5 Questions with Daniel Witkin
“The Inconceivable Mountain” is a black and white silent film, both homage and satire, following a musicologist and her dog climbing a mountain in search of a mysterious song. We asked director Daniel Witkin where the idea came from, what the biggest challenge was, and a recent film he’s loved…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I grew up as a real video store kid. My childhood home was about a block away from a branch of Video Americain, which was probably the best video store in the mid-Atlantic. Barry and Annie Solan, who owned the place, ran it almost like a museum, albeit one that stayed in business at least in part by renting porn. They saw themselves as educators of a sort and took this role very seriously, providing a real service to a few generations of kids from DC, Baltimore, Delaware, etc. Among other things, this meant that I was exposed from perhaps too young an age to Tarkovsky and Tsai and a bunch of other directors whose work in all likelihood went over my head. It almost certainly damaged my personality, but at the same time has probably helped my filmmaking.
Since then I’ve basically been building on that education. I studied film at Wesleyan, and have since been writing about it in various publications, for a year in Moscow and after that in New York. Throughout, I’ve been trying to ask questions about the medium, and think up approaches to making films.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
Over the course of my critical work, I started thinking a lot about how contemporary society relates to film—what people want movies to do that they generally don’t, and what that they do in fact do that people don’t want. This was also around the time that I began to realize how comically unequipped our media systems were to deal responsibly with resurgent fascism. Trump’s election was probably the most obvious example of this, but it was just one of many, including a lot of things that I pieced together while living in Russia. So that was the backdrop. The actual film grew out of some idea of the mountain film, a somewhat little genre of prewar German film that’s probably best known today as the proving ground of Leni Reifenstahl, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker. I was interested in how these movies, which are in their content almost comically wholesome, interacted with their depraved, apocalyptic times—both in terms of complicity and a sort of all-too-plausible deniability thereof. I became interested in the idea of making a sort of phantom mountain film, in which some strains of 20th= century history would play out in a fantastic kind of way—and of course I wanted the whole thing to be funny somehow. Then the main narrative mechanism occurred to me, and it became something much more focused on the present, albeit still connected to the past, which is of course always much closer to us than is flattering to believe.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the best, and the least?
The biggest challenges generally came from shooting on the mountain. The creators of the original mountain films were often very skilled mountaineers, whereas we were for the most part enthusiastic amateurs (for awhile I jokingly described the movie as a German mountain film made by a Jew who’s scared of heights). We were diligent about scouting locations, but we did so in the summer and weren’t able to begin shooting until October, so that by the time we actually got there the conditions made things even trickier than we were expecting. The day that we were scheduled to shoot on top of the mountain, violent winds started in the morning and then just didn’t stop, so we had no choice but to fight through and get everything we could before it would no longer be possible to continue.
I generally like the parts of the process that involve first sharing my work with others, whether that’s showing the script to my collaborators or getting feedback from members of the crew on a first cut. Filmmaking is an incredibly detailed, laborious process, and seeing it alongside a pair of fresh eyes is really helpful for getting a new perspective when you may have started to take things for granted or gotten too used to your own ideas. Apologetically, I’ll keep the “least” to myself so as not to talk myself out of any work.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I saw two movies by Nobuhiko Obayashi, The Discarnates (1988) and Reason (2004), at Film Forum’s magisterial Shitamachi series (playing through November 7), which was programmed by my friend Aiko Masubuchi. Obayashi is best known for directing House (1977), which is one of those movies that feels as if it just materialized from another dimension, so it feels pretty wild to become more familiar with the person who actually made it. All three films diverge wildly in terms of tone and idiom, but there are some uncanny points of contact, in particular a certain, unusually haunted sense of familial bonds and longing. The Discarnates starts as a sort of lonely urban melodrama then goes somewhere else. It’s a peculiar sweet and sad movie. Reason is even weirder, operating between a social realist mode and a sort of Brechtian modernism. It builds this big emotional climax from what seems for a lot of the film like the recitation of facts. It’s almost three hours long, but feels longer than that. I liked it a lot.
5) What’s next for you?
I’m currently helping to edit a short film called The Chicken, directed by Neo Sora, who was the cinematographer on Inconceivable Mountain. It’s an adaptation of a Japanese short story, long out of print in English, by a writer named Naoya Shiga. It’s going to be good. We’re excited about it.
I’ve also been writing a lot. I’ve written a feature script that I’m looking to develop, and also recently wrote another, very different short. I’ve been continuing to write criticism, and have been working on a collection of short stories. I hope that all of these will see the light of day in the not-too-distant future.
Contact Info:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dzwitkin