EXCULSIVE INTERVIEW: MATT PORTERFIELD

Putty Hill writer-director Matt Porterfield.

In his hands

By Don Simpson

I am a real sucker for cinematic realism, so writer-director Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill is right up my proverbial alley. The setting is a poor, working-class suburb of Baltimore where descriptive adjectives such as decrepit, depressing and boring seem to fit best. There is nothing of merit or worth here. It seems as though no one works -- with the exception of drug dealers. This is a community of tattoos, dreadlocks, torn clothes, skaters and BMXers, graffiti, paintball, video games and drugs. Nonetheless, a place in Porterfield’s sympathetic hands.

JEsther Entertainment met up with Porterfield at Putty Hill’s U.S. premiere at SXSW 2010 to chat about the collaborative nature of his sophomore effort and his unique brand of cinematic realism.

JEsther Entertainment: Something that really intrigues me about Putty Hill is the high level of realism. Did you set any specific standards for yourself, the cast and the crew to achieve this?

Matt Porterfield: When I made my first feature film, Hamilton -- which is also an attempt at cinematic realism -- I did set strict rules for myself to follow, like [Robert] Bresson’s model. No score, only diegetic sound of an onscreen source. The approach to the aesthetic, as well, was really pared back -- a kind of an economy to the aesthetic. This time going in -- because the circumstances were so different -- the only devise in place was the interviews with the cast. That served to make all of us aware that we were attempting, self-consciously, this exercise in realism. All of us were aware of the mechanism and aware of the fictive and truer elements of the film and how they kept intersecting, and that's the experience that the audience has as well. I didn’t give the actors too much back story. I told them about the fictive character Cory who ties all of their worlds together. I told them that I would be off-camera interviewing them and if I asked questions that they could answer truthfully from within their own life than I encouraged them to do so. I have an aesthetic sensibility that favors long masters and I use non-professionals principally. Working that way allows every scene to have its own internal breath and potentially a little bit of magic; and those things contrast well with the more traditional documentary style interviews throughout, so its like this dialectic at play.

JE: The documentary format works especially well because so many of the characters seemed so naturally introverted, so the only way these characters would speak -- especially to reveal personal information -- would be if a third party intervened.

MP: At the time we were shooting there was a question on all of our minds regarding how this would play out and work together. I didn’t really see it until we started cutting. I like that the questions aren’t too probing, that they maintain a respectful distance from the characters. I could have dug deeper but it just didn’t feel right. On some level it’s just appropriate.

JE: A lot of the actors were carryovers from Metal Gods. How did you approach them initially for Metal Gods and then how did you bring them over to Putty Hill?

MP:  Metal Gods is about young people, so we held auditions at area high schools. I was inspired by the stories I heard from the casting of Paranoid Park -- how the casting agents in Portland, whom Gus Van Zant was working with, used MySpace and also advertised public auditions. So I kind of followed that model. We set up a MySpace page just for casting the movie and then used that as an Internet reference point. I had some friends helping me, so, in addition to seeing people on the street, we would find people via the Internet. We just did a lot of digging around. We printed postcards, so we would flyer the street or hand them out at malls. We had these more formal auditions at high schools that I was able to set up -- focusing on the high schools with performing arts programs -- and then we tried to use every means that we could to publicize the public auditions around town. We had about six of those altogether. I saw upwards around 500 to 600 people probably. Along the way I met some kids that I really wanted to work with but I wasn’t certain how well they’d fit or how they would handle the Metal Gods material. So when our hand was forced and we switched gears, it was really liberating then to create a scenario just using the people that I wanted to see on screen as a sort of thread or inspiration. I took a casting credit on Putty Hill.

JE: And you mentioned that you didn’t really coach the actors, but so many of the performances are so consistently quiet and toned down – so that just came naturally with the actors that you chose?

MP: There’s a certain way in which I feel like I’m learning more -- and I’ve definitely learned a lot between Hamilton and Putty Hill -- ways of working with actors. One of the most important things is that I’ve honed a way to communicate with actors that conveys the kind of energy on set that translates on screen. It’s a balance. You have to give a nonprofessional actor enough information to feel safe and secure. Some will ask you very directly for specific things that they need, but then also don’t give them too much information. You could very easily crowd their heads with directions. So I try just to focus on the reality of the action. If we’re shooting a wide master, then it’s really about getting them comfortable with a few key actions that they can then focus on. The scene where the mom is playing the guitar in the kitchen is an example of something that really just came about organically. I knew I wanted to shoot in the kitchen. I knew Cody was going to come in. I planned to have his girlfriend and his baby there. But mom happened to be there that morning playing guitar, so I decided to keep her in the scene -- pretty much where she had been. And it was just a matter of giving Cody specific movements to get him from point A to point B. Then, in running through it together we came up with lines. It wasn’t so important to me what they said as long as they were comfortable with the dialogue and it felt natural.

JE: Let’s discuss your use of sound. In some scenes you use noises that almost blur out the audio -- there’s the scene in the tattoo shop during which you wound up having to use subtitles because the sound was so obscured.

MP: Traditionally we would have shot that scene without the tattoo gun turned on and then just added that in post, to get the dialogue, but you can’t do that when you’re working the way we were.

JE: And it added another level of realism.

MP: Exactly. The whole film is an exercise in the perception of objective and subjective cinematic reality -- if there is such a thing -- and just playing with the audience’s awareness of that relationship. I was selective. There is dialogue in scenes that we chose not to bring up because it wasn’t important. Sometimes we keep the relationship between camera and subject realistic and other times we don’t. There are scenes [when] we broke our own rules, like the scene where they take that long walk and we can hear the dialogue all the way. But then there is that scene in the woods, where you can’t hear anything the girls are saying. It was just a matter of scene by scene what felt right -- what we wanted to highlight. And then, in post, it was just trying to create just the right balance. Bring down some of the treble on the tattoo gun so it’s not too annoying for an audience but maintains its integrity, and we chose to subtitle really because I was thinking about my mom in the theater -- she wouldn’t pick up anything if she watched that scene. For me, it’s an example of what is important. What’s important is what they are saying as well as everything else, so it needs to be intelligible. In this case, subtitles were the answer. And then of course being the second scene of the film adds that sort of extra “is there a documentary feeling?” Subtitles again reinforce this idea that we’re blending the lines between fiction and non-fiction.

JE: Did you intend any specific economic or political message with Putty Hill?

MP: That’s always on my mind. I am very aware -- having grown up in Baltimore and lived there as an adult for almost ten years -- that it’s a very stratified city, like so many American cities, along the lines of race and class. Despite the fact that in the city proper there’s diversity -- in that we all live on top of one another. Those lines of communication are severed. There was a purpose -- and it’s maybe the reason that I stay working in Baltimore -- I would like to portray the diversity of experience onscreen of a very particular place that I know and love. As artists working in America it is important to show other visions of America; and a city like Baltimore can be a tool to bridge gaps and open lines of communication. It’s about a place that I know very well, so anything about the particular economy of that world is just part of the realism that we were attempting.

JE: There is also the degradation of the family element in Putty Hill. Though most of the family lives close to each other, they just don’t communicate. Nobody really spoke to Cory. Nobody really knew him…

MP: And the guy that was most connected with Cory in the film is Dustin. It is crazy to think that they had to be in prison together to really connect at that level. It’s true that a lot of the characters in Cory’s family don’t have much to say. I think that’s just true. I was meditating a lot on the idea of loss and what a family would go through if they lost someone.