Award-winning indie filmmaker Maria Giese's charitable heart and experimental quirk of mind are a welcome anomaly in the realm of film production. She's often wanted to perform an experiment where 50 random people from arbitrary walks of life are given jobs on the set of a feature film, and says she'd wager that with a great script, this makeshift cast and crew could produce a feature as good as any coming out of Hollywood in a given year.
Giese loves the idea of audience participation, which necessarily involves the unexpected, nice to hear from someone representing a medium known for favoring ‘canned' scenarios. "As you can see in Hunger," she points out, "almost all the extras were real people just wandering around, going through their daily routines. Our camera and crew were so small, few even knew we were shooting a film. That's a wonderful use of Los Angeles-the locations include great throngs of built-in extras."
Giese's adaptation of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, long one of my favorite novels, was shot on a budget of zero dollars entirely on digital camera, with borrowed film and effects, and is the only one I've seen so far to successfully recreate the surge I felt first reading it. Driven by faith in his worth as a writer, the film's protagonist "Charlie" lives and dies by the literal world's regard for what he's worth, as every dedicated artist must begin. As Giese says, "Midway through reading it, I knew that on some level, 100 years later, that character was me."
Her first film, When Saturday Comes, was financed by U.K.-based Capitol Films during production, but she never saw a penny after its release. The five subsequent years of failed attempts to get another feature off the ground, during which Giese subsisted by writing screenplays, were frustrating, she says, "not to mention the spiritual and financial destitution that accompanies what seems to be career failure. My mother sent me a copy of Hunger. Shortly after reading the book, it hit me in the sudden way that inspiration sometimes visits us: I had to contemporize this story. I would make a film about a screenwriter wandering around Hollywood, trying to get a job, literally starving to death. Exactly what I'd been doing for five years-if not physically, then spiritually. My friend, the brilliantly gifted actor, Joseph Culp, immediately wanted to make the film with me."
A few fledgling attempts to get producers to finance the project were fruitless. "They hated the script. They would have hated the novel, too. I knew that shooting this film for any kind of budget, with a big star, would be totally inauthentic to the story." Shot entirely on digital camera, with borrowed film and effects, Hunger's narrative, originally set in late 19th century Norway, is artfully transposed to modern day Los Angeles in Giese's film, and the novel's comical aspects skillfully accentuated without any betrayal of Hamsun's blueprint, and the updated times and surroundings have the effect of emphasizing points made in the original, rather than muffling or trivializing them, as might be feared.
In true DIY fashion, Giese caught on to the notion that if you had a great story to tell, people would overlook the grainy nature of projected video image and in time, even come to revere it as much as they did the traditional style, provided the films were good enough. "History is jammed with examples of how human aesthetics make radical shifts. Among the most obvious: Van Gogh. In his time, his work was viewed nearly universally as being lurid, ugly. Now most people see it is exquisite. With the advent of the digital video camera anyone, anywhere in the world, could make feature films of any kind-even ‘little epics' based on classic works of literature. The trick was not to try to make video look like film, but instead to embrace it and use it to enhance the story. And more than that, embrace everything about no-budget guerilla filmmaking: unsteady images, weird zooms, in-camera digital effects. Whatever works."
But despite the profoundly liberating nature of the concept of ‘Free Movies', the film business is crowded and influenced by corporate interests, independent filmmakers left to their own devices in terms of promotion and distribution. "There is truly no accounting for peoples' success in the film business," she says. "The best we can do is attempt to get our films into festivals in order to get the necessary attention that may result in a distribution deal. I prefer to give everything away for free. I suppose I have always agreed with Karl Marx on that subject: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. Unfortunately, I am one of those who is perpetually in need-and I live in America."
But there is a bright side. The 150th centennial of Knut Hamsun's birth (August 4th, 1859) took place recently, so Hunger the novel is enjoying a nice resurgence in Norway, and the excellent documentary, "HAMSUN", by one of Norway's finest directors, Knut Erik Jensen, emphasizing the contemporary influence of Hamsun's work around the world, including clips from Hunger the film and several interviews with Giese and Culp, premiered there early last month. Besides which, in August her film helped celebrate the opening of the new Hamsun Museum in Hamaroy near the Arctic Circle, and was accepted to four festivals, winning Best Film in two, Best Underground Film in another, and receiving a five minute standing ovation at the Nordkapp Film festival, held in Norway, near Hamsun's home town. "That screening was thanks to Knut Erik, and the response from the toughest audience my film will ever face was pretty overwhelming, to say the least."
She's working on another adaptation at the moment, of Meindert Dejong's Newbery Award winning children's novel, The Wheel on the School, set in Holland in 1910. "I co-adapted it with my writing partner, Laurie Grotstein. She's a two-time Emmy-nominated editor and one of the best screenwriters I know. It's a beautiful story of how a group of children (and their propensity to wonder why) restore grace to a bereft community. If we can get it made, it will become a children's classic. It has a message the world sorely needs to hear right now."
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