Contemporary Color: Michael Almereyda on "Tesla"

The latest film by the wide-ranging, ever-experimenting American filmmaker is a quintessentially inventive biopic of Nikola Tesla.
Lawrence Garcia

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” 

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

A master without a masterwork: such, one might say, is the peculiar, paradoxical position of American filmmaker Michael Almereyda. Spanning over three decades, his career is vigorous, accomplished, and frequently inspired, intriguing not just for its eclectic breadth of focus, but also for its doggedly exploratory bent—ranging from sundry experiments with the Pixelvision camera, to a turn-of-the-millennium Hamlet adaptation, to documentaries on the photographer William Eggleston and actor-screenwriter Hampton Fancher. But no matter what the subject, his always generous work seems to resist the pull of the monumental, often progressing at strange, seductive tangents and charting out alternate paths of approach, as if questioning received ideas regarding progress, and thereby challenging the very notion of the towering edifice, the definitive work.

Originating from a script the director wrote in the 1980s—at one point optioned by Jerzy Skolimowski, but never produced—Almereyda’s latest, Tesla, is both a serendipitous return and a resolute step forward. Playing the eponymous Serbian-American inventor, Ethan Hawke stars opposite a robust cast, including Hamlet co-star Kyle MacLachlan as Thomas Edison, Eve Hewson as Anne, the self-possessed daughter of American financier J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz), and Rebecca Dayan as the famed French actress and singer Sarah Bernhardt. But as in his Stanley Milgram project Experimenter (2015), Almereyda leverages the film’s historical biopic status to heady, scintillating effect, maximizing the tension between the grounding of written record and the genre’s speculative potentialities. Across the film, the great inventor’s life is diffracted through a bevy of cinematic alienation devices (rear projection, direct-address narration) and artificial stagings (glimpses of a cellphone, a MacBook, and a Google search; snatches of an anachronistic club beat), and throughout, there’s a constant sense of what it truly means to inhabit one’s present—the inexorable, rather lonely ache of being trapped in one’s time and place, in one’s own mind and body.

If there is a recurring theme in Almereyda’s wide-ranging practice, it’s this intense preoccupation with all the implications of the here and now, to borrow from the director’s compellingly fragmented New Orleans–set Happy Here and Now (2002), a film that expresses an earlier fascination with Tesla, and whose title is itself borrowed from the writings of Blaise Pascal. Confronted with the limits of human existence—both abstract and all-too-physical—his films continually interrogate the mutating modes and manifestations of those very limitations. Elephants have now appeared at least twice in Almereyda’s cinema (in Experimenter and Another Girl, Another Planet), calling to mind the ancient parable of the blind men, only ever able to apprehend the bounded surface of things—though in Tesla, the operative metaphor is of nature as “a gigantic cat,” the central question here being, “Who strokes its back?” It is perhaps the curse of inventors and artists alike that, more than most people, they are plagued by such questions, and that they should consequently invest so much of themselves into attempting to see the world as no one before them had thought to—or indeed, attempting to invent new ways of seeing altogether.


NOTEBOOK: I wanted to start with something a bit broad. I was reading a conversation you did with Dakin Matthews for the foreword of a Shakespeare volume [Shakespeare and the Middle Ages] where you quote the Hamlet line about showing “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” And you go on to talk about the sense in which Shakespeare is always urgent, which is also to say the sense in which the classics are always contemporary. So I wanted to ask: How does this notion inform your approach to historical, biographical subjects like Tesla?

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA: One of my biggest influences is Jean-Luc Godard, who has never made a period film. He’s so attentive to now, to contemporary reality, and at the same time he has a great grasp of history and a great concern for how history is related to, transcribed, and displayed in movies. I feel a sort of twinge when setting out to make a historical movie because there’s fundamentally something very artificial about it—but why not embrace that artificiality, why not acknowledge it?  We’re always trapped in our limited up-to-the-moment vantage points, and the moment is always dissolving, rushing past, changing shape. We can pretend, but we can’t really escape being “contemporary.” The book I reference in that Shakespeare conversation is Jan Kott’s Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, and part of what makes Shakespeare so supernatural is the way he continues to be resonant and relevant in a future he could only dream of. At any rate, part of the fun and challenge of making a historical biopic, for lack of a better word, is to leverage classic texts or quotes, to flash off of contemporary reality, to recognize how things did or didn’t turn out, and to play with the context to include points of view that reach beyond the protagonist’s self-knowledge.  

NOTEBOOK: After I saw the film, I read some reviews that expressed some surprise that Tesla, despite being based on a script you had originally written in the 80s, was rather close to Experimenter. In a sense, though, it would have been stranger if you hadn’t updated the script, and if the resulting film wasn’t closer to your recent work. But did you ever seriously consider filming the script as you’d originally written it?

ALMEREYDA: A few things changed dramatically between the writing of the script and the shooting of the film. When I wrote the first draft, I had no practical filmmaking experience, I was swimming in fantasy, the screenplay was a thoroughly extravagant epic. A science fiction film set in the past, requiring the kind of budget only Christopher Nolan could afford, which made it impossible to get off the ground. Another factor, accounting for big changes, was the arrival of a number of strong, in-depth books about Tesla published since that time, and I was able to filter or distill a lot of information that wasn’t initially available. So I didn’t have a desire to step back in time and film my 139-page script. But I did, in effect, collaborate with my younger self, and there are a few scenes that are remarkably, word for word, identical to that script. With conscious respect for my ghost self, I kept the dialogue in those scenes but changed the settings. For some reason they’re all scenes with authority figures—[George] Westinghouse and [J.P.] Morgan. The most notable, probably, is the scene on the tennis court, originally set in Morgan’s study. By transplanting it, inserting Anne Morgan and two other racket-wielding women, it’s charged with a considerably different energy. That’s an example of how I both respected the old script and threw it away. As you say, it would be weird if the movie didn’t reflect aspects of other films I’ve made in the meantime.

NOTEBOOK: The tennis scene was actually one that stuck out to me. I was curious why you had set it there. Was it just to add the presence of the three other women?

ALMEREYDA: It was intended to make Tesla’s outsider status more poignant. The scene is extrapolated from the historical record—almost all of Tesla’s dialogue throughout the movie comes from his letters and writings, and I felt scrupulous, constrained by my research.  But I’d occasionally jump free of the facts, because I wanted to make things more physical, in that scene in particular, to give a sense of Tesla having to chase money that was never going to be delivered. He wrote something like twenty letters to J.P. Morgan, and they’re increasingly desperate and pathetic. My way of dramatizing that was to pack the desperation into one extended scene, and to make him have to physically show up at Morgan’s gate. And it’s an anachronism because sure, tennis existed at the time, but we didn’t have the money to build a historically accurate tennis court. Chain link fences weren’t invented until a few decades later. But the metaphor, the imagery, felt appropriate and emotionally true. The film is not literal-minded, obviously. It’s often carefully historically accurate in many respects, but in other ways, as I’ve said to other people, it’s Drunk History. It’s a blurry, muddled, out-of-focus version of things that we can’t really know, we’ll never know. It’s not just that the person telling the story is drunk, it’s that history is inherently drunk.

NOTEBOOK: In something else you wrote a while back, a piece titled "Looking Fast," you discuss the experience of browsing through various digitized archives of photographs. The Google search material here, where [Anne Morgan] mentions how many images come up when you type in Tesla’s name or Edison’s name, seems very much related to those ideas and questions. It’s almost a meta-narrative of your research, about how technology modifies our relationship to not just Tesla, but to most any historical figure. How did these ideas affect your research process, and how did you choose to narrow things down?

ALMEREYDA: My research was sort of stratified because I value solid, footnoted accounts in books more than the loose talk that washes up on the Internet. The Internet tends to skim off the top, to be superficial and opinionated in ways that are maddening. But the Internet also became part of the film’s essence, because Anne Morgan, narrating the story, is distinctly opinionated and able to mirror that slanted, speculative approach. Tesla seems to invite conspiracy theorists and passionate partisans, but I didn’t want to take that tack entirely; I can recognize that those people are out there, and I’ll be curious to know what they'll make of the movie, how inevitably irate they might be. But my own sense of Tesla began to feel more and more concentrated, shaped by my sense of his loneliness. That was a starting point for me, as an adolescent kid relating to the lone wolf outsider, and in many ways that didn’t change. The more I knew about Tesla the more harrowing it seemed that he was so alone, compared to Edison or almost anyone who was his contemporary. To be that brilliant and that socially cut off is a powerful peculiarity. Ethan Hawke related to it especially, both in the research we shared and his interpretation of the role, and that goes beyond any kind of footnoted research or overview.

NOTEBOOK: The supporting characters in the film are unusually vivid for what you could call a biopic. There’s a certain balance in also having, opposite Tesla, this cast with Westinghouse, Edison, and even Sarah Bernhardt. Did you always intend to offset Tesla’s arc in this way?

ALMEREYDA: Another big change between the first draft and the shooting script involved the decision to make the movie more of a group portrait. The aim was to have Tesla more sharply defined by contrasts with those characters, men and women who led very different lives—equally anomalous, equally extraordinary in some respects—but who were able to make human connections that Tesla didn’t. It was essential to show that.

NOTEBOOK: There’s a really evocative line in the Colorado Springs section of the movie about how Tesla’s experiments were “like getting the ocean to sit for a portrait,” a phrase that expressed something about what I find attractive about your films in general, which is that they have a kind of restless, searching quality. Is it important for you that your films feel unresolved in this sense?

ALMEREYDA: [laughs] I really appreciate the question. I can tell you that the line is stolen, or lifted respectfully, from a John Ashbery poem called “The Painter.” It’s a line reflecting Ashbery’s understanding of what a lot of artists are up to. It’s a magnificent poem. And Ashbery, as you may know, was a master of irresolution. I got to know him a bit just before he died [in 2017]. We made a film together that’s showing on the Criterion Channel this month. Criterion funded it, but they hadn’t released it till just now, almost three years after the fact. I’m proud of it, though it’s just a fragment of what I was hoping to do when John invited me to collaborate. As an ongoing tribute to him, I slipped that line into Tesla. I’m glad it was resonant for you—I wouldn’t pretend to take credit for it, but somehow you recognized its importance to me.

NOTEBOOK: There’s another line in the film, which Eve Hewson as Anne Morgan says: “Idealism cannot walk hand in hand with capitalism. True or false?” Which is, in some sense, the central conflict of the movie in that it speculates about how ideas, inventions, and society might develop within a different framework. The relationship between these themes and certain contemporary billionaire technocrats is perhaps obvious, but was that conscious for you when you were approaching Tesla?

ALMEREYDA: Well, it was conscious enough for that question to emerge. I think what was so cheeky about asking it, on Anne Morgan’s part, is that the answer is not necessarily true or false, is it? It’s not that easy or simple to resolve. But what you describe is definitely an abiding theme. The first script was more about energy and power, and as it evolved it became more about love and money. But those may be different names for the same things, and in any case there’s an inter-connectedness. The question is meant to haunt the movie.

NOTEBOOK: The Tears for Fears song, which you include at the end, also seems to express something similar, and a lot of what the movie is about: competition, and these aspects of people trying to dominate their surroundings in some way.

ALMEREYDA: And failing, and being doomed to fail. So it’s not just about conquest. All the kingpins in the movie, they all have their experience of failure, they all have their disappointments. In my research, it was poignant for me to learn that Morgan and Edison both had wives who died young. I don’t think that’s a casual disappointment. Other kinds of victories and conquests are balanced by that, and my research kept pointing me towards various kinds of loss. There are so many corners of the canvas that could’ve been stretched if the movie were a different movie, a bigger movie. At any rate, the more I read about all these captains of industry, the more human they appear. And the karaoke scene, with that song, was meant to tap into Tesla’s humanity as well.

NOTEBOOK: One of the most intriguing scenes of the film was the reconciliation between Tesla and Edison, which never actually happened. Part of what was so interesting was that you introduce Edison’s Kinetoscope, which got me thinking about something like Noël Burch’s Life to those Shadows, and various histories of cinematic formats and representational modes that never took off for one reason or another. And your films in general, this and Experimenter, seem interested in these sort of dead ends. Do you have any particular fascination with what you could call failed technologies or projects?

ALMEREYDA: I’m not sure how you’re shaping the question since Edison did premiere the Kinetoscope at the World’s Fair, so that wasn’t a failed technology.

NOTEBOOK: I was thinking more generally about inventions or projects that don’t become standardized or dominant, but that nonetheless express certain desires of their creators or their respective eras or ages. Your treatment of these things seems to be a way of moving beyond a grand narrative arc. In the Stanley Milgram story, you look at his obedience experiments, which were his main legacy, but you constantly move to these other paths and capture the range of his practice.

ALMEREYDA: One thing that filmmakers and inventors and other dreamers and schemers have in common, is that they’re often chasing beyond what’s immediately obvious or available, looking past the immediate horizon. And this can propel a person to new heights just as surely as it can cause them to fly off the track. Tesla, at any rate, was particularly good at overreaching. One of the myths about him is that Edison and Morgan clipped his wings, blocked or stole his patents, ruined his life—but the unsettling truth is that he was very good at self-sabotage. At the height of his success—this isn’t in the movie, but it’s a curious fact—in a speech in Buffalo when the Niagara Falls project was unleashed and certified, and there was a big banquet in his honor, he got up and muddled through a speech where he made it seem as if this was all about nothing, just small fry compared to his newest ideas about wireless energy. A slap in the face to all the people who were there to tell him how great he was. It wasn’t strictly a case of false modesty, because he wasn’t a modest person—but he was completely undermining himself, staring out into the future in a way that was both visionary and blind. Curious how complicated and conflicted this man could be.

Whereas Edison—and I did include this in the movie—spent four million dollars of his own money on a truly disastrous mining experiment. Yet he was able to get over it, and ultimately land on his feet; he had a resilience Tesla couldn’t match. The reason I decided to cut the story off at 1901 is because for the next forty years, up to his death, Tesla crashed and burned through one failed or incomplete project after another. He made visionary proclamations, but the evidence suggests he didn’t have the science to justify them, to convert dream into reality. He was living in his head, and he was lost. We can save this portrait of the skeletal old man surrounded by pigeons for another movie, which I invite someone else to make as soon as is humanly possible.

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