By Fred Topel | Images property of Magnolia Picture.
Fay Grim
It's rare for indie films to get sequels. That's a big budget Hollywood studio sort of deal. But Hal Hartley got to follow up his 1997 film Henry Fool with this month's Fay Grim. Now Henry's wife takes center stage as she explores the secret history of her ex-husband.
Hal Hartley Talks Fay Grim
Hartley said he always planned a sequel. "I used to joke about it even when I was writing the script and like most jokes it was half serious," said Hartley. "I think by the time we were shooting I thought about it more and then when we finished it I thought about it more and there were a couple of years there from 1998 to 2000-2001 where I’d often be found after supper trying out different scenarios verbally trying to entertain people. At a certain point I did that one too many times and James Urbaniak, who plays Simon, said 'I don’t believe you anymore. This is not just a joke. You’re serious about this. You’re going to do a number 2.”' That just irked me, kind of pushed me."
10 years later, we're in a very different world, so Fay Grim reflects that. "All of my films ever since the beginning have always been very important for me to have my films, regardless of what they’re about, to be reflective of the time and place that I’m living in. It doesn’t have to be right up front and center but it should be there. I used a similar technique, or a similar discipline when I was writing Henry Fool. I was reading the newspapers, reading magazines and watching the news, just trying to get concrete examples of representative things in that time and everybody in that time was a swing to the right in Congress and Senate and a more right wing politics and also all this stuff about censorship of the Internet and the real heated debate going on about how it should be controlled. Should the government control it? So those things found themselves into the core of the story and so I took the same approach here with Fay."
Post 9/11, there is a wealth of material on espionage. "I knew it was going to be some sort of espionage thing. It kind of lent itself to that in terms of comedy and in terms of where we left off with Henry Fool. Did he get on the plane or did he not get on the plane? So I did the same thing. I kept a folder and clippings and I was surprised to find how many in the daily newspapers, how many little stories there are about really about what we used to call espionage spy stuff. You read this and say this sounds like a James Bond movie. I collected them and tried to put them all in there. Almost all that stuff they referred to is real. It comes from a real source. The American’s had satellites spying on Britain and Israel during a period of time when they were allies about something and that would piss everybody off. I was just really intrigued by that."
Fay Grim was cofinanced by HDNET Films, according to their alternate release strategy. "I’m very excited about this approach that the film will be out on movie screens in 25 cities and on the same day it will be available to be viewed on HD Net films TV and then apparently like a couple of days later you can get in on DVD anywhere in the states. What excites me about that is the whole idea of the whole nation can all at once see the film. It was always intriguing but somehow disappointing back in the olden days, five or six years ago, when a film would come out in L.A. and New York and maybe Chicago and then depending on how it did there it would go to Minneapolis, Tucson and how it did there it would go to smaller things and it was this long kind of flow and whatever you call it. It would take a while. I can’t help but wonder what would be different now if people in a small town in Kansas can rent or buy it on DVD in the same week that people are seeing it in Chicago in movie theatres. Just the conversation, particularly when the conversation is via the internet and everything is so much accelerated these days. People talk to each other."
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