2000-2001 With Director's Commentary
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About This Video
Director's commentary on 2000-2001 footage. Van's retrospective narration over material from the earliest period of his filmmaking career. Over two decades between the footage and the commentary. The present self explaining the past self to the current audience.
Transcript
so this was my first favorite movie that i ever made and uh what you're looking at is a sheet
and i filmed this underneath my skylight in my apartment in cobble hill brooklyn on
degraw street between court and clinton [Music] and this was summer 2000. [Music] i had this list of questions from a science magazine where i was working and one of the questions sent in by high
school kids was can a goldfish live in mountain dew and i thought it was hilarious so i made this video but there were other
questions on the on the list here and that's why i put these in because i thought they were kind of sad and beautiful and i wasn't much older than a
high school kid at the time too my brother and i remade this video two years later as part of a
series called science experiments that was commissioned by this man named tom healey and science experiments played in
museums all over the world and peta contacted us about
killing even though we didn't kill this goldfish but i talked to a veterinarian and he said oh no in vet school that's how we
would anesthetize fish to do like i don't know maybe operations on them or something he said yeah we would
put them in carbonated water and the carbonation just makes them pass out and it's
totally harmless it's like anesthesia for them this music
i was working with this guy at scholastic and he made this music it's so good and i i'm so sorry i don't remember your name but we used to have
lunch together every day so if you if you contact me just tell me one of the names of the guys
that we ate with and i'll know it's you or tell me a couple of the guys names that we ate with and i'll know it's you
and i'd love to give you credit but yeah i just asked him hey can you score this and he made this beautiful music
[Music] and this is the moment man hadn't planned on this [Music] and i was just so when i knew i had this shot i was so elated i left
the camera running by accident and called my friend keller grayson and on the original tape you can hear me in the background just telling relaying to
him what happened oh my god i just you know shocked this fish back together and i got it and
i'd kill for that tape but you know back in the day i didn't have any money those tapes were 17 or 20 each and
i probably taped over it which i stopped doing i think after that
okay so this one was my first video ever uploaded to the internet i shot it on november 11th 2000.
it's 5 30 on a friday night i'm on prince street in manhattan i'm headed toward uh
barrack street 10 10 wins jam cam traffic report saying that there was a 35 minute delay
in the holland tunnel i'm just gonna go show those fools how dumb they are to try to drive in
this town hide behind this test truck hopefully they'll block my view from the
cops [Applause] and i'm in okay and this music is by elastica and there's two reasons for that one it's an incredible song and two
at the time that i made this edit tom sachs was dating
the lead singer of elastically and i figured i might not get sued
if i used this music but when i shot this i hadn't worked for
tom sachs yet i didn't know him yet but this edit was for japanese television and you can see the
subtitles there in and japanese i put this music in it and thank god i've never been sued thank you justine oh and that cop that was just luck that
was just god you know i was so afraid that uh there would be cops on the other side like some cop would have called new jersey
like there's a kid riding his bike through the holland tunnel go get him and that didn't happen and there happened to be a cop on the outside so this doesn't
read but you're not allowed to bring bikes on the train between uh 3 30 and 6
30 p.m it was five o'clock so i had to wait to bring the bike on the train back to manhattan
so this is the first movie i ever made for tom sachs and i wasn't authorized to make it i just snuck a camera in and shot the space
where we were working and he saw it and from then on i was a professional filmmaker because he said keep making
these videos and i'll pay you 10 bucks an hour and
this is the only version i have of it it was lost so it's like a very tiny like mpeg version that's why it's all super
pixelated but what it is is um just audio from the shining
and music from the shining uh and then the space where we were working and it was because i noticed one day that my tape measure
that i was using said it was a stanley tape measure but instead of saying stanley power lock 2 it said stanley
kubrick is dead i thought it was so hilarious and and this is what i made
because for some people solitude and isolation can of itself become a problem and this site was chosen for its seclusion and scenic beauty
but at some point during the winter he must have suffered some kind of a complete mental breakdown he ran a muck and
[Music] killed his family with an axe stacked neatly in one of the rooms with a west wing and then he um
he put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth that was grand machinery exchange on hester street now it's luxury
apartments one day i got a call from sax he said come to the studio i need your help and there was it is a good place to listen to the music kate moss and they didn't know what to do with her and so i had my video camera and i said
let's have her make a cheeseburger because you know she was only there for a few minutes and kate moss was one of the
supermodels for which the term supermodel was coined that era of 90s supermodels and she was
so unbelievably cool and she just looked like another pretty girl that hung out at tom's
studio and that until i looked through at her through the viewfinder of the camera and bang she was kate moss
um just has a perfect face for camera lenses and when she was done she just had a baby uh
who was in the car with the nanny and she said this was the first cheeseburger she had ever made in her life and
you know she started modeling when she was whatever 16 or 17 and she's british so
there you have it and this song is wesley willis rock and roll mcdonald's this is saks and my favorite
of the nutses films and we did 30 of these and they played in museums
[Music] each hole in these horizontal screens was hand punched using a heinrich model 6 deep throat bench punch the voice of oscar hennigsberg sax's grand uncle i
think especially calibrated guide fence provided precise alignment for each of the rows of holes
an eye patch ensured accurate spacing for the one millimeter space between each punch
because the many hours of punching often lowered employee enthusiasm casey neistat wrote that necessary to provide
motivation for the bench punch operator you are nothing no one likes you you are ugly you are worthless you are not important if you were to die no one would notice keep punching punch outs
were collected in a dixie cup receptacle which was periodically emptied into a two gallon zip press bag
in all six rows of holes were punched into the horizontal screen strips for a total of 144
000 holes that job alone took i think three people like a month or something
just to punch the holes in this the world's largest scale model of the of corbusier's united habitation and that was the first
fabrication project i'd ever worked on ever and that's what i was hired to do [Music]
Products & Tools Mentioned
- HD cam uses
- Stanley (tape measure) mentions
- Dixie cup mentions
- Heinrich Model 6 deep throat bench punch uses
People Referenced
Tom Sachs, Casey Neistat, Kate Moss, Keller Grayson, Tom Healey, Oscar Hennigsberg, Wesley Willis, Stanley Kubrick, Le Corbusier, Elastica (band), Justine Frischmann