“Chloë had to shift her schedule a month and a half and I wanted to film her scene first because I wanted to sense the vibe of that scene and play off that vibe for the rest of the film. So the postponements cost me three months.”
“Curtis Clayton, who edited Buffalo ‘66 with me, calls me every day—’It’s the greatest, you’ve covered everything, the film looks great.’ I just wanted him to look at the footage, tell me if anything was scratched or not usable, and then we would edit together. I finish shooting and he works one day with me, and he makes an odd face and says, ‘You know, I’ve told you if I ever get my film financed I might not be able to finish this film.’ I’m like, oh yeah, no problem, we should be done anyway. He says, ‘Well, Ed Pressman called me while you were at lunch and said my film is green-lit.’”
“Curtis is a beautiful person with a lot of integrity, but he has a sort of smugness. He went, ‘So I can work ten more days with you if you want, but that’s it.’ I said, ‘Listen, if you felt you were even coming close, you should have brought me in on that. You cost me $150 grand just to look at my footage.’ He goes, ‘Well, I have the footage all arranged.’
“I said, ‘You don’t know the geography of America; I can’t go by your things; I’m just gonna wipe the discs clean and I’ll reload myself and I’ll have it batch-digitized and I’ll arrange everything in my way because I don’t know if you had a foolproof system where you batch-digitized every frame of the film; you made so many mistakes in Buffalo ‘66—not intentional, but those things happen. I’m a fanatic and I wanna be sure that I have every frame of my picture.
“And we had a little tension, but he’s not the kind of person you really have ordinary tension with so he just sort of left in a smug way. And I was freaked out because I could control everything else but I needed Curtis not even so much for his talent but for his voice of reason, his maturity, and his ability to keep me balanced, you know, allowing me to have a point of view and to take radical chances but with balance, you know.
“He leaves and for about two weeks I don’t do anything; I’m nervous, very nervous. And I find an assistant who would be one of at least ten assistants, each of them leaving on a bad note because I was extremely unpleasant to work with.”
What with one thing and another, the film seemed destined to be finished in September 2003. But then Thierry Fremaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, asked to see it.
“I hadn’t even cut the motel scene at this point, so not only is the film in rough cut, I haven’t even got to the Chloë scene.”
The Chloë scene. That would be the scene of graphic oral sex, which contrasts with the earlier scenes in the way pornography might contrast with a travelogue.
“I showed Thierry everything up until the motel scene; he asks if I will be able to finish the film in time for the festival. I say I don’t know. I negotiate with the Japanese financiers that I’ll rough through the motel scene—which will be good for me, because I’ve been stuck on it—and I’ll make some fake ending because I was supposed to shoot the ending in April, which should have a motorcycle crash at the end.”
Where you die?
“Yeah, where I die. A deliberate suicide. Not thinking clearly if I would use it because I had the same dilemma in Buffalo ‘66. I always write the film with the suicide and then I find a way out of it. The guy was gonna have a negative fantasy for a second of the van crashing. There were some shots of bunnies, there was the shot of him on the side of the road. I sort of clipped it together with the song.”
The result was one of the most disastrous screenings in Cannes history. I refer to the press screening; at the public screening, reaction was more evenly divided between applause and boos, but the press hated the film. The impression got around that I led the boos, perhaps because the hex on my colon drew untoward attention toward me, but the British trade magazine Screen International, which convenes a panel of critics to score each entry, reported that The Brown Bunny got the lowest score in the history of its ratings.
Did I sing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” at one point? To my shame, I did, but softly and briefly, before my wife dug her elbow into my side. By that point the screening was out of control anyway, with audience members hooting, whistling, and honking at the screen.
As it turns out, the French director Gaspar Noe was seated near me.
“He’s not a great pal,” Gallo said, “but I do know him, and he sort of twerks me on all the time. He loves to wind me up. And he came out of the screening and left like six messages on my voice mail. And he pinned it all on you, because he was sitting close to you and he presented it to me that you were orchestrating …”
But there were three thousand seats in that theater, I said. It got pretty demonstrative.
“Well,” said Gallo, “because you asked and it needs to be answered clearly: Did I feel the film was finished at Cannes? No, of course not.”
The next day at a press conference, I said, there was the impression you apologized for the film.
“Screen International falsely said I apologized for the film. What I said was this: Film has a purpose. It’s not art. Real art is an esoteric thing done by somebody without purpose in mind. I’ve done that in my life and I’m not doing that making movies. I’m an entertainer. I love all movies. I don’t divide them up into art films, independent films. The Brown Bunny was my idea of what a good movie would be.
“I’m not a marginal person. I don’t pretend to be a cult figure. I’m just making a movie and I think the film is beautiful and I think, wow, everybody’s gonna see how beautiful it is and when they don’t agree with me, then in a sense I failed. I didn’t fail myself because I made what I think is beautiful and I stand behind thinking that it’s beautiful. I’ve only failed in this commercial way because I haven’t entertained the crowd. If people don’t like my movie, then I’m sorry they didn’t like my movie. But I wasn’t apologizing for it.”
This new version, I said, is a lot shorter and in my opinion a lot better. It has a rhythm and tone that the Cannes version lacked.
“Seeing my film for the first time at Cannes,” he said, “I was able to see what was wrong. It was clear that the Colorado and Utah piece was too long. There was also a dissolve where the film turned black for a minute. That was a mistake in the lab. Now if that mistake happened in a hundred other movies at Cannes, the audience would have been prepared to look past it. But because the film was so extreme and so untightened at that time, it really stood out.”
What did you take out?
“What changed was the opening sequence. I shortened the race, which was a good four and a half minutes longer. The whole film at Cannes was exactly twenty-six minutes longer. The credits were three and a half minutes longer at the end, and one minute longer in the beginning. So that’s about nine, ten minutes there. So there’s sixteen more minutes of changes, and here’s where the biggest chunk came. When he comes out of the Kansas motel, he does not wash the car, he does not change his sweater, and he does not go on that sequence through Colorado and Utah. Eight minutes and thirty seconds came out of that driving sequence.
“The other cuts were in the motel scene. … I rambled on maybe another two or three minutes. And those road shots at the end were about another minute leading up to the closing sequence, and then I cut out the end, which was three and a half or four minutes. That’s what I cut. There’s no tightening or tweaking anywhere else.”