Seriously Funny, Seriously
An interview with Funny Ha Ha director Andrew Bujalski
by Ken D. Melton

Do you ever feel embarrassed for characters in sitcoms? Let’s say Raymond gets caught looking at some young waitress’s tush and has to gracelessly lie his way out of the doghouse. Those moments make me cringe and look away from the television set. Imagine a movie with scene after scene of this kind of embarrassing situation, but the circumstances are realistic. Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha is one of those films. Watching it had me in a state of utter panic, like I’d run into fifteen ex-girlfriends, all on dates with the lead singers of post-garage bands, and I had porno mags and a box of doughnuts in my hands. The film is more than that, though. The main character, Marnie, rambles through that Linklaterian post-adolescent world of uncertainty. She bounces from embarrassing situations to awkward conversations to unfulfilling jobs to drunken confessions. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a character pops up and recounts a hilarious story about getting beaten up by eleven-year-old bullies. Desires go unfulfilled, decisions pass by unmade and resolution just doesn’t exist in the world of Funny Ha Ha, a world not unlike our own… ha ha. All joking aside, Bujalski has created a film that, above all else, feels true to life. It’s real like a Cassavettes film, with pitch perfect timing (or lack thereof), cadence, seemingly mundane situations, unobtrusive camera and editing, natural acting, uncompromising spirit and self-assured direction.

Independent films are difficult to make and difficult to see. Funny Ha Ha is not a commercial film. It wasn’t created with the intentions of making money, and it’s unfortunate that that leaves it with such a limited audience. Luckily, because of some influential critics (such as Gerald Peary, Warren Curry, Amy Taubin and BU professor Ray Carney), film festival prizes (Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, Northampton Independent Film Festival) and an Independent Spirit Award, Funny Ha Ha is on the map and somewhat available. Andrew Bujalski’s second film is nearing completion and, with luck, he will continue to make more. If Funny Ha Ha is any indication, his viewers will continue to feast on wholly unique and satisfying movies. These kinds of films, more often than not, have to be discovered. Get on board, get a little anxious, and go find an adventure:

If you’re in New York, Boston or Los Angeles keep your eyes peeled for a small theatrical run in March. You can find out about upcoming screenings or buy a DVD from here:
www.funnyhahafilm.com.


So, you went to Harvard, right?
Yes.

Have you heard of a little movie called Good Will Hunting?
Yes, 100% accurate.

While at Harvard, did you have trouble with Townies trying to steal your ladies?
No, well, I didn’t hang out at that bar.

How about Townie janitors solving math problems that were left on the chalkboards?
Well, I took one math class. Then I gave up on math after that and no Townies ever helped me.

So, Good Will Hunting, not accurate.
Inaccurate.

Oh, yes, thanks. Prior to Funny Ha Ha, had you written many scripts or made many short films?
A few. I know I’d written a couple of others in Austin, and then Funny Ha Ha was one where I just felt like I was ready to commit whatever I had to actually make it—as opposed to the more theoretical exercise that scriptwriting usually is. I did shorts in school. I did a thesis film that was 26 minutes long—a fiction film. And also some documentary work at Harvard. Harvard has a really strong documentary program, which, I think learning in that milieu, has certainly had a lot of influence on how I approach fiction… Uh, I told you I wouldn’t be too articulate on the phone…

Well, I’m the opposite of articulate, but I’ve been listening to Studs Terkel tapes all day, so maybe that’ll help us through. (Pause) Yeah, um… let’s see… How long did it actually take to make Funny Ha Ha?
It depends how you measure that. But after Texas, I was in Los Angeles for 6 months, and I was trying to get the film going there and that kind of almost happened but then didn’t happen. And we ended up doing it in Boston. We shot in Boston in the summer of 2001, in August. Once I got back to Boston everything came together fairly quickly. There is just a huge amount of good fortune involved in all of this, every step of the way. So I shot in August 2001, and it was done 7 months later. Which, in retrospect, seems amazing to me because this new film has already taken twice as long in post-production.

Were most of the actors your friends?
Yeah, I wrote the part of Marnie for Kate, who played it. She was my roommate at the time that I started writing in Austin. From there, there’re several people that we knew in common and another assortment of friends. Not everyone was, though. Jen Schaper, who played Rachel in the film, was someone that I met at a party a month or so before we started shooting. I was desperately looking for someone for that role, and I was incredibly lucky once again.

Do you think an unprofessional cast of mostly friends helped add to the realism?
Yes, well, especially when you have people playing people that’ve know each other for a really long time. It’s just one less thing to act.

Are those party scenes acted? Are your actors drinking?
Different people are drinking to different extents. Certainly there was on set drinking, some more than others. This new film has even more drinking, real and imagined.

During one of the party scenes, the character Dave is seen getting people to sit on his lap. Is that gathered from real life?
The thing that I always say about the film is that it’s not autobiographical, but it is personal. Very few of the things actually happened to anyone, but that might be one of the few autobiographical details that snuck in there. Somewhere near the end of college, I found myself trying to get people to sit in my lap a lot. It passed. So, yeah, that was me.

Do you see yourself continuing to make films beyond your current one?
We’ll see. I’ve been thinking about that quite a lot, of course. What I’ve been doing is not particularly sustainable. So, I have no idea where I would find the resources to do a third one. But a piece of advice that Ray Carney gave me, which was great—but also not necessarily practical—was, “Everyone will love your first film after you’ve made three more.” And, of course, it’s really hard to apply that. I think that’s definitely true. I think the more you hang around and the more people know you and the more people are used to you, the more they are willing to accept what you’re doing. But, I’d love to keep making films. I have no idea if it’s possible. There’s part of me, too, that fantasizes about walking completely away from it and going to teach English somewhere weird. You do start to feel somewhat shackled to the process.

Along those lines, Funny Ha Ha is partly about that time in life when decisions are made that will affect the rest of one’s life (career, marriage, etc.). I was hoping that the new film would offer some resolution to that state, but, talking to you now, it doesn’t seem like that’ll happen.
I guess I’m not a great believer in resolution. I do think the new film is more mature in some ways, maybe not, but it deals with more of the quasi-adult questions. Tangentially, it’s still very much steeped in the post-adolescent milieu. How many times have I said milieu? Terrible… (muttering)… Terrible.

Do you have a real job?
No, that’s kind of a problem. I’ve been working a lot on the sound mix lately. I was substitute teaching a while back for a charter school, but they haven’t needed me recently. So I think I’m going to start subbing for Boston Public Schools, which is nerve racking.

Yeah, I’ve seen the show. There’s crisis daily.
I hopefully won’t go to that one.

Good. Right after watching Funny Ha Ha I had this awkward encounter with an old friend. It left me feeling a bit self-conscious, and I kind of blame that on thinking about your movie, which hinges on so many embarrassing moments. What’s the draw, for you, to these moments?
That’s probably something we’d need to bring in a therapist to look at. I feel like I see a lot of movies and it’s all about very large scale negotiations between people—people that have conflicts because they are cops or gangsters or whatever. I guess, I felt like most human drama, as I knew it, was taking place on a much more microscopic level, and that embarrassment and neurosis and these things play into a lot of it and inform a lot of it. Certainly that’s true for me. Also, when I get the footage back, anything that seems true I’m going to put in the film. I suppose that a lot of the times more of the awkward moments ring true to me.

I know what you mean about seeing films like that, though. I remember seeing Taxi Driver and then walking around for a couple of days muttering to myself.

…(We get to talking about other movies, Being There gets us onto the upcoming Peter Sellers biopic, which I pronounce “bi-opic” and Andrew pronounces “bio-pic”, we decide Andrew is right. Then we talk a little bit about some Avant-Garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage and Jon Jost in particular, and not so much about their films, but their poor healthcare options. Andrew mulls the possibility of sustaining shoestring-budget, anti-profit filmmaking)…

…I often question, is that something I’m willing to do? Is that something that makes sense for me to do? Obviously, the kinds of films I’m making are not in the same vein particularly [as Avant-Garde film]. That’s the odd thing about the sort of filmmaking that I’m doing, too. It is in a weird netherworld, not Avant-Garde and not Hollywood. Not that those are the only two things, but those are two established worlds and there’s not an obvious world for my films to live in. But, of course, it would be disingenuous for me to complain. This last film has received more support from more places than I could ever have imagined. I mean, where does money come from? I guess it comes from grants and production companies. But production companies want to get their money back, and I don’t see any reason to think any production company would want to get involved in the sorts of things I’m trying to do right now. First and foremost, both the last film and the new one, are all non-professional actors. I think that’s really hard for anyone with a financial interest to get behind. I don’t think that it’s because they’re unadventurous, I think it’s accurate. It’s really hard to make your money back on a movie. The more I learn about the economy of film making and film distribution, the less I understand of how it has survived in its present form as long as it has. Seems like everyone I meet who is trying to do something good, be it as a filmmaker, as a distributor, as an exhibitor…if you’re trying to do something that’s different, you’re kind of always in a martyr phase.

It must feel nice, then, to know that you’ll have completed two films pretty much on your own terms.
Yeah, which is an opportunity that very few people ever have. That’s another thing, too. When you read about the directors throughout history. It’s like, no matter how great you are, no matter how important you are, every director has been fucked with and tampered with. Of course sometimes that works out well. Sometimes the studio is right, but I don’t think so most of the time.