PART 3: NEW LIVES. NEW WORK. NEW YORK.
In the previous installment, Martin Donovan and Jared Harris weighed in on the film, while Elina and Galaxy recalled their notorious “seduction” scene. Director Michael Almereyda demurred on what the film means to him personally while the author found a glimmer of hope in the gloom of the movie’s atmosphere as well as the author’s own experiences.
“I think Eric Stoltz had the role before me. Did you know that?” Martin Donovan asks me.
I had not known this. I can’t picture Jim as anyone but Martin, speaking in his soothing, somewhat hypnotic stop-start cadence.
“He fell out. For some reason. Maybe I’m hallucinating that. You should verify that with Michael. I’m not sure. That’s my memory of it,” Martin tells me. He speaks in real life quite a lot like his character in Nadja. It’s quietly powerful. He states things plainly, honestly, but then just as quickly, he follows it up with a comment expressing his uncertainty. It leaves you wondering, pondering.
It’s difficult for me to imagine Eric Stoltz as Jim. I’ve been watching Jim as portrayed by Martin Donovan for 25 years now. But Michael Almereyda confirms as much over email when I follow up with him about it: “Eric Stoltz was scheduled to play Jim. (I wrote the script with Eric in mind; he and Suzy Amis [who plays his sister in the film] look like twins.) But Eric learned that his mother was mortally ill, and he made the necessary decision to be at her side.”
“I was glad that Martin was available to jump in,” he adds.
“Did Michael tell you that David swooped in and saved us at the last minute?” Jared Harris asks me. He’s referring to executive producer David Lynch, who also has a cameo in the film as a morgue receptionist.
This was also news to me. And as it turns out, it had to do with the casting change. Michael explains: “[T]he financing fell out when Eric departed – and David Lynch ended up reaching into his own pocket to pay for the film.”
“As far as I know, he put up his own money. My understanding was that he wrote the check, personally,” Jared says.
“The apocryphal story is that David Lynch got a perfume commercial and our entire budget was his fee from a perfume commercial,” Jim Denault, the film’s cinematographer, tells me. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it makes a fun story.”
Whether or not it came from Lynch’s perfume commercial gig, one thing is certain: it came from Lynch entirely, and though it was sufficient to make the film, it was tight. The crew was small. There were no trailers. In short, Denault says: “We had to watch every dollar.”
“I remember meeting [Lynch] two or three times. He was very positive and encouraging. I’m grateful to him… We were all very grateful to him because it was something we wanted to do,” Jared recalls. But it wasn’t just Lynch’s support that made the film possible. It was the commitment to the project from everyone on the team.
“We were very invested in doing it… We understood that there was this sort of bare bones, independent guerilla filmmaking approach to it which was how we were going to be able to do it. We were all on board for it. We were on board for the anarchy, for the subversiveness of it,” Jared told me.
And so despite the setbacks of casting changes and financial shortfalls, the project happened. The film was finished, where it was shown at film festivals, in theaters, to critics and to too-loud, too-sensitive teenagers looking for an escape.
And it happened because Almereyda had support. From his cast and his crew.
***
Support. Financial support. Emotional support. As artists, creators, we’d like to believe we don’t need any of it; that we don’t need anyone. That we can do it all on our own if need be. But that’s almost never the case.
Nadja was not inevitable.
As I write this, I am 42 years old. As an artist (musician and writer), I have created and achieved things that, on paper, seem significant. But in life and in practice, I truly feel I am not even on the outside looking in. Instead, it feels like I am on the outside desperately jumping to catch a fleeting glimpse of a window fogged over by the heat generated by the successes and accomplishments of those unseen people within.
My wife says I’m far too hard on myself. I think about Martin Donavan telling me he never broke out, and my reaction, which was basically: you’re kidding me, right?
My wife and I recently collaborated on a book and, without the help of an agent, we managed to sell it. The day they sent us the formal deal memo, my wife joked, “Well, this should keep you happy ‘til what? Tomorrow? The next day?”
I guess what I mean is: I know I’m no Martin Donovan, but maybe I’m further along than I think.
How do we measure success as artists? Is it money? Is it acceptance by other artists or the critics? Or is the creation of art its own end, its own success?
In my mid-twenties, success looked different than it does now. Success was more of an abstract feeling. At 42 with a spouse and kids and much less time than I have responsibilities, I think in far more practical terms. And practically speaking, my art is still not generating enough resources to sustain us all on its own, so I have to supplement.
I don’t have an agent for my novel. My short fiction has a 9% acceptance rate (according to the submissions tracking platform Duotrope). My bands have signed to big labels, and the records have been critically acclaimed, but they’ve barely sold. I’ve been on countless tours. But for countless shows on those countless tours, I’ve performed for an empty room. It doesn’t feel good enough.
Am I a failure?
Have I always been a failure?
What is failure? And what would success look like?
I think I can picture it.
In 2003, at one of my lowest points, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life.
After graduating college in 2001, I’d slipped into a comfortable copywriting job, and a spacious but poorly constructed apartment in a new complex on the edges of Austin, Texas. I went to work in the mornings, came back in the evenings, had drinks with colleagues. Had a band, but it was never going to be anything very serious, considering we all had full-time jobs in office buildings.
A little over a year later, I drifted up to Chicago where I continued copywriting but also did some writing for a day trading magazine. Once again, I played music with some friends on the weekend, and while I tried to write something creative, I failed miserably.
In Nadja, Galaxy Craze’s Lucy is bitten by Nadja, and she falls under her spell. She stares blankly and speaks in a monotone voice. “Face it, Jim. She’s a zombie,” Van Helsing (as played by Peter Fonda) remarks to Lucy’s husband.
A zombie. That’s precisely how I felt when I got on a plane to visit one of my closest friends who lived in Brooklyn. I flew into Newark Airport, unprepared for the rush of emotion I would experience when I stepped out of the terminal and into the New Jersey air. It was a homecoming. That evening, I sat on my friend’s fire escape and looked out over the Gowanus Canal at the BQE, and I decided right then: I was moving there, starting over, giving myself a shot at coming back from the dead, as it were.
By the time I flew back to Chicago less than a week later, I had the lease and keys to a rented Brooklyn apartment.
In Chicago, I gathered and boxed my possessions. On my second to last day before I left for New York, my car died a violent death on Ashland Avenue – the transmission cannibalized itself and projectile vomited the final meal onto the pavement. I called AAA. They asked me where I wanted it towed. I directed them to a spot a block away from my apartment where there was plentiful parking along the train tracks. The tow truck pulled away. I put the keys in the ignition and taped a note in the window: FREE CAR.
I rented a minivan and, a day later, I left for New York, leaving my zombie life behind, but chasing an entirely different phantom: an artistically successful life.
I immediately formed a band called Goes Cube with my friend, and rather than jam on the weekends, we played constantly. We were a new band in a city with far too many bands than it needed. But we scraped and scraped until, finally, a few venues would give us a slot.
Among the few clubs that would book us was a place called Sin-e. It was there, at Sin-e, where we got our biggest break. We’d put on our best performance yet and some prominent critics were in the audience. The next morning, multiple raving reviews went up about Goes Cube, hailing us for our volume and raw energy.
Tours were booked. Record label discussions happened. We went into a studio with an actual producer. We made no money whatsoever from any of this. In fact, if anything, it cost even more because tours were self-financed. But it was traction. It was a major step forward. That phantom I’d been chasing seemed to be getting closer, not further.
I also fell in love with a woman who was not trying to be an artist, but who was an artist. Her name was Sarah, and in addition to painting, she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A family member came to visit me and to meet Sarah. After the usual pleasantries, I caught them up on the goings-on with Goes Cube.
There was a long silence, and they asked: “When are you going to finally quit and admit you’ve failed?”
Sarah was aghast by the question. I was shattered. They went back to a hotel, and I went back to Sarah’s where she helped me to recover. And I did.
Support matters.
Sarah and I married about a year later.
***
Even a supernatural phantom like Nadja needs someone who supports them. Someone like Renfield.
Renfield seems resigned to his role as a man-servant, though it’s clear he’d rather do more than just drive Nadja around lower Manhattan as she devours her victims or listen to her complain about her family while they smoke cigarettes and idly play the piano in her gloomy apartment.
And they do seem like a good match. In addition to his loyalty and their shared affection for cigarettes, Renfield is as handsome as Nadja is beautiful. But, alas, Nadja doesn’t like him like that, and, ultimately, Renfield impales himself as a friend, not a lover.
In Renfield, Nadja found a loyal servant. In a guy working at a bar called Sin-e, Michael Almereyda found Renfield – it’s where he first spotted actor Karl Geary.
I can’t help but tell Karl how important Sin-e is to me, that it’s where my band got its first big break.
“That’s funny. That’s great. God, the world is tiny,” he muses in his native Irish accent. “That’s wild. That’s wild.”
Karl recalls that day at Sin-e when he got his own break. “I remember distinctly Michael coming in. There was a front table at Sin-e, and I don’t know if Michael was aware of it or not but the band was setting up to go on, and I was opening up,” he recalls, then interrupts himself to ask, “Have you met Michael?”
I tell him I have not.
“Michael has a really interesting way of carrying himself,” he tells me. “It’s kind of very unassuming, but when he speaks he has this sort of an authority that’s not in any way…” he says without finishing the statement. He decides there’s a better way to put it: “There’s just a clarity to his authority, if that makes sense. He’s quite an interesting character… he was interesting immediately.”
So, then, Karl continues, “He sat down and he introduced himself kinda shyly and he said he was making a film. He was really straightforward. He asks if I would be interested in playing a role in it, and I thought it was ludicrous, actually. I just thought, ‘What are you talking about, man?’” he laughs. “So I kind of remember standing up and I picked up the keys off the counter and I said to whoever was there behind the bar, I said, ‘Listen, fuck it. I’m not gonna open up [the bar]. I’m gonna go to Hollywood instead.’”
Michael hung around a bit while Karl continued to open Sin-e for the night. Then, he says, “He left a script behind – his original script.” Included with the script were photographs to give Karl a feel for what Michael envisioned. Despite having never acted, he was intrigued, drawn in not only by Michael himself, but the script and visuals. So, Karl decided to go for it.
“It didn’t seem real to me,” he says.
***
The more experienced actors on set did not look down on the newcomers.
“I think what was interesting was, I remember Martin being extremely helpful. Galaxy and I were really the new kids in town, you know. What I do remember distinctly about the job, and I’m sure everyone’s mentioned it, what was great and terrible about it was there was a single caravan, there were no trailers. [So] there was a kind of closeness that wouldn’t normally develop in the way that it did. It was great. But I remember Galaxy and I were talking like, ‘Jesus I don’t know what I’m doing,’ and she was like, ‘I don’t know,’ and Martin was like, ‘You’re doing fine, just keep doing what you’re doing.’”
I tell Karl that I think he did a fantastic job, striking a balance between moody and sarcastic, and I even cite some of my favorite scenes of his. “I mean, it’s very kind of you to say [that],” he tells me. “Next time you happen to look through the film, if you check out the first time when Renfield is sitting at the piano with Nadja, at one point, I’m trying to light a cigarette and it’s the first scene I’d ever done in my life, ever. And I’m pretty sure my hand is trembling like a debutante on her opening night. I’m pretty sure the whole scene I’m trying to stop my hand from shaking,” he says.
He’d get over his nerves. And not just enough to finish filming his part, but to also appear in The Burrowers (2008), Jimmy’s Hall (2014), and a number of other Almereyda’s films including Hamlet (2000), Happy Here and Now (2002) and Experimenter (2015), among others. He also appears in Sex and the City (1998), Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story (2001) – and that’s just to name a few.
Another film he’d star in was 2002’s Coney Island Baby, directed by Amy Hobby, a producer of Nadja. A notable film not only because he stars opposite Laura Fraser whom he’s now married to, but because he wrote the film.
The story didn’t start out as a screenplay, Karl explains. “I went off when I was about twenty-one and I wrote a novel, which was terrible, actually,” he explains. “It didn’t get published. Thank god. But I turned it into a screenplay, which was made.”
After Coney Island Baby, Karl says, “I kinda stopped writing. I had my own stuff. I worked pretty steady as an actor, but I never felt assured. It had kinda fallen in my lap a bit. I loved it. Probably like you, the mechanics of filmmaking are just endlessly fascinating to me. But the life, the actual life, of an actor,” he reflects, “it was transitioning.”
As the ‘90s came to a close, a sort of golden era of independent film came to a close, as well. Movies, Karl says, became “much more name-orientated, and people needed certain names to get a film made. So people who were on my level were mostly transitioning over to TV, which is a good life if you can do it.”
But as Karl explains, “I couldn’t. I hated it. Because the difference between cinema and TV is that TV is a producer’s medium. In cinema, I got to work with directors, it was great.” But with TV, it was more of a grind, he explains. “[I] felt like everything had to dovetail into something else just to keep things going. So it wasn’t working for me anyway. In the interim I’d moved upstate, I was just outside of Woodstock, actually. I had put off writing another book because I’d just gotten so beaten down by the first one.”
But with the decision to put acting aside, his thoughts returned to writing a novel. “I thought it was just something I felt I really had to do.”
And so he did. And this time it was published. Not just published, but widely acclaimed. Montpelier Parade was published in 2017 and was nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, and enjoyed glowing reviews in The Guardian, Kirkus and the New Yorker, among other publications.
But somehow, it had slipped beneath my radar until I started researching the essay. So I quickly made it a point to read the novel. It’s a fast-paced, riveting read, about a teenager in Dublin in the 1980s. He spends most of his time sneaking away to drink and smoke cigarettes with his friend until he becomes infatuated and entangled with an older woman.
It’s an unconventional book that is written in the second person, so that “you” become the main character. (For instance, this sentence appears in the first chapter: “You found yourself standing over his body, bending your knees as you dipped closer.”) Once you get used to it, this lesser-used POV puts the reader almost uncomfortably close to the action which, in and of itself, gets to be fairly uncomfortable.
“It’s been great,” Karl tells me of his new life as a novelist. “It’s been kinda transformative for me in some ways,” he says.
I ask him if he’s working on another novel and he says in a funny-you-should-ask kind of way, “Yeah, I just finished. I suspect it’ll come out in the world some time in the new year, but yeah, I’ve been really lucky actually that I’ve been able to keep going with that. It’s what I do full-time. I have a studio here in Glasgow and I tend to show up there about half-five most mornings because I’m weird.”
He laughs easily, sounding genuinely content. “So that’s what I do, yeah.”
***
To use the second person POV, as Karl Geary does in his novel, you do your best not to compare yourself. You do your best to not wonder how some people can manage to be successful at more than one thing when it’s so hard for you to be successful at all.
You ask yourself if you are envious. You are. But you have learned something over the years: there is nothing wrong with envy. You have, of course, been taught that envy is a negative, destructive emotion. But as you have learned for yourself: envy is natural. And if you don’t fear it, it won’t hurt you.
Envy, like other demons, is not nearly so dangerous when dragged out into the daylight.
You can envy someone while admiring them and their work. Envy is nothing compared to depression…
