Since 1989, Long Island-native Hal Hartley has made 18 feature films, numerous shorts, directed television, written a novel, composed several albums of music, and started a publishing company, to name a few (but not all) of his mediums. His latest film, Where to Land (2025), is now opening at the Roxy Cinema. Featuring Hartley regulars alongside newcomers, we meet Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a director of romantic comedies who is making a last will and testament to tidy up his adulthood. But his niece (Katelyn Sparks), his lawyer (Gia Crovatin), his ex-wife (Edie Falco), and his TV-celebrity girlfriend (Kim Taff), are each led to believe Joe is hiding a terminal diagnosis.
Over the course of one New York City day, concern collides with comedy in Hartley's poignant exploration of what it means to make peace with the living and the uncontrollable, including an anarchist superintendent (Joe Perrino), a loyal cemetery groundskeeper (Robert John Burke), and a cigar-loving 100-year-old dame (Kathleen Chalfant). I caught up with Hal in his Manhattan apartment, featured as Joe's place in the film, where we discussed anarchy, Kickstarter funding, and making music on floppy disks. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Shelby Shaw: You're a filmmaker who's made a film about a filmmaker. A lot of audiences might ask, "Is this you, Hal Hartley, in the film?"
Hal Hartley: I use the word personal rather than autobiographical. Even if I did use particulars from my life, as a writer I would strive to make it more general, because if the personal remains too specific, it doesn't connect with other people. You want plausible detail, which can resonate. I hope that people who are not in the arts can appreciate Joe's situation.
SS: Joe is 58 and making his last will and testament, which of course sounds very dramatic.
HH: It's actually hilarious. I had to do it when I was 53, 54 years old, when I started writing a novella. Then Ned Rifle [2014] got in the way and I was lucky enough to get directing work for Amazon on their show Red Oaks [2014 - 2017]. So, I didn't get back to it until around 2017, and I had all these notes and some scenes, like when Joe first goes to the lawyer's. I wrote that within hours of getting back from my own lawyer's office. But the particulars of my own, Hal Hartley's, last will and testament are boring.
SS: I liked how Joe took the lawyer very literally about cataloguing his estate. He goes home with his little notebook and he starts with his table, it's made of wood, this is how big it is.
HH: I was shocked that that was in fact what it meant. There's three lawyers in the room, they've been telling me to do this for years and years, and it only lasted 15 minutes. You've got to go home and make a list of the stuff you own, and figure out who you want to give it to when you die.
SS: In the background of the lawyer's office is a poster for your film, Flirt [1995].
HH: That was a last-minute addition. Richard Sylvarnes, our production designer, was having trouble getting some artwork licensed. So I said, call this guy at MoMA, where they have all my art.
SS: I didn't know that.
HH: Yeah, it's a tremendous resource. Otherwise this place would be packed with stuff. The Flirt poster was good because I knew it was big enough, it's mounted, it doesn't have glass on it. So they sent that over. And I like getting Miho in there, my ex-wife.
SS: I saw, in the credits, that she's also a patron at the café.
HH: And her new husband, Philipp.
SS: We were talking earlier about Gia, who plays the lawyer, and Edie, who plays Joe's ex-wife, and it reminded me of Fellini's 8 1/2 [1963], where all the women from his past come back to him.
HH: Oh, yeah, yeah.
SS: This didn't occur to me until just now, this circus of everyone.
HH: No, it hadn't occurred to me either, but it's an apropos thing, because his whole life is coming back on that one afternoon.
Writing Where to Land, I reached back into the things that excited me at the beginning of my career, Molière in particular. Farces. That was the year before I made my first film, The Unbelievable Truth. I had rediscovered Molière. I stayed up on New Year's Eve, 1987, I think. I went back to Long Island, to my dad's house. He was at a church dance or something and I sat up with a six-pack of beer and read Molière's Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. Both of them, twice, right through. Laughing my head off, alone in the house. And I just said, I know exactly what to do. A couple of months later it looked like I could make a feature for a very small amount of money. I wrote The Unbelievable Truth in 10 or 12 days as a result of having this newfound rediscovery, because I had read Molière in college. I said, that's what I can do, something like this in my idiom—in English, suburbs, America, but with that type of intelligence, wit, anger, and lightness. Molière was fantastic about that kind of thing. So that's what I tried to do with The Unbelievable Truth. Whether I succeeded or not, I don't know. But I went back to that for Where to Land.
SS: I was wondering if you would discuss Elizabeth's character, the 100-year-old philosopher. She pulled together the whole film for me.
HH: That really became, for me in the writing stage, the heart of the whole movie. It's the heaviest part of Joe's day, a casual conversation about big things. Elizabeth's based on two women in my life. First, Mimi Arsham, who was my teacher at SUNY Purchase and a friend. She lived to be 102. When she got into her 80s, me and a group of other students of hers would check in on her all the time. We had the same conversation from Where to Land, where I went over to get her for dinner, and she's reading this article about climate change and says, "I wish I'd be around to see that." The film dialogue is better than I'm capable of doing in my personal life, but I think I did say that I was hoping to be dead by the time this shit happened. Mimi was a big part of my intellectual life. But also a woman actually named Elizabeth, the mom of my best friend in my teenage years. She was probably the only person of some education in town. She liked me immediately, and she knew that my mother had passed on, so a different kind of relationship started with her. She became really, really close. She was the one who sat me down at her kitchen table to fill out the paperwork to get into SUNY Purchase, and then took off from work at the public library and drove me to the interview. She lived to be 91 and we'd have those conversations about belief and history. That relationship affected Joe and Elizabeth's scene in the film, when she says, "You still worry about being understood?" You can't possibly worry because by the time you're just getting your shit together in your mid-40s or 50s, the world has already changed tremendously.
SS: The pandemic affected casting and locations, but did you rewrite the film?
HH: No, not at all. Including the pandemic wouldn't have been more meaningful than the conversation Joe has with Elizabeth about global warming. I definitely didn't want the movie to represent or imply this, but Covid-19 is part of global warming and unchecked capitalist expansion. It was fun to write the scenes that Joe Perrino plays as superintendent Oliver, who's gonna run as an anarchist candidate for city council. I wanted it to be plausible, it seemed irresponsible not to have a representative of the socialist persuasion in the mix somewhere.
SS: Joe tells Oliver the quote, "Ownership is bondage," by [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon. Or as Oliver says, Proud-hon. When did you first come across that quote? It's perfect for the film.
HH: In my college years. I started reading about Brecht and then found that I couldn't understand what I was reading about Brecht because I didn't understand this politics thing. So I began reading about the politics and the history of early 20th century social movements. Communism. And then, in my continued reading through life, Proudhon is constantly referenced.
SS: There's a signature to a lot of your films in the ways they're directed, but I think a Hal Hartley film to many people is most recognizable for its dialogue and language.
HH: Definitely. But the movement grew out of that. I was more confident right from the get-go, with the first films, with the dialogue. As I continued to make films I saw the opportunity for dialogue and physical activity, wherever I could manage it, to be in concert. There's beat, measure, rhythm, melody, all that. It probably started around the turn of the century—The Girl from Monday [2005], No Such Thing [2001]—when I really started getting confident about that. There are plays, like a football game. You're trying to execute beautiful strategy in the face of brutal opposition.
SS: The plan for Where to Land was always to be a Kickstarter-funded production, which you did before with Ned Rifle, in 2014.
HH: We've done about eight of them now with the box sets.
SS: How did you get into that?
HH: I was teaching at The New School for a summer and some students were doing little Kickstarters. I said, this is just a credit card clearing operation. Brilliant. I was on the road with my film Meanwhile [2011] so these youngsters did the Kickstarter for me. The film was done, we just wanted to manufacture DVDs. We went out for $40,000 and we got like $65,000. I was like, wow, that really works. Then in 2013, I said, I should do Ned Rifle. Finish the Henry Fool thing once and for all. And that was the hardest thing I've done.
SS: The film or the Kickstarter?
HH: The Kickstarter. It has to do with temperament and personality too, to be that public for 30 straight days and keep it going. I lived in front of that computer. Dealing with everybody and sending notes and reading their notes. We got way more than 100%. It was incredible. That really laid the foundation for this worldwide network of fans I have. Kickstarter is a better way to finance my work, better than dealing with the kinds of people you have to deal with in more conventional financing if you're an artist. That's a fan, somebody who will put down, say, $50 for a Blu-ray two and a half years before it's available. You gotta love that. So you stay in touch with them. This was kind of a love-fest, Where to Land.
SS: The numbers are amazing, less than 1,600 backers total.
HH: 1,327.
SS: And they gave over $344,000 when you were asking for $300,000. You also have a fondness for physical media. I don't know if most directors feel like it's on the decline, but with everyone and their mothers starting a streaming service these days, there's a new wave of people pushing for physical.
HH: It's not dying a quick death. For instance, The Long Island Trilogy is popular and sold out in DVDs. But you know, halhartley.com has its own Vimeo channel, so you can just go there and watch any of the films for cheaper than anywhere else.
SS: It was in a 2019 interview that you called your production hub more of a graphic design firm at the moment.
HH: It really was. That's how we started the publishing company, Elboro Press. We were already publishers. These box sets, we publish books that go inside them. We do all this graphic design work.
SS: At the kickoff party for Ned Rifle in 2014, we were at your previous apartment with all your full bookshelves and you mentioned that you felt closer to the novel than to film. Do you still feel that way?
HH: I do, more and more.
SS: For me to hear you say that, it made so much sense of the few films I'd seen of yours at that time.
HH: I took so much time with the Where to Land script because I was thinking about Tolstoy and Melville. I wanted to make something that's as deep and as entertaining. It's books, for me, mostly. If you told me you just watched something you really liked, that would intrigue me because I know you. I'd watch it. But it doesn't live with me so much. Certain things really do. I'm interested in everything Godard did, but what he was doing in the '80s, just as I was starting to make films, I could watch with proper awareness. Alan Rudolph, Carl Theodor Dreyer.
SS: Do you feel like making Where to Land is you looking back on filmmaking and making a last hurrah in this philosophical vein?
HH: I don't think I'm looking back at filmmaking. I'm just looking at life. I didn't want to invent a career for Joe so I just wrote about what I know. But it's a last will and testament in a sense.
SS: You composed almost all the music in Where to Land and I noticed that the copyright dates on the songs range from 2012 to 2022.
HH: It was around 2012 that I started making CDs of my music that weren’t attached to a movie, so I drew on those albums. All of that music was made on a machine called the XP-80, which uses floppy disks, so I went in and poked around.
SS: When you say you went in, you popped in a floppy disk?
HH: Yeah.
SS: Wow.
HH: Totally physical.
SS: That's amazing.
HH: Barbaric.
SS: Incredible.
HH: I don't know what to do with the XP-80. I don't see myself making music that much more.
SS: Is writing your future?
HH: Yeah, I think that's how I'll spend the rest of my time. I feel like I've achieved what I'm going to achieve with music. Again, it's a similar thing with the filmmaking, that I don't want to make music anymore all on my own. Whereas it's great to be in the studio with an engineer who's knowledgeable and says, "Go play." I'd make music that way.
SS: In Where to Land, Joe tries to give his library away but nobody wants his books. Do you know what you want done with your own library post-mortem?
HH: MoMA keeps a lot of my stuff, but I don't know if they'd want the books. I've been to shows at MoMA about artists, and they really are tchotchke shops. Like, "This is the calculator he used to do the budget for The Unbelievable Truth." Chris [McChane, Production Manager] is actually kind of feeling them out about taking the XP-80.
SS: I meant to start by asking you if the end credits were a jab at yourself: "The persons and events in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons living or dead, or to actual events, is unintended."
HH: Yeah, it's not biographical. But it's as much me as anything else. It's as much me as Joe is, or Henry Fool, or any of them really. I mean, there's a lot of me that goes into my writing but I make fiction. That is funny. This is not about Hal. Not about Hal.
Where to Land runs September 12-16 at the Roxy. Director Hal Hartley will be in attendance for a series of Q&As.
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