Crispin Hellion Glover: It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine

Crispin Hellion Glover: It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine

By Erin Broadley

Dec 19, 2007

Crispin Hellion Glover is, in many ways, a man that embodies the Renaissance ideal. There is an intensity that fuels his life and his work; one that some may view as somewhat strange, but others realize as truly impassioned. He is an author, actor, director, and, though he doesn't consider himself a musician, a recording artist. He is the misfit auteur with a fascination for the macabre who first impressed mainstream audiences with his breakout role as Back to the Future's George McFly, though it wasn't until the release of his directorial debut What Is It? (2005) that audiences got their first real look into Glover's mind and his penchant for films that go beyond the realm of good and evil.

The first in a trilogy, Glover once described What Is It? as, "The adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe and how to get home, and is tormented by a hubristic, racist inner psyche." SuicideGirls' own Daniel Robert Epstein called the film, "Weird, different, frustrating, bizarre and even brilliant; but it’s so far from the mainstream that it almost overlaps and becomes mainstream again."

The second film in Glover's trilogy, It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, made its world premiere at 2007's Sundance Film Festival, dizzying audiences with its bold and fresh treatment of what might otherwise be considered taboo subject matter. Written by and starring Steven C. Stewart, a man afflicted with Cerebral Palsy, the film follows Stewart's character as he moves in and out of relationships with women, despite his handicap, and indulges his fetish for long hair before ultimately murdering them by strangulation. But rather than lose touch with Stewart's screenplay in the trappings of a crime drama, Glover explores the film as a graphic, genre-style fantasy that he likens to "a television murder mystery movie from the '70s."

During his US tour of It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, SuicideGirls caught up with Glover to chat about creative financing, working with Steven C. Stewart, and the importance of choosing one's words carefully.

For more information and your chance to catch a screening of It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, check out Glover's official website here.

Erin Broadley: Hey, how are you?
Crispin Hellion Glover: Good, good. Everything’s terribly hectic, but that’s good. There’s been a lot of press interest for the film. I really am proud of the film and excited to show it to people so I am glad.
EB:
So, this film is the second in a trilogy. How did you fund this film? Do you think that, in terms of creative financing, the nature of what you might call pro culture dictates how we have to finance the projects that we really want to do as filmmakers and artists?
CG:
The money that I made from the first Charlie’s Angel’s film went straight into making this film, Everything Is Fine. I think what’s happening in corporately funded filmmaking is that, no matter who funds the film, they are the person who is going to have the final say on what is in the content. Rarely will somebody fund a film without wanting to have a particular element in it. So, if the filmmaker does not fund the film, it’s usual that there is some kind of concession in it. And sometimes that’s okay, there certainly have been good films made with that consideration, but I find that within the last 20 or 30 years in the corporately funded and corporately distributed film entities, it’s become the norm that anything that can possibly make the audience uncomfortable in any way whatsoever is necessarily excised, or the film will not be funded or distributed.
EB:
Right, and you’ve said before that those uncomfortable feelings, those moments, are when an audience is really having an interaction with the film.
CG:
Where questions start to happen. It’s when an audience member sits back and looks up at the screen and asks themselves, “Is it right what I’m watching? Is it wrong what I’m watching? Should the filmmaker have done this? What is it? What is it that’s taboo in the culture? What does it mean that this taboo has been excised from the most important form of communication in the culture?” I think that is a bad thing. It is those moments when the audience is questioning these very things that they are having an educational experience. For that to be ubiquitously excised from the most important form of communication in the culture ends up stupefying the culture. And one can feel that that’s happened. It’s very important for sociological studies to be able to determine what the taboo of the culture is. One can understand the culture much more readily when they understand what the taboo of the culture is. When it’s kind of made murky it’s a little bit harder to disseminate the information.
EB:
Would you agree that it’s more important for art and for film these days to pose questions, rather than offer answers?
CG:
Yeah. The problem is that there are dictations in the way that films are made that do not let audience members think. The way I’ve really been talking about the films that I’m interested in making right now are films that go beyond the realm of that which is considered good and evil. Wherein if there is something that would be considered a bad thing, an evil thing, within a corporately funded and distributed film, in the structure of the film it must necessarily be pointed to as an evil thing so that the audiences understand that the filmmakers feel that’s how it is. [It must be] dictated to the audience that that thing is a bad thing and there’s no other way to think about it. Whereas, in a film that goes beyond the realm of that which is considered good and evil, this so-called “evil thing” may very well exist within the structure of the film but the filmmaker may not necessarily point [it out], an audience member may sit and think about it themselves, as opposed to being dictated to. Then that’s educational. For the most part is not happening in corporately funded and distributed films at this time.
EB:
Yeah, it seems like a lot of corporately funded and distributed film makes decisions on a very fear-based level when it comes to their audience. I never think somebody should underestimate the intelligence of their audience to be able to come up with their own interpretations or decisions about good or evil, or what something means, whether it’s taboo or not.
CG:
Yeah. Right. I don’t even necessarily think it’s a fear of that but a concern about is what is going to be salable, not to audiences, but in terms of foreign market sales, to the people who are buying things en masse. It’s not a concept of what the audience will be dealing with but what is easy to sell to particular business markets. It’s not even a concept about people actually enjoying or getting something out of the film, it’s more about what is readily salable to particular market areas. It’s very apparent when I go on tour with a film there is a huge amount of audience interest in unusual subject matter and thoughtful subject matter. In fact, on some level I’m kind of quite grateful for the fact that such a large gap has come to exist so as an entrepreneur I can come and fill that gap. It’s unfortunate, in terms of an audience member myself, not being able to find content that is genuinely thoughtful and interesting.
EB:
In your last interview with SuicideGirls you opened up by talking about the phrase “counter-culturalism”.
CG:
Right. I’ve stopped using that phrase. That’s why I started using “films that go beyond the realm of good and evil”. The reason I stopped using it, it's slang. I mean on some level people understand what it is that I’m referring to. Specifically it had to do with the counter-culture that the media spoke about, using that term, in the late '60s to early '70s. That counter-culture has stopped being represented in the media. At that point in time corporate entities were able to point to that group and say, “This is where we can sell this more esoteric fare to.” That’s very specifically why I was using that term but why I’ve stopped using that term is because counter-culture is almost an oxymoron. Culture is anybody that’s a human being or the byproduct of human beings so how can there really be a counter to it? It’s just a matter of words that could be misinterpreted. So I’ve stopped using that.
EB:
I like people who choose their words carefully. You’re right -- so many words get used incorrectly and there are so many misconceptions that happen.
CG:
Yeah. I’m finding there is less misconception when I am describing it as films that go beyond the realm of that which is considered good and evil. It’s a bit longer but more specific.
EB:
The work you create is very all encompassing. You’re a writer, you’re an actor, you’re a director, and you’ve made music. Have you found your role as a director any more fulfilling than certain other of those pursuits?
CG:
Yeah. I definitely like making my own films the best, there’s no question about it. I still enjoy doing all of the other things that I do. But making my own films, that is my favorite.
EB:
How did you meet Steven C. Stewart?
CG:
It’s a long story about Steven C. Stewart. When I was 19, which would be 1983, I was working on a film at AFI called The Orkly Kid, which was a good movie. It’s a movie I’m still proud of. The filmmaker, the director and writer of that film was from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was friends with another Salt Lake City filmmaker named Larry Roberts who had done a documentary on Steven C. Stewart. He was born with a severe case of Cerebral Palsy and he had been locked in a nursing home when he was in his early 20s when his mother died and he couldn’t get out for approximately 10 years. The people who attended him there derisively would call him MR, a mental retard, which wasn’t a nice thing to say to anybody. He was of normal intelligence.

I have to see the documentary again. It’s been many years since I saw it, but I believe that the documentary Larry made about helped get Steve out of the nursing home and then he lived the rest of his life in an assisted living place, which I went and saw. It was a nice place. Once someone sees the film, almost everything is shot on sets. Steven C. Stewart’s screenplay was written in genre style, like a television murder mystery movie from the ‘70s. It had a naïve element to it and yet very detailed sexual elements and a lot of fantasy elements having to do with women’s hair. It’s a fascinating story. When he got out of the nursing home he told Larry about this screenplay that he wanted to make into a movie. Larry was involved in certain other things but he knew of a filmmaker that was making interesting, unusual films and he told Steve he should meet with that filmmaker. Also, Trent and Larry, not too long after I had worked on The Orkly Kid, they showed me some of David Brother’s movies and it was right around the time that I wanted to start making my own films from some of my books. I thought he was very creative and would be good to work with, so we started making The Backwards Swing, which, actually, is next thing I want to edit together now. That was in 1986 and that’s when David showed me the screenplay for Everything Is Fine. As soon as I read it, I knew that this was a movie that I had to produce.
EB:
I think it’s interesting that you came across this script before you had written you had written What Is It?.
CG:
That’s correct... they were not related to each other at all. What Is It? was written originally to be a short film to promote yet a different screenplay, which will ultimately be part three of the trilogy of films. Two screenwriters from Arizona had contacted me and wanted to direct me in a movie that they had written a screenplay for. They made an offer to my agent, which they really shouldn’t have done because they didn’t have any money.
EB:
[Laughs]
CG:
It was right about the time that I decided the first filmmaker that I’d work with would be myself and I stuck with that. I talked to them about it and they said they wanted to hear what my concepts were. So they came out and met with me, and the main thing was that the characters in the film to be played by actors with Down Syndrome. They set about rewriting the screenplay and then David Lynch agreed to executive produce it for me to direct. I went to one of the large corporate entities in Los Angeles and after a number of meetings and discussions they said that they were concerned about funding a film where the majority of characters were played by actors with Down Syndrome. So it was deemed that I should write a short film to promote that this was a viable idea. That short film that I wrote was What Is It?. I could see that with more work I could make it into a feature film, so that’s what I did. I took that footage and figured a way to change the antagonism within it and make it into a different film. I put myself in the film as the central antagonist, or a personification of the antagonism. I knew that the screenplay, It Is Fine!, could serve as a sequel to what would now be a feature film. Then I started thinking that there were certain themes and elements that were related to the Steven C. Stewart screenplay in certain ways.
EB:
Right, there were certain elements there that you could tie together and connect.
CG:
Yes, and I realized that if I put Steve into part one with myself then his could be a sequel to What Is It? and it would help commercially with his film and be an interesting way of working all of these things together.
EB:
Well, with his screenplay, how much were you involved in kind of bringing that to form on the screen? How much were you working together hands on?
CG:
David Brothers and I were very concerned with making certain that a naïve element comes through. The strength of the film is that there is a very strong, cathartic, emotional resonance with the Steven C. Stewart character, and that it was very apparent this was in his screenplay. This was the most important thing to get through. Steve would have let us do anything we wanted to the screenplay. He wouldn’t have any thoughts or concerns or worry but David and I wanted to make sure that there were certain elements that just came through. We wanted to have a genuine respect for the naïveté with which the screenplay was written and not to interfere with it, in terms of funding. Margit Carstensen plays one of the main characters in it and, really, the emotional crux had to do with the relationship having to do with her character and the daughter character. There’s another element that it goes into with other women and everything having to do with long hair and women cutting their hair. It’s really a fascinating thing.

The things that were incredibly detailed and important with Steve’s script were the dialogue, how he described the hair and how he described the graphic sexuality of it. Another element that was important, there’s a lot of sexuality in the film. In the original screenplay there was even more graphic sexuality. I wasn’t against bringing graphic sexuality into the film for any kind of moral reason but I was concerned about being able to find a certain caliber of actors that was comfortable with as much sexuality as there was. There was an element that he had written in very specifically that was graphic in nature in the sexuality. So it was important to have some of that. When one watches the film, I’m very pleased with it. I said it before even before finishing it and I still feel like this -- I do feel like it will be the best film of the trilogy, and that isn’t to say I’m not trying to dismiss the other films, I’m incredibly proud of What Is It?, and I want to make all kinds of films. But no matter what, this film will be the best film I’ll have anything to do with in my whole career.
EB:
There’s something about this one.
CG:
There’s something about it, and it has to do with Steven C. Stewart and his particular story. What Is It? is my intellectual reaction to the restraints that have happened within corporately funded film and distributed film within the last 30 years, and that’s a valuable thing to be dealing with but Steve’s story is about his reaction to a very specific set of circumstances. Some of it has to do with the fact that he has Cerebral Palsy but even more than that it really has to do with this particularity that he has about hair.
EB:
Right, and how he interacts with the world because of it.
CG:
That is at least as important, and what’s even more important is that this film is not a documentary, this is a documentation of this particular person living out this particular fantasy. That is a very unusual thing and I do not know of another film that has happened in. I would have genuinely felt I had done a bad thing if I had not gotten this film completed or done if Steve had died. You know, he did die within a month after we finished shooting. Cerebral Palsy is not degenerative but he, one of his lungs had collapsed in the year 2000 and that’s why, when I, I knew that with the money I made from the first Charlie’s Angel’s film I could put it straight into making this movie and that’s exactly what happened.
EB:
I’m assuming that it was important for you as well to have him not only behind the screenplay, but also involved in the film and every aspect while you were making it.
CG:
There was no way that the film could have been made without him. If Steve had died and the screenplay would exist -- theoretically you would hire another man who had Cerebral Palsy or, if it was done in the standard kind of corporately funded and distributed film situation, an actor that didn’t have Cerebral Palsy that played somebody that had Cerebral Palsy -- it would just be nothing. As far as I’m concerned, even if it was a man who had Cerebral Palsy playing this role of a man who had a hair fetish, again it was important that it was a documentation of this man living this particular fantasy out. Something that’s interesting about the movie that I’ll never know is exactly what Steve’s reality was with this whole thing. It’s something David Brothers and I will talk about a lot, “What did Steve feel about all of this?” We talked to Steve about it. We said, “You know, people will think this is strange.” Steve said, “Oh yeah, I know.” He definitely had the mindset of somebody that was a bit of a prankster.
EB:
Yeah [laughs].
CG:
Which is something I could relate to and I like that about him. At the same time, if you ask specifics about it, I don’t know how analytical he would have been. Sometimes David feels like maybe the only thing that Steve wanted to do was to have the attention and the experience of doing this. I tend toward feeling like that’s not just what it was. Within a month after we finished shooting the film, Steve died. I had gotten a telephone call one morning after we finished shooting and basically Steve asked David and I permission to take himself off of life support. One of his lungs had collapsed again and he would have had to get an operation and wouldn’t have been able to go back to the assisted living place he had lived in. He would have had to go back to the nursing home and he did not want to ever do that again. That was, of course, a very sad day and a heavy responsibility to indeed say to Steve that yes, indeed we did have enough footage and he could do what he needed to do. I had contemplated beforehand how I would feel about [the fact] that Steve may die. He could have died right in the middle of when we were making the film but I also knew that he wouldn’t because he was a very strong-minded individual.
EB:
He had rewritten the screenplay a few times, correct?
CG:
The basic crux was there. What he would tend toward adding would be more scenes of sex with women having to do with hair and then there’s a great deal of violence in there as well. He’s not a nice guy in the movie. He wanted himself to be the bad guy.
EB:
Many people who have seen the film also note how charming he is, though.
CG:
Oh yeah, he was.
EB:
I don’t necessarily think they’re mutually exclusive; you can be a bad guy and be a total charmer.
CG:
Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what he is in the movie. It’s a funny thing. [Laughs]
EB:
[Laughs] To touch back on some of the darker undertones of the film, was there a certain beauty you wanted to bring out in the graphic qualities?
CG:
Well, it’s very apparent that there’s an emotional connection that’s going on in the kind of violence that there is in the movie. If he had just written a standard autobiography, it would not have had anywhere near the emotional truth and interest that comes through by just the fact that he’s using truthful elements of his psyche within a genre structure. That, and yet he could have made a complete fantasy movie where he wasn’t in a wheelchair or he didn’t have a hair fetish. In the movie the women like him and they’re sexually attracted to him and they have sex with him and they love him, in fact. But he still ends up being very violent and killing many of them.
EB:
Do you think it’s important for people to see the first one before the second?
CG:
Well, my business plan is that I will always play the first film first in any city that I go to. Then, when I come back a second time, I’ll play the second film for a majority of the run but I’ll always let another showing of What Is It? be there so people can see it as well. Everything Is Fine does completely work as a film on its own. It does not have to have a prequel or sequel but I don’t wish to dismiss the importance of What Is It? as well. What Is It? is almost a thesis going into the realms of these taboo subject matters. Everything Is Fine does have taboo subject matter mainly having to do with the graphic sexuality involved. But I just, I feel that films I’d like to go into are going into territory that is not typically dealt with in the manner that I want to deal with it and I feel like What Is It? addresses all those elements and opens the doors. Like I said, it’s a thesis saying its time to be able to just explore all these things without being so concerned about whether it’s a taboo or not. Beyond the realm of that which is considered good and evil -- I certainly feel that the Steven C. Stewart film is. I’ll be touring both of these films for many years to come.

For more information go to crispinglover.com
3 Comments PRINT
Email this Interview

YOUR NAME:

YOUR EMAIL:

THEIR NAME:

THEIR EMAIL: