At 41, am I too old for Mumblecore?

POSTED BY Trevor Miller, 03 September 2007

In the last few weeks, for some reason, I have been bombarded with emails from friends and colleagues regarding Mumblecore . Maybe it was because of the New York Times article a few weeks ago, or The New Talkies screenings at the IFC Center, even the cover story in Filmmaker Magazine. That is all likely and possible, however I would like to think that it is because my contemporaries are finally getting hip to the trip. Finally realizing that with new technology, even forty-somethings like us might reclaim our own piece of indie film power.

Most people of my age that I know in the business have been banging their heads against brick walls for the last two decades. Many have them have tried calling card features or calling card shorts or digital movies that never quite worked. They have done the festival circuit and fallen foul of distributors concerned more with sex and violence than good writing or drama. They have rewritten their scripts just so some vaguely known actors and money folks might come on-board, hoping for a festival hit. Most times that never worked. More often than not, the stories and the movies and the quality suffered from this kind of compromise.

Now we are all older and along come the likes of Andrew Bujalski,Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, and Joe Swanberg. These young guns (for want of a better, less clichéd phrase) have exploited the technology in much smarter ways than my generation. They have used the on-line venues for sales, marketing and distribution. They have told personal stories and ultimately found an audience of like minded individuals. An audience, who I might add, rightly shares an equal distaste for both Hollywood movies and what indie film has come to represent in these here United States.

So I’m asking the question: at 41 am I too old for Mumblecore? Strangely the answer is actually quite refreshing, because the answer is no. Yes. I said, NO. There is something that the forty-somethings like me can learn here. Maybe we should forget the old models that have failed us. Maybe we need to forget recruiting minorly known actors and somebody’s uncle’s $200k as a bankroll. Perhaps the route to being like Cassavetes isn’t in replicating what he had, but instead re-inventing it via the route of these quietly spoken New Kids On The Block.

It actually seems quite simple when I think about it. Quite a revelation. It reminds me of a conversation that I had with my British producer friend, Karl Hunter several weeks ago. Karl mentioned Nollywood -- which is the Nigerian no-budget film business. Armed with digital camcorders, no money and non-actors a handful of Nigerian directors started making tiny films that grew into a multi-million dollar industry. Their fiscal success is a long distance vindication of the Mumblecore notion. So maybe anything is possible, even for the over forty filmmaker.

I think I might just go and get a cash advance on my credit card and start shooting my Mumblecore feature next week. mumblecore, Jay Duplass, Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Aaron Katz, John Cassavetes