"You should say yes to every possibility. It’s simple, just go and try it.
Film Section: THE TECHNICAL WRITER
By Tarvis Watson
"Both Michael [Harris] and I, we could very easily fall into that ourselves, very easily take any excuse to stay home, not go out, not deal with people," Saunders says of himself and Michael Harris, the lead actor and co-writer of The Technical Writer. "In neither of our cases has it ever become so pronounced that we just stayed inside. In some ways our work is therapeutic in that regard because our work forces us to get out of the house." They drew upon their own experiences and people they’d met to fashion the story of an agoraphobic and his two new neighbors, who happen to be swingers.
Michael plays Jessup in the movie, whose work does not afford him such a luxury of constant human interaction. He works out of his apartment writing computer manuals and instead of mourning the absence of human contact in his day-to-day life, Jessup seems to have grown accustomed to it like walls of a prison. In fact, he seems quite content. Here’s Jessup on perhaps the most intimate of human interactions: "Sex is a drug like any other drug and in this country it’s the one true opiate of the masses. I hate drugs." He takes a drag from his cigarette. "Every part of this so-called culture uses sex to keep us enslaved as if reproduction was an issue or still relevant to survival. But I’ve set myself free. Halle-fuckin’-lujah."
"It’s bullshit," Saunders says of his lead character. "He’s just running this big interference game so he won’t have to deal with this very strong, aggressive woman."
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Jessup’s mini-diatribe is that he happens to be sitting ten feet away from an orgy while giving it. Slim and Joe know how to throw a party. Jessup has so convinced himself that sexual gratification is a vice to be avoided that he sounds more like an extreme religious fundamentalist rather than the New York intellectual he most likely prides himself to be. Either way it’s been a long long time for him and, characteristically, he refuses to notice Slim’s slight advances, her gaze towards him and her not too terribly innocent grin.
"When she came in to meet with us, it was like a rock star walking in," Saunders says of Tatum O’Neal who plays Slim. " She was the first person who could stand up to Michael [Jessup] and give him as much shit as he gave her."
Gradually Slim’s advances grow more frank and overt until, finally, in a scene that is as humorous as it is tantalizing, Jessup concedes. It’s not a minor accomplishment–only someone with a very formidable presence could hope to contend with him.
The same goes for Joe, Slim’s husband, played by William Forsythe. "He’s a sort of big, brash, life-of-the-party kind of guy," Saunders describes. "But he has a lot more going on then just being the ‘I’ll take anything that comes my way’ kind of individual." Joe seems childlike and impulsive, especially when compared to his wife who is generally more straightforward and refined. Seeing the two of them together, one can easily imagine how these two opposed personas work together. But The Technical Writer’s greatest strength is that its characters do not have easily defined relationships with one another. As things get more complicated between them, so do the characters. Straightforward and refined turn into fragile and soft, childlike and brash turn introspective and at one moment in particular, menacing.
"Sure they’re fucking with this guy, but they see that he has these issues and they see that there is something they can bring to him," Saunders says about Slim and her husband Joe. "Life is messy, life is dangerous. You have to decide on a case-by-case basis what is right. You cannot just say sexual behavior is to be avoided," he adds.
In all likelihood the character Camilla would agree. "I want to go to the Himalayas. I want to get fucked by some big Mongolian on the plains of central Asia," she confesses to Jessup. Pamela Gordon, who plays Camilla, delivers the line with a soft-spoken irony and endows it with the weight of her character’s encroaching mortality, making it one of the more tender and gentle moments in The Technical Writer. While Jessup’s interactions with Slim are largely carnal, even primal in their nature, his interactions with Camilla are emotionally and psychologically penetrating. In their scenes together they are at turns kind and warm, then antagonistic and impatient. It’s a friendship that is as honest as it is flavorful.
"Those are some of my favorite scenes," Saunders says of their relationship. "Those are some of the ones when the intimacy of the relationships comes through." Camille’s character was the first one Saunders and Michael came up with in writing the script. "She was sort of a composite of Michael’s mom and my grandmother, they both died while we were sort of in the process of putting the story together. Their take on life, their feistiness, made it into that character."
Pamela died several months after completing production on the film. "None of knew she was terminally ill, I don’t even know if she did. But the role was sort of her message to the world."
In 2000, Saunders was named one of the 10 Digital Directors to watch by Variety Magazine. The Technical Writer, like the majority of his work and previous features was shot in video. Back in 1998 he gave an interview where he mentioned the one of the inherent challenges to shooting video is the lower resolution, which doesn’t lend itself to wide panoramic shots. I asked him the same question this time around and he had a slightly different answer. "It’s getting better. If I were to shoot HD I’d be much less hesitant to shoot those wide shots. I still think that if you’re shooting standard definition video it really lends itself to smaller introspective human dramas."
While it is true that the movie is above all concerned with its characters and their foibles, Saunders saves a shot for the end of the film that so clean and crisp you’ll think it won’t be too long before we start shooting full-blown epics digitally. It’s the resolution. Up to that point the movie is saturated with characters and events that are "messy and dangerous." It ends on a note that is absent of its prior calamity, one that is quiet and serene.
The Technical Writer, like Saunders’s previous features, screened at Sundance. Vagrant Films is the Canadian distributor. He’s currently looking for distribution in the US.
