Devil in the details: Henry Rosenthal and Jeff Feuerzeig on the making of "The Devil and Daniel Johnston"

By Michael Fox

Henry Rosenthal has long been San Francisco’s preeminent independent producer of narrative films. His list of credits include startling works such as Jon Jost’s “All the Vermeers in New York” and “The Bed You Sleep In,” Gregg Araki’s “The Living End,” Jon Moritsugu’s “Mod Fuck Explosion,” Lynn Hershman’s “Conceiving Ada” and Caveh Zahedi’s “I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore.” Rosenthal also produced Jamie Meltzer’s offbeat and marvelous music documentary, “Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story.”

Jeff Feuerzeig, who works out of New York primarily as a successful director of TV commercials, has crafted two previous profiles of musicians. “Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King” is a remarkable indie testament to the underground oeuvre of brothers Jad and David Fair while “Jon Hendricks: The Freddie Sessions” was a slicker piece made for PBS.

Their first collaboration, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” earned Feuerzeig the best director trophy at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary, a riveting, disturbing portrait of a gifted artist, had its local premiere last year at SF Indiefest, and is now opening theatrically around the country. I talked with Rosenthal and Feuerzeig in a boutique San Francisco hotel last month.

SF360: Since both of you have made music films, I presume that this documentary had its genesis in Daniel Johnston’s songs.

Henry Rosenthal: Yes, I encountered Daniel first as a recording artist, and Jeff did, too. So music was the entry point.

Jeff Feuerzeig: Music was the entry point for maybe 30 seconds. The entry point was a piece of performance art, his album ‘Hi, How Are You,’ which is basically his ‘Meet the Beatles.’ The title works both ways. It’s like a greeting from Daniel Johnston, ‘Hi, how are you,’ but also he’s mentally ill, so it’s ‘Hi, how are YOU?’ On this home-recorded album of songs of unrequited love, he recorded his mom yelling at him and released that between some of the songs. Well, that’s not an album — that’s something else. And his primitive line art on the cover — what’d he call him — Jeremiah? Yeah, Jeremiah, the Frog of Innocence. On the back is his version of the devil, a character named Vile Corrupt. He always thought of himself as a comic artist. That’s what he started out being. It’s just that his songs took over because people received them first. Now it’s his art career that’s really taking off. That’s how he started off and that’s how I think it’s going to end.

SF360: Once you found out he was mentally ill, and met him for the first time, did that fuel an obsession with making a movie about him?

Feuerzeig: Everyone who heard Daniel Johnston in 1985 knew he was mentally ill, and all the fanzines were writing about that. But that’s not why we liked his music. Brian Wilson is mentally ill and there’s no warning label when you put on Pet Sounds. There should be no warning labels about Daniel Johnston’s art, either. There are a lot of great mentally ill artists and writers.

SF360: Right, but what made you driven to make a film about him?

Feuerzeig: I was nuts to make a film about him as early as 1990. I became obsessed with his story as well as his art and music. I was collecting Village Voice articles. Daniel would throw a woman out a window, the Voice would write about it. Daniel would crash his dad’s plane because he thought he was Casper the Friendly Ghost, the Voice would write about it. Daniel Johnston was on the radar of most hip writers and musicians, and people in the underground.

SF360: How did you two get together on this film?

Rosenthal: We met at the Berlin Film Festival in 1993. I was there with two Jon Jost films in the Forum. I stopped by the American Independent Booth and checked out who was there and what films, and I saw ‘Half Japanese, The Band Who Would Be King.’ I asked the people there, ‘Do you know anything about this film?’ They’re like, ‘No.’ I said, “Is it about the band Half Japanese?” They’re like, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Is the [filmmaker] here?’ ‘I think so, I’m not sure.’ So I went to the market screening and I sat there, and I felt like the movie had been made just for me. I knew I was the only guy in the room who knew who Half Japanese was. I couldn’t believe somebody had shot this thing on film and elevated them to that level, as obscure as they were, and when I walked out Jeff was standing by the door. We became friends that day. That very day we talked about Daniel Johnston.

Feuerzeig: Daniel Johnston was a collaborator of Jad Fair. There’s a Daniel Johnston song in that movie that Jad covers, ‘Tears Stupid Tears,’ wonderful song. They recorded a legendary album, ‘Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston.’ That’s what it was known as back then, it’s since been retitled ‘It’s Spooky.’ And it was indeed spooky. They also made a movie together, ‘My Dinner with Daniel,’ back when ‘My Dinner with Andre’ was very popular. Daniel directed — well, Daniel took over directing David Fair’s movie. We hope to have the complete cut as a bonus DVD on ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston,’ because it really is quite a film. Very humorous, as well as tragic and cathartic. Daniel breaks down in tears. But he’s also an incredible director, as you see from his early Super 8 films in our film. Daniel was basically a junior Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis at the age of 13. He directed himself in a film called ‘It Must be Monday.’ Probably the greatest home movie I’ve ever seen, much better than my own student films. He dresses as himself as well as his mom in drag, his mom yelling at him, calling him ‘an unprofitable servant.’

SF360: Your film makes it clear that Johnston’s parents are right-wing fundamentalist Christians, but that seems less important than their inability to get where he was coming from as an artist in his formative years.

Feuerzeig: You had this Andy Warhol-level artist in the basement driving them all crazy. Growing up on the same river as Warhol, you can throw a rock at Pittsburgh from Chester, West Virginia, and East Liverpool, Ohio, on the Ohio River. They were saying what a lot of parents say to their kids. ‘This should just be a hobby. Go get a job.’ So I don’t vilify them for that, for not understanding. The truth is they were very supportive of his art. They were so proud of it, they displayed it in the house. When Daniel would get a gig for the high school yearbook drawing the cartoons, or his high school art gallery showings, his dad was so proud. And they sent him to art school in East Liverpool.

Rosenthal: He was painting murals all over the high school. He was a machine even then, even before his illness really kicked in. Creative in all kinds of ways.

Feuerzeig: The whole family is very creative. They’re all musical. Some of them are music teachers, some are art teachers. They didn’t understand him, but they did support his art, and when he went into music mode — which is three years in that basement when he wrote hundreds of songs of unrequited love — they didn’t understand that. [Eventually,] when he ended up in Austin, it was really no different from when Dylan ended up in Greenwich Village. When Dylan showed up, he became the scene in a matter of weeks. Daniel did the exact same thing in Austin. Now all those musicians from back then, they’re footnotes. But Daniel is not. They all went on to record his music and support him. And everyone became obsessed with him. Why? Because it’s very rare that someone like a Dylan or a Daniel Johnston shows up. This is not an everyday occurrence. That’s one of the reasons Henry and I had to make this film. He would be lost in history as a bit of a footnote if we did not revisit exactly what happened and tell the whole story. People knew bits and pieces of his story, but nobody knew the whole thing.

SF360: From a visual standpoint, this is not a show-offy film where the technique overwhelms the subject. How do you decide on the look and style of the film?

Rosenthal: I think we’re both classicists. We’re luddites and old school at heart.

Feuerzeig: We still shoot film.

Rosenthal: Yeah, the decision to shoot film was the first major decision facing us. Clearly video was an option for us five-and-a-half, six years ago when we started. But we made the decision to give the proper weight and respect for the subject matter that film implies. And all the other decisions flowed from there. Jeff is the master of the hard cut, and that’s what filmmaking is all about. His years of directing commercials have given him this kind of razor-sharp edge that follows through in every frame of this film.

SF360: How would you define hard cut?

Rosenthal: I’m talking about two pieces of film spliced together that work together, the creative energy and charge that lead you from one to the next. Not having dissolve and other effects, but one brilliantly conceived shot flowing into the next.

SF360: Some people might say that is the essence of all filmmaking.

Feuerzeig: When it’s done right.

Rosenthal: You’re talking about the tricks and the bells and the whistles. I’m talking about classical filmmaking of one shot having a relationship to the next shot.

Feuerzeig: And the relationship of the sound that it’s married to. The reason that there’s no bells and whistles to try to take you to Dan Johnston’s manic state is that he did that work already. It’s in the sound. This film is conceived almost as a radio play. The fact that you find it to be smooth [is] intentional. We did point-of-view recreations that were inspired by Stanley Kubrick, we moved through mental hospital hallways, throwing the woman out the window, but it’s all done with sound design. No actors, no recreations. We thought that was a unique thing. They’re ghost scenes. I don’t think it’s technique-y. It’s very classical.

SF360: It’s like revisiting the scene of the crime.

Feuerzeig: Yes. But Daniel’s sound takes us there. Daniel recorded his entire life. We’re not going to see this probably ever again in an artist. You couldn’t make a film about John Lennon or David Bowie or Elvis Presley or Elvis Costello or Tom Waits like this. They weren’t recording their whole life from age 13. So we can’t ever know what it was like to be there with them in their family. [Johnston] was documenting the whole time, through an audio letter or an audio diary or a phone call that he surreptitiously recorded with a little Radio Shack five-dollar suction cup, with a family member or friend [who] didn’t know they were being recorded. It’s in the art and it’s in the songs. You can piece it together. That’s what I did. I wove this three-act narrative together. Not a lot of documentaries are three acts anymore. Or maybe ever were. They are [mostly] what I call thematic documentaries. This film has three acts, but Daniel’s life had three acts.

SF360: Yes, but you resisted the temptation to indulge in an array of techniques and gimmick inspired by the ephemeral nature of Daniel’s music and art.

Feuerzeig: The film has loads of cinema verite, it has audio verite, it has recreations and animation, and it’s got a kitchen sink of ideas and Woody Allen jump-cut editing that I imposed on it. It’s like ‘Take The Money and Run,’ a brilliantly edited fake documentary. Woody Allen is the master of handing a scene off, like passing a baton. There’s a cut in our film where Dave Thornberry, Daniel’s best friend says, ‘And Daniel is such a problem.’ And then cut and Bill Johnston, his dad, says, ‘Well, when the problem began,’ and they’re talking about a different problem. That is the kind of cutting that I get off on and Henry digs.

SF360: It sounds like free association.

Feuerzeig: It actually moves the story forward. Daniel used to do the exact same thing — not consciously — but he used to make radio shows. He would say things on these tapes and it spoke to me. I think we sort of met somewhere on that other plane of storytelling.

SF360: What’s your favorite piece of filmmaking gear?

Feuerzeig: My Bolex. I shot a lot of this film on my Super 16mm Bolex with vintage Switar lenses. It’s hand cranked. My favorite piece of film I ever shot — at the end credits, Daniel dancing in that garage — it was just me, Henry and Daniel, and my Bolex that night at three in the morning.

SF360: Why do you guys insist on making documentaries about living people, when it makes your lives so much harder?

Feuerzeig: Well, Daniel Johnston is a ghost of his former self. It’s arguable whether he is alive anymore. He is an enigma in his own film. You don’t get to meet Daniel. It’s not like that Brian Wilson film that Don Was made. Daniel Johnston is not able to host his own film like Isaac Mizrahi did in ‘Unzipped’ or Mark Borchardt did in ‘American Movie’ or Robert Crumb did in ‘Crumb.’ And that’s what makes this film unique.

The last thing I want to say is that the film is not a music documentary. It’s the portrait of a living artist who is an enigma. It is a journey that takes you as close to madness and creativity as you probably are ever going to get. And that’s because Daniel documented his own life and gave us these materials to work with.

Rosenthal: People are fascinated by artists. Not all manic-depressives are creative artists and not all artists are manic-depressives. Daniel is part of a small group of people who are blessed or cursed with both attributes. I think people are endlessly fascinated by that relationship, and the list of his spiritual antecedents would bear this out. That’s what’s going to compel people, and that’s what makes this such an interesting story. It’s a complete 360-degree portrait of a person through their own original source material.

04.03.2006