Surviving Desire & Company

by Hal Hartley

I recently came across an interview with Martin Donovan from 2004 that was produced by my own company for inclusion on a DVD re-release of Surviving Desire in Australia. At one point during the interview, Donovan recalls that I was unhappy with Surviving Desire when I finished it. 

I was startled to be reminded of this. But it’s true. I was making a lot of work back then, quickly, and trying out a lot of newly acquired ideas. I was happy, busy, but never perfectly confident.  

While restoring these three films from 1991 (and Opera No.1 from 1994) I remember that, in making Surviving Desire, I felt I had veered away from the very exciting effects of Theory of Achievement and Ambition, produced only a few months earlier. For all its playfulness, Surviving Desire is a fairly realistic narrative fiction. The two preceding shorts were not. I think I hoped the longer film would make use of the same happy disregard for plausible and naturalistic characterization. But it wasn’t written that way and it took me a while to admit that. In the meantime, I wondered if the new film was a retreat or a misstep—a betrayal of my quickly evolving sensibilities and so on.

Twenty-eight years later, I’m glad I let Surviving Desire settle into the conventions it seemed to demand. Sixty minutes of Ambition’s unapologetic ranting and raving might have been too much. And, anyway, I was hugely entertained by the actors in Surviving Desire as they interpreted my script. Martin Donovan, Mary Ward, Matt Malloy and Rebecca Nelson reminded me I had leaned quite heavily on classical examples of farce when putting this comedy together—from Molière’s The Learned Ladies all the way to episodes of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners.

But making Theory of Achievement and Ambition the way I did was a thrill. By late 1990 I had made two feature films. One had just been awarded a prize at a festival and the other was about to be distributed worldwide. My friend, the aspiring producer Ted Hope, asked if I could manage a short film for fifteen thousand dollars he thought he could raise from some investors. I said yes because I liked working and I still thought every film I made would be my last. I responded to any opportunity that came along. I turned to a script I had written in 1986, Theory of Achievement. 

The original script thought through the implications of living life productively in the face of, perhaps, never achieving anything the outside world might recognize as such—a very real concern for any young person with non-commercial aspirations. But I was, in fact, by 1990, achieving my aspirations. So my theories about achievement were informed by new data, so to speak. Most of my friends had similar aspirations as me and would also go on to pursue them successfully in the years to come. (They’re all in the film.) But at the time we were all still more or less broke and constantly lending one another money. It was an incredibly lively and productive time.

The two features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, were dialogue-built, performer-driven, character-based fictions where naturalistic verisimilitude was a part of every creative decision no matter how unrealistic a scene might be on the surface. And that’s how I wanted it. But Theory and Ambition were more like some kind of propaganda—manifestos gone off the rails. In my notebook, I started referring to these exercises as demonstrations. 

The heroes could be wrong-headed and learn nothing. So it was after all, still fiction, I supposed. 

This was due to reading about Brecht. 

Though I had seen a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at college, my knowledge of Bertolt Brecht was limited to his collected writings translated into English by John Willett, Brecht on Theater, and different references to him made by, amongst others, Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But it was, in fact, another work—but one following in the line of Brecht—that encouraged me to proceed as I did with Theory of Achievement and Ambition.

Peter Brook’s film of his own staging of Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade was almost the only film I was watching from around 1989 through 1992. I had the VHS tape out from the video rental store so much they eventually let me have it as my own. Apparently, no one else ever asked for it—and I had worn the thing out through repeated viewing anyway. 

This film and the play's text encouraged me in all sorts of ways. Weiss’ play, Brook’s staging, and the filming of it inspired me, I'm afraid to say, to embrace philosophical disputation as vaudeville! It seemed the perfect vehicle for my learning at the time. 

Opera No.1 was produced three years later, commissioned by a cable television network asking for a short, musical and funny distraction. It was a welcome opportunity to fall back into the fierce playfulness of Theory, Ambition and Surviving Desire.

Kid was written and revised through the spring 1983 semester of my junior year at the State University of New York (or SUNY) Purchase. I developed my script under Milena Jelinek, who was unfailingly friendly and encouraging, but who cautioned me to write more like an American and less like a European. This was bracing advice to receive from an accomplished screenplay writer associated with the Czech New Wave. But she was right. I was channeling my enthusiasms for everyone from Jean Vigo to Eisenstein to Terrence Malick and Wim Wenders and crossing all this with John Ford and Howard Hawks.

When I came back in the fall to start my senior year, I continued to work on the script under Aram Avakian, who would also advise me through production, direction and editing. Aram’s concern was that I was trying to pack the whole world into this half hour tale. He reminded me this was not likely to be the only film I'd make in my life and I didn’t have to resolve, definitively, all of life’s major issues my first time out of the gate. But in my darker moments I really did suspect Kid would be my one and only stab at a motion picture. It took my friends and teachers to help me see otherwise. 

A year and a half out of college, I was living and working in New York City. The Cartographer’s Girlfriend came to me quickly in November of 1985 and was inspired mostly by eight cans of outdated 16mm color negative my boss, Jerry Brownstein, had sitting in the office’s fridge. He told to me to get rid of it—the stock was almost a decade out of date and was probably worthless. So I just took it and wrote something I could produce in my apartment and surrounding neighborhood up in the Inwood section of Manhattan. It was cast by Christmas and rehearsals were underway in early January 1986. 

I was writing regularly whenever I could between freelance gigs as a production assistant on TV commercials and various features—and more steadily when I started working for Jerry regularly. My attention was spread over a few feature film scripts—early versions of what would become Trust, Simple Men and Amateur. And so I had various unused story ideas lying around, remnants I could weave together into this odd little movie. 

For inspiration, I turned to immediate reality and invented from there: There was, for instance, a huge billboard of a leggy blond seated prettily and nude in a martini glass high above Times Square that I was forced (forced!) to march by each morning on my way to work. It was truly impressive—the ambition of such things! And they were all over the place. Wherever I looked, there they were: sparklingly presented young females as far from my universe as any other extraterrestrial. It was the kind of thing that got me thinking: do I even know what an actual woman looks like anymore? The scenes between the cartographer, Bob, and his co-worker, George, were early drafts of scenes originally intended for Simple Men.

It took me months to pay the lab and reclaim the developed footage. My cinematographer, Michael Spiller, and I had to wait and see if anything useable resulted. Most of it was useable. But some reels were just too degraded to retain an image. I made what I could from what we had and was not unhappy. Though the film is probably a little more surreal than I intended in the script stage.

Hal Hartley, New York, May 2019