Geschrieben 10. September 2004, 18:55
QUESTIONS FOR VINCENT GALLO
Gallo's Humor
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: August 22, 2004
Q Your new film, ''The Brown Bunny,'' which you directed, wrote and starred in, is basically an art-house road movie that ends with a singularly raw and controversial sex scene between you and Chloe Sevigny. Why did you choose to end the film that way?
It wasn't like the choice of the mustache on Robert Redford in ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' -- should he wear it or not?
But you took this scene and blew it up on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
I made the billboard so that the film would appear to be a substantial event. One day the billboard is up, and five days later it's down. There is no reason and no return calls from the company. I'm so angry about it.
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Who paid for the billboard?
I did. It cost $37,773. That is more money than I made from ''Buffalo '66'' and ''The Brown Bunny'' put together.
So where do you get your money from?
From my luck in purchasing things that turned out to be valuable in retrospect -- houses and land. I scrimp and scrounge, and I scrimp and scrounge.
But don't you live in that stylish new Richard Meier building by the West Side Highway in New York?
I own the place, but I don't live there. The problem I'm having is finding an emotional way to move out of my 300-square-foot apartment on Elizabeth Street that I've been in since I was 16. I've spent more time resurfacing, rearranging, cleaning and redecorating it than all the other work I've done in the world put together.
I think of you as a poet of loneliness, somewhat in the tradition of Edward Hopper. What do you think of his work?
When I was first exposed to Hopper, I was 16 years old. I got it. I understood it. But his work was not what I was looking at. To me, at that time, he didn't seem like a radical artist. But I'm a fan now.
Do you find America lonelier than Europe?
I find Europe the loneliest place in the world. To leave the cities in Europe and move toward the suburbs or the countryside is the most dark, dank, sad, drunken, cheese-riddled, depressing thing in the world.
Why aren't you married?
Intimacy always creates an urge in me that I am missing out on something.
You are. You are missing out on isolation. Do you cultivate isolation for your art?
I don't think in terms of art. I think in terms of getting things done, fixed, cleaned, finished, arranged. I am more of a custodian.
You were fairly accomplished as a figurative painter in New York when you decided to give it up.
I felt I was doing work without purpose.
What purpose does film have?
It has a general purpose. Entertainment. I like to entertain, even though it is me, myself and I who I am entertaining. When I was doing artwork, I was not entertaining myself.
I know you are fond of our president.
I relate to him in that he has become easily unlikable. In a perfect world, John Kerry would own a restaurant in Connecticut.
And Teresa?
It just makes you wonder how the money ends up in certain places.
Have you met Bush?
I've met his daughter, Barbara. Zac Posen, the designer, invited me to his show and said he would seat me next to the Bush girl because I'm a Republican.
Why are you a Republican?
If we were going to see a show of Dennis Hopper's photographs, do you think Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton would be more sensitive to the work? I see Nixon as an intellectual. I consider Bill Clinton a huckster.
There are so few right-wing actors like yourself, now that the generation of John Wayne has died off.
I agree with you. It is not an interesting group. But I would rather have dinner with Newt or Dick Armey than with Bruce Springsteen.
Perhaps you can speak at the Republican convention.
I would like to. They haven't invited me yet.
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