Don Hertzfeldt on It’s Such a Beau­ti­ful Day at 10

When you’re a film crit­ic, peo­ple always ask, ​“What is your favourite film?”, and ever since 2013 I answer very quick­ly and eas­i­ly: Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such A Beau­ti­ful Day. There are not many films that are short­hand for the genet­ic mate­r­i­al of your soul. In my case, there’s only one. Although, tech­ni­cal­ly, it’s three short films com­piled into a sin­gle port­man­teau fea­ture ani­ma­tion, and it fol­lows a hatwear­ing stick fig­ure named Bill who is try­ing to live his lit­tle life against the back­drop of some med­ical bad news that is root­ed in his fam­i­ly his­to­ry. Maybe this doesn’t sound like much on paper, but its svelte 62 min­utes cov­ers all of life: the sil­ly embar­rass­ments; the absurd humour; the inher­it­ed suf­fer­ing; the desire for love; the iso­la­tion; the yearn­ing; the mem­o­ries; the dreams.

I dis­cov­ered the film at its 2013 run at London’s ICA cin­e­ma that kicked off with a spe­cial Hertzfeldt extrav­a­gan­za night, co-com­pered by LWLies’ edi­tor David Jenk­ins. They say don’t meet your heroes, so it’s a good thing that Don and I did this inter­view over email. In a bid to cur­ry favour when I reached out to Don, I men­tioned that I once went home with a man I met at a bus stop because he said (before I did) that It’s Such a Beau­ti­ful Day was his favourite film. Don wrote back, ​“I might require that your bus stop anec­dote appears in the fin­ished arti­cle.” A deal was struck. Now over to him.

LWLies: Why do you always write in low­er­case? Have you changed the set­tings on all your elec­tron­ics so that auto­cor­rect doesn’t inter­fere with a capitalisation?

Hertzfeldt: nobody ever taught me how to type. hon­est­ly. it’s embar­rass­ing that it has come to this. when i was a kid i just found that ignor­ing the shift key was the fastest way to fum­ble across the key­board. and when i began to respond to inter­views, i always assumed edi­tors would cor­rect my cap­i­tal­iza­tion and punc­tu­a­tion before it would go print. but they almost nev­er did. so over the years, the low­er­case became some sort of a ​“thing” which i think must have caused oth­er edi­tors to nev­er cor­rect it either. maybe they thought i’d get mad? i don’t know but can you imag­ine get­ting mad over some­thing like that? i like cap­i­tal let­ters just fine. if i’d known i wield­ed such pow­er, i’d have demand­ed my own per­son­al red font every­where from day one. so any­way, it’s not a thing, it’s just eas­i­er for me to write. we can run the inter­view in all caps if you like. i’ve also learned i tie my shoes the wrong way.

Do your films first come to you in words or images?

i don’t know if there’s always a dif­fer­ence. it can often be sort of a mash, like a fuzzy mem­o­ry. i usu­al­ly begin writ­ing some­thing with a stack of scat­tered ideas that i’d been col­lect­ing since when­ev­er the last movie was. they’re not even nar­ra­tive ideas yet, maybe just a great line i jot­ted down, some­thing sad i saw on the side of the road, a dream… just inter­est­ing half-scenes, bits and pieces. ​“this needs to be in a movie some­how,” ​“that would be a great end­ing to some­thing.” when a par­tic­u­lar idea arrives, it real­ly feels like i’m very clear­ly rec­og­niz­ing some­thing that pre-exists. it’s hard to explain. there is no ambi­gu­i­ty, it’s like a clear and direct light­ning bolt. like, ​“yes, there it is, obvi­ous­ly that is going into the movie.” it’s a new idea but it’s extreme­ly famil­iar, for lack of a bet­ter word ​“icon­ic”, and feels like i had noth­ing at all to do with cre­at­ing it.

i’ve only just redis­cov­ered it, ​“of course! where has this been?” and then it seems like all i real­ly have to do is try not to for­get about it, or mess up the deliv­ery. so i write all these things down as soon as they come along. by the time i’m ready to seri­ous­ly start writ­ing a new project, all these notes i’ve col­lect­ed become the foun­da­tion. i already know i want all these lit­tle scenes and moments to be in the movie, so how do i write a sto­ry now that makes all the pieces con­nect? i would nev­er want to start writ­ing with a blank piece of paper and no big stack of ideas. that’s like get­ting into a car with an emp­ty gas tank.

It is so very touch­ing how small and inglo­ri­ous Bill’s life is, and yet you give him the soar­ing clas­si­cal treat­ment. Who is Bill to you? How did you decide what music would sound­track his life? 

the big music that plays when bill has his first epiphany, and every­thing begins to turn to colour is tra­di­tion­al­ly per­formed as a piano piece. it’s rach­mani­noff. i first heard the unusu­al full orches­tra ver­sion that was used in the movie dur­ing the win­ter olympics. it’s this epic piece. a girl came out skat­ing to it. she’d been hyped up as the per­son to beat in this com­pe­ti­tion and had all of her big jumps timed to the real­ly explo­sive moments in this music. but on her first jump, she fell. and she kept falling. and the music kept going and the big­ness of the music just made it more and more trag­ic. she just kept falling.

when i find the right music, like find­ing a new idea, again some­thing clicks and it’s like i have no choice. that’s it, that’s going in a movie. i want­ed to use big beau­ti­ful oper­at­ic cues for bill’s sto­ry because everyone’s life, even when noth­ing much is going on, is still full of beau­ty and small moments that can feel just as big to some­one as any big roman­tic mur­der­ous sub­plot in a melo­dra­ma. just look­ing at the right tree can be a big oper­at­ic moment for some­body. i think there’s also this sad sense of urgency and inevitabil­i­ty to so many of the pieces i end­ed up choos­ing. like a deep feel­ing of miss­ing out, of anoth­er life that’s always just around the cor­ner but you can nev­er get there.

How many pass­es does it take you to arrive at lines like, ​“He died alone in a field one sum­mer morn­ing while dream­ing of the moon. Six weeks lat­er a sun­flower grew out of his head.” and ​“On his sixth birth­day his moth­er gave him a postage stamp and a piece of yarn and hugged him for five minutes”?

some­times they arrive ful­ly baked and you don’t dare change a word and oth­er times you think it’s per­fect until you hear the line actu­al­ly read out loud and sud­den­ly it’s awful. some lines are only good on paper. there was a pecu­liar rhythm to the movie’s nar­ra­tion that i could nev­er real­ly put my fin­ger on, but i think i always knew it when i heard it, and tried to learn when to stop fuss­ing. it would some­times come down to the num­ber of syl­la­bles in a sen­tence. when i was direct­ing julia for ​“world of tomor­row” she learned very quick­ly, with­out telling me, that the takes i liked the most were the ones when she was imi­tat­ing how i nar­rat­ed ​“it’s such a beau­ti­ful day.”

Is the tragi­com­ic tone of the film a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your outlook?

prob­a­bly, or at least my out­look from 10 or so years ago. large chunks of the movie were lift­ed from my old diary. when i’d hit a wall while writ­ing i’d go through my diary again to see if there was any­thing else to steal. i’m not bill, but we were both liv­ing in cramped apart­ments in our late 20s, so many things seemed to cross over easily.

I love Ter­rence Mal­ick and the way that nature offers grace amidst our absolute car­ni­val of suf­fer­ing is some­thing I see in ISABD too. How do you feel about Malick?

oh what can you say, he’s rare and beau­ti­ful, i love him too. we’ve met before here in austin. i can’t remem­ber but i think i signed an NDA so unfor­tu­nate­ly i can’t gos­sip unless you get me drunk. but i’m real­iz­ing late­ly how the most inspi­ra­tional thing can sim­ply be see­ing anoth­er film­mak­er out there, just doing what­ev­er they want to do. it’s rare for a per­son to real­ly have that free­dom. it’s also nice to see a per­son know what they want to do, which i guess can also be rare.

The throw­away images and jokes are dizzy­ing­ly inven­tive. I’m think­ing of the ice­man who could nev­er have imag­ined that the sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment would be exam­in­ing his colon and the kid with alu­mini­um hook arms run­ning into the sea cry­ing ​‘BOON BOON’ nev­er to be seen again… Are these real obser­va­tions tak­en from some­where or the prod­uct of your imag­i­na­tion or some hybrid?

i did see a frozen ice­man doc­u­men­tary where they went all up in his colon and i remem­ber feel­ing weird­ly sad about it. i had a neigh­bor in this apart­ment build­ing who’d say strange things to me in the park­ing lot and i’d always try to remem­ber to write them down, if i wasn’t try­ing to avoid him. the box­ing match on TV from mex­i­co with the bleed­ing head on repeat, the man­a­tee / man­tis mis­un­der­stand­ing, see­ing some­one in pub­lic with lion king slip­pers, those were all things that hap­pened. i’m not sure, but i think every dream bill has in the movie was also a dream i’d had at some point. i was just gath­er­ing as many moments as i could that might help round out the cor­ners of this sto­ry and also sort of pull at bill’s seams a lit­tle. the kid with the alu­minum hooks, i don’t think i know where that came from… when i can’t remem­ber writ­ing some­thing, it usu­al­ly means it just sort of appeared one day.

Have you ever thought about launch­ing your sev­ered head into space?

hasn’t every­one? that scene came from a con­ver­sa­tion too.

Can you nar­ra­tivise the ori­gins sto­ry of It’s Such a Beau­ti­ful Day?

in 1999, before the big dot-com crash, there was a new media com­pa­ny that asked me to do a com­ic strip for their web­site. they said i could keep all the rights to it and they’d pay the rent on my apart­ment for as long as i did the strip. and i said, that sounds like a pret­ty good deal to me. so, i start­ed draw­ing these com­ic strips and out of them came this one recur­ring char­ac­ter. all my char­ac­ters looked more or less the same so i put a hat on him. the strips weren’t very good but they had a sort of weird qual­i­ty to them because there weren’t real­ly any punch­lines. at the time i was sort of inter­est­ed in the idea of an anti-com­ic strip, where maybe noth­ing fun­ny even happens.

it would just be bill walk­ing around doing this or that, and then sad­ly going home again and that’s it. so this web­site didn’t last very long, and maybe it was my fault, but this char­ac­ter stuck with me. and why was he wear­ing this hat, real­ly? maybe he’s self-con­scious because he’s got no hair. but he’s not very old, so what hap­pened to his hair? or maybe he’s got some scars he’s cov­er­ing up. did he have a cou­ple of brain surg­eries? i worked on some oth­er things but these ideas float­ed after me for five more years and in 2005 they sort of burst out all at once and i start­ed work on every­thing will be ok.

How long was that entire process?

from every­thing will be ok to it’s such a beau­ti­ful day was about six years to write, ani­mate, and shoot. maybe a lit­tle more.

The form you work in – and the num­ber of jobs you do for it – is so labour inten­sive. What keeps you going?

if i ever feel sad dur­ing a pro­duc­tion it’s nev­er from actu­al­ly ani­mat­ing – ani­mat­ing is very much like a dif­fer­ent state of mind, like emo­tion­less con­cen­tra­tion – but the side effect of work­ing for months and months can begin to feel like you’re just a ham­ster on a wheel. every day has a same­ness to it, you wake up, get back on the ham­ster wheel, you run and run, eat ham­ster food, and go back to sleep. and the out­side world can real­ly start to seem like it’s mov­ing in fast motion and total­ly pass­ing you by as you run in place every day.

but then you step out of the wheel and think, wait a minute, i total­ly for­got this ham­ster wheel’s been con­nect­ed to this bat­tery. and run­ning on the wheel every day has been gen­er­at­ing this tremen­dous amount of ener­gy, and look how it’s all been adding up. this lit­tle wheel has made this movie, that movie, this thing, that oth­er thing, allowed me to trav­el here and to there, and on and on. the movies that have come out of this still seem so much big­ger than the work. it still feels like some kind of miracle.

Were there spe­cif­ic cul­tur­al prop­er­ties (a song, a movie, a quote) that kept you on track dur­ing the mak­ing of It’s Such a Beau­ti­ful Day?

there’s wasn’t a spe­cif­ic sin­gle thing that kept me on track, but music in general’s always been a real­ly impor­tant dri­ving force. if i can’t lis­ten to music while i ani­mate, i’ll get sad. i’m con­fused when i meet some­one who isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in music of any kind. how is such a thing pos­si­ble? when i was ani­mat­ing in school, after so many months i began to buy arm­fuls of used cas­sette tapes for 50 cents from the record shop down the street, lit­er­al­ly any­thing, i didn’t care what it was, i just need­ed any­thing new to lis­ten to as i kept work­ing. i do think many ran­dom song lyrics have found their way into the writ­ing over the years. i don’t remem­ber when i noticed this, but for instance if you look at the lyrics to r.e.m.’s ​‘you are the every­thing’, that’s maybe it’s such a beau­ti­ful day right there.

How did you devel­op the tech­nique you use that I am going to man­gle the descrip­tion of (please cor­rect my man­gled descrip­tion): with lots of images that are both ani­ma­tion and live-action pho­tog­ra­phy on screen in sep­a­rate blobs at the same time?

i come from the video tape gen­er­a­tion. when i start­ed to learn ani­ma­tion i only had VHS to shoot on, which meant you get one shot at some­thing and if you make a mis­take you just go back and tape over it. when i was around 12, i found this big beau­ti­ful indus­tri­al light & mag­ic cof­fee table book at a flea mar­ket. it’s the one from 1986. i saved up $40 and went back a month lat­er to buy it. it’s full of pic­tures of their motion con­trol cam­eras, mat­te paint­ings, opti­cal print­ers, all the great old spe­cial effects tech­niques. i couldn’t read enough about how these spe­cial effects were cre­at­ed and i kept on read­ing stuff like cine­fan­tas­tique and fan­go­ria. i don’t know why, i was just enthralled.

oth­er kids had their favorite base­ball play­ers and i had guys like den­nis muren and phil tip­pett. and i began to wrap my brain around the con­cept that film is not at all like video tape. film only reacts to light hit­ting the sur­face. and you can do some amaz­ing things with light if you leave part of the frame opaque and put anoth­er image on top. years lat­er, i think i might have been in the very last grad­u­at­ing class at film school to actu­al­ly shoot on film, before dig­i­tal began to take over. so i used this old 16mm ros­trum cam­era to shoot all my stu­dent films. it’s a cam­era that’s mount­ed on a crane, point­ed straight down at a table where you set your art­work. it’s got an ani­ma­tion motor on it and you press a trig­ger to shoot one frame at a time. after grad­u­a­tion, i found a cam­era stu­dio in bur­bank that was get­ting rid of old gear and i bought my own giant 35mm ros­trum cam­era, from the 1940s.

for ear­ly shorts like ​“reject­ed” i was still using the cam­era in a very straight­for­ward way. but at a cer­tain point i real­ized, hey you know what, this ani­ma­tion motor goes both for­wards and back­wards. you could shoot some­thing, then run the film back­wards with the shut­ter closed, and then expose that same piece of film again. you’re shoot­ing blind­ly with no video play­back, but you can try to keep track of where you’re at on the roll of film with a frame counter. it wasn’t high tech but i began try­ing out some mul­ti­ple expo­sures for the first time with a short called ​“the mean­ing of life”. it was main­ly for straight spe­cial effects stuff, like com­posit­ing dif­fer­ent mov­ing lights togeth­er. when i was first devel­op­ing ​“every­thing will be ok”, i couldn’t crack the sto­ry for a while because i couldn’t pic­ture it yet. the cam­era was very bulky and lim­it­ing, it was kind of annoy­ing and cum­ber­some just to shoot a zoom or a track­ing shot, so the car­toons often felt very sta­t­ic. i also didn’t want to lit­er­al­ly show a city when bill’s walk­ing around. the pic­ture need­ed to be more impres­sion­is­tic and sen­so­ry, since it all takes place in his head.

but hey, what if i broke the actu­al film frame up into pieces? then i could zip all those pieces around with much more con­trol, inde­pen­dent of mov­ing the cam­era itself. so the idea was to frame a lit­tle win­dow of action by shoot­ing it through a tiny torn holes in black con­struc­tion paper, placed about an inch below the lens. then i’d close the shut­ter, rewind the film to the cor­rect spot, shoot the sec­ond lit­tle win­dow in anoth­er area, and just keep run­ning it back forth until all the pieces were pho­tographed. some­times there’d be a dozen or so cam­era pass­es in a sin­gle shot. but when you’re fin­ished you’ve com­pos­it­ed this pret­ty cool col­lage sort of thing that feels a lot more sub­jec­tive and scat­tered. it saved a lot of time at the ani­ma­tion desk too, because now i could sug­gest more than i need­ed to actu­al­ly show. the entire fea­ture film was even­tu­al­ly shot like this. all of it was cap­tured in-cam­era with mul­ti­ple exposures.

I read that in cre­at­ing Bill’s ail­ment you were care­ful not to make it too spe­cif­ic in order to make it more of a Rorschach ail­ment that peo­ple could see them­selves in. What did you draw from to cre­ate it, and what is the art to mak­ing an ill­ness seem famil­iar but not too familiar?

right, i didn’t want to tell the audi­ence, okay he has this rare thing with this long latin name, and give peo­ple that exit ramp: ​“well, thank­ful­ly this will nev­er hap­pen to me.” i don’t want to put it in a box, but if we were to very gen­er­al­ly say the movie is about dying, then the ​“how” is ulti­mate­ly not real­ly that impor­tant. the how is just details. what’s more impor­tant is, ​“what are we actu­al­ly going to do with this knowl­edge?” i also liked the idea that maybe the audi­ence doesn’t know what’s wrong with bill because bill just doesn’t remem­ber. we only know what bill knows, and he’s very confused.

so, i researched a par­tic­u­lar neu­ro­log­i­cal issue and worked back­wards from there: what sort of tests would they give him? what sort of mem­o­ry prob­lems would he have? how do we make this feel ground­ed, com­pared to the fan­ta­sy stuff hap­pen­ing in his head? i think i was also get­ting a lit­tle annoyed with men­tal ill­ness in movies always mean­ing someone’s either a scream­ing mur­der­er or a delight­ful quirky genius who eats peanut but­ter with a spoon, like it’s a sort of stu­pid super­pow­er, and i want­ed to do some­thing that felt more honest.

we see that a lot of bill’s suf­fer­ing is inher­it­ed, and that there is a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness in his fam­i­ly. did he ever have a chance for things to go any way oth­er than the way they did?

no, i don’t think so. there’s all sorts of images of forces of nature in ​“i am so proud of you” that seem to sug­gest his fate is just the way things are.

Do you fear death?

some­times. i think i’m more both­ered by the idea of run­ning out of time before i’m ready, like a rude or sud­den inter­rup­tion. i don’t know if we always fear death itself as much as the feel­ing of being oskar schindler at the end of the movie, say­ing, ​“i could have done more, i could have done more.”

How moti­vat­ed are you by the thought of how peo­ple will receive your work? I ask because it’s so per­son­al that it feels like a very deep com­mu­ni­ca­tion and I won­der if you send it out in the hope of receiv­ing a spe­cif­ic kind of response? 

i think prob­a­bly not at all. i try not to let it cross my mind. when­ev­er i begin to think about how some­thing might be received or how many peo­ple might be watch­ing, it’s sort of par­a­lyz­ing. it’s the only time i start to feel what would be described as a cre­ative block. won­der­ing about the audi­ence a lot can be a sort of poi­son. the only thing i want to focus on with the audi­ence in mind is clar­i­ty. just mak­ing sure i’m not get­ting ahead of myself, not mak­ing some­thing con­fus­ing or over­ly com­pli­cat­ed, or los­ing the audi­ence by pick­ing the wrong angle or some­thing. the director’s most basic job is clar­i­ty. clar­i­ty is my favourite word. and then, if you’ve done the best job you could, whether or not the audi­ence likes the movie is more their problem.

Tell me every­thing you sen­si­bly can about what you’re work­ing on now!!

it’s a musi­cal, sort of. i’m not able to talk about it yet, but it should be done by the end of the year. when it comes out, i think a lot of peo­ple will say, ​“don that’s not real­ly a musi­cal,” but i already think they’re wrong. and after that, it looks like i’ll final­ly be get­ting start­ed on a new fea­ture film. which will be a very big project. but i’m not allowed to talk about that either. why are there so many secrets? i’d still like to get back into doing more ​“world of tomor­row” episodes some­day, but it doesn’t seem like that will be soon.

I read some­where that you like to walk a lot. Do you still do that?

i think there’s just some­thing about your brain need­ing to switch to far­sight­ed vision after spend­ing so much time doing near­sight­ed work. it seems real­ly impor­tant to be able to focus on things far away after spend­ing so many hours draw­ing. i used to take so many mid­night walks around the block in my old place by the sea while work­ing on ​“beau­ti­ful day” that i may have worn a lit­tle trench in the con­crete. but it always cleared my head and shook a lot of stuff out. i’ve been notic­ing it late­ly in oth­er ani­ma­tors, this sort of vacant, des­per­ate 100 yard stare into the mid­dle dis­tance when we sit around, like the brain has been wait­ing so long to switch over.

Has being nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar cor­rupt­ed your soul?

yes prob­a­bly.

Your work cre­ates a very emo­tion­al type of fan­dom, with peo­ple hurl­ing their con­fes­sions your way. Do you know what to do with those inti­mate confidences?

i try to be a good lis­ten­er. but the movie is real­ly the thing that’s there for peo­ple when they need it, i’m just the dope who made it.

It’s Such a Beau­ti­ful Day is avail­able on Blu-ray via bit​ter​films​.com and view­able online via Don Hertzfeldt’s Vimeo channel.