Video stills from The Making of Lorna Simpson's "Recollection" by Mara Zoltners, 1998

Siri Engberg: What was the impulse that caused you to move into narrative film from the photographic work?

Lorna Simpson: I always had an interest in how films were made, particularly underground films from the '50s and '60s and the structure of documentary films. I got out of graduate school and still had an interest in it, but knowing the costs--which were prohibitive--and not knowing technically how to proceed meant putting the desire to work in film aside. The opportunity to actually work in film came about through the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. They invited me to look at their exhibition space and facilities for an artist-in-residence project. I heard that they had Avid editing machines and thought that would be a great in-kind budget item, because it would allow me to spend more money on production than on postproduction. So I decided to jump for it and they were very supportive. Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty came out of that residency.

Sarah Cook: How do you see your three film works fitting together?

LS: I see Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty as a way of looking at the physical space the viewer occupies and the way one's attention, one's voyeurism, is pulled--either through the soundtrack of the interior scenes or by silently watching from afar. So that piece functions as an installation work. Call Waiting was made almost right after I had completed Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty. I find working in film really challenging, partly because of the collaborative process and also because I work with the actors and actresses in an intuitive, improvisational style rather than giving them an exact script.

In Call Waiting I wanted to try something more structured and more traditional in terms of film, keeping in mind my budget and the way I wanted to manage the narrative. So I chose to use the telephone because it could be a vehicle for a staccato or disjointed narrative and could allow me to use many different characters and languages. It also helped me construct the script in a more linear form than the way Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty was developed. Then the following year I made Recollection, in which the viewer expects that, as it goes along, certain characters should continue on in certain guises, but they don't; and certain narratives should maintain their continuity, but they don't. I intended for it to become even more disjointed than Call Waiting. So the films are progressing in different directions in terms of the way I look at the structure of them.

SE: In many of your early works, you deliberately made your figures anonymous, but in the films we're encountering identifiable characters. How did you work with that shift in the films?

LS: That body of [photographic] work was a very specific, formulaic way of working that I did over a period of nine or ten years. But by the early '90s I got to a point where I wanted to shift the focus of the work and really eliminate the figure. I then used different objects, like the wigs, for example, to indicate the body rather than actually using the body itself. But it's all about being able to revisit things differently, so the films are another version of constructed or contrived scenarios. They never really have been about specific individuals, they're about actors who are playing specific roles in the same way that I would have someone pose for me in the earlier work.

SE: During the film shoots you're also taking photographs on the sets, but these are constructed photographs, rather than "film stills" in the sense that we usually think of them. How does that parallel creative process operate?

Video stills from The Making of Lorna Simpson's "Recollection" by Mara Zoltners, 1998

LS: It actually gets me to do two things, which is kind of nice. I enjoy the process of film so much that it's a high in terms of collaborative exchange. But being able to set up the camera and take photographs is just an added extra. As an activity that I'm familiar with, it allows me to have a minute to think about the way the shots are composed from one to the next. It works on different levels, because it gives me instant documentation of what went on that day, which is great. After we finish shooting each day--and this is before I get to see any of the film after it's been processed--I have all the scenes laid out before me and the way the characters appeared in them in the Polaroids.

SE: So they become a storyboard, in a sense?

LS: Yes, in the days after we do the shoot I look at them and think about order. It's like a touchstone to the project in that space and time before I begin editing. And that's a really nice thing. As I began to take more and more photographs on the first project, I began to think of them as independent from, yet related to, the film.

SE: How did your process of writing for films differ from your earlier works?

LS: The only thing that I see as developing from the earlier work is that the films are even more about language. I was a little trepidacious about the way that text might translate onto film. Once you have someone mouth the words that you have written down, it's completely different than how a reader consumes that text when it is juxtaposed with a photograph. I was a little bit afraid of the text falling flat. In terms of preproduction, I didn't have a lot of time and money to just spend a few days with the actors and go over lines. I started with brief synopses and then I gave people scripts. I would give them maybe about an hour to look at it, and then have them deliver it in their own way, in the way that they thought was interesting, and then I'd direct them from there. I tried to have them maintain some naturalism, not out of the idea that this had to be natural, but because I did not want the dialogue to appear to be read or to be stiff. I find actors to be fascinating in the way that they can jump from one character into another and come up with something completely different than they did five minutes ago. To play with that skill is quite interesting. That's the thing that's shifted a little bit: I allowed that play. I'm not so wedded to my own text that it has to be maintained word for word when we're working collaboratively.

SE: Writing a script is clearly a very different kind of writing than you've used for the captions in the still photographs, for example.

LS: Yeah, it is. In some ways I'm trying to pull back and not make them completely descriptive of the project. But the photographs stand on their own and have their own interest in the way that the image and text relate. I'm trying to maintain a similar content level to what's in the films, but give a slightly different take with the photographs. And that's hard because I've done this for so long. I'm trying to work differently from the ways that I'm used to working.

SE: Do your scripts contain directions that resemble your captions? For example, in one photograph of a woman in a bedroom from Interior/Exterior, we read "soft, yet deliberate, and convincing manner of packing her bags."

LS: No, the scripts themselves do not contain direction notes, but that caption is an indication of how I wanted the rhythm of the scene to go, because they are static, uninterrupted sequences. In developing things with the actors, we may do one run-through without the cameras on. Or if I can sense they will get it the first time it comes out of their mouth, I'll turn on the camera for the first run-through--sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. It depends on the level of expertise each person has. The scripts have gone from an outline of a story to a very detailed dialogue. Sometimes when there is the need to stick to a particular wording in the script and the actor cannot deliver it in the manner that I think it needs, I have allowed them to go for it in the manner that they feel more comfortable--again, sometimes that doesn't work, and sometimes it can lead to a slightly different interpretation that makes the sequence more interesting.

SE: Happy accidents happen, I'm sure.

LS: I welcome those moments.

SC: How do you see the photographs relating to the films in the end?

LS: I see the photos as slices or segments of the process of decision-making that went on during the shoot, with text that reflects the subject of the films. I believe that audiences always try to equate the two and end up saying, "Oh, but the film is far more interesting than the photographs." I think they're two completely different things. The photographs are integral because they are part of the overall process.

SC: And how do the photographic works on felt fit into all of this?

LS: Again, it's all about process and incorporating the different forms I am currently involved with.

SC: How is the dialogue of the characters mediated through your use of spaces and locations in the films? For instance, Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty presents different locations in the same house, and in Call Waiting you have various locations connected by the telephone conversations.

LS: Well, one aspect of having various locations is that they serve to isolate the characters in spaces that either underlie or play in opposition to the content of the dialogue. For instance, in Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty there is a woman in a bedroom talking on a phone, laughing and reassuring the person on the other end of the line that she will be there, but her actions within this private space suggest that she is leaving town. Or the bathroom scene where there are two women in a tub--one might expect that the conversation between them would be of a confessional or sexual nature, but it reveals that they are speaking quite frankly about work and visibility. So each room of the house reveals a different sort of conversation. With Call Waiting the phone allows the viewer to glimpse simultaneous situations between individuals.

SE: There was definitely a shift in your work in the early 1990s toward more location-oriented imagery. In the films, there are very specific, stylized locations that you seem to gravitate toward, such as the movie theater in Recollection, which also appears in the large felt piece. How have you made these choices?

LS: I think I've made them in terms of lighting and having a love for the way decor can be made to look like a different period, time of day, or "mood." The bedroom scene in Interior/Exterior is very '30s. It's stage lighting. I'm using slightly older locations because they indicate very quickly the mood that I'm trying to invoke. When you just add a particular kind of lighting it all comes together. The movie theater was perfect because it's a collapsed space. A very small space was necessary in order to get things like an exit sign in the background, and also to have some sense of perspective. The theater didn't recede like contemporary movie theaters that have a gazillion seats. It indicated a more intimate, smaller arena, and was also perfect for the stylization of the film in terms of setting up that shot. I've become more knowledgeable about how to indicate a small room while still having a big space to shoot in.

SC: You mentioned that you studied film history in school. Have you been influenced by any film genre or any particular directors? In Call Waiting and Recollection there seems to be a strong reference to film noir--in the mysteriousness, in the way you film the scenes with an air of seduction around the characters.

LS: I think stylistically I have a love for the structure of films from the 1930s. I'm drawn to the work of Costa-Gavras, Jean-Luc Godard with Jean-Pierre Gorin, and also films of the 1960s. I'm not saying my work looks like that, because that's a completely different sort of filmmaking. There is a similar slippage in terms of the audience's expectations of what they are going to see and how things are actually delivered through the use of a disjointed narrative between the soundtrack and the visuals, which is something even contemporary Hollywood film has employed. In some ways--in terms of lighting, for example--I get moody like 1930s films. I think I like the back-and-forth banter of films from that period. In Call Waiting I try to deliver a little bit of that.

SC: To return to the question about locations--you said that you chose places because they gave you a mood or certain qualities--I wonder if it is in part the locations, such as the Alibi bar in Call Waiting, which evokes this film noir look.

LS: No, I think particularly in the case of Call Waiting it was the actress at the bar, Kimberly Ann Floyd, who inspired that. I actually asked the makeup artist to make her up to look like Dorothy Dandridge. Then I explained to her that she didn't have to be exactly like Dorothy Dandridge in terms of her delivery, but to have that attitude--something from that period I thought of as belonging to black actresses. It was not so much the opportunities they were given on camera, but certainly something about their attitude given the narratives written back then. The Dandridge persona was more about that look, or the development of that look and the delivery than it was about any particular film she acted in.

SE: This brings up an interesting question, too, about your use of female characters in the three films. They're not traditional leading ladies or possessible objects in the sense that women often are in older films. They seem very much in control of their fates and have a strong, contemporary presence on the screen. What was your goal in creating the female characters in the films?

LS: I think this has to do with my background, because I came of age in the late 1970s. In some ways the feminist movement, and particularly black feminism during that time and my exposure to it, is intrinsic to the way that I think and also the way I develop the work. It was pointed out to me: "You have two men in all of your projects." So in Call Waiting I thought, "Okay, I gotta get some men to say something."

SE: But then you got rid of them altogether in Recollection.

LS: I know, and then I said, "Well, why bother?" [laughs.] But it's an interesting thing that I keep returning to. Not that I don't feel comfortable working with men, but it's something about the dialogue of women that I find completely interesting. It takes me a little bit more time, and it's more difficult to weave in what the purpose of a male perspective would be within some of the dialogue that takes place in my films. I've done it, but I come at it from a different direction. So in some ways the nature of the characters--the way they behave, their assertiveness--comes from the way that I intrinsically look at things given my background or my experience. The characters are not traditional characters. I'm thinking of the conversation in Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty between the two seated women pouring a glass of vodka. They're about to have a drink, and one woman is complaining, "I could've killed him." And the scene should, I hope, get the viewer to assume, "Oh, this is going to be a scene of one woman consoling the other--some guy is really giving her a hard time or is mistreating her." Then it turns out to be a conversation about murder. The other woman is disgusted with her because she didn't carry it out. So the scene shifts from empathy to--not disgust--frustration with the other woman because she didn't do what she said she was going to do in terms of taking care of her own business, taking care of killing this person. So it's supposed to leave the audience in this slightly unexpected place. I want to push the characters further than the normal chatty scenes.

SC: Will you talk about your next project--are you going to work with film again?

LS: Yes, I'll definitely work with film again, and it's going to be shot out in Los Angeles. I would like to go back and play some more with the installation quality that Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty provided, where the narrative is driven by the dynamic of the space. What I've learned from these pieces is that space will affect the narrative. That's the plan for the moment.