WILL THE MOUNTAIN COME TO MOHAMMED?: A Profile of Independent Filmmaker Russell Rocheleau
Part 1 of 2
By: Doug
Sparks
6/11/02
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WILL THE MOUNTAIN COME TO MOHAMMED?: A Profile of Independent Filmmaker Russell Rocheleau Part 1 of 2 By: Doug
Sparks |
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"Film as it exists today as a consumer product is probably the worst medium I could want to work with. Maybe I never will again."
When I first sat down to speak with independent filmmaker Russell Rocheleau about Rockwater I visited him at his home in Holliston, MA. In some ways, the town is the opposite of his native Lowell. Whereas Lowell is ethnically diverse, busy, and industrial, Holliston is rural, green, and quiet. Yet in the midst of this pleasant suburb, Rocheleau has found himself in a working class environment, and this is a situation he knows well. He has never been wholly at ease in either the working class world of his parents, in which filmmaking wasn't work, or in the world of independent cinema, where he feels at odds with the zeitgeist. When he says, "I can honestly say that I have no influences" he makes clear this sense of feeling outside not only what filmmakers typically do, but who filmmakers typically are. At least these days. So it is of little surprise, as I drive past endless SUV's topped with expensive mountain bikes to turn a corner and find Rocheleau living in an apartment. It is late in the afternoon. At the foot of the stairs, two women with strong accents drink beer and laugh. His apartment smells of mentholated cigarettes and no less than five pets scurry about his cramped living room at any given time. The only indication of his extensive knowledge of film (and it is as great as any person's I've ever met) is buried in the corner a few Criterion DVDs amid the cheap porn, newspapers, and traces of unseen children.
"Where I grew up, you either ended up in jail or you managed to get away. I was lucky, I guess. I found things to be interested in, writing, martial arts. The rest of the boys moved into drugs and crime. I have family members who've spent much of their lives in prison, others who've drunk themselves to death."
For Russell, his history is not a front, not a performance, but an often painful reality. The son of a foreman and a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, he graduated second in his class from Lowell High School. When he was thirteen years old, a man who, high on drugs, confused it with the home of his estranged girlfriend burned down his apartment. For a time, he lived with extended family in the nearby city of Lawrence, and arose early every morning so he could attend school back in Lowell. In the afternoon, he had to wait for his father to get out of work before he could be picked up, so he spent hours among the stacks at the Lowell Public library. It was there where he first discovered film criticism.
"There's a point in Rockwater when Teddy talks about this country having nothing left to offer its young people. It's kind of a speech that he gives in the car en route to Canada. I don't really know what he means or if I even totally believe it, but my life, my job, all the stuff I've come to see and know has led me to think that there really are limited opportunities for people out there in the big, bad world."
In the stacks of the library, Rocheleau discovered the writings of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. He rented countless films on video, and reaped the benefits of the old formats on cable stations such as USA and HBO. The films he lists as seminal in his development as a filmmaker were all experienced not as films, but as television: Clockwork Orange, Night of the Living Dead, Blood Feast, and Bruce Lee's Return of the Dragon. These are all movies that deal with violence, and violence was a fact of life growing up on Carter Street where as a boy he lived in constant fear of being mowed down by a car. Yet they are also about outsiders who strive to transcend violence in different ways, through aesthetic experience, through suicidal bravery, through dark comedy, through humility. The student film he made at Fitchburg State College, a film still shown to students there today, gathered together all these elements, and added to them his own distinctive way of framing the world. His characters occasionally seem to drop from mundane existence and move in a space where nature, machines, and sounds become blurred. This world, ambiguous, frightening, isolated, often deathly quiet, becomes magnified into the setting of his first feature, Rockwater. This film captures the feel of a New England winter, not a sentimental winter but the way it is truly experienced, in a way that is unlike anything else I've seen. It is startling to hear the characters speak. You realize how rarely you hear strong New England accents, even on the local television stations, and the effect adds to the film's strangeness. By being in some ways utterly plain and true to life, Rocheleau creates a filmic vision that is both alien and distant.
"I wrote Rockwater in a couple
of weeks. I banged out a couple more drafts and got it into a
shape I thought I could work with it as basically a film crew
of one. Two if you count the sound recordist. From first draft
to completion, I worked and obsessed over this film for four years,
directing, photographing and editing it whenever I could find
the time."
After the initial idea for this article, Rocheleau and I exchanged emails and the results were nearly twenty thousands words in total. We covered far too much material to even allude to in this short article. At times, the exchange became heated and personal, as I tried to draw him out, to get passed his own myth of himself.
"Rockwater is not autobiographical
in any real way. I think there are parts of myself in there. The
characters are all a part of me. It was written in a difficult
and confusing time. I can't run away. It's not in me. Leaving
NYC was traumatic because it marked the only real time that I
did run. I don't know if it was for the best, although I'm certain
that I'd still be without a film if I had stayed."
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