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Interview with American Splendor director Robert Pulcini
A comic book adaptation with a different kind of mutant.
By Dylan Behan.
Never before have the everyday real life adventures of a cynical, misanthropic Cleveland file clerk lit up the screen so vividly.
Crafted out of the auto biographical rantings of unassuming (nay, annoying) underground comic writer Harvey Pekar, American documentarians Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman have delivered a truly original and insightful bio-pic. A winner at both Sundance and Cannes, it's as eccentric as the character it portrays, filled with documentary footage, over-stylised real life cameos, semi-animated segments and manic, gritty recreations. It's a homage to true creativity in depressing, adverse circumstances, as well as to the honest, eternally unhappy pessimist who broke free of mediocrity by documenting it.
"I started reading them and we fell in love with them," says co-director Robert Pulcini on how he came to direct the film after he was sent copies by the film's producer, Ted Hope. "We really connected to Harvey and then we put a tape in on his appearances on the Letterman show, and we just thought we have to do this."
Constantly cantankerous, Harvey still sees the worse in everything. Present day interviews about the film are full of complaints about a lack of work and travelling ordeals.
"He seems to be this kind of creative soul trapped in a dead end job and I could certainly relate to that place in my life...trying to work and looking for some sort of creative outlet." Pulcini, before becoming a filmmaker, dropped out of college, only to work in hotels and convenience stores.
But for Robert, the appeal of Pekar wasn't just related to creative stifling. The direct and self-referential honesty with which Harvey criticised himself was also his most entertaining and funny feature. The first words he said to his future wife Joyce over dinner were: "I've had a vasectomy."
"The brutal honesty with which he lays out his flaws and all his quirks and obsessions is just admirable," notes Robert. "I love the way he finds value in the most mundane aspects of life. His comic books are filled with these moments that everyone else would just edit out of stories. So, it was a challenge and that kind of turned us on. We like puzzles."
American Splendour is a puzzle-like adaptation to say the least, A little like a jazz solo, the film unravels Harvey's life story in a free-form string of vignettes, often jumping back and forth between interviews with the real Harvey (on a surrealist white set) and the gritty Giamatti fiction version. Amazingly, it still manages to retain an emotional core - thanks to the central relationship at play with equally disaffected wife Joyce (played by Hope Davis from About Schmidt). For Pulcini, this fractured creative epiphany, reversing the forms of documentary reality and bio-pic fiction, actually came from the pages of Harvey's comics.
"One of the things that first confused us and then intrigued us was the fact that he was drawn by so many different artists. You know, when I first started flicking through the pages I didn't even know if it was the same character. So I said, this is what's unique about this guy, he's invited all these different interpretations and representations of himself, so we should try and do the same thing in the movie. So we have the real Harvey, have an actor playing him, have some animation, Harvey on stage and child Harvey."
So is the real Harvey as annoying as he seems?
"He can whine and he complain and he's a pessimist, but he's also really fun to be around. He's got an amazing sense of humour."
Trivia Fact: The phone call from the States for this one came in early, and I literally wound up doing this interview shivering, half-naked and with a towel around my waist having just jumped out of the shower.
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Directors David Cronenberg Miranda July Walter Salles Guillermo Del Toro American Splendor Morgan Spurlock Tarnation's Jonathon Caouette What The Bleep...
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Working in a Virginia hospital in the 1970's, the movie opens with Harvey (played flawlessly by misanthropic character actor Paul Giamatti) in the midst of his second marriage crumbling. Determined to make something of his life, Pekar, an avid record collector and freelance jazz critic, recruits fellow local jazz fan (and future comic book legend) Robert Crumb to illustrate a comic based on his own uneventful life. That 1976 effort, American Splendour #1, would go onto be published on a semi-annual basis up until the present day, winning Pekar a cult following, a publishing deal, a play adaptation and a feast of guest spots on Letterman. Astoundingly, all while this was happening, Pekar kept working as a file clerk at the hospital up until his retirement in 2001. But for Harvey, his comics, once compared to the elevation of the working class everyday of Beckett and Chekhov, were his life.