Finding Love in Anti-Romance
Interview with Eric Byler, director of Tre

EntToday: Will your current activist work affect your future feature filmmaking?

Byler: It might.  I just know and feel that I'm a different person now and—because my films are so personal—my films will change; but, I'm still discovering who I'm becoming and so I can't predict how my films will change.  I know that I could continue to make anti-romances and make them well and I probably will make more of them; but, I've changed through this process and I'm glad I have.  I find it more rewarding to make a difference than to make a movie, frankly.  I don't know if that means the films will be better or worse in the eyes of others.

EntToday: One of my favorite scenes in Tre, and its appropriate tagline, is that a whole life can change on the basis of 10 seconds.  As a filmmaker you seem keen on capturing those moments when individuals change.

Byler: If you were to create a formula for Charlotte Sometimes and Tre, you would ask the question: could an ordinary life be depicted as a movie?  Can you find something universal and revealing in a life that doesn't include saving the Earth from a comet that's going to destroy us all or a life that doesn't include running from zombies?  That never happens to any of my characters.  It's not the events that make their stories extraordinary; it's the character of their hearts.  It's who they are as people.

My hypothesis is that in any person's life there was a period of time when they were most alive, when everything mattered, when they felt that everything in their life up to that point had led to this particular moment or this particular night and everything that followed was in some sense an aftermath.  We could all find that time in our lives if we look back.  If there was a movie about my life it would be about the two weeks that led up to that night, after which everything else was just an epilog.  In Charlotte Sometimes and in Tre you see four people in each movie who all go through that experience in a short span of time.  None of them are going to go down in history.  None of them are going to run for public office.  None of them will ever fire a weapon at an extraterrestrial.  But those extraordinary moments that they lived, any human being could live if they're really open to falling in love or if they have conflicts about being open to falling in love, which is the essence of the title characters in both films.

EntToday: Diarist Anaïs Nin—infamous for recording everyday moments—once described the large dimension of small gestures.  You don't have to be dodging comets or avoiding zombies to feel the drama of your own biography as it's unfolding, moment by moment.  These moments are frequently placed within silence in your films.  Can you speak to your use of silence to further narrative?

Byler: I only notice the silence in my movies when I spend a lot of time watching "normal" movies and then I come back to mine.  Silence is not so uncommon in life and my movies are, as I've said, always an attempt to try to come as close as possible to approximating real life.  The choices I make artistically are not necessarily defined by or governed by choices other filmmakers have made.  In the case of silence, if a film is about loneliness—as Charlotte Sometimes and AMERICANese both are—you can't depict loneliness without the aid of time.  A really quick scene about loneliness I can't imagine I can do sincerely.  So, yeah, there are these sprawling long takes that show a person alone in their apartment.  I don't know why I've always been interested in what people do when they're alone and how observing them can tell you something about their characters when they don't intend to be emoting or communicating with anyone; they're alone.  You really can't do that anywhere but in a movie because—in real life—just as soon as there are two people there, there's something of a performance and a little bit of artifice involved.  Here, not only in the scenes about loneliness but in scenes where people interact, in both of those films and in Tre you see people that are hiding more than they show.  It's sort of the opposite of the way that most people might approach a movie where a character is designed to emote as much as possible to provide as much information to the audience as possible in a limited amount of time because you know the commercial is coming soon.  I assume that if you sit down to watch an Eric Byler movie, you're okay with a slightly unorthodox approach to storytelling and you're not going to begrudge me a secret or a subtlety or a moment of pause or silence.

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