In “Alexander the Last,” independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg explores the struggles of young artists trying to fully commit themselves to their relationships and their art, finding areas where the two intersect.
Melnitz Movies will screen the film Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater, followed by a Q&A with Swanberg himself.
The Daily Bruin’s Saba Mohtasham spoke with Swanberg about the role his personal life plays in his movies and his vision as a young artist.
Daily Bruin: What inspired you to make this film?
Joe Swanberg: I’ve been working almost nonstop since I made my first movie a couple years ago. I got married in 2007, and wanted to immediately make a film that dealt with that kind of commitment and dealing or not dealing with the effect all that work had on my relationship. I’m taking stories from the actors, too; everybody’s contributing to it. I don’t want to claim that it’s completely autobiographical, but certainly a lot of the reason of wanting to make a film with this story line is coming from things that we were dealing with.
DB: How much of the dialogue was improvised?
JS: All of it. To a large extent, the story’s improvised too. We started shooting with an idea of where the story would go and who the characters were, but anything that the characters are saying was all come up with on the spot.
DB: How did you think of the title?
JS: I stole it from my cousin named William III. When he was a little kid, he announced to everybody that he was Billy the Last, which I thought was pretty incredible that even from that age he’d decided he would not be carrying on that name. (For the movie,) I was thinking that the two sisters’ dad would’ve been Alexander Jr. and instead of hoping to have a boy later, (the parents) just named her Alexander (III) and it always annoyed her as a kid. At some point in her life she had similarly declared that she was Alexander the Last. Tying in with that, I also liked the play on words of Alexander the Great. This idea of “specialness” that sort of surrounded him throughout his life is something that I feel a little for her ““ this idea of being an actress and this feeling of “specialness.”
DB: So you’re 27 years old and you’ve made five films in the last five years, three webshows and you’re in the band The Ice Cream Floats. How do you do it?
JS: It’s nice because the webshows seem to always fall between projects; I like to be working all the time. When a lot of friends of mine finish a project, they’re super exhausted and are looking forward to taking time off and recovering, but the shooting of the films themselves is always really fun for me and it’s an environment I’m always excited to get back to. The band was just something that (my bandmate and I) started doing. … We liked doing it, so we kept doing it. It’s all the same project for me. … I’m moving from one to the next so fluidly that it all just blurs together, like one big job.
DB: And what exactly is your mission or artistic goal?
JS: It’s changing. With the early movies, it was very much to document … representations of young people I didn’t feel like television or Hollywood movies were doing a very good job of showing. Even indie films I didn’t think were doing a very good job of showing those things. Originally, it was to focus more on capturing small moments instead of having any bigger plot. When I first started, there was no YouTube; MySpace was being used in a very different way and Facebook wasn’t the cultural force that it is now. In a way, all of those things have stepped in for what I was trying to do, and I feel there’s a very accurate self-representation. I’m still looking to work in areas that I feel like Hollywood is not doing a good job covering, but it’s something more ambiguous now.
DB: What do you hope audiences take away from “Alexander the Last?”
JS: Whatever kind of commitment people have in their lives, it’s easy to find temptation anywhere. Hopefully people are coming away from it asking themselves some questions about their behavior. I don’t want to be a moralist or judgmental about it, but I certainly am hoping to raise questions and give people a channel through which to investigate their own lives.
E-mail Mohtasham at smohtasham@media.ucla.edu.