An Interview with Milford Thomas

If silent films never existed there wouldn’t be cinema and we probably wouldn’t have heard of Claire and its director Milford Thomas.

Milford Thomas talks at the DVD release party. (photo: Eric Bomba-Ire)

Atlanta-based filmmaker Milford Thomas revisited that era 1998 in a fifty-three minute silent film, shot with an antique 35mm hand crank camera to create his first almost-feature film Claire.

Claire is retro, a risqué endeavor for a director amidst this digital filmmaking frenzy – an invitation to the history of the technology that brought us the cinema – but above all, an artful homage to the silent film era.

The film was inspired by a Japanese folk tale about an elderly, childless couple who find the princess moon in a stalk of bamboo and raise her until she grows into a beautiful woman. Thomas’ Claire re-invents the tale by substituting the couple with an elderly male couple on a farm in the rural 1920s South who find the moon princess in an ear of corn.

After its premiere here in 2001, Thomas, alongside Atlanta composer Anne Richardson and an 11-piece chamber ensemble accompaniment, went on a successful national and international festival run where they garnered several awards.

Early this year, Thomas, blazing a trail of his own, was accepted into the Sundance screenwriters and directors lab with his script Uncloudy Day, for which he has been busily preparing for production. The director made time to celebrate the recent release to DVD of Claire five years after its completion and CinemATL finally caught up with him during the celebration party.

CinemATL: What was the Japanese folk tale you used for the basis story in Claire?

MT: It is called Kaguyahime. It’s about an elderly childless couple and the old man is a bamboo cutter. While cutting bamboo one day, he finds this girl in a stock of bamboo, brings her home and he and his wife adopt her and she becomes the most sought after woman in Southeast Asia. And then all of these princes from china and everywhere go to these tests to try to win her hand but she won’t take it. And at the end her parents [her moon parents] come out from the moon and take her back up.

CinemATL: What attracted you to that particular story?

MT: I lived in Japan for years and when I came back I wanted to do something simple for a silent film and visually it was the most effective for me out of the fairy tale book.  So I thought about doing a ten minutes film and that turn into fifty-three minutes and eighty thousands dollars.

Toniet Gallego stars as Claire (photo: Put Down The Plow Productions, Inc.)

MT: Yes. I saw Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the early nineties and there’s a sequence where Wynona Ryder and Gary Oldman are walking down the streets in London that was shot with one of [Coppola’s] personal cameras from the 1890s and I thought “Wow! What if they did the whole movie like that?”

CinemATL: I have seen a lot of silent films and Claire seems a lot more European influenced - especially the lack of lots of title cards…

MT: Murnau is my favorite director of all time; he did Sunrise which has about six title cards. The characters are the men are from the country, the women from the city. The city, the country, all non specific so I was really attracted by it because I thought it gave the audience the chance to fill in the blanks.

CinemATL: In Claire the childless couple was changed from an elderly man and woman to two elderly men. What was the motivation to make that change?

MT: Yeah! A lot of people think that [making them a gay couple] is a subversive political statement but it’s not. That’s the way I see things. Those are the things that were around me when I was a kid because I am gay and I wished that I had some kind of folklore, something traditional to relate to and I never did.  So I was like, “From now on whenever I do something it’s going to be my way,” and that’s how Claire turned out and it was fun. The whole thing wasn’t a serious political statement intentionally. No it’s not, it’s me.

CinemATL: Was there any particular part that was your favorite scene to shoot?

MT: The Fairy Dance sequence on the water because we did that in my backyard. We shot it with a double exposure. We built a pool in my yard out of black plastic and we did these oversized paper mach water lilies for them and shot it. Then we went back and shot a painting that was the size of a piece of poster paper. The enchanted forest with a foreground proscenium cut out in poster paper also with foreground trees to give it depth. Then we masked all that off and we shot the girls in the middle. It was a very fortuitous shoot because it shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

The choreographer had a baby three days later and one of the girls left town and it started raining thirty seconds after we wrapped at three o’clock in the morning, so it was crazy good fortune [that we finished] so I am just happy with that.

I thought it was going to look like Georges Méliès, like Trip to the Moon stuff. Trip looks so fake. But people think we actually had a large backdrop for the enchanted forest, but it was the size of a poster board. 

CinemATL: Is there one thing that you want audiences to take away from the film?

MT: I think that this is a medium that needs to be looked at again, as potential entertainment now in a new form. The live music added such a component to it that would not have existed if we had just shot this and put a soundtrack and hit the film festivals. We always played with an orchestra and it always gets people. So many people came up to me with so many meanings and experiences in their mind after the film.

I remember in Italy, this guy came up to me and said “Was Claire Asian because [gay couples] can adopt Chinese girls like couples in Italy?” (Laughs) I am like “No because she was the coolest chick that I met for the part and she dances really well and she’s very expressive, non-verbally and all that.” So people bring their own meaning to it.

I think that there is something that should be said about that. We aren’t spoon-fed every last detail and you can bring whatever meaning you want to bring to it, good or bad.

I think silent film is a really powerful medium. I am not saying every film has to be like Claire, but the potential is there. Because every movie — to me — looks like a freaking car commercial. It’s bull crap. It’s digital or plastic and there’s no organic connection to it and film should be organic, especially when you are experiencing it. It should be a whole different experience.

Mish. P. Delight and James Ferguson in 'Claire.' (photo: Put Down The Plow Productions, Inc.)

MT:  I don’t consider Claire to be a gay film but it was of interest to gay festivals. I’m not interested in gay films per se because the genre is so ghettoized. I’m not disrespecting anyone but I think life is much more universal than one sub-sect of society. And my thing, like with Claire, I just wanted to bring my personal sub-sect into the world and that is my way of doing that.

In general, in the gay film festivals, the projects aren’t that interesting to me because they are so marginalized. Its like if you are not a bear or a cub or a certain type of lesbian the festivals don’t find those films interesting and to me that’s kind of a moot point. It goes against the point of wanting to share a story. I want to make [my stories] a little more personal, but that’s just me.

CinemATL: How are things working with the Sundance Lab?

MT: It’s good, my co-writer and I sent out the newest draft and our advisors came back and said it’s almost there. But it’s been great, you can email your advisors and the advisors are like Stanley Tucci or someone famous. It’s been very interesting.

Being in Sundance Labs opened so many doors and that’s how Claire got picked up. It’s like “Oh! You are in Sundance so I’ll talk to you now. Can we distribute your DVD or maybe we can file a contract now?” and I am really happy that Claire is out. Frameline is great; they have been good and kept me involved in every step of the distribution process.

So Yeah! Sundance has been really good. I haven’t really experienced the full fruit yet of it but they are opening a lot of doors and they are a really good support team.

To purchase Claire online, visit http://www.frameline.org/distribution/hv/claire.html

Charles Judson is a local screen & comic book writer and a regular contributor and film critic for CinemATL. Eric Bomba-Ire is the founder of CinemATL.