Eight years after Andrew Bujalski's shoestring-budget feature debut Funny Ha Ha emerged to significant critical acclaim (no less than The New York Times declared it one of the most influential films of the decade, due in large part to Bujalski's follow-up Mutual Appreciation and the Mumblecore movement that sprung up around it), the filmmaker is back in development mode with his shoestring-budget fourth feature, Computer Chess. And this time around, you can help.
Bujalski and his producers are more than halfway to their crowdsourced fundraising goal forComputer Chess, a tale about a tournament of chess players and computer programmers in the early 1980s. As Bujalski writes at the fundraising campaign's Web site at United States Artists, more than just bragging rights were at stake: "As computers were exploding into the public sphere, and regular folks were just getting used to seeing them in the workplace, or home, a group of geniuses at the vanguard of the technology were trying to teach it what seemed like an almost unimaginable skill--could these machines, these glorified calculators, ever conquer the human world champion in chess? Obviously a human being would have to be a genius to be the world chess champ, so if they could get a computer to do it, the computer would have to acquire a kind of genius, right?"
In his customarily wry accompanying video, Bujalski depicts the unlikelihood of finding mainstream funding for Computer Chess:
Which is where the public comes in. Movieline caught up with Bujalski this week for a chat about Computer Chess (which commences shooting Aug. 19), the art-science divide, the inexorable march of technology and dinner dates for cash.
What have you been up to since Beeswax in 2009?
I got married and had a kid and bought a house.
Congratulations!
Thanks. That's quite a big and... consuming project.
Indeed. And then there's Computer Chess. What can you tell me about it?
Actually, I'm struggling with how to talk about it right now because we're in this funny situation where we're doing the crowd-sourcing thing, and we want to whip up as much excitement and enthusiasm as we can But I also have this terrible ambivalence because I also really want to retain some of the surprise for the movie. I don't want to give everything away, especially before we've even made it. I'm terribly superstitious, too.
But in broad strokes, it's certainly a fascinating subject. It's a real oddball project for me, or for anyone. It was kind of my fantasy, back-of-the-mind project for a few years now. I've spent so much of the last several years trying to figure out how to be a responsible adult and earn a living and that kind of stuff -- especially now that I have a family and a mortgage and those kinds of things. So I spend a lot of time sitting around thinking: "How can I earn a living?" I'm very bad at, and I don't enjoy it. So I think my fantasy refuge would be to run off and think, "Well, let's put that aside for a moment. What's a cockamamie project that doesn't stand a chance in the commercial marketplace?" So my idea of fun for years was to contemplate this totally peculiar movie about computer chess programmers. And I don't quite recall how that got stuck in my head in the first place, because I'm not a computer guy, and I'm not a chess guy. But for some reason, I think I read something somewhere about computer chess, and images started to accumulate.
You've said you could have gone either way as a young person -- into film or into computers and technology. What compelled one versus the other?
Maybe I could have. In truth, I think my destiny was set. Early on in this project, I had reason to contact an engineer I found through the Internet to ask some technical questions. He wrote back a very nice, helpful e-mail -- answered all my questions, and as an addendum wrote, "Sounds like an interesting project, and good luck to you. I've got to admit to you I often don't understand what you artist guys are doing. But it sounds ambitious." I wrote back on behalf of "artist guys" that we don't necessarily understand what we're doing or why we're doing it, either! There's something similar in a way. I think going to make a movie is not totally unlike going and writing a computer program. The processes have a lot in common, the major difference being that when you're dealing with something a little more scientific or engineering-based, on some level you know if your program works or not. If there's some major problem, then you de-bug it and try to get it fully functional again. When all is said and done, maybe you wish you'd written a better program. But basically either it worked or it didn't.
And with movies, it's so much harder to know. The only thing that's actually measurable is commercial success, and obviously that's how the business works, and that's how Hollywood works. They look at those numbers, and they'll tell you: "This is a success," or "This is a failure." But I don't think most of us who make films really think about it quite that way. So you never know. The thing goes out into the world, and it has a life. You can go to the grave not knowing if you succeeded or not. But to go back to your question of whether I could be a computer nerd, as much as that stuff is all very interesting to me, there's something about this strange uncertainty of moviemaking that I'm addicted to. Also, as is evident from every film I've made, I'm much more interested in questions than answers. I don't know if I would have hacked it as a computer guy.
I think that certainly is going to be part of our narrative. Today, computers are such an incredibly ubiquitous presence in our lives -- certainly people who are going to see this interview spend a lot of time with computers-- and I don't think we think about it too much. I think we've accepted their place in our lives. But go back 30-something years. I have some vague memory of this from childhood. I think there was a little bit more anxiety about the relationship between [people and computers]. We all knew that computers were coming. But this question of, "What will this do to the human soul?" -- it's a question that seems a little bit quaint now and that maybe people can laugh at now. I can laugh at it.
And now we've got Watson winning on Jeopardy! I know that was essentially a commercial for IBM, but it was actually pretty destabilizing for me.
Were you a Jeopardy! fan?
Yeah, I am. And I wasn't laughing.
I'm sorry to say I didn't see it. But absolutely -- and obviously IBM was also the same company that defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997 with Deep Blue. And whatever Jeopardy! is for this generation, it's been around for however many decades. Chess has been around for however many centuries. It is quite a thing to cede that ground to computers. Of course, the game of chess is still played by humans, and there is a place for humans in that world.
What's your own relationship with technology?
If you look at the movies I've made so far, I've shot them on 16-millimeter and cut them on a Steenbeck. So I like to say to people that I really like and am interested in technology up to about 1985 and then I kind of part ways with it. That said, I feel like I probably spend about 40 percent of my life writing e-mails. I live in Austin now; Austin is a town full of great coffee shops. But I also lived in Austin 10 or 12 years ago before I moved away and came back. When I first moved here, those coffee shops had people with laptops in them, but they had a lot more people talking. Now that ratio has really changed; there are fewer and fewer people in there talking to each other. But my own relationship is probably fairly typical for my demographic. I spend a ton of time staring at that screen. I don't think to much about it. I take it for granted, I suppose. Obviously it's very convenient machine, but I'm also delighted to turn it off when I get the opportunity. My wife has tried to institute a "no computer after dinner rule," which I'm rarely able to stick to. But she's convinced that any sleep problems can be ascribed to that.
And now you're crowdsourcing your funding -- you're a quarter of the way to your goal. What pointed you in that direction?
Very honestly, it's hard to argue with the economics of it -- if it works. If it works, it's tremendous. And obviously a ton of people have been doing it in the last year or so. I don't know when it started, but it really has taken off. I feel like I'm getting e-mails about stuff constantly. That's the danger, of course: You feel like you're up against fatigue -- everyone's already given $20 to someone they know. But having been down this road, before, I know exactly how tough it is out there for any kind of indie film in the commercial marketplace. It really behooves us to be as scrappy as we can. It was just hard to argue with the notion. The beauty of it is that you can get a significant chunk of change that can really help you get things done, but you do it without having to imperil any one investor. That's a tough situation to be in; given the economics of the film industry, I hate having people's money on the line when I don't know with confidence that we can get it back. And considering how zany this project is and what a risk it is, we wanted to minimize the risk and put it out to the people and see how did.
Where does this $43,500 figure come from? That's not enough to make the movie, right?
It's not enough to make the movie. We do have some cash in hand from private investors -- the kind of people I mentioned earlier, who are taking a big risk. It is going to cover a big chunk of it for sure and make it more likely that these other investors who've come in on a bigger level are able to see their money back some day -- which we would love.
Shouldn't supporting their favorite filmmakers be enough for viewers? Should all these incentives -- apart from maybe a "Special Thanks," or whatever -- really be necessary?
Who knows? I have such mixed feelings about all this. I hate asking people for money in general, whether it's asking a big investor to come on in the five-figure range or just asking my friends for $10. And I hate writing the mass e-mails I wrote about this thing this week to try to get the word out. Certainly nobody owes me this money. But by all means, when people come along and say they're interested in the project and they want to support it, then that's real. It feels great when someone tells you, "No, I want you to have this -- even if it is $10 -- because I want this movie to be made. I'm not giving you $10 because I want you to make me a millionaire with it. I just want to support it." That's very humbling, but it's very nice.
The most significant perk in there, obviously, is that you get a DVD of the finished film. That has a fairly specific value. There are some other things in there that are nice. And then I think they put dinner with me on there, which seems like a very silly perk. But if somebody wants it, it's out there. It all seems a little goofy, but I don't place any judgment on what people should or should not be doing or wanting. If somebody really wants to pay whatever number it is for dinner with me, then I'm for sale.
What's your timetable? When can we expect to look for it?
That's a great question, and I don't know the answer. My producers would love for me to be done ASAP; they'd love to have it for Sundance in January. As somebody whose slightly notorious for being a slow editor, I'm not going to crack the whip too hard on myself to get it done instantly. I'd like to sit with it and let it marinate, and of course, once the shoot is over, I'd like to pay attention to my family for a little while. So we'll see! I hope it won't be too long. Part of the whole fantasy of this project was that it'd be fast and loose. I don't want to sit on it forever. Let's hope for some time in 2012 -- before the apocalypse.