Andrew Bujalski '99 (Writer & Director, FUNNY HA HA, MUTUAL APPRECIATION, BEESWAX)
By Cristina Slattery '97
Filmmaker Andrew Bujalski '99 states that the "desire for a controlled existence” is a theme that runs through his work. This writer/director of independent films, FUNNY HA HA, MUTUAL APPRECIATION, and BEESWAX, currently lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, novelist Karen Olsen, and their five-month old son. The journey that has taken him from Harvard to Austin is one that started in a supportive family in Boston. Unlike many artists who use their anger against family members to propel their creativity, Andrew states that this is a "well from which he has never been able to draw.” He adds that his "family has been supportive…without fail” and says that he is sure that this is the basis for any confidence he has, clarifying that he will take full credit for any and all of his insecurities.
Bujalski is grateful to have studied at Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies department (VES), a concentration in which students learn filmmaking, studio art, photography, and related disciplines, and says that the program helped shape him into the filmmaker he is today. Harvard’s VES program allowed Andrew access to incredibly smart people and didn’t provide too much "hand-holding,” but enabled students to become fully immersed in the creative process and the craft of storytelling and making films. Unlike programs that are more focused on "how the professional world works,” VES gave him the tools to become proficient at filmmaking and the freedom to worry less about how the movie industry is organized. "Certainly my VES training has been massively influential on how I continue to make films. The spine of that program is documentary and I hope I've brought a documentarian's eye to narrative filmmaking, most of my favorite films operate in some ways on documentary principles.”
A "great lesson from documentary is that you don’t know what you’re going to get,” explains Andrew. For his film BEESWAX, for example, he wrote the film with two sisters in mind, the Hatcher sisters. "I would not have dared to try to make it with anyone else,” Andrew emphasizes. "Maggie I knew from Harvard, she'd acted in my thesis film, and shortly thereafter I met her twin, Tilly. They're both remarkably compelling people, and together make up a kind of supernova of charisma. I always thought it would be great to try to build a movie around them. And there does seem to be something inherently cinematic about twins, they're an immediate visual metaphor for the differing paths we choose to take, the same face in different circumstances. As for what people take from it, I can't prescribe any specific reaction, but I will say that I always thought of it as a kind of ‘Sunday afternoon’ film. I suspect that if you watch it during those hours it might soak in better and surprise you later in the week...”
Bujalski thinks viewers of his films should come to the stories as "observers,” and his films do tend to show the influence of his documentary training. Although the characters are often facing their own personal crises, the action or high-stakes drama that some viewers are used to from Hollywood is typically absent from his stories. "I seem to be compelled by mysteries of human behavior,” Andrew says. "A typical Screenwriting 101 orthodoxy would be ‘up the stakes’--e.g. This scene will be more interesting if there is a bomb about to go off in the corner, and even *more* interesting if it's a *nuclear* bomb. But, much to the detriment of my earning potential, I like stories about people's behavior in apparently low stakes situations,” he acknowledges.
A favorite writer of Bujalski’s when he was younger was Don DeLillo and Andrew admires "anyone creative and brave enough to look beyond the accepted orthodoxy of ‘how things are done’ on whatever path they tread.” He remains mindful that "peer pressure" is not just something that exists in adolescence and notes that it "seems all the more powerful and insidious in adulthood.”
Andrew is currently teaching at the University of Texas and working on new projects, and he enjoys the friendly creative community in Austin. Although Bujalski states that he "desperately wants to make more films,” he says that with a family, finding time to write and direct films has become even more challenging.
At Harvard, Bujalski lived in Grays East, on the 2nd floor. "I remember it seeming like all the other rooms in the dorm had been designed by the housing-assigning masterminds with clear themes (confident preppy dudes, affable science dudes, etc.) and ours seemed like a mop-up for whoever was left over,” he recalls. An observation like this, perhaps, would have escaped the mind of another student. But, such a comment is evidence of how this writer/director thinks. His films chronicle the lives of this "mop-up” of students post-graduation - the unexpected paths that some have forged, and the aimlessness that characterized some members of his generation after college. What Andrew will show us next remains to be seen, as his peers, now in their 30s, confront the challenges and opportunities of this next stage of life. Independent film audiences, however, are surely looking forward to seeing whether or not they identify with his characters’ struggles and everyday anxieties in the future.