Sara Dri­ver: ​‘You dream a film before you make it’

It’s not a sight you see very often: a direc­tor cred­it dis­play­ing the name Sara Dri­ver. Her first film work was as a direc­tor in 1983 – she made a film inspired by a Paul Bowles nov­el called ​‘You Are Not I’, and only secured the leg­endary author’s approval after it was made. She seemed to shift towards some­thing a lit­tle more notice­ably pol­ished with 1986’s tremen­dous­ly weird and won­der­ful Sleep­walk and then, fol­low­ing the charm­ing ghost sto­ry When Pigs Fly, every­thing went qui­et on that front.

Dri­ver most­ly worked behind the scenes, main­ly assist­ing in writ­ing screen­plays with her hus­band, Jim Jar­musch, for films like Pater­son, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samu­rai and Bro­ken Flow­ers. Now she’s back with Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a doc­u­men­tary chart­ing the cre­ative blos­som­ing of the icon­ic New York artist. Here Dri­ver speaks about the mak­ing of the film.

“I nev­er real­ly thought about mak­ing a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat. His life was kind of so sad towards the end and it was not some­thing i want­ed to involve myself in. But a hur­ri­cane hit New York in 2012 and it flood­ed the whole Low­er East Side. I have this friend called Alex­is Adler, an embry­ol­o­gist who start­ed the first fer­til­i­ty pro­gram in New York City. She lived with Jean-Michel from 1979 to 1980 when she was study­ing at Rock­e­feller Uni­ver­si­ty. She had a mur­al paint­ed on her bed­room wall which Basquiat did when he was liv­ing there, and he also paint­ed one of her clos­et doors and refrigerator.

“After the flood she got real­ly wor­ried. She remem­bered sud­den­ly that she had all this work she had put away and it was under­ground. She was afraid that it had been destroyed. So she went to retrieve it, and it was in per­fect shape – it had over 60 writ­ings, draw­ings, note­books, 150 pho­tographs she took of him while he lived with her. All very beau­ti­ful pho­tographs. I went to over to her house for a cup of tea about three weeks after the hur­ri­cane, and she showed me all this stuff. There’s such a small body of Basquiat’s work that remained at that time because he was so transient.

“And so when I saw the it all, it just offered this big hint as to the artist he lat­er became. It was also a door­way into what New York was like at that time. And so I just went out and bought a cam­era and start­ed shoot­ing. I was going to put togeth­er maybe a 20 minute poet­ic short and then it just start­ed becom­ing big­ger. Every­body gave me archives and art­work. I felt very sup­port­ed in the whole process. And also this was a very par­tic­u­lar moment in time in New York because we didn’t know a name for AIDS. Nobody want­ed to live in the city because it was so dan­ger­ous and it looked like a war zone. All except for artists… we were also drawn to Down­town because of Warhol’s fac­to­ry, because Bor­oughs was liv­ing down there, all the myth and lore behind all those beats.

“It’s a select­ed group that fea­tures in the film. I didn’t just ques­tion them abut their rela­tion­ship with John, but about also about the city. Like the famous graf­fi­ti artist Lee Quinonas. He was a real­ly under­ground char­ac­ter for a long time because he paint­ed over 100 sub­way trains between the age of 13 and 18. He would go up to the train yards by him­self. And he’s an extra­or­di­nary painter. He’s some­body who I knew of but I didn’t know per­son­al­ly. And now we’ve become good friends.

“The kind of peo­ple that John picked to hang out with at that par­tic­u­lar peri­od was so inter­est­ing. He was observ­ing things. He was get­ting his edu­ca­tion. And he went to a school at a place called City With­out Walls, which was about learn­ing from the city itself. And they used to take these trou­bled teenagers and put them in muse­ums to work. It was almost like a con­tin­u­a­tion of his High School edu­ca­tion. He was liv­ing with Alex­is who was a sci­en­tist. He was look­ing at her sci­ence books, and many of his paint­ings have graphs and charts in them. I always won­dered why they did. And then i realised a lot of it came from him look­ing at her stuff. It start­ed to all make sense.

“When I orig­i­nal­ly saw Alex­is’ col­lec­tion I knew she would be able to afford to get the mur­al off the wall, which need­ed to be tak­en off and pre­served. I was afraid that her archive was going to get scat­tered. So i thought, if I made a film – a cin­e­mat­ic record of it all – at least we would have that… Now it’s trav­el­ing to muse­ums. And there’s been a won­der­ful book called Basquiat Before Basquiat, which actu­al­ly has a lot of the peo­ple I inter­viewed in it. But I just felt like i need­ed a visu­al record just in case.

“I knew Basquiat as a kid, and I loved his work of course. And I thought he was an amaz­ing poet as well as a painter. And I have great deal of admi­ra­tion for Jean. But I nev­er thought I would make a film about him. I nev­er thought i would enter into that world. He’s worth a lot of mon­ey and its a very tricky thing. But … it didn’t even occur to me, until i saw what Alex­is had. And then sud­den­ly it all made sense. I think that’s how movies come togeth­er: you see some­thing, or you read a sto­ry, and sud­den­ly you see the whole thing. It’s almost like you dream a film before you make it.”

Boom for Real is released 22 June. Read the LWLies review.