Daydreamer: A Conversation with Sara Driver

Since the early 1980s, when she emerged from the downtown New York arts scene, filmmaker Sara Driver has honed her gift for finding a sense of the hypnagogic and phantasmagoric in the rhythms of everyday life. Now regarded as a landmark of independent cinema, her work draws on everything from ancient mythology and classical fairy tales to American B movies and the French cinéma fantastique. When I visited her recently at her studio, she explained her artistic sensibility by telling me, “I’ve always been a daydreamer. I’ve always loved fantasy. I’m not really good with reality.”

Like many of the artists who got their start in the same cultural milieu, Driver grew up on the outskirts of the city, in suburban New Jersey. After high school, she studied theater and classics before pursuing a master’s degree in film at New York University alongside such peers as Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee. It was there that she began collaborating with Jarmusch, producing his first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980), and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). In between those films, she made her directorial debut with You Are Not I (1981), an eerie and expressionistic adaptation of a Paul Bowles story about a woman who escapes a mental hospital, stumbles upon a deadly accident, and gets mistaken for one of the survivors. Produced on a shoestring budget, You Are Not I was made with a remarkable group of collaborators—including Jarmusch, who cowrote the script and shot the film; photographer Nan Goldin; writer Lucy Sante; and actor Suzanne Fletcher. It was followed by Sleepwalk (1986), which tells the story of a woman (Fletcher) whose life takes a turn for the uncanny after she is hired to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript, and When Pigs Fly (1993), an elegiac portrait of a down-and-out jazz musician (Alfred Molina) haunted by a pair of ghosts (one of whom is played by Marianne Faithfull) after he comes into possession of an old rocking chair. Alongside her fiction films, Driver has made several documentaries that celebrate the New York she has come to know over the past forty years, including The Bowery and Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

With a retrospective of her work now playing on the Criterion Channel, Driver talked with me during my studio visit about how she has navigated being an artist in the city and how her dreams and collaborations have brought her films to life.

Did you always feel the pull of the city and know you wanted to become an artist?: I always knew I’d live in New York. It was this big shadow over me, and I knew I would find my place here. I also fell in love with cinema when I was a little kid. My dad commuted into the city for work every day, and my mom was a businesswoman, so when she’d come in for meetings, she’d bring me along and drop me off at the Carnegie Cinema. They didn’t let me watch television at home, but they loved movies. My mom thought I’d learn French by seeing French New Wave movies, so I was watching things like Claire’s Knee and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. But I was young, so I just remember being really confused about sex—and I didn’t learn any French. I have a vivid memory of being in the backseat of my parents’ car, waiting in traffic to get through the Lincoln Tunnel on Ninth Avenue and looking up at a seedy tenement apartment with flickering fluorescent lights, thinking: I’m going to live in one of those apartments one day. And I am gonna watch the TV series Million Dollar Movie whenever I want!

When did that love for film give rise to the desire to become a filmmaker?: Initially I wanted to be an archeologist. I had always been interested in storytelling and thought it would be great to sit in the mud and discover stories of past civilizations. But soon I realized that, as a woman, I would never be able to achieve much of anything as an academic in that field. [Laughs.] So instead I decided to make my place in the male-dominated film world. When I started writing, I realized it was really helpful to have studied classics and theater. Now I always encourage students to know mythology and classical archetypes, because having that background is so integral to storytelling.

When I moved to New York, I started working in off-off-Broadway theater, but it all felt pretty staid and stodgy. People like Richard Foreman and Bob Wilson were doing great stuff, but there wasn’t a lot going on that interested me. I wrote a play about Zelda Fitzgerald, and when people read it they kept telling me it was “very cinematic.” I didn’t know what that meant! But I used that script to apply for film school.

That early interest in exhuming the past and bringing it into dialogue with the present turns up in your work. When you made the transition into filmmaking, did you have a specific vision of the films you wanted to make?: Well, my first film was in Middle English and was based on the story of Sir Orfeo. My sister, Dr. Martha Driver, is a medievalist, so she helped me. It was a short with a lute soundtrack. But then I read Paul Bowles’s story “You Are Not I”; it’s only seven pages, but I felt such a shock when it ended. I knew that I needed to bring it to the screen and direct the film exactly as I’d read the story. I was very fond of Bowles’s writing, and I just loved being inside the character Ethel’s mind. I love psychological horror, and I’m very interested in the human brain.

It’s funny, years after I made You Are Not I, a therapist told me he first saw it in an institution for people with schizophrenia. But I didn’t approach it with any intent other than to put what I felt from the story onto the screen. It wasn’t researched; everything that you see is from the text. I used that as my guide and wanted to stay true to that. It’s rare to be able to do that with literature.

I’ve heard you talk about the importance of collaboration in filmmaking and of having a sense of community around your work. Was that something that formed during your time at NYU?: NYU was a small school back then, only about 150 students in the three-year program. You had to be invited back each year, which kind of goes against the whole collaborative nature of making films together. But there really was a feeling of community. All artists want to have that sense of community. That’s why people have this love for New York in the eighties. We want to find our herd, our tribe, and to have that support was fantastic.

To edit You Are Not I, I rented an editing room on Ninth Avenue in the Film Center building, but I couldn’t afford to be there during normal hours. I’d work from around midnight to six in the morning, and it was really spooky, especially for a young woman. The elevator scene in Sleepwalk comes from this specific fear of taking the elevator at these weird hours. But a good example of how New York was then is that one day I was editing, a couple of junkie friends stopped by for a visit, a theater director and a legendary jazz drummer. I was working on the rented Steenbeck and one of them said, “Oh, I know where there is a whole stolen truck full of those things. You can get one real cheap—twenty bucks each.” That’s just how things were then.

I’m curious about your experience as a producer and how that role engages you differently than your directorial work.: I’m grateful to have experiences as a producer. It makes you appreciate everyone’s job. But producing is kind of my Achilles heel because I do it so naturally—I like to solve problems. But it takes away from my work as a director, so sometimes I have to keep that side of myself away from myself. I do enjoy producing though. When we were making Permanent Vacation, Jim told me something like, “Now, I want you to find fifteen locations for free.” It did it somehow. It’s kind of like being pushed into a pool and having to learn to swim. I love playing chess, and producing is like chess—it’s all about strategy.

Can you talk about your approach to the visual language of Sleepwalk?: Before I made the film, I read an essay by [Carl Theodor] Dreyer that was about the psychological effect of dim lighting on a movie audience. It also talked about the ways in which color film enhances details while black and white minimizes the details. Although Sleepwalk is in color, I had that on my mind when envisioning the art direction. I liked the idea of making a color film that had the feeling, shadows, and textures of black and white. I always put together a book of things that are influencing me while I’m conceiving a film, and then I share it with my cinematographer and crew.

So how did this mix of dreaming and waking life inform Sleepwalk?: I was working at Todd’s Copy Shop downtown with Kim Gordon, and I was spending so much time staring at the flashing light of the machine. I was stimulated by the idea of machines and how they control you. I also started thinking about fairy tales and the experience of reading something, absorbing it, and then seeing it echoed out in the real world. So much of that film came from my journals.

When I’m making a film, it’s helpful for me to think of one sentence that embodies the soul of it. I don’t remember the exact words I came up with for Sleepwalk, but it had to do with the magic of the city. I love Tarkovsky, I love magic realism, and cinéma fantastique is my favorite genre. I wanted this film to celebrate my city and also to capture this fantastical feeling. It’s funny that After Hours came out the same year as Sleepwalk, as both films are similar, and about our magical, mysterious city.

The city at that time was so alive and emotional because it was so dangerous. You had to have a kind of antenna up all the time and be aware of your surroundings, especially if you were a young woman walking around alone at night. But there was something so great about that because it forced you to focus on details. I cut off my hair and learned to walk like a boy so I wouldn’t be harmed. The city streets at night were empty and lawless. Everyone downtown felt we somehow owned the city.

Although your filmmaking community was primarily in New York, your work also feels connected to what was being made in Europe at that time in the ’80s and ’90s.: When we started making films, we were very lucky because, although we didn’t have any money, film festivals would fly us to places like Rotterdam where we’d meet our heroes. You could see movies by artists like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and then meet them.

There’s a whole discussion now about the relevance of film festivals, and I was recently asked to do a lecture about the future of them. I ended up talking about the New York Film Festival and how people love it because it’s noncompetitive and the filmmakers feel like they have contact with the audience. So many festivals have lost this intimacy and sense of community, but it is so important to nurture young filmmakers and to be able to see films and meet their future collaborators who might be from a different part of the world.

You’d originally written When Pigs Fly to be shot in New England. How did you end up making the film in East Germany?: I’d scouted locations in the Catskills and then in Massachusetts, but we got money from a Dutch producer and funding from Germany at the last minute, so we had to move the film to Hamburg about a month before we were set to start shooting. I brought five Americans for crew—my sound team, first A.D., wardrobe, and production designer. We filled a quarter of a container ship with props we found in antique stores upstate so that we could have some American references. But I liked the idea of the film existing in a sort of netherworld that didn’t feel distinctly fixed in a specific location.

What was the shooting experience like once you got there?: When I got there, I took a boat ride around to get the feeling of the city. Hamburg had been so badly bombed during World War II that you could only place your camera in a few locations, so we scouted throughout East Germany. It was right after the Berlin Wall came down, and there was still a lot of hesitation from the West Germans about working with East Germans, but the people we worked with were wonderful.

We ended up filming in a town called Wismar, which was perfect. I later found out it was where Murnau shot Nosferatu. But it was such a bizarre period to be there, because there were still so many remnants of the past, and Wismar, due to the merging of East with West, was frozen in time. Huge ships built by the Russians in Wismar were unsold and waiting, thousands of East German cars, Trabant cars lined up on the dock to be shipped out. Russian troops were still marching around. The Russian government was unable to afford to bring them home. I ended up using a lot of Russian soldiers as extras in the big ghost walk scene. We fed them well and paid them, which they needed very badly. We also got hit by the neo-Nazis, who destroyed the one Cadillac we had for the film. They put sugar in the gas tanks, and painted swastikas on the walls of our brick location. We had to hire former Stasi to protect our locations and our equipment. It was pretty insane.

I’d love to know about your work with Robby Müller and how you approached the look of the film and the in-camera effects.: I was fascinated by directors like Jean Cocteau and cinematographers like Henri Alekan, who created films with such amazing in-camera effects. We met with Henri Tiquet, who worked with Cocteau and Alekan on Beauty and the Beast and advised us on the in-camera effects.

Robby and I had a lot of fun figuring out the effects. For example, the scene where the little girl ghost is hitting Alfred [Molina] in the stomach, we used mirrors. We shot straight through to Alfred while the girl was hitting a black wall across the room. Her reflection bounced through a half-mirror and right into the camera. Alfred remained solid, and she was semitransparent. That kind of work is so exciting.

Before the shoot, I gave Robby a book of all my visual references, and I remember him saying—in that voice that was so much like Peter Lorre’s—“No one has ever given me such a beautiful book.”

Music is so important to the atmosphere and the characters in When Pigs Fly. What was it like working with Joe Strummer on this?: Recently, I keep finding Joe’s notes on the process. He was a good friend of ours. I always thought of him as a musicologist, because he knew so much about all kinds of music. He played with the Pogues, so of course he knew Irish music, which was important to this story. We could afford only a few days in Wales to record the music, but Joe had written all the songs before we got there, based on what I’d told him about the story. He was incredible and gave the film so much. I remember laughing, telling him I couldn’t afford to index all of the music, but he was just bursting—he’d been kept out of the studio for years because the Clash supposedly owed the record company money.

Thinking about your work being on the Criterion Channel and finding new audiences, I’m wondering how it feels to revisit your films now.: I didn’t really watch them again until I worked on restoring the films in 2011. It’s very difficult to watch your own films; they seem almost like a different life. I don’t really judge them; they’re just in their own space and time. I was once at the Midnight Sun Film Festival with Aki Kaurismäki, and there was some director there who was watching his own films. I remember Aki saying, “I don’t trust directors who watch their films over and over again.” And I thought, okay, I’m not going to do that.

Daydreamer: A Conversation with Sara Driver

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