I finally saw Killer Of Sheep for the first time the other day. I loved it, and was also struck by how familiar certain elements were; you can see the influence the film had on everything from early Jim Jarmusch to Barbershop . Do you ever go to the movies and see your own influence up on the screen?

Sometimes. Sometimes people call me and say "I want you to see my film because I was impacted by your film, and I want to see what you think of it." I've had that on occasion.

Did David Gordon Green call you when he made George Washington?

Yes, everyone brings that up! He sent me a tape of it. He's doing very well now.

You started this film when you were at UCLA. Was it actually a student film, or was it produced outside the curriculum?

No, it was a student film. It was my thesis film, and it was a part of an ongoing discussion and debate about how film can aide in changing society. A lot of people were very much interested in that, and were making films about the working class, but they had no relationship with the working class. They were making the same film over and over again, with the same solution over and over again, about the factories being exploited by management, getting the unions started and everything.

Where I came from, people were in totally different situations. I said I wanted to make a film, without imposing my values, and say "look, here's a situation. How can we help Stan? [note: Stan is the central character in the film] How can we help the community? What can we do to change it?" And that was the point of the film. To create a debate and not just say here's a solution, here's a filmmaker's point of view. So that was the idea behind the film, and also to make it so anti-Hollywood that it appeared to be something captured in the moment. To form the narrative by having these events that, in the way they're tied together, lead to insight and story.

Did you go to film school with the goal of making this sort of film, or was it something that evolved over the course of your studies and making short films and such?

No, I wanted to tell a story, I wanted to tell what happened to people in the community. When I was in high school, I saw how the system was crippling the kids. The whole idea of encouraging kids to go to prison, like it was a right of passage. Our school did nothing to help. I mentioned in some other interviews that when I was in class, one of our teachers just went down the aisle, pointing and going "you're not going to be anything, you're not going to be anything." There was always this antagonism between teacher and student. Most of these kids, no one in their family had a college education. What they used to tell us coming up was to just get a high school diploma. Because then, before the sixties, you could make a living with a high school diploma. You could get a manual labor job and do quite well. No one ever told us what the reasons were. School's supposed to be a nurturing place where you could take a kid and inspire them. You've seen teachers who come in and change students, because they have that dedication. I wanted to do something about that.

To capture the results of this sort of conditioning?

Yeah, the whole thing of who's responsible. Stan's responsible, society is definitely responsible, and I think that if you realize that it's a complex issue, who the good guys bad guys are is not always clear.

I felt that, precisely because you don't point fingers in the film, there's a general sense of social malaise but also a great deal of hope and opportunity shining through the cracks. There wasn't necessarily any one thing keeping anyone down.

I think back then it was more optimistic. The thing about it was that when we were coming up, the idea of a man was to provide for your family, to keep a job no matter what. The positive thing about Stan is that he endured. He didn't fail or drop out. He was determined to do things to make sure his family was going to survive, and so that in itself is very positive. It's not the kind of thing where he wins the lottery and his kids go to Harvard or whatever. His kids are going to have a rough time just like he did. All those kids in the community are going to have a rough time. They're being trained and conditioned to be able to survive and endure.

The film's been widely cited for it's almost documentarian approach, but I understand that it was completely scripted, and even storyboarded.

It's scripted, yeah. There's a few places where we ad libbed. It was made to look like a loosely shot film, where the narrative sort of evolves, but it was scripted. A lot of the images were drawn. I was looking for specific things in the scenes, but the idea was not to have perfect lighting and stuff like that. Also, the idea was to bring filmmaking into the community and demystify it, to encourage kids that, look, if you can turn a HiFi on, you can turn a Nagra on and do sound. Just watch the button and keep it level. And they would do it. Five year old, six year old kids. The kids you see running around, they'd drag the lights, do the slate. The only thing they didn't do was change the magazine and load the camera, but everything else they had their hands on.

That's fantastic!

We had a crew from the film school, but they got sort of impatient about waiting. So it was just myself and Charles Bracy, a friend of mine who was an actor. When he wasn't in front of the camera, he was also helping behind the scenes. He was probably the most consistent adult we had.

Do you think you could get away with something like that now? Film school has become so institutionalized...

It has, it has. The attitude has changed. When we went to film school, we didn't think about getting into Hollywood. At the time, you could just get in as a technician. Become a cameraman. You had to go through the union, go through all these steps, and you accepted it. I wanted to be a cameraman, and I knew that in order to be one it was going to take fifteen or twenty years. It was hard to get into the unions then. Sundance didn't exist then. We weren't under any illusions about three picture deals. We made films because we liked making films, and the best place to do what we were doing was in film school. Today it's not like that. The studios are right there looking at these kids coming up, and they're picking them off the tree before they're ripe, because they figure these kids know what the audience wants.

Was it surprising to you that Killer Of Sheep developed such a tremendous legacy? And, considering that you didn't have any expectations when you made it, is this theatrical release thirty year later just icing on the cake

It's not icing on the cake. If I made the film yesterday, it would have had a different effect. A totally different effect. My new film has a lot of commercial elements, totally different from Killer Of Sheep. You can't sell the concept; you sell stars, and how much money it's going to make at the box office and what audience it's for, and it really effects your approach to the subject. You're already compromising, thinking that you have to have this commercial appeal. When I was doing Killer Of Sheep, I didn't care one way or another. It wasn't made to appeal to people in that sense. If I had been thinking about it, I would have been conscious of a lot of different things.

But I imagine you were able to make a much stronger film as a result of being liberated from any sort of mainstream expectations.

Unfortunately, I think we have to consider that if you're going to make a living in this business. You're up and down; you have success and disappointments, success and disappointments, and so it sort of balances out a certain way. You take it knowing that tomorrow's another day, and you have to wake up in the morning and look at an empty page all over again and hopefully get something done, and fight again to try and get a film made. What you've done in the past gets your foot in the door, but that's all it does.

Did Killer Of Sheep open any doors in Hollywood for you?

No. It didn't open any doors at all, actually. When I was at Berlin, I got some money to do My Brother's Wedding after they saw the film, so in that sense, yeah, but it wasn't from Hollywood. It was local European television. Then I wrote this script, To Sleep With Anger, and I was really lucky to find the right people who had the money and the interest to look for money to put the film together. I think that's the film that's helped me more than anything.

I read that when you finished the film, you took it to black communities around the country...

To a certain number of cities. Oliver Franklin in Philadelphia and Pearl Bowser each had this program, this tour of black film that they created. So we were a part of that and we took our film around to different communities, and screened it and talked to the neighbors, to the people. And that was a very, very important thing.

That reminds me of how John Cassavetes wanted to show his pictures to working class audiences; he always thought they would be his most appreciative audience, that they would intrinsically understand his films, and he was always disappointed when they didn't respond. Did you find that people got what you were trying to do with Killer Of Sheep?

No, no, no. They normally don't, and that's not important. Everyone has their own reality, their own perception of what life is, and someone living two or three houses down sees things differently. The film never claimed to be a total representation of black community. I didn't expect anyone to understand the film. And particularly now, when people are so used to seeing these really commercial action-oriented films...I look at To Sleep With Anger and see how slow it is. It just plods along. Things have changed. Just looking at the image used to be really exciting in and of itself. It had a story to tell.

Are there any films that excite you these days?

I can think of a lot of filmmakers working now that I admire greatly, and from the past as well. I don't want to name any names because tomorrow I'll be like "oh, I wish I had said this, I wish I'd said that." But there's a lot of good work.

When you watch Killer Of Sheep now, how do you feel about it?

I don't really look at it. I saw it so many times while editing it. The mistakes you see get magnify instead of atrophy. It's not a perfect film. A lot of filmmakers go back and re-edit their stuff. But it's never going to change. You have to live with it.

I read that, in the scene where Stan dances with his wife to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth", you had a different song in mind...

Yeah, I had Louis Russell's "Sad Lover's Blues." I took it to school, the 78, and the thing was so brittle that it cracked and broke.

Did you ever consider going back and putting it back in?

Yeah, actually, we found a copy of it, and we played it. It's a different melody, it's just as haunting, but when you're used to the Dinah Washington, it's kind of hard to change. I don't know if I'd have lost anything if I went back to the, but it's still hard to get used to. But we used it in the trailer, and it goes very nicely there.

One thing I meant to ask earlier was whether, when you were shooting, you have difficulty getting access to film in a slaughterhouse?

I had difficulty getting into a slaughterhouse in the LA area, because at the time I was making the film, there was an upsurge of vegetarianism. A lot of the vegetarians were also making movies, and they went to slaughterhouses and exposed a lot of the cruelty to animals. So they were hesitant about letting me use it. So I went up to another meatpacking place near Vallejo. They were this real meatpacking company owned by this guy who said "I want to help someone who's trying to help himself. If you come in and don't interrupt the assembly process, you're okay to do this." People were very helpful. This is why I tried to shoot in the community, because businesses were very helpful about letting me use their facilities if I was doing something positive.

The effect the title has on the film itself, the weight that it gives to Stan is a character, is tremendous. Was that always going to be the title, or did you come up with it later?

That was pretty much the title as long as I can remember. I as working on this story about this guy who had problems sleeping and had these nightmares, and all the things that had an impact on him. I was going to college at the time, and I always saw this one guy on the bus. One day he happened to sit by me, and I had the opportunity to ask him what he did. He told me he worked at the slaughterhouse, and what he did was kill sheep. What they did then was they had a sledgehammer, and they would hit the animal in the head with the sledgehammer and crush the skull. And I just couldn't imagine someone doing that every day, day in and day out, without it creating some nightmarish effect. I never looked at him the same after that. So that's where I got that the idea that this was what Stan ought to do. Something as horrible as that.