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 unny Ha Ha is the ultimate microbudget movie about being young and adrift. Marnie, a twentysomething post-collegian with no discernible career plan, floats around Boston temping, making out with all the wrong people at parties, contemplating a tattoo and trying, with limited success, not to drink quite so much.From the awkward house-party hook-up to the non-date with the former co-worker who's a little too into her, the film is unsparingly accurate about the ineffable, unsettling quality of dating — or doing whatever complex series of sexual and romantic things it is one does — in this emotionally unintelligent time. The film's writer and director, Andrew Bujalski, turned twenty-eight on the same day the film was released in New York to great acclaim. We spoke with him by phone from Boston about longing, the film's controversial non-ending, and why he didn't follow Garden State's example and cash in with a Shins-saturated soundtrack. — Ada Calhoun While this is definitely about being a specific age, you hate people calling it a generational film. I'm a big fan of Say Anything and John Hughes movies. The reasons I loved those movies have nothing to do with being the voice-of-a-generation movies. They're about specific characters, but certainly I was not setting out to make a generational statement. Everything in the film is almost startlingly naturalistic, kind of like Mike Leigh's work. Mike Leigh is a huge inspiration, I'd love to try working in his style [months of rehearsal, mostly improvised dialogue], although there probably wouldn't be much point at this point, as he's got that territory covered. Why do you use non-professional actors? Well, part of it is that I'm not well enough versed in the language of directing to get the performances I want out of professionals. And as a filmmaker I try to put things on screen that seem very real and simple. There's this idea that a movie isn't exciting unless someone defuses a nuclear bomb, but of course at this point, it's kind of boring to watch bombs being defused all the time. Part of the reason we go to the movies is to pass judgment on characters, to have them be just bad guys or good guys so we can leave feeling something sure about them, but I like to create characters who are complicated. This movie is so intimate I wonder if people think they know you. Have you had groupies at all the festivals you've been to? Not particularly. I think the movie is probably not THAT kind of intimate. It's a more embarrassing stripe of intimacy. And the most embarrassing character is the one you play: Mitchell. He's the hopelessly cute-but-nerdy guy with the crush on his fellow temp. He's sort of pathetic, but I was rooting for him. It's funny how people bring all these different things to these relationships. Some people really root for Mitchell, even though he does plenty of things that make him less than sympathetic. Right, like he throws a beer bottle off a balcony for no reason and keeps insisting Marnie should want to date him. Was it hard to direct yourself? The whole process of getting a movie made on almost no money is so stressful that I didn't have any space to get stressed out about acting. Where did you find the amazing actress who played Marnie? Her performance got incredible reviews. Kate Dollenmayer was my roommate when I started writing the film. It was more or less designed as a "vehicle" for what I imagined her acting talents would be. As it turned out, she's way more technically gifted than I could have guessed. But she doesn't pursue acting. She's an experimental filmmaker out in L.A., and does some teaching and assistant editing for money. Much too sane to chase after an acting career, though I'm sure she could be monstrously successful at it if she cared to be. What made you want to make movies? What made you want to make this movie specifically? I've been a movie crazy kid as far back as my memory goes. I never seriously considered doing anything else — which, incidentally, I do not see as a badge of honor. On the contrary, I'm a bit ashamed and embarrassed that I never really bothered to think any of this through. As for this film, as I said, it began with the germ of thinking Kate could carry a movie, and on top of that I threw all sorts of personal stuff into a grinder. The movie is set in Boston, but it actually feels like Austin, Texas, with its pathologically slow pace. People who haven't been to Boston usually think it has an Anytown, USA feel, but people who are from Boston think it's very much a Boston film. But it's funny — I actually started writing it when I was living in Austin, which was brief. And I love the movie Slacker. I used the companion book to find my way around when I moved there. I highly recommend that book in general. You were in your early twenties then, and it took a few years for this film to get made. Do you now feel way older than the characters in the film? This whole process has taken a long time. But I'm still drifting in the self-serving yaw of the eternal adolescence. Little change there. There are moments of the film that mean something important to me every time I see them. It's a hard movie to talk about since hardly anything happens. What it conveys is more of a mood: lovelorn slackerdom. I feel like these days a lot of novels are written to be movie adaptation pitches. And in reaction, I like the idea of making a movie that is like a novel that would never get made into a movie. What are you reading or listening to? I've gotten enamored of Paul Theroux again lately. I really enjoyed Hotel Honolulu. The new Roky Erickson anthology is mindblowing. So you do know about music! Why isn't there any in Funny Ha Ha? Why no Garden State-style soundtrack? I feel like music is so powerful in films and Garden State is an example of a movie where music's given the go-ahead to carry the emotion of the film. But I was more interested in the minutiae of the performances, which I think would have been overpowered by music. Film-as-opera is great, but I don't think it would have been right for this. Do you have a filmmaking mission? No mission! Except to try to make a good movie. Though my films seem to stand in opposition to louder or crasser trends, I guess I lack enthusiasm for wanting to tear down the system — I'd much rather just orbit around somewhere outside the system. I won't lob missiles at them if they won't at me. How do you respond to criticisms of the film's abrupt ending [the credits essentially roll in the middle of a conversation]? A lot of people really like it and other people don't get it or are turned off by it. But I felt that it's such a small story that to tack on a big ending would have been disingenuous, and I wouldn't have known how to do it. There's a pressure to put the message into the ending in a way that makes the rest of the movie almost irrelevant. There's something about not delivering a grand statement at the end that puts the pressure to provide meaning back on the movie as a whole. Garden State's Zach Braff told us he loves playing Spin the Bottle. Do you have any similarly hip sexual pastimes? Oh geez. Spin the Bottle sounds terribly stressful to me. Zach Braff lives in L.A., though, right? Boston parties tend not to end so sexily. n° 
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