Nine years after making “Henry Fool,” U.S. indie director Hal Hartley has turned out a sequel, “Fay Grim.” Shot in Paris and Istanbul, the movie features actress Parker Posey (“Waiting for Guffman,” “Superman Returns”) in the title role, tracking down the “confessions” of her long-missing husband from the earlier film. These shabby notebooks of Henry Fool, held captive by Islamic terrorists, contain coded information that could bring down governments.
I recently met Hartley, 47, in a New York hotel while he was promoting his movie, which opens May 18 nationwide, with its DVD release to follow just four days later. Tall and smartly dressed in a brown suit, the blue-eyed auteur talked about his cinematic intrigue.
Hilferty: What’s “Fay Grim” about?
Hartley: It’s about a well-intentioned but typical uninformed American who learns about the world fast and furiously. It’s a satire of international relations, espionage and terrorism. It’s serious and funny, like most of my movies. Comedy tends to be the fog at the beginning that evaporates the closer you get to the end.
Hilferty: “Fay Grim” has a terrifically convoluted plot. What’s the deal?
Hartley: It’s impossibly complicated. I worked towards it, swimming upstream, realizing a film like this is going to need a lot of exposition. It’s really having fun with exposition as poetry, but the exposition is unreliable. That’s when the film really cracks open.
Hilferty: Visually, most of the shots are tilted. Why?
Hartley: The angling of the movie signals fun. There’s going to be a lot of talk and ideas bandied about in the film, but right away I want the audience to know that it’s not oppressive. They can laugh a lot if they want.
Hilferty: Did your perception of Americans come more into focus after you moved to Berlin in 2004?
Hartley: No, this was all written before Berlin. Fay may be uninformed in the beginning, but she gets informed and rises to the occasion with a remarkable amount of bravery, charity and smarts.
Hilferty: What do you like about actress Parker Posey?
Hartley: I made it a mission in life to write a great Parker Posey movie after working with her for only four days on “Henry Fool.” I think we have the same pulse. I write dialogue with my ears, and I never need to point out things about melody and diction to Parker – she hears it the way I’ve written it. And I like the way she moves.
Hilferty: You also wrote the impressive score for the film, no small part of the experience.
Hartley: The music is very present, right in there with the dialogue. There are sequences when Fay will say something and there will be a drumbeat, and then the Jeff Goldblum character will say something else, punctuated with piano and a drumbeat.
Accenting the rhythm this way is almost like kabuki. I haven’t done composing so aggressive since “Simple Men” in the early ’90s, though that was very different music, much more spacious.
Hilferty: Any musical training for this?
Hartley: The biggest influence on me these days is Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. I’ve written text for some of his pieces, and I’m staging his oratorio, “The Comedy,” next summer in Holland. I learned tons being with him. Four years ago, I expressed some dissatisfaction I was having with my music – I wanted it to be richer. He said, “Just hold some notes longer than you’re supposed to. You’re bound to discover something.”
(Robert Hilferty is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
