TIM KINSELLA AND I MET IN 1997 AND HAVE BEEN EXCHANGING PREOCCUPATIONS EVER SINCE. Ever prolific, Kinsella, who began his public life as a musician at the age of 16 in the band Cap’n Jazz, has recorded dozens of albums since, and with the meltdown of the music industry, has shifted to filmmaking as another artistic outlet, itself a troubled medium for anyone wanting to make a career today. [Kinsella’s diverse collaborations have appeared under such names as Joan of Arc and Make Believe.] His writing-directing debut, Orchard Vale, a claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization, opens the 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 15, just a few weeks after his decision to leave the band Make Believe. We had several conversations about process as the movie was prepared and in the final stages of post-production, from the transition from songwriting to filmmaking, and the kinds of fears of contemporary apocalypse you’d find in the movies of the Dardennes brothers or Michael Haneke, what a younger John Cale or Captain Beefheart might be up to today, and why you shouldn’t compare your movie to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” (Orchard Vale was shot by Chris Strong, and edited by Amy Cargill; a trailer for the film is at the end of this interview.)

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RAY PRIDE: Is the disintegration of the music industry because of evolving technology one of the reasons you decided to explore filmmaking?
TIM KINSELLA: I don’t get the impression it was ever very easy to make a living as a musician. By the late nineties, I saw my life as potentially fitting into the historical archetype of traveling bard far more so than any aspirations towards rockstardom. I think I had a pretty realistic idea at a relatively young age that those ambitions would only end in bitterness and a sense of personal failure. So to a large degree, I feel I have been able to exist outside the music industry and whether the alt-fad that year is electro-clash or folk, I wouldn’t really be fazed. I guess the music-industry life lesson that enabled me to embark on this Orchard Vale pit would be more a matter of internalizing the DIY ethics of my formative punk rock years and extrapolating that approach from hanging your own flyers to making a movie.
PRIDE: Is it one of the reasons you dropped out of Make Believe, this uncertainty about being able to recoup time, let alone money?
KINSELLA: The cost/benefit ratio has certainly stayed about the same, that is, lousy from day one, but I think I have just changed some. I was perfectly happy drifting around a different city every day for months at a time through my twenties and just being able to get away with it was enough. If we could make enough money traveling that I wouldn’t need to work too much when I got home then I’d be able to work on the next record and recording is when I truly feel most myself and most alive and like I am doing what I should be doing. And having just returned from some adventure, I’d have plenty of material to think through. But touring eventually becomes twenty-three hours a day of mostly waiting around. You can’t get anything done.

The way things were going in Make Believe it didn’t seem worth sacrificing every other aspect of my life for anymore.
PRIDE: But who can make a career in the modern music industry? I remember Bettina Richards of Thrill Jockey saying hopeful things way back about how she wanted to give her bands a comfortable living, and not worry about things like being American idols…
KINSELLA: I guess it’s like the fifties again? People don’t listen to albums anymore, just MP3 players on shuffle. So it’s the single that is prioritized. In the same way that the listener doesn’t sit with a side of a record and let it develop anymore, the business doesn’t develop careers like it seems maybe was possible in some golden era of the seventies. I don’t know. If John Cale or Don Van Vliet were young men today I’m sure they’d still find a way to get away with what they wanted to do.
PRIDE: Can you expand on the self-description on the Joan of Arc Web site about becoming a “bizarro David Lee Roth or whatever”?
KINSELLA: Oh, I guess I meant my specific role in Make Believe was constricting. A persona developed pretty naturally when we began that I felt was the appropriate approach at the time for front-manning those songs. But towards the end, when I required a new approach to remain interested, it didn’t really seem like I had the space to develop that within the context of that band. I wish it wasn’t the case, and maybe we could’ve talked through it better as a group, but it’s the decision that appeared inevitable at the time.
PRIDE: Have you made any shorts or directed any videos for your music?
KINSELLA: I made two shorts. Me and Chris [Strong] made Ping-Pong Meditations, which was a slow-motion, twenty-minute ping-pong game on a ping-pong table floating in outer space then landing on the Earth. Joan of Arc did live accompaniment to it at the [the now-defunct] Three Penny [Cinema on Lincoln Avenue] a few years ago at a Movieside festival with Jim Jarmusch [as guest]. Not recommended viewing for anyone who is anything less than aware at that moment that they have never been so high in their life before. And last year me, Chris, Amy and Armeen [Monahan], our sound guy on Orchard Vale, made a short called A Lovers’ Discourse with Rosie Sanders and Paul Koob. It was one line of dialogue, a joke with no punch line, repeated over and over in twenty different locations. It was really an exercise in setting up and breaking down quickly to get us in shape for the movie we thought we were gonna try to make before making Orchard Vale.
PRIDE: You’ve gone from the music industry, and now to narrative filmmaking, the industry support of which is being eroded, even demolished economically by the same technology that puts it into the hands of almost anyone. Is this out of the frying pan and into the deep fryer?
KINSELLA: The economic reality of it is, I’m a bartender. That frees up a lot of mental space regarding popular reception of an idea I may want to pursue, like nudging a note over here and there and straightening out the structure of this song just a teeny-weeny bit might make it more palatable to the masses and then I can pay my rent easier or whatever. But I don’t need to worry about that because I am a bartender. For years I had this small bit of money I was able to move around from project to project to kick-start different things and then when it paid itself back, I could move it into the next thing. But this was never to be confused with the money I lived on. But since record labels discontinued the old tradition of paying royalties and after making Orchard Vale, this small bundle has dissipated.
PRIDE: In our earlier conversations about working on Orchard Vale, it seems you’ve enjoyed is the collaboration, expanding on ways you like to work as a musician. Can you tell me more?
KINSELLA: It has been a very rare occasion in which I have found myself with a song that I think is so preciously perfect that it shouldn’t be tarnished by another’s touch. For me, finding the right collaborators is the single most important aspect of any creative venture. We may both have blind spots that obscure ninety percent of each of our vision, but then focusing on the same thing, even if those blind spots overlap halfway, we’re still both now aware of fifteen percent instead of ten percent. I know I didn’t explain that so well, but you know what I mean. In the end, it’s still all intuition and trusting your gut to know which opinions to listen to and disregarding what doesn’t fit into the vague form you have preconceived to some degree. Different people twist the same things in different ways. I personally wouldn’t be able to ingest the same depth into something that I trust multiple perspectives would. Which isn’t to say cubist, but maybe a time-lapse cubism? Ideally creating something that can interact more with the listener or viewer. My favorite records and movies that I return to over and over are participatory, they all have some sense of mystery about them that seem to change as I interact with them at different points in my life. This is the vitality of the output.
PRIDE: What’s the key influence that’s not music itself or performance on the way you pull things out of your head?
KINSELLA: I guess I try to not try. Too much effort seems to corrupt the process. Music I listen to and performances of any kind I see have very little conscious effect on my approach. If it did I’d sound just like Fleetwood Mac and strut around like Humphrey Bogart. So maybe the trick for me to getting anything done has been integrating work into my life to such a degree that I don’t notice when its happening or not? When I know I’m trying to work then the little censor sitting behind my forehead comes out and insists, “No, no, no its all wrong, I’m the pilot around here and I say its not clever enough or heavy enough or whatever and blah blah blah,” and the entire ambition seems perverse and vain and I need to walk it off. I make great effort towards being conscious of humility in my approach and always remaining aware of what is the smallest gesture necessary, the most economical means to give every dimension summoned fair representation. Of course, I fail at all of this constantly and am aware that what I see and hear in others’ work that bugs me is only how it resonates with some aspect of myself I want to strip away. It’s really the hours between midnight and 6am that are vital. Everything else I could say is hypotheses, but those hours, the world is much more sparsely populated and that quiet leaves a great deal more room for turning inward. The only thing in the world I know for sure is I work best when I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep. Amy worries about me when I go through phases of not sleeping for days at a time, but those are specifically the days she shouldn’t be worried about me.
PRIDE: Like Jon Brion’s score for P. T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, the score to Orchard Vale—the music seems to convey more discordance than the spare, repetitive dialogue.
KINSELLA: I wrote the title theme and played along on some other stuff a little, but mostly just steered the process. Nate Kinsella wrote the piano theme that reappears in various warpings throughout. Josh Abrams and Ben Vida can both play any instrument at any moment and make it sound great. I would say, “How about something like this?” and they would take my idea a step deeper and better than I had imagined it. Mark Messing made strange sounds with lots of instruments you would never guess were instruments from just looking at them.
PRIDE: You don’t have much wordplay. These characters have been dulled into a banality beyond survival… They’ve survived to survive, to live in a few daydreams each of what came before. There’s not much flashy discourse unless you include the film’s last line, which is so unlikely yet so bittersweet and so girlish and so childish and so mature, cadenced like a small girl’s equivalent of the opening line of “A Hundred Years of Solitude,” which would be some kind of sendoff in any case. I don’t mean that pretentiously or preciously at all, but there’s a precision and ache there, the sensations of a sensual moment she recalls that’s forever a splinter in mind.
KINSELLA: I like that about the last line. Thanks.
PRIDE: Were you planning to have this much music and for it to be so integral?
KINSELLA: Not at all. I really hoped to make something like the Dardenne brothers or Michael Haneke. I am pretty excited about this contemporary approach to film making, that is, demanding such patience from the audience is certainly a subversive act. But as our movie was beginning to take shape, it became apparent that certain dimensions were lacking to see that vision through successfully. It just wasn’t kinetic enough or compositionally developed enough to survive like that. So it needed a little boost. I felt unsure about how to approach it and wasn’t into corrupting the original idea for months until I stopped thinking about it and then all at once I just knew how it should be.
PRIDE: Do you like quieter scores and sound design in movies? Examples? We were talking recently about Walter Murch’s ideas about subtraction in sound and reflecting the aural sculpture of urban spaces…
KINSELLA: Equally as big an influence as the Murch articles I’d gotten absorbed in was the running gag in the Tromaville movies in which someone in the frame drops or throws something outside the frame and then a cat which has never been seen or referred to in any way before screeches.
PRIDE: How’d you keep yourself from working in a dense wordplay like your song lyrics?
KINSELLA: That was never an issue. The mediums are so totally different that even if the ambitions of my efforts with either form overlap in some ways, creating a half-dream state of some kind, the means of aiming towards those ends are so different. I think a lot of what I’ve learned through music in broader terms, both administrative and dynamic, gave me a boost towards engineering this fiasco. But there was never a temptation to try to replicate anything that might be seen from the outside as some signature style of mine or whatever.
PRIDE: Was there more chat in the writing or shooting? How’d you work with actors as a first-time director? Non-actors, I believe, for the most part.
KINSELLA: There was a lot more chatter in the first version of the script we all sat down with together. By the time we began shooting, it had been whittled down and streamlined a good deal. But the biggest leaps definitely came in later edits. Many of the scenes which seemed well balanced on their own suddenly seemed clunky and weighted down once they were placed side-by-side with other scenes. Once we got into taking out single lines within scenes, things really opened up. In the original concept, which includes how we shot it, there was a much more deliberate and exaggerated sense of cycles of long silences followed by babble. Once we started cutting, it really became apparent how totally boring both long silences and babble are and though moments of each have survived into our final cut, it was really torturous originally. The actors were all great to work with. I was very aware of positive reinforcement because we were all feeling our way through it together. I was mostly there to just keep everyone cool, make sure no one got too anxious about trying to act, and beyond that it was just talking through the characters with each of them and coming to decisions together.
PRIDE: Has this experience suited your customary method? If there’s frustration, shift, surprise yourself? You’ve always seemed willing to say, “Fuck, my instinct was wrong and not my instinct is to try this. Fuck. What now?”
KINSELLA: When my customary method is explained back to me like that then I would have to say yeah, this suited my lifestyle micro and macro perfectly. But maybe you know me a bit too well to be interviewing me about that, I don’t want to have to think of my customary method like that.
PRIDE: How long did you shoot? Edit? How did you collaborate with Chris Strong?
KINSELLA: Primary shooting was done in two absurdly long weekends last August [2006]. Beyond that, there were two afternoons and a few evenings over the next couple of months. The second long weekend, we ended up getting rained out with one scene left to go and we were up in Wisconsin. When we organized to all go back up to Wisconsin to shoot one scene, the van broke down on the highway. Then the dudes grew their beards back over the winter, tried to shoot again in April and a blizzard literally appeared out of nowhere right after we got the lights set up. It had been a month since snow. I won’t tell you which scene it was, but we re-conceptualized it and it became a piece of cake. The fates were on my side. Editing began with thirty-five hours of footage and just sorting through it and I would make notes about all the takes and Amy would piece the scenes together while sitting with my notes and then it was just a long process of negotiation. Really I feel like we are now better suited to work as marriage counselors than filmmakers. Editing took from about nine months, a couple weeks at a time of concentrated attention and then a couple weeks off to get some perspective when we’d return to it. While shooting I’d say we were at pretty even thirds, me, Amy and Chris with coming up with specific camera set-ups or approaches to certain scenes. I had about half the screenplay story-boarded and very deliberately left the other half more open, but we were working at such an absurd pace that a few of my set-ups got simplified and blown off or blown through just to keep on schedule. Chris dealt with the practical aspects of lighting strategies and now color correction, but while shooting Amy had an equal say as me and Chris. Or you know, equal to Chris and more than me…
PRIDE: You were talking to me before about how dark you wanted the finished product to look, and how a local journalist had unwittingly asked for an image from the film that wasn’t dark.
KINSELLA: We’re having a terrible time figuring out which monitor to trust—this color stuff is killing us.
PRIDE: You’d been talking for a while about another script, as I recall. Something like a latter-day John Hughes story shot in one simple location, a la Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth. How’d this one get to the front of the line? Is there anything about the practical location or the origin of the story you could share?
KINSELLA: We spent a year trying to figure out how to shoot the other script I had written, “Budding.” It is a story of grown-up burnouts living in their parents’ basements in the suburbs. But it just proved impossible to shoot with our budget—zip, zero, zilch—too many locations, too many characters, quasi-epic screenplay. So we tallied our resources like actors and locations, and I wrote the screenplay specifically with that in mind. There were, of course, a few minor holes to plug up. The story was greatly influenced by living with Amy while she was cutting [Usama Alshaibi’s documentary] Nice Bombs, so every time I’d walk in the room there’d be some horrible Baghdad reality, as well as my cousin [Nate Kinsella] getting out of jail and telling me stories. The screenplay is really a warped consolidation of those two influences.
PRIDE: I know you’d personally avoid the comparison, but the young girl’s hopeful voiceover and the film’s confinement mostly to one location (in the “present” portion of the story) do share some of the aspects of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” But Anne Frank never knew how hopeless things were, did she? There’s a terrible, pervasive sensation of helplessness in the actions of these characters that have been stripped of civilization.
KINSELLA: I wasn’t avoiding the comparison at all. In fact I was describing it to people as “Anne Frank set in the future” until Amy ordered a cease-and-desist order on that phrase fearing people may find it insensitive or coarse. So I can’t say I was thinking of that, but I’m pleased to hear if that was evoked in any manner.
PRIDE: You don’t specify how long suburbia’s been divided into hermits and roving gangs. What’s fearful is to consider it could be seventy-two hours or seventy-two days after the failure of the electrical grid and other fully accepted, fully expected parts of the infrastructure. You stay close in. You don’t know about collapsed bridges or burning city centers. Onward and inward… Hermits and drunks and childlike dreamers lie as bait for marauders. You sit still, a target, or you move, seeking targets.
KINSELLA: Yeah, keeping time and space constantly ambiguous seemed vital to any tension we hoped to create. We didn’t want to attempt to show this tension, but more to create a strange time/space hanging there as if the frame were a cage and the tension was creeping in from outside the frame. Did we succeed at that? I have no idea, I’m too in the middle of it by this point to even know if it comes off as a farce or just a sloppy pile or what. In a way I can only talk about our intentions, even if that is totally meaningless compared to what actually exists.
PRIDE: Have you read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”?
KINSELLA: No. Don’t know what that is.
PRIDE: Are there other things you’ve read, fiction or nonfiction that made you think about how fragile the tendrils of technology are? There’s a modest form of road rage from most people now if they discover a brief, momentary period their cell phone can’t find a signal.
KINSELLA: Yeah. I suffered from severe zombie-apocalypse daydreams for years. Like whenever I would be in a crowd I would just be looking at people and imagine what it would take to transform everyone instantly into snarling dogs snapping at each other. I couldn’t shake it for years. Shooting this has really helped me work through that and really improved my overall mindset in a lot of ways. My anxiety was really off the charts all the time about seemingly impossible scenarios; the sky cracking open and bleeding Biblical shit, but also all the liberal-rapture scenarios of environmental devastation a la [James Howard Kunstler’s nonfiction book] “The Long Emergency” and political doublespeak towards an endgame of fascism that requires no use of force, its spiritual and mental bondage is so strong. I don’t know. Complex systems collapse easily. I never don’t feel like we’re in the salad days now and living on borrowed time. It’s a floating historical moment. There are no roots to connect us to any living history. Everything can evaporate and everyone would be cool with it. But my anxiety is more rooted in what if we don’t all evaporate, but what if we are instead all forced to live with the repercussions, the flipside of our blessings, living in our own filth. I guess it’d be tough for a little while, and then slowly, like any heartbreak dissolves, everyone would just fall back into gossip and small hierarchies.
PRIDE: The young girl’s memories are shown as cutouts floating across brightly lit public spaces that are surely deserted in the story’s present tense—it’s pragmatic for the budget and size of your production, but did you arrive at this without consideration of cost?
KINSELLA: More so than cost, it meant a lot to me to portray the suburbs as a dream-world utopia. That may in fact be the central motivating force to the entire movie, how to establish the circumstances in which I can show mall culture as a dream.
PRIDE: How’d you arrive at this bunch to represent the remnants of civilization?
KINSELLA: Mostly, they were the people I know with enough mutual trust to all get into doing this together. Cyan [Walker, who plays the young girl] and my uncle [Gene Blake] were vital to me to distinguish it from being a movie by a thirtysomething bohemian that shows a world populated exclusively by thirtysomething bohemians. I was Cyan’s babysitter when she was a little kid, and I knew she would be great. And my uncle has always been a good sport and a spontaneous clown with some critical depth and an occasional sad streak to him, so there was no question it would be exciting, and important even, to work together. We were shooting in my dad’s apartment shortly after my dad died and my uncle was the MC for his service as well as his old business partner and it was an act of temporary adoption in a way for him to get behind me with this. Joe’s character was transposed into the story from another project Amy and I had been talking to Joe about getting into, the Christian gay-reformists.
PRIDE: Does Orchard Vale reflect on your own childhood experiences in suburbia? As a punk escapee from a young age?
KINSELLA: Amy sees the whole thing as just my tour-analogy, everyone locked in together and coping in their own way. I don’t disagree, but it’s equally “high school cafeteria.”
PRIDE: Are you still discovering things in these last hours of post? What sort of tweaks are you making last minute? Sometimes when I write movie reviews, I think I’m translating messages that haven’t been sent, but that’s the beauty of any complex assembly that hopes to be artful, the subconscious is doing some heavy lifting no matter what the conscious intentions of the makers.
KINSELLA: Yeah, there are new rhyming patterns and tiny logics revealed every time I see it. I’m now in gynecologist mode, to steal Albini’s analogy, so when I actually get the rare chance to see it all the way through, I am surprised over and over. Embarrassed at times and thrilled at others with how stuff seems to materialize from the resonance between moments.
PRIDE: Do you read reviews of your music? There’s a streak out there of folks who like to hate your work. What’s a phrase you’ve read you can’t shake?
KINSELLA: I don’t know. Out of survival I have had to give up completely on worrying about how I can be perceived by people I don’t know. It used to scare me that I could come across so at odds with what I thought my motives to be, but it’s too far beyond my control to waste any mind-space with. Consumer culture flips things on their heads to sell them, if I somehow line myself up to be consumed, I shouldn’t complain when I get flipped on my head.
PRIDE: When’s the next Joan of Arc album? What’s its shape or form or configuration? Are you happy with it?
KINSELLA: I love the batch of songs that live in my room. I have never enjoyed working on music more than I am these days when I can steal an hour or two to sit with something. We are recording the new record in October for a summer 2008 release on Polyvinyl.
PRIDE: Coming down to the wire, what’s your biggest fear about the two shows a week from Wednesday?
KINSELLA: Just the general public humiliation and ridicule before ones’ peers. These fears are requiring an awful lot of attention these days. [Ray Pride; photograph of Tim Kinsella © 2007 Ray Pride; all others courtesy orchardvalethemovie.com.]