August 15, 2004
Vincent Gallo Dares You to See It (If You Can Find It)
By RANDY KENNEDY
VINCENT GALLO tells a story about returning to Buffalo in the early 1980's and proudly playing a tape of his music for his father, a local crooner.
But the music was not exactly of the Vic Damone variety. It was industrial-sounding art music, and Mr. Gallo's father — a thinly fictionalized, seething version of whom Ben Gazzara played in Mr. Gallo's directorial debut "Buffalo '66" — hated it. In fact, he hated it violently. Mr. Gallo said he was stunned.
"I didn't know he was going to call me insane and a psycho and throw me out of the house," he said recently during a four-hour interview at an East Village diner, seeming genuinely hurt all these years later.
"I thought the music I was playing for him was so, so beautiful," he said, adding: "How am I supposed to know that what is so obvious to me is not obvious to someone else?"
It's the kind of question Mr. Gallo has been wrestling with over the last year or so, since his second movie, "The Brown Bunny," had its premiere at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. He says the movie — which is finally being released, on Aug. 27, in New York and Los Angeles — is "the most beautiful thing I've ever done in my life." But during a now-notorious press screening at Cannes, viewers found little beauty in it.
Their reaction has been chronicled endlessly, filling a new chapter in the Gallo legend: they hooted and hollered; Roger Ebert afterward called the movie the worst in the festival's history. Mr. Gallo later called Mr. Ebert a "fat pig" and said that with the help of the filmmaker Kenneth Anger he had put a curse on the critic's prostate or maybe his colon. Mr. Ebert responded that he had enjoyed watching a video of his own colonoscopy more than "The Brown Bunny."
Mr. Gallo argues that the whole episode was exaggerated by the press and points out that the movie received a standing ovation at its official Cannes showing. In any case, it is coming to American theaters with some of the worst advance word in recent cinematic memory, almost daring moviegoers to go see it. Added to this is the fact that the movie, which follows Mr. Gallo (as a motorcycle racer named Bud Clay) on a solo, Zen-like crosscountry road trip, contains a scene of explicit oral sex, performed by Chloë Sevigny on Mr. Gallo; as a result, it is being released without a rating, which means it will be ineligible to appear in many theaters.
If an advertising agency had been hired to promote the movie, it might have come up with a slogan something like: "The Worst Movie Ever Made? Watch It and Decide for Yourself. If You Can Find It." As it happens, however, Mr. Gallo — who in addition to being the movie's star was also its director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer — is pretty much handling the movie's promotion himself.
With film in hand, he has taken to the road by himself in a rental car on a six-city, cross-country trip, staying in no-frills places, showing his movie to local film society members and critics. He's very "low maintenance," says Ryan Werner, head of distribution for Wellspring, the movie's distributor. After a recent screening in Detroit, Mr. Gallo opened the floor to questions from the audience, and stuck around to answer three hours' worth, prompting one local Web log writer there to proclaim him "the coolest person alive today." Mr. Gallo also put up a billboard right on Sunset Boulevard featuring an image from the infamous oral sex scene. But after fielding complaints for a few days, the company that owns the billboard pulled it down. (Mr. Gallo says he will sue; he still uses the image on the cover of the movie's soundtrack and, in one trailer for the movie, declares it boldly "the most controversial American film ever made.")
Going by the standard playbook of movie publicity, these initiatives may seem ill-advised, even crazy. But "The Brown Bunny" is, of course, not a standard film. And Mr. Gallo is not a standard filmmaker.
Despite flashes of anger from Mr. Gallo during the rambling, frenetic and often very entertaining interview, it became clear that he was almost happy that things had turned out this way — casting him once again in his familiar role as the outsider, the misunderstood auteur pursuing an intensely personal vision, spurning not only Hollywood but also the independent movie community he is supposedly a part of. ("When I hear the word `indie,' " he said, "it just means someone who's not going to pay me.")
"Do you hate me yet?" Mr. Gallo asked, smiling, only 30 seconds into the conversation.
Mr. Gallo, 42, has been a part of the New York and Los Angeles art and music scenes since he was a teenager and has gone through so many incarnations it is hard to believe he is not much older. He helped manage one of the earliest break-dancing groups, the New York City Breakers. He was a successful painter but gave that up. He was a Formula II motorcycle racer and modeled for Calvin Klein and Anna Sui.
Instead of enumerating his accomplishments, though, Mr. Gallo mostly enjoys emphasizing what he is not. He is not a provocateur, he says. He is also not an artist. He has never read a book of fiction and says he can barely spell. Though he has made two movies, he is not a filmmaker and is not influenced by other filmmakers, though he owns tapes of thousands of movies and often mentions his love of Monte Hellman (whose 1971 "Two-Lane Blacktop" is clearly an influence on "The Brown Bunny"). He also mentions Antonioni, whose spare, minimalist films "L'Avventura" and "La Notte" from the early 1960's seem almost Hollywoodesque when compared with long, real-time scenes of Mr. Gallo driving, gassing up his van and taking his motorcycle for a diagnostic test.
After making "Buffalo '66" Mr. Gallo said he had all but decided to leave filmmaking because he hated working with stars (he publicly insulted his costars, Christina Ricci and Anjelica Huston, as well as Ms. Sevigny), with unions and with almost everybody else involved in the movie business.
Instead, he decided to milk it for all it was worth. He says he started choosing his roles with only one thing in mind. "You call me up: `How much? How many days? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got a great project. How much? How many days?' " he said. "I'm the how-much-how-many-days guy." He also directed a few Japanese commercials, invested in real estate and at one point considered selling his sperm on eBay. "Have a baby with the guy from `Buffalo '66.' Buy it now, $100,000," he said, adding, "I'm on a mission."
A few years ago, he says, he was offered what amounted to a blank check by a Japanese distribution company to make another movie, which at that point was little more than a vague concept and a title — "The Brown Bunny." He said he had come up with the name before envisioning any kind of story (rabbits are his favorite animals, and he has always been a little obsessed with the color brown). After a few false starts, he hit upon the story of a motorcycle racer who finishes a race in New Hampshire and drives across the country to another in Los Angeles, nursing some kind of horrible grief and trying to assuage it with fleeting encounters with women (one of whom is played, incongruously, by the 1970's supermodel Cheryl Tiegs).
He said he became almost maniacal in trying to shape every detail of the film, painting the motorcycles in the race dozens of times to get just the right shade of gold. He worked so hard that he collapsed twice and later had to fix a scene in which the camera showed that a patch of his hair had fallen out.
"I'm forgetting the fact that I'm a human being," he said, "that I need to eat, sleep, that I have a life and there are some people — not that they care about me — but there are some people who casually know me who pretend to be my friends that want to see me. I denied my body any respect, any attention at all cost, because of this intense desperation to be able to look back at something and feel like I did it in the best, most aggressive way possible, the best job I could have."
Ms. Sevigny, an old friend of Mr. Gallo's who had stopped speaking to him, said that when she was in Sweden working on Lars von Trier's "Dogville," Mr. Gallo began to pursue her for the role. "I got an e-mail from him," she said, during an interview, adding: "I'm not even sure how he got my e-mail address."
She said that he apologized for insulting her "in not so many words and, you know, said that I had hurt him."
"He always brings it back to himself," she said, laughing.
When he explained that the movie would involve a scene of real oral sex, Ms. Sevigny said she was hesitant but eventually concluded that the scene was integral to the movie. (She also smokes crack during the scene — but that, she said, was faked.)
"I knew what I was getting into," she said. "I know him as a person. And I just said I have to trust this man entirely and be as open to this process as I possibly can be."
Mr. Gallo, who calls himself a conservative Republican, says that he sees the movie (the version being released is, at 92 minutes, about 25 minutes shorter than the Cannes version) as a love story and a celebration of America that is virulently antidrug and anti-pornography. And in some ways, the sex scene does seem like the antithesis of pornography. The camera and microphones are so close to the characters that the familiar sense of voyeuristic distance is impossible to maintain.
"I think that was the scariest three days of my life," Mr. Gallo said, of the sex scene, filmed in a motel room, adding: "If people are sitting there watching `The Brown Bunny' and waiting for the motel scene, then I just can't relate to them."
"I don't see the film as a boring, monotonous film that leads up to a big sexual climax," he said.
And now that the film is finally about to hit theaters, how does he think American moviegoers and critics will respond? He says he does not care all that much.
"If you go to see `The Brown Bunny' without hating me — or resenting me as a filmmaker — then there's a beautiful film there," he said. "But if you can't get past your feelings about me, then you can't see that."
"Long after I'm dead — which is any day now — this film will still exist," he added. "I feel much better now that I've placed this piece of work in the world."
