MUTUAL APPRECIATION is now on DVD, chock full of special features, including PEOPLES' HOUSE, a new short film by writer/director Andrew Bujalski, alternate posters and trailers, and a commentary track recorded by the parents of the cast and crew. In addition, there's an insert of a film festival dispatch (in the form of a children's book), previewed here:

When did you know you wanted to be a filmmaker?

Oh geez. As far back as I can remember. I was a movie-crazed kid, for better or worse I never thought too much about doing anything else.

There was a panel at the Austin Film Festival last weekend entitled ..Film school: Is it worth it?.. or something to that effect. I know you had some film studies in your undergraduate courses at Harvard; care to weigh in on the subject?

My undergrad experience was pretty great--I learned how to use all the equipment, I learned how to make something out of nothing, how not to be (too) intimidated by what can be an extremely intimidating medium. And, I suppose more important than all of that, I had really wonderful peers and really wonderful instructors, all of whom continue to influence my views on just about everything. And it was college, and we were all young and starry-eyed and drunken angels and all that. I never went to grad school, though. Funny Ha Ha was more or less grad school for me.

When you sat down to write Funny Ha Ha, did you expect it to get produced?

Who knows. It's hard to have a grip on the reality of what that means if you've never done it. Of course, paradoxically, it's that naiveté that usually gives you the moxie to get impossible things done. When I was 7 or so I remember plotting with some friends to murder our lunch lady through some weird Rube Goldberg-ian scheme we drew out with markers on white paper. We never went through with it, but it seemed real to us when we talked about it. Writing a script is probably somewhere in a similar fantasy realm.

I read somewhere that you wrote Funny with Kate Dollenmayer in mind, basically knowing that her ability to carry the film made it a viable project. How did you meet Kate?

Kate and I went to college together but never really knew each other, only got to be pals in the last few weeks. Then we ended up moving down to Austin with a couple other friends in '99 and were roommates, and during that period I wrote Funny Ha Ha...Also Kate's dad co-wrote a popular German textbook (Neue Horizonte) with my uncle...

Speaking of writing Funny Ha Ha, I read that you wrote the screenplay while living in Austin. What brought a Massachusetts native down to sweltering Texas?

I was a year out of college and had no responsibilities to anything and I'd always had a theoretical fondness to Texas, just based on movies I guess. I don't know why I thought I'd like it, but I did, it was great. I often fantasize of the alternate universe where I never left Austin. (Never would have made these films but in many other respects would have been better off, I suspect.)

Not to be confrontational, but why did you move back to Boston from Austin to shoot?

There hangs a tale so long and complex that I don't know if I can even reconstruct it properly anymore. For a little while I was trying to get it up and running in Los Angeles, and I think I was very lucky that that didn't happen, we never would have survived it. As it happened, Boston was great, it is still more or less my hometown and people were very good to us here.

Your first film is very character-driven, can you explain your writing process and how you weigh ideas of character, theme and plot in your story-telling?

Mm...Can I? It's 1:30 in the morning and I have a cold and need to get up in a few hours to fly to Austin...So I might punt on this one, too hard, sorry...How about, "Character is destiny"?

I really enjoyed the naturalistic performances in Funny. They featured stammering and pauses that, done poorly, can seem pretentious or contrived beyond belief. Was that pacing and tone a result of improvisation or calculated rehearsal?

Certainly not "calculated rehearsal." I could never have micromanaged performances into those shapes, but neither was the whole thing just spat out in a random improvisation. The script has all kinds of pauses and ellipses and oddball herky-jerkies, which are not necessarily the same ones on the screen...The actors brought life to everything. The page is necessarily inert.

Funny Ha Ha has been screening now, off and on, for four years. That is pretty crazy. What is like to have received critical acclaim that keeps making your little gem of a movie pop up here and there all over the country, even as your second film hits theatres?

Extremely gratifying and extremely strange, particularly when I'm being interviewed! Often when people ask about the origins of the film, I feel a little bit absurd trying to explain or defend some thought process that began in 1999 when I was a year out of college...

What was the inspiration for Mutual Appreciation? Was it another movie written with a friend-as-lead in mind? What happens when you run out of friends for whom to write?

Yeah, Mutual was written for Justin Rice to play the lead. I wouldn't have dared write a musician lead without knowing that I had an ace in the hole who could deliver on that crucial aspect of performance.

As for what happens when I run out of friends, your guess is as good as mine. Enemies?

I imagine, since you had Funny in the can more than four years ago, that you had been working on Mutual Appreciation before the majority of press and acclaim came for your first film. Do you think your approach, or anxiety levels, would have been any different with Mutual had Funny not been an immediate, attention-garnering hit before you began writing the second?

No question. While there was a little bit more sense on the set of Mutual--that we were making something that someone someday might actually SEE--than there ever was on Funny, it was not crushing pressure. I am hoping to shoot something next year and indeed it's a bit terrifying. But I'm pretty sure the work itself will ultimately be more terrifying than any imagined pressure, which will be a relief.

How did your experience working on Funny affect your process of making Mutual?

Probably a million different ways, none of which I can remember!

What are the benefits and drawbacks to wearing the myriad hats of writer, director and editor?

The major benefit is that you're always able to cover up in one role how badly you fucked up in the previous role. The director hides the mistakes of the writer; the editor hides the mistakes of the director. I can't speak so much to the drawbacks...which perhaps speaks to the tunnel vision.

I would imagine that, with the success of Funny, you would have been able to approach some studios, or may even have been chased by them. Why did you decide to return to the low-budget style of your first film?

I'm writing a screenplay for a studio right now and it's great to be not substitute teaching and not clerking in a bookstore or any of the other gigs I've done in recent years, but I still feel like there is life in the kind of work I've done and, as mentioned earlier, I am hoping to another in that vein soon. Like a lot of filmmakers, I think I have the John Sayles fantasy of getting paid for (fairly pleasant) studio work and still doing my own.

Since your success, have you gotten a taste of the difficulty of dealing with the Hollywood machine and the sketchy relationship between art and commerce?

Commerce is okay. Art is much better.

Many young filmmakers and writers talk about the danger of being typecast by the success of their early work, often having to ..write themselves.. out of their brand. Do you worry that the money-men to whom you will have to eventually turn will pigeon hole you based on these two movies and their themes? Or are you going to continue to make uber-indies?

My films have gotten lots of attention but nobody's made any money off of them and as such I don't think any money-men will have any desire to pigeonhole me. (But will I pigeonhole myself?)

So, you..ve been out of Austin for a few years now? What do you miss about your former home? Any favorite spots you will make sure to hit up while in town over the weekend?

We'll see how the wind blows. I might have to make a stop at Tamale House ..3. And of course the coffee houses, Little City, Spiderhouse, Mojo's, Quack's, Flightpath, ALL of them used to be in walking distance of my house on 34th St., and those were the days! Before the days of wireless internet everywhere, I suppose I'd have a different relationship w/ them now than I did then...

A Letter from Justin Rice:

Hey, everybody.

I got back from Chile this morning. It's en eight hour flight from Miami,
so I spent a long time in the air for a short time on the ground.
Tomorrow, I leave for Detroit at 6 am. I'm tired, dead tired, so I may
ramble...

Chile was amazing. I expected to show up to a screening buried deep in
the back pages of the festival catalogue, and to answer a question or two
from one of the five befuddled people who attended by mistake. I don't
know why, but that's just what I thought would happen.

However, the screening, which was at 10 pm on a Sunday night, was sold
out, and people were trying everything they could to talk their way in.
The crowd loved the movie, and they really seemed to get it. The Q and A
went on for almost forty five minutes, and would have gone on longer, but
the theater needed us to leave, and so they cut it short. No one asked
how much the movie cost to make. Everywhere I went for the rest of the
weekend, including the airport, I ran into people who were at the
screening or heard about the movie. Strange. They would say things like:
"I hear you're the new Jim Jarmusch." By which they meant they heard
Andrew is the new Jim Jarmusch.

The trip was sponsered by a grant from the U.S. embassy. The morning
after the screening, an embassy driver picked me up, and I was shuttled
off in grand style. I met the ambassador, and the future cultural attache
to the Chilean embassy in Washington, who is, apparently, a famous Chilean
actor.

Then it got surreal. I went to a lunch at the Bi-National Center, and sat
at the head of a giant table complete with white tablecloth. As the
waiters, who looked sharp in their tuxedos, poured glasses of wine and
served up the four-course meal, I was introduced to various filmmakers,
producers, festival programmers, and animators, most of whom were old, and
all of whom were baffled that young people responded so well to the
festival in general and to Mutual Appreciation in particular. A few weeks
ago, the U.S. embassy asked me for a bio, and I wrote one that was meant,
mostly, to be funny. Tounge, cheek, etc. They had translated this bio
into Spanish, and read aloud to the assembled host. I had a little ear
bug so I could hear the translator, who hovered behind everyone and
pretended not to exist.

That afternoon, they took me to lecture film students on the state of
independent cinema in the United States. It turned out, they mostly just
wanted to know how you get a job in Hollywood, and I unloaded piles of
unfounded armchair expertise.

I also met the guy who did the subtitles for both Mutual and Funny Ha Ha.
He said Mutual took twenty times longer than any other movie at the
festival, and that he worked very hard to try to make it scan right. The
timing of the titles, he said, was damn near impossible. He gave me a
disc with the subtitles. Everyone I talked to said he did a great job,
and I told him I'd give you the disc and his email, so when I unpack and
find it at some point here, I will.

I will end with the festival guide. It was very clever, the way they
would describe movies.
----
Mutual Appreciation:
Students from New York have a rock'n roll band, they chat, drink wine and
smoke pot. Alan just got to New York and is looking for a drummer for his
band; meanwhile he chats with his two friends, goes to an interview, and
buys some wine in the corner's liquid store. Time goes by in the living
room of the apartment of one of them, while the coversation goes from the
every day life to intellectual criticism. There is a melancholy feel over
them, of pure jazz that involves this movie with a subtle charm.
----

I always did like that part where time goes by in the living room of the
apartment of one of them. Plus, the liquid store, which they made up.

-----
Funny Ha Ha
After graduating from school; Marnie decides to take some time to look for
a suitable job and a permanent boyfriend. However, things are not easy
for her, because she is in love with a boy who doesn't love her, who likes
to drink, and who doesn't manage to get a real job
-----

Those are the decriptions unadulterated and in their entirety. Most of
the descriptions in the in the guide read more like this: "Windows is an
unusual narrative with as series of mine stories, each constructor as an
uncut shot, looking thought a Windows." The movie Belhorizon is described
as: "A wimp to the "Discrete charm of the bourgeoisie."

Now to sleep.

More later,
Justin