Tea time with Love He Said

Interview with Inès Sedan, director of Love He Said

 Could you describe your admiration for Charles Bukowski and how you found out about this public appearance?
I discovered this public appearance by Bukowski almost by chance. I was working on another animation project and listening to Tom Waits on YouTube when the autoplay feature suddenly put on this incredible reading by Bukowski. I immediately stopped what I was doing and let myself sink into the atmosphere of the recording. The images from his poem Lovecame to me one by one and when he finished his recitation, in my head I saw Bukowski crying, and that was when I decided to make a film about the recording. I bought a book with all his poems, I read and reread his novels, I wanted to know who this vulgar, punk writer was. Bukowski was a man who gave everything for his creation, a fighter, a man who believed in love despite everything. And after two years of work on this short film, I can safely say that Bukowski has become my best friend, like Bowie or Frida Kahlo, artists who help us get through difficult moments. Every so often I read his poem – my favorite Bukowski poem – The Genius of the Crowdand it gives me the courage to persist in my madness, my life.

 The voice we hear is actually the original recording, correct? Is it complete or did you recompose it?
Yes, it’s the complete original recording, we didn’t even clean up the sound when did the mixing in order to preserve Bukowski’s voice and keep the trashy, slightly dirty side. The only part we added to the original sound recording is the part where he’s crying. In the original recording he doesn’t cry, but I wanted to concretize the image I had in my head when I heard it the first time.

 Did you use real images as the basis for the animated sequence of the public reading?
The images of Bukowski’s reading are real, but I didn’t do standard rotoscoping [an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action – editor’s note]. The archival images I had access to were very bad quality, filmed at the time with a 16mm camera and completely ruined after being transferred to VHS for television (in 1973, so a long time ago). So I mixed a few still photos of Bukowski with the archival image. I first did cutout animation using After Effects, then I drew on the images – Bukowski’s face, hands and body – then I painted over each individual image with the program TVPaint to visually recreate his reading. There are no real images of this exact moment of his reading – I had to use other archives and also animate Bukowski’s face to accompany the movement of his mouth, lip-syncing it to the audio. Nothing is real in animation!J

 What interested you in the relationship between wine and sexuality?
I’d say more like the relationship between sexuality and the bottle. In one of his poems, Bukowski produces an ode to beer, to the little bottle of beer which, unlike the women he frequented, was always there, faithful, by his side. That was my starting point: a bottle can represent both a man’s genitals and a woman. I play with that ambiguity in the dream sequence of my short film, where the bottle becomes a unisex sex toy, filled with a magic liquid that makes you forget the pains of love.

 Does the theme of the vulnerability that each of us carries within ourselves hold a particular interest for you, and are you planning on making other films around this idea?
More than the theme of vulnerability, I’d say I’m interested in the urgent need every individual has of being loved, even a rough, vulgar man like Bukowski. Yes, absolutely, I’m currently working on another short film idea about a woman who loses her head searching for her soul mate, based on real story I heard on the radio!

 Have you discovered any advantages that the short film form provides?
Yes, with the short form, I feel like I’m completely free, especially in animated shorts, at least for the way I work. For me, it’s like writing poems, just with images.

Love He Said is part of Lab Competition L4.