cineSOURCE magazine

Rob Nilsson: Enfant Terrible, Old Master of the Indie
by Doniphan Blair

Rob Nilsson, the actor, painter and poet as well as prolific filmmaker, enjoyed his recent New York star turn at the premier of his 40-year old 'Prairie Trilogy'. photo: Nicholas Blair

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ROB NILSSON, THE PROLIFIC, POETIC
and iconoclastic Bay Area filmmaker, just did a full circle of sorts. In August, he showed a brace of 40-year-old documentaries co-directed with John Hanson, collectively called “Prairie Trilogy”, to great acclaim at Manhattan’s cool, new Metrograph Theater.

“We got it because of Trump,” Nilsson told me at the beginning of our rambling, revealing and occasionally contentious three-day, two-coast interview, which started late July, at his large house in the flats of Berkeley, and ended a few days ago, via email. “People are looking to see if there is some other way, in the effort to get rid of this clown.”

Nilsson and I also chatted at the Metrograph, before his show and at the deluxe after-party, in the haute cuisine restaurant that is part of the theater—it was the film's forty-year-belated world premiere, after all. As we washed down their spectacular food with their vaguely-drinkable wine—Nilsson going light on the latter, due to his monkish demeanor—we couldn’t help but notice how far we were from the tough times depicted in “Prairie Trilogy”.

Fortunately, Nilsson’s an old hand at such surrealist stretches, having leapt from obscurity into the spotlight at Cannes, in The New York Times, at meetings in Hollywood, and back again, many, many times. As it happens, “Prairie Trilogy” is about hard-scrabble farmers, vicious capitalists, home-grown socialists and a brilliant poet-activist named Henry Martinson, whom Hanson and Nilsson found still working at the AFL-CIO’s Fargo, North Dakota, office, age 97!

Nilsson himself just cracked that number in reverse, 79, although he's as vigorous and opinionated as ever, and swears he'll never retire.

“No, heaven forbid. I do my bike riding and stuff to keep my mechanism rolling—so far, so good.” On October 30th, the day after his 79th birthday, he biked nearly forty-five miles, from his home, half way across the Bay Bridge and to the foot of the Richmond Bridge, “in 3 1/2 hours,” he bragged by email.

Those statements notwithstanding, Nilsson is now creating his last films, also a trilogy, coincidentally. “It will probably be the last major thing I will do. I don’t know. Maybe there is something more coming.”

Of course, making features is insanely taxing, no matter how masterful Nilsson has become after 51—or so he claims (his IMDb page lists a "mere" 33, and four shorts, while there must be almost a hundred of the latter). Making features can easily reduce youngsters half his age to blubbering idiots, not to mention Nilsson often acts or stars, as well as directs.

With his chiseled features—both sagging and drawn tight with age—intense gaze and priest-like bearing, which evaporates when he deems to crack his wide smile, Nilsson has delivered his unique brand of acting performance to scores of films. While IMDb lists only 33, there are undoubtedly double or triple that, given he's acted in at least half his own films and dozens more by cineastes from around the Bay, the States and the world, often indie mavericks in their own right.

Nilsson has also performed in Hollywood, appearing once each on “Miami Vice” and “Beverly Hills 90210” (1986 and 1992, respectively), and rendering roles in many of Bobby Roth’s TV films. Even at 79, he continues to send out headshots and garner much needed income from his acting career.

Nilsson's “Nomad Trilogy”, which he has already started with “Arid Cut", now in editorial, focuses on a young man embarking on a walkabout.

“This kid, Train Schickele—his name is Rail in the movie—this young, disaffected—well, I won’t call him disaffected—this young poet and tap dancer [is] needing to know about why he never met his father."

Farmer-actor John Ness (left) and 97-year-old poet-activist Henry Martinson in 'Prairie Trilogy' (1978). photo: courtesy R. Nilsson/J. Hanson

“He journeys through homeless encampments and out to the Nevada desert," Nilsson continued. "The search for his father provides the through-line through the three films.”

In another circle completing, Train Schickele is the son of David Schickele (1937-1999), one of Nilsson's best friend since the early '60s and their Peace Corps days in Nigeria.

That turned out to be a cultural adventure of immense proportions, given not only the fascinating village where Nilsson taught school for almost two years (Okeagbe, Akoko province), but the funky 8mm camera he brought and began shooting.

When the film came back from processing in England, he cut it—literally, using a razor blade and a board fitted with nails—into “The Lesson”, a spoof on colonialism featuring white surfers motorcycling around West Africa. Sadly, the only print disappeared, along with a box of camera equipment, when his apartment was burgled a few years later.

After his Peace Corps service, Nilsson retired to an island off the coast, where he wrote, painted and hung with locals through a paradise year, which ended abruptly with the news that Frithjof Holmboe, his beloved maternal grandfather, also a filmmaker, had died.

“He never even heard about my turn toward film,” Nilsson told cineSOURCE in 2008.

A peripatetic photographer known for shooting wild orchids and the first documentaries in North Dakota, where he was the state photographer, Holmboe eventually settled in Wisconsin, where Nilsson was born and raised to fourteen. After lighting out for the coast, Holmboe brought his extended family to Mill Valley, Marin County, fifteen miles north of San Francisco, where he bought and ran Strawbridge’s Camera store.

Nilsson ended up becoming the star of Mill Valley's Tamalpais High. Respected as a poet by his peers, he was also the class president, cross-country team captain and the big band's lead trumpeter, before heading off to college—none other than Harvard.

After taking a year off to work on Swedish freighters and hitchhike around Europe, he graduated from Harvard in 1962, only to find himself draft eligible and the war in Vietnam looming. When his conscientious objector application was nixed, he joined the Peace Corps, which was allowed as an alternative.

Before that, “I was trying to become a civil rights lawyer," he told me. "Food for Freedom was something that was being set up in Marin for people in Mississippi. They selected me to deliver the money. I had the check sewn into my jacket.”

“All these guys were in the SNCC headquarters,” the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Greenwood, Mississippi, “trying to hold out. I don’t think it could have been my idea, but I did do the bulk of the work, going to the city hall, going through the records, finding all the people who were wealthy enough—and liberal enough—to stand bail.”

“It just seemed like: ‘Wow, this is something so powerful, I have to be a part of it!’ I asked my grandfather if he would stake me going to law school and he said he would. I called the SNCC [but] they said, ‘The outside agitator [accusations] are so strong, we have to just do it on our own.’”

Rob Nilsson as Mel Hurley, a lovelorn war photographer, in his Sundance-winning 'Heat and Sunlight' (1997), which he also directed. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

After Nigeria, Nilsson drove a cab (in Boston), met a woman (Indira, one of his fares), which produced a daughter (Robindira, to whom he is preternaturally devoted), and developed his art (poetry, painting and film).

His first real movie, “The Country Mouse", was an hour-long drama about an innocent abroad shot on the streets of Boston. He turned next to documentary, as was his pattern, after getting the gig to shoot a 30-minute "making-of" movie about Otto Preminger’s “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon” (1970). Repatriating to California, he cut it on a Steenbeck this time, lent by Schickele, who preceded him back to the Bay and, by some strange quirk of fate, had also become a professional filmmaker.

Schickele had a Steenbeck, an expensive German flatbed editing machine, because he was already neck deep in his first feature, the docu-fictional “Bushman” (1971). Still taught at some film schools, “Bushman” opens as a narrative about a Nigerian, played by one of Schickele's students from the University of Nigeria, Paul Okpokam, who comes to America to attend San Francisco State University.

But when the actual Okpokam started organizing students to strike against the war in Vietnam and was arrested, “'Bushman' turned into a documentary about [David’s] efforts to get him out of San Quentin,” Nilsson explained, “which Willy Brown [a lawyer, who became mayor of San Francisco] helped him do.”

Schickele also appeared in “Signal 7” (1986), Nilsson first film using the method he invented for preparing actors and creating improvised scenes, which he calls “direct action,” but is essentially “direct acting,” given there’s little scripted dialogue.

Since then, Nilsson has done Direct Action workshops around the world, including in Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Italy and Armenia, and developed its ideas in lectures, in the book “Wild Surmise: a Dissident View”, and on his websites, Rob Nilsson and Citizen Cinema (there’s also a Wikipedia page).

In addition to using improvisation, Nilsson recommends we reject the “film as short story,” a paradigm promoted by film schools and Hollywood. “Smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot," cineSOURCE quoted him saying, in the same 2008 article. "Create a poetic cinema based not on writing but on observing… mistrust your ideas… trust your experiences."

“Film is not a director’s medium,” Nilsson proclaimed, manifesto-like, on his website at that time (a statement no longer up). “The magicians who bottle the genie are the actors. The magician who lets the genie out of the bottle is the editor.”

“The second [new film] is ‘Center Divide’. It is about how gentrification is pushing people into homeless and RV encampments,” Nilsson continued in our interview, the first round of which was conducted in his old screening room, now full of film cans, video cassettes and half-full cardboard boxes.

After decades in a house with an edit suite, living quarters and sizable third floor loft, which he used as a painting studio, as well as a screening room, Nilsson appeared to be moving. “It is about the trip, the voyage itself, the adventure,” he said about his new film, but with a furrowed brow I took as a reference to his current situation, having to start anew so late in life.

Nilsson on his motor bike, although he also does regular biking, including a 40-miler on håis 79th birthday. photo: D. Blair

For this epic, road-trip triad, Nilsson created a new workshop and production group, albeit still under the auspices of what he calls Direct Action or Citizen Cinema interchangeably. Along with Schickele, it includes Penny Werner, who co-stars in "Arid Cut", Russell Murphy, a retired principal dancer from the San Francisco and Smuin ballets, and Michelle Anton Allen.

Allen was an alienated south-Cali kid when she happened to catch, late one night on cable, “Northern Lights”, the companion narrative to the "Prairie Trilogy" docs. Its stark, black-and-white images of struggling farmers stuck with her as she studied acting at Julliard in New York and returned home to work in TV-landia.

“While on a movie set with a once-prominent TV actress,” Allen told cineSOURCE, “I had an epiphany. 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 becoming a Citizen Cinema stalwart, acting or producing, as needed. “I’m happiest working with Rob, my cinematic soul mate.”

Also signed up for this ride are Lydia Becker, a longtime CC actress as well as practitioner of the complimentary Reichian therapy, Dante Dunn, an up-and-coming rap artist, the actress, singer, dancer AND fine artist Emily Corbo, and newbie Tony Milliner, who has done several CC workshops but no film until now.

Nilsson also happens to live near one of Berkeley’s infamous homeless encampments, in this case a community of van dwellers, seasonal workers and off-grid techies. Having befriended some, he's enlisted them as character actors, consultants or even set providers, be it the interior of their vehicles or their collective mass at meet-ups.

“Some of these people have the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous [at] Quartz Site, Arizona, I believe," Nilsson noted. "They get about 3,000 people. They have workshops on how you can live in the rough, put a solar panel on a Prius.”

Fleeing personal demons or the Bay Area's ridiculous rent, Nilsson’s nomads are houseless, but not homeless, and are reversing a millennia of "westward ho" by heading east for their better life.

On top of his prodigious film work, Nilsson is an accomplished painter, who shows his large, brush-strokey and colorful canvases, both abstract and figurative, most recently at San Francisco’s Spark Arts and the Harvey Milk Photo Center.

Poetry, too, remains an important, ongoing self-exploration. Ten years ago Nilsson published, “From a Refugee of Tristan da Cunha” (2007), a “collection of songs, rants, raids, runs into the chaos” (according to its Amazon page, where it's available—by the way, da Cunha is a remote, south Atlantic island not a brilliant Brazilian poet).

But these are loner pursuits: “Poetry is very internal thing for me. I kind of trust it will emerge viscerally. Painting is imagination. Filmmaking is more observation, I think, for me.”

Pure observation would be documentary but, aside from "Prairie Trilogy” and a handful of others, Nilsson skews narrative, which requires actors and larger crews, in other words: community.

In the early ‘70s, Nillson joined the Filmmaker’s Union of San Francisco, an alternative labor union, which led to the formation of Cine Manifest, a film collective (see his long remembrance at the end of cineSOURCE's “Cine Collectives Come Back, Finally!”).

Nilsson enjoying the 'Prairie Trilogy' premiere after-party with a Japanese filmmaker, with whom he was discussing a collaboration. photo: D. Blair

Cine Manifest facilitated his partnership with Hanson, whom he first met in Boston. In part because they both had North Dakotan grandfathers, their bond blossomed into “Prairie Trilogy”, “Northern Lights” and finally a full-fledged film company, New Front Films, in 1982.

After the success of their first feature, “We set out to make two films,” Nilsson recalled, in one of the dozens of email follow-ups to our seven hours of recorded interview, “my ‘On the Edge’ and Hanson’s ‘Wildrose’.” They completed those projects in 1986 and 1984, respectively.

"We raised about a million and half for ‘On the Edge’ throughout the country," Nilsson elaborated. "Along the way, we met Bruce [Dern, a respected Hollywood actor], a lifelong runner. He was perfect for the lead role of Wes Holman, as the film featured a runner and a cross country race based on Mill Valley’s Dipsea," America's second-oldest foot race. Nilsson himself continued to run track at Harvard and 10Ks and marathons into his sixties.

After Cine Manifest, which was a bit too ideological and doc-oriented for his taste, Nilsson went on to found a number of narrative film tribes, notably the Tenderloin Action Group, in the late-'90s, which became the Tenderloin yGroup, and Citizen Cinema, in the mid-2000s.

“How could I do this without friends, without a whole fortunate…” he waved his hands. “Once in a while you meet people like Marshall,” he opened his arms further. Marshall Spight is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has both acted in and funded Nilsson projects and now owns Meets the Eye, one of the Bay Area’s biggest green screen studios.

There has also been financing from David and Carol Richards, the former a Nilsson classmate from Harvard, and help from many friends and collaborators. John Stout, a lawyer, producer and fundraiser, raised much of the million-five for “On the Edge”, big money those days—big money these days, considering how hard it is to fund anything but commercially-minded indies.

“The whole workshop thing is hundreds of people just being able to be there for these movies,” Nillson said, spreading his arms again.

“One thing I do wish is that I could get back some needed capital to these people that never had much,” Nilsson lamented. “That would be mean a financial success I’ve never had. I guess I can’t say there is much hope of that.“ Except, perhaps, “Nomad Trilogy”.

“They are all multi-story films," he said, returning to the epic at hand, "and some of the characters come across all three stories. The third is called ‘In Outland’, or perhaps 'Yonder'.”

Regardless of whether the trilogy's final film has a Mobius strip title or one shooting for the stars, it will be shot on the Schickele family land outside Mina, Nevada, which will serve as an Ithaca homeland for both Rail, the trilogy's Prodigal Son, and Nilsson himself.

“Hopefully housing a transcendent Penelope,” I remarked.

"No, Penny [Werner]'s character dies at the end of the first film."

"I meant symbolically, as in Odysseus's Penelope... in terms of the film."

“No! They find out they’re outsiders no matter where they go,” Nilsson answered, looking down.

Bruce Dern stars Nilsson's most Hollywood films, 'On the Edge', which combines an underdog sports story with Nilsson's political ruminations. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

“It was a good weekend,” he noted by email, about his latest Manhattan star turn. In point of fact, he’s had quite a few, starting in 1979 when "Northern Lights" went to Cannes and brought back the Camera d’Or, the best first film prize, and was well-reviewed by Vince Canby, The New York Times' premier film critic.

“I went to the [Metrograph] shows on Saturday and Sunday and had enthusiastic responses," Nilsson wrote. "Four major articles: NY Times, Village Voice, Counter Punch and something from Criterion.”

“We now have a distributor and requests coming in. I'm blowing on the coals.” And what do you know—they're fired right up!

Indeed, Nilsson has been touring ever since, showing “Prairie Trilogy” at art theaters, colleges and festivals all over the country, including San Francisco’s Roxie and Marin’s Smith Rafael Film Center in late October, although a black-and-white documentary about impoverished, fly-over farmers will doubtfully deliver much relief to Nilsson's impecunious associates.

Not to mention another problem: “If I had my choice of which of my films I wanted to be known and seen,” Nilsson admitted, “it is not my favorite film.”

“I got more interested… in the cities than in the countryside,” he remarked, in what would be his only explanation for his Damascus Road conversion from salt-of-the-earth, somewhat-straight, cinema explorations to more bohemian wanderings and wonderings.

“What are the joys and sorrows, the sufferings,” he ruminated, "of these odd migratory animals, who came in from the land to master new technologies and be confronted by modern contradictions?"

“I would say ‘Heat and Sunlight’ is a more challenging film," he said, surveying his enormous oeuvre. One of his most impassioned unrequited love stories, playing out over one long day—both of which became preferred Nilsson tropes—“Heat and Sunlight” (1987) combined scripted moments and Direct Action.

It follows Mel Hurley (Nilsson in a black leather jacket), a photojournalist who covered the Biafran Genocide, the starvation of over a million Nigerians while the world watched, during the civil war that destroyed the country a few years after Nilsson was there. Hurley is now confronting another massive indifference, that of his lover, a gorgeous dancer, whom he suspects is sleeping with her performance partner.

About the madness of art as well as jealousy, with music by David Byrne and Brian Eno (with whom Nilsson did a doc about The Velvet Underground's John Cale), “Heat and Sunlight” stormed Sundance in 1988 and took the Grand Jury Prize (see a short clip here, sadly, Nilsson is severely underrepresented on YouTube).

Consuelo Faust, who plays the dancer, in what would be her only film role, "becomes a sexy, vivid, mesmerizing focus," according to the now-well-known critic Janet Maslin, in The NY Times. "And Mr. Nilsson himself ably captures the urgency and jealousy."

“On the Edge”, Nilsson's film preceding “Heat and Sunlight”, is not one of his favorites. Arguably his most Hollywood, the promotional catchphrase—"Feel the pain, live the dream, share the glory"— probably makes him want to puke to this day. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it thirty years ago and it’s fascinating from a film-studies perspective (see its trailer)

Starring Dern and Pam Grier, the great Blaxploitation star gone mainstream, it also features John Marley, from “Faces” (1968), the film which brought John Cassavetes's unique breed of improvisation, cinéma vérité and intimacy to a large audience (it was nominated for three Oscars). As if cribbed from a Hollywood movie, Nilsson met Marley accidentally at the famous Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard.

In fact, “On the Edge” garnered rave reviews, including one from the surprisingly-insightful mainstream critic Roger Egbert—"an angry, original, unpredictable movie... Bruce Dern, in one of his best performances"—and a pretty good one from The Times, which characterized it as a thinking man’s “Rocky” (1976), replete with requisite silhouette shots of training.

Nilsson hard at work at his edit bench/computer, which can require up to two years per film. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

While The Times reviewer characterized the obstacles confronting the hero as routine, what is hardly Hollywood is Wes's father, a tough old lefty, who boycotts his son’s races because he wants him to stop dicking around and stand up for the people. I recall the father was played to a "T" by Bill Bailey, a non-actor who developed his back story fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War, ripping Nazi flags off German ships in US harbors and facing down the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Also Bailey’s only film appearance—he died shortly after production—the father character allowed Nilsson to explore issues vexing him from “Prairie Trilogy” and “Northern Lights” to the strange pair of Russian films he made seven years ago: How do we help our brethren? And what do we do if helping becomes hurting, if ideas or organizations become repressive or murderous?

Regardless of critical acclaim or personal faves, "It is always the next film that interests me,” Nilsson told me. “I like ‘Permission to Touch’ [2014]. I like ‘Fourth Movement’ [2017]."

Yet another Ouroboros digesting its own derriere, "Permission to Touch" is Nilsson's return to the characters and themes of "Heat and Sunlight", notably a now-elderly Mel Hurley and what women do with their bodies. While it doesn't achieve the original’s punchy, politicized romanticism or iconic black-and-white imagery—both in “Heat and Sunlight”'s cinematography and Mel's photography (provided by Steve and Hildy Burns)—it remains very solid Nilsson: heartfelt or insufficiently felt, as the case may be, taking place in one night and largely improvised.

Not to mention, he produced it on a fraction of the budget, with only two actors, himself and T. Moon, a stunning, woman-of-color television and theater actress who plays a performance artist (in lieu of a dancer), a crew of three and all shooting and editing executed entirely inside his Berkeley home.

T. Moon is a pseudonym because she doesn't want to be associated with the movie (for personal reasons), even though she delivers a fantastic scream-fest fight with Nilsson in its beginning, a lovely art-dance piece in its middle, and together they produce some rambling, if realistic, reconciliation, in its closing.

"Fourth Movement" didn’t grab me as much, although it's an intriguing piece about people on the periphery of the jazz scene who end up drinking and commiserating through one of the worst nights of their lives: election night, 2016, the dawn of the Trumpocalypse (see clip here).

"I guess it is because I can see what it is I am trying to do, and I can’t let it alone,” Nilsson explained, in reference to why it is always the next film that concerns him. “Whether anyone else sees, it is kind of irrelevant, anyway. I succeed, I fail, on my own terms—that way I know who to blame.”

“You can’t try to please anyone—that is ridiculous," he counseled. "Nor do I think you should play to an audience. You should play to your sense of what’s real, what needs to be done. In the end that’s all you’ve got. You have to know whose criticism to listen to. In the end, you feel it or you don’t.”

They obviously felt it back in the late fall of 1977, when Nilsson, Hanson and half of Cine Manifest decamped from their south-of-Market San Francisco warehouse and flew to North Dakota, where they were hosted by Hanson’s mother and neighboring farmers. Hanson also secured grants from the North Dakota’s National Endowment for the Humanities, arts organizations and unions.

So deeply did they feel it, in fact, they made not one but four films, “Prairie Trilogy” plus “Northern Lights”.

Nilsson in his once-lovely screening room now full of boxes and moving paraphernalia. photo: D. Blair

Perfectly complimenting its companion docs, right down to the elderly socialist Martinson doing the narration, “Northern Lights” was “stunningly photographed” by Cine Manifester Judy Irola, according to Times critic Canby. Using lots of chiaroscuro and graphic framing, Irola starkly iconized the young women and men trying to farm, survive and organize on America’s harsh northern prairies (see clips here).

“Northern Lights” opens equal or better than anything by Bergman himself: a laughing, lightly-dressed and erotically-charged Ray and Inga chasing each other through a snowy forest. Played by Susan Lynch and Bob Behling, from San Francisco’s theater scene, they're soon beset by money troubles, Ray's father dying and Inga leaving the homestead to look for work. Upon learning her marriage has to be postponed, Inga gulps down a whiskey—a rare Nilsson nod to hedonism.

One piercingly poignant scene shot in telephoto shows a clutch of young, inexperienced farmers struggling to thresh winter wheat in thin overcoats, high wind and swirling snow.

The story was based on Hanson’s grandfather, a Dakota farmer radicalized during World War I, who joined the Nonpartisan League, a movement advocating for farmers and against the rail, grain and bank monopolies. Nilsson’s grandfather Holmboe posthumously contributed the excellent North Dakota footage he shot in the 1920s, which appears throughout "Prairie Trilogy".

Joe Spano, another “Northern Lights” lead, moved to Hollywood soon after production to become Detective Henry Goldblume on “Hill Street Blues” (1981-87), but most of the remaining cast were Dakotan civilians. They were led by the Ness family, in particular John, with his commanding mustache and charismatic smile, who also appears in "Prairie Trilogy", scenes which look like outtakes from “Northern Lights”.

Ray, the first of many politically-conflicted Nilsson characters, reluctantly agrees to join the Nonpartisan League, which was called that to protect against the standard tactic of “red-baiting.” Sadly, the actual League was taken over by populists and right-wingers, just as Ray feared and for which “Trilogy” provides the historical account.

When “Northern Lights” returned from Cannes, in the spring of '79, with the first-time filmmaker's prize, Nilsson, Hanson and the Cine Manifesters were ecstatic but also shocked, as was much of the film world. European in style and politics but American in subject and character, it was the veritable opposite of the other great films of the late ‘70s, notably those by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who were also forging a new cinema by the Bay. Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", also 1979, masterfully and artistically captured the '60s, but was unabashedly a war and Hollywood film.

Nilsson and Hanson's lower-budget backward glance seemed to provide a better window into the conflicts and complexities of the Bay Area, where artists and activists were trying to keep alive the ‘60s' social movements in the face of the tragedy of the Black Panthers, the Milk and Moscone murders and the Jonestown massacre.

“After having read about ‘Northern Lights’ for years, I reached out to Rob,” Jacob Perlin, the artistic director of the Metrograph Theater, wrote me by email, in response to my question: “Why the ‘Prairie Trilogy’ revival now?”

“I fell in love with the film and asked Rob and John Hanson if I could do a theatrical re-release. In 2013, the film opened at Film Forum in New York City, followed by a national tour.”

“[Then] I asked them for copies of everything they had done. I instantly recognized ‘Prairie Trilogy’ as being as much of a masterpiece as ‘Northern Lights’, and completely revelatory in terms of the kind of non-fiction films that were being made at that time.”

“Little did I know,” concluded Perlin, who decided to show and distribute "Prairie Trilogy", “the film had never had an official release, and the audience and critics are finding it just as wonderful as I had.”

'Signal 7', Nilsson's second break out film, featuring his improv technique, Direct Action, was presented by Francis Ford Coppola. photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

Why am I not surprised?

I became enamored of Nilsson’s work immediately upon viewing the wild and wooly, yet quite coherent, “Signal 7” at the Mill Valley Film Festival, which has world premiered many Nilsson films, in 1986 (not 1984 as listed on IMDb; also, its title is “Signal 7”, not “Signal Seven”). It, too, went on to be well reviewed by The NY Times, which called it “an unusual, touching, intelligent film," one that proved "excellent movies can be made without big stars and mega-budgets.” Presented by Francis Ford Coppola (meaning he introduced, not produced, it), Nilsson estimated it cost only $150,000.

I also happened to attend that after-party, which I spent drinking heavily with some "Signal 7" actors and their friends, notably the charming Raven de la Croix, a former Russ Meyer actress with a world-class bosom, whose day job was stripping.

About two cabbies (Bill Ackridge and Dan Leegant), in the course of one night (yet again), as they swerve around San Francisco, discussing life and dealing with difficulties (like the shooting of a fellow cabbie), “Signal 7” was the first movie—ever—filmed on the new generation of video cameras and transferred to 35 mm film for theatrical distribution.

Although marketed as “portable,” those cameras were not small and, with the film shot hand-held over three, very long nights, Nilsson introduced his cinematographers (Geoffrey Schaaf and Tomas Tucker) at the Mill Valley premier as “two human tripods.”

In addition to its video innovation, “Signal 7” marked Nilsson’s aesthetic about-face from his freshman feature—a leap a lesser artist would have been reluctant to take—to colorful, contemporary and aggressively-emotive films, which were largely improvised. Indeed, dialogue, actions and sometimes entire scenes were made up, after extensive exercises and backstory development using his Direct Action method.

Jazz achieved full improvisation in the early 1960s, but cinema was slow to jettison scripts in favor of free-blowing, outside of a few adventurous auteurs, like Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes—one of whom Nilsson hates, because he typifies the bloodless conceptual artist that is an anathema to a can-do, romantic Man of the West, the other whom he adores.

cineSOURCE magazine, for our part, has long advocated genre miscegenation, with one of the best mixes being the improvised film with anything else: drama, romance, comedy, cop, etc. One easy way to do this: shoot a few scripted takes—playing the head, as in jazz—and, once you have something serviceable in the can, improvise the hell out of it.

Then let the best take win in the editing room, where “the magician lets the genie out of the bottle," which can be incredibly laborious in an improvised film. First of all, dialogue and blocking vary greatly from take to take; secondly, the editing itself is extemporized, with the film often reinvented entirely anew in the editing room.

“Most of my films take over a year to edit, some two,” Nilsson informed me by email. "I’ve been on ‘Arid Cut’ now for over a year and I’ve got another year to go.”

Nilsson routinely attracts editors right out of film school, kids who’ve seen and fallen in love with his films, a system which also serves his budgets in recent years. Despite claiming that editors are the real directors, which implies introducing a second visionary, Nilsson closely oversees the entire process.

Almost all filmmakers, including those as hidebound as Hitchcock, allow ad-libbing, notably when confronted by bad lines or great actors able to inhabit characters better than some schlemiel scriptwriter.

But Nilsson reverses that ratio, rejecting the entire pretense of commercial filmmaking, while retaining many of its conventions, like cutaways, character arc and the hour-plus-some length. To get the rawest feeling and most relevant spontaneity, Nilsson recommends you prepare extensively but then take a deep breath and blow freely with all you got.

If it doesn’t gel into brilliant cinema, Nilsson doesn’t yell cut or bitch out his actors, like some dictatorial auteur. Instead, he interjects a few words, a reassuring look or even a hug (especially useful for inspiring first-time non-actors), and continues the scene. Even if a scene is bombing, he lets it dribble down to its natural demise, during which it may reanimate or deliver one last revelatory statement or expression.

And so it was that Nilsson assembled an immense body of unusual and fresh films and came to be recognized by many critics and film school professors as the foremost inheritor of the improv mantle from its great groundbreaker, Cassavetes, to whom “Signal 7” is dedicated.

Indeed, Nilsson is an aggressive innovator in his own right. He looks to poetry and mysticism much more than Cassavetes, a libertine who died of cirrhosis of the liver at 59. And he developed Direct Action, a fully immersive method, which fostered more improv. Cassavetes only used improvisation in rehearsal, after which he would edit the results into script form for traditional shooting.

Nilsson continued the discussion with an old friend, follower and some times provocateur, cineSOURCE publisher/editor Doniphan Blair at the Metrograph opening. photo: N. Blair

The first American director to win awards at both Cannes and Sundance, Nilsson has received numerous other plaudits, prizes and rave reviews; he has worked with some of America’s finest film actors (Stacy Keach in “Imbued”, 2009; Ron Perlman in “Stroke”, 2000); he’s attracted financing from Silicon Valley; and he has taught dozens of classes.

In addition to facilitating scores of Direct Action workshops around the world, Nilsson did almost a decade and a half running the Tenderloin Action/yGroup, in San Francisco; he has taught numerous classes at Emeryville's Film Acting Bay Area, which also provided actors and financing for a few films; and he held the columnist emeritus post—if only for one issue—here at cineSOURCE, in Oakland.

Alas, it's not quite the acknowledgement befitting a master of the indie, alternative or art feature—call it what you will. Indeed, Nilsson has had trouble of late raising money for his films or even covering his mortgage—apparently why he's subdividing in his home into rentals—not that Nilsson, the old Nigerian world traveller, well versed in Buddhist and poetic asceticism, complains.

The prophet's acclaim is often greater overseas, as the saying goes. And with European viewers more comfortable with complex cinema, Nilsson is in demand as a festival judge, teacher and collaborator in Russia, Armenia, Italy and elsewhere. On his peregrinations, however, he hasn’t found many people doing improv-ed films, perhaps because cinema's cost precludes leaving so much to chance.

“I bet you there are a lot more than I know,” Nilsson answered, when I asked about that absence. “I bet you because it is such a natural choice. Once you realize how difficult it is to get anyone to a realist point of view with written lines—it is like pulling teeth. Great actors can do it. But I’m not interested in acting. I’m looking for something closer to doing and being.”

Fortunately, in the course of making almost 30 Direct Action/Citizen Cinema features around the Bay, Nilsson has inspired a hard-working local group. Loosely affiliated as Bricolage, French for styles stuck together, they act in and produce each other's films, often using skills honed at Nilsson’s elbow: directing, workshopping or editing.

“Yeah, those guys are doing their best to follow that line. To me, it is a legit and possible dream,” Nilsson said, pausing. "I have a lot of respect for these filmmakers because they’re working from passion and commitment, not commerce. I hope they’ve learned things from me but they go their own way.”

And so they have. Jeff Kao, a fine artist turned filmmaker, delivered the astoundingly natural coming-of-age story, "Knowing Nothing Cold" (2016), with a completely teenage cast, including his daughter (see cineSOURCE article). Deniz Demirer, a handsome actor who turned in a strong performance in Nilsson's "Love Twice" (2015), wrote, directed and starred in “American Mongrel" (2012), an amazing, largely-improvised road trip movie. It concerns three acquaintances who, after a night of drinking and arguing, head off around the North-West.

Other Bricolagers include cinematographer Aaron Hollander, who has shot for Nilsson but is the human tripod for the prodigious output of fellow Bricolager, Daniel Kremer. Also a film scholar and historian, author of "Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films" and dozens of articles (including the above-mentioned one on Kao), Kremer is an indefatigable film worker, who has been the editor on a number of Nilsson epics.

Kremer has also directed over a half-a-dozen features, although I've only seen "Raise Your Kids on Seltzer" (2015) and “Ezer Kenegdo” (2017). A believable story of a Jew and a Pole becoming uneasy friends, “Ezer Kenegdo” follows the former, played by Kremer himself (despite a debilitating stutter growing up), as he hangs out with Orthodox Jews in New York, travels to San Francisco and connects with Demirer (who is originally Polish). Entirely improvised from that point on, they search for, find and finally drive out to the countryside to meet their favorite artist, a reclusive painter played by Nilsson.

Despite his anti-Hollywood stance, Nilsson often attracts its leading actors, like Bruce Dern, Stacey Keach or Carl Lumbly, shown here, in 'Love Twice' (2015). photo: courtesy R. Nilsson

The first time this author met Kremer and Demirer was in 2013, at one of the monthly screenings Nilsson mounted for a few years. The films were usually fantastic foreign features he selected, save one night when he presented a recent project, a 30-minute piece made with Celik Kayalar, the actor-director who runs Film Acting Bay Area, and three other accomplished thespians.

The film concerned the friends and collaborators of a deceased filmmaker (Nilsson, yet again filmed entirely in his Berkeley home), as they gather for the reading of his will. Although the lawyer never shows and they eventually disperse, his mentally-challenged daughter remains, providing a powerful indicator of the permanence of love.

The cast workshopped intensely with Nilsson and turned in excellent performances, but the production suffered longueurs, like when the pro-sumer camera iris-ed down at every window and blossomed after. When I suggested the film could better serve as a dress rehearsal to secure financing for a well-produced final version, Nilsson was outraged.

“The film was a class exercise done in a single take,” he said, “not a commercial enterprise.” Aside from criticizing the messenger, even though I thought the message was good, I wanted to muck up “an honest film” with “pretentious dolly shots” or “other Hollywood crap.”

Filmmaking in the rough is the sacrifice we have to make for Christ-like content, Nilsson seemed to say, although I also heard him opine one time that, “I think of myself more as a Judas, who has been accused of attempting to crucify Hollywood.”

“Absurd,” I retorted, as Nilsson’s small screening room went sound-stage quiet, "All film is interpreted reality. Doing a decent production would just be the logical, final step of the rehearsal process that you and the actors obviously worked very hard on."

As Nilsson clambered to his feet, he was interrupted by Demirer, who proceeded to ridicule my insane obsession with lighting, my bourgeois attachment to production values, and my suicidal devotion to death cinema, or words to that effect.

"I do recall 'interrupting' or offering my point of view," Demirer told me recently by email. Instead of my summary, however, he recalls saying, "We have to get over the forms of cinema that have been... forced on us for so long... [A] shaky camera, [an] unexpected and unusual light appearing and disappearing erratically in the frame does constitute cinema and does offer a psychological experience, whether you want to admit it or not."

"Yes, production elements, the filmmaker's tools, can sometimes draw attention to themselves, but why should this not be the case?" Demirer claims he continued, professorially, despite the fact that we were embroiled in a loud argument, which only lasted a few minutes.

"No one owes the actors anything but an honest search, a truthful approach which originally may have stemmed from a lack of resources but has long since become a conscious style that maintains integrity," he concluded. Or "something like that, the exact words are inaccessible at this point," he admitted, by email.

Alas, as anyone who was there undoubtedly recalls, things got so heated, with both Demirer and Nilsson yelling on top of each other as well as at me, I decided to perform my point—the 25 or so audience members were mostly filmmakers and actors, after all. I started crawling on all fours frantically about the room, proving what, I don't recall, save we should lighten up.

I had hoped that the master would welcome, and the acolytes would appreciate, honest feedback, but cloistered cults often have a hard time with that, a problem Nilsson himself addresses in his critiques of the Left. Indeed, Nilsson often makes an attempt to be open and curious, accepting criticism good-naturedly or suddenly switching from a self-centered monologue to inquiring about his interlocutor's opinions or affairs.

The Nilsson-inspired film group Bricolage (lf-rt, top): Daniel Kremer, Aaron Hollander, Josh Peterson and Penny Werner; (bot) Kris Caltagirone and Jeff Kao. photo: D. Blair

Equanimity returned with Nilsson giving Demirer an avuncular pat and me a forbearing nod, although I felt it prudent to exit post haste. Walking to my car, I thought I was about to be mugged, but it was just Kremer jogging after me. The film-school kid chopping away on Nilsson’s current project, I assumed, Kremer had observed the entire fracas from the back.

"Pretty wild, eh," I said, "well, you know, artists."

"Yeah, but I agree with you," he said.

That was not the only time Nilsson and I disputed the appropriate level of production. At a FABA event a year later, he screened a class production concerning a woman reuniting with the now-adult son she had given up for adoption. On top of its moving story, the actors had Direct Actioned to a fare-thee-well and delivered eerily-embodied performances. Alas, my enjoyment was again interrupted by production problems, while Nilsson was again irritated by my mention of it, although that time there was no shouting or crawling on the floor.

Thinking about that argument, however, I came to the realization that Nilsson's method is holistic, both of one piece and based on full commitment, at whatever venue or production level the situation allows. Hence, films rise rapidly from conception, come alive through Direct Action and are soon captured on film, by the shooters and cameras that are available, providing "a truthful approach," as Demirer noted in his email, if not our actual argument.

About a year after our second, friendship-threatening blow up, I had another epiphany. While I prefer to err on the side of professionalism, the more important quest is the investigation and revelation of strong feelings and inventive ideas. This makes me a Nilssonian, I realized, more devoted to a feminine-principled and visionary art than the work of macho, hyper-technical artists, who often lack innovation, honesty or soul.

Rounding out Bricolage is Josh Peterson, a true genie-releaser—he was nominated for an Emmy for editing “Soldiers of Conscience” (2009)—and the actors Kris Caltagirone, who also starred in "American Mongrel", and Penny Werner. A un-showy actress who throws herself subtly but fully into her roles, Werner stars in "Odds", a dark comedy she co-directed with Kao, as well as Kremer's "Raise Your Kids on Seltzer" and Nilsson’s “Arid Cut”.

"I think of Rob as a great inspiration in my life, even a 'mentor'—bordering on therapist!" Werner wrote me recently, by email. "I only began acting in earnest after attending one of his powerful workshops. My life has been greatly changed and enhanced from having met him."

In addition to doing a lot of extemporaneous scenes, the Bricolagers exemplify Nilsson’s notions of filmmaking as an exploratory or even shamanist quest—and not in the airy-fairy sense. Nilsson is interested in artistic vision, of course, but even more in simply seeing the basic reality of our all-too-human character and conditions.

“All the excellent acting you see on television, I can’t stand to look at it any more,” Nilsson told me. “Its excellence is excellent, but it ain’t what I am looking for.”

“The genius of the everyday people is what interests me. That is harder for people to understand or to like because you don’t have the music to go with it [although he often scores with fantastic music], the niceties, the little fillips of attraction. It is a little raw.”

“‘Why am I looking at him, he is just like my uncle?' That's why you should be looking at him,” he almost shouted, “because you NEVER looked at your uncle!”

So allergic is Nilsson to commercial film, he felt compelled to walk out in the middle of “Sorry to Bother You”, the surprise summer indie hit, written, directed and scored by Oakland rapper and activist Boots Riley. Nilsson had heard about and was impressed by Riley’s lefty family, but found his white characters “cartoonish,” despite my attempt to explain, “it was a broad farce. Weren’t the Russian ambassador or American general in 'Dr. Strangelove' cartoonish?”

Nilsson (2nd from rt) directing his crew on an early project, in the early-'80s. photo: courtesy R. NIlsson

Ironically, Nilsson seemed surprised when I mentioned that the second half of “Sorry to Bother You” featured animation, puppetry and a bio-engineering twist involving “horse cocks,” although I can just about hear his response, “Glad I missed it.”

Nilsson also didn’t like the first half of Oakland’s other summer hit, “Blindspotting”, telling me it was boring and that “the audience was laughing at not with the characters.” Again I tried to explain, this time that an elderly white guy, no matter how well-traveled or -read, could hardly expect to get jokes written by and about twenty-somethings of color.

Nilsson would have nothing of it. The individual, he insisted, is entitled to view any work of art on their own terms and render judgment.

Unlike with "Sorry to Bother You", Nilsson was forced to sit through “Blindspotting” because we went together and were grabbing a bite after. Fortunately, he was pleasantly surprised when film came alive halfway through, in its first fight sequence, which it was delivered in flashback, a trick Nilsson admitted worked well. I, in turn, thought the whole film worked well, with that fight drawing together stories nicely rendered during the more comic first half (see "Blindspotting Shows West Oakland’s Heart")

“I’m not interested in either of these films,” Nilsson wrote me by email, “and they weren’t part of our interview,” suggesting his strong opinions should be off the record. “I seldom see films I respect,” he added, by way of a conciliation prize to Oakland’s widely-acclaimed new filmmakers, although he did mention two recent ones he found to be “surprising breakthroughs.”

"Life and Nothing More" (2017), by the Spaniard Antonio Méndez Esparza, "is a terrific film,” he said. Distributed by Mark Fishkin, director of the Mill Valley Film Festival and long time Nilsson comrade-in-arms, "it is about a black single mother and her difficult son, shot in Florida.”

“The other is ‘Capernaum’ [2018, Nadine Labaki], which won a special jury award at Cannes. Shot in the slums of Beirut, [it is] about a street kid and his attempts to keep alive a young child left in his care by a prostitute. Both filmmakers—one which I’ve come to know and respect—spent years researching their films, and both films are done with non-actors, very much in my style.”

On top of eschewing commercial film's line delivery, blocking and script slavery, Nilsson had some recent run-ins with Hollywood hustlers.

“I had two people in the last couple of years whom I trusted, whom I shouldn’t have. There are so many hard chargers out there.”

In Hollywood, “‘We are making a film’ is a positive statement but in a negative context," he explained. "Most of the people who are making films aren’t doing anything. They are bullshitting with the hope that one of their lies will stick to another and actually [become] a film. Never, in my experience, is there ever a film when people talk that way. I got snookered and paid the price.”

Nilsson’s insistence on absolute artistic freedom also compelled him to end his columnist-muse position at cineSOURCE. That was after his second article went way long and the editor politely proposed a few cuts (we were still a paper magazine back then, with limited space), not to mention he spent a third of his piece trashing Warhol (whom we liked, as a filmmaker as well as an artist).

Nilsson’s first and only cineSOURCE article "Survival of Imbued" (2008), however, still rings loud and clear, perhaps enough to last us through the ages:

"The nature of film is that its disasters begin early and stay late,” it opens archly. “The film 'Imbued' is an example... The film was dead, and its death almost a relief.”

“Too much to do. Resources inadequate to the task. Bills piling up. Nerves stretched to slingshot mayhem into the retreating behinds of the routed... All that remained was the coffin, lugged to the boneyard by a cortege of spavined nags."

But “[y]ou can’t give in to Mother Chaos," Nilsson insists. "You’ll be swallowed up, yes; but the question is when. ‘Not yet,’ was the answer. And so two letters went out into the gloom. One was ignored. The other was answered: Stacy Keach was interested."

An edgy as well as accomplished Hollywood actor, Keach fell in with Nilsson like two peas in a pod of grizzled bohemians, rendering a nuanced performance as an old gambler obsessed with a young call girl. Played luminescently by Liz Sklar, she accidentally appears at the gambler's unfinished, luxury condo, where he’s camping out.

“A light bulb goes on which would otherwise have remained off,” Nilsson concludes about his characters, which he would probably admit were well-worn archetypes. In the end, Sklar’s character hits the down button but the elevator goes up, gracefully implying her new trajectory.

Nilsson did finally drop cineSOURCE a line eight years later, in 2016. He wanted to inquire if we would be so kind as to publish an essay, “yGroup Manifesto”, written 30 years earlier by him and his much-laurelled Tenderloin workshop. It would pair nicely, he said, with the about-to-be-released “Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics”, which included his article “The Way of Seeming”.

We were overjoyed: it had been four years since our last article (“Nilsson Not Slowing”); the cinema community needed an injection of Vitamin N; and cineSOURCE specializes in manifestos—in fact, we are the world leader, having published five of the eleven manifestos listed on Wikipedia's "Film Manifesto" page.

Not to mention the “yGroup Manifesto” provided a picture window into the famous film group, which had influenced so many filmmakers as well as viewers through its workshops as well as films.

The Tenderloin Action Group’s freshman outing, "Chalk" (1996), a pool hall story featuring members of the Action Group and some of the world’s top nine-ball pool players, was voted one of that year’s top ten films by New York’s Village Voice.

The Action Group and its subsequent iteration, the yGroup, went on to produce nine "9 @ Night" films, oddly paralleling the name of the pool game but so-called because their stories all start at nine in the evening. In the course of nine features, many of them also acclaimed, the "9 @ Night" series examines almost fifty characters on the rough edges of America.

“Driving through the Tenderloin,” San Francisco’s not-so-soft center, where Nilsson was editing “Heat and Sunlight” in 1987, “got me interested in making features right on the street,” Nilsson told cineSOURCE in 2008. “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.”

Article continues at Rob Nilsson: Old Master of the Indie, Part II

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Feb 09, 2019 - 03:01 AM