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| | Issue #21.15 :: 04/09/2008 - 04/15/2008 | Don't Call it "Mumblecore"
| BY PATRICK WALL
| Who: Aaron Katz
What: Indie Grits Awards Ceremony
When: Saturday, April 12 (7 p.m.)
Where: South Carolina State Museum (301 Gervais St.)
Born in Portland, Ore., Aaron Katz he became interested in film and acting in high school. When he realized that he wasn’t a very good actor, he decided to go to film school at North Carolina School of the Arts. His latest film, Quiet City, was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at Film Independent’s Spirit Awards and was featured on several year-end Top 10 lists, placing Katz squarely at the forefront of what’s being called the “mumblecore” movement.
So what is “mumblecore”?
You tell me; I don’t know! Mumblecore ... I don’t know. I have mixed feelings. First of all, if there has to be a term for what we’re doing, I wish it didn’t sound so lame.
I was a particular fan of [the term] “slackavettes.”
Slackavettes, mumblecore ... I don’t know. I mean, it feels silly to quibble over the name, but “mumblecore” is the worst. But that aside, I guess that sort of refers to what I’m doing and Andrew Bujalksi and Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers and a few others. And I think the main thing that we’re all interested in is getting at a truthful human interaction and using experiences from our own lives and what we observe about the people around us as a template for that.
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| Aaron Katz |
What got you into film and, more specifically, into writing and directing?
I actually didn’t go to any movies until I was fairly old — and by old I mean, like, 10. And I also didn’t watch a lot of TV; my family wouldn’t let me watch anything but PBS. But when I was about 10 my family got a TV and we would go to the library and I remember watching and really, really loving the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. And from there I started getting interested in film and started watching older films. But then in high school I took a lot of theater classes and the theater teacher also taught a dramatic writing class and through a lot of conversations with him I realized what I really wanted was to make movies.
The Boston Phoenix said that Quiet City will “restore your faith in youth and romance.” Yeah?
I hope so. Hopefully if we accomplished what we want to, it feels like a much more naturalistic take to meet someone when you’re 22, and that will maybe remind people of something real from their own life. And it’ll be dissimilar from a lot of films that maybe are not so realistic.
So you’re coming to the festival as kind of the keynote speaker of the awards ceremony; do you have any particular wisdom in particular you’re looking to impart?
I think that maybe the thing that I’ll focus on is the idea of community and finding a group of people who are excited about making films and who might not necessarily agree with everything that you think but who you have a good back-and-forth with and finding people who have ideas that make your ideas better, and your ideas make their ideas better. That’s what’s really important and that’s what, be it making a movie for $2,000 or $50 million, makes things really exciting. | |
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