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Rob Nilsson: Indie Master
by Doniphan Blair & David Hakim
Nilsson on his bike (motorized) at home in North Berkeley; he also does regular biking, including a 70 miler on his 70th birthday. photo: D. BlairNestled snugly in Marin County’s Mill Valley, Tamalpais High School seems like just another suburban school in a deluxe Nor Cal setting, replete with the newest computers, cheerleaders, and cynical kids raised on South Park. Perhaps, but 50 years ago things were different.
“No one liked Marin County. It had nothing. Nothing was happening," notes photographer Jack Fulton, SF Art Institute department head and Tamalpais alumnus (class of ’56). But art flourishes in such obscurity and Tam High was teeming with creativity. Indeed, Fulton was part of a coterie of budding artists, intellectuals, and hipsters – along with Robbie Nelson (class of ’57) who’d come to California in 1954.
“Rob was in an intellectual crowd, a very smart guy,” recalls Fulton. “We knew him as a poet, who in those days were considered unusual people – like Alan Ginsberg, who came to talk at the school.”
Twenty years later, Nilsson’s first feature film, Northern Lights, made with co-director John Hanson, took the Camera d’Or at Cannes. About farmers in North Dakota, the film tells a story of loss – of love, property, and identity – with B&W images, chiaroscuro faces, radical framing, and narratives as far from today’s Marin as you can get.
In the intervening 30 years, Nilsson has completed a marathon 24 features (15 since the millennia), and shows no signs of slowing down, either in workload or depth. Indeed, he is being honored this month by the Filmmakers Alliance in Los Angeles with the first-ever Nilsson Award – named in his honor. Moreover, the long-awaited 9 @ Night series will premiere at various theaters throughout the Bay Area (see calendar, p15). How did this almost-native son get into filmmaking, and then conquer so much of it? And what does his work tell all of us – but especially Tam High’s current students?
Northern Lights follows the travails of Ray Sorenson, a young man radicalized by the tough times leading up to World War One (based on the experiences of Hanson’s grandfather, a Dakota farmer and early Nonpartisan League member who worked with Socialist organizer Henry Martinson). Martinson, 94 when the film was made, introduces the story, documentary-style. In lead roles were three professional actors: Bob Behling and Susan Lynch from the SF theater scene, and Joe Spano (later Hill Street Blues’ Lieutenant Goldblume, recently Buckminster Fuller at Ft Mason’s Cowell Theater). Three other roles were filled by the Ness family of northwest North Dakota, reviving the Populist can-do spirit of the early prairie homesteaders. Together with a supporting cast of actual farmers, they made Northern Lights a latter-day classic – much like Bergman’s similarly aggressive character turns, or fellow-Scandinavian Carl Dreyer’s stark photography and smoldering internal passion.
Nilsson was born in Rhinelander (a Wisconsin paper-mill town), moving to Marin when his family followed his restless maternal grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe. One of North Dakota’s first filmmakers and later a set photographer for United Artists, Holmboe settled in Mill Valley where he acquired Strawbridge’s Camera Store. “He was a major influence,” remembers Nilsson, “an autodidact, a reader, a recognized photographer of wild orchids, a lover of Gauguin and Vlaminck, a citizen of the world in the best way. He wanted to know about you. He’d sit you down and ask you what you were thinking. But I wasn’t much interested in cameras back then. I was going to be a poet. And later, a painter. And I still do both. I was 40 before I made my first feature.”
“Rob was a popular guy in high school,” recalls author Abby Wasserman. “I thought he was rather dashing – literally and figuratively, since he was a runner. He may have felt like an outsider, but he didn’t communicate that. He only expressed it later.” In 1957, Nilsson went on to Harvard. Five years later, he emerged with an English degree, after taking a year off to ‘travel the world,’ working on Swedish freighters and hitchhiking through Europe. Vietnam was looming, so he filed papers as a conscientious objector – but was rejected by Marin’s draft board. Choosing the Peace Corps over Vietnam, he spent two years teaching English in Nigeria. Oddly enough, “Filmmaking first hit when I was teaching in Okeagbe. I made a one-hour dramatic film with my friends, completely on a lark.”
Then came his ‘Gauguin year’ – living on the Biafran island of Fernando P€ in a farmhouse on the beach – dealing with the delicate social relations, writing, and painting (he even showed his paintings locally). His year ended when he learned that grandfather Holmboe had died: “He never even heard about my turn toward film.”
A runner in college, Nilsson takes on the Dipsea Race in scenic Marin County, California, circa 1977. photo: courtesy R. NilssonReturning to the US, Nilsson drove a cab in Boston, where one of his fares was future wife Indira. With a new daughter, Robindira, they settled in the Bay Area, where Nilsson began to edit The Country Mouse, a 30-minute dramatic piece he had shot in the streets of Boston. David Schickele, who’d made films in Africa about the Bushmen and the Peace Corps, let him use his Steenbeck flatbed at night, and the two remained friends and collaborators until Schickele’s death in 1999. About this time, Nilsson changed his name back to the original Swedish spelling, for reasons of practicality as well as identity: “I was processing my film at Palmer’s Lab and I started getting it back with out paying. They were billing the account of Robert Nelson [a San Francisco filmmaker who made arty, sometimes humorous, shorts]. I didn’t want to be Robert Nelson, so I went back to the family’s original name.”
When The Country Mouse was finished, Nilsson started working with the Filmmaker’s Union of San Francisco, an alternative labor union.’ FUSF led to the formation of filmmaking collective Cine Manifest and his relationship with John Hanson. “John and I first met in Boston,” recalls Nilsson. “His grandfather was an original member of the Dakota Nonpartisan League while mine was the state photographer. With Cine Manifest’s social mandate to elucidate the politics of working peoples and our mutual Dakota background, it was only natural we’d work together.”
“At Cine Manifest,” says Nilsson, “we looked at all the different movements and politically-oriented directors: Cinema Novo in Brazil, Neo-Realism in Italy, Costa-Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo, and many others. Within the group, I argued to avoid ideology. I opposed the thought that there is any single idea that solves the human issues. When you read Madison and Hamilton, you realize they were very wary of human nature. Your biggest enemy is often in the family or the state next door. All humans have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Other members of Cine Manifest were Marxist-oriented Lefties in the 60s, but I was more of a populist/anarchist.”
This point is poignantly dramatized in Northern Lights by main character Ray’s initial rejection of politics (despite the economic hardships) and his romantic bent. The film begins with Ray (Behling) and his betrothed, Inga (Lynch), chasing each other through a snowy forest, but soon descends into disenchantment as their marriage is endlessly postponed – first by his father’s death, then by his mother’s move back East, and finally Inga’s departure to seek work in town. In the end, Inga tosses back a glass of whiskey in a gesture of surprising sensuality and rebellion against her fate. Ray finally joins the League: there was nothing else to do, emotionally, economically, or politically. While the spate of foreclosures also parallels events today, Ray’s initial ambivalence and then conversion to political action could be a comment on the California conundrum of the 70s, when life was easy but suffering was endemic elsewhere, and, despite the squareness of some politicos, something had to be done.
Northern Lights won the Camera d’Or and took Cannes by storm. European in aesthetic and subject, and completely unlike Apocalypse Now or other American films of the day, the film launched Nilsson’s career – suddenly and internationally. While retaining the collaboration learned from Cine Manifest, he soon transitioned in style and shooting format to make Signal 7 (one of the first tape-to-film movies) in 1983, and On the Edge with Bruce Dern in 1984.
“John Hanson and I, along with attorney John Stout, created a company, New Front Films,” Nilsson recalls, “and set out to make two films, my On the Edge and Hanson’s Wildrose. We formed limited partnerships, and raised about a million and half for On the Edge throughout the country. Along the way, we met Bruce, a lifelong runner, and John Marley, the lead actor in Cassavete’s Faces, was discovered at Schwabs in LA – á la Lana Turner.
Starring Bruce Dern, On the Edge is a story energized by Nilsson’s passion for running and drawn from the life of Wes Hildreth, another Tamalpais alum and long-distance runner (also a Harvard graduate and eventually an international volcanologist).
Signal 7, however, was hailed as “an unusual, touching, intelligent film,” by Nina Darnton of the New York Times in 1986, who went on to report, “It helps to prove the case… that excellent movies can be made without big stars and mega-budgets” (about $150,000). Once again Nilsson tackled a narrative with which he was intimate: the sometimes dangerous life of San Francisco cabbies. The film – shot in three nights with hand-held cameras – follows Marty and Speed, played with depth and sensitivity by Dan Leegant and Bill Ackridge, as they scramble for fares, air out illusions of acting careers, and deal with the brutal murder of a colleague. “He assembled a group of out-of-work actor friends and forged them into a cast that displays the cohesion of a long-established repertory company,” continues Darnton. “The dialogue is improvised around Mr. Nilsson’s central story to produce the naturalism seen in the films of John Cassavetes, to whom Signal 7 is dedicated.”
Five years after the stark Northern Lights, Nilsson had transitioned to a second style, the freewheeling improvisational system that would scaffold many of his successful future films – notably Heat and Sunlight, a study of jealousy, sex and violence which garnered the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1988 (making Nilsson the first American director to win at both Cannes and Sundance). “My two influences were Bergman and Cassavetes,” Nilsson says. “With Heat and Sunlight and the 9 @ Night Series, I moved towards the latter – more character and circumstance – to explore the human bottom line. It’s a search for ‘the way things seem to be’ – I can’t say ‘truth’ – trying to examine the moment.”
John Hanson (left) and Nilsson on the location of Northern Lights in Ambrose, North Dakota. photo: courtesy R. NilssonNilsson codified his thinking into his Direct Action method, which “allows actors and technicians the high freedom and deep responsibility to seek the unexpected, the extraordinary, the miracles only a well-prepared combo can play,” he wrote. “You create a situation… define and develop a character. Combine the two and watch them collide, attract and repel. Build drama from this dynamic… closer to the way life happens.”
Nilsson recommends that we reject the ‘film as short story’ theory promoted by Hollywood and the film schools: “Smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot. Create a poetic cinema based not on writing but on observing… mistrust your ideas… trust your experiences. Discover… don’t prescribe...to fashion a cinema not of auteurs but of interpreters. Film is not a director’s medium. The magicians who bottle the genie are the actors. The magician who lets the genie out of the bottle is the editor.”
“He is one of those extraordinary people,” explains his old friend Wasserman, “who follows his vision and takes the rest of us along with him. He sparks in me an ability to take risks. I have teased him that he is my ‘risk master.’ He is interested in putting people into situations and plucking their true responses from way down deep. That is about risk. For someone who wants so much control in his life, he is also willing to give up control.”
“Driving through the Tenderloin,” Nilsson recalls, “to the edit room for Heat got me interested in making features right on the street. My brother Greg was mentally ill and had been missing for ten years. I didn’t know where he was, but I hoped to find some clues. It turned out he was homeless in the South.” To test his thesis, Nilsson started the Tenderloin Action group with Pacific Rim Media, later moving it to the Faithful Fools Ministry (where it became the Tenderloin yGroup). He set up improv situations, developed characters, themes and studies – which included scriptwriting, although the ‘scripts’ are generally short descriptions or thematic lists to get the functional balance between the story, the actors, and the technicians.
Sometimes, early on, the ‘risk taking’ got out of hand. “There were some in the class who were pretty intense,” recalls Gabriela Maltz Larkin. “One guy, for example, would scare people. At one point, he had Rob on the floor in a choke hold, with a wooden peg pushed into his eye. It was an exercise, but I think it got too real.” “I miss the class,” laments Larkin, who delivered a stellar performance as one of the sex workers in the 9 @ Night feature Need. “I miss the camaraderie of fourteen years. It clicked the first time. I walked into class one day and never left. I remember the first exercise was around loss, total loss, like homelessness – and I still regret not participating that first day. I looked forward to coming on Tuesday nights and exploring different feelings – what he calls the six basic feelings: fear, happiness, anger, surprise, despair and love.”
David Fine, an LA-based actor with dozens of minor credits, took thoroughly to Nilsson and his method because he’d “done some time being a drug cowboy in the Tenderloin and I like dark crime. From Rob I learned the ability to relax or wire up, [to be] elated and then devastated... to look within, breathe deeply [and] then reinvent. All at once the rag-tag band of merry/melancholy men and women turned the tables on their demons.” The method worked: Chalk, the Tenderloin yGroup’s first feature was shown in the Locarno and Toronto film festivals, had a nationwide a theatrical release in 2000, and was voted one of the year’s top films by the Village Voice.
Since then, Nilsson has done a wide variety of projects, from A Town Has Turned to Dust (a 1998 Rod Serling- scripted feature for USA Network) to Winter Oranges (a Japanese feature with Hiroshima’s Studio Malaparte in 2000) to Samt (a Direct Action feature shot in Jordan with ZENID, Farah Daghistani’s Jordanian social development institute) to Frank Dead Souls (a Direct Action work-in-progress shot in Cape Town as part of RESFEST South Africa). He recently completed shooting Imbued, starring Stacy Keach and Liz Sklar, about an aging bookie mulling over life and love with a visionary young call girl.
Now the 9 @ Night films have come to full fruition, with all nine features completed and available in a handsome box set. They also open around the Bay Area on August 22. All the films begin at 9 PM, and tell the stories of (says Nilsson) “forty or fifty characters from the rough edges of America. Together they paint a kaleidoscopic portrait of lives in crisis but each film stands alone and can be viewed separately.”Citizen Cinema, an acting workshop that makes features, is the newest iteration of the long line of collaborative groups that Nilsson has helped create stretching back to Cine Manifest.
Michelle Allen (working as an actress, producer, caterer, and script supervisor) gravitated to Nilsson after seeing Northern Lights on the Z Channel as a kid. “While on a movie set with a once-prominent TV actress, I had an epiphany – I was young and a complete Pollyanna, and I knew this. I also knew that if I was not careful, I could easily end up as an unstable, insecure, addiction-riddled TV actress surrounded by Yes People. My response was to shave my head, throw away my makeup, and make several serious changes in my life including working for Greenpeace where I put my acting skills to good use by creating environmental guerilla street-theater pieces for various campaigns. I’m happiest working with Rob, my cinematic soulmate. His current workshop in Berkeley is not to be missed, if you are an actor or filmmaker. I’m grateful to be a part of it. “
“I am not interested in the predictable,” Nilsson says. “Today Avant Garde is really another name for The Establishment. Life is too dangerous and fragile to be exhibiting urinals while claiming to be anti-bourgeois. We have environmental problems, political meltdown, a proliferation of madmen who want bombs. I’m sick of the ‘Art Is Anything I Say It Is’ crowd. Give me ‘the Aprés Garde’ with creators who astonish us with skill, vision and the freedom to rediscover new songs of the open road. Give me the true high wire walkers who dare the unknown and accept the consequences if they fall. Give me people who know how to draw instead of just drawing attention to themselves. Sunburnt souls finding their themes and saying ‘This is worth pursuing all the way around the bend.’”
On August 20 the Filmmakers Alliance will present Nilsson the 2008 Nilsson Award at the Directors Guild in LA. According to them, “Mr. Nilsson has been a prolific, dynamic, visionary and fiercely independent filmmaker… from his breath-taking first film Northern Lights to his searing, epic 9@Night Series. This is no lifetime achievement award: this is a shout of recognition and encouragement for an ongoing creative journey from which all [of us] can and should gain immense inspiration.”
The recognition has always been there, of course – considering Nilsson won at Cannes with his very first film. Nevertheless, such recognition means little to the true artist, except that it facilitates furthering the vision. Hence, the struggle continues for bigger, more ambitious projects, difficult at any time, given that Nilsson is invariably working on two to four features, generally with a dedicated crew of new twenty-somethings and solid old hands. And he is usually immersed in and enjoying the work, the exchange of ideas with his fellow creators, the pursuit of his own interpretation, the dedication to the craft, and even the vast physical labor of organizing, shooting, editing, mixing, and promoting the works currently in front of him.
Rob Nilsson presents us with nothing less than a massive oeuvre that both descends to the depths and takes us to Parnassian heights in search of love, dreams, and their realization. Nilsson’s work is bristling with an underlying message of freedom and poetry, romance and practicality, egalitarianism and anarchy, deeply artistic direct action – unified by obligations to the deep narrative quest. Posted on Aug 08, 2008 - 07:41 AM
by Doniphan Blair & David Hakim
Nilsson on his bike (motorized) at home in North Berkeley; he also does regular biking, including a 70 miler on his 70th birthday. photo: D. Blair“No one liked Marin County. It had nothing. Nothing was happening," notes photographer Jack Fulton, SF Art Institute department head and Tamalpais alumnus (class of ’56). But art flourishes in such obscurity and Tam High was teeming with creativity. Indeed, Fulton was part of a coterie of budding artists, intellectuals, and hipsters – along with Robbie Nelson (class of ’57) who’d come to California in 1954.
“Rob was in an intellectual crowd, a very smart guy,” recalls Fulton. “We knew him as a poet, who in those days were considered unusual people – like Alan Ginsberg, who came to talk at the school.”
Twenty years later, Nilsson’s first feature film, Northern Lights, made with co-director John Hanson, took the Camera d’Or at Cannes. About farmers in North Dakota, the film tells a story of loss – of love, property, and identity – with B&W images, chiaroscuro faces, radical framing, and narratives as far from today’s Marin as you can get.
In the intervening 30 years, Nilsson has completed a marathon 24 features (15 since the millennia), and shows no signs of slowing down, either in workload or depth. Indeed, he is being honored this month by the Filmmakers Alliance in Los Angeles with the first-ever Nilsson Award – named in his honor. Moreover, the long-awaited 9 @ Night series will premiere at various theaters throughout the Bay Area (see calendar, p15). How did this almost-native son get into filmmaking, and then conquer so much of it? And what does his work tell all of us – but especially Tam High’s current students?
Northern Lights follows the travails of Ray Sorenson, a young man radicalized by the tough times leading up to World War One (based on the experiences of Hanson’s grandfather, a Dakota farmer and early Nonpartisan League member who worked with Socialist organizer Henry Martinson). Martinson, 94 when the film was made, introduces the story, documentary-style. In lead roles were three professional actors: Bob Behling and Susan Lynch from the SF theater scene, and Joe Spano (later Hill Street Blues’ Lieutenant Goldblume, recently Buckminster Fuller at Ft Mason’s Cowell Theater). Three other roles were filled by the Ness family of northwest North Dakota, reviving the Populist can-do spirit of the early prairie homesteaders. Together with a supporting cast of actual farmers, they made Northern Lights a latter-day classic – much like Bergman’s similarly aggressive character turns, or fellow-Scandinavian Carl Dreyer’s stark photography and smoldering internal passion.
Nilsson was born in Rhinelander (a Wisconsin paper-mill town), moving to Marin when his family followed his restless maternal grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe. One of North Dakota’s first filmmakers and later a set photographer for United Artists, Holmboe settled in Mill Valley where he acquired Strawbridge’s Camera Store. “He was a major influence,” remembers Nilsson, “an autodidact, a reader, a recognized photographer of wild orchids, a lover of Gauguin and Vlaminck, a citizen of the world in the best way. He wanted to know about you. He’d sit you down and ask you what you were thinking. But I wasn’t much interested in cameras back then. I was going to be a poet. And later, a painter. And I still do both. I was 40 before I made my first feature.”
“Rob was a popular guy in high school,” recalls author Abby Wasserman. “I thought he was rather dashing – literally and figuratively, since he was a runner. He may have felt like an outsider, but he didn’t communicate that. He only expressed it later.” In 1957, Nilsson went on to Harvard. Five years later, he emerged with an English degree, after taking a year off to ‘travel the world,’ working on Swedish freighters and hitchhiking through Europe. Vietnam was looming, so he filed papers as a conscientious objector – but was rejected by Marin’s draft board. Choosing the Peace Corps over Vietnam, he spent two years teaching English in Nigeria. Oddly enough, “Filmmaking first hit when I was teaching in Okeagbe. I made a one-hour dramatic film with my friends, completely on a lark.”
Then came his ‘Gauguin year’ – living on the Biafran island of Fernando P€ in a farmhouse on the beach – dealing with the delicate social relations, writing, and painting (he even showed his paintings locally). His year ended when he learned that grandfather Holmboe had died: “He never even heard about my turn toward film.”
A runner in college, Nilsson takes on the Dipsea Race in scenic Marin County, California, circa 1977. photo: courtesy R. NilssonWhen The Country Mouse was finished, Nilsson started working with the Filmmaker’s Union of San Francisco, an alternative labor union.’ FUSF led to the formation of filmmaking collective Cine Manifest and his relationship with John Hanson. “John and I first met in Boston,” recalls Nilsson. “His grandfather was an original member of the Dakota Nonpartisan League while mine was the state photographer. With Cine Manifest’s social mandate to elucidate the politics of working peoples and our mutual Dakota background, it was only natural we’d work together.”
“At Cine Manifest,” says Nilsson, “we looked at all the different movements and politically-oriented directors: Cinema Novo in Brazil, Neo-Realism in Italy, Costa-Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo, and many others. Within the group, I argued to avoid ideology. I opposed the thought that there is any single idea that solves the human issues. When you read Madison and Hamilton, you realize they were very wary of human nature. Your biggest enemy is often in the family or the state next door. All humans have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Other members of Cine Manifest were Marxist-oriented Lefties in the 60s, but I was more of a populist/anarchist.”
This point is poignantly dramatized in Northern Lights by main character Ray’s initial rejection of politics (despite the economic hardships) and his romantic bent. The film begins with Ray (Behling) and his betrothed, Inga (Lynch), chasing each other through a snowy forest, but soon descends into disenchantment as their marriage is endlessly postponed – first by his father’s death, then by his mother’s move back East, and finally Inga’s departure to seek work in town. In the end, Inga tosses back a glass of whiskey in a gesture of surprising sensuality and rebellion against her fate. Ray finally joins the League: there was nothing else to do, emotionally, economically, or politically. While the spate of foreclosures also parallels events today, Ray’s initial ambivalence and then conversion to political action could be a comment on the California conundrum of the 70s, when life was easy but suffering was endemic elsewhere, and, despite the squareness of some politicos, something had to be done.
Northern Lights won the Camera d’Or and took Cannes by storm. European in aesthetic and subject, and completely unlike Apocalypse Now or other American films of the day, the film launched Nilsson’s career – suddenly and internationally. While retaining the collaboration learned from Cine Manifest, he soon transitioned in style and shooting format to make Signal 7 (one of the first tape-to-film movies) in 1983, and On the Edge with Bruce Dern in 1984.
“John Hanson and I, along with attorney John Stout, created a company, New Front Films,” Nilsson recalls, “and set out to make two films, my On the Edge and Hanson’s Wildrose. We formed limited partnerships, and raised about a million and half for On the Edge throughout the country. Along the way, we met Bruce, a lifelong runner, and John Marley, the lead actor in Cassavete’s Faces, was discovered at Schwabs in LA – á la Lana Turner.
Starring Bruce Dern, On the Edge is a story energized by Nilsson’s passion for running and drawn from the life of Wes Hildreth, another Tamalpais alum and long-distance runner (also a Harvard graduate and eventually an international volcanologist).
Signal 7, however, was hailed as “an unusual, touching, intelligent film,” by Nina Darnton of the New York Times in 1986, who went on to report, “It helps to prove the case… that excellent movies can be made without big stars and mega-budgets” (about $150,000). Once again Nilsson tackled a narrative with which he was intimate: the sometimes dangerous life of San Francisco cabbies. The film – shot in three nights with hand-held cameras – follows Marty and Speed, played with depth and sensitivity by Dan Leegant and Bill Ackridge, as they scramble for fares, air out illusions of acting careers, and deal with the brutal murder of a colleague. “He assembled a group of out-of-work actor friends and forged them into a cast that displays the cohesion of a long-established repertory company,” continues Darnton. “The dialogue is improvised around Mr. Nilsson’s central story to produce the naturalism seen in the films of John Cassavetes, to whom Signal 7 is dedicated.”
Five years after the stark Northern Lights, Nilsson had transitioned to a second style, the freewheeling improvisational system that would scaffold many of his successful future films – notably Heat and Sunlight, a study of jealousy, sex and violence which garnered the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1988 (making Nilsson the first American director to win at both Cannes and Sundance). “My two influences were Bergman and Cassavetes,” Nilsson says. “With Heat and Sunlight and the 9 @ Night Series, I moved towards the latter – more character and circumstance – to explore the human bottom line. It’s a search for ‘the way things seem to be’ – I can’t say ‘truth’ – trying to examine the moment.”
John Hanson (left) and Nilsson on the location of Northern Lights in Ambrose, North Dakota. photo: courtesy R. NilssonNilsson recommends that we reject the ‘film as short story’ theory promoted by Hollywood and the film schools: “Smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot. Create a poetic cinema based not on writing but on observing… mistrust your ideas… trust your experiences. Discover… don’t prescribe...to fashion a cinema not of auteurs but of interpreters. Film is not a director’s medium. The magicians who bottle the genie are the actors. The magician who lets the genie out of the bottle is the editor.”
“He is one of those extraordinary people,” explains his old friend Wasserman, “who follows his vision and takes the rest of us along with him. He sparks in me an ability to take risks. I have teased him that he is my ‘risk master.’ He is interested in putting people into situations and plucking their true responses from way down deep. That is about risk. For someone who wants so much control in his life, he is also willing to give up control.”
“Driving through the Tenderloin,” Nilsson recalls, “to the edit room for Heat got me interested in making features right on the street. My brother Greg was mentally ill and had been missing for ten years. I didn’t know where he was, but I hoped to find some clues. It turned out he was homeless in the South.” To test his thesis, Nilsson started the Tenderloin Action group with Pacific Rim Media, later moving it to the Faithful Fools Ministry (where it became the Tenderloin yGroup). He set up improv situations, developed characters, themes and studies – which included scriptwriting, although the ‘scripts’ are generally short descriptions or thematic lists to get the functional balance between the story, the actors, and the technicians.
Sometimes, early on, the ‘risk taking’ got out of hand. “There were some in the class who were pretty intense,” recalls Gabriela Maltz Larkin. “One guy, for example, would scare people. At one point, he had Rob on the floor in a choke hold, with a wooden peg pushed into his eye. It was an exercise, but I think it got too real.” “I miss the class,” laments Larkin, who delivered a stellar performance as one of the sex workers in the 9 @ Night feature Need. “I miss the camaraderie of fourteen years. It clicked the first time. I walked into class one day and never left. I remember the first exercise was around loss, total loss, like homelessness – and I still regret not participating that first day. I looked forward to coming on Tuesday nights and exploring different feelings – what he calls the six basic feelings: fear, happiness, anger, surprise, despair and love.”
David Fine, an LA-based actor with dozens of minor credits, took thoroughly to Nilsson and his method because he’d “done some time being a drug cowboy in the Tenderloin and I like dark crime. From Rob I learned the ability to relax or wire up, [to be] elated and then devastated... to look within, breathe deeply [and] then reinvent. All at once the rag-tag band of merry/melancholy men and women turned the tables on their demons.” The method worked: Chalk, the Tenderloin yGroup’s first feature was shown in the Locarno and Toronto film festivals, had a nationwide a theatrical release in 2000, and was voted one of the year’s top films by the Village Voice.
Since then, Nilsson has done a wide variety of projects, from A Town Has Turned to Dust (a 1998 Rod Serling- scripted feature for USA Network) to Winter Oranges (a Japanese feature with Hiroshima’s Studio Malaparte in 2000) to Samt (a Direct Action feature shot in Jordan with ZENID, Farah Daghistani’s Jordanian social development institute) to Frank Dead Souls (a Direct Action work-in-progress shot in Cape Town as part of RESFEST South Africa). He recently completed shooting Imbued, starring Stacy Keach and Liz Sklar, about an aging bookie mulling over life and love with a visionary young call girl.
Now the 9 @ Night films have come to full fruition, with all nine features completed and available in a handsome box set. They also open around the Bay Area on August 22. All the films begin at 9 PM, and tell the stories of (says Nilsson) “forty or fifty characters from the rough edges of America. Together they paint a kaleidoscopic portrait of lives in crisis but each film stands alone and can be viewed separately.”Citizen Cinema, an acting workshop that makes features, is the newest iteration of the long line of collaborative groups that Nilsson has helped create stretching back to Cine Manifest.
Michelle Allen (working as an actress, producer, caterer, and script supervisor) gravitated to Nilsson after seeing Northern Lights on the Z Channel as a kid. “While on a movie set with a once-prominent TV actress, I had an epiphany – I was young and a complete Pollyanna, and I knew this. I also knew that if I was not careful, I could easily end up as an unstable, insecure, addiction-riddled TV actress surrounded by Yes People. My response was to shave my head, throw away my makeup, and make several serious changes in my life including working for Greenpeace where I put my acting skills to good use by creating environmental guerilla street-theater pieces for various campaigns. I’m happiest working with Rob, my cinematic soulmate. His current workshop in Berkeley is not to be missed, if you are an actor or filmmaker. I’m grateful to be a part of it. “
“I am not interested in the predictable,” Nilsson says. “Today Avant Garde is really another name for The Establishment. Life is too dangerous and fragile to be exhibiting urinals while claiming to be anti-bourgeois. We have environmental problems, political meltdown, a proliferation of madmen who want bombs. I’m sick of the ‘Art Is Anything I Say It Is’ crowd. Give me ‘the Aprés Garde’ with creators who astonish us with skill, vision and the freedom to rediscover new songs of the open road. Give me the true high wire walkers who dare the unknown and accept the consequences if they fall. Give me people who know how to draw instead of just drawing attention to themselves. Sunburnt souls finding their themes and saying ‘This is worth pursuing all the way around the bend.’”
On August 20 the Filmmakers Alliance will present Nilsson the 2008 Nilsson Award at the Directors Guild in LA. According to them, “Mr. Nilsson has been a prolific, dynamic, visionary and fiercely independent filmmaker… from his breath-taking first film Northern Lights to his searing, epic 9@Night Series. This is no lifetime achievement award: this is a shout of recognition and encouragement for an ongoing creative journey from which all [of us] can and should gain immense inspiration.”
The recognition has always been there, of course – considering Nilsson won at Cannes with his very first film. Nevertheless, such recognition means little to the true artist, except that it facilitates furthering the vision. Hence, the struggle continues for bigger, more ambitious projects, difficult at any time, given that Nilsson is invariably working on two to four features, generally with a dedicated crew of new twenty-somethings and solid old hands. And he is usually immersed in and enjoying the work, the exchange of ideas with his fellow creators, the pursuit of his own interpretation, the dedication to the craft, and even the vast physical labor of organizing, shooting, editing, mixing, and promoting the works currently in front of him.
Rob Nilsson presents us with nothing less than a massive oeuvre that both descends to the depths and takes us to Parnassian heights in search of love, dreams, and their realization. Nilsson’s work is bristling with an underlying message of freedom and poetry, romance and practicality, egalitarianism and anarchy, deeply artistic direct action – unified by obligations to the deep narrative quest. Posted on Aug 08, 2008 - 07:41 AM
