Interview: Tim Blake Nelson

'I always try to find philosophy in genre'

Joseph Owen

Eagle-eyed observers will remember the following billet doux that opened my dispatch from the Locarno Film Festival last year:

I love trudging up the sharp incline to the Belvedere. I love finding Tim Blake Nelson ensconced in an attractive suite overlooking a mountain panorama, only to sadly notify him that Holes (dir. Andrew Davis, 2003) dominated our formative English GCSE syllabus. I love staggering back down the incline, pulse quickening, dictaphone overheating, with a scribbled piece of paper in my pocket that reads: “Pitch TBN interview to FT Arts Desk in early Jan before new Captain America– ££.”

Well, January came and went. The Financial Times passed. The Guardian had a full inventory. Filmmaker Magazine read the transcript. The Film Stage said “Thanks, but no budget.” So, this interview now finds itself in its spiritual home, pegged to no new release, but safely at ease, palliatively comfortable, in familiar surrounds.

What do I remember about the interview? Nelson is a lovely bloke. He spent the first few minutes remarking on my Englishness, which led him to soliloquise on the riots then flickering across the country. He asked specifically if I was related to Stacey Vint, who—and I can’t do much more than paraphrase the headlines, here—fell over while pushing a burning wheelie bin at police in Middlesbrough. She was later jailed.

It was a weird time. Did that new Captain America even come out?

CYZ: You’re here as a member of the jury. In general, the task of these festivals is to protect and valorise smaller movies, but over time, festivals such as Cannes have started programming star-studded blockbusters along with independent films.

TBN: Hopefully, such movies are going to be premieres and not competition films. As long as that’s the case, I don’t have any issue with it because if they help bring people to the festival and maintain interest in the festival, all power to them—I’m in favour of it. Where it gets tricky is if they take competition slots.

Festivals right now are carrying a very important torch because we’re seeing movies more and more infrequently in theatres and more and more frequently at home, and this is especially true for art films. I can’t imagine that I would see in the United States more than three out of the 16 films we’ve seen so far. Of those three, maybe one of them would appear in a theatre outside of New York City, whereas even ten years ago, half of them might make their way into movie theatres all over the country. But the art houses are going out of business everywhere, except in New York City and some other major cities like Chicago and Seattle. Angelika [Film Centre] in Dallas just closed.

Movies are made to be seen in movie theatres, not on television screens, so film festivals are where you can still see great, ambitious cinema, projected. If blockbusters suddenly colonise those slots, I have a problem with that. If they’re simple premieres, maybe it’ll bring more people to the festival.