An attempt to find clarity

An interview with Hal Hartley.

For me the fun in making motion pictures is in trying to make the invisible tensions and connections between people visible through activity. When the boy places his hand on the table and the girl removes hers and returns it to her lap – what’s that mean? Depending on what’s been going on previously, it can mean anything. It’s almost like composing music. I treat dialogue the same way, as activity. And people do evasive things when they’re using words to communicate.

“Philosophy” and “spirituality” always seemed heavy-handed terms to me in regard to the fiction I was making. But it’s true: I make characters who not only think about their ideas and feelings but who discuss them as people aiming to clarify more general truths. After all this time and all these movies, I see that pretty clearly. It’s what I like in novels. And I’ve always felt closer to novel writing than to movies, even though movies are the only thing I know how to do and even though major early influences were the plays of Molière or Peter Weiss and so on. It was working with words to both create a complexity that audiences recognise as a real part of our shared experience and an attempt to find clarity – to suggest alternatives to habit.

[Via]