Lovely, Now: Q&A with filmmaker Nik Fackler

When AP first interviewed Omaha filmmaker Nik Fackler back in early 2009, it was about a year after he’d finished directing his feature debut, Lovely, Still, starring Oscar winners Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn. After another year of haggling with distributors, Fackler finally secured theatrical release dates (see locations here) throughout September and October 2010. When we caught up with him again at a coffee shop in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, he was already juggling several new projects, including music videos for Deerhunter and Man Man, the release of his own music (under the moniker Dreama) on Team Love Records, and his next feature, a cinematic adaptation of bizarro cartoonist Tony Millionaire’s Sock Monkey.

Do you live in L.A. now?
Well, it’s hard to say. I still have a house in Omaha, but I’ve been living here for a while just to get the next projects going. But all my music stuff is in Omaha. Is it possible to live in two places? ’Cause I kinda do. I just moved all my shit here, and my dog’s here. I live with a producer who I met about two years ago. He’s like a cartoon dude. I started hanging out with him because he plays a bunch of videos and talks about cartoons. He introduced me to Tony Millionaire, which is the next film I’m gonna do. We have a test shoot next Saturday, which is gonna be crazy.

You made your first movie when you were 23, based on your own script, and starring two Oscar winners…
And I got final cut.

What are you, a lawyer?  How did you swing that?
[Laughs.] I don’t even have a lawyer. But it wasn’t like it just happened. It was six years of turning down a lot of stuff. The first thing I ran into was people just wanting to buy the script, which means I wouldn’t have been attached as director. But it would’ve been a good way to get my foot in the door.

Must’ve been tempting.
Definitely. And then there were other temptations, like guys with the money [to produce the film] but who were kinda sleazeballs. I didn’t want to get involved with those dudes. But there’s this producer I work with back in Omaha named Dana Altman. He’s Robert Altman’s grandson, so he’s been doing film shit since he was, like, 13. He was sort of like my mentor, so I worked with him a lot and we were sort of a team. For six years we tried to get the perfect deal—someone who would give us money, let us keep the script the same, give us creative control and let me direct and have final cut.

That seems like a hard sell under any circumstances, but for a 23-year-old first-time screenwriter?
Well, that’s what made it really hard. I wrote the script when I was 17, so for those first couple of years, no one would even look at it. Then we started hiding my age. When we finally got Martin [Landau] on, we didn’t tell him my age until we met for the first time. We had to trick people. But I was doing music videos during this whole time, so my reel was getting longer and longer. Then I got an agent. A guy from the William Morris Agency just e-mailed me one day.

Out of the blue?
Yeah. I think it was one of those things where he was probably emailing like 40 young directors that he found online like, “Hey—we can help you out.” That’s the vibe I got. But we took advantage of it. We had him send the script to Martin Landau. At that point I was, like, 22. Martin read it and wanted to meet with me, so I flew out to L.A. and we met at a coffee shop just like this and talked.

Was Landau taken aback when he saw how young you were?
Yeah, but I think he was sort of into it, too. At that point in his career, I think he was just excited about the experimentation of it, because it would be two older, extremely experienced people and one younger, ambitious but extremely inexperienced director.

Your youthful exuberance rubbed off on him.
Totally. And the film is sort of about that, too, in a way. It’s sort of a youthful look at these feelings that people have at any age. So there was this easy-to-relate-to thing at the center of the story that someone of any age could connect to. The only thing that changes is your perception of it. So I wanted to tell a story about someone’s perception of falling in love for the first time but they’re at the end of their life. It would be a similar experience to falling in love when you’re 16, which I was actually doing at the time I was writing the script. So it’s kind of a firsthand account, but I let it run through the actors.

Did you feel strange giving such experienced, well-respected actors direction onset?
Not really, because you can’t. Working for six years to make this happen and going through all the bullshit definitely toughened me up, like, “Okay, I can’t fuck this up. I can’t be afraid to ask for something. I’ve got one chance.”

I was trying to think about how we could talk about the huge shift in tone that happens toward the end of the film without giving too much away. You’re very successful in lulling the viewer into this sappy elderly romance and then… something else happens.
Yeah, yeah. I was trying to experiment a little bit with changing the storytelling form. We’ve gotten really used to the form that’s used in American storytelling, the kind of Star Wars mythological story arc—[Joseph Campbell’s] The Hero’s Journey and all that. So the romance in this movie starts out really traditional and then it’s suddenly not anymore, but hopefully you realize that it is all building up to something and then it reaches that climax. I’ve watched it with audiences, and you can sense that there’s this thing they’re trying to figure out but they don’t know why they’re trying to figure it out. I remember being really excited when I was writing it because it gets almost cheesy and then something dark happens. So it’s almost like a trick, I guess, but a trick with emotion. It’s a twist film in the context of a love story, which I think ends up making it even more emotional.

So you’re okay with mentioning that there’s a big twist at the end?
I think it’s okay to talk about. If anything, it’s a reason to get people to go see it.

Because otherwise it’s just a movie about old people …
[Laughs.] Yeah, and that’s why it took so long to get a distributor. It took forever. So many distributors aren’t taking chances with anything these days. The thing we kept hearing back from the major distributors was, “People will not go see a film with two older leads in it when they can go see something cool and hip.” But I was always kind of expecting that a little bit. And I didn’t wanna do a love story between teenagers.

You must be in a weird place right now. You wrote this movie when you were 17, made it when you were 23, and it’s coming out when you’re 26. It’s been a nine-year roller coaster.
At this point, I’m kinda off the rollercoaster. All the energy had died down and now it’s supposed to get all spun up again. I don’t know how I feel right know, actually. The whole process has been kind of emotionally draining. I mean, this thing went through some shit, man. We started showing it to distributors in ’08, right when the recession started, and even now—I mean, you see the movies that are getting made right now—they’re being very safe about how they spend their money. But now it’s done and all I can do is think about making another film.

Nice segue. Tell us about the Tony Millionaire movie you’re working on.
For people who don’t know, Tony Millionaire is this insane, crazy comic artist. He does a strip called Maakies that’s been a weekly strip for a long time now. It’s about this alcoholic bird named Drinky Crow. He also does a comic calledSock Monkey. Tony has this really deviant, dark sense of humor, but then when he had kids, he started making these really beautiful children’s books that were still like from the mind of this alcoholic madman. But it’s the sweet side of him who’s remembering his childhood through the eyes of someone who’s been through a lot. So he makes these deeply philosophical, somewhat existential children’s stories about these old Victorian toys. I read them and got obsessed with them. I ended up meeting Tony Millionaire and seeing if I could somehow adapt his stories into a movie. So I started writing a screenplay two years ago and it’s done now. But the fun part is that it’s all gonna be puppetry.

Like in the Azure Ray video for "We Are Mice" you did.
Yeah, I love puppetry.  But for this movie, we’re gonna go to old Victorian houses in the mountains of Utah and it’s gonna be this new style of puppetry that we created over the last couple of months. We have the first test with the puppeteers tomorrow. It’s not gonna look like Jim Henson at all. It’s like tangible, real puppetry using modern technology to enhance it.

Will it be stop-motion animation?
No, all live. Like Labyrinth and stuff like that, but not Jim Henson. It’s gonna be weird and existential and psychedelic in a justifiably children’s way. It’s a kids’ movie, but not a kids’ movie at the same time. All of its messages and themes are based on an existential reality. It’s totally taken from Tony’s world. It’s his message.

And you’ve got an album coming out next year.
I signed to Team Love in August—just in time for this interview! I’ve been playing music back in Omaha for, like, five years now, so it feels good to finally have something to show for it. So that comes out in the first quarter of 2011. I’m also in another band called Flowers Forever back in Omaha, where I’m going in a couple of weeks to start work on our new record. So I fly to Omaha for 10 days to record, then come back here for the Lovely, Still release and then go to Phoenix for a Lovely, Still release and then go back to Omaha for a Lovely, Still release. It’s a lot of jumping around. Luckily, they feed you at these things. ALT