Ten years on from our Cinema Scope interview and with the arrival of Gangsterism into the world, Isiah and I decided it would be a good idea if we sit down for a long talk once a decade for as long as we’re both around. Below is the first half of that conversation, which focuses on the conceptual contexts for the new film; the forthcoming second half looks more specifically at various formal concerns and qualities. Writing about 88:88 in the intro to that first interview, I said that I’d call it a masterpiece, but those were things of the past. Well, history has started up again in the intervening time—in horrifying ways, of course, from rising fascism to livestreamed genocide—so all I’ll say about Gangsterism is that it, too, is a masterpiece, one made very much for, against, and beyond the present.
Phil Coldiron: Let’s start with genre. Depending on how you look at them, all four features since 88:88 can be taken as genre works: Inventing the Future as sci-fi, Night is Limpid as a comedy of manners, He Thought He Died as a heist film, and now with Gangsterism, you’ve got a pretty overt gangster movie. What does genre do for you, what does it open up? There are obvious historical connections—early Godard or whatever—but I’m curious how that comes into play structurally when you’re just at the very beginning of making a picture.
Isiah Medina: To begin with, I think it’s this deeper question of fiction as well too. Even Semi-Auto Colours, obviously it’s based on some real stuff, but it’s a fiction film, and it was always programmed in documentary festivals at the time, which is weird to me. So it’s almost like this fight for the right to fiction.
But also there’s the Badiou schema that I always love: love, science, politics, art. You re-experience thinking via these genres of thinking, let’s say. And cinema obviously has a history of genre in this way, but I also think of it like the Kuleshov effect, but rather than someone’s face and a bowl of soup, and then someone’s face and this and that, it’s like the auteur in question and then gangster picture, and then the auteur in question and then whatever it is. And then we keep reintegrating, rethinking, adding new pressure to what the auteur as an idea is capable of thinking. It’s an excuse in a way to think through a sort of tradition of forms, to experience my thinking through other people and other thinkers, and see how far we can take it.
For example, I was looking at Rear Window, and then I saw Godard’s Here and Elsewhere again and I thought, ‘Wait, this is Rear Window: you’re looking across and saying, “How am I responsible for these images?”’ Godard’s images are even just all a bunch of squares in the frame. So it’s like even in this phase, he’s still thinking, ‘What about Hitchcock?’ But I think these are things that are very, very serious. So I think, ‘Okay, what have these genres meant to me, and how can I think with them?’ It’s kind of why I want to do a romance picture next, because so many of us learned what it means to court someone and talk to someone by watching movies.
And it’s a question of just being able to work faster this way too. I could keep telling people, ‘Oh, I’m making a “heist movie,”’ rather than having to explain to them that this next stage of my philosophical self-education is doing this with a cut, etc. So it also has this economic question. That said, I joked with Kelley that I thought working with “the popular forms” would bring in more people to watch it or this or that. But now I almost feel like it has an even deeper alienation effect than my previous work, which is funny too. Still, it’s important to me to have this will to work through any popular form, but really rethink what it means to be popular, of the people, etc.
PC: To go back to what you said about maybe bringing more people in, I’m curious how you think about the expectations something like that sets up in an audience, going into a movie and thinking, for example, ‘I’m going to watch a gangster movie’—even having that in the title this time. If you’re a director working with that, it opens up different things that you can play with. Were there things here where you were like, ‘This is what I want to fuck around with in the idea of a gangster movie’?
IM: Sure. I mean, one reason I was interested in the gangster is that I just watched a lot of gangster movies growing up, and on that Henry Hill tip, as far back as I could remember, I always wanted to make a gangster movie. So that was interesting to me to finally do it. But also, the more I watched movies, I started to notice this sense of something like Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten by a Lizard,” where he’s being bitten by a lizard and going like [pantomimes gesture], but in fact it’s clear that he’s painting: it’s a picture of Caravaggio painting. I was looking at Only Angels Have Wings, and with Cary Grant’s character, I’m like, ‘Why does this guy who’s ostensibly directing plane traffic have a megaphone, that hat, all these big lights? Okay, he’s making a movie.’ And I feel like these genres are just excuses for me to think that type of question: which funny hat can I wear this time to think what it means to make a movie? I really realized that genres are all just fun tricks that let me really, again, rethink why I make movies, what it is to make a movie. They always end up being some sort of allegory for that somehow.
As for gangster movies specifically, I was also interested in the fact that when Scorsese was making Goodfellas, he felt kind of lost, so he watched Man With a Movie Camera and it helped him think what he’s doing. And obviously with De Palma’s Untouchables, he does the Odessa steps sequence. And I’m like, ‘Okay, but why?’ Every time there’s an American capitalist picture, they have to go back to the Soviets to rethink what that means. So it’s this interesting idea that all these capitalist forms must go back to Soviet montage to think their own economy. So I wanted to almost take that back by saying, ‘Okay, let’s go to the gangster picture, but rethink it with all of the ideas of these communist forms explicit.’ So that was really inspiring to me too.
That’s why the tagline on the poster is “DEPICTION = ENDORSEMENT.” Think about how the original Scarface had that subtitle: Shame of a Nation. It’s like, we don’t endorse this. Or when you watch the interviews with DiCaprio and Scorsese about Wolf of Wall Street: ‘It’s a critique! It’s a critique!’ Come on, I’m watching this, I want to have a good time now. This idea of disavowal of what I’m watching… if I’m watching Wolf of Wall Street, it’s not ‘ah, the critique of Wall Street,’ I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to party.’ I feel like that relationship to cinema is so pure in gangster movies.
PC: Those murkier spaces—whether it’s ethics or morality or whatever—are something that you’re having a lot of serious fun with here.
IM: Erik made a joke recently after we saw 88:88: ‘Wow, that one was so personal you had to go and make a movie about economic policy next [Inventing the Future].’ And it’s true, like, boy, I can’t keep feeling all this stuff. But after doing Inventing the Future, after adapting someone else, I wanted to adapt myself and slowly understand myself again and be personal. And with a gangster picture, you can say anything. I feel like because it’s a gangster on screen, it allowed me to just say whatever I really feel like and then if it sounds offensive or something—it’s a gangster, a gangster said it. With most movies, you’re like, hm, I don’t know why this character said that, why that character said this, but with a gangster: he might just say that! So you can get away with anything you want because essentially everyone’s a criminal on screen. And if they’re all gangsters on screen, then I could just type whatever I want, say what I feel like saying, and I could probably get away with it. So that was actually a big impetus.
I have a note on my phone where every time I would say something wild when I was hanging out with Kelley or whoever, ‘Oh, that’s so Gangsterism.’ I just wrote it down. You always expect someone to say some wild claim and you always remember these one-liners in gangster movies, these things you start living by because, wow, that’s a crazy line. The De Palma Scarface is full of that.
PC: When it comes to the characters saying things that might be out of pocket, I’m curious how you approached balancing across characters. One of the things I think is really rich and interesting here is how much it forces the viewer to actually be like, ‘Oh wait, who do I agree with right now?’ There’s an extremely active relationship on that front, there’s no taking for granted that this person has the white hat and this person has the black hat. It’s closer to the Renoir everyone-has-their-reasons type of thing.
IM: Yeah, totally. I wanted to revert back to the early Plato rather than the late Plato, because late Plato is one guy talking and another guy’s like, ‘By Zeus! It’s true.’ But then with the early work, there’s a bunch of different positions—is Plato’s position…? Why is he…? Why is everyone? And I’m not really sure where to land with it. And that’s really interesting to me too, that aspect of thinking or presenting thinking as philosophy. When I was younger I liked that sort of provocation of one person speaking—oooh, anti-democratic. But now it’s really interesting that I don’t know who I agree with, what does the author think or not, yada yada, which is the classic Platonic question.
But when I write, I have a sense of, okay, this character would say that, this character wouldn’t say that, etc. Since a lot of the actors are filmmakers—the actors are filmmakers and the characters are often filmmakers in the movie too—I gave everyone that character’s list of favorite movies. It’s just so they have an idea of what that character likes to watch. Everyone got their kind of personal canon—even though that never really made its way into film—I thought it was important for them to see that.
Writing screenplays became easier when I stopped writing the character’s name first. I just write the name ‘voice,’ and just go off what do I feel like hearing? And then once I get all the things I want to hear, then I start splitting up this character would say that, this character would say that, this character would say that. If there’s certain back and forths, I already have those in mind, but usually when I start a script, I just start with voice one, voice two, etc.: what am I trying to think and get through that and what kind of opposing claim can I make here? This one, I had a couple of characters in mind already. I thought the difference between Night is Limpid and getting to Gangsterism is I do think the characters are way more well-defined here on what their point of views are. Whereas He Thought He Died was pure blank, I didn’t really care as much just because I always joke we made that one for money. We just worked really fast to put money into Gangsterism. It was a heist. It was like how fast can we work to get through this? So I feel like He Thought He Died was more about positions—Night is Limpid actually had characters—but here I wanted to combine the positions and the characters a bit more. But also human emotions: what people might just say, not because of following the strict ideology either. That was really key. I feel like I don’t see that as often lately in movies, where I don’t know what I’m supposed to take from that. If that person says that, and that person says that, and I’m also flickering this cut in there, I want to have that tension for me as someone watching to take that all in and now really think, okay, what am I getting at here?
This is a polemical point I like to joke around about, but obviously I love Histoire(s), but I feel like when Godard said later with The Image Book, ‘I don’t want to work with actors,’ I just think it’s really easy to get a microphone and say a lot of heat. But what’s tough is to get an actor to say it. Of course I could just get a microphone and say a bunch of crazy things, but what’s really interesting when you start getting actors and they’re like, ‘Why am I saying this?’ Then you have to really go through it. And I think that’s really important, because I feel like a lot of younger filmmakers today are making clip shows, images sourced from the internet, some voice etc. etc., but we’re losing the tension we need for images and sound to actually hit us, rather than just full stream ahead going at me with a bunch of images sourced from elsewhere and a voice or two that are basically saying the same thing. I wanted to rethink this question, or else why do shot/counter shot (which is derived from the Kuelshov effect) if there’s no real tension from what we’re hearing with what we’re seeing? We’re losing the tension that’s in reality itself. So I wanted to be able to enjoy that as well, just the pure pleasure of seeing people say certain things—where do I stand with that?—and on top of all that, there’s this cutting going on, the framings going on.
PC: In these recent films that are moving more toward not necessarily conventional narrative, but conventional actorly style, let’s say, how much are you working toward the overall structure of the film in that early writing? And how much of that do you have in mind? Because for example, I find it really touching that we open with these extremely tender scenes of Clem (Mark Balcolol) and Ez (Kalil Hadid), these beautiful domestic bits with them reading in bed or the part where they’re at the beach, both dealing with their own bullshit and then coming back together. Those set up a tone that’s still there in the background when we move into gnarlier parts, with Clem sending his minions out to shake people down and stuff. And then swerving again in the third act to where we’re filming pictures of the universe burning—it’s like, wait, how did we get to this? So could you just talk about how you get to that overall structure?
IM: What you hear on screen is relatively close to how it was written, it’s just that some of the domestic scenes are a bit more spread out. When I was editing I realized, actually I want to start with this particular two and how these two see the world. Just that sanctuary of being quiet with your lover and that’s how you enter the world—you’ll always have that, you can always think that through. And then, how will the world come into that? But besides that, most of it is relatively close to the way it appears in the script. Obviously I move stuff around because editing is what it is.
Of course, certain phrases or certain ideas pop up again, so I do think of the general structure for sure, but there’s also this question of needing less. When I did Night is Limpid, the script was like 85 pages, and there’s that rule that if you have one page, it’s one minute, but I realized this was definitely not working, it’s 85 pages and the rough cut was two hours and a bit. So then with He Thought He Died, I decided I was going to write 20 pages, and whatever happens, I’ll just shoot the rest. And with Gangsterism it was like 40 pages. I wanted to think about that, just to understand my own personal scale in relation to words and screen. Because once I realized, okay, 40 pages will actually be X amount of time, that’s something I can work with.
PC: I want to go back to something you touched on before, about the individual and the collective, both in this specific context and as a more general idea.
IM: This idea of the individual is important in the sense of—beyond liberalism, of course, either—but say, studying Eisenstein, this movement between October and Ivan the Terrible, what does that mean? And how do you get toward that moment where there’s this much montage happening here—actually maybe more. But at first might, you might be like, no, it’s slower; it’s not actually, it’s maybe faster. These types of questions. So how to think all of this together where Eisenstein has to do self-portraiture, where Ivan’s both Stalin and Eisenstein, what does that mean to hold all those contradictions in a character? When I create these characters, it allows me to think with myself and re-experience myself in that way too. The truth is there’s a lot of that in 88:88, but everyone just thinks it’s pure documentary. But obviously I’m getting everyone else to say some of my poems and say some of this and that too.
So this other question of self-portraiture, it goes back to the Socrates thing of know thyself. And once you try to know thyself, you find out there’s nothing there. You have to just keep rethinking what that even means to know who you are, who other people are. I think it’s because maybe today what it means to be some sort of individual speaking being, I wouldn’t say it’s under attack, but when everyone’s connected to a similar capitalist algorithm and getting their taste all from the same place, there’s this question of how does someone individually be that one person, how that person become that person. And that leads to a relationship to collectivity, it’s concrete that way. When you’re in a collective, whether you’re making a movie or in some sort of movement, we are still ourselves too, because when you fall in love with someone, you fall in love with that one person. And that’s really important. So it made me really want to think what it means to be an individual person beyond that liberal question.
This gets back to the questions of voice, how I’ve been trying to work with voice in my movies. I just think it’s interesting that we can start from the collective protagonist of early Soviet pictures, and then when things get back to the real with Neorealism and no sync sound—I mean, it’s not recorded with the image—the individual reappears. It’s one of the big tensions in how to think the individual with the collective, so I’ve been working through that.
PC: I can imagine people are going to see this and see that there’s an obvious director character who shares certain traits with you and say, ‘Oh, that’s Isiah in the movie.’ But there are certain things that I know are personal to you, things from your life, that you then put in other characters’ mouths. And I thought that was a really touching way to get this fragmented, but still very personal, quality that I think does come through even if someone isn’t friends with you, even if they don’t know anything about your life. So what does making personal art mean to you? What’s the importance of having your person present?
IM: In science, who cares who said E=mc²? Obviously it’s great that we know, but it doesn’t affect what the truth of that is. But with philosophy, it’s important to know a bit about the life of the philosopher, because it’s about love of wisdom and this transference of love. Obviously there are personal questions in politics, but in some deep sense, it has to be universal in a different way.
Bringing that personal context in also just historicizes where all these claims or images and sounds are coming from. I’ve always loved how in Rhapsody in August, the Kurosawa, all the kids are dressed like grandpas—the self portraiture is so deep. I don’t know why these kids are wearing these dad cargo shorts and big tees and fishermen hats. Or like I was saying to you the other day, why is Trey in Highest 2 Lowest saying “with the quickness?” I don’t know that a teenager would say that, but Spike Lee would. I think the more I’ve watched, I’ve realized how so many great artists I respect end up putting themselves everywhere to try to understand themselves and the world. And that’s really key to me.
But also, I see myself in everyone in Gangsterism, for sure. Maybe it’s just parts of me, but yeah, every image, every frame, I have to be there in some sense. I take everyone seriously in it too, and I think that’s really important. So I would spread these things out, because when I spread it out, now I could interact with other parts of my ideas here and there. And I think that’s the reason why it’s important to make personal art in this sense: you get so much closer to these existential questions. Why the hell do I even do this? Why do I wake up for a day to make these movies? Because I’m discovering it. If I knew who I was, I wouldn’t have to do this. But because I don’t, I’ll have to spread them out across ten characters and put them in frames and cuts. And by doing that, I’ll figure out my relationship to the world and, more importantly, how do I think with the world as such, right? So it’s my way to think about the world again, but I have to not deny that I’m in it. And if I’m in it, then I have to really think what that means and how to present that. It might mean dividing myself into multiple people, views, etc.
It goes back to this question of infinity. I feel like once you realize it’s not just like, oh, the one is not, and this infinite world, no: you’re infinite, I’m infinite. That’s the thing. It’s not like I’m just one person and there’s this one object, this object, this object, on to the infinite. It’s like, no, every little thing’s infinite. So to know that I’m infinite, then I could really explore that by having this multiplicity in the pictures too, with the cuts, etc.
PC: To pluck out one specific example in terms of that kind of historicizing, the gangster plot is driven by Clem looking for a person who’s leaking his work, and you’re someone who’s always really actively engaged with the different possibilities around controlling distribution and circulation. Where are you at on the idea of distribution and circulation at this point?
IM: I mean, it’s really interesting because not only is he leaking the films, but I’m leaking through all these characters too, right? That’s why I have these opposing views. When Nico says Clem’s living in the past, leaks are the only way we’ll see anything—that’s a different position too, that’s in the movie. But I think it’s a constant fight. Just like I should never necessarily say, ‘Okay, now I just do character dramas, now I just do these type of cuts,’ I feel like distribution is another part of the artistic idea that I have to always be intentional with and fight with.
I think the one thing about distribution that I’m very adamant about though is that obviously YouTube, etc. is interesting, but I need to see it on the big screen. As I get older—I think I always loved the big screen—but now it’s more like, no, I need the big screen. If I make a movie and it plays on one big screen once, then I did my duty, I can move on to the next picture.
I always loved in The Lady Without Camelias, where the Antonioni surrogate is just holding his reels and talking to the theater owner—what a beautiful image. I feel like that’s something I don’t often see, but it was so real. Just talking to the guy: could he play it for another week? And they’re like, ‘No, no, no…’ It’s such a raw image of a filmmaker really trying to get his movie to play in the movie theater. These are images that really touch me, the fight just to be able see it on the big screen and be able to move on after that.
I know today a lot of filmmakers show their works at bars and different places, and everyone has the right to what they do, but with streaming and all these other questions, I’m really just old-fashioned enough to claim I have a medium. And I think it has to do with the big screen; I think that’s a really important part of why I chose this one. So part of the distribution just means how can I get it on a big screen, even if it’s for one person. And if that one person’s me, that’s also totally cool to watch it.
That’s why there’s the line here: ‘It’s still a mass art, even if only one person showed up to watch the movie.’ It gets at this relationship to the mass, this sort of battle between mass art and social media that I’m interested in. I was thinking about how Edison had loops as individual viewing—that’s social media. With the Lumières at least you get the idea of a crowd, we’re all watching at the same time, but Edison is social media. So this is an older question that I’m really thinking about. That’s why even though sometimes I know some people can only see things if they’re online, I would prefer the cinema; I just think it’s a different relationship to experience.
It’s like when I was telling you about rewatching 88:88 on the big screen. I know a lot of people saw it on their laptop, but it’s different when it’s on the big screen, because you know what it’s fighting against too. I went to see the Claude Lelouche movie, A Man and a Woman—terrible movie—and then seeing 88 on the same screen the next week, I’m like, “Okay, this is why we’re fighting for this big screen.” Or there’s that Matisse, The Red Studio, and for a while it was in a club; some rich person bought it and had it in his club. And that hurts my feelings.
PC: Not to get misty, but your point about mass art makes me think about that screening we did years ago at Anthology of Time Is The Sun, where it was me, you, Myles, and I think one paying customer. We were so happy just to see it big, even if the audience in New York didn’t exist for that work.
IM: I think about this relationship to the audience that you’re trying to invent—obviously no audience preexists, you should never think the audience preexists anything you’re doing—but this gets back to the question of the leak too. Remember when Take Care was about to drop? The album leaked right before it came out, but without the final track. I always thought that was a planned move. It felt like a planned move to make everyone who loves the work love it already before it really comes out. And then we get the treat of “The Ride,” which is a great song. Or think about Ye, especially with his newest phase in his work. It’s clear either he’s poorly managed or just leaks his stuff himself, just so the diehards stay supportive, let’s say. Or Playboy Carti is another example: everyone’s favorite Playboy Carti song is always a leak that wasn’t on Music. I remember when 88 was about to come out, I went out of my way to send it to a lot of people, just to feel protected almost, but then obviously Inventing the Future was given to everyone. With Night is Limpid, because it was a pandemic movie and we never got to see movies on the big screen, I wanted to preserve that for the big screen. And then He Thought He Died was kind of a bit of both. So I think it’s about this relationship, how do you think with the audience, which audience you want, but also the ethics of it. It’s like, okay, if I give you a link can you not screencap it? Do you have to log it before the premiere? It’s all very modern. I don’t know if Welles and Godard ever worried about their reels leaking in the same way. Or when these Markopoulos files start floating around with a big watermark, I’m like, is that how I want to see it? To me these are all really deep questions of how to respect the work, because we should, this is our lives. And we only get to see a movie for the first time once, and I think surprise has cognitive benefits. I want people to be able to have the joy of seeing it in an engaged manner, not just watch, log, log, log, starring, etc. We lose our intuition and sensation of how to receive a movie. It’s about not just becoming a commodity who’s nothing but a bunch of leaks and output. I’m still a person, that’s really important to me.
PC: To come back to the title itself, it’s delightful how many different ways you can read the word, whether it’s an ideology, whether it’s maybe some sort of illness—you could go down the line on all of the ways that just adding that -ism to the end of it inflects it. Where did that specific word come from for you, and is there any stress that you would prefer to have fall on it?
IM: Well, yeah, I think when you say the -ism, it has this nice quality and obviously it just sounds hard. Number one, titles have to be hard. But I just would see it pop up. I remember it’s used in The Last Tycoon briefly, and I was like, ‘Ooh, that’s a beautiful word.’ And Last Tycoon is this sort of Thalberg fan fiction, which is interesting. I remember at one point I read Badiou talking about capitalism and just saying the word ‘gangsterism,’ and it just sounds so evocative. And then of course in Basquiat’s “Hollywood Africans,” the word ‘gangsterism’ is in the painting and there’s a jokey seven star rating for a movie. That’s crazy, I always love that too. That’s this beautiful painting and having the word ‘gangster’ introduced into that really touched me. It also had to do with Hollywood, which was interesting to me.
So it kept popping up and I just thought it’s such a perfect title for a gangster movie. I joked with Alex, obviously I have a lot of my philosophical ideas in the movies. I like that if I give you a philosophical treatise, it’s not called Contributions to Ontology, it’s called Gangsterism. I remember when Badiou did his hypertranslation of The Republic, he said one of the other titles he didn’t end up using was On Communism. The gangsterism question just seemed really intriguing to me as an -ism, as genre even, back to that genre question. So yeah, these things were probably all floating in my head when I chose it. When you walk into it and it’s called Gangsterism, you have all these assumptions, which I think is really exciting too. It’s almost like a Platonic form: ooh, gangsterism as such. I get to play with that too, right, and all it could possibly mean.