Hubley is best known for her acclaimed shorts and the animated sequences in John Cameron Mitchell's cult hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch. A few days before the film's theatrical premiere at MoMA (tonight), Hubley sat down to talk about creative trust and famous parents (Oscar-winning animators John and Faith Hubley).
JJC: You wrote the poetry that the dogs recite between their up-to-no-good maneuvers. Name some poets that inspire you.
EH: I’m a William Blake fan. And Dickinson, of course.
JJC: Blake was one of my favorites at university. Is poetry just another means of expression for you, like animation?
EH: [LAUGHS] I had never written poetry before. The words just came out, but I worked on them, and spent a lot of time with them. I just felt, at some point, I'm going to get the poetry police on me: saying ‘You are an imposter!'
JJC: You don’t own a dog, so where did you get this idea for four card-playing dogs, which reminds me of [C.M.] Coolidge’s famous canines?
EH: I originally wrote the script thinking that there would be no animation in the movie. But as I was finishing, I got this idea: ‘But wait, you're an animator, where do you get off writing a movie?' Well it is, in its way, an animation because the narrative is really just the game that's being played by the animated dogs. It's a joke, a flip: The reality was the figment of the animation's imagination. So that's where it started, but then the dogs developed as characters and imposed their way.
JJC: What was it like directing actors as opposed to drawing them?
EH: The cast came to the project in different ways, but it was all a matter of the script attracting them. It wasn't me-and it certainly wasn't the money. It was always just the characters in the story and, to some degree, the novelty. With animation, I think about living in the process of making the animation. Living in the process of making the live-action was very similar. You are totally infused in the business of making a thing from an idea. Except with the live action, you have a lot more people engaged with you.My whole approach to working with the actors was giving them the character. I don’t pretend to know how they should act or portray the character. I just supply them with everything that they need to create and own the character. I think that everyone who came in was responding to their character and to this world we were trying to create. I felt, apart from very minor type of things, that it was really a matter of trusting them. As soon as I got out of the thinking that I was being asked to do something that I wasn’t equipped to do, then it was a sheer joy to provide people with what they needed, whether a glass of water, information, anything. It was really a sort of juggling act. As long as you can get everyone into the space of feeling taken care, then they’re able to do good work.
JJC: I like that way of looking at directing. Everyone contributing their own take with the given materials.
EH: And trusting them to do it so they don’t feel that they’re being judged. Like, ‘Oh no, I can’t believe you moved three inches, instead of two inches. Why did you do that?’ People are all acting on a basis of trust.
JJC: Eli Wallach is in the film. I can never imagine him as anything but the Ugly.
EH: [LAUGHS] The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly was a real obsession for me when I was growing up. He was so sharp, so on the ball. When we recorded, we recorded all the voices together, but also staggering it a bit since there were parts that each actor had to do alone. The way that it worked out was that Eli and Marian Seldes were the first actors there and the actors that were due to come after them had some real-world snag-a car stuck in traffic and so forth. I felt really bad for making them wait to record the next thing. But they were so happy to see each other and they have this whole shared history in New York theatre.
JJC: How would you compare the process of making a short versus a feature length?
EH: I don't know if it's really the length, but the scale in terms of personal process. Especially on the more recent films that I make, you discover them as you go. Putting something this big together, there's not much space for surprises. I think there's a lot of magic in the film and there's a lot of stuff that I certainly didn't predict or I didn't understand at the time. But in my short films, it's all like that: it's all a process of discovery.
JJC: I just heard the Ella Fitzgerald song that your parents used in one of my favorite shorts, The Tender Game.
EH: Part of what I'm doing now is going through my parents' archives. I just came across an interview in Norway or Sweden with my dad and him talking about Tender Game and the forms of it. These films, they come in waves.
JJC: Your sister Georgia is the drummer for Yo La Tengo, your brother Ray is a successful film editor, and you're an esteemed animator...
EH: My parents took us on field trips and it was what fired them up. My mother didn't have an easy childhood, so she really wanted to provide her dream childhood. We're gonna do this now, we're gonna do that. Sometimes we didn't want to, but we had to go to the ballet class, the museum. I didn't plan to be an animator, but we went to international animation festivals when we were pretty young.
JJC: Your first film screened before a non-verbal masterwork, Jacques Tati's Trafic—that's some monumental company for a debut.
EH: He keeps coming up too! I don't know how my dad finagled that. Maybe the Elgin Theater was booking shorts that they had made. Anyway, they took me into the projection booth and were, "Listen, you're a filmmaker now, this is your responsibility." I was like, "Really? I just made this for my high school project." But it’s a good thing to do with kids, just to tell them things are important, that things have weight.
JJC: I love the Yo La Tengo soundtrack for Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy and Jean Painleve's underwater shorts.
EH: I've been using their music in my shorts for a long time and their music plays a very big part in my life. So there is an intimacy there. I wanted specific music: I always wanted to have themes that repeated with variation or overlapped in different ways. I also had this idea that came from my brother, that Fellini pre-scored a lot of his movies. A lot of animation is done pre-scored.
JJC: Why's that?
EH: With animation it helps to have your story make the music work to its laws and its own creative essence, then you animate to have the full marriage, rather than trying to make the music behave to the motion. I wanted to do that as much as possible, but of course it wasn't pragmatic to truly do it all the way. But I did ask for some themes in advance. Actually when Ray was putting together the film, he used all Yo La Tengo music, even for the temp track. If it wasn't the music they had already scored, it was music they had made so that it was in a common language.
JJC: It probably helps that they're family.
EH: Yeah, but they care about what they're doing too and I trust their interpretation of the story as much as I trust my own. There were very few missed steps in that way. There were a couple of times that I would go there and just cry because it was so moving.
JJC: For your characters, life isn’t as simple as Xs and Os. There are numerous symbols or glyphs that are simultaneously obscure and open to interpretation. Was this the point?
EH: Going back to William Blake, for a second, he has this saying that I’ll paraphrase: ‘I will invent my own system or be defined by another man’s.’ I think everyone develops their own system of beliefs, rules of how to be in the world. In The Toe Tactic, Mona tries to build her own. She’s trying to glean it from lessons from her father, but they’re also from herself and, as it turns out, from her mother and other people. I never wanted to be didactic. They’re just little clues of what she’s finding, presenting little moments that have the essence of truth without ever saying that this is the way. Instead, it just happens to be her way to manage this business of getting through the days.
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