Inspired by the Mississippi Delta, Lance Hammer’s first feature Ballast, quickly became one of the standout films of the Sundance film festival. After winning The Directing Award and The Excellence in Cinematography Award at Sundance, Ballast has been nominated for a Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale and has even picked up by IFC. In a quiet atrium nestled away from the chaos of Sundance HQ, Lance spoke to us about working with non-actors to deliver strong non-performances, developing deliberate and visually poetic shots and how his desire to do the anti-hollywood film resulted in a quiet and intensely powerful feature film debut.

So how did you go from Architecture to filmmaking?

It was actually a really smooth transition… My thesis project in school dealt with information architecture, a semiotic analysis of built form and digital space. This was in ’92 when cyberspace was not being explored by architects. I was interested in live data that created three-dimensional architectural built form in cyberspace. I don’t need to get into that too much except the important part was that I had to buy a very expensive silicon graphics machine. In ’92 it was like fifty thousand dollars worth of software and machine.

In order to pay for the machine, I had to prostitute myself out as a renderer; I would create competition renderings for really big architectural offices like Cesar Pelli… and they would pay me money to make photo realistic renderings for their competition entries. Those got out in the media – in computer graphic magazines and architectural magazines – and Warner Brothers saw the work and they were trying to build a Gotham City for Batman Forever, so they called me. I went to them and they hired me on the spot to design buildings and to execute a three dimensional Gotham City. I was doing so much architectural design that Barbara Ling, who was the production designer on that series, hired me as an art director on Batman and Robin. I didn’t get the title because I wasn’t in the union. Then I started trying to work on more traditional art directing things and less computer graphic stuff. So I did that. I got into art directing immediately after school, didn’t even work in an architect’s office.

I was always trying to get back to – Wings of Desire was the thing. When I saw Wings of Desire as an English major, I wanted to be a filmmaker. It was so moving, so brilliant and so poetic. It was like, you can make a difference, you can move somebody with this medium. I was 19 years old I think and I didn’t know how to do it… any chance I could take to step closer to the film world I took – but it was the studio world. I discovered how horrible the stories are and just how commodity-based it is. The artisans and the craftsmen doing the work are the very best, because they pay you a lot of money, and they’re wonderful people, but they are in service to this piece of shit story. So as I became disgusted with that and as my disgust increased, I wrote more. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and pretty soon I got something off the ground on a very small scale.

So did it take you a while to write Ballast? Were you really laboring over your writing just to make sure it wasn’t in this commodity-based kind of realm?

Yeah, I mean I think there was a reactionary component to this process. Since I was 19, I was majorly interested in the art house, particularly in French cinema, Eastern European cinema and Japanese cinema. So I’ve always had an interest in that… I’m also a musician, an admirer of painters, I just live in that world, but I worked for the enemy for a while. Even though that’s kind of my nature, I had a reactionary component – I worked for the studio system, I hated what they were doing, it was money driven, it had nothing to do with someone’s soul – that made me so angry that I wanted to write something and do something that was the opposite. Something that was tiny, that had no commercial value essentially… It was kind of in defiance to say, “Fuck you! Let’s do something that’s really meaningful on a very, very small scale.”

So was there something specific that inspired Ballast? Or did something lead you to the story?

Yeah, it had to do with going to the Delta about 10 years ago for the first time. It was the winter, and I was writing another project that I thought I was going to site in Tennessee or Kentucky. So I drove out there – I like to drive when I write – I was in Tennessee, I was in Memphis and I said, “I’m just going to go and check out Mississippi,” and so I went south and I ended up in the Delta and was just blown away. I can’t describe the sensation, because it lives in a world that is beyond verbal articulation – and that’s precisely the thing, I wanted to try to convey that, and I knew writing a novel or poetry wouldn’t capture that feeling… I was determined to make a film that somehow captured the presence of this place. It dealt specifically with sorrow, and it dealt specifically with a patient endurance in the face of suffering, and the dignity of this endurance just moved me tremendously. So I kept going back. For the last 10 years I’ve traveled there many times a year: I stay sometimes for a month, I’ve been taken around the Delta by countless people, I’ve gone to churches, you name it. I’m very educated in the Delta but I’m not from there, so I still don’t completely understand it. The film is the desire to capture that feeling of that sadness. I had to build some sort of story to give it some form, but I tried to keep it as lean as possible…

When you mention that quiet dignity and sadness, it perfectly describes your main character Lawrence… Well, all three lead characters were amazing! Your ability to bring out those performances in local, non-actors was really impressive! What did you look for while casting the locals?

It really wasn’t about bringing something out; it was about preventing them from putting something out there that wasn’t them. So my singular goal in the direction of actors, was to have the actors behave as they are at all times…I wanted them. This is straight out of Robert Bresson – you cast people for them. It’s not acting. I don’t want them to act. There was one semi-professional actor, Johnny McPhail, who plays John the neighbor, he had some acting experience in a couple of films that came through Mississippi and some theatre and he had a lot of theatre delivery. It took a lot to work with him to remove all of that, and to just say, “Forget about acting. Everything you learned, turn that part of your brain off. I only want you. I want you to be naive and have no experience with acting at all and just behave as you.”

It was easier with Mike Smith who plays Lawrence, Tarra Riggs who played Marlee and JimMyron Ross who played James. They were virgin, you know? So anyway that was the goal and in the casting process itself, I was looking for physical temperament, for demeanor and I really was intuitively responding to energetic presences of people. It took a very long time. I gave myself enough time to find the right people and not stop casting until I was certain that I found the right people. Then when I narrowed it down to a couple people for each role, I would consider the chemistry between people. That took a lot of time. I chose not to select certain people, not because of their inability to do it, because they had a great capacity to do this, but they didn’t work with the other person. Particularly with the boy James, which was the last person I cast, I had three really great kids in line before him, but they didn’t work with the adults. Thankfully, I did wait to that last possible moment with JimMyron. I found him in the boys and girls club and he was exactly the right guy. He worked perfectly with the Lawrence and Marlee characters.

Once we narrowed it down to a few, I would put people in sort of semi-audition like situations… I had to show a little bit of the script in that case, where I’d take a scene and I’d say, “Read it once and then give it back to me.” There’s no way you can have memory of dialogue, but they got a sense of what we were trying to do. I learned that if you could show something to someone quick and then take it back and they could respond immediately – they’d have to wing it of course and I said, “If you forget something, just go with whatever comes to your mind, and behave like you would in that situation.” The people that did that really well ironically were the ones that I’d chosen anyway. So it was a very improvisational auditioning process and I was interested in the way people worked together. I mean I was really, really lucky to find these people. We went into a really long rehearsal period which, again we didn’t use the script. We’d go to the locations… we would sit down in the environments, block out scenes and talk about them. We did a lot of rehearsing before we did any locations, particularly any actual scenario rehearsal. We did psychotherapy like things, where we’d work out a conflict between two characters. They’d just dig in to conflict with each other.

Like character background history kinds of things?

History stuff, yeah. It was all history. It had nothing to do with the script. It had to do with everything before the script. I would sit like a psychotherapist and direct them a little bit. Not direct them in a film sense, in a therapist sense. It was really fun. That’s what built the foundation. Then when there was a lot of conflict, and these people were truly inhabiting these lives, but with their own temperaments, with their own emotions, we began the rehearsals and the language really evolved… I would videotape it all and then every night I’d go back and transcribe it. That became the new script… I knew that what I wrote as dialogue was just provisional. I was interested in the language that everybody would bring to it and it became much better.

The dialogue was really interesting because it was very efficient. Like the kind of conversation you’d have with a normal person – which is broken. You only say as much as you need to say. The dialogue was great because you don’t get everything at once; everything isn’t all laid out for you. But as you watch the film, it all just comes to you as the story progresses…

That was my anti-hollywood approach. (Smiles) The economy of the language, although a lot of it is written, most of that is editorial because I did encourage the actors to say anything. The amazing thing was, they had almost 100% accuracy in their repeatability between takes. It was just amazing! But sometimes they would just go off and it would go some other place and it was often really profound. I was like, “Where the fuck did you come up with that? I’m keeping it! It’s in the film!” (Laughs) and it is usually is. But a lot of times it would just go on and on, so editorial became an important tool – just excise everything that wasn’t absolutely essential to driving the story.

So how long was your rehearsal period?

It was three months. Then we had to start shooting because we were running out of winter. It had to be winter and when we were rehearsing, it was like gorgeous rain and super freezing weather and I was like, “We’ve got to just start shooting.” So we started shooting, but we hadn’t rehearsed the whole story yet. So we’d shoot – and this became very tiring – but we’d shoot and then we’d rehearse what’s coming next.

In terms of the cinematography, the shot composition was really deliberate and thought out… How did you develop the look of the film with your cinematographer Lol Crawley?

Well Lol was my collaborator, not just photographically; it was with every aspect of the film, even producing. I wasn’t prepared to have that close of collaboration with a cinematographer. I had never met Lol. I saw his work on a UK film council DVD… a short that he did which was really brilliant by Duane Hopkins. I called him up, we talked on the phone and I met him for the first time at an airport in Jackson! Then it just became such a tight relationship… Creatively, we saw things so similarly.

I started with storyboards and shot listing and all that. I always knew I wanted to deviate to anything that we could respond to on the day, weather-wise, the actors, but after shooting a couple of scenes that way, we just threw it all away and I never storyboarded another thing.

In pre-production there was also the technical aspect, where he and I spent many weeks together talking about the photography. The photographer Todd Hido was kind of an influence on us both, and just the Delta. We’d just go out into this beautiful place, take the cameras out and look around. We would just examine every aspect of every location. It was all just long master shots that I subsequently cut up into pieces, but we shot it as long master shots. We wanted it to be visually impressive as well, not just documenting something but also documenting visual poetry as much as possible. So yeah, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to follow people around inside of spaces and outside, compositionally you can’t go wrong. Lol’s a brilliant cinematographer. He is hugely responsible for the aesthetic of this film.

What did you shoot the film on?

Super 35. Then we blew it up anamorphic on an optical printer.

Wow… Super 35? That must’ve cost you!

We got a really great deal. It was a super great deal from Technicolor.

What inspires you as a filmmaker or as a creative person?

It sounds stupid or cliché I guess, but people inspire me. I like to ride on buses and be around humans that don’t know I’m present. The guiding technical principal of this film is David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth… The camera is the way I observe my environment, the way I’m moved by my environment. Like an alien that has no comprehension of the world they’re in but is observing… It’s slightly detached and objective. Watching people in their suffering or their joy. That was the guiding principal. Lol and I would talk about it in terms of David Bowie. So people move me. Being amongst people in cities, that’s what does it for me. Music too. Those do things to you that you can’t express. It’s emotional responses, and you can’t articulate these things, but they do drive creative design processes. It drove creative processes for this film.

So do you have any thoughts or advice you’d like to share with any new filmmakers out there?

Don’t try to hold out for actors and big bucks. On the smallest scale you can, just make your films. Don’t wait for the industry, especially in this country. It’s a producer driven industry, so make your own stuff. Whatever it takes. Digital video is an excellent medium. It’s all about the story. Keep your stories simple, inexpensive and make them yourselves… that can take you places. You can do something better after that, but don’t wait around forever waiting for the money to fall into your lap. It’s just not going to happen! But you can make your own shit – so do! That would be my advice. That’s finally what I did, after waiting and waiting and playing with the agents and all that other shit. Just make your own thing.