By Hye Jean Chung
AFI FEST Daily News

In I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, critically acclaimed filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt presents the second installment of a three-part story about a stick-figure character named Bill, who was introduced in the first film, EVERYTHING WILL BE OK (2006). Containing as much narrative complexity and emotional intensity as any feature length film, this animated short provides us with a glimpse of Bill’s deceptively mundane daily routine, memories, and dreams, interspersed with anecdotes from his family history that fluidly interweave humor and tragedy. Boundaries between past and present moments, and real and imagined experiences are also dissolved to tell the compelling, indelible story of Bill and his family. The film itself looks like a dreamscape, with several windows opening against a dark backdrop to offer a concurrent view of multiple times and spaces, or as one character notes in the film, the past, present and future is “laid out like an infinite landscape of simultaneous events.”

Don Hertzfeldt has recently finished his theatrical tour of I AM SO PROUD OF YOU that included 33 shows in 22 cities and four countries.

Q. Many people enjoy the unscripted and spontaneous nature of your films. In I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, the episodes seem like disassociated vignettes, like snippets from a dream or a visual stream of consciousness. I don’t want to demystify the process of your work, but could you tell us a bit about how you create your films? Do you jot down random thoughts as they spring to your mind? I’ve heard you say that about 30 percent of your work is based on your own experiences and dreams–are any of them in this film? I’m especially curious about the part about defecating a pile of blueberries, and the aquatic creature making off with a prized cow.

A. I like how your question sounded like we were about to discuss something really deep and interesting and then you ended with, “tell me about the part about defecating a pile of blueberries.” Yeah, I think you’re right, the writing usually comes from little pieces of everything . . . dreams, science books, conversations, little moments that run through my head . . . especially for this movie because like you say, it’s so splintered from scene to scene. the story is jumping from different moments in the past and the present to the distant past, to dreams, to memories, to possibly imagined pasts and imagined futures, to the idea that there’s really no such thing as a present. Just from shot to shot, the tense of the narration sometimes changes from the past to the present and back again. moments and scenes may not seem like they connect at first, but overall there is a sort of dream logic that flows you through the whole thing. Which is also how I think the brain works . . . your senses pick up little fragments of everything from the world and from the subconscious, and it sort of filters out all the noise and creates a whole. But for some people, something is wrong and the brain has trouble figuring out which signals are more important than other signals.

The two bits you mention with the cow and later the blueberries, I think that was all written in one sitting . . . some nights you are lucky to write one sentence, and other nights many pages sort of come gushing out at once and will refuse to be rewritten afterwards . . . most of Bill’s family history, that whole sequence I think came out all at once.

Q. Again, this is related to the spontaneous, unanticipated nature of your work, but I’ve often wondered this while watching your films: Do you sometimes think in pure images (without words) when you are creating characters and storylines?

A. Yes, I think so, but the words are not far behind.

Q. The interweaving of live action and animation in I AM SO PROUD OF YOU is really quite striking. Although it seems to create a sense of disjuncture between the different modes, the juxtaposition of the two also somehow amplifies the “realness” of the animated parts. Could you tell us a bit about your decision to integrate live action shots in this film?

A. That carries over from the first chapter, EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY, and will be cracked open a bit further in Chapter Three. It’s how Bill perceives himself as well as the things around him. The photos and the animation share space and amplify each other–but there is an obvious distance between them. It’s Bill’s disconnection from the rest of the world. I probably shouldn’t say more than that. There’s a reason for everything, but trying to explain it can sometimes be like trying to explain why a joke is funny or why a painting is beautiful; it will make sense but since the emotions are gone it will dissolve in your hands.

Q. One of my favorite Peanuts comic strips is one where Charlie Brown looks at a stick figure that Linus drew and makes all sorts of speculations on why he drew him without any hands, and finally Linus looks at Charlie Brown and simply says that he didn’t know how to draw hands. The deceptive simplicity and subtlety of your work must invite all sorts of interpretations from various people. How do you feel about this?

A. Hey, that’s one of my favorite Peanuts strips, too. Although it’s harder to generate emotion and personality in simpler characters (naturally you just have less to work with), I think it’s easier for audiences to project into them and empathize with them. Charlie Brown’s a perfect example of that. And I think personal interpretations are exactly what any filmmaker wants. There is little to interpret when I see an animated character that is photorealistically rendered with amazing graphics; that character only exists to me as a noun. I’m more attracted to animation and characters that are drawn from a specific point of view . . . drawings that start to tell a story as soon as you see them, before the narrative even begins.

Q. In a recent interview, you described Bill as a silent film star, which seems to be a very apt description. One big difference is that silent film stars usually communicated through exaggerated expressions and gestures, while Bill’s performance is for the most part understated. But it is amazing how expressive Bill’s features and gestures are, considering he’s a stick figure. How many times do you have to draw him to get him to be “just right”?

A. I guess it depends on the scene . . . but yeah, when a character is stripped down to its very basic features–like just two eyes and a mouth–isn’t it amazing how amplified those features become? If I draw one of Bill’s eye dots a millimeter this way or that, his demeanor totally shifts, at least to my eyes. If he had a nose and ears and colors and shoes, I think that subtlety would be lessened . . . I don’t think you’d be quite as drawn in by his understated gestures and details you’re noticing. When you have a character who doesn’t speak a single line of dialogue, those little mannerisms become very important. He’s a very minimal character, even for me, so you have to be much more careful about every pose.

Q. Once during a Q and A session, you mentioned how you enjoy the happy accidents that occur when creating hand-drawn animation, as opposed to the rigid and calculative nature of computer animation. Could you elaborate on that by giving us an example from I AM SO PROUD OF YOU?

A. That big flood of images towards the end of the movie when Bill is having a seizure is a good example . . . everything is composited in the camera, and that sequence was mostly shot in the spirit of “let’s blindly run the film back and forth over beautiful stuff and see what happens.” It’s colored lights, experiments, colorful photos, film fogs, light leaks, optical effects, all piled one on top of the other. Every frame is made up of several exposures of different things, with drawn animation sort of coming in and out of it. I like having complete control over editing and sound–we are totally digital there–but visually I want to leave the door open a crack. So often you’ll get images you would have never otherwise visualized . . . in a small way it brings to the table one of the strengths of live action.

Q. There is a level of intensity in the sheer amount of information that is included in each sequence of the film–partly because of the emotional intensity of the narrative and the images, and partly because of the simultaneity of multiple temporalities and spaces that co-exist in one frame in different windows. In fact the whole film complicates the uni-directional concept of time by moving across different points in Bill’s life and the lives of his family members. Like one character notes, “the passing of time is just an illusion because all of eternity is actually taking place at once; the past never vanishes away and the future has already happened.” Would you say that this concept of time is something that pervades the form and content of your work?

A. For I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, yes, that sentence pretty much explains the narrative structure of the entire short. I get really annoyed when filmmakers say “narrative structure”, but there it is.

Q. Going back to the point of Bill as a silent film star, I’ve heard there’s a hidden Easter Egg on the DVD of EVERYTHING WILL BE OK that plays a narration-free version of the film. I’ve been trying to access it without success. Could you give me (and other clueless hunters) a hint?

A. Oh, right, just click around left or right on the Special Features page. It should highlight something hidden. The same thing is on the I AM SO PROUD OF YOU DVD.

Q. Besides the anticipated last installment of the trilogy following EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY and I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, could you tell us about any future projects to look out for?

A. I’m mostly finished now with this new five-minute thing, a really silly cartoon. EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY and I AM SO PROUD OF YOU were made back-to-back and I just needed to do something really quick and really stupid this year before sinking into the long nights of the Third Chapter. We just premiered it in Canada a few weeks ago as a surprise, sort of a test screening I guess, and there were equal parts horrified laughter and horrified screams. In a good way. I’m not sure yet when that will roll into theaters officially. I’ve also been sort of plugging away at a graphic novel and a couple of other things . . . but Chapter Three is the big gorilla in the room now.

Hye Jean Chung is a writer who can be reached at robinjean9@gmail.com.