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The first question that I would love to ask is how you came up with
this idea, because it seems like an idea that many people would sympathize
with. Was it something that came out of a real experience, or was it
just a response to dealing with landlords?
Well, the whole idea really started with the last image first. I spent
a lot of my adult life in Vermont. And when I moved here, if I'd feel down
I'd look up at the watertowers. And maybe that's because watertowers were
the only things made of wood in the city and they weather like barns, I
guess. And I would just imagine that they were rockets and that
I would be walking in Manhattan and imagine the whole city
lifting off, just leaving the empty spaces. That always cheered me up.
So I wanted to use that as the end of the film. So then I had to make up a
whole film to go with it. And I knew that I wanted to do a film about a
strong woman that didn't have anything to do with relationships, because so
many people that I know are just into one thing passionately and that's
kind of the core of their lives. And so at the time when I was making it
and trying to figure out what this film would be about, it seemed like four
out of five people I would talk to were having some problem with their
landlord or they were looking for a new place because in one year their
rent had gone up $200. And it just seemed like such a central subject at
that time. So it just made sense, because I did also want to
make a film that people could relate to.
How did you come up with the character of Rocket Girl, because she's
quite delightful and her passions are really well expressed in this. And I
think she's also a really great role model for people. As you said, it's
not about a love affair necessarily as much as it is about her own
obsessions and love of her work.
Right. Let's see. It sort of seemed because I was going to be using
animation in the end, that this character was sort of a super hero comic
book type of character. But I didn't want to use the image like the male
comic-book-super-hero-woman-wearing-tight-fitting-clothes-type of person at
all, because that would kind of be expected. And I actually had Karen -- the
actor is Karen Sherman -- and I had seen her once reading text at a dance
performance and at that time because of her hair and the way she was, she
reminded me of a comic book character from this lesbian comic strip. I
can't remember the name of it now. And when I was living in the country, I
always thought that lesbians don't exist like that, like where is this
ideal world? So she had always reminded me of one of those characters.
And then I ran into her on the subway right when I was making the film, and
I asked would she be interested in doing it. So that's kind of how the
image of the character came about. And when I first started writing the
script, it had a lot more characters at the beginning, and then I didn't want
it to be very verbal, so I had to take out a lot of the characters. I
think that's why, one reason why, she ended up being alone a lot. And
I know that I spend a lot of time just by myself and I think a lot of
people do. I have had different ideas at different times of making a film
or writing a story about somebody who is basically alone and capable all
the time. And so part of the character came from that idea.
First, I was writing and then there was a roommate who was always
going off to political workshops and meetings and was just totally busy. And
the other character was at home just doing her own thing -- which, at that
time, was model trains, not model rockets. And she would always just be
home and she was so into what she was doing and her roommate would always be
saying, "But, you know, you're not doing anything, and we're going to lose our
apartment," and this and that. And, in the end, the character who was
really into her own thing sort of solved the whole problem by ending up
being even more radical than her roommate. And so that was where
the idea was coming from. When you're into what you're doing, it usually
ends up that you can solve the problems that way.
When you were thinking about making this, did you
consider other kinds of formats? It follows a fairly traditional
narrative style, and I was interested in if you thought about doing it more
experimentally, or in animation, or were there other considerations before
you got into this?
At that time my intent was definitively to work on it as a narrative.
That was the task I had set out to do. I had done before a
short narrative which was much more serious and I didn't feel it was very
successful. So I wanted to keep working on a pretty straight narrative
format and see if I could get better at it. And I think that's why I
wanted to put a lot more humor in this time, because I think that was
missing in the first one. So I wanted to work on a narrative and make
it enjoyable at the same time, instead of just being a heavy, heavy story.
And, at that time, I wasn't too into experimental work at all, and now that's
definitely creeping in. And I'd like to do
more animation. Before that I had done some animated films using little
like cowboy and firemen figures, and they all danced and all sorts of things
happened so . . . That's why I knew I could do the animation. It didn't seem
like a problem.
Did you have any kind of odd production happenings
when you were shooting?
A couple. One is, when it came time to, I wanted to get a permit to
launch the rocket in Prospect Park, and it turns out there's no place in
New York City where it's legal to launch a model rocket. There's some park
where you can do those airplanes, but you can't launch a rocket. And so it
crossed my mind, "Well, I'll just do it anyway," but as soon as you have a
movie camera out you attract attention. People come watch, park rangers
come by, and all this stuff. So I ended up -- I grew up in Connecticut and
my parents live in town now, but we used to live where there were a lot of
woods and fields. So I called up my father and he met me at the station and
we went out to the field where I used to launch rockets with my brother and
neighbor when I was a kid. And we launched it there. And my father
just barely remembered that we had ever done model rockets at all. But
then it turned out that the color of the grass didn't match enough for me,
and it was very hard to shoot the rocket actually because you have to do
tight close-ups, and you have to catch it. You have to know where it's
going to be in the sky. I mean that was actually probably the hardest part
of the filming. But so I didn't really like how that day of shooting had
come out. That was in December, and then in March, a
friend -- who was the assistant director -- and I went back to Connecticut,
and this time I went to my old elementary school where people used to also
launch rockets and we did it there. And that was the final shoot. And,
actually, in the field we found an old model rocket somebody else had shot
off recently.
Oh, that's funny. It really did look like it was all filmed in Prospect Park.
Well, Karen was in Prospect Park, but then all the shots of the rocket
were just cutaways, so Karen wasn't even there.
It works quite well. So you had this obsession of
rocket launching from when you were a kid. I mean you actually did this
when you were growing up?
Yeah, it wasn't an obsession. It was really more something my brother
did and that I thought was cool. He was a year older, so I would help him,
and we'd go out with our neighbor and shoot off rockets. They were a lot
more into it [than I was]. But I remember, I was a member of the Estees Rocket Club and
put their iron-on patches on my T-shirts, and stuff like that. Oh, there's
one other production story. Okay, so the scenes that are outside, except for
the ones with dialogue, I shot silently and then put all the sounds in
later. So I drove over two blocks from where I live to where we had
shot some of the outside thing, the scene where she knocks over the real
estate sign. And I wanted the traffic sounds from there, so I double-parked. I
needed two minutes of sound. I got out. I recorded the sound. I got back
to my car, which was right in front of me, and I had a parking ticket. I
didn't see the meter maid come by, or anything. I was there for two minutes
and there's this $55 ticket for double-parking. It was just the weirdest
thing.
You know there's this scene in there about the character
going to visit the psychic to ask for advice, and I just wondered how that
scene came about. Have you had experience with psychics or was it, you
know, as you've said in the film instead of going to a lawyer she decides
to go to see the psychic?
Well, the way that that came about was I took a class at the New School
in order to make the film, because then you can use all their production
equipment in your classes. So, before the first
class, we had to have a script and the weekend before the
first class and I still didn't know exactly what this film was. And so I
was walking down the street in Brooklyn, and somebody handed me their little
flyer. It was like Madame Sonya or something. I just all of a sudden
remembered that there are so many psychics around here. And it's something
that a lot of women that I know and older women are really into. And you
know how you'll be walking down the street and sometimes they'll beckon you
in and everyone's like, "I better go because she beckoned me," even though
it's a ploy. And so it just seemed like a theme that a lot of people are
interested in. And it's also sort of, I don't know if this is a
sexist comment, but it seems like more women I know than men are into it.
That may not actually be true. It doesn't matter, actually.
And it just seemed like I wanted to put it into the film.
I didn't want her to be overlooking
possibilities that other people would have said, "Well, she would have gone
to a lawyer." You know, I wanted her to actually make the decision not to
go to a lawyer. You know, they would have said, "How stupid. Why didn't
she just sue him?" And I wanted to make that a conscious choice, that
she would solve it in her own way.
Right. And the thing that's interesting about the psychic is that she
kind of leaves her hanging a little bit.
I've had my fortune read on the street and it seems
like that is always what happens. They tell you a few things that could
apply to anybody and then you're left not really either believing what they
said or not knowing anything more than before. So you're the same
person, and that really didn't help, and you're still left on your own. At
Halloween the year before, a friend had been reading Tarot cards and when
she read mine -- that's where the line "this deck is so hot" came from --
because this person said, "This deck is so hot.
You're very angry about something." And I was at that time, I was
just angry about many, many things, and she could actually feel that.
She was actually a beginner, and she was a great Tarot card reader. She
was amazing. And then also at the same time, it was funny.
I also work at a dance theater doing the lights, and I was talking
to a woman who was working on a dance at that time, and she also was doing
something sort of based on the idea of a psychic and oranges.
And my brother in high school had spent a
year in Brazil -- I was 12 or so at the time -- and I
remember him showing us that sparking orange peel thing, and saying that the
Brazilians actually use that in their rocket fuels. Just these little
things I wanted to put into the film all came together, and they wrote the
story.
The other thing that's really interesting is the colors in
the film.
Yeah, color is always really important to me. So, orange was obviously
a main color. And then the blue of the table was just there, which I think
is really nice. But the quality, the tone of the blue and the
green of the car and the orange, all sort of were the same color tone. But
the orange was also a visual thing.
I just decided I want Rocket Girl to be in an orange worksuit.
The thing that's
interesting about the colors is it makes the film really graphic. Like you
were talking about kind of going back to these woman superheroes, you
know, or comic books as a source. And, in a way, the film has a really
graphic quality to it. I think because you've used these really strong
colors that are in opposition to each other, but working quite well
complementarily, too.
And maybe also because I decided to use hand-drawn titles.
I wanted it to have a little bit of a roughness to it rather than
use, you know, those black and white titles that look so formal and
everyone sort of gets into, "Wow, doesn't my film look professional now
because of the titles." And I'm not into that at all, so that's why I did
the hand-drawn titles.
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