You can make a pretty solid case that Don Hertzfeldt is the most successful independent filmmaker of the 21st century. Not because he’s topped the box office or made a killing—although in an hourlong conversation, he more than once used the word lucrative to describe his work—but because nearly 30 years after his animated stick-figure shorts started to attract attention, he’s still making them and showing them to sellout crowds all over the world. Even more impressively, he’s done it without the help of movie studios or distributors, evolving from the ingenious crudity of early films like Rejected and Billy’s Balloon to the poignant It’s Such a Beautiful Day and the devastating World of Tomorrow trilogy, a mind-bending sci-fi saga whose characters evoke profound and complex emotions despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that they still look like childish scribbles.
Despite his substantial fan base, Hertzfeldt had never taken on a commission more elaborate than a Simpsons couch gag until a rock band approached him about making a film to accompany songs from their forthcoming album. (For legal reasons, he’s not allowed to name them, but Arcade Fire seems like an awfully good guess.) He’d just about finished the 20-minute visual when a scandal tanked the album-release plans, and although Hertzfeldt got his film back, he no longer had the songs he’d built the entire thing around: a musical with no music. But rather than be daunted, Hertzfeldt went back to what he’s always done: making it himself. The band’s songs were replaced by tracks ranging from avant-garde opera to Jelly Roll Morton, and the story of a self-involved inventor whose creation brings the world to the brink of a lonely apocalypse seems as purely his as anything Hertzfeldt has ever made, and like something no one else could. With Me at last available on demand, Hertzfeldt talked to Slate from his home in Austin, Texas, about how he’s survived and flourished as an independent artist, why the feature film he’s been trying to make for a decade might actually be happening soon, and the reason we should all be Taylor Swift fans. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Sam Adams: It’s not unusual for filmmakers to have to swap out a song after their movie’s complete, but I’m not sure I know of another case where the entire soundtrack had to be replaced. How did you cope with that situation?
Don Hertzfeldt: From the very beginning, when I was writing, I thought about my own favorite songs, and how interesting and strange it was that, although I’ve been listening to some of them for 30 years, I’m not sure if I could easily tell you what they’re about. There’s something about a great song that maybe it means something to me, but it could mean something completely different to you and something completely different to the guy who wrote the song. It’s probably why we return to our favorite songs often, like a great poem. There’s something you can’t put your finger on that’s mysterious and beautiful and a little elusive. That got me thinking, how do I get that feeling in a picture? How do you get that vibe of, “I can’t explain to you what this is, but I know it when I’m watching it.”
When everything went sideways on me, it was more of a technical challenge than a creative one. The story was the story from the beginning. That didn’t change much. I spent a lot of time trimming and adding, but most of it was like, “OK, I’ve got to find all new music, and then that music’s going to have its own rhythm, and so I’m editing to something completely different. Does this throw the pacing out? Do I tell this in a different order now? Do I tell this in a different way?” There’s still moments in there, a lot of them in the first third, where these big ink splots fill the screen, and all of those used to be synced to beats and drums and things. Removing those and putting in something different, they just sort of appear now. It seems like it’s haunted by the music that’s not there—which I like.
It took a few viewings for me to get my head around Me, but one thing that jumped out is that in the first section, you have this character who is very focused on a device that he is inventing, and he’s so preoccupied with his own work that he doesn’t notice that the police are shooting protesters or that people wearing surgical masks are dropping dead in the street. Your movies rarely have a concrete sense of time or place, but that seems to pretty clearly be about what happened in 2020.
If you have a film with themes of fascism or genocide, unfortunately, it’s going to be timeless. It seems with mass graves, unfortunately, that’s going to be timeless. The pandemic was in there, but we may have another one soon enough where it may seem topical again. It was a movie that was very present compared to some of the other things I’ve been working on in a way, but it was not a reaction to specific things, because there’s so many global nightmares that have happened since.
The last time we did an interview was 12 years ago, and you were still working with film and drawing on paper. You’ve since gone entirely digital, but at the time you were concerned that digital animation was pushing people toward a lack of individuality: “If you ask a computer animator … ‘Draw me a guy on a bicycle,’ you’re going to get a perfectly rendered bicycle. It’s a noun.” Have you found upsides to working digitally, apart from it making the entire process less labor-intensive?
I still think that for 3D animation, there’s this great homogenization. And that for 2D on a theatrical feature-length level, you see that to some degree too, where everything starts looking the same. There’s something beautiful about the way, if I asked you to draw a bicycle from memory, it’d just be this beautiful—I know nothing about your art skills, maybe you’re a wonderful draftsman.
They’re, uh, extremely limited.
Well, there’s a good chance it’s going to be this beautiful-looking weird contraption, and there’s something about that that is expressing a worldview. There’s something about that that is unique to you as Sam, that I can’t draw like that, that someone else can’t draw like that. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Only Mike Judge can draw characters the way Mike Judge draws them, like Beavis and Butt-Head. It’s not beautifully rendered, but there’s a personality in those lines. That was the fear from making that technological leap. But then you realize, Oh, you just make the move from paper to a tablet. That’s what I did.
So you are still drawing by hand, just on a different surface.
I’m still hand-drawing everything like I was forever. Some animators I know can’t do it. They don’t like drawing on a tablet because it feels like you’re writing on glass, and there’s a texture and a tension there that they’re missing. Some animators I know still do paper and then they sit and scan it all. I was able to take to the tablet pretty easily. I might just not be as talented as an illustrator. I don’t know.
My other hesitation was with film and cameras, it’s just literally a box that can contain light. Anything I can put under that lens is fair game, and I don’t have to render it out, I don’t have to work on filters. I can shoot through weird lenses and get experimental with my hands. I was very afraid that with a computer, you have to know what you want. Tell the computer what you want, and it’ll create it for you. I don’t think a filmmaker should know what they want or even get what they want all the time. It’s nice to have to realize that your first idea wasn’t your best. I think Me might be the perfect large-scale example of that.
But then I learned to experiment with the software. You don’t really know what this is until you’ve gotten your hands dirty and you’re working on the images and, “Oh, it can look like this. We can bend it this way.” I’m working on an experimental thing right now, where I don’t know if this project I’m working on is just going to give everyone motion sickness. I think I cracked the code late last night. But there’s only so much you can do on the page. There’s only so much you can write. It’s not until I’m animating that it’s like draft one again. You get the sense of, “OK, this is actually where the movie seems to be headed.” Long story short, I was able to figure that out with the digital stuff. The World of Tomorrow movies are extremely experimental visually, and that’s all coming from that spirit.
You animate in Photoshop, but you’ve said that you don’t really know how it works, and I wonder if that’s a feeling you try to hold onto. You could presumably sit down with the manual and learn all the tools, but you would lose the likelihood of discovering things by accident.
Yeah, absolutely. You don’t know what you’re not allowed to do. I still don’t know, but I’ve felt better about myself because I have spoken to people who are in technical positions in cinema who are like, “Yeah, I don’t know what half this stuff does either.” I think it’s a sign of good software where you don’t need to. A sign of good software to me is it’s intuitive, and you can put your things in, and hopefully behave like an artist and make a mess and not break things. The downside is when you realize there’s something you could have done easier a long time ago.
I felt that way too about just animating in general. I’m self-taught, I never took an animation class, and that probably shows here and there. It wasn’t until I was maybe 10 years into animating that I discovered some of these great all-time animation books, like, “Here’s philosophy on walks. Here’s philosophies on bouncing balls.” You think, “I really wish I had this when I was a kid.” But there’s something to be said for just being thrown into the woods with a knife, because you learn a lot that way too.
At one point, your new films were being financed in large part by DVD sales of your previous work. Has the decline of physical media affected your sustainability?
The Blu-rays are still selling great. Maybe it’s just my audience, just that kind of a collector, I don’t know, but I haven’t noticed a big change there. Sometimes they’re still outselling our streaming sales. Streaming, that’s always going to be a frustrating area, just because … I have so many theories about streaming. I feel like if one of your favorite filmmakers said, “Announcement: I’ve got a new science-fiction movie coming out, and it’s going to be out in a year,” you’ll be excited and you’re going to speculate: “What’s this going to be about? I can’t wait to see this.” But if they said, “Surprise, it’s streaming right now on Netflix,” it’s like, “Oh, cool, OK, well, I’ve got to get through House of the Dragon, and then I still haven’t finished Succession.” You just kind of throw it onto the heap.
I think if you’re a fan of something, you want to be excited, you want to be involved, you want to feel like you’re part of that culture. If you look at the Taylor Swift fans who are following her around on tour, they’re steeped in the lore of her bullshit life or whatever’s going on with that, they’re having a great time. It’s fun to be a fan of something and to feel like you can be excited again.
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
I feel like culture is when we’re all on the same page. For better or worse, when everyone’s watching the same thing, we all get something to talk about. That brings people together. Deep down, we want to be a Taylor Swift fan.
You’ve always worked alone, or close to it: The only credit on Me is “A Film by Don Hertzfeldt.” But you’ve been talking for almost 10 years about making a feature-length film with a crew of other animators. That project has been dormant at times, but it seems like it’s starting up again. Is that true, and is it still Antarctica?
It’s Antarctica, and it is starting up. I can’t say it’s been in development for so many years, because that’s just an embarrassing thing to say. It’s been festering. It’s been stagnating for 15-odd years. There’s been so many false starts, but we’ve got a fantastic team now. Ari Aster is producing through his Square Peg company, and it’s now just logistics: money and location and all of the big stuff. Where are all the great young 2D animators living now? How much is this going to cost in the end? I’ve never felt more confident about it. Just last week, I came up with my wish list of performers. And I’m dying to work with a crew. I’m dying to get some other creative people in the room and collaborate and play. It’s been 30 years where, I’ve had an actor here and there, but by and large, it’s just me. I’m not getting any younger. Even before the production of Me began, I was thinking, “How much longer do I want to do this by myself?” Me was only supposed to take a year, but it took two, and The World of Tomorrow Episode 3 took two years. It’s a fun thing to do, but at a certain point, it’s like, “Is this the only thing? Is this the rest of my life? Is this still rewarding? Is this still interesting?” Then you start to think, “Am I running up against the boundaries of what I can do by myself?”
I’m very confident in Antarctica, because it is a movie that I started writing so long ago, and every few years I take it off the shelf and give it a rewrite and put it back. It’s not a movie that I just wrote last weekend and I’m still figuring out. I’ve made it in my head about 20 times. I know every shot, and I know everything we’d like to try. I’m not worried about going in there with the crew and wasting time.
You mentioned you were up late experimenting with something. Is that typical for you? As someone who has sustained an artistic practice for almost 30 years, what’s a day in the life of Don Hertzfeldt like?
I like to work at night, for sure. There’s less I can distract myself with. There’s no emails to check. There’s no one to talk to. I can just focus. I can see from the outside looking in, it’s a strange job. It seems like it can be a lonely job. But it’s still fun, and I’m still learning. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning. That is addictive, and that is exciting. Not just learning animation or techniques, but you learn about yourself and what you’re writing. I definitely want to extinguish any romantic ideas of artists have to suffer, because this is a lot of fun and it’s very interesting. That’s the only reason I’m still doing it. It’s not to make a pile of cash or anything. You’re pursuing something, and you don’t always know what that is.
I think I’ve been able to survive this long, ironically, because I’ve had to be independent. It’s because I’ve had to be self-financed. When I was young, no one would invest in this stuff. Why would they? We don’t have [an equivalent of the] National Film Board of Canada, but if we did, they would own the movie. I’ve never had studio involvement with this stuff. I’ve never had a grant. If I’m going to make this stuff, it just came out of my bank account. I could never afford to hire a crew. I’ve always felt very guilty about asking people to work for free. The upshot of that is I own everything now. I’ve got this body of work. Except for the thing I did for The Simpsons, it’s all mine, and that’s been incredibly lucrative, which is not what one would expect from making cartoons for 30 years. That’s enabled me to continue doing this with complete freedom, which is a dream.
I also get a lot of anxiety when I’m not in production on something. I’ve learned that when I finish a project, it’s very good for me to just launch right into another one. You would think I should go on vacation or take a cruise or something, but that stops all of this momentum, and I’ll kind of crash and maybe I’ll get sad or something. If I have something else I can leap into right away, it’s easier to wrap this one up, and I can carry that energy onward. It’s taken many, many years to learn this, through a lot of trial and error, but it’s just the way I seem to be built. When I’m not in production on something, I feel like I’m wasting time. I’m squandering something that not everybody has the ability to do. Maybe that’s not healthy either. Maybe a therapist could sort some of that out. I think the bottom line is it’s still fun. To that end, I don’t feel like I ever have a reason to retire, because what else am I going to do? What the hell else am I capable of doing?
There was a period a few years ago where I was sitting around feeling lousy and couldn’t figure out why, and I suddenly realized, Oh, it’s because I haven’t written anything in a while. A lot of writers will say that they mainly enjoy having written, but I actually like the process.
It’s because you’re good at it. That’s something that when I was young, I also sort of discounted, because I was animating in high school and it was just a fun laugh, just to show my friends something funny on a weekend. I always thought I’d get into live action, even when I went to film school. I didn’t take animation seriously because it came easily to me. It took me a long time to realize, maybe it comes easily to me and it’s fun because I’m good at it. Maybe that’s what a talent is called, but you feel like you have to beat yourself up and do things the hard way or it doesn’t count. It took a lot of reprogramming to realize not everybody feels this way, and not everybody takes to animation as naturally. This is maybe something you should be thinking about.
Sitting at a desk and drawing incremental variations on the same movements for days on end is not most people’s idea of a good time.
No. I think a lot of animators have a lot of anxiety. We have a lot of depression. Everybody does. When I’m animating, the anxiety goes away, and no drug makes that happen. You get the sense of, at the very least, “This is maybe what I should be doing.” I don’t want to analyze it too closely, because I’m afraid of jiggling the wires and maybe something will not work anymore, but it feels like a natural thing. If I’m able to do this and I’m enjoying it, I’m not going to inspect it too closely.
You might get this question all the time, but if a young person comes up to you and is trying to establish themselves as an independent artist, what advice would you have for them?
I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that nobody knows anything, especially with independent animation, and that there absolutely are no rules. We’re all just making things up, especially with the technologies changing every few years. We’re all adapting. When I was a student in the ’90s, it was very, very difficult to make an animated short at all. And what that did was it created a great filter. If you were somebody who was just kind of messing around, maybe you want to make this, maybe you don’t—if you didn’t really believe in this idea, you’re not going to finish the movie. So if you actually completed an animated short, it was probably going to be pretty good. In a given year in the ’90s, maybe there were 50 animated shorts that were pretty good. There was MTV, there was the Spike and Mike festival. There were all these distributors who wanted them. It was relatively easy to be noticed and to break through if you actually completed the thing and got it out there. Today, it’s completely reversed. You can make a movie on your phone, you can animate something in your garage. You don’t have to know about labs, you don’t have to know about all this other junk, but there’s 300,000 animated shorts made every year. How on earth are you going to stand out? That I don’t envy.
I think the only thing that has really stayed the same are the film festivals. I think that’s still the best way to separate yourself from some YouTuber, and say this is legitimate in some way, however you want to define it. Everyone in the film festival world tends to know each other, and they’re going to remember you for your next movie. If I was young today, that’s what I would do. I don’t even know if that’s the correct advice, but I also feel like it’s very liberating, at least, to know that there still are not really any career paths. You could say, “Do what Don did,” but I could have just gotten extremely lucky. Who can say? I’ve been floundering in different directions, and every few years, you have to evolve again or die. “OK, now we’ll do a Blu-ray. OK, now everyone’s doing this. We’ll go into streaming.” You just listen to what the audience wants and follow them.
I will say, one thing that students have asked a few times—it’s sort of a defeatist question—where they’ll make their short, they’ll make their student film, and then they’ll say, “Well, who would ever pay to watch this?” I’ve really been pushing to retrain audiences to pay for shorts, to learn that a short is worth paying for, even if it’s a 99-cent rental. It’s just the principle of the thing. I really don’t want to be cruel, and I don’t want to be dismissive, but if you don’t believe your work is worth paying for, you need to be making better work. If you yourself, the filmmaker, don’t believe you would pay for this, then you got to keep working and you got to keep upping your game.
I say this as someone who never took Economics 101, but it’s Economics 101 that the value of a thing is defined by how much someone will pay for it. If you charge nothing for it, it is, in the strictest sense, worth nothing.
The YouTube model has done a lot of damage to a lot of young students and filmmakers, who are primarily starting out in shorts, by training them that their work has no value. It’s just, put it on YouTube for the attention, and then maybe you’ll attract an advertising campaign, and that’ll pay for the next thing you want to make, rather than the work paying for itself. That is something that I wish we could break.
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