"Where you going?"

"I don?t know. Do you want to help?"

A year and a half ago, Matt, Casey and I talked about coming together. Casey was my neighbor in New York City, so we were always hanging out with each other. We?d done work together before?Casey was in "To Die For" and Matt and he were in "Good Will Hunting." So, I guess we all wanted to work together again. Matt and Casey, in particular, wanted to do a project that was a little different, that we would only outline before we shot it and then do as we were progressing.

I remembered a true story Matt once told me about two guys who got lost on a hike. We took whatever we knew about that actual event, and I had my own experiences getting along in the wilderness and so did Matt, though we never actually got lost. There were also stories that Casey was reading about at the time. We started brainstorming about all of this and the desert. But, we tried to stay away from the particular facts in that true story. We never really explored any other concepts.

I was influenced by things I had seen recently by Bela Tarr that I was trying to explain to Matt and Casey. I think my major addition to this project was the idea of doing something on screen that was much more like real time. In some of Bela?s films, especially later ones like "Satantango," there?s a special rhythm. Say, for example, that somebody is walking in a field. Instead of having them walk around part of the field, he would show them walking across the whole field. For me, there was a point where I would start to notice a lot of things happening even though nothing much was happening. There was a kind of reflection going on in the film and I very much wanted to do something similar.

I thought of films and filmmakers I remember. James Benning is one of them and there?s a film of his, "The United States of America," where he?s driving across the country. In Warhol?s films, though in a different way, there?s that same instance of a camera rolling for long periods of time. I don?t think he?s much of an influence on me, but some connection does exist. I think Andrei Tarkovsky was an influence, and Alexander Sokurov, who was Tarkovsky?s assistant. Then there?s Chantal Ackerman, who made "Jeanne Dielmann," Fassbinder, and Derek Jarman, who made a film called "Blue" which was just a blue screen and a soundtrack. In America, films have to be like fireworks, where you push the audience along very quickly, and don?t let them think. These filmmakers let you think. I guess I fell under a sort of spell and became possessed by this desire to work in a form like that.

"I think you gotta jump."

I wanted to do something like this for a number of years so, when we started talking about a film where two guys go hiking in the desert, it was pretty easy to jump from there, because hiking is so contemplative, and getting lost tied in as well. I began with an outline?just thirty different incidents or pieces of action. Casey wrote a screenplay that fit those incidents. For example, there was a scene where his character got stuck on a rock. That was a line in my outline, but it was a 20-page scene in Casey?s computer.

"There?s so many different Gerrys along the way."

"Gerry" basically means "fuck up" as in, "Hey, fuck up, come here" or "look at that fuck up." The characters in the film don?t really have names. They just call themselves "fuck up". It?s like saying "dude," except that it means more than that. My original desire was to have Matt and Casey use as many words as they could that they?ve used over the years with their group of friends. I got different stories from them about the history of the word "Gerry". So, finally, I asked Ben [Affleck], "Hey, what does ?Gerry? mean?" and he gave me the rundown. Apparently there were a lot of Gerrys in their life, some of them good, but there was this, let?s say "questionable" manager named Gerry. Also, there was an album that they found in a record store by another Gerry. I?ve seen the album and the guy looks like an Asian swinger. Anyway, all these different Gerrys just became a term for questionable or fucked up people and things.

In speaking, there are a lot of words that are abbreviations or shorthand. Most of them come from people because they have so many different and complex things about them that the only way to describe them is to use their name, as in "don?t pull a Josh on me." Because Matt and Casey are so close, it means something to them. Sometimes it?s just a nickname of a friend, or a television character who I don?t know. "Gerry" is the only one of these words that I?ve looked into?

"I conquered Thebes."

"When?"

"Two weeks ago."

Collectively, we all decided to make the dialog in the film less expository. If two people strike up a conversation, especially on a hike, you or I wouldn?t necessarily get all the references. In a lot of the movie you?re coming in on something that?s already been established years before between these two men and, as a result, we don?t have the usual exposition that most movies have, where characters HAVE to say something. Here, they don?t say anything at all for a long time and, when they do, you wouldn?t necessarily know right away that they are talking about a video game or a quiz show. This isn?t a social situation where you have to include a third person in the conversation. They?re trying to get away from that person who is you, or the camera. We didn?t want the audience to always make out what they were saying. One of the tragedies of the advent of sound in the movies is that everything is basically about talk. In "Gerry," the dialog is really about THEM. It?s not about the story.

Part of what we wanted was for the audience to get lost along with these guys. But, part of it was getting them to a different place where they basically got "unlost" in a stylistic way?to get them away from modern American film style. There?s a place we?ve gotten to, and it?s almost as if we can?t go any further in this direction.

"We have not seen any of the stuff that we?ve seen. You know what I mean? We haven?t passed any fucking landmark, anything that looks familiar."

It seems to have started at the turn of the last century, with the way cinema first told stories. With people like D.W. Griffith, who was a product of the industrial revolution, films changed and established a code or a language of medium shots, wide shots, close-ups, and cutaways that we all have to use if we tell stories in the cinema?even today. In the early silent movies, people would laugh when they saw close-ups, because the actors? legs were missing. It looked funny. But, eventually, the audience learned to work the code and that became the way our eyes started to move and work. Today, 100 years later, it?s still basically the same code.

The Museum of Modern Art had a retrospective of Bela Tarr?s work last September and I wrote a piece for the catalog. I watched his films and it struck me that he was really dialing back to a time before this style came into being, when filmmakers were still doing things like a long, single take of a train pulling into a station. That?s what cinema was at first, but then it got combined with literature and theater and it became about storytelling instead of about pure spectacle.

What we did in "Gerry," I?ve never really done before. I worked from stories that haven?t been so conventionally theatrical, like "Drugstore Cowboy? and "My Own Private Idaho." And there have been examples of experimentation in my work, like the time-lapse images in "Idaho", which became a metaphor for what that character was going through with his narcolepsy. But, stylistically, I?ve never done this before, where I try to go back to the beginning of the cinema as if there had been no industrial revolution. The desert is one of those places where the industry doesn?t really seem to apply. It?s still alive. "Gerry" could be about two guys getting lost 2000 years ago.

"Everything?s gonna lead to the same place."

My desire is to figure out what direction cinema can go in and "Gerry" is an effort to say, "Where do we go from here?" so that we?re not just in the same place all the time. When MTV first appeared in 1980 or 1981, filmmakers felt kind of threatened. They said, "This will never work. They?re just making stupid, little pieces of film to go along with the songs." But, soon, filmmakers started working with MTV. They were no longer threatened and, eventually, a good number of them, people like Darren Aronofsky and Oliver Stone, began making films that looked like they were made by MTV. If it doesn?t look right, switch the image to black and white, do the jazzy stuff; hold the audience in the seat. Everybody?s doing it. It?s a certain style that came quickly, but it doesn?t take you anywhere. It?s nervous filmmaking. I guess I?m a holdout?somebody who doesn?t want to have MTV eyes.

And, that?s another thing! Holding audiences in their seats: Why is that a filmmaker?s job? I think there are a lot of ways of enchanting audiences, but I?ve noticed that today, no matter what the subject is, the filmmaking is exactly the same, whether it?s a really depressing story or one about a guy who saves the world. It tries to get a rise out of the audience, and it?s got to be exciting. Everything a filmmaker does is an effort to make it exciting for you as an audience member. It?s as uniform as a McDonald?s hamburger. It has the same consistency. You can go to any film and it doesn?t matter. I don?t think it was like that in the past. Twenty years ago there wasn?t one prototypical movie. There were more choices. Now, we have two: action and comedy. But, back when we had a Fassbinder, he made what he wanted to make?all kinds of movies?and he was free, inasmuch as he only had to make a few hundred thousand dollars to get his next grant to make his next film and he was free of the stress of knowing that everybody has to like it or go see it or you?re not going to be able to work again.

"Is this the way we were going? Yeah. This is it."

We pretty much tried to do without a lot of things, mostly out of a desire to trim down a lot of different areas. I think we were only about thirty people and it took twenty-six days. We didn?t have a makeup person on the film. We didn?t have any lights. We didn?t have a script girl because there was no script, so we didn?t need her. We had a small transportation department. But I think our biggest department was our grips because we had a half a mile of tracks to lay.