Three months, two cassette-sides, and one out-of-his-depth aspiring journo later, DAVID LEVINSON brings us his one-on-one interview with Undertow director David Gordon Green.


Do you see yourself as belonging to any kind of movement?

Um, not really. A movement? I think a movement is a little too self-conscious of itself. I just do what I feel like doing at that moment which doesn't really have a purpose or a y'know attitude about it.

How would you describe your personal idea of the American South?

All three of [my films] are my personal idea of the South. I think again, they're a lot less self-conscious of that and more about just the attitude and atmosphere and characters I've picked up and feel like writing about y'know, so a lot of that just motivation for human behaviour is family and love and frustration and fear and all that... all that fun movie-making shit.

So there's nothing you're self-consciously working against?

Yeah pretty much, I mean certainly there's a lot of Hollywood kinda clichéd glamorized storytelling that goes into most movies that depict the South. But I play with those clichés myself so I can't really attack them so much.

I realize you're probably sick of hearing Terrence Malick's name at this point, but has its constantly being brought up developed into a kind of anxiety of influence?

Anxiety of influence?

Having his name hovering over your stuff...

I don't know that it hovers over my... I mean in this movie it does because he's in the credits [laughs]. But um y'know he's certainly an influence on what I do and probably a great y'know... and a y'know reason I'm making movies a lot is filmmakers like him during the seventies – him and a dozen other filmmakers – were making things that I thought were inspiring... but just as much as he does so does seventies Robert Altman and older Charles Burnett stuff... and of the dozens of people that have had an influence on me, his name is the one that is brought up most often.

Your films seem to display a really varying caliber of acting experiences. Do you have to quite radically readjust the way you deal with each?

Yeah you do. It's 'cos a lot of the people in my movies aren't actors and have never been in movies and things like that that and so you have to deal with them a lot differently than somebody that has expectations of performance and y'know memorizing lines and a lot of that.

Do you try to steer away from using professional actors?

Not necessarily. I just try steer away from using assholes. So there's a lot of professional actors that have attitudes... well, not necessarily attitudes, but like they have expectations which the industry gives them for a lot of luxuries that I'm not willing to donate to. Um, but y'know I just look for the right face and voice – doesn't matter if they're worth a hundred million dollars or fifty cents.

How many other screenwriters were there on this film?

One. Well, one guy wrote the story and another guy wrote the script.

Did you know the guy who wrote the script beforehand?

He wrote a draft before I met him and then I met him and then I rewrote it.

So was it weird not handling your own material?

It wasn't weird for me, it was weird for him because I took his whole thing... I did something very different with his script. He didn't really like it. But he got paid [laughs].

The kind of consistent director-cinematographer relationship you have with Tim Orr you often find arising in the industry. Do you feel like what you do is creatively dispersed across your and his shoulders? Would you ever consider working with anyone else?

Yeah, I mean I like that Tim's available when I've needed him. But I work with the same production sound mixer and musician... like everybody's the same. It's just nice to have that shorthand. And everybody has their ideas about how the movie should be made, and we all get together and try make sure it's realized. But Tim's definitely very valuable and I just like him because I just don't have to keep looking over his shoulder, and he's not challenging... I mean he's challenging in a good way, like "let's just try make this as good as we can get. Let's try something we've never tried before." There's nothing confrontational or annoying about it.

This is probably just the gushing nineteen-year old boy in me speaking, but do you have any plans to work with Zooey again?

Oh yeah. Actually, she's down in New Orleans now. I wrote a role for her in a script that I don't know that I'll ever get to make because maybe too big a budget. But, yeah we hang out. We're trying to figure out what the right next step would be.

And what about Paul? I heard his scenes were cut from [Undertow].

Well, before we even got to film him we cut a lot of the budget out, so I had to cut out his part. It was too expensive – we had to wreck a hearse through a church, the scene that's the wedding now, he had to destroy the entire church. But Paul's doing really well. He's just finished Cameron Crowe's new movie [Elizabethtown]. It comes out this fall. It's got Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. It's funny seeing – like I just saw the trailer for it the other day in front of War of the Worlds, and was like "okay, there's Paul about to be a movie star." And he's got a big Christmas movie coming out. So he's doing really well.

It's kind of weird talking about these people like they're intimate friends.

[laughs] Yeah well they're just very human people, so there's no other way to talk about it. That's what's kinda weird about the business though, it's like you think somebody's like what you see on the movie poster and the marquee and then you have lunch with them and smell their farts and you realize they're just as human as everybody else.

With Undertow, were you self-consciously trying to make a genre movie?

Yeah, and I think I failed [laughs]. But I wanted to – that was my goal.

It felt like your sensibility was fighting the genre elements – by the second half, the tension had just kinda diffused...

Well, I didn't wanna diffuse the tension, but I wanted to see if you could take a lot of clichés of the genre and the structure of – I mean there's nothing remarkable about the plot, other than it's real, but to take a lot of those things and put more of a pause and a twist and more of a human element into them, and certainly it adds a relaxed tension to a lot of – I mean it goes against of a lot of the Americans who are in the audience's conditioning to watch movies in the genre. So I don't know if it was a great idea to try and blend those two, but at the same time I love it when people mess with genre. Like Robert Altman used to do – he'd take a western genre and do McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he'd take a detective movie and put Elliot Gould in it, and it's just totally fucked up, which I love. I just like being able to take what they like about a genre and then put what they're good at into it.

Are you allowed to disclose what the major story embellishments were?

Nothing major. It's all the little things – like the nail through the foot is like what really happened to me. I mean I didn't run a mile...

Did your brother try put his finger through your foot?

He did not do that, but I was also the little brother – like I had an anxiety disorder where I'd puke because I'd eat lead-based paint and dirt and things, because I had an iron deficiency. I mean there's a ton of autobiographical things that I tried to use within it.

And the Mexican gold?

That is part of the true story – I mean it wasn't Mexican gold, it was money. But like I just tried to take the adventure story element of it. I just didn't want it to be so contemporary. Like in the real story, he was chasing them by tracking their credit cards – they stole their dad's credit cards, so he'd find out where they spent money on their credit card. That's just gross.

What was Gus Van Sant's connection with the film?

He was our still photographer. We couldn't afford to pay a real still photographer, so we'd have a magazine sponsor a great photographer to come down and spend a week with us. So he was just a good mentor and it was cool hanging out with him.