A COFFEE WITH ... ANDREW BUJALSKI

Making movies in the mold of 'Slacker,' a director keeps up the do-it-yourself spirit

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Thursday, August 30, 2007

She's new here, this young barista at Dominican Joe's, and she would like to make a complex coffee drink to practice her beverage art. Andrew Bujalski, a filmmaker, prefers simple, practical drinks. A regular drip coffee will do. Nothing fancy. Really.

With nudging from the barista, Bujalski, wearing smudged glasses and a Bluto beard, fidgets and weighs his options. She suggests a flan latte, something elaborate that will hone her drink-making skills. She describes it. He takes it.

"What size do you want?" she asks.

I tell him it's on me. "Huge," he says.

That will be $4.90. He mouths: "Wow."

"That evaporated milk doesn't come easy," the barista chirps.

Bujalski, who just wrapped his latest micro-budget feature in Austin, drops a beat-up backpack on a bench, sits down and ponders the drink being made.

"It's very exciting," he says.

More exciting is having a movie filmed and in the can, even if "I really have no clue right now what we've done exactly," Bujalski says.

A former short-term Austinite who lives in his native Boston, Bujalski, 30, is a true rising star in the ultra-indie film world, thanks to a pair of deeply personal do-it-yourself features about the romantic flailings of post-collegiate twentysomethings that were made for peanuts but earned across-the-board raves.

He wrote his first film, the gangly, sweetly disarming "Funny Ha Ha," while living in Austin from 1999 to 2000. He shot it in Boston with a nonprofessional cast and crew composed of friends and fellow Harvard University graduates, including the movie's lanky star, Kate Dollenmayer, who (longish story) was one of the animators on Richard Linklater's "Waking Life."

He made his second feature, "Mutual Appreciation" — another addled-youth, sort-of-romance shot in grainy black and white — in Boston with a bunch of the same friends. That film played in Austin last fall.

Bujalski's voluble movies flaunt their debt to Linklater's definitive muttering-youth, DIY classic "Slacker." Bujalski recalls how, when he moved to Austin at 22 after earning a degree in film at Harvard, he used the "Slacker" tie-in book as his daily guide to Austin, its history and characters.

"Andrew!" It's the barista. His flan latte is ready.

"It's really good," Bujalski says when he returns to the table. "I don't know if I needed a large. But it does taste like flan. She said something about it being made with flan juice. I'm not sure what that is."

Bujalski and a tight crew of eight, most of them from the previous movies, shot the still-untitled film in a speedy 20 days, starting July 13, around town. Unimpressed by the digital-video revolution, he shot on color Super 16 film.

Bujalski refers to it as the "Sisters Project" because it stars his friends, real-life twin sisters Maggie and Tilly (last names coyly withheld). One of them plays the co-owner of a clothing boutique, "which is a challenge because I don't know anything about clothes and neither particularly does she," Bujalski says.

(Later, I read in Esquire that one of the sisters will use a wheelchair in the movie. Bujalski doesn't give up details easily.)

The writer-director and sometimes actor — he's performed in his own films as well as DIY cohort Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs," which played South by Southwest this year — chose Storyville Boutique, at East 51st and Duval streets, for his movie's shop. He describes it as "a clothing slash fun, arty, knick-knacky, tchotchke store."

"They were great to us," he says. "That's a lot of why I shot in Austin, because it was a perfect location."

Many locals appear in the movie, "friends of friends of friends and people we just stumbled upon." Bujalski always shoots on budget-saving location, this time including the Dougherty Arts Center, Lava Java, private homes and a few parking lots.

Self-conscious and soft-spoken, Bujalski says he can't quite describe the film's plot, but allows that compared with his other features, "This one's a little more plotty." And of course "very chatty."

"When I was writing it, I was thinking of it as a legal thriller without any thrills," he adds.

"I'll be curious to know how it comes out, because I really have no clue right now what we've done exactly," says Bujalski, who hopes it will be ready to show by next summer.

The filmmaker returns this month to his roommates in Boston, where he plans to finish another draft of a screenplay for a major Hollywood movie — yes, the DIYer has been discovered. Bujalski was hired by Paramount Pictures to adapt Benjamin Kunkel's acclaimed novel "Indecision," and there are rumors that he will direct it.

He frowns at the idea of living in L.A., but says, "Any time I set foot in Austin, I fantasize about moving back."

Bujalski finishes his tall foamy drink. "It's really rich," he says. "It's like honey. What is in flan?"

Prospects of a raging sugar high are eclipsed by other considerations.

"I'm afraid it will give me some gastrointestinal trouble," Bujalski says. "We'll see."