Shake Hands With Todd Rohal

As regular readers of this blog are getting tired of being reminded, I'm a big fan of Todd Rohal's low-budget comedy The Guatemalan Handshake. The film is getting its first theatrical showing at Metro Cinema here in Edmonton next weekend, and so I used that fact as an excuse to score an interview with Rohal for SEE Magazine, the alt-weekly whose film section I edit.

Here's that interview. If you haven't been persuaded by my two previous posts to check out The Guatemalan Handshake, hopefully this will do the trick.

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Of the six low-budget indie features screening this week as part of Metro Cinema’s “Generation DIY” series, Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake is very much the odd film out.

Where movies like LOL and Quiet City aim for artless naturalism, Handshake aims for stylized humour. Where the alienating Frownland was shot on 16mm and blown up to a grainy-looking 35mm print, Handshake is bathed in warm oranges and browns—sunset hues straight out of a Terrence Malick movie.

And where a lot of these so-called “mumblecore” movies feel like the work of young directors and actors still finding their voices and groping for greater meaning, The Guatemalan Handshake feels like the work of a filmmaker who knows exactly what effects he’s going for—a deadpan blend of comedy and poignancy that may leave some viewers uncertain of how to react, but which achieves many moments of surprising, undeniable beauty.

Oh yeah—the plot. Well, that’s a hard one. The Guatemalan Handshake begins with the unexplained disappearance of a hapless young man named Donald Turnupseed (musician Will Oldham)—one moment he’s driving his bright orange electric car down the Pennsylvania highway, and the next he’s wandered out of the frame, never to return. The rest of the film is an Altmanesque ensemble piece about the family and friends Donald has left behind, including his father (who’s trying to figure out how to get into the locked shed in his backyard), his ex-girlfriend (who’s busy preparing for that weekend’s demolition derby), and a little girl named Turkeylegs (who seems to be the only person in the world who misses him).

Part Napoleon Dynamite, part George Washington, it’s a melancholy, humane comedy set in one of the few remaining corners of the U.S.A. that hasn’t yet been colonized by technology—a place of roller rinks, amusement park rides, and demolition derbies, where telephone booths still exist and cordless phones apparently have yet to be invented. It’s a great place to wander around in for an hour and a half.

Todd Rohal talked to me earlier this week from his home in Brooklyn.

Q: This movie feels so different from the usual kind of Sundance-approved pictures that most people think of when they hear the phrase “independent film.” What’s your background, and where did your sensibility form?

Todd Rohal: Well, I couldn’t afford the bigger film schools, so I went to film school at a small university in Ohio. It was very experimental-based. I thought I’d go there for a couple of years and transfer to NYU or something, but once I got there, it was really invigorating. We had a lot of freedom. For me to see that if you have a vision for something you wanted to make that doesn’t have a giant, obvious chance of returning its money, the only way to do it is to do it yourself. So you’d see other students not finishing their projects because no one was pushing them, and others who were really digging into projects that weren’t for giant audiences but for very specific people. That was very exciting to me.

Q: Is The Guatemalan Handshake the kind of movie you always wanted to make, or were you surprised at all to find yourself making something this odd?

TR: In some ways I am! You know, it’s already so hard to get a movie made, to write a script and get it filmed and get it into a festival. There are so many things against you, why make it even more difficult for yourself? I get a little frustrated with myself that way, but I also get frustrated with the kind of audiences and critics who keep calling for new things but then whenever anyone pops their head up with something different, they chop it off. I felt like the new kid who shows up at school with weird clothes and who gets made fun of. But really, that should be encouraged! Even if your clothes are mismatched, there’s something in that spirit that really needs encouragement. It’s so easy to knock down the retarded kid, you know?

Q: This was your first feature, and you were working with a lot of nonprofessionals. Did you feel confident on the set? Did you feel like you were in control of the movie’s tone?

TR: Well, I had made four short films before this one, so I felt fairly confident as a director. But at the same time, I was so worried about not being prepared—we really had no backup plans if something went wrong. So I feel such a sense of accomplishment with this movie—I think we pulled off some pretty impossible stuff. We had no money, and to get so many of the images just right, just the way I’d imagined them, was such a cool feeling. You sit at your desk for so long thinking of these images, and then they’re all there thanks to this amazing crew—the sun’s just right, the sound is exactly how you had it in your head and everything.

Q: The script definitely has the feel of something you tailored to the talents of certain actors.

TR: In some cases, yeah. And a lot of the people we cast were from the town we shot in, so it was we’d pick the town, and that would then provide the pool of actors we’d choose from. Not even actors—a lot of the cast were people who’d never acted before but who had good faces. I really wanted audiences to have no idea of who these people are, like in a foreign film, so they’d have no idea of where the story would go.

Q: The only person I’d ever seen before was Will Oldham, who disappears, like, 10 minutes into the story.

TR: Yeah, and then we went and played the lead in that movie Old Joy, which sort of stole the thunder from our movie. [Laughs.]

Q: I’m curious: when exactly is the movie supposed to be taking place? Is it, like 1979? Or is it the present day, except that nobody’s bought anything new since the ’80s?

TR: That’s amazing that you said that, because that was exactly our concept: it’s the present day but no one has bought anything since, like, 1984. Everyone just got budget-conscious at some point in the past and everything froze at a certain year. It’s like what’s cool about Cuba—all the cars are out of date.

Q: Speaking of cars, the movie ends with a demolition derby, and on the Guatemalan Handshake DVD, one of the bonus features is a short film about demolition derbies. What is it about demolition derbies that appeals to you so much?

TR: I don’t know. It’s the only sport I really like going to and that can hold my attention. It’s a really Midwestern activity. It’s so populist and yet it seems like such a rich person’s sport. And the only movies that had ever been made about it are, like, Pitstop or some Roger Corman picture, so it seemed like it was about time someone made another movie in that world.

Q: What is the ideal reaction you’d like to get from people who see this movie? Is it enough for them to say, “It made me laugh,” or is there a deeper reaction you’re hoping for?

TR: Yeah. I feel it’s really connection when people pick up on the sadness of it, and how it’s about loss. I think all these characters have a sense of humour about the situations they’re in—I think that’s a great personality trait, when you can be going through hard times and still have a sense of humour about it. That was my big goal with the movie—to translate this feeling of joy and sadness and commiseration to the screen. And I really wanted to have the happiest depressing ending possible, to have this headlong collision of feelings, where the little girl, Turkeylegs, is having the first adult realization of her life. And none of this is explicit, but I hoped it would come through anyway.

Q: Do negative reactions to the film sting you? I’m thinking of something like The Onion’s review, which found it too precious and whimsical for their tastes, which seems like an odd response to me.

TR: Yeah, I can’t wrap my head around it either. It’s the most depressing thing, when you feel like people are coming in with some other baggage. I know that ever since Juno came out, the word “quirky” suddenly started appearing in every single review. You’re kind of at the mercy of the other films that are released at the same times as yours—before you know it, a critic winds up taking out their anger over Juno winning the Academy Award on me, you know? It’s hard when a movie like this one, with no studio or anything behind it, gets a bad rap because of Juno—and people won’t cut it some slack even though I made it three years before. It really burns; I put everything I had into it, and to have it dismissed because I don’t have the backing of a studio to make me look “legitimate.” That’s, like, every filmmaker’s nightmare right there.

Q: At the same time, it seems like you’ve done okay for yourself. You’ve got this really beautiful DVD from Benten Films, and for a low-budget movie from an unknown regional director, it’s achieved a certain profile. It’s no Juno, obviously, but are you surprised it’s gotten this much attention? Or are you surprised it hasn’t gotten more?

TR: Well, I think every director, no matter what level they’re at, always feels their movie isn’t achieving at the level it should. The ones who get their movie distributed feel like the box office should have been better; the ones who get picked up by a bigger company feel they should have been released to more cities. I guess I’m happy that people are able to see it, but it’s really hard to tell who’s actually watching it.

Q: Are you working on anything new?

TR: Yeah, I’ve written a movie about my time in the Boy Scouts. It’s based on this one incident where these scoutmasters faked the death of one of the other scoutmasters as a First Aid test, and the script is about how that incident kind of affected all of us in our lives. I’m hoping to put together a really good, weird cast. I think it’s going to happen; we’ve met some good people, and hopefully it won’t be as much of a struggle as the first one.