A Conversation With Don Hertfeldt, Part Three
Written by Finnegan Parks   
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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rejected still frame

Still frame from Rejected © Bitter Films 

Part Three of A Conversation With Don Hertfeldt continues with insight into that eternal struggle between the artist and his own perception of his creation.  Don explains that his films are rather like children who go off and live their own lives and seem to do very well without him.  Catch up on Part One and Part Two .  More to come tomorrow.

Bridgerack:  What is it like for you to watch your films?

Don Hertzfeldt:  it depends. i can enjoy them but i usually still can't help but to study for flaws. the number of cringes increase the further back you go. if i'm in an audience i can feed off their energy a little and relax a little more about it.  i tend to have very few memories from my time animating... hundreds of blurry repetitive nights sort of blend together. so sometimes i almost feel like a fraud, like i'm taking all this credit for someone else's hard work that i can't really remember doing. while on the other hand i sometimes feel like this detached mass abstraction called "don hertzfeldt" is out there taking credit for the hard work i do remember, so i guess it all evens out.


Does your perception of them change with time?

i guess it must. it's weird, but the more distance i get from them the less i feel like they're entirely mine. i'm sure you can blame a bit of that on my bad memory but some of them have also become so entrenched and popular with so many other people over the years that to me they've sort of changed into a whole separate thing, almost like a fun house mirror of the originals. like one of the guys with the tattoos of the characters, doing the movie quotes, or making toys... that's not really my movie anymore, it's this entirely other abstract animal that's somehow related to it, but belongs to everybody. the more people discover and share them, the more they seem to change. which is great, don't get me wrong... the movies are like kids i guess, i love to see them  move out and get weird piercings and form new relationships and take on unexpected lives of their own and transform into totally different things with new meanings. it's just weird to look back on from here, like an out of body experience or something. the movies lead way more interesting lives than i do.

Animation film-making is a tedious process that can take years to see a film's completion.  How do you stay focused?  Are there ever any dark days where you've realized what you've done just doesn't work or play the way you want it to?
 
sure.. you often don't get a true sense of a piece until it starts to come together in the edit, and that's when you can sometimes run into all-new kinds of madness as the whole thing takes shape or falls apart.  but i've got some very rare luxuries here that most filmmakers don't. nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie. some bad movies are potentially good movies that were forced into theaters half-baked because the money or time ran out to make the  repairs they needed. i'm able to work alone, so if i find something isn't clicking i can immediately make the changes i need - sometimes very drastic and sweeping changes -  without messing up someone else's job down the line or seeking approval from a dozen people. and i don't need a lot of money to fund my own stuff and i can usually work without any solid deadlines. so i can really take my time if i need to - that's a big thing.  in theory there's no reason everything in there shouldn't eventually work. if it doesn't come out right the first time i'll just keep indefinitely shaping it until it does. that's a very, very lucky position to be in. so there's always going to be a few dark spots in there but nothing yet that i haven't been able find ways to polish out.
 
What's the largest amount of completed work you've trashed in favor of a newer idea?

i've cut out or reworked a number of things but a lot of the ideas wind up recycled instead of trashed..   often a deleted or abandoned idea from one thing will eventually find its way into another, maybe even years later. i've always got stray pieces floating around looking for a home. some of rejected was stitched together and re-animated from spare parts like that.
 
there's always a lot of rewriting involved, but almost all of the biggest changes are done to chunks of the movie i haven't gotten around to animating yet. i try to be careful to only begin animating the rock solid parts.

 

Read A Conversation With Don Hertzfeldt, Part Four


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