Crispin Hellion Glover at NWFF
Crispin Hellion Glover at NWFF Kelly O

Most articles you read about Crispin Hellion Glover tend to emphasize the idea that he is weird.

This perception is aided by the excellent performances he has given in films (most memorably in Back to the Future, River’s Edge, Rubin and Ed, Charlie’s Angels, Oliver Stone’s The Doors, David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, and Hot Tub Time Machine), but also by his off-screen work, which has included the creation of books and music using experimental and outsider art techniques, and discomfiting interactions with mainstream media (e.g. the notorious in-character appearance on Letterman in 1987).

His effectiveness as an actor, and the consistency of his personal artistic aesthetic, has combined with the mounting predictability of the entertainment industry over the 30 years or so that he has been working to create an easy shorthand category for Glover: the last of the conspicuous eccentrics who still get work in Hollywood from time to time. And while there’s more than a bit of condescension implied by such a classification, it has undoubtedly helped keep him employed, and that employment, in turn, has enabled him to finance his work as an independent filmmaker—in the tradition, if not the style, of Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Glover’s River’s Edge co-star Dennis Hopper, among others.

He is in Seattle presenting screenings of What Is It? and It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE—the first two films in an in-progress trilogy—accompanied by a narrated slide show tonight and tomorrow at the Northwest Film Forum.

I met him at NWFF for a brief interview last week and found him to be genial and talkative—which was only surprising in light of the 30 years worth of profiles I’d read in that conflated his persona with his person. The following is a condensed account of our conversation, which began with Glover explaining that he had recently completed principal photography on a new film in which he appears with his father, the actor Bruce Glover, for the first time. Though the new film is not part of the trilogy, he’ll show a trailer for it at the screenings.

You’ve been making this trilogy for a long time. Is it hard maintain your connection to an artistic endeavor over such a long period?
I started shooting What Is It in 1996. When I started shooting it, it was a short film to promote a different screenplay, which is called It Is Mine.. That will ultimately end up being part three of the trilogy. I didn’t have a trilogy in mind when I started it. So, 1996, next year will be 20 years. I’m right now in my 10th anniversary of touring with the films… I’m pretty sure these screenings will sell out this time—it’s funny, ‘selling out,’ the two meanings: one sounds like it’s bad. It’s a strange term because selling out is great, like, I want to sell out!

Right. Because you tour with the films and I haven’t been able to make it to prior sceenings in Seattle, I’ve had to rely on third party descriptions of what the trilogy is about.
It’s not a standard trilogy. They’re more thematically related. It really doesn’t matter what order somebody sees it in.

Are you at work on these films constantly (when you’re not acting in other movies) or do you step away from them and come back?
I had read the screenplay [for Everything is Fine] back in 1986 or ’87. How long ago is that? 30 years, practically. Time flies. It’s part of why I didn’t shoot part three, and why I shot the film with my father. And I’m assuming the next film I make I’m assuming won’t be part three either. I need to step away. I mean, it’s been essentially 20 years. That’s a long time to be dealing with a thematic element. I don’t mind… There’s a funny thing that happens when you’re physically editing—I edit on Adobe Premiere—you get enmeshed in it in a certain way that it becomes reality. Then you step out of it and you enter an alternate reality.

[A long, technical discussion of the stages of Adobe Premiere software development and the process by which Glover taught himself to use it follows.]

Most of what I have read about the trilogy, or at least What Is It? focusses on the fact that many of the cast members have Down Syndrome, but aside from speculation about your motivations for casting them, I haven’t seen a lot of writing about what the film is getting at.
The thing I always say, and I know it by heart is: Most of the actors in the film have Down Syndrome, but the film is not about Down Syndrome at all. What it really is is my reaction to the corporate constraints that have happened in the last 30 or more years of filmmaking wherein anything that could possibly make an audience member uncomfortable is necessarily excised, or that film will not be corporately funded or distributed. This is a very damaging thing because it’s that moment when an audience member sits back in their chair and thinks to themselves, ‘Is this right, what I’m watching? Is this wrong, what I’m watching? Should I be here? Should the filmmaker have done this? What is it?’—that’s the title of the film—‘What is it that’s taboo in the culture? What does it mean when the taboo has been ubiquitously excised?’ This is very damaging because to ubiquitously excise the taboo or the possibility of the audience to ask questions… the etymological breakdown of the word ‘educate’ is ‘to learn from within.’ That’s how questions cause true education. To ubiquitously excise that possibility, it becomes non-educational, or worse—the opposite of educational. What’s the opposite of education? It’s propaganda. And that is what’s happening in our corporately funded film industry. Anyhow, What Is It? and Everything is Fine… they’re not good films to sell to corporations.

Are corporations interested?
There were people who contacted me for both the films from smaller companies that wanted to distribute them, but I knew what would happen—and I talked to many of filmmakers who have gone through this. I knew they would open in LA, New York, Chicago, for a week or a few days, then put them out on DVD and I would never see any money from it. I knew I would have much more wherewithal to get the films in front of audiences on the big screen by touring with the films and the slide show. I know that I did the right thing. I always knew. I didn’t exactly know how it would manifest… This new film is still strongly an art house film, but it is not aggressively anti-corporate. It doesn’t have things that would cause a commotion if it was shown on an airplane, for example, whereas What Is It? and Everything Is Fine are not airplane-friendly.