Hal Hartley on Henry Fool


SPC: On one hand, "Henry Fool" deals with spiritual,
philosophical issues like art and its importance to society.
On the other hand, the film plunges deep into the muck,
with numerous references to bodily fluids. Why did you
decide to go so deep into the scatological with your
storytelling?

Hartley: It's just a desire. Maybe in my process of
growing up and making films, I had never done that,
so I decided to just roll up my shirt sleeves and try something
completely different. I really wanted a loud, ugly beauty of
a thing. I wanted to be knee-deep in creatureal reality -- the
blood, guts, urine, sperm, and spite of the common muck. And
I wanted to amp it up to a comic book clarity. And this was a
challenge for me because I usually shy away from the time
consuming technical labor of stunts and effects (the puking was
a lot of work). Sex -- the filming of sexual encounters -- is stunt
work. I wanted Henry to wallow in depravity. I needed him to
be consistently and increasingly outrageous, because I had every
intention of also showing him as possessing the highest human
qualities. But I wanted these admirable aspects to be hard to
see.