Who is the hunter, and who is the hunted? You'll have to watch the movie to find out.
The filmmaker and photographer Jamie Stuart’s first feature, A Motion Selfie, hit the on-demand market the other day. It’s a funny, creepy, meticulous movie that’s a clear landmark in that it’s an entirely one-person show. Jamie, besides portraying the lead character, a fictionalized version of himself, handled every single aspect of behind-the-camera production himself. He shot it, edited it, wrote the original score to which the rhythms of this entirely dialogue-free movie are synchronized. He logged in probably literally countless hours on color correction and other post-production niceties that few film critics know about or perhaps can even conceive of.
He did not, however, play all the roles. And that’s where I, and several other peopled more accomplished at performing than I, come in. The movie begins with “Jamie” enjoying some recognition with his short blizzard film Idiot With A Tripod, which was championed by Roger Ebert after Jamie put it up on his site in 2010. (Roger's own praise of the film also posted in 2010; the link is to an updated version of the post.) But in the world of this movie, the recognition brings him more trouble than satisfaction. Jamie’s tormented by a Twitter troll with what may by now seem an overfamiliar handle. And he’s corporeally stalked by a disturbed man who’s obsessed with the red carpet shots Jamie’s done at film festivals.
Guess which character I play.
I am not eager to re-litigate my early years as a bad citizen of social media, but it was in this period, I suppose, that Jamie, with whom I’ve had a nodding acquaintance for over a decade, saw something in me that could complete his vision. My mailbox-cleaning habits mean that I don’t have Jamie’s approach e-mails, which started coming in 2015, but if I recall correctly they were tentative. Although not sheepish. Jamie, soft-spoken though he may be, is not a sheepish guy. Some time prior to starting Selfie, Jamie had asked me to stand in a shot of one of his New York Film Festival-related shorts. And to give the camera the finger. Always eager to support the arts, I obliged.
Somehow, to Jamie, I had become emblematic of a certain film-critical hostility. And he wanted to expand on this with Selfie. My character doesn’t have a lot of screen time in the “real life” of the movie, but his abusive tweets, directed at Jamie, take up a lot of real estate in the character’s brain. The only time “Honey Badger Mofo” (as the character was first called—his name’s been modified for the finished film, but that’s always how I’m going to think of him) does show up in the movie's real wold it’s because Jamie’s tracked him down—he suspects this is the guy who recently broke into his apartment and scared the bejesus out of his cat sitter. (He is not. And that's not a spoiler.)
After I agreed to appear in the film, I only worked one day of the whole shoot. In my prior film roles, after having had the parameters of the character laid out by writers, then an AD followed by the actual director, or a writer/director, I was instructed to let loose—that is, I improvised all my dialogue and had relative freedom of movement. Here, not so much. Jamie always had “the whole equation” of the picture in his head while blocking and shooting, it seemed. Each performer’s style had to conform with the unambiguous, practically mechanized provisions of the film’s circumscribed style. All the effects that A Motion Selfie aspires to, and I believe achieves, are arrived at via a specific set of constraints.
Which meant that my main task as a performer was not to display my personality. But instead to hit specific marks, maintain continuity on the fact that my character has only one earbud in when he first appears, not unzip my ridiculous white hoodie, and so on. I remember asking Jamie whether I should make any kind of indicating facial on seeing his character across the street from mine. He said absolutely not.
Instead, I was merely to come out of doorways, go down streets, and whatever else you’ll see in the movie. It was rather like being a living piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I knew and admired Jamie’s work in still photos and short films, and I’d seen swatches of Selfie before I signed on to participate in it, so I had confidence that he was making something special. But it was a little peculiar, this mix of minimal and maximal that I was being asked to enact.
If you watch the movie, and I think you should, you’ll see the end result…works. Every performance has its own very particular tone but they all exist within brackets that Jamie very solidly constructed. But the organic whole of the movie doesn’t feel strained. Rather, it’s alive with formal ingenuity and playfulness, and also with possibility for aspiring moviemakers. Check it out and see for yourself.
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