From the "People" Archives:

by Anthony Kaufman

When it screened at the LAIFF, indieWIRE staffers were astounded. We did not know, as New Yorkers sharing in a similarly exhilarating and isolating experience in our (un)fair city, if we were the only ones struck by Bennett Miller's witty and profound portrait of Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a Manhattan double decker tour guide who cruises through life, thriving on chaos, and waxing hilarious bits of history and philosophy to unsuspecting people from all around the world.

We soon found out that we were not the only ones seized by this intimate urban profile of a man compared to the likes of Jerry Lewis and Tiny Tim, Truman Capote and Woody Allen -- even Gore Vidal and Willy Wonka comparisions appear in rousing notices from the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, the LA Weekly, the Village Voice and the New Times. And after an enthusiastic screening at New York's docfest on Saturday, where even documentary legend Jean Rouch ("Chronicle of a Summer") showed up, "The Cruise" has now become a bit of a legend in its own right, with its one-man crew, miniDV black & white cinematography, simple, subtle story, and an emotional staying power that will likely propel it from a film festival favorite to a documentary distributed to a theater near you.

Walking through Central Park with Miller and Speed, documentarian and subject, was like being inside the movie -- dumbstruck by Speed's knowledge of the Park's every detail and guided by Miller's calm, observant and encouraging remarks. Although reading a portion of our conversation gives some indication of the breadth, poetry, and wackiness of Timothy "Speed" Levitch and his unpretentious profiler Bennett Miller, it is simply incomparable to witnessing their collaboration in "The Cruise."

indieWIRE: What were your expectations? When you made this film, did you think, oh, I want it to have a theatrical release?

Bennett Miller: No. My expectations were that this would be the last thing I do before I leave the film business forever. And I had no real expectations of anybody ever seeing it -- I did it by myself and by the time it was completely shot, there was not another individual that had even seen it. It wasn't until the first rough cut screening -- when people began to respond to it -- that I realized it could be more popular than I expected. It does speak to people on bigger levels than I would have expected, but I never thought about it. I never thought about it.

iW: At what point did you start to think about it?

Miller: I would say, when we begin to show it to people. Even at its earliest stages it became very clear that people were moved in unexpected ways by the movie. It's attractive to people on a superficial level, I knew people would be interested -- just the fascination of being able to look at a purely bizarre human being. But on a deeper level, as the film reveals him, we can all identify with him and that's where the lasting feelings about the film come from and why people seem to be reacting the way they're reacting.

iW: At what point did the video-camera come into play in your relationship?

Timothy "Speed" Levitch: Bennett came onto the double decker bus, with a pretty simple video-camera. And it was in the winter time, in December, and I was, in particular despair at that time. And I remember the first day, he came on, I was working with "The Kabul Comet", Najim Shaquid, who was one of the great double decker drivers of the original Red Cavalry. And we buzzed around the city and did a loop and he was basically having a good time with the video-camera and I realized he was just on the ride with everybody else who had a videocamera -- there were twenty other people on the bus with video-cameras. And we were all together, looking out the window. (He laughs a gigglish chortle that really can't be described with words.)

iW: Was that camera the beginning or was that just research?

Miller: I guess you could call it research. I shot about 80 hours before I began shooting what would become the footage that we'd cut together. So there was about a 80 disposable hours before I figured out what I was doing.

iW: Were you thinking about structure?

Miller: I was specifically not thinking about structure. I made a strong determination not to structure it in any way in my brain. I heard Norman Mailer say, in an interview about writing, that you should not make decisions about the characters and the plot and what happens. As a writer, you have to be on the adventure, the same way a reader needs to be, otherwise, it's a little bit contrived. I decided that's what I wanted to do.

There was something compelling about "Speed". To get to it, I didn't want to delineate it in my own mind and try to force it out one way or the other, I wanted to get it naturally and make sense out of it later.

iW: Speed, how did you feel about being the object of the lens?

Speed: It was a psychedelic experience. And a specific craft to be practiced. Like piano playing. To be an object is an athleticism and an artistry, (laughs) and an opulent one, I should say. It's like being your own instrument, playing yourself as your own instrument. And the question is, are you in tune and are you a virtuoso? What kind of an instrument is it going to be? Is it a clarinet? Is it a piano? Is it a tympany drum? Sometimes it's all of those things. Often, I just became what we all are on a daily basis -- which is a walking, 80-instrument symphony. Like bang -- violins, cellos. . . (Laughs)

iW: Did you feel you changed at all because the camera was there?

Speed: Well, it was a craft -- it is a craft. It took me a long time to find the right rhythm, the right rhythmic dance with this thing, the camera. And of course, a lot of things clicked when I began to understand that the camera was my lover. And vice versa, when we fell in love. There was a long time there where I was certainly a walking rough draft, waiting to find the right rhythms, to just look into a camera directly and speak.

iW: Bennett, how collaborative do you think the process was between the two of you?

Miller: From my perspective, being a voyeur and wanting some detachment from the subject itself and yet wanting to get at something from within it -- I saw my job as cultivating an atmosphere for Speed to self-consciouslessly allow the aspects of himself that interested me to be evoked and to capture them in a cinematic and artful way and then to put them together in such a way that an audience coming in cold could feel and experience my bigger feelings that I had toward Timothy's being.

Hanging out with Speed made me feel a particular way. I found something extraordinary in him. And I think Speed will attest to this, that most human beings before the film did not give him the same credit. There was a lot of quicker judgement of him and it required some looking into. It required some patience and sensitivity and interest and curiosity to appreciate, because he's fucking unusual.

Speed: (agreeing) Yeah, yeah.

Miller: But . . . I don't consider it a performance piece, I don't consider it as exhibitionism and just entertainment. I think what speaks to people is that who he is gets captured, gets evoked, gets presented. It's a portrait.

iW: How long was the editing?

Miller: About 8 months. We were on a full-time intensive...we weren't doing anything else.

iW: Speed, did you come in during editing and check it out?

Speed: Very rarely. I dedicated myself to the chaos of the universe. The universe breathes through chaos. And Bennett's mind was in full throttle disassociation with the chaos, so I was confident to leave it in his hands and to let it unfold organically. I think that the best moments of our collaboration are these moments when we were hanging off the same edge together and there were moments when ecstasy knew us by the same name. And perhaps, that's what true collaboration is about.

iW: What were those moments when you were both hanging?

Speed: There are moments in that footage when the despair that I am feeling is the despair that he's feeling and that is why he was able to fixate the camera in a certain way. When I watched the film recently, it came across to me as a distillation of a character, like there are several test tubes on a table, different phylums of tantra, and the thing becomes a discussion between multiple personalities. (Laughs)

Miller: Someone after seeing the movie said to me, "It's a self-portrait."

Speed: This is Leonardo DaVinci's original dictum. I think he said, "Any portrait is a self-portrait" and that's a beautiful process. We are marching through the dark forestries of ourselves together and that's what collaboration is about.

Comradery is, we all have battlefields, I'm going to supply you with armaments and I'm going to back up your artillery [Gestures towards Kaufman]. Like, together we're going to go in on the left flank on your battlefield and then later in the afternoon, you're going to give me a tank for my battlefield. You've got a special adeptness and understanding of the horse cavalry unit, you're going to help me surround the enemy.

We are contributing to each other's battlefronts in the frontiers of our awareness. By speaking to Burrito [Speed's nickname for Bennett] and his camera, I am sharing in his energy, we're experiencing osmosis as a tactile experience. What's happening there is that he is taking me, escorting me into new aspects of myself. I'm discovering things about myself that I didn't even know, in the impromptu moments of improvisation in front of this camera.

(pause)

Miller: I agree with what Speed said. . .

["The Cruise" screens this week at the Newport International Film Festival.]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Next week, with "The Cruise" as a reference point, indieWIRE will publish a DIY article exploring the process of making a film utilizing emerging digital technology.]

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