LiC Interview: ‘Ballast’ director Lance Hammer

Lance Hammer at the Berlin International Film Festival
(Photo by John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images)

I recently sat down in West Hollywood to chat with Lance Hammer who won the Sundance Film Festival directing award for his debut feature Ballast. The film also won the cinematography award at Sundance and it has been nominated for four Gotham Independent Film Awards.

You can read the LiC review here.

Craig Kennedy. As a guy who was born and raised in Southern California, what inspired you to make a movie that takes place in the Mississippi Delta?

Lance Hammer. I don’t know. It was largely accidental. About 10 years ago, I was writing another story I thought was going to take place in Tennessee or Kentucky and I was in Memphis and I decided to go driving into the Delta to just see it. It’s such an important part for any American trying to reconcile that history with yourself and your role as an American and that kind of brutality and prejudice. It’s mythic and I had to see it.

I was art directing on studio films at that time and that’s kind of this gypsy life where you work for 8 months or 18 months on a project and then you’re off for 3 months or for as long as you want until the money runs out. So every time I’d get off a gig, I’d just go straight to the Delta and start roaming and recording audio and taking photographs and I’d start to write. There was academic research as well. I picked up everything I could on the Internet and every book that I could find.

CK. Was it everything you imagined it would be?

LH. What I wasn’t prepared for was to be completely overwhelmed by a sense of sadness, but at the same time this great sense of beauty — beauty that had to do largely with the natural landscape and the winter. At the moment when I was feeling this, just kind of standing out on the road in an expansive fallow cotton field, I had a very strong desire to make a film that communicated that feeling. Like, I can’t articulate it with words. I still can’t express this feeling that I felt, but I really wanted to try.

CK. And that led to Ballast?

LH. It stemmed from a desire to make a film that was purely tonal — where narrative would be unimportant. It was just about communicating an emotion.

Eventually, you know, I realized a narrative was required to give some sort of form to this amorphous tonal experience, so I began very slowly trying to find some sort of narrative that would be very minimal and unobtrusive, yet give enough structure that it wouldn’t be just a jerk off. I actually wrote one screenplay and shot some scenes from it and then started over because it wasn’t what I wanted.

I think that first screenplay was sort of my enthusiastic outburst trying to communicate everything I’d learned about the Delta and I realized that it was not very subtle. It was earnest but it wasn’t the right approach. Also, as I learned more about the place, I learned that I was nowhere near being an expert because I wasn’t born there. No matter what, you can’t be an authority [on a place] unless you’re born there and that’s just it. And you really have to be black to talk about these things. You really do.

So I realized I had to totally retool and speak of only universal things. Like speak about grieving, speak about hope and more than anything else to speak about the dignity of persevering in the face of tremendous adversity and depression. These are things I’m capable of talking about and they transcend race. They transcend class. You can shoot a film anywhere in the world and talk about these things. I have experience with these things.

In order to speak specifically about that place, I realized I had to involve people from the region. I actually had to cast from the towns we were going to shoot in. They were not actors, they were real people living there and the language had to be given by them and not by me. So I realized I was going to write a script — I was going to write dialogue — but it was only for me. I was never going to show the script to the actors. Instead we were going to talk about it for as many months as it took and they were going to contribute the language and they were going to tell me if a scene wasn’t working because it just didn’t ring true.

This is how I was hoping we’d get at a truth that was specific to the place. I knew if the project would have any hope of being successful in terms of speaking about a place specifically, you’d see it in the physicality of the characters interacting with each other and in the words they chose to use.

CK. For your first feature, wasn’t it kind of stressful to have to rely on non-actors improvising?

LH. There are so many filmmakers that do this, it’s like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. The most giant of them all is Robert Bresson for me. He didn’t actually improvise, he would give the actors lines and they’d memorize them, but they were these naked vessels of pure emotion. Mike Leigh on the other hand does a lot of improvisation with his actors. Wong Kar-Wai. There are just so many — in Europe particularly — so I didn’t feel like I was inventing anything. I felt a certain security in knowing that people had done it successfully in the past so why couldn’t I?

It was just so important to me to get to the emotional truth of a particular person. You know, I can create scenarios and I can create one point of view for many characters, but that becomes one-dimensional. I realized that if there was going to be any real chance at animation or life, vitality — complex vitality, multidimensional vitality — it had to be from many people contributing themselves to this union of many people’s original points of view and original ways of expressing something. It was very exciting to me and excitement outweighed the fear.

CK. How did you go about finding the actors?

LH. I went to the churches first in these small towns to talk to the pastors about the project because it was important to me to see if the churches would be supportive. You know, they’re the patriarchal centers of these towns and if they weren’t supportive then we’d have to really reconsider what we were doing.

They turned out to be supportive. They were very interested in the fact that the story was about the salvation of a child, a black child. They were interested that we were about to use people in their towns and that those people would use their own language. It was collaborative. It wasn’t some studio coming in and making a film about civil rights and a white director giving lines for black characters to say. It’s a white director, yes, but a white director that’s saying “here, you tell me what you’re going to say. It’s your voice. It’s your town. I want to know about your town the way it really is as close as we can so that’s going to fall on your shoulders and not mine.”

I think the pastors responded very favorably to that. I found myself at the services. They made announcements that I was there. At the luncheons afterwards, I met with a lot of the congregation. Talked about the project with various individuals. Some people were interested in being in the film and some weren’t.

Mike Smith who plays Lawrence was the son of one of the pastors and that’s how I found him. Tarra Riggs who plays Marlee responded to an open casting call. JimMyron Ross who plays the boy James, I found him at like the 11th hour at a Boys and Girls Club in Mississippi. Johnny McPhail who plays the white guy, he’s the only guy that had some acting experience. He responded to an open casting call.

CK. What were you looking for in your cast?

LH. Having gone there so much and observed people and talked to many people, I already saw it. I saw that 70% of the population could do this. I’d see someone walking down the sidewalk and I could tell. I was very interested in casting by physical demeanor and that’s how I did it. It wasn’t until the very last stages of the auditioning process where I actually put people into a situation to see if it would actually work. Mainly I’d cast people based on the way they moved through space when I was talking to them like you and I are without putting them through the motions of a scene.

The scenes with the teenagers were not part of the script. They were there in a structural sense, but I didn’t know anything about drug culture. I’d done a lot of research, but I suspected that you’d really have to be part of it to know how that works so I found drug dealers and I also found a narcotics agent. We got together in a room for a couple weeks and we worked out those scenarios.

I started with literally 30 teenagers and I had to whittle it down to a few. They just brainstormed it all together and I just kind of recorded all of it with a video camera. When we actually shot those scenes it was kind of interesting because fifty percent of it was shot when they didn’t even know we were shooting. They always knew we were going to do that but they never really knew when the camera was rolling and when it wasn’t. That was some of the most organic material and it was entirely theirs. They have complete ownership of it. All I did was record it and put it together in a way that made sense narratively. That was the most interesting, joyful part of the process for me was when those things actually took life and I had nothing to do with it.

CK. It sounds like in the end, Ballast was more than just an attempt to express a feeling, it was an actual learning experience.

LH. Oh yeah. Definitely. And that’s, you know, more than anything else I think I enjoyed learning. When you put yourself in harm’s way, it’s really just to learn.

CK. But you did it with cameras rolling.

LH. (laughs) Yeah, you might as well document it in case you want to look at it again later.

CK. How long did production take?

LH. It took 2 years to write this version of the script. The casting process was 2 or 3 months. Rehearsal was 3 months. Photography was 45 days. I cut the film for almost 2 years, so whatever that is — 5 years, 4 or 5 years.

CK. A significant chunk of your life.

LH. Definitely.

CK. So after 5 years of hard work and in the middle of supposedly gloomy times for independent film, you turned down IFC’s offer to buy Ballast and you’re releasing it yourself. How come?

LH. Honestly I didn’t have a choice. Maybe it’s a gloomy time, but I happen to think it’s a time of great opportunity and liberation. Financially it’s challenging, you know, but this is why I didn’t have a choice. With one of the major distributors, the state of the marketplace disables them from offering you anything for your film. If they offer you $500,000 they have a likelihood of losing money so they can’t or they’ll go bankrupt.

So this is what it’s come down to these days. You basically have to give your film up for 25 to 50 thousand dollars. For that you give 20-year ownership over to a company and you sign a contract that says you can’t make decisions on your film. The contract is very fascist. The people are all great, but the fuckin’ attorneys man, they’re fascists and the companies stand behind these contracts which are just ridiculous. I’m not willing to give anybody my film for free and give away 20-year ownership for that. It just made no sense.

I still love IFC. I think they’re a great company. They’re one of the few that, because of their innovation, they’re actually staying profitable. They have good curatorial taste. They are the good guys out there. They’re keeping independent film alive, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re offering me nothing. Nobody was offering anything so the only option I had was to put together my own team and try it myself.

It’s not self-distribution. I put together a team of experts. It’s just like production. You hire the best cinematographer, the best actors and you use your instincts to hire those people. It’s liberating. I was going to make no money with IFC so I have nothing to prove. I don’t have to make any money to be in exactly the same position I would’ve been in before and I end up with ownership.

If I make money that’s going to be just a bonus and I’m going to be giddy, but it’s not a goal to be honest. The goal is to present the film to the world in the best way possible and make the best decisions for the film’s sake and not for profit’s sake. In the next two years I believe this film will still have an active life and the Internet will have matured in such a way that we won’t even recognize the way films are presented to the world. I want to be the one keeping control of it.

CK. Plus this way you had complete control over marketing. You were able to design your own poster and your own trailer for example.

LH. Yeah. Those are very important things to me and I wasn’t going to be allowed to do that. I had very specific ideas and there were things I wanted to do — like have no music in the trailer — and they were, you know, market suicide, but it turns out that that’s not true. People are responding very favorably to the trailer.

These are important things to me and if they weren’t going to give me money, I needed to have control over those things, but they weren’t going to allow that.

CK. Do you have any regrets?

LH. It’s extremely stressful, extremely time consuming and extremely expensive. Ultimately though, I’m happy with the decision.

CK. Thank you for your time Lance and good luck with Ballast.

LH. Thank you.

Ballast has been slowly making its way around the country and it opens in Los Angeles today. You can check a list of future screening dates here.

Filed under: Interviews
Tags: Ballast, Lance Hammer