A Conversation with Filmmaker Cindy Stillwell

exclusive interview
During a recent evening, Cindy Stillwell sat down with hoboeye editors Brad Bunkers and Mitchell McInnis to discuss her approach to film. Stillwell is a Bozeman, Montana-based filmmaker and media artist whose films have been featured in domestic and international film festivals. Most recently, her work was screened at SunDanielce and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In addition to her years as a working filmmaker, Stillwell is a professor and holds a master’s from New York University’s film school.

McInnis: First question goes to the idea that the three of us are friends and I know that you work in different mediums, but I’ve never asked you this directly. I know you’re a multi-talented artist, so why is film your primary medium?

Stillwell: Film is what I’m trained in. At this point in time, I have formal training and years of experience in making films. I’m not nearly as confident writing or painting and drawing. I like doing them—they’re more tactile. Film is not so immediate; when I shoot, I have to wait to see it when it comes back from the lab, then edit it to see what else I need and there’s tons of things that take a lot of time.  And when I make films, I’m not touching them. That’s part of why I draw or paint, to touch the paper, the pencil, the brush; even my work with slide constructions that were in the Lost show. [Editor’s note: In June 2005, Stillwell, Bunkers and McInnis collaborated on the first-ever installation exhibit in Livingston called “Lost: Forgotten Identities & Hidden Mythologies.” Transforming the gallery space into a roadside motel room, the exhibit combined Stillwell’s films, Bunkers paintings and McInnis’ poetry.]  The part I was attracted to is cutting up the film strips, taping them in place, messing with the slide mounts… using my hands, touching it, moving stuff around it’s a much different experience. But film, for me, if it’s done right, it touches people at an emotional core… I was just talking about this with a friend. I think different people watch movies in different ways.  Some people will watch them and be real interested in the visuals, where I am much more about responding emotionally.  I’m going for the emotional place I can enter in.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be narrative or character, I can be brought in emotionally by visual patterns, being engaged emotionally through that… but there doesn’t have to be character and narrative, but those films, I think they still affect me emotionally, just in different ways. 

McInnis: If I’m hearing you properly, there’s an interesting distinction you’re elucidating there… You’re talking about touch, about the tactile in interesting ways. You’re talking about visual arts in the way where it’s very tactile for you, and your talking about film in the way it touches people… Is there a correlation there, where you’re renewing your own sensibilities by doing more visual arts and when you’re working in film you’re thinking about how it’s touching the viewer?

Stillwell: It’s getting closer to what I’m trying to say, I think. When I look at a painting or drawing I can be moved emotionally, but there’s something about watching a movie where I feel like all the senses are involved. The only one that’s not is smell, but otherwise all of them are working together, there’s sound and visuals and rhythm, but you are never touching anything.  Making a painting or drawing, you’re touching materials and doing it, where with filmmaking is a machine, a machine is separation, but I’m sort of confusing the two things, one is responding to it and the other is making it.  

Bunkers: Do you feel in filmmaking there’s a lack of that immediacy or that sort of raw outlet or creativity where you can do a charcoal painting? You talk about the senses in film, where if you’re doing a charcoal drawing or painting, you have all those senses— smell, touch—all that’s right there instantly rather than waiting for film to get back from editing.

Stillwell: To make that distinction of making and experience… the making of it, the making of the charcoal drawing for example, you have the materials in your hands in an immediate way.… you can smell, you can touch the paper, but in film, for me, it’s usually just me or one other person who is with me and this little machine that I hope is working properly, but I won’t really know for sure for a while and it is much more cerebral. It’s like I have a notion in my mind, a larger frame of what I’m making and the idea behind it. The process is sort of cerebral that way where I think I’m getting, in other words shooting or photographing, the right thing to make the whole that I want to later, but I don’t know yet how I’ll, if I can, pull it together. I mean, that’s not the way I’m trained to make film.  I’m trained to make film where you have a script, you have shooting days, and you break the script down to what you shoot what day… you do it in small steps in a concentrated timeframe.

This approach is very formal and systematic. Narrative feature filmmaking is what I’m alluding to, what I was trained in. The work I’ve been doing lately is more trying to figure out how to be spontaneous. When you have the script and you break it down into shots, it takes away some of the thinking on your feet that I enjoy. This kind of spontaneity can feel like maybe in a way closer to drawing and what not, you don’t necessarily know when you start a drawing where you’re going to go. You have a loose idea in your mind, but you have to get better at dealing with what comes out… the filmmaking that I’ve been practicing lately is much more about not knowing what it’s going to be yet. I’m gathering my raw materials in a way, and trying to get where I was trying to go in the first place.

McInnis: So why does the American west and its themes fascinate you? Not only in your work, but obviously you moved your life to the American west.

Stillwell: I think that it’s one of those deals where… you know, the common story I hear a lot out here… people come to the west for the first time and they’re like ‘oh’ I never want to leave.   I definitely had that. When I first came to the west as an adult, it was Wyoming, and I was so sure that this was the place I should have been born. I was meant to live out here. Who knows what that is? Some past life resurfacing? Who knows? But now I’ve been out here for a while and thinking and functioning out here… dealing with the realities of making a life here. Still, it’s the size of the land and the sky that keep me here. They are big enough for me, I feel like I don’t have to be squeezed into any one thing.  I can be everything that I am all at once. No editing of myself or trying to fit some urban success story… that has all dropped away and I can breathe. Living out here, following my own path. A lot of the romantic pull toward living out here has faded, but this general sense of scale, of being able to think big and freely remains, maybe more grounded in reality, but it’s still alive.

McInnis: When you say this is where you should have been born, talk about that a little more...

Stillwell: That’s what it felt like when I first came to Montana as an adult.  I became convinced that part of me lived out here before, in another life.

Bunkers: I had that exact same experience.

Stillwell: At that point in time I was in my early twenties. I remember there were no billboards in Wyoming, no power lines… you can see enough that you get the whole picture. When you look at someone under a sky in Wyoming or even here in Montana, there is so much sky reflected back in their eyes. You can literally see it in their eyes—that made me feel hopeful. It’s funny because when you’re living out here and I think that’s what I try to get at in my work… these fantasies, these myths like we talked about during the Lost show, or even personal myths where you feel like you lived a certain way or you were a certain way and then you have to deal with just ‘OK, well, there’s what I hoped for and then there’s what I have’… this same thing happens in making movies. There is this picture for the film, what I think it will be when I start, and there is then the reality of what I have when I am done. This play between myth and reality seems to be a constant force for me living in the west, a lot of my films have people living here or working here, working with the land or animals… closer to the land or landscapes that I think is some assumption I made when I moved out here. That just living with all this landscape, I would be closer to it. In reality it’s much different. I drive to work, I have an office and a cell phone… but it leads me to wonder about how landscapes effect people and what people do with their landscapes. What they do with them.

McInnis: It’s a romantic notion we’ve talked about a lot in that way… and even having grown up in Montana, I certainly battle with that romanticism. When you said there was the way you were thinking about the west, and you started to live here and it changed a little bit… Is there something about trying to construct a life when you have those romantic ideals? Is there a certain inherent friction and tension that’s interesting?

Stillwell: I would imagine I can’t say it’s totally conscious, but it makes a lot of sense, what I have been making my films about the last five years since I lived out here is maybe trying to cope with some of that tension, like ‘Gee, I live out here now and my job isn’t really taking me to any of the things when I thought about where I should be from.  I have an office, I drive to work so maybe it is about where is that myth for anyone, really,’ and then when I’m around people sheep sheering or cutting wheat and seeing that reality, too. Maybe deconstructing the myth, that tension, is exactly what’s driving me to do that.

McInnis: In that way where it ties back to the medium itself… and film being a little more formal, cerebral at that point… is it almost more reassuring when we’re talking about engaging that tension? Is there something that… maybe meditative isn’t quite the right word… but meditative about being able to sit back and realize you’re a  part of this tension that your engaging formally through the medium, but at the same time there’s a way that it’s distanced from you… Is there any reassurance in that formality?

Stillwell: Maybe some… don’t know if it’s reassuring but it’s an attempt to understand it, an active attempt to understand it. This is making it all sound like I somehow chose these subjects in order to get myself into the landscape, and I don’t want to say that’s really true… I don’t know if I can say that and really feel like I’m being truthful. It seems like when I first dreamed up these ideas… Well, for instance, the first story was about trying to explore what’s my deal with… why am I so fascinated by overland freight, these freight trains and semi-trucks… these powerful machines? Do they somehow match the landscape or is there a connection between the diesel power of a train… say, and the power of the landscape? It was formal but not in that ‘Oh… I am going to deconstruct the myths I have about the west!’ it was more formal in that it was: ‘I would like to visually study these machines and this landscape.’

McInnis: And there’s a break, right, when you were in grad school, you were focusing on narrative film—dialogue driven, plot driven narratives—and the work you’ve done here… to go to go back on that formal point and then pull it back little bit… has been formal in so far as it’s cerebral. But in the way you’re going after it in terms of craft, it is very much more like the charcoal drawing and paintings you’re talking about...

Stillwell: It’s a great point. It’s funny, but the approach that I use now feels more organic, somehow like a drawing. I think the easiest traditional visual art to compare it to is sculpture. It seems like there are two ways to think of it: you have this raw material and you chisel away or carve away to find the forms in it, which is one sort of approach to apply. But sculpture can also be gathering material to build something from nothing, to start from nothing and build up… which also applies to the way I’m working right now. I’ve said before when I look at a certain shot or sequence, I sense it’s like a drawing or painting. I can’t really explain it, but some movies feel like a drawing, like in Wong Kar-Wai films. They are like drawings because there is something free about them, in some ways, you don’t know where it’s going and in some ways it’s very controlled and you know exactly where it’s going… it’s a weird balance and those films strike that balance for me, too.

McInnis: You seem to be talking about improvisation on a certain level… the way that craft and moment meet where all your training comes up through that moment and at the same time you’re very free.

Stillwell: To be good at improvisation, you have to know your craft inside and out. And then you have to be yourself inside and out and be able to be free and let yourself think on your feet and respond to what’s around you… but in a relevant way that is relevant to the whole that you’re making.

Bunkers: Understand all the principals before you disregard one…

Stillwell: Perform your work …on an intuitive level, so that everything you know and everything you are is guiding you moment to moment.

Bunkers: Then, when you’re out filming, you have to have confidence in yourself that you’re gathering these raw materials and not second-guessing yourself all the time, saying you need to be more rigid here… you have more faith in the process that you’re going to get what you need and come back to the drawing board… and it’s going to come together and work itself out.  It’s blind faith in a way.