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Marnie is both amused and a little horrified by the courtship rituals. “What’s my deal?” she replies to a date. “I’m sorry that’s such a terrible question.”
Bujalski’s world of boys and girls is full of fumbling and kissing, followed by prolonged apology. If there’s a sharpness and rigidity to this meandering, it’s in the execution. Here, the director’s laissez-faire approach is discarded in favor of dogma. Bujalski shot the film shortly after 9/11 in black and white, with a 16 mm camera. None of the angles were fancy. He clashed with his ad hoc sound and lighting crew when it was suggested that they try some effects. “Part of the nature of making a film is the conflict between the director wanting the performance and the DP wanting things to look right,” says Justin Rice, who did sound on Funny Ha Ha and would later star in Bujalski’s follow-up, Mutual Appreciation.
“The DP wants to put up lights and the director just wants to shoot. But for Andrew, it was definitely clear to all of us that he didn’t give a fuck [about lights]. He was just thinking it had to stay off the cuff. Always rolling. Ready to shoot at a given moment, and the more time you spend staging things, the less of that shambling vitality you get.”
Like Wes Anderson, Bujalski invented a cinematic language, only nobody could quite make it out. A few years later, his sound director Eric Masunaga, in an affectionate bit of mockery, named it “mumblecore.” The sound, already compromised, was further muted by the marble-mouthed, untrained actors that Bujalski insisted make up his world. There’s a comfort to Funny Ha Ha that would be impossible if it was cast with professional, trained, capital-A Actors. It was as if Bujalski had to know them and observe a certain inner quality before he would cast them. “A politeness,” Rice says. “He picked people who had politeness to their essential nature. Polite people portraying polite characters. I remember something he said to me: ‘It’s about people looking for a chance to be kind to each other.’” It was as far from Hollywood and business as it could possibly be, but Funny Ha Ha was about to imprint the movie industry in a major way.
The film was completed at a time when word of mouth was faster and more powerful than ever before. Specialized sites, once the province of gamers, chat-room haunters, and the antisocial, were now common places for fans of bands, films, and authors to connect and for once in their lives enjoy a sense of popularity (in the years before it was measured by “likes” and “followers”).
Over the next three years, as Bujalski cut and screened the film and attempted to get a distribution deal, the legend of Funny Ha Ha grew. Here was a film that didn’t talk down to its young audience but presented a raw, funny reflection of that audience that was both comforting and flattering. There was no hard sell necessary, no weekend window in which to make back all the money for a film like this. It was the first film of its kind to meander into profitability at its own pace, and was so ahead of the curve that it had the luxury of aggregating a myth before finally hitting proper theaters in 2005. “We were really lucky in that it had this weird, uncanny lifespan. That’s something unrepeatable, to have a movie that has a three-year word-of-mouth build,” Bujalski says.
By the time the film was playing in major cities and Bujalski was being heralded as an exciting, new voice, he was already shooting his next film in Brooklyn. Mutual Appreciation is again the story of a somewhat bewildered Twee hero, navigating a world where cynics have agendas. As with Dollenmayer, Bujalski had an actor in mind when he wrote the script, this time envisioning Rice as the lead. “He asked me to do it based on the relationship that we had, and not necessarily any aspirations that I had to act,” Rice now says. A fan of the director’s vision, Rice agreed. Mutual Appreciation was an even bigger success than Bujalski’s debut (success in this new world being applause at festivals and, if you were lucky, some bookings in art houses and a distribution deal to screen on cable channels like IFC, which launched in the mid-1990s but a decade in began to stop rerunning classic independent film in favor of newer, younger voices).
Rice, with his bed head, skinny tie, and blazer, looked like he could have been the sixth member of the Strokes, and became the first heartthrob of the nascent genre—or at least the closest thing to one. In real life, Rice’s rock band, Bishop Allen, was gaining a following too. That said, the real star of Mutual Appreciation is the new Brooklyn.
“I lived for a while on the sixth stop of the L train, the Morgan stop. In one month, thirty people got mugged on my block, and one time we found a finger in the snow. There were cars burned up on the street. You could see the smoking husk of the car. Now, right around the corner from where that was, is Roberta’s Pizza, this beautiful, amazingly cool restaurant. They grow their own food. Bake their own bread. Have their own radio station. There were a lot of like-minded people coming to Brooklyn. The process was under way when we were shooting Mutual Appreciation,” Rice says. Nearly a decade before HBO’s Brooklyn-set Girls, this was the first time the new, young, Indie Brooklyn was captured on film for those outside of the five boroughs to witness. And they liked what they saw.
Mumblecore took on a life of its own after Mutual Appreciation. It was a phrase, like “the Brat Pack,” that the media could seize on and studios could place in context. Suddenly there were big opportunities for Dollenmayer and Rice. “I thought of it as a Lord of the Rings scenario,” says Bujalski, “where Kate held the ring, which was the power of being a tremendous natural actor, wildly charismatic and watchable onscreen—and she just didn’t want it. She threw the ring into whatever that mountain is with the fire that destroys it. People asked her to be in their films and she politely demurred. Which is funny to me since she’s always broke. I thought, ‘You should sell out just a little. Make some money.’ I believe the casting director of Talladega Nights sent her the script. Kate read it and said, ‘This is kind of dumb.’ And that was the end of that. That was her Hollywood career.”
Bujalski remained Indie despite the cachet that two underground critical hits afforded him. “I came to understand that selling out is as much if not more work than just doing what you care about and love—given that choice, I always defaulted back to doing what I love.” Bujalski’s third film, 2009’s Beeswax, was an even more meandering and casual account of polite people coping with an impolite world.
Beeswax, unlike Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, was shot on digital video. In the years since Bujalski’s first two films, cameras became smaller, lighter, and more high-tech than they had ever been before. Most phones were embedded with video cameras that could produce sound and video of a quality not too far removed from that of many low-budget films.
“There’s no way I could have done the movie if those cameras were not on the market,” says Alex Karpovsky, the star of Beeswax, who would begin making his own low-budget films like the documentary The Hole Story (2005) and the thriller Red Flag (2009) around this time. Karpovsky would later find wider fame as poor Ray, the struggling, bitter, Andy Kaufman–obsessed café worker on Girls. Says Karpovsky, “There’s no way there’d be this explosion in independent film that we’ve seen in the last six or seven years if it wasn’t for the digital paradigm shift, making cameras that allow for an aesthetically presentable format on a financially acceptable level.”
The technology included new computer software like iMovie that enabled aspiring young filmmakers to edit on their personal computers rather than rent an expensive Avid system. These advances, combined with the critical context of mumblecore as a viable subgenre, led to the support of major film festivals, which were now thriving as both a business pool and a sort of social circle. “The festival circuit is where I met most of the people that I ended up collaborating with,” says Karpovsky.
Joe Swanberg was one of the aspiring filmmakers fascinated by the improbable rise of Bujalski. A film student at Southern Illinois University, he had an amused, mischievous squint and preferred more radical fare. “Funny Ha Ha was heavily influential to me,” he says. “In a sense it provided a chart of all the things I didn�
�t want to do with my first movie.” A firebrand and button pusher more than a basic entertainer, Swanberg felt that, if anything, Bujalski’s “kind” world was a bit too quaint. He’d worked in a video store as a teen in suburban Illinois where he could mail-order independent films. By the time he was graduating, he felt he’d already consumed the classics of the 1980s and ’90s: the independent films of Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Spike Lee, Todd Solondz, and Quentin Tarantino as well as New Wave directors like Eric Rohmer. “There’s a nostalgic quality [to Bujalski] that I didn’t relate to at all. Shooting on sixteen-millimeter, it was a throwback to a certain kind of independent film that I didn’t have a need for in my life. I was ready to make movies about where the culture was that second. I didn’t want it to look old. I wanted it to look oppressively current. I really embraced that video look, that kind of handheld reality-TV look.” If Swanberg afforded Bujalski any respect at all, it was for the barriers the older director had knocked down. “He was a big inspiration because here was this guy who made this really small movie with his friends, and I’d gone and bought a ticket and seen it in a movie theater.”
The first film Swanberg made after graduating from film school was called Kissing on the Mouth. Shot on digital video, it covers similar ground as Funny Ha Ha, but its depiction of postcollege relationships, infidelity, and insecurity is much more in-your-face. Swanberg cuts the soapy travails of his leads Ellen (Swanberg’s then-girlfriend, Kate Winterich) and Patrick (Swanberg himself) with documentary-style interviews with real-life new college grads. “With that first movie I just wanted to make something really important to me. I’d been out of film school for like seven months and I hadn’t done anything. Everything about Kissing on the Mouth was about practicality. My girlfriend, who is my wife now, and two of our friends did everything on the movie, acted in it and wrote it.”
Swanberg, like Bujalski, features in his own work, but only out of necessity. “I wanted to put this really explicit sexual stuff in there, and I know that I’m comfortable doing it so I know there’s one less person I have to talk to about this.” Specifically, there’s a scene where Patrick masturbates to ejaculation in the shower. It’s shot very matter-of-factly, as if it’s the most boring, routine thing in the world, creating an uneasy sensation in the viewer. The rawness of this new movement in film seems to be a kiss-off to the sort of neo-Reagan values that surged back under the Bush-Cheney administration. “Early on I was really angry that I wasn’t seeing this stuff in movies. It just made no sense to me that as adults there seems to be a fear of putting this stuff on the screen—coming out of film school, I was really annoyed by the lack of courage I was seeing in Indie films,” Swanberg says. “We were living in a weird, new Puritan age.”
The fearless sexuality and attitude of Swanberg’s early films made an impact at Austin’s South by Southwest festival, where, for basically the cost of application dues, a young filmmaker could carve out a name for his low- or no-budget feature. “It wasn’t until I got to Austin that I realized that the main advantage of the film festival was to meet people and see new work. That week at SXSW in 2005 was completely life-changing for me. In the span of seven days I met more people who are still important to me than I ever will again.”
Aaron Katz, the most sophisticated visual stylist of the new movement, was also there that year with his debut, Dance Party, USA. Essentially a day in the life of attendees of a suburban keg party, it’s teens with cheap cups of beer talking about life, squinty-eyed, stoned, and unintentionally hilarious. “You know what shit fucks me up? The clit,” one says. The verisimilitude is astounding, and the digital color scheme feels deep, like old Super 8 home movies.
Also at SXSW, Mark and Jay Duplass, two brothers from New Orleans, were premiering The Puffy Chair. The film concerns a young man who enlists his brother to travel to pick up the titular piece of furniture, won in an eBay auction, to present to their father on his birthday. It’s a road-trip movie, à la Alexander Payne’s Sideways, with higher production values and a greater sense of “someone took time to actually write a script here” than most mumblecore offerings to date. The Duplasses are also the least meandering of the early mumblecore directors. Swanberg was representing with his next film, LOL, which had become one of several dozen acronyms, in this case for “laugh out loud,” instantly known and constantly employed by the new, fast, social-media generation. The film is a quickly made hodgepodge of donated footage bound together by the theme of technology as something that brings people closer in an illusory way; it consists almost entirely of phone messages left for people.
“I was desperate to get back,” Swanberg says. “I came home from the last SXSW and immediately started working on [2006’s] LOL because I knew I wanted to be back at that festival the next year. I never wanted to not be part of that conversation and part of that community.”
“There were all these great regional film festivals that bring filmmakers together [in the 2000s],” says the writer-director-editor Lynn Shelton. “I think a lot of new filmmakers emerged, and especially those making really small films with their buddies and figuring it out on their own. It’s like we were in the trenches alone and we’d completely bond when we’d meet each other at these fests because our families and friends didn’t have any idea what we were doing. They couldn’t really relate to the blood, sweat, and tears and then the massive effort it takes to make a movie.”
“They were critical,” Duplass says of the mid-’00s festivals. “Jay and I often credit Sundance with the reason we have a career in the first place. But it was also a place where we met our peers and made some of our longest-lasting friends. Also, there was a new breed of young filmmakers working with the new technology in the early mid-2000’s, and we all just sort of gelled.”
Previously, a director or producer would show up at a festival sweating over whether their relatively expensive production (sometimes the product of a maxed-out credit card) would sell and allow them to eat. Now the pressure was more like, “Will my peers like it and encourage me to continue?” These films were so cheap, the professional stakes were in the basement, and art was everything.
LOL is also noteworthy as the film debut of Greta Gerwig. If Funny Ha Ha’s Kate Dollenmayer was presented with the option of being mumblecore’s breakout female movie star and rejected it, Gerwig, a student at Barnard College, was happy to have the job. Swanberg met Gerwig through a mutual friend, Chris Wells. Wells and the director became acquainted at the Telluride Film Festival, and Swanberg sent him a copy of Kissing on the Mouth. “He’d shown it to Greta and some of his other friends at Columbia. She was just his girlfriend at the time and kind of interested in acting.”
At the time, Swanberg was shooting a Web series for IFC called Young American Bodies. The newly launched channel was all over mumblecore, as it was inexpensive and intriguing. Gerwig inspired the director to begin writing for her.
“I had a good time shooting a scene with her, and started putting together Hannah Takes the Stairs,” Swanberg says. “She confessed to me later that she knew I was going to do another movie and that she was purposefully around.” Gerwig wasn’t simply opportunistic. She was also a writer, studying English and philosophy. She brought ideas and did not shy away from the subject matter. “Shooting a movie without a script required actors to generate a lot of their own material, and at the time scenes were pretty sexually explicit, or at least sexually realistic, and she was somebody who didn’t seem to be fazed by all that—I was impressed by that aspect of her—and I also thought that her presence was really magnetic.”
The statuesque, blond Gerwig was, relative to the mousy mumblecore actresses, a kind of Gena Rowlands among two dozen Peter Falks; a conventional beauty with a good complexion. She had a quirky, sometimes goofy demeanor that seemed authentic, despite her Hollywood-ready looks. “She almost seemed to me like somebody who was already a movie star,” Swanberg now says. “I just sort of knew she was up for the challenge and I also knew she was excited abo
ut doing a film, which was a major criterion for me.”
“I think Greta is just a star,” Duplass (who stars alongside her in Hannah Takes the Stairs) says. “She’s odd, likable, funny, cute, raw. I love working with her and hope to do so again—she also has that wonderful extra skill of being a talented writer, so her improvisation is particularly astute.”
The production values of Hannah Takes the Stairs are not that different from those of LOL, but Gerwig makes Hannah explode onscreen. Like Dollenmayer, she is a postgrad who’s unsure of what she wants. She works at a website (where Bujalski, in a cameo, is also employed) and dates around. But here was a mumblecore star who actually wanted to be famous, and the whole scene just took off. “It was instantly a way bigger movie than we expected,” says Swanberg.
Features in Rolling Stone’s annual “Hot” issue, Filmmaker, and the New York Times followed. “Artists who mine life’s minutiae are by no means new, but mumblecore bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience,” Dennis Lim wrote in the Times. The IFC Center, a newly opened movie house on Sixth Avenue where the old Waverly Theater used to be, launched a ten-film mumblecore series that summer.
“At first, we all laughed at the word mumblecore,” Duplass says. “It seemed a bit pejorative, but in the end if the New York Times was going to write about our tiny little movies, we figured they could call them whatever the hell they wanted.”