INTERVIEW WITH THE HERZOG BROTHERS

How would you describe your film?
JOHN: How would we describe our film? What do you think?
MATT: I think "interesting" is the best word for it.
JOHN: Yeah, "interesting" is good. That's kind of hard to answer because it means something completely different to us. The thing that we wanted to do is make a film that's kind of an homage to silent film and films from the Fifties. So, I guess you could describe it like that.
MATT: That's a little more complicated than what we feel it is, but it works I think.
JOHN: It's not a parody.
MATT: Yeah, some people think it's a parody because of the way that we've approached it, but we consider it an homage.

What was your inspiration?
MATT: That's a really loaded question.
JOHN: Yeah. A lot of people think that the idea behind this came from some failed relationship in the past that damaged one of us to the point of being bitter about it and wanting to stick it to the female gender through film.
MATT: Either that, or that we wanted to comment on human relationships or something.
JOHN: When, really, we just wanted to make something that we thought was somewhat funny, and thought that others might find it somewhat funny as well. We're not that deep, much to the disappointment of those looking for a "deeper meaning" in the film.
MATT: It all comes back to silent films like The General or films with Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton in them.
JOHN: And movies from the Fifties. Hollywood was big on those romance/relationship movies in the Fifties, like A Place in The Sun or All That Heaven Allows or Never Say Goodbye. The relationship aspect of our film comes from all of those romance/relationship films of the Fifties, and the no talking part of our film comes from our love of the silent film era.
MATT: Except our romance/relationship in the film is a little warped. The no talking part is pretty normal.
JOHN: As far as mixing color in with a black and white image, we sort of borrowed that concept from those greeting cards you find at grocery stores.
MATT: The ones where you have the two kids in 1920's garb kissing and a piece of their clothing has been colorized.
JOHN: Or the two kids walking down the street, still dressed in 1920's garb, carrying a handful of balloons and the balloons are the only thing in color in the picture.
MATT: We've always liked the idea of mixing color and black and white, and thought it would be interesting to try something like that.

I saw the "True Blue Beauty" as being the girl at first but then realized the blue flower at the end. Tell me your interpretation of "True Blue Beauty."
JOHN: Well, we've made it a point not to have any interpretation of the film.
MATT: Which really throws some people off. Most people are just confused by it. Or angered. One of the two.
JOHN: Which is kind of what we were going for. As much as we try to convince people that it's not as abstract as they might think, people still look for something inferred, either by the flower, or by some other aspect of the film.
MATT: We make it a point when asked, "What did you mean by this?" to ask back, "Well, what do you think it means?"
JOHN: Kubrick did that with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
MATT: Yeah. We always say that we're pulling a Kubrick on the audience because we really don't have an interpretation.
JOHN: But, more importantly, if someone feels compelled to give some meaning to the film, they can and are encouraged to do so by us. We're interested in what people think our film is about, rather than what we say our film is about.

Why a black and white, 1950s theme?
JOHN: It just felt right.
MATT: Yeah, you couldn't set something like this in modern times.
JOHN: Plus, it's rare that you see something in black and white today. There are a few films like Ed Wood or Schindler's List or, more recently, The Man Who Wasn't There that are in black and white that are fairly modern. But black and white photography in film is considered almost archaic and unnecessary in today's predominantly color world.
MATT: Not that we're too adamant about it. We're just big fans of the Fifties and black and white photography. Plus it just felt right for this piece.
JOHN: We actually shot it on color negative film, and then digitally converted it to black and white. Part of the reason for doing that was so we could get a finer grained look to the film, and also so we could go in and digitally capture the flower and alter it's color. The flower was actually red while we were shooting.
MATT: But, while we were color timing the film, we had Doug Fowkes, the colorist, change the color from red to blue. Originally, we were going to go through, frame by frame, and colorize the flower. But, since we were able to capture it during the color correction process, we were able to save a lot of time and energy.
JOHN: It would have taken a long time to add the color to that flower! It was actually Doug's idea to digitally capture it and change the color to blue. The results were better than we expected, so we were pretty happy with that.

What are your aspirations in the future in the film industry?
JOHN: Well, right now we're working on our first feature-length film.
MATT: It's about a door-to-door salesman in the late 1950's. That's about all we can say.
JOHN: As far as the future goes, we really just want to continue making films that are interesting and have a good story.
MATT: Yeah, we just want to make movies that people can see and enjoy and say, "Gee, that wasn't a bad way to spend the past two hours of my life."
JOHN: "Now, everyone pile in the car!" (laughter)
MATT: Yeah. "Let's go see some rodeo clowns!" (more laughter)

Interview by Tracy Chartier, March 10, 2004