Filmmaker John O'Brien has always found his hometown of Tunbridge, Vt. to be good surroundings not only for living, but also for making movies. O'Brien has made three films known as the Tunbridge Trilogy in which his friends and neighbors play themselves as part of a larger story.
"Man With a Plan," the second installation in the series, received national attention when its subject, Fred Tuttle, ran for the United States Senate after having fictitiously run for the House of Representatives in the film.
"Nosey Parker," the final film in the trilogy, will be screened in Spaulding Auditorium tomorrow night at 7:30. O'Brien talked to The Dartmouth about his latest film in a phone interview yesterday.
The Dartmouth: What exactly is "Nosey Parker" about?
John O'Brien: It's about the relationship between the wife of a couple that has just moved to Vermont and an old-time Vermonter.
The D: What is it about rural Vermont that makes it intriguing as a setting for your films?
JO: Well I grew up here, I was born in Hanover, so I've spent my whole life in the same place, same house, same farm, and I've grown up with all these people. So, as they slowly pass away, it seems like we're losing something valuable and irreplaceable. They're great characters. And the sets are unbeatable.
The D: Now, you're also a sheep farmer. How do you find your experiences as a farmer play into your work as a filmmaker?
JO: Well, yesterday I went to Boston to work on the trailer for the film, got back at one in the morning and had some lambs I had to attend to -- they were not doing well. So after a couple of hours of feeding the lambs and getting the mother up and walking I finally went to bed. They don't dovetail perfectly, but farm-ing's a good training ground, because you're a generalist if you farm and you're hardened to the frustrations of weather and work that doesn't work. So filmmaking is very similar: things that go wrong, rejection, money woes, machinery that doesn't work. It's an endurance test, both of them.
The D: "Nosey Parker" is your first film to use professional actors. Why the change, and how has that changed the filmmaking process for you?
JO: The nice thing about it was that I could finally experiment with scenes of emotional intensity. I can't ask my neighbors to have a marital fight and have me film it. So we could improvise with these actors, and do these John Cassavetes-type improvisations with actors, which is different from having your neighbors improvise as themselves. And you can do it over and over again. Non-professionals are great in the first take or not at all. So the trick is to shoot the same scene so that they're fresh again.
The D: It's been eight years since the release of "Man With a Plan." What did you do during the time off from filmmaking?
JO: I shot most of the principal photography [for "Nosey Parker"] in '97. In '98 Fred Tuttle ran for the U.S. Senate for real, so I was running his campaign. That same year [actor] George Lyford was diagnosed with lung cancer, so through '99 I found it hard to edit when he was very sick. So since then I've been cutting the plot out of the movie. We did some re-shoots, did some fundraising for post-production. It's taken a long time. I thought it was done last fall, and then people saw it and thought it was great except for this pre-title and title sequence so then I went and just redid that. So, it was a give-and-take with friends and family until everyone was happy with it. Since I have to live with this for the rest of my life, it makes more sense to work on it for five years and get it right than do it in two and regret it.
The D: Were any signs of George's cancer apparent during shooting?
JO: During the shoot he had a terrible cough through the whole thing, but he was still buoyant and charismatic. It wasn't until the next year that it really started to change his personality. His family and his friends agree the George in the film is the George that they remember.
The D: So, considering George's death, would you say this is one of your more personal films?
JO: Oh, definitely it's more personal. It's funny and moving, which I didn't anticipate. But once he died, that needed to be recognized. There was something else going on here, so how do we work his death into the film without taking advantage of it?
The D: You alluded to "cutting the plot" from your footage. Did you go into shooting with a story in mind?
JO: Well, there was a story I'd written up that had much more of a plot. There was more confrontation, crisis that George had to mediate between the natives and these people. And because you're trying to create that drama with non-pros, it just seemed fake. It just didn't have the same verve as George and [actor] Natalie [Picoe]. The relationship then became the story. A lot of my favorite movies, the arc of the story is the evolution of a relationship and that's the movie, something like "Annie Hall," for example.
The D: Such as?
JO: Last year I read "Anna Karenina," and Tolstoy is quite cinematic, and his observational powers caused me to kind of see the world -- and also how he breaks scenes. I should read that book again before I make my next movie, because he worked scene-by-scene, like lots of individual shorts making up a big story.
The D: What are you hoping viewers take away from "Nosey Parker"?
JO: What I like about it is that we've all been at some point either outsiders or natives to some extent. This film I think is very fair to both the old-timers and the newcomers, so a lot of people who see it will recognize themselves in that transition of being a newcomer to being a fixture now. So, that transition is quite interesting. It's also an elegy to all these old Americans who are passing away.
