You mentioned a little bit about how hanging out with James Laxton informed the geography of the city and how the film relates to it. With regards to the path that Micah and Jo take around the city, how did you formulate the exact places they would go?
It was two parts. One, there were things or memories I had of my time navigating the city, you know, within this relationship. As I said, the apartment that my relationship took place in was partly in the apartment that Micah occupies in the film, and then an apartment just one block down and then one block downhill, which is where my partner lived. We would gravitate between the two apartments. I worked downtown at Banana Republic. My girlfriend, at the time, worked in solar energy at a big building downtown, as well. You just end up doing certain walks; you just have certain paths to get to all your spots. Some of it was modeled on that.
It was also modeled on James and I having very limited resources to make this film. We had very limited resources to permit this film. That was the great thing about writing the film, knowing we were going to make it and knowing I was going to make it with James, is that we could really tailor the movement of the characters around the city to things we definitely have access to and be amongst this group of things that we felt would photograph well. And by well, I mean, would lend themselves to the themes of the film.
I did love the city at that time, so it was also really trying to relay the dizzying, euphoric feeling of spending 24 hours with someone you’re either in love with or infatuated with or in lust with in San Francisco at this time. It was just a very evocative thing. It was different from having that feeling in LA or New York or Paris or any other place. There was something very distinct about that experience in San Francisco. We tried to model the movement of the characters with that sort of Venn diagram of coordinates. It was how we decided which way we would chart the film.
Did you and James always know you wanted to desaturate the film? You had, of course, tried something similar with “My Josephine.”
We did. You know, the reason we did it for “My Josephine” was totally different than the reason we did it for this, because for “My Josephine” we shot on film. We could have shot the thing on any Kodak stock back then; you could actually shoot some really awesome Kodak slide film and 16MM if you wanted. But with both “My Josephine” and “Medicine,” maybe it’s just where my mind always resides, or my emotional energy resides, which is a melancholic approach to beauty. For me, that’s just been because of my just innate skepticism of overt beauty, or at least my ability to possess it.
I identified very well with the characters in “My Josephine.” There’s a version of the world that assumes these immigrants who own a business, a thriving business, that America’s this Kodachrome, supersaturated, very vibrant thing. But in the time that the film is made, in speaking of “My Josephine,” it’s a very confusing, confounding thing. It’s fueled with this wash of melancholy. My relationship with San Francisco, at the time, felt the same way.
San Francisco, for me, had always been this very vibrant place, even with the fog and things like that. But in the aftermath of this relationship, I was seeing it anew. I was feeling very apart from it. I remember saying to James that the color correction of the film needed to reflect the emotions of the main characters and not necessarily the pictorial dynamics. Micah was feeling very gray throughout the film. So the movie is very gray, except for the moments when he allows himself to truly just be in his body and be in the presence of his partner. That’s when the color kind of wells to the surface. That was our guiding light.
There’s, of course, as you mentioned, a lot of melancholy in Micah’s character. But there’s also a lot of anger. I think he might be, if not the angriest character that’s ever inhabited one of your projects, at least among them. Could you talk about that? Because I don’t think people necessarily associate your filmmaking with anger.
He’s angry. It’s interesting. People typically automatically associate anger with violence. He’s not a violent guy. But you’re right; he’s disillusioned and disappointed with the city and with his life. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t understand the role that he plays in the disillusionment.. But yeah, he is angry. You know, not every movie you make is gonna be therapy. But many of the thoughts and opinions expressed in this film were things that I’d expressed myself, most of them just to my inner self. My partner and I never got into the kind of arguments that Micah and Jo get into in this film.
We stumbled into, sometimes, the inciting incidents or the inciting impulses that gave rise to those things. But his anger comes out of my frustration with the city because I could feel it happening, the thing that’s come to pass in San Francisco, the continual expulsion of people of certain socioeconomic backgrounds, certain ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I just saw those things coming, and it did anger me. It did. For this character, whose life is truly based in the city, who was born and raised there, in a way, he’s kind of like the characters from Joe Talbot’s film [“The Last Black Man in San Francisco”].
You really could take Micah and put him in that movie. He and those characters are kind of coming from the same place; especially the Jimmy Fails character. I felt like “Medicine for Melancholy” was a justifiable platform to express those things. And the Micah character was a beautiful, wonderful platform to express them through.
I like the touch of Jo wearing the Barbara Loden shirt. She does that for a couple women filmmakers. Could you talk about the inspiration behind that decision?
Sometimes when you make a film, you make your picture as though you’re never gonna get to make another film ever. I really thought I was gonna make this thing and then go back to working at Banana Republic and somehow rise up and become the floor manager at Banana Republic and maybe run a store and that would be a good life, you know? In this case, I wanted to put everything into this film. Telluride, at that point, and to this day, played a really big role in my life. But it played an even bigger role back then when I was just an anonymous person working there every year where I’d go and be exposed to all these wonderful films.
I saw “Wanda” on the big screen, projected on film at Telluride. I was just blown away by it. It was upsetting that I’d never heard of her. It was the chance encounter with this restoration of the film print at Telluride that made me wonder how many other filmmakers there were, women, Black, Asian, and so many different people who had made cinema that unfortunately had been pushed to the margins. How many of those people were there that had existed?
When I was thinking of the character of Jo, I just thought, if I have this feeling, a character like Jo would have this feeling to the nth degree. What would she do about it? She would just screenprint these t-shirts so people could ask the question: What’s a Loden? The question that Micah asked was. Then it’s not about making money; it’s about spreading the word of who Barbara Loden is. The first shirt she wears in the film, which we never get a prominent close-up of because I didn’t wanna make these things the point, especially when the scene with the Loden t-shirt was gonna be such a big point, but the first shirt she’s wearing is for Alice Guy-Blaché, who is someone who I also had never heard of. So she actually wears two over the course of the film. I had the experience of finally being exposed to Barbara Loden’s work. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just put that energy into this film?
It’s interesting to think about this movie as a specific time captured in amber.
It is. It’s a time capsule whenever the MySpace page pops up. I mean, because it’s coming out on Criterion now, they’re probably kids who only know me from “Moonlight,” and then they’ll watch this thing and will be like: Why does this look so bad? [laughs] They’re also gonna be like, what’s a MySpace?
That’s definitely a vibe. There’s a vibe for a very specific generation.
Exactly. I remember we used to land on those pages that had way too much Hotmail going on, and it would break your computer. But, you know, we strove to have just the right balance of customization and self-expression. I love MySpace, man. It’s a cool platform. You know, and then Facebook had to ruin it all.
Much more from this interview on the next page.
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