Rick Alverson
New Jerusalem, Rick Alverson (2011)
Rick Alverson is an American screenwriter, cinematographer, producer, editor, and film director. His debut feature, The Builder, explores the life of an Irish immigrant; Alverson teamed with actor and fellow co-screenwrier Colm O'Leary once more for his second feature New Jerusalem, whichpremiered at IFFR - Rotterdam International Film Festival, SXSW, Sarasota, and CPH:PIX. Alverson's 2012 film The Comedy premiered at Sundance and Oak Cliff Film Festival, where it won Best Narrative Feature; his fourth feature Entertainement premiered at Sundance, Sarasota and Locarno, where it won a Jury Award. Loosely based on the life of American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman II, Alverson's latest film, The Mountain, premiered at Stockholm, Rotterdam, Vienna, and the Venice Film Festival, where it won a Special Mention.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Alverson discusses the perilous notion of American utopia, challenging spectatorial passivity, the first time he saw Tarkovsky's Stalker, and his next projects.
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FILMATIQUE: New Jerusalem centers around Sean, an Irishman who has recently returned from a tour in the National Guard and found employment at an auto repair shop. Here he becomes friends with Ike, a proud Christian who sees faith as the antidote to Sean's anxiety and existential paralysis. Can you discuss the genesis for this film—what themes or concepts led you to gravitate toward this story initially?
RICK ALVERSON: Initially the movie was to be called The American. It was a better title, more direct about its themes. Anton Corbijn announced his George Clooney venture with that title as I was finishing the cut and I naively believed there was room for only one American. The primary theme running through all my movies, through to the present, is the subject of utopia, specifically the American experiment's infatuation with exceptionalism of the individual. Is there an inherent danger in that optimism? Where does an idea diverge from an actuality? What separates them? At what point, and under what pressure, does an awareness of that gulf occur for a character and for an audience?
New Jerusalem centers around that conundrum, and explores it from the opposing, but complementary, angles of the aspirational immigrant and the "native" believer. One is searching for an actuality that is increasingly and evidently unavailable, and the other has found it in the essence and form of belief and fantasy itself.
FLMTQ: The script was developed alongside Colm O'Leary, who delivers an impressive performance as Sean. How did you two first come to know each other, and how would you describe your collaborative partnership?
RA: We met in New York City in 1989 and became close when I moved there in the early 90's. We both worked at Cafe Orlin in the East Village. I was attending NYU for film, briefly, and he was a painter. He was three years older than me. I admired his formalism tremendously, his dedication to the arts, the possibility of that in a life. I fell in with the ex-pat Irish community, to a degree, and felt at home with them and their social generosity. I found the evidence of their heritage—even as they were at war with so many elements of it—to be something sorely lacking in my own experience, something I longed for, something communal by nature.
New Jerusalem, Rick Alverson (2011)
FLMTQ: In terms of tone, New Jerusalem is quite dissimilar from your later works, adopting a pared-down, cinéma vérité approach to the immigrant experience that resembles the Dardennes brothers more than The Comedy. How would you place New Jerusalem within your oeuvre as a whole, and what resonances do you see between this and your other works?
RA: I learned the craft, like many people in the independent digital age, by experimenting in the public eye, whatever public would watch. New Jerusalem, for what it's worth, was an experiment for me in trying to distance myself from the medium, not using it as a pulpit for my views so much as letting a conversation take place between the form and subject matter and my preconceptions of those things. I am an atheist, a strongly opinionated one, but I wanted that view and position to be lost to the thing. I became more interested in exploring what I disliked than vocalizing what I liked. I realized that the only future for me in the field was pushing against my own comforts and complacencies, something I still struggle to do but hold very dearly.
From there, with The Comedy, I found that it might be possible to use and orient the audience in that same struggle, to create and try and orchestrate conflict in their orientation to the form of the film, to play with distrust so they question not just the character but the maker, and ideally, themselves and their relationship to the work and their privilege of access as an audience.
New Jerusalem, Rick Alverson (2011)