MCN Blogs
Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 - Comments Off on Dentler takes the stairs
Be Sociable, Share!

Dentler takes the stairs

Hannah1-1_50.jpg

SXSW PROGRAMMER MATT DENTLER HAS BEEN A MAJOR SUPPORTER OF JOE SWANBERG’S WORK and he’s interviewed the participants in the Chicago-based writer-director’s latest, Hannah Takes The Stairs, before its August 22 debut in New York via IFC First Take at the IFC Center. Dentler asked several bloggers to share the interviews, and Indie’s got an exchange with actor (and Guatemalan Handshake director) Todd Rohal. [There’s more at the film’s website.]
Writes Dentler: “On the eve of the theatrical debut of Joe Swanberg’s SXSW 2007 hit, I wanted to check in with each of the film’s principal collaborators. The film has been documented as a successful collaboration between acclaimed film artists from around the nation, each one offering their own trademark influence on the finished film.
DENTLER: How did you first get connected to Hannah Takes the Stairs?
ROHAL: I met Joe, Kevin, Kris and Tipper at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, where they, like most people at film festivals, assumed I was Mike Tully’s personal assistant because of the way I would stand just behind Mike Tully’s left shoulder and listen in on conversations. Adam Roffman, the director of IFFB, told me just before my screening that Joe had been saying that he really wanted to meet me. Much to his surprise, we had already been hanging out for three days. In his embarrassment he asked me to be in his new film, which was flattering, but far from made up for the pain that he caused me.
DENTLER: What do you remember most about the shoot in Chicago?
ROHAL: I slept on an air mattress next to Andrew Bujalski.


He would wake up in the morning and pull the plug on the end of the mattress, letting all of the air out while still laying on it. I loved seeing the sight of that every morning and think that there is no better way to get out of bed in the morning than to do that. You’re actually not getting out of bed, bed is getting out of you. I also remember everyone playing the Atari game Breakout way too much, and they were all amazingly good at it. I couldn’t get into it, but I did download the song “Breakout” by Swing Out Sister and played it while everyone was getting into that game. I don’t think I got any laughs for doing that, though. Kent Osborne’s late night penis trick performances became legendary for me. He is a national treasure.
DENTLER: How did the production process differ from your own other projects, or projects you’ve acted in before or since?
ROHAL: I make “movies,” Joe makes “films.” He reminds me of that every time I see him.
DENTLER: What are your thoughts on the issues of sex and relationships that come to the forefront of the film?
ROHAL: Sex seems like it’d be a fun time and I would someday like to try out a relationship, though both of them do seem a bit time consuming.
DENTLER: Ever been in a love triangle?
ROHAL: It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I found out what a love triangle actually was…I thought it was the same thing as a three-way. So I wouldn’t rent movies that had mentions of love triangles in their synopsis for fear of getting caught bringing home a porno from Blockbuster. Which explains why I didn’t see “Days of Heaven until I was 17.
DENTLER: Did you ever work with “the stairs?” Any thoughts on why they didn’t make the cut?
ROHAL: “Some get the elevator, some get the shaft — Hannah Takes the Stairs” — a rejected tagline idea. [Matt Dentler.]

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Dentler takes the stairs

Comments are closed.

Movie City Indie

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon