TOM: I guess we should start by introducing ourselves.

 

MARY: You're Tom and I'm Mary.

 

TOM: We are independent filmmakers, based in Dearborn. We're both of us lifelong residents, we've been married for over five years and we work together on our films. We do the writing, directing, editing, shooting, catering, everything as equal partners.

 

MARY: I've been unemployed since April of 2008 and Tom works part-time for the city. We're just scraping by, but we still make films because it's a passion of ours.

 

 

TOM: I didn't go to college myself. I studied with Russ Gibb in high school and that gave me a pretty good grounding of the technical aspects of filmmaking, though not exactly the artistic; the video program at Dearborn High at that time at least was really more about prepping you for work in commercials or broadcast news programs, stuff like that.

 

THE COUNTER PROJECT: How did you meet?

 

TOM: At the library, where I work. I'd like to say that she came in and then, ahem, I "checked her out", but I was actually working the Return Desk at the time. She brought back some books on filmmaking and a VHS copy of Taxi Driver, and that got us talking. We talked on-and-off for two or three years after that; when I was working on my earlier films, I invited her to the set and we got much closer over that summer. We moved in together in the autumn and got married the following February.

 

THE COUNTER PROJECT: What are you guys working on now?

 

TOM: We recently began distributing our films on DVD through Amazon.com, starting with a film we made in 2007, ‘The Man Who Loved.’ We made ‘The Man Who Loved’ after a particularly tough period in our lives. We had made a film prior to which we just couldn't get any exposure for. We made a number of short films online that didn't fare much better as far as getting them in front of human eyeballs.

 

MARY: We're proud of them, and we do have people who watch them and follow what we do online, but we just got swallowed up and lost in the void of YouTube.

 

TOM: It was a very discouraging period that lasted two or three years and culminated in my run for mayor of Dearborn. It was sort of a last-ditch long-shot effort to prove to myself I was good at something. At the same time, I knew that I probably wouldn't be successful. I don't know if I'd go as far as to call it intentionally quixotic, because is it still quixotic if you know all along that you're tilting at windmills? Anyway, I lost, which is probably for the best, because I think Mayor O'Reilly is doing a better job than either myself or any of his other opponents ever could have, and we just ended up feeling more miserable than we did at the start.

 

MARY: And we knew we had to do something to get us out of the blue funk we were in. We had to make another film.

 

TOM: And around that same time, just after the election, we got some feedback on our previous film from Andrew Bujalski, a friend of mine and a fairly prominent independent filmmaker (‘Funny Ha-Ha,’ ‘Mutual Appreciation,’ ‘Beeswax’), very positive feedback coming from someone we respect and admire, and so it was very validating. And another filmmaker friend, Joe Swanberg (‘Hannah Takes the Stairs,’ ‘Nights and Weekends,’ ‘Alexander the Last’), gave us a sort of pep talk; as high-profile as he was, he wasn't making any money with his films either. And it just reminded us why we were doing it.

 

MARY: Because we have a passion for making films. We have ideas that we want to explore visually and things we want to say.

 

TOM: And we work cheaply enough so that we can afford to make films even in the current economic climate.

 

MARY: We have our own camera so we're not renting equipment. We have a shotgun mic that we've duct-taped to a wooden rod and, voila, boom mic. We have 500-watt halogen bulb shop lights that we bought from the ACO Hardware on Michigan Avenue for twenty bucks a piece. Tom and I are the entire crew, sometimes we're even in the cast. We write and edit. We have some good actors who work for pizza on some free nights and weekends. So we pursue our dream of making movies.

 

TOM: And because we're working so cheaply and with our own money, we can make films that are more personal.

 

MARY: ‘The Man Who Loved’ is about a young couple, George and Sarah, going

through a crisis. Sarah starts acting strangely, and George doesn't really know what to do. But having said all that, the film has a lot of humor and sympathy for both characters. It's a realistic film, a real film about real people and real emotions; it's not "Hollywood-y." We strive for truth in all our films.

 

TOM: Though that's not to say that it's autobiographical. We try to make our films about more than just ourselves without at the same time losing sight of our special point of view.

 

THE COUNTER PROJECT: Who has influenced you? What filmmakers do you look to for inspiration?

 

TOM: The question of influence is a difficult one, because I don't think you can look at our films and say, oh, this is their homage to this film or this filmmaker. Our films are really about life and not about films. But, having said that... Yasujiro Ozu [‘Tokyo Story,’ ‘Late Spring’] is very gentle and loving towards his characters but doesn't gloss over the disappointment and pain of life. Francois Truffaut [‘Stolen Kisses,’ ‘The Wild Child’] for much the same reason, though you couldn't have two filmmakers who are more different in terms of both style and substance. Andrei Tarkovsky [‘Solaris,’ ‘Stalker’] for the way he uses time.

Films are visual, films are acoustical, but they're also temporal and he understands that better than anyone. There are great stylists and masters of the form that we admire greatly, like

[Martin] Scorsese (‘Raging Bull,’ ‘Kundun’), [Michael] Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger (‘The Red Shoes,’ ‘Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’), [Stanley] Kubrick (‘Barry Lyndon,’ ‘The Shining’), Wes Anderson (‘Darjeeling Limited,’ ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’) and P. T. Anderson (‘There Will Be Blood,’ ‘Punch-Drunk Love’), but I don't think you can draw a line from their work to ours.

I think the game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda) is a tremendous influence on the way I approach art, but I can't really quantify that or put my finger on exactly how he's an influence. Then there's Tom Laughlin (‘Born Losers,’ ‘Billy Jack’), and I know he's not really technically a very great filmmaker. There's a lot lacking in his films, but having watched his films and listened to the commentary tracks on the DVDs, I first became aware that I could make films, that anyone could do it and make it personal. Some filmmakers have that same revelation after watching a [John] Cassavetes film (‘Faces,’ ‘Woman Under the Influence’), but I saw Laughlin's films first. Mary? Anything to add?

 

MARY: I agree with all that Tom said and would add Terrance Malick (‘Badlands,’ ‘Days of Heaven’) as well as films from the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. I've watched a lot of movies. I love watching movies.

 

THE COUNTER PROJECT: How would you describe your style?

 

MARY: Eclectic and eccentric. We feel each film requires a different approach. In ‘The Man Who Loved’ we used a lot of close-ups. It's an intimate character study.

 

TOM: Each film's subject matter and characters also dicates its structure. We don't really use a three-act structure as people are accustomed to it and so I guess this counts as fair warning.

 

 

MARY: We're self-distributing our films to get them in front of people. We were spending more money submitting the films to festivals to try to attract distributors than we were on making the films themselves. Festivals look for name actors or controversial subject matter, and we don't have either. Or they look for "buzz". How do you get buzz if you can't get into a festival?

 

TOM: And the worst kept secret of the festival circuit is that they don't watch all their submissions all the way through. If you don't know somebody, or if you don't catch their attention right away from the first frame, you're screwed. And since our films are quieter and more cumulative, our chances are fairly slim.

 

MARY: So, with our financial situation, it just is not responsible of us to give what money we have to people who don't watch our films in the first place.

 

TOM: But it's really very freeing, actually. With "The Man Who Loved", we

wrote the opening scene, which has quite a bit of kissing, with the festival circuit in mind. To try and make it an attention-getting opening. But since we're no longer playing that game, we can do what we want as artists. I guess we kinda realized this with ‘Son of a Seahorse,’ because that opening scene is the exact opposite of what a festival is looking for. It's over twenty-two minutes long and is comprised almost entirely of phone conversations about a utility bill. It's very funny, it's a really great opening, but it's not that sort of Patton-in-front-of-the-American-flag opening that festivals are looking for. We got something really good by doing what we wanted to do. And that's what we're going to do in the future. Our next film, which we're writing currently, is going to be released directly to DVD via this method. We're done with festivals.

 

MARY: We hope that by distributing our films through Amazon we can get people to join the "Russell revolution".

 

TOM: We're always looking for people who are interested in film, especially acting.  Also locations, props, all that. We'll make you an honorary Russell. We can't pay anyone, except in pizza. And if someone wants to give us free pizza, we're down with that, too.

 

MARY: We'll only be making three or four dollars in royalties for every disc we sell, which doesn't compare to a five- or six-figure distribution deal with the majors. But it's better than having the films sit on our DVD shelf, being watched by no-one. You can love them or hate them, but you can't do either if you don't have access to it.

'The Man Who Loved' is available on Amazon.com for $19.99. To follow the Russells' work, check out their blog at turtleneckfilms.blogspot.com.