Crispin Glover is one of modern American cinema’s true originals. An instantly recognizable actor from his idiosyncratic appearances in dozens of films (including several I promise you’ve seen), Glover has built a fascinating body of work across several mediums, including nearly 20 books of collage and prose and a truly unforgettable album of experimental pop music. It is his career as a filmmaker, however, which has truly become the stuff of legend: he refuses to release any of his three features to streaming or home video, instead preferring to tour them around the world so that he can be present for all screenings (those interested in keeping tabs on future screenings, as well as Glover’s other projects, are invited to subscribe to his mailing list). Tonight, Glover brings his latest feature, the wonderfully titled No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky at a Distance, to the main stage at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, along with his customary pre-film slideshow and post-film Q&A. In anticipation of the event, I spoke to Glover about his career as a filmmaker, the midnight movies that opened his eyes to the medium, and the importance of the cinematic experience. (This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow).
BOSTON HASSLE: I haven’t seen the film yet, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about No! YOU’RE WRONG., and what the film’s about.
CRISPIN GLOVER: The entire title is No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance, and it takes place in multiple time periods: 1868, 1888, 1918, 1948, and contemporary. The film started out being No! YOU’RE WRONG., but a conceptual element changed during the making of the film, and it became No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance.
I’m careful to not give too many details about it, because the way that the film is made and intended, it’s almost [like] the more that I say about it, when somebody’s watching it, it could define certain things that can limit what people are thinking about it. So I prefer to let people see the film without me saying too much… It’s funny, because I’ve seen somebody describe the film as being a silent movie. The trailer might lead someone to believe the film IS a silent film. And actually, the way the film starts, somewhere between four and five minutes is essentially like a silent film. But there is synced dialog in the movie.
[So] I’m reticent to say too many things. My experience is that there are films that I love that operate on the level of being something where the audience can be more interpretive of what is going on in it, and I will be one of those audience members that enjoys what I’m interpreting in my head. Even some of the greatest filmmakers I’ve seen start to describe some things, and it’s like, “Oh, I wish they hadn’t said that!” [It’s] not like I would feel that I’m wrong about it, but I just don’t want that extra information. I like what I’m seeing and what’s going on in my head, and I don’t want to be distracted by it. And usually those filmmakers are careful about that, and I think it is a good thing to be careful about. I aspire toward that.
BH: Going back a little bit, you’re of course primarily known to a lot of people as an actor, but you’ve worked in so many different fields and media, including, of course, filmmaking, where you’ve really developed a unique body of work. What drew you into filmmaking? How did you start in that?
CG: Well, like many kids, I had a Super 8 camera, and made some Super 8 films— some small animations. I had an intervalometer on my Super 8 camera, so I was able to shoot some flowers opening. I just played around, it was enjoyable. But the time when I really became fascinated with film wasn’t until I was 16 years old, which was 1980. I learned how to drive, and I was going to a lot of the revival houses that were quite popular in Los Angeles, before the video availability helped to shut a lot of those down. I was always interested in painting and writing, and I would draw and be creative, but… I wasn’t necessarily equating movies strongly with art, and if I was, it was a relatively minor conception of that. But when I turned 16, and was going to see these films at these various revival houses, then it really struck me, and I got very excited about that.
I was thinking it would be exciting to be an actor supporting this kind of filmmaking that I was seeing. The films that I was seeing in 1980 were films from the ’70s, ’60s, ‘20s, what have you, all through the time periods. At that time, a lot of the films were really questioning things, and I was excited about that. And then, as I started acting in films in the ’80s, I was looking about, thinking, “Where are these questions that I’ve been excited to be a part of?” It didn’t seem like that was really the zeitgeist at the exact moment. And so, as time has gone on, I’ve felt more and more imperative toward making my own films that aspire toward that, both questioning [themselves and] letting the audience question within themselves. And that is what all of my films, on one level or another, aspire toward.
BH: Do you remember any of the particular films you saw around that time, when you started going to the rep theaters, that blew your mind?
CG: Well, when I was 14 years old, I was going to a private school. I went from first to ninth grade to a school in Los Angeles called Mirman School. After we’d read certain books, we would go to the Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard and see the movie versions of the book. Films like 1984— the older one, not the one with John Hurt that was made in the ’80s— Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Grapes of Wrath, various books that we’d read at school. And for some reason, the projectionist played the coming attractions for all these school kids. And one of the coming attractions—this would be 1978— that’s when they started playing Eraserhead at the Nuart as a midnight movie. And the projectionist [ran the trailer] for all these kids! [laughs] I didn’t know what the film was! I thought, is this an old film from the 1950s? It looked very interesting to me. And I thought, if this is still playing at midnight in a couple of years when I learn how to drive, I’m going to go see this movie. And I did! I went and saw it at least 12 times when I was 16 years old. And it was before Elephant Man had come out, so it wasn’t that big of an audience at the time that was going to see the midnight shows of Eraserhead.
You could call David Lynch an American small-s surrealist, but I liked [Luis] Buñuel already at that point as well. I’m sure I saw Un Chien Andalou projected. I always liked a lot of the silent films and older movies. Freaks, of course, by Tod Browning, is an incredible piece of filmmaking. I remember seeing The Devils. There was a great venue called the Fox Venice that had a beautiful widescreen. I saw a lot of the Sergio Leone films there, and Fellini films, and Polanski’s Repulsion. Films I still love that I saw back in the ’80s, projected properly in the movie theater.
BH: For your new film, you collaborated with your father. In addition to acting alongside him, you also co-wrote the movie with him. Is that correct?
CG: Yes. He came a bit later into it. It was a conception I had. I had a feeling that was something that was going to happen, which I knew could have some difficulty. I had directed him in my second film, and my mother; my mother’s in both of those films as well, both the second film and this film. It was easy for me to direct my father as an actor, but working with him as a writer, that was more difficult… There are elements within the film, the Spooky Action at a Distance part, that go into some of it. The whole film is ultimately fictionalized, but there are aspects of certain parts of reality that seep into it, and some of that is represented within the film. People seem to enjoy that part. It has an amusing quality to it. In real life, it was a little more difficult, but I knew it would play as amusing, and it does.
BH: You have a longstanding policy of only showing your films in very controlled settings, and never without you present. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your reason for that, and why you prefer showing your films that way?
CG: Well, it’s evolved. I first performed the slideshow, which consists of my books, and there’s multiple variations on the slideshows. I present different books before different films… There are eight books, and I published Rat Catching in 1988… When you publish a book, at least at the time, the norm was that a published author would appear at bookstores and they would read selections from their books. But because my books are so profusely illustrated— virtually every page has an illustration on it, and the story sometimes is moved forward by the illustrations, not by the words— it never really made sense for me to just go to bookstores and read the text. I realized I would have to have slides of the images as I read them. So it wasn’t until 1993, five years after I’d published Rat Catching, that there was a film festival at the Capitol Theater in Olympia, Washington that had a retrospective of some of the films that I’d been in up to that point. They invited me up there, and I thought this would be a good time to perform the slide show. So I had 35 millimeter slides of the books made… [the] eight of them that made the most sense to perform for that show. The very first time I ever did it, it went perfectly well. People really liked it. People invited me to perform it in other places. I went to a few different places with a short film that I had acted in, and I got good audiences for it, and I recognized that this would be a way that I could tour with my own films if I wanted to, and this would be a way I could distribute my own films.
So then, when I started shooting What Is It? in 2005, I knew that the film— it developed in a lot of different ways, but it dealt with taboo qualities. It was an accident at first; I wasn’t initially doing things that were purposefully taboo and/or anti-corporate, but I recognized after I’d started What Is It? that there was innately something within it that would be considered taboo by the corporate entities, and that this was something that would cause questions that the corporate entities did not want to have asked. So I recognized that this should be a point within the film, and that, once I completed the film, which ended up taking over 10 years… I would have a question and answer period, because the film, What Is It?, brings up a lot of questions for the audience to ask, because it is provocative. The film doesn’t have answers within it. It doesn’t have a smooth resolution. I knew it would be something that could get people upset. It was designed that way. So I did feel that it was important to keep it in that environment, that it would not go into the digital realm, and that people could ask me questions about it. Most of the actors in the film have Down’s syndrome, and this was even before the internet was as it is, but I knew that things could be taken out of context. I didn’t want people to be making frivolous comments about the actors in the film. Before the word “canceling” came around, I knew it was the kind of movie that could cause problems.
So I never wanted to distribute it in that what I would almost call haphazard fashion. Not that it’s wrong for most films; most films, it’s fine to distribute that way. But that’s initially why I was very careful about it. But as it happens, there’s something I also like about it, because all of the films have been made cinematically, to project up on a big screen with a proper sound system, and that does make a huge difference as to how a film is viewed. I like having the films in nice cinemas where people can appreciate what the film was made for. All of the films I took a long time on, particularly this new one. I’ve recently been saying it’s sort of a cinematic activism. It’s not necessarily the most lucrative way to approach it, but for whatever reason I feel like it’s the proper way to approach it for these films.
BH: Do you have any other projects in the pipeline, or are you going to sit with this one for a while and then see what comes next?
CG: I mean, this one’s taken a lot of work, but I actually started shooting yet another feature project last year. I’m working on it in a different fashion, kind of, than my other productions. I want to make things more rapidly. My average rate of filmmaking is, each film has approximately taken 10 years per production, which is way too slow. I don’t like that. So I’m thinking of other ways to make my productions faster. There’s a concept I have– I’ve already started shooting it last year, but I don’t always shoot things straight through. For various reasons, it made sense for me to shoot something that was imperative to shoot last year. But it’s given me a way of thinking about the production and how to shoot it, which may make it faster. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I would like to have it out sooner than 10 years from the initial shooting day!
No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance
2025
dir. Crispin Glover
85 min.
Screens Monday, 11/3, 7:00pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Director in person!
With pre-film slideshow and post-film Q&A
