A Farce with Teeth: Hal Hartley Chronicles the Making of His Scrappy Debut ‘The Unbelievable Truth’

“This inescapable truth about our lives today that any given moment each and every one of us could become a broken and confused animal scratching the surface of the Earth for some small sign of life.”

In August 1988, Steven Soderbergh shot his first narrative feature film, “sex, lies, and videotape,” in one month with a budget $1.2 million. Five months later, it premiered at the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where it won the first-ever Audience Award. A few months after that, it screened at Cannes and won the Palme d’Or over “Do the Right Thing.” “sex, lies, and videotape” hit theaters in August 1989, a year after it went into production, and earned over $36 million worldwide. The rest is history.

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The film’s commercial success quickly turned the American independent film scene into a hot commodity, while the U.S. Film Festival rebranded as Sundance and become the premier spot for million-dollar sales of similar talky dramas.

But another dialogue-driven, relationship-focused film would begin production around the same time as Soderbergh’s, only filmed in a much shorter time and made for roughly 5 percent of its budget. Hal Hartley’s debut feature “The Unbelievable Truth” would also premiere in 1989 before being bought by Miramax, which would ultimately distribute the film in 1990 in a relatively limited capacity.

Though it would make little impact on the industry at large compared to “sex, lies, and videotape,” “The Unbelievable Truth” signaled the birth of a unique artistic talent. Hartley’s deadpan rhythms, his disaffected characters brimming with deep desires, and his florid, rhythmic dialogue would garner a sizable cult following over the subsequent decade with films like “Trust” (1990), “Amateur” (1994), and “Henry Fool” (1997).

During a time when “indie film” would become less of a production label and more of a marketing tool, Hartley would stand as one of the few meaningfully independent filmmakers of his era. Though Soderbergh came to be known as a pioneer of ’90s independent cinema, he would eventually transition into studio filmmaking a decade after the release of “sex, lies, and videotape.”

Hartley, on the other hand, remained firmly in the indie trenches, developing his style without many commercial concessions, even when his work consistently made money. “sex, lies, and videotape” forged a path forward for the mainstream viability of a certain type of low-budget drama, but in many ways “The Unbelievable Truth” strongly embodied an ’80s independent ethic that Hartley would carry over into the subsequent decade when those values would become fetishized. (It’s appropriate “The Unbelievable Truth” received a theatrical run at the beginning of the ’90s.)

By staying true to himself, Hartley was a man both of his time and outside of it, which allowed him to become a uniquely transitional figure, someone who exemplified the freedom of marching to the beat of their own drum.

Yet, before Hartley became the epitome of angsty cool, or Martin Donovan became a permanent part of his ensemble, or his soundtracks featured prominent appearances from Sonic Youth and PJ Harvey, his feature film career began with a humble image: a man, clad in black, trying to hitch a ride. We quickly learn the person in question is an auto mechanic (not a priest, like everyone assumes from his getup) returning to Long Island after a stint in prison. When Josh Hutton (Robert Burke) arrives back in his hometown, he discovers that everyone knows about his troubled history involving the deaths of a girl and her father years prior, only no one can remember the exact details.

Meanwhile, high school senior Audry (Adrienne Shelly) has become so consumed by fears of an impending nuclear war that she frequently hallucinates the sound of bombs in her head. She retreats into apathy, disgusted by her conservative, avaricious father Vic (Chris Cooke) and her arrogant ex-boyfriend Emmet (Gary Sauer), both of whom embody the decade’s worst cultural excesses. When she runs into Josh at a bookstore, she tells him to seek out her dad’s auto body shop. Vic hires him, despite his infamy, and he starts to work alongside Mike (Mark Bailey), the boyfriend of Pearl (Julia McNeal), whose sister and father were killed by Josh. As Josh integrates himself back into the community, Audry quickly falls for the mysterious mechanic, much to the chagrin of her father.

In classic Hartley fashion, this intricate web of relations never threatens to boil over into hysterics, despite its melodramatic foundation. Characters always act and react to each other deliberately, even when their behavior can be described as rash. While some critics might characterize Hartley’s subjects as cold, nothing could be further from the truth. He specializes in people who carry deep wells of passion, but constantly guard themselves with alienated or cynical exteriors, and his films frequently examine the tension between internal desires and external masks. When conflicts in “The Unbelievable Truth” come to a head, it’s because enough guilt, jealousy, and misunderstandings have arisen that everyone feels the need to betray their instinct for self-preservation.

During our lengthy conversation about the making of “The Unbelievable Truth,” Hartley said that what initially excited him about the film was “trying to make a farce out of the way people lie to themselves and each other.” In fact, his debut feature can be characterized as a comedic examination of the various social ironies that stem from how principles dictate actions.

At the same time, however, “The Unbelievable Truth” remains a uniquely enigmatic film that avoids convenient definitions. Sure, it chronicles a romance between a young girl with a future and an older man with a past, but even that description feels too simplistic for a fairly knotty work about the Reagan-era culture of greed, the various paradoxes of suburbia, and the ways our ever-expanding awareness of the apocalypse engenders social isolation. “The Unbelievable Truth” is best taken as a reflection of Hartley’s mindset in his late-twenties as he tries to distill his anxieties and influences into a dramatic form.

Over the course of an hour, Hartley spoke to IndieWire about the film’s literary origins, how he assembled a mostly green cast and crews, and the times he and his cinematographer devised on-set solutions in a timespan of under two weeks. It’s the story of a group of people making a film that still looks and sounds entirely like itself.

The Beginning

After graduating from the SUNY Purchase filmmaking program in 1984, Hartley took a regular job as an office manager at the production company of Jerome Brownstein, who specialized in commercials, PSAs, and info tapes. While he was there, Hartley continued writing and making short films on the side. In June of 1988, Brownstein, who had become fast friends with Hartley, informed the young filmmaker that he could conceivably finance a feature shot on 35mm for $50,000. Though he had been drafting it in patches the previous spring, Hartley started writing “The Unbelievable Truth” in earnest at Brownstein’s urging.

Every day after work, Hartley would head to the main branch of the New York Public Library, which was down the street from Brownstein’s offices in Midtown, and write his draft of the film in pencil on a yellow legal pad, much like Soderbergh did with “sex, lies, and videotape.” “That actual document still exists,” he says. “There was no descriptions of anything. Just dialogue.”

The film’s origins can be traced back to the French playwright Molière, whose plays Hartley rediscovered near the end of 1987 after initially reading them in school and occasionally seeing them performed. Molière’s work attacked 17^th century social hypocrisies and were often denounced or suppressed by the Catholic Church.

“His comedies are about very serious things, which I was really ready to hear at that time,” Hartley said. “He deals a lot with the contradictions in human relationships and personalities. I said, ‘I think I can do this.’ Maybe, I can’t do it as well. Certainly not in French. But I think I can make a farce that has teeth, that’s a little bit angry but also a celebration of people. I can do this in my own milieu on Long Island and on the street I grew up in.”

He continued, “I was really letting myself be affected by the Molière plays, where the atmosphere is indicated in what the characters are saying. I just knew that with the small amount of money I had, if I wanted to make a film that had some meat to it, I was going to have to rely on the thing that I felt most confident about, and which, in fact, is the cheapest: words.”

Hartley also let himself filter various cultural criticisms into his relationship farce. “I wanted to get at the whole dubious value people put on money. I have no problem with money, but that was the Reagan years, and being a young person who was beginning to become aware of the world around him in a real way, I was dissatisfied with the community of it,” he said. “I didn’t want to make a big treatise on that, but I thought I could make a comedy about how flawed our culture is.”

He even based Audry’s ex-boyfriend Emmet on Donald Trump who, at the time, was merely a ubiquitous New York figure. “We used to just laugh at this asshole on the TV, and there he is. He just doesn’t go away,” Hartley said with a chuckle.

Similarly, Audry’s fixation on nuclear war came from Hartley’s own preoccupation with the subject. “By the end of my time at Purchase in 1984 through the rest of the ’80s, I was reading a lot of history, as I still do, and the big picture kind of became clearer to me how precarious our situation is,” he said.

In the film, Audry frequently reads aloud from “The End of the World” by Ned Rifle, a fictional book credited to Hartley’s recurring pseudonym, but its origins lie in Jonathan Schell’s 1982 book “The Fate of the Earth,” which describes in detail the consequences of nuclear fallout. “It was a real wake-up call about how dangerous a situation we’ve made for ourselves,” Hartley notes, “which hasn’t gone away.”

Casting

While “The Unbelievable Truth” was the first time Hartley’s style flourished on a larger canvas, it would have fallen flat without an ensemble of fresh-faced actors capable of bringing it to life. The film marks the feature debuts of almost everyone in the cast, including Shelly, Matt Molloy (“In the Company of Men”), Paul Schulze (“The Sopranos”), and Bill Sage (“American Psycho”).

According to Hartley, it was a draw that everyone was so green because he couldn’t really pay anybody. (“Luckily, we made money on it,” Hartley said. “Everybody got paid after about a year.”) In fact, “The Unbelievable Truth” was an opportunity for many of Hartley’s friends and college peers to get their first credit in a professional capacity. “Everybody needed the step up,” he said. “They needed to be a department head, essentially.”

Much of the cast were comprised of people whom he knew socially from Purchase or in New York. Cooke was in a senior film directed by Bob Gosse, a classmate of Hartley’s who would later go on to produce Michael Almereyda’s early PixelVision feature “Another Girl Another Planet.” (“He was one-note, he just always does the same thing, but he’s hilarious. I knew I wasn’t going to get him to recite Shakespeare or anything like that, but I knew that this thing he did was reliable and always useful.”)

Meanwhile, Falco, who had only appeared in one film before “The Unbelievable Truth,” was just two years behind Hartley at Purchase and someone whom he knew informally. (“I had never seen her work at school, but some of my other friends had and said she’s really good. I had seen her in a couple of short films that some of my other friends had done. I just got a good feel from her.”)

But the leads were a different story. Robert Burke was in the Acting Conservatory at Purchase, and though he had appeared in a handful of small roles in the early ’80s, he had largely stayed away from the business by the time “The Unbelievable Truth” was about to shoot. “He was doing construction work,” said Hartley. “I was walking down Fifth Ave. doing business with Jerry, and there was Bob. We started talking and I said, ‘I think I might be making this movie,’ and we went back to the office and I gave him a copy of the script, and that was it. He got back in.”

But the late, great Adrienne Shelly was cast the old-fashioned way — from a headshot. When it was slow in Brownstein’s office, Hartley would simply sift through stacks of picture and pick out the ones he liked. “Adrienne’s shot stuck to the wall and it was up there for a couple of months,” Hartley recalled. “I had put an ad in Backstage and in The Village Voice to have actors come in, but her information was right there. She was a contender right away. She had to come back in like three times, but she was great with the dialogue. She knew how not to be too histrionic or anything like that. She could be straight and dry and funny.”

There was some initial concern that it wasn’t plausible for Shelly to play a fashion model, given her petite stature, but Hartley quickly devised a solution. “Our office was quite close to all the old-time department stores on Fifth Ave.,” Hartley said. “I walked in there one afternoon and saw that there was this thing called Junior Miss Fashionwear where like young teenagers were the models. I went back and changed the descriptions of what she’s doing to be that.”

But it was Shelly who immediately understood the stylized tone of Hartley’s writing, specifically how to deliver his lines without putting too much mustard on them. According to Hartley, “Adrienne just said, ‘It’s clear when you read it on the page how this is supposed to be said. You don’t need to interpret it too much. It’s funny. It’s clearly someone saying what they believe they mean, but it reads as though she doesn’t know why she believes.’”

While Hartley would give line readings to actors very early in his directing career, “knowing that that was definitely not a cool thing to do,” he eventually surrounded himself with actors who innately recognized and appreciated his style.

“All of us kind of understood that the things I was making were dialogue built, performer-driven. It took me well into ‘Trust’ and then into ‘Simple Men’ to understand what I was really after was integrating the rhythm and melody of the dialogue with the rhythm and melody of the physical activity,” Hartley said. “When I met Jeff Goldblum, for instance, in like 2003, the first thing he said when he met me was, ‘I know what you do. You move people around and have them talk.’ I said, ‘Yes, that is exactly what I do.’”

Michael Spiller

By the fall of 1988, Hartley was backed by Brownstein, who later became his regular producer and business manager, with his $50K as well as Bruce Weiss — another producer who rented space in Brownstein’s office — who ponied up another $12,500 of financing over the course of a weekend. He went out to shoot on Long Island armed with his script, a young cast and crew, and $62,500 that he was determined to stretch for the entire shoot. Fortunately, he was aided by his good friend and collaborator Michael Spiller, who lent his own burgeoning expertise to Hartley’s debut feature.

Before he became a veteran TV director, who helmed multiple episodes of “Sex and the City,” “Scrubs,” “The Mindy Project,” and dozens of other sitcoms from the last two decades, Spiller was just another SUNY Purchase grad with an eye for photography. He met Hartley at SUNY, where they studied under the same teachers and assisted on their peers’ projects.

“They really wanted us to learn all aspects of the craft of making a film, believing that we would become proficient in something once we got out of school,” said Hartley. “By our senior year, Mike was clearly becoming a cinematographer and I was clearly becoming a writer-director. The two of us worked together on a lot of people’s films: he shot them and I assistant directed.”

While at school, Spiller shot Hartley’s senior thesis short film, “Kid” (1984), about a young man trying to escape his Long Island suburb only to be thwarted by many surreal obstacles. Once they graduated, Spiller also photographed Hartley’s next short, “The Cartographer’s Girlfriend” (1987), which he shot with outdated 16mm film stock that Brownstein had in his office refrigerator. (“I asked Jerry, ‘What should we do with this stuff?’ and he said, ‘Oh, that’s so old, just throw it out,’ and I could never do that. So, I talked to Michael and we looked at it. We couldn’t open it up or anything, of course, we just kind of looked at the cans. It was all like six or seven years out of date. He said, ‘Well, write something.’”)

While understandably rough around the edges, both films feature elements of Hartley’s signature style: dry wit, stylized dialogue, grounded surrealism, and characters whose passions are at odds with their environments.

When Hartley was working at Brownstein’s office, Spiller and their other mutual friends were working in crews on commercials and small features where they learned professional procedures, like how to organize a daily shot list and systematize camera movements. These skills inevitably helped Spiller on the set of “The Unbelievable Truth,” giving him confidence to lend the film greater production value within their budget.

“I was just so nervous about the money,” remembered Hartley. “I’m a completion-oriented kind of person. Lots of people at the time would say, ‘Oh, just shoot the film for the $62,000 and then get money from somebody else later to finish it,’ and I’m like, ‘No, because that’s where you lose control.’ The last money in is always the more powerful: ‘You want to finish your film? You got to do what I tell you to do.’ I was very strict about avoiding that. Mike knew what I was afraid of. He had worked on plenty of little independent films that went nowhere because they never got finished.”

When first devising “The Unbelievable Truth,” Hartley wanted to follow in the footsteps of Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise,” which utilized minimal set-ups, i.e., one shot per scene, often from a fixed position, partially as a budgetary measure. While plenty of that tableau style exists in the finished film, it was Spiller who added more dynamism to each shot by incorporating more weapons in their arsenal.

“Mike really insisted that if we had a PeeWee dolly for at least half the time we shot, we would be able to take certain great scenes and give them more production value. Wearing my producer hat, I was terrified, but Mike said, ‘No, no, I think I can get a good deal on it.’ There’s a sequence where Adrienne [Shelly] and Gary Sauer are walking down the street and she hears bombs and stuff,” Hartley said. “There are some really quite articulated camera moves there: dollies and booms and blocking the actors, things I had actively resisted as a producer.”

“The Unbelievable Truth” was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between Hartley and Spiller that lasted the better part of a decade. Together, they would work with bigger casts and budgets, across larger interiors in more complex narratives.

“I really loved that relationship,” Hartley mused. “I never came off the set without having learned something. I often felt like I was the John Lennon and he was the Paul McCartney. He was the one who knew how a song was put together and had a good sense of, ‘This is all it needs to be and it can be really excellent!’ whereas I was wanting to fuck around. It was a nice push and shove.”

Production

Hartley and his crew shot “The Unbelievable Truth” in 11 days, largely on the street Hartley grew up on. Most of the houses were owned by his uncle and cousins. Josh’s dilapidated house — the place where Audry, Vic, Mike, and Pearl all spy on each other because of various misunderstandings near the end of the film — was actually Hartley’s cousin Don’s, which he was tearing apart and putting back together again. “I had the opportunity to just hang out in those spaces and figure out good, simple, strong mise-en-scene,” the filmmaker said. “In fact, I had shot all of the three shorter films, but also the six or seven Super 8mm films I made in the late ’70s and early ’80s, o that street, in those houses, in those backyards.”

Hartley’s team were forced to solve problems with minimal resources as quickly as they could. Their biggest issue turned out to be the big meetup in the parking lot by the beach near the end of the film, where everyone learns about Josh’s innocence and Audry squares things with her father. “We shot that over the course of two days with the terror of thinking the weather might be different on each day,” he said. “This was before mobile phones where you can check what the weather’s gonna be. We got really lucky. But I really had to break that up into all these shots. It’s really very different from the rest of the film.”

The other problem, said Hartley, was merely struggling to stay awake as he dealt with the stress of shooting his first feature: “I might have slept two of those nights. There was the scene in the diner with Edie as the waitress, and there’s some business with Gary Sauer and the guy hitting on her. I was sitting on an apple box next to Mike and camera. I was so spaced out. Jerry Brownstein’s company was called Action Productions, and of course one of my big jobs in the office was answering the phone. Someone put the slate in before the camera. You know, ‘Everyone shut up, sound, camera, camera rolling,’ and then I said, ‘Action Productions.’ Michael just turned off the camera, looked at me, and said, ‘Somebody find Hal a glass of cold water and a coffee.’”

Music

While Hartley would score most of his later films himself under his recurring pseudonym Ned Rifle, he relied on musicians to build out the eerie, yet inviting environment of “The Unbelievable Truth,” including keyboardist and sampling artist Jim Coleman. “He was making the kind of music that I guess would be classified in the rock thing,” said Hartley, “but it didn’t have a beat and they weren’t songs. It could be very rough and rhythmic, but also very atmospheric. I was working with some of the things he had been making, but then he had to go away on some other work, so I took my own guitar and just plugged into an amp in the cutting room and started playing to the scenes.”

But Hartley didn’t feel like he played that well, so he sought out the help of Philip Reed, who used to play in a band called Wild Blue Yonder. “I had seen them play in New York a few times. He was a great guitarist, so I just paid him some money and he came in and spent one evening in my studio apartment with me,” he said. “We didn’t even have picture, he would just listen to the little riff I had recorded, or I’d have my own guitar out and I’d play it for him, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, well, you can do it a number of different ways.’ He would do it and it really kind of had much more color and dynamism and all that. We finally got those recordings onto a CD recently. I think when we did the Long Island Trilogy box set, the CD that goes along with that has two eight- or 10-minute collages of Phil playing those tunes.”

The soundtrack was filled out by songs from Wild Blue Yonder and the Rhode Island duo The Brothers Kendall, who was introduced to Hartley by filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. Reichardt, who served as the wardrobe supervisor on “The Unbelievable Truth” and also makes a wordless cameo as the wife of the “irate driver” that picks up Josh at the beginning of the film, spent some time in the editing room with Hartley. There, she introduced him not just to the Brothers Kendall, but other bands who would later inform Hartley’s later work.

“The producer Ted Hope, who was our assistant director, introduced me to Kelly. She was part of this whole crowd, which I believe was a kind of independent rock ‘n’ roll crowd,” Hartley said. “She came by the cutting room and said, ‘Well, I have friends who make music,’ and that was Yo La Tengo, Hub Moore, and The Brothers Kendall. I hadn’t even thought about that, just bringing in other kinds of music, but I found it really livened things up.”

Sure enough, Hub Moore contributed songs to Hartley’s next feature “Trust” and he and his band The Great Outdoors appeared as themselves in “Surviving Desire.” Meanwhile, Yo La Tengo would contribute multiple tracks to “Simple Men” and “Amateur” and also make a cameo as the Salvation Army Band in Hartley’s religious satire “The Book of Life.”

Post-Production

The directive on set was to trust the dialogue, especially after an initial table read where everyone reportedly laughed themselves sick. (“If you can find opportunities for interesting visualization of the scene, that’s great. But if push comes to shove and you got to move on, just get the dialogue and show the faces.”) In the editing room, however, Hartley occasionally had to get creative to fill in various gaps.

His biggest addition were the Godardian intertitles that appear throughout the film, such as, “MEANWHILE,” “A MONTH MAYBE TWO MONTHS LATER,” “BUT,” “THEN,” etc. Time operates in a slippery register in “The Unbelievable Truth” — it’s not always clear when certain scenes take place, even if they occur sequentially. A party occurs and them a vague amount of time passes. Audry disappears to Europe for a seemingly unspecified number of months. Still, none of the action feels incoherent, and that lightly surreal texture lends the film a unique identity.

But Hartley included them in order to fill in crucial gaps that he missed during production. “There was a shortfall in the shooting,” he said. “You can imagine you shoot a feature film in 11 days and you’re not sleeping, you know, every once and awhile, you’re going to forget something. I was depressed about that, but I remember my friend Steven O’Conner was with me in the cutting room. He said, ‘Well, when is this? Is this two weeks later or is this the next day?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s like one or two weeks later.’ So, I wrote a card. It made the slipperiness a thing, not just a mistake.”

Similarly, there are two scenes when Audry hears someone speak and their voice repeats and echoes in her head. The first time, it’s with her parents as they drone on about their disappointment with her truancy, and left-wing politics. Hartley realized that their inane banter, while funny on the page, wasn’t so compelling on screen. “I needed to invent something there. I just took the same recording and made a duplicate of it, so I had two tracks and split them by a foot so they’re a second out of sync,” he said. “Then, I went even further and I cut them up differently. Because you don’t see the parents, it didn’t have to be in sync with their mouths.”

The result is a powerful illustration of Audry’s apathy: she’s so unplugged from her surroundings that speech doubles back on itself in her mind until it becomes just another part of a poisoned atmosphere. But when Hartley deploys the effect again, it’s to demonstrate the depths of her ardor. As she sits on Josh’s stoop listening to him explain how an automatic transmission works, his words similarly begin to echo, but it’s because of how much she wants them to linger in her brain. “Will you make love to me?” she asks when there’s a pause in the conversation.

Early in “The Unbelievable Truth,” Josh listens to Audry discuss Molière’s “The Misanthrope,” about a man who rejects the social conventions of his time but still loves a woman who proudly subscribes to them. When Josh asks Audry if it has a happy ending, she replies, “Nobody gets what they want, and they all go away frustrated and sad.” Josh surmises that the play is a tragedy, a label that Audry agrees with, but “The Misanthrope” is technically a comedy of manners, albeit one that ends in social impotence.

This ironic genre mix-up ultimately foreshadows the structure of the film. In the beginning, Hartley’s characters are frustrated, depressed, or at the very least carrying a burden, and nobody has what they want. But by the end, every one of them is slightly contented with some of what they want. Pearl admits to Josh that he didn’t kill her father and only identified him as the culprit to the police out of shock; Josh serenely accepts that he was falsely imprisoned and harbors no ill will against her. Audry gives all of her modeling money to her father as a gesture of goodwill after nullifying the various deals they made together. She and Josh agree to travel the world together despite being broke because they decide they can’t have faith in what they haven’t seen.

Over thirty years later, Hartley owns the rights to most of his films and sells them directly through his website, where he also sells his own music, published screenplays, as well as an original novel. He’s currently on track to shoot another feature film sometime next year. Despite the changes in film production and distribution, technological shifts, and whatever other bombs may lie in the distance, Hal Hartley still endures, which is enough to make anyone have faith in the future.

“The Unbelievable Truth” is available to stream or purchase directly from Hal Hartley’s website.

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