Writing and music rights: Agnes Varda’s Gleaners and I is on Sundance again. [It’s been released on DVD now, too.] While I’ve mentioned the, video-to-film transfer pleasure aspect of seeing it on TV, it’s weird to see how similar some of shots in Souvenir November 2001 are to her movie. I’d been influenced even more than I knew.
Attribute some similarity to shooting in roughly the same places: overcast and rainy French autoroutes, rural side roads, fallow fields, smalltown streets. Her success in “gleaning” people (on the street, in a field) became our solution when we lost all the actors we’d lined up; we started meeting and interviewing people wherever we could find them. And I no doubt took on one of her themes as well, if unconsciously: like The Gleaners, Souvenir is a road movie, a search, but one whose target isn’t clear at first. The New Yorker in Souvenir only begins to recognize what he’s actually looking for after he’s engrossed in the search. And as Varda makes poignantly clear, the search is what’s important. Unlike Varda, however, I do not write and perform my own rap voiceover. Of course, if it costs too much to clear our music clips, I may have to…
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the making of, by greg allen