"Augustine Dalton in Fourteen Questions" by Alden Nagel
An Interview, with Olympia, WA's Great King of Filmmaking
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alden Nagel is the founder and editor of Nut Hole Publishing, and also a writer. You can find him at @aldennagelward
Alden Nagel: What film-viewing experiences have affected you the most? What was the context of them, and did the context change or elevate your viewing experience?
Augustine Dalton: At the inappropriate age of 8 years old, I watched The Blair Witch Project. The experience blew the doors off of what I thought a movie could be and I've been doggedly chasing after that zenith ever since. It wasn't just the movie's sheer aesthetic achievement, it also - in hindsight - was the apotheosis of a late century moment that, for better and for worse, democratized the artform. The indie boom of the VCR Generation of filmmakers made you believe it was possible, Dogme 95 was the writing on the wall, and then finally the denouement of the millennium saw a massive blockbuster and cultural touchstone partially produced on a Hi8 video camera.
Other films that found me in just the right place at just the right time: Lost Highway ; Dogville ; Paris, Texas ; A Clockwork Orange ; South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.
AN: How do you view the pre-production of your films? How does that play into the shooting of, and final project, of your films, for you?
AD: Pre-production typically entails - before any other topic can be broached - a long period of me dilly-dallying about whether or not I'm actually going to go through with a particular project, either because I can't find the shape of it or because I realize the scope of it is, at least at the moment, out of my reach. At any given time, there's something like a dozen projects I'm taking on - a select few in the foreground, most on the backburner. It's a massively inefficient way to work and it's nothing short of a miracle that it ever yields anything at all. But of course, we're interested in those cinematic sperms that survive, not the ones that wither away on the hard drive.
Everything begins with fragments. There's an image, a moment, a thought, a mood, maybe some combination thereof. I often have scenes before I have anything resembling a narrative. The actual honest-to-God pain-in-the-ass work part of it is cohering the fragments, seeing if it makes any sense. At my level of filmmaking, the name of the game is reverse-engineering from what one has access to; don't try to touch the fish yet if you haven't mastered the rice, to borrow a sushi metaphor from a video essay I once saw about independent filmmaking.
I like working with stage actors, because they know where to funnel their energy and it frees me up to think about what's required of me. I value shot lists over storyboards. Because I'm doing my own cinematography and camera operation, I've become adept at making split decisions about how I intend to block and what sort of coverage I want extemporaneously. Even still, "fix it in pre-" is my attitude.
AN: What film(s) of yours do you have the most pride in? Why?
AD: There's at least one film I've done that is so near to my heart and that I'm so inordinately pleased with, even if it's not our greatest work by some objective yardstick, and that is the quarantine dramedy Due to Unforeseen Circumstances..., which was both set and shot entirely in quarantine at the fever pitch of summer 2020. While navigating what the lockdown meant to us creatively, Gabe and I arrived at a similar consensus of "Well, everything's fucked and it kinda seems like we're all about to die. Perhaps we should make a film about it". It's one of the projects I have the least regrets about; there are, on the odd occasion, endeavors where one thing works and then the next thing works even better and eventually it's a fully-fledged snowball of creative satisfaction. In hindsight, I suffer some contrition about being so creatively on fire that summer while the world was, well, actually on fire.
Besides that, I'm probably most proud of our most recent short film, the "anti"-erotic thriller V.P., which was our longest-gestating labor of love.
AN: What are your thoughts on film piracy?
AD: This next statement might emanate from a place of (what could counterintuitively be called) privilege, that is, the "privilege" of somebody who doesn't generally make any money off of this craft. It's one of those things that's neutral until shaped by context. Sort of like the riot is the language of the unheard, piracy is what people resort to when distributors can't get their heads out of their asses and the streaming apparatus that we were promised would give audiences greater options than ever before stray from their duty.
Did you know that one of this century's greatest and most hugely popular horror movies, helmed by an Oscar winner/two-time Criterion director and starring the man who just won Best Actor, is basically inaccessible right now? The Blu-Ray for Boyle's 28 Days Later... is out of print and, at least in the west, it's on none of the streaming services. The former attorney who's now the media executive at Warner Brothers has memoryholed entire fully-shot projects because of what a line on some graph portended. The people handling distribution at the highest levels aren't terribly invested in movies.
It's an ugly thing. If I was at risk of making even one red cent off this endeavor at all, I would hope patrons of the artform would consider doing their part and rewarding us - or, really, any indie creators - with their dollar votes. But the way things are configured now, I can't entirely blame anybody for resorting to more fly-by-night means of viewing media.
AN: What do you think a “future of film” looks like?
AD: The late novelist Philip Roth once prognosticated that literature would maybe never go away but would instead become a more "cultic" activity, a pursuit that becomes increasingly esoteric as fewer and fewer people possess the powers of concentration and attentiveness required to be regular, consistent readers of adult literature. Part of his rationale was that the page struggled to contend with further and further iteration on "the screen"; i.e., the cinema, television and eventually the digital screen. My corollary worry is that the art of the cinema is increasingly something that's going to struggle to find a place in a world that's daily hemorrhaging empathy and curiosity.
For one thing, movies are just one more variation in the context of Content World, where anything and everything from the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien to TikToks meant to liquify children's brains to the last season of Dexter to Joel Haver videos are treated as the same homogenous stew of media sludge. For another thing, I worry that in this ubiquitous noise the film is no longer a particularly distinguished medium. People no longer revere the film as the king of the artforms. What's going on out there? A new Mad Max can't even turn a buck? My hope, naturally, is to be wrong about all this.
AN: What non-filmic inspirations do you intake that goes into your work?
AD: One of the phoniest things a fledgling filmmaker can do is rip off from just one source. Be the most original thief on your block. Rip off from everything, not just movies – only aping what you’ve seen in the pictures or, vastly worse, consciously flexing your homages to preexisting cinema to show everybody that you, too, have been to film school, will only make you like a dweeb. Cinema is the most lifelike of artforms, so why draw from only one narrow well when the entire field of human experience is there for the reaping? Find inspiration in film, yes, but look for it also in books, video games, music, memes, 4chan threads, conversations you overhear on the bus, Twitter arguments. Did any eagle-eyed readers catch that I paraphrased this quote from Jim Jarmusch? Lesson learned.
Spend time around enough new filmmakers and it becomes obvious - to the point of being discernible within minutes, sometimes - which of them are unifying a life of experience into something that can only be rendered with the cinematic method, and which of them are primarily just eager to show you that they've seen other movies before.
AN: Tell us all about your upcoming film project, titled Pervert.
AD: In the summer of 2022, I began scrambling together the components for what, at the time, I was sure I wanted my first feature project to be: a gnostic science-fiction horror called The Millennial Book of the Dead, the short logline of which I half-jokingly articulate as "Pauly Shore goes to Hell". Developing it, I realized that the technical breadth of what script called for would be beyond my present purview. While The Millennial Book of the Dead remains my white whale project, I resolved to think about a feature, smaller in scale, that could utilize what and who I already have access to.
And what is my greatest asset as an underground filmmaker? The answer, all these years later, remains the same: Gabe Hall. Without him, there would have been no impetus for the inaugural short effort, no gonzo performance in lockdown to tickle the festivals' fancy, nothing. What had I learned about his abilities as an actor in our years working together? An important trifecta: he's funny, he elicits sympathy, and in certain contexts he can be frightening. As chance would have it, two things happened in very close proximity that summer: 1, I contracted COVID-19 for the first time and spent many hours in bed dousing myself with the mental Vicodin of To Catch a Predator sting compilations, and 2, one afternoon my talented friend Jonny (of @jonnysboyband) sent me a haunting piece she'd composed to see if I was interested in using it for anything. The music, a saturnine piano piece with one central melody that repeated over and over like an intrusive thought, started forming the central character for me.
Pervert will be our first feature film effort, and will star Gabe Hall as a loner obsessed who - through a cocktail of religious mania and a monomaniacal obsession with a certain mid-2000s primetime news segment - embarks on a misguided jihad against the child predators and pedophiles of the world - or at least, those he believes fit this description. Coppola says to boil down your entire story to one concept or theme as expressed in one word, and let that word guide every creative decision from there on out. The one word of Pervert is (and this isn’t a huge stretch just by looking at the title): sin. We're first going to do a little proof-of-concept short adapting a pivotal scene from the feature's script, which I hear will pit Gabe against a very handsome co-star. My goal is for this short to not only have some festival life of its own but potentially tickle the fancy of prospective investors - otherwise, naturally, it's going to be a self-financer.
AN: How has your late father been a part of your film life?
AD: The last conversation my dad and I had over the phone before he succumbed to thyroid cancer was my first short film effort, an apocalyptic bromance entitled Silent Key. It's a pretty handsomely-made though many of the dumb foibles of a first-time filmmaking effort are present; it's too fucking long despite trying to cram a feature-length concept into 18 minutes, I gave myself too great of a burden in having to learn how to block, edit, shoot, edit more, record and mix sound, color grade to at least a passable degree, edit, and - it really does bear repeating - teach myself about editing.
He called me specifically to say that he'd just checked out the Vimeo link and he was frankly stunned that I, or one, could "just do that", i.e., make a fairly professional-looking film with no resources. The moment was, in hindsight, almost cinematic; they were words I'd also hoped to exchange with him in some capacity - me, having accomplished something and him genuinely impressed by it - and of course they turned out to be our last.
AN: You refer to the film scene in the Olympia area as “Olywood”. What is Olywood to you? Who are some of the key players in it? What do you love about it? How would you improve it?
AD: It's best to start by understanding the film scene in the Northwest in general, at least as I understand it - it's broad and has overlapping components, but it's also curiously splintered. Seattle has its own film scene, Portland has its own film scene, ditto Tacoma and the peninsular extremities (see: the West Sound Film Festival in Bremerton and its many frequent fliers). Olympia's film scene is a bit different in that it has one solid, primary entity at its core and a few that surround it, and that primary entity is the Olympia Film Collective (or OlyFilm), a nonprofit headed by Jeff Barehand. Many of its star players have either joined the GloomTex fold or have come awfully close - among them, the magnetic cinematographer-turned-actress Janice Liu, Thurston Community Media public access tycoon Robert Kam. Until last year, I and my troupe existed mostly on the peripheries of this relatively niche local film community, until our jury prize win at Tacoma's 253 Film Competition forced us into (Olywood's rough equivalence of) the limelight. This town is home to a ton of very talented actors on stage and screen alike who I hope to bring aboard for larger-scale projects we're currently launching.
AN: What do you think about Olympia, WA?
AD: What can you say about the biggest small town in the world? A place where one doesn't date but takes turns. A "punk" town that feels like a tired old state worker town by day, and a...tired old state worker town by night. I make fun, but obviously there's some reason or several that I haven't ditched it.
AN: Also, what do you think about The Evergreen State College, your alma mater?
AD: College is supposed to give whatever you put into it, and Evergreen is an extreme form of this. It's simultaneously all the good things you've heard about it and most of the bad things.
AN: Any notable memories from your time there, at the Evergreen State College?
AD: In no particular order of severity: I sat next to a future murderer in computer class, I exchanged maybe two sentences with Bret Weinstein before he became inextricably the biggest name associated with the college, I was there when the directly aforementioned shit went down, I spent my 21st birthday on a boat doing an ecological survey in the San Juan Islands and at least one other harrowing incident that I'll leave to your readership's imagination because I'm not sure if it's my story to tell; suffice to say, nobody in that particular lit class in fall quarter 2014 will ever forget what we heard that night.
AN: Recommend 10 films that the readership of Nut Hole Publishing needs to watch.
AD:
Slacker (1991, dir. Richard Linklater) - because you have to understand that indie film and Austin, TX, alike were once cool.
Barton Fink (1991, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen) - I know there's creatives among your audience and this film is mandatory viewing for all such people.
Ben & Arthur (2002, dir. Sam Mraovich) - Happy Pride!
Society (1989, dir. Brian Yuzna) - because it's imperative that you witness the greatest setup and payoff involving the insult "butthead" in cinematic history.
Naked (1993, dir. Mike Leigh) - alright, I'm going to stop annotating these with descriptions now. It's probably getting long as it is.
Freddy Got Fingered (2001, dir. Tom Green)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Hour of the Wolf (1968, dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Andrei Rublev (1966, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, dir. Peter Yates)
[Editor’s Note: You can watch trailers for all of these movies here.]
AN: Where were you on September 11th, 2001?
AD: SpeeDee Oil Change & Auto Service; Cedar Hill, Texas. I was sort of an awful shit who was between schools for socially maladroit behavior, and this is where I found myself at an early appointment with my mother. For a long time, I remembered us being there for an oil change, until my mother confirmed that we were in fact there to get the Chevy's air conditioning inspected. This once mincing of details is the only way in which my story has evolved over the years, meaning that I can more consistently account for my whereabouts than the late Donald Rumsfield!