A strange singer with “God-given talent” drifts through the mythic city of Memphis under its canopy of ancient oak trees, shattered windows, and burning spirituality. Surrounded by lovers, legends, hustlers, preachers, and a wolfpack of kids, the unstable performer avoids the recording studio and is driven to spend time in his own form of self-discovery. Shown in fragments, his journey drags him from love and happiness right to the edge of another dimension. Featuring an explosive performance and score from Willis Earl Beal, Tim Sutton’s haunting Memphis is hard to categorize. It’s a film steeped in folklore, music, surrealism, and the abstract search for glory.
I sat down with director Tim Sutton at a restaurant in Hollywood to discuss this beautiful film.
Danny Miller: I hadn’t read anything about the film before I saw it and I was convinced that I was watching a stunning and provocative documentary about Willis Earl Beal. I was kind of flabbergasted afterwards when I found out that it wasn’t a documentary at all.
Tim Sutton: Which is great! Making a movie like this that is not easy to define can be a challenge in terms of positioning, but I like that people coming to it cold are a little confused. People shouldn’t always know the exact intentions of a filmmaker or the reality of a situation. I love putting people on fertile but unstable ground. I love that people might think it’s a documentary all the way through or halfway through or they might think Willis is from Memphis or that he knows all these people. The movie starts with him saying, “Everything is artifice.” There are all sorts of constructed moments in the film that don’t take away from a documentary-like experience.
It’s rare to see a movie that so takes advantage of the medium of filmmaking, it’s really beautiful to look at and I loved letting the images wash over me. But even now talking to you I have a hard time accepting that Willis’s character isn’t really him.
But it is him! I think I said in an early interview, and I know it sounds stupid but it’s completely true, that the person you see on screen is exactly him and not him at all! People think I’m being mysterious but that is truly what it is. I created a script, a 45-page story that had dialogue. I started with that as a blueprint and all those ideas are in the finished film, but they’re twisted into something organic. I never used any of the dialogue that I wrote, but I did use the situations and transitions and feelings. What you’re seeing are those people executing that visions themselves.
So none of the other people in the film are actors?
No, I’ve never worked much with actors. For me, it’s much more interesting to find the beauty and the talent in regular situations with regular people. There are either people who look at the camera and don’t get it or people who trust you and live versions of themselves in front of your camera. When you find those people, they are able to deliver something that no actor can create, something totally unique to the moment and the space. Like that older woman, Bertha, sitting on the couch with the younger woman, Constance, talking to her about the meaning of life. “You never know how life is gonna go, it could be beautiful, it could be sad, you’re gonna have ups and downs any way you go.” That’s wisdom. All I do is sit them down and say “Bertha, talk to Constance about love,” because I knew Bertha has some wisdom to impart. Why would I give them lines — I’m some white guy from upstate New York! Come down here and collaborate, don’t come down here and direct, you know what I mean?
I love Willis’s music but I have a feeling that he is not someone who has much patience for the commercial side of the music industry. I imagine that attitude can sometimes get in the way of his music getting out there or him becoming “successful” in the traditional sense.
Yes, that’s exactly what’s been happening in his real life — the film is sort of a prophecy in that regard. He was on this label and he did an album which was a masterpiece — it’s so fucking great — but it’s not “entertainment,” it didn’t have “hits” so they dropped him and now he’s off on his own. He’s living in the woods in Olympia, Washington, these days, free as a bird and creating beautiful music.
Getting a sense of what he’s like, I’m a little surprised that he agreed to be the focus of this film.
Willis really believes in cinema, he loves movies and he takes them very seriously. I think he’s on a mission to create some kind of message about his life and the world and at the same time I’m trying to tell my life through images. So even though I’m not an African American singer winding my way through Memphis, this movie is about both of us as artists discovering the same things together. When Willis read the script, I think he found everything he wanted to say in a movie. I’m not sure he would do well in a film where he had to wake up at 6 am and read lines. This movie was very conducive to his lifestyle. We were creating a vision that was natural and devoid of worry. We wanted to think deeply and to go as far out as we wanted into this kind of abstract storytelling. The movie had to be this kind of loose, beautiful mess to be true to the vision that both Willis and I had.
I’ve talked to a lot of indie filmmakers who tend to use pretty much everything they have because they don’t have the luxury of shooting a lot of footage. But I imagine this film had to be much more organic and free-flowing.
I think the problem with a lot of low-budget filmmaking is when they try to make a $5 million movie for $200,000. My goal is always to make a movie that I know I can make. To me, that means sacrificing plot to create a world — a world that then becomes its own story. We didn’t have a set schedule, everything was always flexible. You have to have producers who are that flexible and can get things done. John Baker, my producer, was great. He’s the one who found Willis and he also infused fiction and documentary-style production techniques in order for me to have every creative choice that I wanted. Look, I’m not asking for a crane shot, I’m not asking for a helicopter, I’m not asking for a crowd of a hundred people, I’m just asking him to believe in the idea of what we were trying to do. One he bought that, he created the platform. That was imperative.
I know you got a lot of your funding from a grant from La Biennale de Venezia, the group that puts on the Venice Film Festival.
We did. But John and I had agreed that if we didn’t get the grant from Venice, we’d take $30,000 and go down to Memphis with Willis and a Cadillac and make a movie! We used the money we got very wisely. I have faith in the idea that you can create a world and if you execute it in an interesting way, people are going to buy into it. I did that with my first film, Pavilion. I had five days in Arizona and I didn’t even have a cast when we got there. But it was thrilling. I knew that once I gathered up these kids, we were going make something worth watching. When you’re creating something that has meaning, even if you’re not sure what the endpoint is, it’s always worthwhile.
It sounds like you and Willis have some similar beliefs about art and commerce.
Listen, man, I would love to make some money, and my wife would love for me to make some money! I would like to make all different kinds of movies. I liked Guardians of the Galaxy, I saw it with my two kids and thought it was great! But what I’m good at as a filmmaker is that I can take a small amount of money and make that into a world that’s believable to me. This kind of film has been marginalized for years and now it’s peeking its head out again. That’s very exciting to me.
Could you have made a similar film in your own town of Brooklyn?
No, not at all, because Memphis is a vortex of spirituality. I’m not a total mysticism-type dude but there are certain places on Earth that have a special power. Memphis is an ancient city in the universe. It is cursed and it is blessed. It is so beautiful and so decrepit. When I go down there, I feel the warmth of the spirit of that geography. I’m not just about urban rubble, I don’t like that kind of porn, but Memphis to me is a place that is being reclaimed by nature. I’d love to make a film in New York some day, but that’s not where I am right now.
Do you worry about the criticism of a “white guy from New York” going down there to make a movie?
Sure. I have two answers to that comment and they’re not stock answers, they’re how I really feel about the “race” question. The first is, as an artist, does that mean I should just make films about Park Slope dads or white kids on bikes? That’s absurd. Like all artists, I’m constantly thinking about different things that mean something to me. And second, I never went down there and told people what to do. We went there with the idea of telling a story of Memphis, one that’s about reality and about folklore, about surrealism and realism, that talks about the city in a way that other people don’t. I think it’s okay to shoot a film as an outsider, but not as a stranger. We went to that church five times before we shot a frame. I spoke at that church three times. We had local people who became our crew. I went down there with respect, with a true willingness to accept other people’s ideas. I didn’t think of myself as a white person telling a black story but as a filmmaker working and collaborating with a city that I wanted to explore. The film is abstract and there will undoubtedly be detractors in Memphis and elsewhere, but if you really look at the film, it’s a love letter.