Interview with Mark Christensen

Here's an interview from my friend Len with filmmaker and self-described Fabricator, Mark Christensen. His second film, North by El Norte is a fabrication that includes a real life flying machine.

An Interview with Mark Christensen,

Director ofThe Box Head Revolutionand

North by El Norte

by Len Borruso

November 2007 Los Angeles, California

(Special to Quentin Lee / AliveNotDead.com)

Testing one, two. This is Mark Christensen, come in…

Where did you grow up? I’m a transfer brat. I had 8 different homes in 20 years.

What were the places you lived in? Freemont, Salt Lake City for high school, college in Denver.

Were you always around the outdoors? I was one of the first school skateboard champions in high school and college. I started in Utah and then Denver and I used to come out to California and win these championship contests.

What was the last year you won a skating championship? 1979.

Holy shit. That’s how old school.

Did you learn in empty swimming pools, like in Dogtown? I was with those guys but they were better and bigger than me.

Then you moved to California? No, I followed a girl to Virginia for about a year. Went back to Denver. Then to California for guitar school in 1986.

Where? Music Institute in LA.

Then you stayed in LA?  I lived in Venice in a garage apartment attic.

I met your Dad. He was doing sound on one of the re-shoot days of your last film. What were your parents like when you were growing up? My parents were pretty private. They had a few friends they would party with. They were not very life skill oriented teachers. But they gave me a good moral fabric. They were supportive of me being an imaginative kid. I think my Dad always thought I was gonna come around to being like him. And he always would say, “Look, what you need to do is just go down to the end of the street and get a job at Household Financial Company and work your way up.” That was his way and so that was really the only way he could really teach me. I had different plans for myself.

When did you start making films? I tried being a musician for about 15 years. I’d started in college.  It just got tiresome and I kind of just didn’t know what to do anymore with music after trying it for so long. I always knew that I would make movies. I just always knew that. So it was time to get a camera, sell the guitar and make a movie.

When was your first film? When I first moved to Los Angeles, I sold whatever I could and bought a Bolex and started making a black and white science fiction film in the backyard. It started out as a short and turned into a feature.

Is this The Box Head Revolution? Yes it is.

When was this? April of ‘98.

When you say sci-fi, what was your film about? It was about another planet that is repressed and devanced in technology. And it’s about an American space probe with a gold record in it. One of the probes we sent up in ’73. It’s about that probe crash landing on that planet. And eventually the rock and roll on that album causing revolution and change.

Who were your early influences? It was all music. John Lennon. The day he died was the day I became a musician. I said, okay, now I get it. That’s what I really want to do. Film always made simple sense to me. I never thought of it as something I would study like music.

What type of music where you listening to at the time Lennon died?  I knew The Beatles were the band that had it.

What kind of music where you listening to when you started making Box-Head Revolution? I was really into a band from Austin, Texas called Ant, Man, Bee. The name of the band didn’t make any sense to me until I learned something on the Discovery channel. There’s only three species in life that gang up together and fight. Represented by an ant farm, a bee hive and humanity. I thought that was a pretty clever name for the band. I liked their original arrangement of pretty clever technical rhythms and melodies. Their music is in the film.

Do you consider yourself political? I never did but I’m reflectively looking at my material going, “Yeah, okay, I’m becoming a little bit like my dad, my patriotic dad. I never had a political agenda about anything I did but after you produce a piece of work and look at it, it’s like, “oh, okay, I guess that’s where my head is.”

What would you say is your political vision? How is this expressed in a specific way? It’s really easy. When you watch political change and evolution throughout the globe, other countries discovering what America is about. And America trying to keep what it had found itself on early in the developing years. It’s just freedom. So I always feel the need to express that element. That the individual has to find that. And remind everybody else.

You once told me that “Nature wants us to make film.” Why do you believe this? I think that Nature wants your film to get made because it communicates your accuracy or inaccuracy of the voicing that you are trying to do in a film. And that’s very important for culture to identify with.

It voices your accuracy? Yeah the accuracy of your voicing is judged by the viewer. Whether it is incorrect or not isn’t important. It’s the viewer that needs to learn whether it is correct or not correct.

How does nature determine that? Well nature allows her film to exist if you yourself try to manifest this film into existence. It’s a difficult task even with money. You’ve got all these elements against you so the nature of it is that you have to have this perseverance and then if you are showing this perseverance nature will recognize that and grant you this opportunity to go and get that developed.

And you believe all films should take at least a year to make? You should purposely take a year to make your film because the discovery of your process is in the process of making it. If you just take the time to watch those discoveries you’re going to embellish those original ideas. And you also have the chance to see if that makes sense to your viewing audience. Truly the only thing you can give film is time. And Hollywood proves it everyday. They throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a film that’s gonna tank. You could throw money at a film all day long but time is what it needs. Its conceptualization needs that embellishment. I think all the films that we do truly enjoy have that time. Whether it’s into the scrīpt for ten years or the filmmaking process.

You are a self-proclaimed fabricator, what do you mean by this? Just of metal materials, you know, you can fabricate things. So I’ve done a lot of metal work, welding, so when it comes to developing things that you can’t afford you just fabricate them.

Necessity is the mother of invention? Well, no. If you can fabricate, you can operate from there. If you can’t fabricate you have to come up with money to get things.

How do you finance your films? Well, you have to start it. And once you start it you realize that if you quit you will be humiliated for the rest of your life and consider it a huge loss --or finish it. Under those terms you do whatever you can to come up with the money. In my case it’s taken me one or two years to the completion of my film by making my own money. I restore cars. I am a fabricator. You go out and buy a car for such and such price. You restore it, put it on the market. You keep doing that till you get enough money to finish your film. That’s how I did North by El Norte and that’s how I did Box Head too. Box Head only cost 10,000 over a three year period. It was like, well, I’ve got a couple hundred dollars, let’s go out on the weekend and get those scenes. I mean, how hard is it to come up with a couple hundred dollars? But with North by El Norte, every time I rent a camera and shoot for a week it’s 18,000 dollars. So I have to spend 6 months restoring these automobiles. One a month and finally I’ve got that much money. And really, that’s a lot of money and I’m really grateful to come up with it under any circumstances.

What influence has science fiction had on you? I’m interested in invention. What’s always fascinated me is how things exist and how are we going to get the things that don’t exist yet. I study invention. I read technical manuals for automobiles and I have a design degree in architecture. So I’m technologically minded and I follow technological growth. And I would probably be an inventor if I wasn’t doing all this stuff, some type. But then again, film is inventing.

So science fiction is your favorite genre? I blame all that on the Twilight Zone. I was 6 years old when I saw my first episode, being broadcast on black and white TV. It was amazing. I looked at that TV as a completely different invention after I saw that first Twilight Zone. Before it was just commercials and soap operas and cartoons and things that seemed normal. It really wasn’t an interesting box to me. And then, the Twilight Zone.

Do you go to see films about music or musicians films? Music belongs where it’s at, on the radio and in your head. When you do films on it you desensitize its natural effect. If it’s not coming across the radio or if you are not just listening to it personally, it’s desensitizing.

What about music videos? Music videos are great but they also desensitize the listening experience, which is what music should be about.

Coming from a music background, how does it all play for you? My relationship with music is pop/rock. And when you write a song, to me you are really writing three verses. And it has to be a small story. That’s why screenplay writing is easy to me. Because it’s three acts. It’s just an expanded three versus. It’s really harder to write three versus that make sense than it is to write a screenplay. So that’s just one relationship that I have with music. When you write dialogue for a song --we’ll call it dialogue-- it is the same story journey just done with your imagination. So that the words in a song are minimal and obscured to the point where you use your imagination to find the story and make it useful to yourself. So there’s three elements, there’s three verses, in a general structure. I mean, there’s all kinds of structure but generally the songs we listen to on the radio have three verses. It’s the first act, second act and third act, with bridge choruses in between. Maybe the answers to the verses are in the choruses, however it ends up being structured the best. So when you go into screenplay writing after writing 400 songs, it made really simple sense that all it was was an expanded song with detail.

As far as getting a tone, an emotional atmosphere for film with music, I’m just now starting that. And I’m very musically inclined so it’s really more of an auto-response, I’m not conscience of it.

Are there any directors you follow? I would have to say no. Though I just saw American Gangster and I think Ridley Scott is pretty amazing.

What do you think of digital effects? People are so used to them. I think the only thing you could do next is make somebody from the past come back to life. Like Marilyn Monroe.

What advice do you have for young filmmakers? If you have an idea, go get a camera and make a movie. It’s as simple as that.

Do you see yourself as part of a movement? No. I have concepts. They’re mine. The industry has a lot of avenues to work with. I think that most filmmakers are people that gather their concepts from other origins and then develop them like producers. Even a director. Even Kubrick would get books and produce them. So I’m in love with my original concepts. And I really like seeing things that don’t exist, exist. I’d rather write from scratch things that don’t exist and bring them as a first time experience. No matter what you think about film, it’s an art form first and a business second, because you can not sell a blank screen.

What about Hollywood filmmakers? Most of the relationships I’ve had with Hollywood filmmakers haven’t worked out. I’m not really sure why yet. But I came here knowing I was gonna make movies for the rest of my life. I came here with the idea that everybody was in their backyards making movies. Who the heck wouldn’t be in their backyard making a sci-fi? They live in Hollywood, they should be showing this effort, under any scale, of making a movie. I found out that the opposite was true. I would be the only one that I knew doing it. I couldn’t believe nobody else was doing it. I can’t figure it out, to this day, what everybody else is thinking in as far as themselves making a movie. In fact I don’t know anybody in the ten years I’ve been here who made a movie except me. I thought that everybody I met in the beginning would have their movie too.

Why are you shooting North by El Norte anamorphically? I don’t think we have ever seen Tijuana, Mexico in anamorphic. I thought that would be great. I knew nobody was gonna take an anamorphic film down to TJ. It’s good for my venture. It’s a clean picture, very cinematic.

For North by El Norte you have concocted a flying machine from a wheelbarrow. Can you tell me more about this idea? Well you see, that’s where fabricating allowed me to write the scrīpt.

Did you just wake up one day and go “A flying wheelbarrow. Yes.” No, it’s never like that. It’s resourceful thinking. If you know you don’t have any money but you are gonna make a movie. First of all you think it’s gonna be a year if not two years of my life. It forces you to get the largest amount of production value out of your available funds. So in approaching this story, what could bring this story to more than just being a basic story about somebody crossing the border? A flying device. Well that’s how that started and since I can fabricate, I knew I could get one of those built and flown. And so when I finally bought the wheelbarrow for 50 bucks at Home Depot. Brought it home and stared at it for three weeks. I looked at it and thought, well I don’t really have to change much. Hook two wheels on the back, mount a motor on it and hang it.

So you flew it in TJ? Yeah. Flew it in TJ. It was amazing to have a film crew shooting this on the ground, while we took off in the air. People along the fence were saying, Go For It! They were relating with this thing flying, trying to get over the border. We had two, I was in the other one shooting. An experienced power parachute pilot, with the actor’s wardrobe on, was in the other one.

What were your thoughts when you started North by El Norte? In dragging cars down to Tijuana, Mexico, I met these guys. In fact, I knew a guy who did excellent leather seats. His name was Amerigo. One time he mentioned, “Mark I’m not going to see you anymore because I’m gonna go hop the fence tonight.” And that was seven years ago and he never left Tijuana. I realized this dream these guys have is just lying to themselves. And this great dream of getting here weekly was never gonna happen to all of them. But the dream was still alive in their head, they just couldn’t get the money to get the coyote or they would fall into drugs. Their fantasy took them into drugs and they could never achieve the integrity it would take to try and get them over the border. And then conquer some kind of survival here in America. That’s a whole different huge thing that you gotta try and conquer. Take your little bit of English and go and get a job here? Yeah, that’s if you get over the border. So I just thought, you know, I’ll make a little story about a guy trying. Of course it’s a little more heightened reality than that, because you need to entertain your audience and I think that the story has a better chance of being seen by everybody, with higher production value, good actors…and a flying device.

I wanted to ask you about Control of the Mode of  Production in like a Marxist way or who knows, a Capitalist way? I mean, you control it!

I didn’t know that though. I have never had a crew. I mean, what is a crew? I am learning that the second week in. I mean, what the hell a crew is. “Oh, that’s what a scrīpty does. Oh, okay, here’s your paycheck for the third week. And I think I’m finally getting it, what you’re doing here.”

What I meant too was that you own your own lighting truck, you own your own grip truck.

I knew right away that it wasn’t gonna happen in thirty days. The whole crew thought yes, a thirty day shoot and we’re gonna wrap it. And I thought, no, no, I wouldn’t even want to.

This goes back to Nature and taking a year and the process.

It does.

So you decided to buy a grip truck? I had the same truck I bought years ago for Box Head. I held on to it knowing that this was the truck I was going to use to make renegade films. Yeah look, it costs 500 dollars a week to rent a truck. It was going to be impossible to afford that. And I had the freedom to go when I wanted if I owned these vehicles. I bought a camera van, which is just a standard three quarter van. And I always had a van that I would use for props and grip.

How did production go? We thought what was storyboarded was possible. When we got to set, we realized, no way.

So you ended up condensing shots? Absolutely.

And changing performance? No. No and we didn’t change the scrīpt. We got it all in one shot or some combos. We never even looked at the storyboard again.

Now that you had a crew all of a sudden, what was your attitude toward them? It’s been hard to identify with them. There was a lot of cloudiness for me at first.  The reasons for me to be doing film are not the reason they are doing film. For me to be that saturated in my perspective, of being motivated enough to go into production with my own money, I mean, that takes a lot of saturation. It takes a lot to peal yourself out and go, now why does the grip have this attitude? It was frustrating. Now, after two years of shooting this, I’ve got it down. I can refine it into two reasons why people are in this business. One is the art form, which is really rare to find those people. And the other one is financial survival. And artistic survival too. They all want to be directors but really they are gonna pay their bills with your money all the way to their film. Nothing wrong with that. But it just wasn’t my view of filmmaking. And I think that they clash. I don’t think they understand me either. So you have to find people who see through the standards of the industry and what they expect filmmaking to give them in order to be a filmmaker like me. Because really I’m just giving to my film whether it gives back or not. And I think that’s pretty rare.

Is there anything good to say about a large film crew? Yes. And that is this. The more extras, and the more driving devices and the more lighting you have for your set you are just not gonna get believability without  a large crew manipulating all these things.

Do you like having  a large crew? No. The only reason for having a large crew is because you need one. That’s 10 percent of any movie, action, automobiles, explosions. If you have over two extras, you need control. Especially crowd control. You need a crew to handle all that stuff. I’ve suffered from it, that’s why I’m suggesting it. Other than that, Kubrick said it best. He worked with the same 6 person crew on every single one of his films. 6 people, how do you do it? How do you make those films with 6 people? He said it best by simply doing it.