INTERVIEW: “Groove’s” Greg Harrison Raves To Success

by Aaron Dalton

First-time director Greg Harrison wrote a movie about a San Francisco rave. No one wanted to fund it. He and producer Danielle Renfrew persisted, found the money and made the movie their way. The result, "Groove," was a smash hit at Sundance, got picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, and has been generating unstoppable word-of-mouth ever since. The film features a cast of stellar unknowns, including the acting debut of renowned UK DJ, John Digweed, who plays himself and forecasts an impending triumph of rave-dom here in the U.S. "No one film could accurately capture the whole scene," says Digweed. "This is the first film from America to do a good job. There will be other films after this. The scene is sweeping America."

Harrison talked with indieWIRE about eye-contact, sleep deprivation and the "human center" of the rave scene. "Groove" has its U.S. premiere Thursday night in San Francisco, followed by releases in New York, Los Angeles and other cities across the country.

indieWIRE: What do you think is the hardest thing about making a movie about the rave scene?

Greg Harrison: Translating the scene into a viable film had not yet been done authentically. The problem with making a movie about a rave is that a rave is non-intellectual and non-verbal, often made up of vignette experiences. It's about being in the moment, about a brief interaction with a stranger, about spontaneity. You can have compelling experiences at a rave, but the challenge is to translate these experiences into film language. Can you create a universal humanistic center that gives the audience access to the story regardless of whether they are in the scene or not?

iW: You mentioned that a rave is often made up of vignettes, crafted in some sense by the guiding hand of the DJ. This film could also be characterized as a vignette movie, guided by the director. Can you comment on the similarities between the role a director plays in a film and the role a DJ plays at a rave?

Harrison: My entry into the rave scene was through the music. I just had an epiphany when I went to go see a really skilled DJ spin. I realized that he was like a live editor. I had worked as a film editor -- working with the dailies, the raw footage, thinking about the dramatic arc of the bigger story. A DJ is also collecting pieces of music to juxtapose. They think like an editor -- the thrill is that they craft a moment-to-moment emotional experience, that they can adjust the set according to the atmosphere of the room. Their sense of drama is impeccable. The difference between a film and a rave of course is that a rave is inherently participatory. A DJ needs the crowd as much as the crowd needs the DJ.

iW: If you wanted to make a film about the rave scene, why write it as a dramatic story rather than a documentary, especially since your producer, Danielle Renfrew, had experience making documentary film? ["Better Living Through Circuitry," now in release, takes the documentary route.]

Harrison: Techno music and raving, perhaps because of their inherently participatory nature, cut through intellectualism. A rave is what it is. For that reason, a dramatic structure was better than a documentary structure, which involves 'talking' about an experience. If you go to a rave, you'll see that there is something everyone there knows but can't say. There are smiles, eye-contact [among the ravers]. This is a form of communication. It is a basic, non-verbal, non-intellectual form of communication.

iW: Do you think this ability for ravers to engage in non-verbal communication contributes to the multi-cultural nature of the rave experience?

Harrison: There is a cliché of music as the universal language. It's true. Electronic music is almost the perfection of basic human communication. You don't see a lot of vocals, therefore electronic music is not composed of "concept songs." A pop song is intending something, but there is a blank-slate quality to electronic music. There is a quasi-spiritual notion that we are all one on the dance floor.

iW: And yet, your film is not evangelical about rave culture -- the rave means different things, good and bad, to the film's characters.

Harrison: If I had made this movie in 1994 [when just getting into the rave scene], it might have been a much more imbalanced film. It might have been much more -- "Raving is the answer. Everyone must know." But now I wanted to explore all points of view. I wanted to use humor to temper the idea of a rave as a serious life-changing event. There is a cynical character that is truly a cynic -- and he's a very important character with whom to explore the scene. There is also a dark aspect to the rave scene. But on the whole, I think the scene is fairly optimistic, life-affirming.

iW: How did your subject matter determine the structure of the film? You've spoken of a rave as consisting of a series of brief, fleeting interactions, and the film too seems to be structured around a non-linear series of interactions among an ensemble cast. No one event or conversation necessarily stands out, but at the end it all adds up to a meaningful story.

Harrison: A lot of my scripts work this way. I build a script on small details that sum up to a greater whole. David [Hamish Linklater] and Leila [Lola Glaudini] do have a little more screen time, a little more meat to their characters. But I was trying to evoke the feeling of a rave, of the rave as the main character. All the little pieces are intended to add up at the end. All the characters are pieces of the puzzle. I didn't want to make them clichés, but I did want them to represent facets of the scene. The sum total of the characters would give you the point, the non-verbal point of the scene. This goes back to the difficulty of talking about the rave experience -- it's about simple, intertwined stories, none of which is exceedingly dramatic.

This film started as a personal endeavor. The satisfying thing is to do something specific and personal and have it come out the other end as universal, to find that the deeper you go into your own honesty, the more universal your expression turns out to be. This film is accurate about the [rave] scene, but [the story] could have taken place anywhere. Almost every scene is about similar issues, people struggling to connect with their own life and with other people. I made a concerted effort to get at the human center of the scene.

iW: You've spoken before about your difficulties in raising money for the film from traditional financing sources who wanted to make the script more moralistic or to add violent scenes. But you and Danielle have also spoken at some length about the ways in which you feel that your non-traditional financing [from dot.com entrepreneurs] and the tight budget ultimately helped the film. Can you elaborate?

Harrison: Danielle and I feel that all choices are creative choices in filmmaking. "Groove" was made for the right amount of money. A good part of its success can be attributed to the fact that it was made outside of the system for no money. For this reason, I had to be open to suggestions from all sorts of people. We had to use first-timers both in front of and behind the cameras. This heavily influenced the creative result. We were really upset and worried at first that no one wanted to make the film. But actually we realized it was perfect. We realized, "We'll make something new! Maybe we have something here that people haven't seen before." As for the kind of investments we got, over two-thirds of our investors were under 30. They were from the Internet world. They had gone to raves. They had ideas for locations. They were our extras. The big lesson for [Danielle and me] was that the creative and business process cannot be treated separately -- they are one entity.

iW: But the low budget forced you to wear many hats, right?

Harrison: I was writer, director, co-producer, editor and post-production supervisor on this film. It was intense. It was insane. We had two-and-a-half weeks to cut the film for submission to Sundance. On the production side, my editing experience turned out to be a great advantage. It turned out to be a huge disadvantage to my physical and mental well-being! I literally didn't see the outside world for weeks. It was like prison -- I was in an editing room with no windows, sleeping on the couch, people bringing me food. I had no money or time to hire other editors. Andrea Gard of Skywalker Ranch was the Sound Editor [and Associate Producer]. We cut all the music on an AVID and exported everything, so that saved us time. One of the hardest sequences was post-production sound. Andrea and I literally slept one hour a day for two weeks. We were so emotionally wrought that we would break into tears when we had trouble trimming a cut. We were drinking Red Bull, this caffeine-like drink. We shot this film in 24 days, edited it in two and a half weeks. We did lots of the other post-production in six weeks. Three days before the Sundance festival we got the final print. We screened it the first night of the festival. There were people dancing in the aisles during the credits. We got four offers. Twenty-four hours later we had closed with Sony.

iW: What's next?

Harrison: We had the unheard of good fortune to make a film that's financially successful before it even hits the theaters -- we were able to pay our investors back out of our advance. Looking forward, we want to do films we're passionate about and have a connection to. We're speaking with people about a couple of different projects.

[Harrison and Renfrew are now in the process of forming a San Francisco-based production company.]

[Aaron Dalton (www.contentsolved.com) continues to search for the "human center" of his own scene while writing for SOMA, Indulge.com, Psychology Today and other fine publications and websites.]

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