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Howl

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Starring James Franco in a career-defining performance as Allen Ginsberg, HOWL is the story of how the young poet’s seminal work broke down societal barriers in the face of an infamous public obscenity trial. In his famously confessional style , Ginsberg – poet, counter-culture icon, and chronicler of the Beat Generation – recounts the road trips, love affairs, and search for personal liberation that led to HOWL, the most timeless work of his career.

Interview with Director Robert Epstein, and Director Jeffrey Friedman

 

(Q): Of the many people that were from the period how many of them did you get a chance to meet or track down in the time?

(Rob Epstein): We did research interviews with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Orlovsky, Allen’s partner; Tuli Kupferberg, one of the Beat poet’s who’s referenced in the poem as the man who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge (it was actually the Manhattan Bridge); Steven Taylor, who toured with Allen later in his life as one of his musicians; Eric Drooker, who was a friend of Allen’s and the artist who did the animation.

(Jeffrey Friedman): Al Bendick, who was a young ACLU lawyer who worked on the case.

(Rob Epstein): So we taped all those interviews, videotaped them, and they’ll all be on the dvd.

(Q): So it’s a movie about poetry. How did you even start to conceive how to do that?

(Jeffrey Friedman): Yeah it took us a while to figure it out. The project came to us from the Ginsberg estate. They wanted to do something about “Howl” and that’s all they knew and they wanted it to be film. We just approached it as we would any other project by starting to do research. And we wanted to understand what went into the making of the poem, what Allen’s creative process was and his personal process; what he had to go through to get to the point where he could produce this poem. And we wanted to understand the world that the poem is being introduced into, and the obscenity trial seemed like a ready-made theater to show that.

And we wanted the poem to live on its own, and the poem lives in different ways in the movie. It lives as performance art, which is the way it was first presented to the world, as spoken word poetry slam, it was really the first poetry slam. And it also lives in the animation, which was inspired by Eric Drooker’s collaboration with Ginsberg on a book of poems, including part of “Howl,” called “Illuminated Poems.”

(Rob Epstein): I’d say the short answer is we wanted the poem to be a character. That was the starting point.

(Q): You guys seem to be real chroniclers of gay cultural experience in America in various ways. Do you feel now that there’s been this body of work do you feel as you look at it is there a coherent sort of message or mission?

(Rob Epstein): I don’t think I’ve spent a second thinking about that and I don’t know if there’s any value in us thinking about that. I mean, I think it’s great if other people want to do that but I don’t think that’s our job. So I’m avoiding your question, which is also to say I don’t think we take on subjects for any predetermined reason. It’s really about the particular subject, the particular idea.

(Q): How much of the dialog in this film is verbatim from interviews or the court transcripts and how much is gist?

(Jeffrey Friedman): 95% is verbatim from court transcripts and interviews Allen gave over the course of his life.

(Q): Did that make the process of writing the script more difficult or less difficult?

(Rob Epstein): That part was not unfamiliar because it’s not unlike when you’re doing a documentary and you have this massive amount of material that you have to cull down and make coherent and give it dramatic shape and figure out the essence of each character that you’re characterizing within that documentary. So that part was very familiar to us. But it’s in large part a film about language so the idea of being faithful to the actual language as source material was an important part of the concept.

(Q): Could you speak a little bit about bringing James Franco into the project and what it was like working with him?

(Rob Epstein): Gus Van Sant, who is our executive producer, suggested James. Gus read the script and liked it and was in San Francisco shooting “Milk” at the time and suggested that James read the script and James like it. We met with him soon thereafter and in that meeting we learned that James had a very close relationship to the Beats, having read them from when he was 14 years old on, and was a student of literature at UCLA at the time. So he had a natural affinity to it and then we looked at a lot of James’ work that we weren’t yet familiar with, particularly the James Dean story that he did as a tv movie.

We saw in that performance so much depth, not that he just so physically personified Dean but there was so much emotional depth to that performance so we knew that he could act the part of Allen Ginsberg. And working with him was a great experience. We were really lucky to have him available to work to really work out the ideas behind the script and the story behind Allen’s character over many sessions over the course of the year, so by the time we started shooting he had the character nailed.

(Jeffrey Friedman): James came on before we had financing. He came on very early; he just loved the project. He said he always thought he would do a Beat project but he assumed that he would play Jack Kerouac, so I think he was kind of tickled that we were asking him to play Ginsberg. And in fact his mother’s Jewish and he’s the same age that Allen was when Allen wrote “Howl,” he was the same age at the time, so it was really a confluence of interests.

(Rob Epstein): It was really interesting working with James, developing the character, and seeing things that he had to do that were just the work of the actor, which is the whole physicalization and vocalization of Allen. That’s something we couldn’t help him with, he had to find that himself, and he found that just by listening to a lot of audio, in particular an interview that Allen did from the ‘50s with Studs Terkel.
It’s this great interview with Allen and Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, and you really get a sense of his personality in that interview and James listened to that again, and again, and again, and again.

(Q): He just did an interview with “The Advocate” where they asked him “Why do you keep playing so many gay characters? Are you gay?” And he’s like “I’m not gay but there’s something in me that makes me able to relate to these characters and play them. What do you guys think that is that’s in him that makes him be able to relate to gay people so well?

(Rob Epstein): I think the fact that he doesn’t even think in those terms so much. He just thinks of it as part of the human experience, and there’s something within that that he finds compelling and interesting. Certainly the kinds of conversations we would have with him about what was going on with Allen, it wasn’t so much that we had to explain anything about the particulars of being gay or not gay, it was what was going on for him emotionally, and I think that’s really what he’s saying what he’s drawn to as material. And maybe because so few actors have been willing to mine that material, maybe that’s another thing that James has been drawn to.

(Q): You mostly focus on “Howl” in this movie and court cases as well. Did you consciously avoid the peace movement so you could just focus on “Howl”?

(Jeffrey Friedman): Well there already are documentaries. There’s a very good documentary called “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg,” by Jerry Aronson that tells the whole story of his life. But the purpose of this film was to understand “Howl” as a cultural phenomenon. It was a poem that began what we think of as the Beat literary movement, the San Francisco renaissance, which became a literary movement and a cultural movement and evolved into all these other cultural movements that we think of as evolving in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but we sort of saw the seeds of all of those in this poem that was written in the mid-‘50s.

(Rob Epstein): It was a golden moment in Allen’s life and we saw it as the film about this particular golden moment when he was finding his creative voice and when all his compadres, these young artists, were in their prime; both their sexual prime and their creative prime. And metaphorically, that it’s the transition from the black and white world of the ‘50s to the color world of the ‘60s and beyond.

(Q): His mother had a rare disease. Do you think that influenced his character?

(Jeffrey Friedman): Very much. He was very, very involved with madness from a young age. He had to take his mother to the institution on the bus, riding across New Jersey on the bus. He had to sign the papers for her lobotomy when he was 21. It sounds like she was very, very disturbed, and that’s what Allen grew up with. So madness was very much a part of his life and he was afraid that he was mad. That was something he really struggled with and that’s very much a part of the poem is who’s mad? Is it me or is it the world?

(Q): When did you guys first hear the poem?

(Rob Epstein): High school. Didn’t understand it, but that’s when I first heard it.

(Jeffrey Friedman): Also high school. And I remember “Moloch” as a kind of a buzz word that the radicals in high school were using to talk about the military industrial complex.

(Q): Are there any other poets or poems that you guys have loved or liked that you think of as an influence?

(Jeffrey Friedman): Well Whitman certainly was an influence on Ginsberg and someone who I thought of in rereading the poem. But neither of us were big poetry people; this was a learning experience for us.

(Rob Epstein): I think more influenced by poetic filmmakers; that’s my inspiration and our inspiration for this film. Certainly Todd Haynes I consider a poetic filmmaker, and I think “Poison” in some way inspired us. The film “American Splendor” was an inspiration. A Beat film called “Portrait of Jason” by Shirley Clarke, from 1967 very much influence the idea of the interview as a core element. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” for the animation.

(Q): One of my favorite lines in the film is during the courtroom scene: “You can’t translate poetry to prose; that’s what makes it poetry.” Would you talk about the process of translation poetry into animation? Do you think it’s a better fit?

(Jeffrey Friedman): Well we don’t think of it as translation, we think of it as adaptation, the way you would adapt a novel. So you have to make it specific because you’re creating something visual, so it’s a very specific vision that we try to imagine as what might have been going on in the head of the poet as these images were emerging.

And we took our cue from Eric really, who had collaborated with Allen, who really understood the kinds of images that Allen liked to see with his images. So we had to trust that relationship, which seemed to have been a really significant relationship.

(Rob Epstein): There’s no one way to interpret the poem, and this is but one interpretation, and why not have but one. I think it was our feeling that we could create a cinematic experience within the whole telling of “Howl” and what was behind it and what was in front of it and what was around it. This could be its own experience within the movie.

So then it was working with Eric on concepts and ideas, like presenting a conceptualization of “Moloch.” How would we want to present it if we were to present an idea of what “Moloch” is, this sacrificing of children to a costly god. So in the movie it becomes a war parable.

(Jeffrey Friedman): We have all these different realities in the film. We have the present tense, which is all in color, which his the obscenity trial and the imagined interview with Allen, which was inspired by this “Time” magazine interview that he gave that was never published during the trial. And then we have flashbacks that are in black and white to events in his life and the first reading of the poem. But we also wanted the poem to live in a kind of timeless, unreal world, so the animation was a way of trying to create that.

(Q): The rest of the cast. Somehow they seem to make sense. Can you talk about how you chose them?

(Rob Epstein): In a way they chose us. Each of those actors responded to the script and they thought it was a great project and they wanted to be involved. So we worked with the casting director here, Bernie Telsey, who is fantastic, and he had some great ideas and we got lucky.

(Q): When you were reviewing the court transcripts we see the funny parts or the unbelievably ignorant parts. Were there other moments that we kind of see the other side? 

(Rob Epstein): No, it was even more ridiculous than it’s presented in the movie. We really had to work to create some dramatic tension because it was so lopsided. We didn’t change any of the transcript but we did try and give it as much equal weight as we could.

(Q): You kind of feel sorry for them because they’re so fearful and they’re so closed minded.

(Rob Epstein): That’s really what it comes down to and thematically that’s what we wanted the audience to get from it, is that ultimately this is about fear and scapegoatism, and that’s the eternal dialectic that we felt like continues to play out and will continue to play out in Democratic society. So now it’s gay marriage and the Koran.

(Q): It’s funny you see it that way. Them, they thought they were so upstanding and upright and they couldn’t imagine how anybody could be that way. Did you find that kind of funny when you think about it now?

(Rob Epstein): We found some of the dialog funny, just the notion of parsing what is an “angelheaded hipster”? Having to have that explained in a trial, there was something kind of delicious about that. So when we were working with the material we realized there were those moments that would play well theatrically as just wonderful scenes, and then there were bigger scenes that we felt really resonated. So that’s why we were so intrigued by the content of the trial.

(Q): In the movie certain lines are repeated in different moments in times and reality. Is that how you came up with picking which lines to repeat?

(Rob Epstein): Sometimes we felt it warranted to repeat just because you have new understanding at different moments in the film. Like the first time it might not quite resonate in the way that it does the third time when you’re hearing it in the courtroom and you have all this back story to Allen’s experience. You have a whole understanding of who Carl Solomon is and what that means, whereas when it’s being presented as evidence it’s just being presented as raw language.

(Q): There’s a scene where one of the interviewers are asking Allen Ginsberg what the Beat generation is and he answers “A bunch of guys trying to get published." What do you think that he himself saw the Beat generation as?

(Jeffrey Friedman): I think he saw it as marketing branding tool. It was a term that was coined I think by Kerouac or Herbert Huncke, there are different stories about who coined the term. But it said “This generation is beat,” and nobody quite knows what it means and it took on different meanings; beat down, beatific. But really it became a label that was used really by mainstream media to identify them and it became a useful marketing tool, and Allen was very good at marketing.

(Q): Given the fascination with Buddhism that they shared with the owners of this company do you find it a good, delicious sort of fulfilling, completely this circle that you’re here with Oscilloscope?

(Rob Epstein): Yes. Sometimes things work out as they should. But this project from our experience on it, it’s been blessed in that way in that it’s always attracted the right people, and some projects that just happens; the right people at the right time.

(Jeffrey Friedman): I mean why would anybody else do this project, if they didn’t feel connected to it? So everybody, from the crew through the cast through the distributor just felt some connection to the material in one way or another.

(Q): Has Peter seen the film?

(Rob Epstein): Peter didn’t see the film but we met Peter two summers ago and we spent some time with him and did this interview and it was wonderful and delightful. By the time we finished the film he was already in hospice, but we wrote him a letter and in that letter we told him a lot of the good things that were happening. We showed him frames from the film of scenes that we had recreated of him and Allen played by Franco and Aaron Tveit, and we know he got the letter, the letter was read to him before he died, about two weeks before he died.

(Q): What did he think about the idea that you were making this?

(Rob Epstein): He seemed very tickled.

(Q): And when he heard James Franco was going to be playing him? That had to be pretty exciting.

(Rob Epstein): I don’t know if he knew. We hadn’t cast it. We were just doing research; we hadn’t gotten that far. But he told some wonderful stories. He told a story about how he and Allen used to take these late night walks, and one time they were walking through the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco, and Peter was singing to him a Hank Williams song, “Howling at the Moon,” and how then he next saw Allen at the typewriter writing “Howl.” So Peter said he never spoke to him about it but he likes to think that that’s where he got the title for the poem from.

(Q): Tuli was one of the few people I think still alive in time to have seen the movie?

(Rob Epstein): No, even when we interviewed Tuli he was very frail but very alive. He sang “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” for us.

(Q): He went blind at the end but I think he still could see when the movie was at Sundance.

(Q): Yeah, but he couldn’t go to Sundance.

(Q): Meeting Jack Kerouac opened up his sexuality as well. Talk about the meeting of Jack Kerouac and his influence.

(Jeffrey Friedman): Jack Kerouac and Allen had this immediate intellectual connection and creative connection, and they were very excited about creating this new language; first thought best thought. It was this idea of creating literature that was related to the way people relate to each other and relate to people’s real experiences and expressing it spontaneously.

And this really became like a cause and it really became their religion in a way, so it was this very, very intense meeting of the minds. And Allen was in love with Jack and eventually confessed his love, and he was afraid that Jack was going to reject him or something, and Jack basically just said well I hope this doesn’t ruin the friendship. And that was a breakthrough for Allen because then he realized that he could just be who he was openly and people wouldn’t reject him.

(Q): What do you guys have coming up? What do you follow this with?

(Rob Epstein): We’re attached as directors to a couple of projects. We could tell you about them.

(Jeffrey Friedman): The one that’s been announced is “Lovelace.”

(Rob Epstein): As in Linda. But not the Lindsay Lohan one.

(Q): I was curious about the makeup on Franco. Did you have any prosthetics?

(Rob Epstein): Just the ears were pushed out. And dying his hair.

(Jeffrey Friedman): James was hosting “Saturday Night Live” one week and he brought pictures of Allen to the makeup room and showed the makeup artist and said “What do you think?” and he said “Yeah you could do that. Just push out the ears a little.”

End.