These days it takes Trecartin about three years to produce a movie. A project begins with him struggling “to articulate certain sensations.” He then collects phrases that he turns into sentences until he has a script. “But they look like poems because I don’t know who’s going to say what.” He proceeds by imagining “an architectural space and voices and the way people move, and then characters, and how their hair would look when they said these lines, and how would it be different if it was a redhead who said it or a baby who said it, or if their hair changed from red to blond while they were saying it.”
Long before there is a finished script, he starts shooting. “At a certain point I’m writing, shooting, and editing at the same time,” he says. “It’s creating a movie the way someone would create a more physical work of art, like a sculpture or a painting.” He thinks of it as “sculpting a vibe” that is “actually unfolding and growing as it’s being filmed in real time.” Without computerized video technology, it couldn’t happen. “I would never be a moviemaker if I had to use film. The magic in having it all be immediate is really, really special.”
The perception that things happen simultaneously on multiple layers guides every aspect of his work. The stagey, exaggerated style of self-presentation that distinguishes his movie characters reflects the self-conscious mode of interaction Trecartin experiences with his friends. “I told my mom when A Family Finds Entertainment came out, ‘Everyone my age is good at performing.’”
As a child, Trecartin thought he would become a performer. The older son of a steelworker (who today owns a scrap-metal business) and a homemaker-turned-teacher, he was born outside Houston but grew up in Ohio. He loved to make costumes and sets, and to dance and act with his friends. These homemade shows were inspired by the surrounding culture: music videos, TV programs, and movies. “Growing up in small towns, that’s what I saw,” he says. “I wasn’t being taken to museums.” The early Nineties witnessed the arrival of reality television as well as the Internet; the two strands spiraled together to form his artistic DNA. MTV, with its in-your-face cameras and quick-cut editing, also helped shape his aesthetic. Although critics have made analogies to the movies of Jack Smith, John Waters, and others, Trecartin typically learns of these people only after the connection has been brought to his attention.
Held back in first grade, he was placed in learning-disability classes. He still doesn’t read much. He prefers to listen to friends talk about books they have read, just as he once met his course requirements by overhearing classmates’ conversations about the assigned reading and writing papers that were his interpretations of their commentary. The static and linear format of a book turns him off. “I like hearing an interpretation of something more than the real thing,” he says.
