The Art & Times of William Farley : 05 of 07
By Robert Anbian, Release Print, Vol. XVIII No. 9, November 1995Your second feature, Of Men and Angels, was also ambitious as a more traditional narrative. How do you feel about the feel about your two features?
With Citizen, I rode the wave of film festivals. I was feted in Florence and went to Deauville in France. It opened at Sundance. I had a wonderful ride on that film even though it didn't generate any money. That it didn't find any kind of commercial outlets I always blamed on what aesthetically wasn't accomplished in the film. I didn't have the ghosts with Citizen that I did with Of Men and Angels. Of Men and Angels was a limited partnership. I asked a lot of people who believed in me to give me money to buy into the film. And no one got their money back. It laid me flat for about a year. I had very unrealistic expectations and I didn't succeed to the degree I wanted to aesthetically. I had a very hard time forgiving myself However, at this point, five or six years later, making of Men end Angels was like getting a Ph.D. in narrative filmmaking. I'm grateful I had the opportunity. [The film] probably had six subplots more than it needed. [laughter]
Have you been teaching over the years?I taught a film class to graduate students and undergraduates for six years at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. I stopped teaching for 13 years. Then I taught a directing class at California College of Arts and Crafts in 1993. Now, I'm at San Francisco State teaching a graduate class in cinema.
How have you seen students change?It's very interesting. If people have dreams of making Hollywood films, they pretty much keep it to themselves. I find that there's an enormous momentum with the majority of students to want to tell their own stories. It's encouraging. Of course, everyone would like to have millions of dollars to tell their story. But I find that a lot of the students, in 1995, are very much committed to being artists. Which is amazing considering the economic pressures. Maybe, on some level, there's a convergence of need. The pressures on us today tend to make a lot of the population live at a less deep level. Maybe, the emergence of this energy of the young film and videomakers is coming from seeing their family, their parents struggling against the devaluation of our money, and the devaluation of the quality of life. Maybe ... an urgency to figure out what's important for them to be alive. It seems the stories they try to tell are very personal stories about themselves and their contemporaries. They seem to be issue driven. But sometimes the issues are subtexted and their stories are emotional stories. If you're this youngest generation and you've seen your parents, who have had some material success, still struggling for meaning and happiness in their lives, then that may just power you to move deeper, to try to experience life and reach out to life in a more meaningful way.