Nick Gomez's Illtown (A Q&A With Myself)

ANSWER: I don’t have a problem with it.

QUESTION: I think you’re taking the piss, mate!

ANSWER: Alright, fine. I’m taking the piss. You crazy Brit. Look, you don’t have to deal with this problem in England, do you? Your entire film system is different. There aren’t, like, twenty million people out there making bad independent films. You have your Mike Leigh, your Ken Loach, you had your Alan Clarke when he was still alive...

QUESTION: Poor bugger...

ANSWER: Amen, brother.

QUESTION: But there’s a difference between European and American funding, particularly in this independent circuit you’re talking about. Krzysztof Kieslowski once said that in Europe (for a filmmaker) it’s like you’re in a zoo: fed, watered, cleaned and generally taken care of by the commissioners, but you’re stuck in a cage. In America, you’re a free man, but everybody’s out to kill you.

ANSWER: That’s a good point.

QUESTION: But back to Illtown. What do you think of Nick Gomez as a director?

ANSWER: Not much, though he did get off to a very goo d start with all those handheld urban dramas, like Laws of Gravity and that other one -- what was it called? It wasn’t even the stories that were so memorable, it was more the muscular exhuberance of his technique. He’d have these long takes where the camera would swish back and forth from one person talking to another, usually these rough ‘n’ ragged ‘n’ authentic looking faces telling each other to “eff” off and whatnot. Quality craft bridged the gap between generic story and audience interest -- they were just well made movies. Gomez has a good sense of frenetic pacing (though Matthew Harrison was doing the same thing better in Rhythm Thief, cuz he (a) has a sense of humor that bears note as a cosmic joke, ha ha, and (b) has a musical rhythm that makes his movies resemble kick-ass rock concerts. You know what I mean? Gomez lacks that sense of tone and finger snappin’, toe tappin’ grace.)

Wanna know the truth? I think Nick Gomez did his best work as an editor for Hal Hartley’s Trust, cuz on that movie he got to use his inherent sense of conversational rhythm (as opposed to musical rhythm) inherent in Harltey’s work at that time. (Though I feel like Hartley found his boon companion in editor Steve Hamilton, who I think cut virtually all of Hartley’s pictures after that. But Gomez was solid. I wish he had stuck to editing.)

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