SM: So Aaron gave you a list of songs?
AK: Basically what he did is he went through his catalogue, and this wasn’t recent stuff either, it was stuff that he’d probably been doing for about ten years, just different artists that he’d done. Probably pulled about a hundred and twenty songs from this catalogue that maybe he had some sort of vision for.
SM: And people cherry picked the one they wanted to make a film for?
AK: Well yeah, and then what we did was, I had contacted these five or six other filmmakers to see if they were interested. These are people I’ve worked with over the years and I contacted them and told them, ‘We’re looking at doing this project, would you be interested to make some films for it using this music?’ Everybody was really interested in doing it. One of the things I’ve always found, when you try to licence music and stuff like that, it’s so hard to licence the really good stuff because it gets really expensive. You always imagine ‘I’d love to work with this music’ but I can’t, because it’s hard to find out who actually owns it. Basically what we were doing was letting these people access this really great music, and giving them the opportunity to make a film from it. So everybody was pretty excited about that. We just gave them free range really. I helped put it together but I didn’t edit anything. Basically told them, make whatever you want. Which was sort of the beauty of the project, I thought.
II. MAKING A SETLIST: “I SERIOUSLY DOUBTED WHETHER SOMEONE WAS GOING TO SIT THERE AND GIVE THEIR COMPLETE ATTENTION TO IT FOR AN HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES”
The flow of the film is helped along not only by the variety of artists on the soundtrack, but also by the variety of content and forms each filmmaker came back with. The short pieces range from purely abstract treatments of the ocean, to quasi-documentary subjects, to brief narratives, to studies in art and the human figure.
Of particular note in this first category are ‘Boy,’ directed by Kidman, with its gorgeous overhead shot of a young kid standing on the shore as waves wash around him (set to a track by Machine Translations); and ‘Mini Waves’ by Monty Webber, a kind of poetical treatment of the curve of waves as they reach the shore. It’s this kind of stuff that reminds you how easy it to forget the beauty and strangeness of the ocean.
I particularly enjoyed two semi-documentary shorts by Richard Kenvin, ‘Bones’ and ‘Requiem for the Lot’. The second of these, set to ‘Held’ by Smog, depicts the protests surrounding the demolition of a parking lot in Tri City, USA. For local surfers the lot is a piece of history: a place where trailblazers and surfing heroes would hang before heading out to sea. For the city it’s a potential dog park. It’s a nice little micro-insight into surfing history and culture. ‘Bones’, set to a Vetiver track, has a real grizzled, leathery old surfer talking about coming from a broken home. When he talks about how surfing saved him it’s easy enough to scoff at the sentiment, but then he hops on his board and the song kicks in and he’s just so graceful, and so relaxed, and he seems to have instantly hit that spot of near-transcendence that athletes find in motion: it’s pretty moving.
SM: What’s really great about Last Hope is the diversity of the different shorts.
AK: That’s all deliberate. Those sorts of things you want to carry the film. You know that when you throw those little documentary features in at different stages it’s going to attract the viewer’s attention to come back up and watch it again. You might be spacing out to watching some perfect waves or something, but your attention will be brought back when these people start talking again. And they were deliberately spaced. I tried to make it something you could watch as an entirety, and I tried to space those things correctly. It is really deliberate; it’s not just something random that got thrown together.
SM: One of the most engaging things about watching Last Hope, at least to me, was examining the way the film is sequenced. I love paying attention to the way albums are ordered; how songs sit side by side with one another, and how they lead into each other, and what sort of associations that creates. This sort of thing is always going on in films, on a scene-by-scene basis, but in Last Hope, by virtue of it being a kind of visual album, it’s all a bit more explicit.
AK: That was probably the biggest part of it, I guess – just because you’re trying to make something watchable from start to finish, and you’ve got all these different ideas that have come in to you. When I was watching the film and trying to put it together and keep people’s attention, [during] some parts I found myself wandering away from it. But even at those points I was thinking ‘well this is not a bad thing, they’re individual films’. I honestly doubted whether someone was going to sit there and give their complete attention to it for an hour and forty minutes. At some points I deliberately let things speed along rather than trying to edit them; I thought, “Well, that’s okay”. Someone can walk away from it and they can come back and something else interesting might be on. To be completely honest what I was trying to do was use the DVD format to its complete capabilities. Somebody might really enjoy one piece and they can just go straight into that chapter and go ‘you gotta see this’ and ‘I really want to watch that again’.
SM: I think the film’s particular manner of distribution and release is worth appreciating. It’s easy to forget how films are released outside of the local multiplex or art-house cinema, or the local festival circuit. It’s certainly worth being aware of these alternative distribution methods, especially given how rapidly the nature of film consumption is changing worldwide: pretty soon things like video on demand, or direct to DVD release will probably be the norm, not the exception. In the case of Last Hope, although the project had been designed with a DVD release by Spunk in mind, you’ve also been touring the film as a live event, with musical accompaniment from your band The Windy Hills.
AK: As much as it had this life as a DVD and that people could sit down in their lounge and watch, I knew there was this other life that it could have. I mean, in your wildest dreams you could have someone like Will Oldham or My Morning Jacket come out and perform live to it. That’s in a perfect world you would do that. But in our world what we did is – because we’re in Australia and we could still present it – with our band we went out and started performing the soundtrack live to it. That was really how I could see that film really coming to life in its best form. What I’ve been doing is re-editing the film completely, cutting it down to about an hour, so you’re taking out like half an hour of it, and then you’re leaving some of the tracks in and they’re playing just off the film with the original soundtrack and then we’ve been coming in and out of it, like the band will come on and I’ll play something live to it and then they’ll go off and then the original soundtrack will be in there, and then the band will come back on again. That was how I envisioned that that thing could really come to life.
SM: And what has been the response?
AK: We toured up the east coast of Australia with it. We didn’t know if it was going to work or not. It could have fallen flat. But we started, and it was pretty successful. We took it to New York, and then the most recent one was the one we did in Perth, at the Perth International Arts Festival. I’m not sure how they found out about it, they must have got some sort of wind of what was happening with it, like some of the responses that were going on with it, and they called us. They actually called Aaron, and they wanted to present the thing just as we saw it. So they brought Holly Throsby over there, and they brought J. Walker from Machine Translations, and they brought us over there and we really presented it. We did the whole film, and we all came in and out playing with it. That really was the pinnacle of what we’ve been trying to do the whole time with it, to really have these bands coming off and on and playing live to the tracks, like some sort of orchestration. For us that was it.
III. INDEPENDENCE IN THE AGE OF iTUNES
This method of touring a film, and the hard work it entails, seems representative of Kidman’s method as an independent commercial artist. On his website he sells his own music, as well as DVDs and a book of his photography and writing. I was particularly interested in this aspect of his work; I think it must be incredibly hard to accomplish and admirable when done right, and so well worth making an example of.
SM: You’ve experimented a lot with the ways people can access your work. Are these experiments paying off?
AK: Does it work? It was working better before YouTube and iTunes came along. Before those two phenomena came along in digital media, the only way to really get the work, if you were independent, was through your website. So people would come down and then they’d drop 25 bucks to buy a CD. But now what’s happened is that people are looking for you on iTunes but you’re not on iTunes because you’ve got to sign up with a record label to get on there. So that becomes a problem. For books and stuff like that? Yeah, it works. Because the only place they can find that book is through that website. What I’ve done in the past is, whenever I’ve made films I’ve just held on to them. Last Hope was different because I did it with Aaron, and distribution became their deal. But other films I’ve made I’ve just tried to hold onto them for as long as possible and not distribute them at all. People have to come back in and get them from you.
SM: Has the Internet changed things for you?
AK: Well, it’s got more interesting. It’s actually got more and more interesting because now you have all this video on demand stuff. If you could actually get your head around how you could put your films online and control all that stuff yourself, well I think you’d probably go okay with it. But it’s a whole job in itself to do that.
SM: I suppose the biggest challenge for an independent artist is to make all of this sustainable.
AK: Well, we’re pretty hand and mouth with it. There’s been periods of time when I’ve been able to make a living from it, and other periods. Like I’m sitting down here writing stories at the moment, because you got to try and make enough money from doing a few other things to buy yourself a bit of time so you might be able to make another film. They don’t cost a lot of money to make these days, either, but it’s more just the time they take. But Last Hope, that probably took like six to eight months to make, really. And we’ve been touring it for almost a year now. You’re not making your money back on the touring. But you believe in the project. You do a show like Perth and you see something like that happen, so you really actually believe in the medium. Like what I said to Aaron after, Aaron was at that show in Perth, and I said to him, ‘This is how I always saw this being presented’. And he agreed, like, ‘This is how I always saw that too’. Because it’s a pretty incredible thing to experience, having live music going on with these amazing visuals that you see playing in the background. It really is. I mean it’s not surfing, it’s some other experience completely. To see that fulfilled, I mean that’s enough, you can sort of put it to bed now and move on, but then you also realise, maybe if you could just move up to the next level of people realising what it was then you might be able to actually make a living from it.
Last Hope, with accompaniment from The Windy Hills, is screening at Speakeasy Cinema (1000 £ Bend, 361 Lt Lonsdale St, Melbourne), on Sunday 28th March, at 7.30pm.
Tix are $20 pre-sale, or $25 on the door. Available through www.moshtix.com.au
Jocelyn
23/03/10 - 6:16 PM
I can’t wait to see it. A surfing movie that non-surfers appreciate is the kind of surfing movie i want to see as a surfer. And your writing’s lovely. Anyhow, speak soon. Joce