When sat atop a well-worn kitchen stool, sinking teeth into an organic, convection oven-toasted burger, then washing it down with a margarita or two, it’s advisable, even polite, to regard hosts that have generously prepared such delights as legends. When those that have prepared such delights are legends, well, all one can do is sit back, enjoy, and entertain whatever quips they lob up regarding recent artistry. In the case of iconic auteur, Monte Hellman, it’s this: “Half-jokingly and half-seriously, I’ve said that I feel all my other films were just rehearsal for this. I just think that I’m a slow-learner, and I’ve finally figured it out. It’s weird—I feel like I’ve learned something in every movie, and I put it all together in this one.”
He’s referring to indie film Road to Nowhere, which will debut at the Venice Film Festival this September–his first ever picture entered into festival competition. The plot is a spaghetti-tangle of character lines, a film within a film, locations from L.A. to North Carolina to London to the isles of Italy, suicides, murders, lust, daydreams, and some gorgeous aerial photography. It stars a painfully sexy Shannyn Sossamon, as well as Cliff De Young, Dominique Swain, and Tygh Runyan.
78-year-old Hellman, who has directed several films–most notably his 1971 masterpiece, Two-Lane Blacktop and several classic-era Roger Corman productions–and lent his producer chops to a handful of others (Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, for instance), describes twisting filmic conventions. “Audiences have certain rules that they were taught to believe,” he says, swirling around the slush in his margarita, “like you have to let them know a certain amount of exposition or the character has to have an arc, and all these things, all these bullshit things. If it doesn’t follow the format that they take almost as a religion, then there’s something wrong with it.”
Playing with convention inspired a self-transformation within Hellman. The director describes how, in tandem with the irregular unfolding of the Road to Nowhere plot, the film’s dramatic and technical execution was equally transcendent and liberating. “I am a control freak–I think all movie directors have to be control freaks,” he shares, leaning across his kitchen counter, “but with this film, at a certain point, I just discovered, or realized–I don’t know what the right word is–that it had a mind of its own, and that it was going to be what it was going to be. And my job was just to let it happen. And that’s what I finally did. And it became something very different than what I initially thought.”
Hellman further shares on the matriculation of the project’s necessitated relinquishing of the unconscious to its participants: “What I tried to do with the actors and the other people who worked on the picture was to try to get them in touch with their unconscious, to work in a way that they weren’t always used to working. Movies help the audience get in touch with their own unconscious–what Aristotle said art was intended to do–a purgation of pity and fear. That I feel is the ideal intention of a good film.”
Monte Hellman strikes one as a kind of shamanistic visionary, a confidant in the radically extended creative psyche. But still, he describes himself as a “romantic realist.” Hellman’s realism of late has come in the form of a threat to the Laurel Canyon property he’s lived in for 31 years. A one-time owner, Hellman sold the home to a friend decades ago under the condition he could continue living there. “The estate [of the friend] said they were forced to liquidate all the assets,” Hellman describes, “including this property, and I would either have to move or buy the house. And I wasn’t really in a position to buy the house, or move after 31 years. I mean, I’ve got 7,500 books or something. I became a nervous wreck and haven’t slept and haven’t eaten. It’s been a horrendous six weeks or whatever it’s been. But hopefully I’ll be able to stay here. We’ve started a website called MonteHellmansHouse.com to help with the down payment.”
Hellman’s new film will only add to the iconoclasm he’s achieved, regardless of whether he’s allowed to stay in his home. The outcome looks promising, though, because Road to Nowhere, if anything, proves he’s got a lot of fight left in him.