Rick Alverson talks film emulating music, and overthrowing the American dream. His bold new feature, Entertainment, which follows the slow demise of a washed-up comedian on the way to see his estranged daughter, screens Sunday, March 29 as the Closing Night selection of the 44th New Directors/New Films.

Entertainment
Rick Alverson, USA, 2015, 110m

Description: Following up his 2013 breakthrough, The Comedy, director Rick Alverson reteams with that film’s star, Tim Heidecker (here serving as co-writer), for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. Or is it the end of comedy? Cult anti-comedian Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) stars as a washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime (Tye Sheridan), working his way across the Mojave Desert to a possible reconciliation with the estranged daughter who never returns his interminable voicemails. Our sort-of hero’s stand-up set is an abrasive assault on audiences, so radically tone-deaf as to be mesmerizing. Alverson uses a slew of surrealist flourishes and poetic non sequiturs to fashion a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. John C. Reilly, Michael Cera, Amy Seimetz, Dean Stockwell, and Heidecker are among the performers who so memorably populate the strange world of Entertainment, a film that utterly scrambles our sense of what is funny—and not funny.

Responses from Rick Alverson:

On discovering that scripted entertainment can be a form of education:

I was an introverted child, and a painfully shy adolescent and young adult. I had an unorthodox upbringing as a competitive figure skater, spending my days at the rink, a boy in the men's locker room in a world that largely belonged to girls. I gleaned much of what I knew about the larger world and social situations from the nightly television of the late ’70s and ’80s, and the more sanitized entertainment I was exposed to as a Catholic boy. As I aged, I began to realize that scripted entertainment was inadvertently a form of education, for all ages; a kind of articulation of what is possible in the world, and what is allowed. I began to realize how difficult those arbitrary fictions were to unlearn, and to become aware of the cultural permanence of things we believe are disposable, temporary, and convenient.

When I was 17, I saw Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky at the Film Forum and that changed my perception and relaxed my skepticism. It suddenly seemed that all that intoxication and recklessness could be used to some constructive end—a way of opening up experience rather than shutting it down, of discovering rather than obscuring.

On overthrowing the image of the American Dream:

I believe movies alter us regardless of our age or intelligence. They sensorially reinforce behaviors and views more often than they upend them. Entertainment is an effort to upset our comfort with the form, and in minute ways, to contend with the consequences of both the form and the culture that made it, specifically the culture of an exported, sanitized American dream, and the heroism of the individual at the expense of the world around it.

On creating a film that emulates music:

I have primarily used unscripted dialogue in my movies. I'm much more interested in cadence and the sound and tone of voices than interactions that convey narrative meaning or message. I am skeptical of that type of filmmaking. It borrows too much from the literary tradition and not enough from the traditions of the visual arts and music, which cinema is more akin to. That being said, people are often prone to believing what is improvised is not “written” or controlled. I try to set up strict limitations for the actors and ask them to provide something unique within the boundaries of the situation. There are no rehearsals, per se; we shoot the rehearsal. I am more interested in the attempt to communicate than what is communicated. There are seldom more than three takes. There are meetings and conversations and a necessary understanding of the instincts and personality of the actor. Without those, I would be lost.

On figure skating, obeying a dog, and the KKK:

I’m working on a mid-century odyssey about figure skating, lobotomies, and occultism; a psychological thriller about a woman whose behavior is dependent on a dog’s actions; and a project about the genesis of the Klan during Reconstruction and the tumult of identities after the war on both sides of the racial divide.