So I wrote an article about Lance Hammer, the director of BALLAST (my favorite film of the year so far). I only had 600 words to use for the article, but he was so insightful and forthcoming in the interview that I wanted to share the whole thing. Be advised: it’s super-long.

Spectator: I noticed at the end of the film, in the credits, that you thanked lots and lots of people. I guess I just wondered how you had worked with the community in the Delta—was that a big part of the process of the film, getting the support of the community?

Lance Hammer: Yeah, it was. When I was in the last phases of the writing process—which had already included many years of traveling to the Delta—I wrote the script based on locations I had found. Everything came from photography first, or things I had seen. I wrote a lot of it there. And I’d see a particular thing, like a particular configuration of houses, or a field, and I would write that into the script. So I was beginning to spend a lot of time there, and I already knew a lot of people to take me around, drive me around in the Delta, and invite me to their homes. I was starting to have connections to the people in the place. When I was pretty close to having a script done, I went…

Spec: How did that all sort of begin? How did you begin to make connections in the area? Did you know people there already?

Lance Hammer: No, it was kind of accidental. I don’t know, like, one example—this is a good illustration, because this is a person that died before the film was done—before we shot. I was at a bar, the Sun-N-Sand Motel in Jackson, Mississippi, which is no longer a motel, and it had a little bar. And the guy next to me was just talking, asking me what I was up to. And I said I was going out to the Delta—I was writing, and I was going out to the Delta tomorrow. And he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna take you. My best friend is out there, he lives in Vicksburg, we’ll pick him up on the way, and we’ll go low-riding.’ You know, this is a white guy, he’s a banker, an executive at a bank, and his best friend is a black guy, in Vicksburg, that does work for him. It was such a strange dynamic. I’m a Californian, and this showed me the complexity of the racial dynamics in the South, the way they exist today.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: They truly were best friends, but there was, it was just—I still don’t understand the nuances of this. So we did this, we went down and we picked up—Leroy Christmas, was his friend’s name. We picked him up. Leroy took us to all—we went the whole day, driving around the Delta—Leroy took us to where his church is, where his parents are buried, where his ancestors were slaved and lived in mule barns. They still exist, those mule barns. And, you know, showed us the first place where he saw someone get killed, logs rolling off a logging truck. And this was just such a generosity of spirit. I’m a total stranger, you know? And I was writing something about this place, and he wanted to help me. And, you know, companionship, camaraderie, all these things were important to them. It was a different sense of time in the South, you know? They have time to do these things. And that was the first of a number of experiences I had just by stumbling into relationships. I’d be someplace, and I’d just strike up a conversation, and the next thing you know, I’d be in a car with somebody, going somewhere to see something. And this was over the course of about ten years, by the way. I’ve been going to the Delta for about ten years.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: So yeah, I established a number of connections in the writing process. But the next major phase was, when I had the script completed, I thought, I’m gonna need to talk to the churches in these small towns, because I’m going to shoot a film, hopefully, in these towns, and they’re very small. It can be a very invasive process, and… the center of these towns, the patriarchal center, is the Baptist Church. And so I said, I’d better go talk to the pastors of the churches, describe the project, and see if they’re supportive. And if they’re not, I have to really seriously consider not doing the project. But it turns out that they were very supportive, and I think the reason why was because they were interested in the fact that I wanted to use people in the film, populate all the roles in the film with people that actually lived in their towns. That weren’t actors.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: That were of this place. African-American. And also, the story has to do with the salvation of a child, basically. And I think these pastors saw that as a valuable thing. They value their children. And this story was, you know, trying to champion the child, and giving structure to a child’s life. So what happened there was the pastor said, ‘Well, you know what, why don’t you come to service next Sunday? And I’ll tell my congregation that you’re here, and that you’re looking for people to play parts in the film, and I’ll validate it that way for you, because I believe in it. And if I speak of it, my congregation will get behind it.’ And that’s what happened at a number of churches that I visited. And Mike Smith, who plays Lawrence, is actually the son of one of those preachers. So when we got out into the churches, suddenly we had a whole community of people that were supportive of the project. And they knew people, and they knew people. Those people knew people. And we cast a lot of the film in that way. There was a lot of direct offers to help. We did some carpentry, we’d hire people from the churches sometimes. And then in Jackson—I worked with a line producer, Nina Parikh, and she’s from Jackson, Mississippi, and she hired all of her friends for the crew. So over time, it was truly—and the Mississippi Film Office was very supportive of this project—so it was truly like a local production, except that I was from Los Angeles and Lol Crawley, the cinematographer’s from New Castle. So in the end, there was an awful lot of people to thank, because a lot of people gave us help.

Spec: Absolutely. I think the Delta has such an important place in American culture, and yet it’s so underrepresented in film—do you find that to be true? Which came first, I guess, the story or the location? I know it was a story your girlfriend had told you and that was the inspiration for the characters, but did you decide you wanted to film there and then sort of find a story to fit it?

Lance Hammer: Yeah.

Spec: That was how it…

Lance Hammer: Yeah. The story remains, I traveled to the Delta ten years ago for the first time, and it was in the winter time, and I was overwhelmed by an emotion of sadness.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: And beauty at the same time. It had to do with the divine beauty of the land.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: You have these moments of existential kind of clarity that you can’t articulate verbally, but you’re seeing, you’re experiencing something on an energetic level. And it’s just pure beauty, you know, but it’s also very melancholic at the same time. And I wanted to capture that feeling. At the same moment, like seconds after I had that feeling, I said, ‘I want to make a film that captures this.’ I have a challenge: can I make a film that’s about tone? That will accurately convey this feeling I’m feeling now? And so that was the impetus for the project. And I also said at that time, I want to make a film with a narrative that is subservient to tone, and as thin as possible. And I never really wavered from that goal; that was the way we made the film. I think I overstructured it, in the end. The plot wasn’t thin enough for my taste. But still, I believe that the tone comes across as the more important thing.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: So I had no idea of a story, at that time. I had no intention of making a film that was populated with African-American characters, or white characters; it was just a place. And a desire to convey something truthfully and accurately. So the idea of the twins thing—several years had passed, I hadn’t given too much thought about what the narrative would actually be. My girlfriend told me that story about the twins. It made sense: grief, the issue of grieving, is an appropriate narrative structure to give some buoyancy to this larger issue of communicating sorrow in the landscape. So that’s how that happened. And then the African-American cast, it’s that there’s no other choice. It wasn’t that I was trying to make a film about an underrepresented region of the country or underrepresented population of the country. That was honestly not my motivation. But when I accepted that the only way to make this film with accuracy is, you know, you have to use African-Americans, because the demographic is eight-to-one, you know, in the South.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: Then I really embraced the idea that this film is important, or could be important, because—and it needs to be my next project, because you don’t see films about the Delta that don’t speak about the blues or civil rights in kind of a clichéd way. So that helped me, you know, I hadn’t written a story yet. I was just tossing the bones around for what it might be. And I thought, let’s try to make a film that’s not a clichéd story about African-American culture in the South. Let’s try to make a story about something very universal, like grieving.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: And that’s the best way to call attention to an underrepresented part of this nation. And, you know, I’m very angry about what’s happened in the South, historically. And I actually wrote another screenplay before this, for the Delta, that actually dealt very overtly with these issues. And I realized I had to do the opposite, because I was being too overt, and I’m not the one with the authority to speak on these issues. So I wrote something much less direct, and relied on the actors, actually, to bring that part of it to the script’s execution.

Spec: To speak to tone a little bit more—in all the literature about the film that I’ve received from Susan [its publicist]—there’s a lot about the Dardennes in there. And I was wondering, in addition to the Dardennes, I was wondering who your favorite filmmakers are, and what sort of aesthetics you were trying to evoke. I was wondering about Malick, too, whether you’re a fan of Malick.

Lance Hammer: Yeah, I’m a fan of both of those folks. All three of those folks. [Laughs] Honestly, when I was making the film, there’s no influence, there’s no, it’s just not the—I don’t know if any artist really works that way.  I’m just not thinking of those things. And film production is so harried and pressure-filled anyway, it’s like, you don’t have time to really style something after someone else. But there is one exception, and it’s neither of those groups of filmmakers that you mentioned. It’s Robert Bresson, who has always been my most important influence.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: And, honestly, I carried the Notes on the Cinematographer with me every day, just for soul support. Because you’re just beaten down in the production, and people are questioning all your motives. And when you’re trying to operate on intuition alone, and trying to turn your intellect off, it doesn’t go down so well with crew. And I needed Robert to remind me.

Spec: [Laughs]

Lance Hammer: [Laughs] But, you know, that was in production. For moral support, I guess. But his principles are so deeply ingrained in my philosophy, and I just indentified with them, when I read his material and saw his films, a while ago when I first came across them, it just automatically connected with my own personal view of how I would like to approach any art—minimalism, economy, passion, commitment to something that you believe in, and commitment to the intuition, and at the same time, a kind of emotional detachment from it. There’s just so many things about his work that resonate with me. So that’s the most significant influence, and I openly confess to that, and proudly so, actually. The interesting thing is, people compare it to Charles Burnett, and I hadn’t seen a Charles Burnett film until three weeks ago, when I watched Killer of Sheep. And I actually saw, in Buenos Aires, in April, I saw My Brother’s Wedding, too. And Killer of Sheep is brilliant. It’s gorgeous.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: The funny thing, I just flew back on a plane with Charles, two days ago.

Spec: On purpose, or it was just a…

Lance Hammer: No, we were both in [unclear]. They were presenting Killer of Sheep—well, actually, five of his films, in a special presentation—and Ballast was playing, too. And we just happened to drive back to the airport together and fly back together. And I got a chance to talk to him about all of his scenes, like the children jumping across the apartment buildings. [Sighs] He’s just, he’s such a gentle and complicated person.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: But the truth is, I had never seen a Charles Burnett film before. People make comparisons to Bruno Dumont—I hadn’t seen a Bruno Dumont film until after I was done, too. And I guess I understand why they might make those comparisons. The Dardenne brothers, on the other hand, they’re majorly important filmmakers to me.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: And I respect their work like no other filmmaker. Le Fils is a perfect film. There’s nothing in my mind that matches Le Fils. But strangely, that’s the one that didn’t get the attention. L’Enfant won the Palme D’Or, and Rosetta, which is beautiful, too. But Le Fils is the one for me. And, certainly, their influence has to be present in my work, because I just respond to what they do. But I wasn’t thinking of it when I was in the middle of production. I think with the Dardennes, what it is, the Dardennes are influenced, too, most significantly by Bresson.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: So if people really want to think about it, we’re both… They’re looking at the Bresson handbook, and so am I, so there’s gotta be crossover for sure. I don’t know. I was surprised that so many people compared it to the Dardennes.

Spec: I think maybe it’s that there’s a sort of quietness to the film—which is something that I also had wanted to ask you about—obviously, in a lot of ways, not just in that there is no score. But I was wondering why you made that decision, especially since music is so important to you, from what I understand.

Lance Hammer: Mm-hmm. I think there’s two very important reasons that, in combination, make a very quiet film. One is that the Delta in the winter is very quiet. And it was essential for me to communicate that to successfully communicate this experience that I had. So much of it had to do with the sound or the lack thereof. Also, I think, related to this quietude, is the pacing. The South—it’s a different pace there, and I wanted the film’s pace to reflect that. The third thing is that I just respond to quietness. If I make a film in the city, it’s gonna be quietly filmed. And I’m doing that, actually. I just respond to space. There’s a musician, Mark Hollis, that used to front a band called Talk Talk, it’s an old band. But he talks about—he’s very minimalist in his approach, too—if you can say something with one note, why use three? I think that goes for the sonic space of the film, as well. If you crowd it with sound, it’s just chaos and it’s just noise. It doesn’t allow the sounds that you choose to put in to have meaning. It dilutes the meaning. And this is the Bresson thing again.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: If you’re gonna put something in there and you want it to be meaningful, don’t crowd it. Let it exist. Let it resonate for awhile, and let the reverberations play out until you can no longer hear them. That’s just my personal aesthetic.

Spec: Absolutely. So when you were working with Mike and with the rest of the cast—I’m just curious about how the process of rehearsing and finally filming them worked. Did they work directly sort of verbatim from your script, or were you just looking for the feeling of a scene that you had written, and they went off-book quite a lot, or…?

Lance Hammer: Yeah. Well, I wrote a script, and I wrote the dialogue, but I always knew the dialogue I was writing was provisional. I didn’t even attempt… It was a joke. The first day I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna write some dialogue now, today.’

Spec: [Laughs]

Lance Hammer: [Laughs] How the hell am I gonna do this? Should I attempt to put idiom in there, or…? And my response was laughter to myself, so I realized no. And I always knew that what I was gonna do was take the film to the Delta, go to the places, and cast people from the actual towns we were gonna shoot in. And I also knew throughout the whole writing process that I was going to not show the script to the actors. Instead, we would talk about scenario and arrive upon the actual language through the human being that was going to actually speak the language. So that’s the way I wrote the script. But I needed to write the dialogue for my own purposes, just to propel the writing process. It was intended to be structural, like that frame over there. It’s a framework upon which you can let chaos occur, yet keep it framed, so it doesn’t dissolve into… It has to be physically contained, still, somehow. So the casting process is a whole other story, but when I was done with the casting, we began a three-month-long process of discovery, where the scenes had to be communicated verbally to the actors by me. And then we would be in the locations, because we had the locations. And we would say, okay, let’s talk about the scene. Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish with the scene, and here’s the psychological dynamics, the physical choreography. But I want you to use your own language. And I don’t care if it’s consistent, you can say different things at different times, and if you think of something new on the second attempt at this rehearsal, let’s just do it, and we’ll see how it sounds. Because we have time on our side, let’s try everything. And we recorded everything with a video camera, so there’s a record of every iteration that was attempted.

Spec: Did they sort of get it, right away?

Lance Hammer: Yeah. In the casting process, the auditions were performed in exactly that manner. So I had already, kind of by accident, there was a filtering system where I realized when I was casting, it was like, ‘Okay, this person knows how to do this just by their own nature. This person can’t. So I’m gonna choose this one, this person gets the role.’ So by the time we got to the rehearsal process, we’d already been doing it, and I knew it was working. But then we sat down in earnest and went through a whole script. But again, I didn’t show the script to them. Towards the midway point of this process, I realized that it was time-efficient to actually Xerox the scene, hand it to the two actors, and say, okay, I’m gonna stand here with you, you read the scene once and then give it back to me. And so they’d do that and give it back. And if you read it once, you can’t memorize dialogue or anything, so they just quickly got a sense of what the scene needed to be, and I wouldn’t need to communicate it. But that happened later, when they became familiar with our working process. And a lot of the dialogue is just one word, so in that sense it’s exactly what the script said. ‘No,’ or ‘yes.’

Spec: Did any of the intentions of a given scene ever change, based on…

Lance Hammer: Yeah.

Spec: Did they ever say ‘yes’ when your script said ‘no?’

Lance Hammer: Yeah. And those are the moments I was hoping for. The language is definitely owned by the actors, but the scenario, often, is coming from me. So I was really wary about, or nervous about forcing something to pass through the personas that was not natural, or wasn’t something that resonated with them emotionally. So right from the beginning, I said if this isn’t working for you, tell me why and tell me what you would do instead. And that was communicated so early on that it was never an issue, and they always did.

Spec: Mm-hmm.

Lance Hammer: For example, say, ‘if she were to say this to me, X, I wouldn’t say this back. What I’d do is I’d leave the house.’ So okay, well, then, leave the house. Let’s try that. So I’d say maybe 30 percent of the film is completely improvised in that way. And by the way, once we got to the rehearsal process, when we were actually shooting the scenes, that was encouraged—spontaneity and responding however you felt like was encouraged in every take. And it happened quite often. I wrote this script, and that was a structural thing only, but the language is really completely owned by the actors.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: I didn’t do much. By the time we started rolling cameras, I wasn’t even involved. I was present, but I wasn’t really involved. Sometimes something obviously wouldn’t work, and I’d say, you know what, let’s just say this word. Because it just has to be this word. But that was kind of work.

Spec: The guy who plays James… JimMyron… how old was he?

Lance Hammer: He was twelve. Now he’s fourteen.

Spec: How did he respond to the—it’s a very subtle movie. Was it any harder or easier to explain what you wanted from a scene to him, or was it just that he’s just so natural?

Lance Hammer: I think children still have access to that thing more than adults do. All children naturally know how to role-play, but they bring their own emotion to a role. And he was by far the easiest to work with.

Spec: He’s brilliant onscreen. I was blown away by his performance.

Lance Hammer: The thing about JimMyron is he memorized everybody else’s lines.

Spec: Really?

Lance Hammer: He knew every different way they would say something, and he would remember it. He had, like, total recall of everybody’s lines. I couldn’t get over it. And yet he could improvise, and I would say, JimMyron, I know you said it this way because I had wanted you to say it this way, but I don’t want you to say it that way know. Do something completely different. Think about your father when you, blah blah blah blah blah. And he would do it, and just be totally natural. And he was brilliant. He’s a really wonderful kid.

Spec: What is he doing now?

Lance Hammer: He’s a big football player, actually. He’s very good. He’s playing, like, he was a freshman on the varsity team.

Spec: Wow.

Lance Hammer: He wants to be a pro football player.

Spec: So, the movie hasn’t changed his way of going about things at all, that you’ve noticed?

Lance Hammer: It transformed everybody’s life.

Spec: Yeah.

Lance Hammer: Everybody—me, the cast. When they all came to Sundance, and I watched JimMyron watch himself, you know, at the Racquet Club, there’s six hundred people, a full, sold-out house. And his face is like twenty feet big on the screen, and people are just in awe of what he did. I can say that, because I really had nothing to do with it. He did it all himself. It was such a rewarding thing for me to see, like what made it all worthwhile. And you could just see his brain shifting permanently, like: ‘I did this with my own skills and my own talent, and these people are responding to it, and I have that power.’ And he’s a really humble kid, too, so it’s not like it goes to his head. It hasn’t. He’s very humble.