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Don HertzfeldtBy Sam Adams • Apr 12, 2012 • 10:30 AM

Imagine The Tree Of Life’s dawn-of-creation sequence recreated with electrical tape

and Popsicle sticks to equally dazzling effect, and you’ll have some idea of the magic

that animator Don Hertzfeldt can work with stick figures and construction paper. A

one-man operation in a medium overwhelmingly dominated by the industrial model,

Hertzfeldt has built a dedicated following over the past two decades. Early shorts like

“Ah, L’Amour” depict the cruelties of life with brutal and sometimes violent wit, but

with 2000’s “Rejected,” Hertzfeldt began to push into more complicated territory.

Ostensibly composed of rejected promo spots for the fictitious Family Learning

Channel, the Oscar-nominated short strings together a collection of hilarious non-

sequiturs that gradually grow more demented and disturbing, until the film begins to

literally collapse in on itself. With 2005’s “The Meaning Of Life,” Hertzfeldt began

mixing his pencil animations with elaborate in-camera effects, and his ambitions took

INTERVIEW

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another leap the following year with “Everything Will Be OK,” the first part of a

trilogy that closes with the just-completed “It’s Such A Beautiful Day.” Over the course

of the three films, the trilogy’s stick-figure hero, Bill, confronts an unidentified but

evidently life-threatening illness that eventually lays waste to his conscious mind, a

degradation rendered no less terrifying for the fact that Bill’s essentially a black-and-

white blob with legs. During a break from a cross-country tour showing the

completed trilogy and other films, Hertzfeldt called The A.V. Club from his home in

Austin to discuss the insanely labor-intensive process behind his films, his plans for a

feature film, and why artists shouldn’t always get what they want.

The A.V. Club: If you compare the simplicity of an early film like “Billy’s

Balloon”with the handmade cosmos of “The Meaning Of Life” or the overlapping

images of the trilogy, there’s a tremendous progression in technique. But one

thing that hasn’t changed is that your protagonists are still stick figures, which is

the crudest possible way of representing the human form. Why stick with stick

figures?

Don Hertzfeldt: I think primarily, if you try to imagine Bill’s movies, those three

chapters, with Bill as a photo-realistic, computer-generated thing with a hundred

moving parts, I think it would just be intolerable. None of this was calculated. Many

of these movies are written as I go, and a lot of it is hindsight. It’s things that kind of

feel right and intuitive. And I don’t want to make it sound like filmmakers are super-

amazing people who know what they’re doing all of the time, because most of the

time I have no idea what I’m doing. But I think there’s so much going on in the

narration, the screen is splitting up, the soundtrack is complicated, the music is

blaring, I think if the characters weren’t minimal, if you didn’t have that white

negative space, it would just be really, really difficult to watch. I think I would be

elbowing you out of the frame and writhing around with myself up there on the

screen. The minimalism of the characters, in hindsight, provides a place that you can

project yourself. I think it’s very easy to relate to a simpler character, and I’ve learned

also that, just from animating Bill through these three movies—you’ve seen the older

ones. He’s the most minimal of very minimal characters to begin with. He’s just a

circle with a couple of dots and a couple of lines, and I’ve realized how much more

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difficult that is to animate and to get a performance out of, because you’re literally

working with less. I’ve grown convinced that if one of his little eye dots, for instance,

is a millimeter this way or that way, his entire expression shifts and every line, every

dot, suddenly becomes really crucial. Every little nuance of the line is magnified

because this is all you have to work with to show a character is thoughtful or pensive

or afraid, and it’s been very careful and very interesting to work with someone like

that.

The final part of the answer is that it’s also just the way that I draw. I think it’s honest.

I’m not trying to force that style into a story that I don’t think would benefit from it. I

didn’t study animation, I didn’t go to Cal Arts, I didn’t take a lot of life-drawing

classes. I went to film school wanting to be Stanley Kubrick like everybody else and

do live-action. I sort of fell into animation accidentally, and it snowballed. But my

heroes are still live-action guys. I still feel like a live-action filmmaker who thinks in

live-action, but just happens to draw.

AVC: Unless you’re Stanley Kubrick, animation is the only way you can spend

years working with no practical limitations.

DH: You can literally put anything on the screen. Some people would call it the purest

way of making a movie, because you are literally building every single frame from

nothing. There’s something amazing about that as well. But you will spend two years

in a dark little room somewhere, working on a short. It’s very easy to lose time; it’s

very easy to get lost in that. But when it’s released and it’s out there, there’s not much

that feels as satisfying.

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AVC: One of the things that’s fascinating about animation is that because you’re

starting with a blank canvas, every film has its own distinct style, where with

live action if you film two people talking in a room, it’s generally going to look

like two people talking in a room. The Animation Show programs you and Mike

Judge put together were a great demonstration of that diversity.

DH: I think that’s what attracts me to shows like The Animation Show and festivals

like that as well, where if I asked you to draw me a guy on a bicycle, it would look a

lot different than me drawing a guy on a bicycle, different than someone else on the

street drawing a guy on a bicycle. Your lines, it’s your personality. You bring

something very unique to that. Because the drawings look so different, each one is

telling a story before your story even starts. If you look at a Tim Burton drawing or a

Mike Judge drawing or a Bill Plympton drawing, as soon as you see the artwork,

there’s a worldview, before the narrative starts. That’s an amazing thing. It’s not often

I get that from a lot of the new computer-animated films, and that’s a major

drawback, I think. I’m not sure where in the process it gets lost, but if you ask a

computer animator—and I don’t want to throw computer animation under the bus at

all, it’s just an example—“Draw me a guy on a bicycle,” you’re going to get a perfectly

rendered bicycle. It’s a noun. I’m not getting anything else from that artwork. It’s

something I miss, and I think that’s the charm of hand-drawn animation. You get not

only the story, but this amazing, unique line art that you can’t replace and that is

identifiable.

AVC: A lot of computer animation is plugging different variables into texturing

algorithms and so forth. It’s almost a different medium at that point.

DH: There are amazing things that can be done there that you can’t do other ways. It’s

become sort of twisted into a competition, a versus sort of thing, and I’ve never

understood that. It seems like we have 100 years of great, amazing film technology,

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and I don’t know why there’s a desire to throw any of our tools out of the toy chest.

When digital came around, the people who were selling that technology turned it into

film versus digital and 3-D versus 2-D—there can be only one. It was sort of shoved

down a lot of artists’ throats, and before you know it became, “Well, we can’t have

both. We can’t have hybrids.” What we’ve been doing over the years, and I think a lot

of artists are now doing this, too, I’m still drawing on paper, I’m still animating and

shooting with these 35-millimeter cameras from 60 years ago, but we’re editing

digitally and doing the sound digitally. There are very easy ways to make things play

well together.

AVC: It’s a practical issue as well as an aesthetic one now, since we’re looking at a

time when there’s simply no film stock being made to shoot on.

DH: I think there’s this illusion, and I think it’s a part of the sales pitch, that digital is

easier, and that computer animation is easier. It’s certainly more convenient. These

cameras I have are 800 pounds, they don’t move very easily, and film is fragile, it’s

expensive, there’s processing. There’s no argument that it’s less convenient. But when

it comes to animation, there really are no shortcuts. Computer animators work just as

hard as someone like me, and I think that’s a big misconception. I think a lot of the

public, when they see a special effect these days, when they see animation these days,

the immediate assumption is—it’s not like, “Wow, how did they do that,” it’s, “Oh, they

just used a computer.” As if there’s a “Make Art” button on a computer, and it’s just

this magical little glowing box that nobody knows how it works but it just spits out

these amazing images. I think computer animators get the short end of the stick a lot

of the time, because again, there just are no shortcuts. Whether I’m shooting with

these cameras or whether I’m sitting there with a mouse, it’s still this grueling, frame-

by-frame process, telling a story in extreme slow motion.

What I do love about the camera is, for these films, for Bill’s movies in particular, I’m

getting visuals that I would never have imagined. When I work with Photoshop or

digital tools, it’s really great and very convenient for when I know exactly what I

want—for when I know exactly where to artificially place everything on the screen.

But most of the time, I don’t know what I want until I see it. And I don’t know if

filmmakers should always get what they want, because so many times your first idea

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doesn’t work, or it looks terrible, or it just doesn’t play right, and you have to roll with

the punches and think and think and think and get these alternate ideas, and those

are almost always better than my first idea. It’s always the blessing in disguise, these

happy accidents that wind up improving the movie. What these cameras do, you’ve

seen the films, there’s so many optical effects with images marrying and multiple

exposures—so much of “It’s Such A Beautiful Day” was shot through magnifying

glasses and broken glass and plastic sheets of diffusion—and when you’re playing

with light leaks and everything on top of it, you get these images that sitting in front

of a monitor, not only would I not know how to make it happen, it would take forever

and I would never have visualized it. It’s like putting your images in a box full of light

and color and shaking it up and getting it back from the lab, and you just get these

amazing experimental things. So that’s why these movies, at least, could not have

been made digitally.

Like you say, it’s a strange thing now where the film seems like it’s going extinct. I

think people, for live-action at least, will be shooting film for at least 50 years. There

are enough guys like Spielberg and Scorsese and cinematographers who insist on

shooting on film, and there are enough young people who want to be like them to

keep it going. I think projecting on film is not long for this earth, and a tour like the

one I’m on now, which is 35-millimeter, this might be the last time I really tour the

country and take advantage of that. But the cameras I use are from the ’40s, from the

’50s, and they still run, I’m guessing, as well as they did back then. They’re very

simple machines—an electrician could probably figure it out in a couple of hours—

and I get these beautiful images from them. I never imagined that they would live

longer than the film. One day they’re just going to be these amazing conversation

pieces. As of now, I have two in the house right now, and they look like torture

devices from the 1800s, and I can’t imagine having to explain what these even were in

30, 40 years.

AVC: You do your visual effects in-camera, using multiple exposures, which

means you don’t have any idea what it’s going to look like until the film comes

back from that lab. For something like “The Meaning Of Life,” where you spent

weeks creating the orbits of dozens of separate stars, is it nerve-wracking to

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think you might spend all that time and then end up with an unusable mess?

DH: You’re shooting blind. You’re shooting a film, there’s no video playback. So much

of it is math and timing. If you go through those special features on DVDs, you see a

lot of those pages of camera notes, and pages and scribbles with numbers all over

them.

AVC: Plus signs and parentheses and numbers and so forth.

DH: Exactly, all of that stuff. They’re camera notes and timing notes. For something

like the “Everything Will Be OK” films, when the screen is splitting up, it’s

choreographing when each little window of action pops up and moves away. Each

one of those I’m shooting through a little miniature hole in a scrap of black

construction paper that’s right in front of the lens. When I’m working on one of those

movies, there’s piles of scraps of black construction paper all over the studio floor,

like some little depressed kid’s art room. I’m just trying to find the right hole, the right

shapes. When they open and close and zip around, it’s just stop-motion animation on

a little scale. And each window is a separate camera pass. So when you look, and

they’re probably not very self-explanatory, but all those camera notes for those films,

I’m choreographing the entrance of every frame of where those interact and zip

around. For something like “The Meaning Of Life,” the shots with the suns—it might

say on the DVD, I can’t remember now—I would say there’s dozens of camera passes,

if not more than a hundred separate camera passes.

[pagebreak]

AVC: You said 112 camera passes or something like that.

DH: Exposing each different element. It’s a movie that I’m happy with, and it’s a

movie that I’m glad I’m done working on. I feel like I’ve since gotten smarter about

getting more out of other areas, getting more out of the camera rather than pounding

it all out on the art desk, and getting more out of the soundtrack than pounding it out

of the camera. It was a fantastic learning curve, but it wasn’t the best environment

for making a movie, because I’m so much more comfortable with writing as I go, and

changing the story as I go, and improving as I go, because I know I’ll be in a dark little

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room for two years, give or take, and so by the time I’ve written and animated this

one scene several weeks later, I know I’ll have these other ideas, and I can put those

in, and I can hang those on the skeleton. “The Meaning Of Life” was a movie that was

pretty much set in stone from the beginning, and there’s not a lot to improvise there

with that story because it was more visual, so I wasn’t able to fire off of my best

cylinders because it became more about the technique than about the writing. And

the writing is really the only thing that keeps me happy and keeps me getting to the

art desk every single day for that long. It’s got to be something that if it still makes me

laugh, it’ll make somebody else laugh. If it still makes me think of something, maybe

it’ll have something of value to somebody else. So that’s why when I got to the Bill

movies, it was like a vacation. I could finally write and feel a little more creative and

flesh out the movies the way I like to do.

AVC: There’s the line in “I Am So Proud Of You” about one of Bill’s ancestors

“strangling a rock in a fit of religious excitement,” which is good enough to make

any novelist jealous. It’s almost unfair.

DH: I’m not the kind of animator—and again, I’m not classically trained, and

sometimes I feel strange referring to myself as an animator, because it would be a

disservice to people who studied—but I’m not the kind of animator who’s going to get

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a kick out of figuring out a new way to make a leaf fall from a tree. It’s got to be the

writing. I love editing, I love doing the sound work, I love working with these old

cameras, obviously. But to me, the animation is the busywork. It’s grinding out, it’s

connecting the dots that I have to do to tell this story. But the only reason I have that

energy is the writing. It’s those ideas that just pop in when you’re in traffic.

AVC: Professional animators often get irritated when mainstream reviewers

focus on the technique of an animated feature, when they’re much more

concerned with story.

DH: That’s very true to a degree. I’ve always felt sort of apart from the animation

community, maybe because I didn’t go to school and maybe because my heroes are

live-action guys, I don’t know. But whenever I do go to an animation blog or pick up

an animation magazine and go through it, or even if there’s a New York Times article

about animation, I almost never see anything about story. It’s almost always about

technology. Nobody writes about writing. That’s such a strange thing. It’s like you

were saying, it’s a medium of film that’s separated only by form and technique. So

many people still think of it as a genre, which doesn’t make any sense at all. You often

find articles about live-action screenwriting and story and famous live-action

screenwriters, but I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything about animation writing. I

don’t know if maybe it’s even important; maybe you shouldn’t think of animation as

writing for animation but just writing. I don’t understand the divide. It’s just a

strange thing that we do.

AVC: The way the Bill films are put together isn’t straightforward narrative,

more like a kind of associative logic. How do they come together, and how much

of the structure is planned in advance? The only person who’s credited other

than you on all three films is an editor, Brian Hamblin, but presumably it’s not a

matter of choosing takes the way a live-action editor would.

DH: He’s an old friend from film school, and he works over at Sony ImageWorks now.

He’s credited as the editor, but I would give him the bigger credit of post-production

supervisor. He’s an editor in a sense that he has the terribly boring task of assembling

the films based on all of my nonsense notes. Brian won’t come into the picture until

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the movie’s nearly finished, after it’s been written, shot, and I’ll have the footage that I

can send to him, and based on my notes—this frame connects to this, take this frame,

put this scene over here—he just puts everything together based on what I send him,

and it never makes any sense because he doesn’t have the soundtrack yet. They’re

silent movies until they’re shot and cut, and then I have the final form that I can start

putting the sound in. So he doesn’t know what we’re working on until I send him a

soundtrack after the picture has already been logged. So he really is the unsung hero

of all these films, because he’s an expert on all the latest digital media. He makes sure

that the neg cut goes smoothly when we conform the actual film negative to match

what we’ve been doing digitally. It’s just all these things that I’m completely ignorant

of and would be lost without. So it’s easier to credit him as editor, but it’s really all of

these things. But unfortunately for him, they’re uncreative things. It’s a technical job

that I’m very, very grateful he’s been able to do. So anyway, beyond that, you’re

asking creatively how they come together, right?

AVC: Yes.

DH: Well, I touched on it before, about how you’re just sitting in traffic and you get

this image. So much of my writing, at least, the worst thing I can do is sit in front of a

blank page, like the cliché, and just be like, “Today, I’m going to be creative!” Nothing

really good ever comes out of that. Sometimes you have to, sometimes you’re on a

deadline, but when you sit and force it, it just doesn’t work. It’s almost like vomiting

or like a bodily function. You go when you have to go. For me at least, I have Post-It

Notes all over the place. And you’re doing the dishes, you’re in the shower, you’re in

traffic, and there’s the ending to the movie, there’s this image. Sometimes it’s like in

“A Beautiful Day,” where he’s having some tests done, and it says he has the image of

a seahorse and a fallen tree, and it’s just something that just comes fully formed like

that. There’s no reason. But there’s something poetic about it, and there’s very little

rewriting beyond the initial spark, and I will go find a way to shoot a falling tree.

When it comes time for me to actually write, it’s not so much about sitting down and

sweating it out; it’s just gathering all these random thoughts and putting them in some

sort of form.

I think every writer will take things from their mind, take things they’re afraid of,

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things that they’d be researching anyway. I’ve always been interested in memory loss

and neurology, and Carl Sagan and Oliver Sacks, and all these case studies. It’s just

this mass of things that I want to see in a movie. So you put them in this form, and

then visually that will tug it in different directions, too. I don’t want to spoil the movie

for a lot of people who haven’t seen it yet, but some of the, I’ll refer to them as the

Roger Rabbit shots, when he’s interacting with live-action—I won’t reveal which shot

it was that was the first I did, because I don’t want to give the scenes away—but the

first shot of that I experimented on just came out looking so much better than I

thought it might. The image married so much better than I thought, and so I started

pushing more in that direction, better visuals, and the writing went that way. The

ending to the movie, which I definitely won’t reveal, it was a similar situation. I was a

year and a half into the production, and the other bits of the movie were sort of

improving, and the ending that I had just wasn’t going to cut it anymore, so I added

on this five-minute extra thing in that direction, because by then, I knew that with the

visuals that I could pull it off.

A similar thing happened in “I Am So Proud Of You.” The movie grows and life

happens, and it goes in directions you weren’t expecting, and the visuals come back

looking different than you thought. The ending for that one was originally the ending

that I thought might take place for the third one. I had in these notes what I thought

might happen in chapter three while working on the second one, and I wound up

cannibalizing it all. So I started chapter three with very little. I knew he’d wake up in

the hospital after having a seizure, and that was really it. I guess overall it’s kind of

stupid to make a trilogy without knowing fully where it’s going to go, other than

vague notions. But it really kind of came together like that. I think when you’re

working primarily alone, for that long, for such a small budget, it is one small luxury

where you can fix it as you go. It’s not like a big-budget production where there’s a

story department, a background department, a music department, and if a year into

the production something’s just not working, you can’t really fix it unless you’re going

to screw up all these other people’s jobs. You can’t add on new scenes. You can’t

dramatically change something without costing a lot of money. You’ll get yelled at. So

it’s one small nice thing. You don’t have to release it until it feels right. So many of my

friends who make big-budget stuff, they don’t often feel like they finish a movie as

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much as it’s released. It’s taken away from them. Of all the grueling things of working

this small, it is nice to have that one thing to hang on to.

AVC: There was a pretty long gap between chapters two and three, broken only

by “Wisdom Teeth,” which seems like a deliberate throwback to the simplicity

and humor of the early films. Was that a deliberate palate cleanser?

DH: It was. That was me blowing off some steam. I did “Everything Will Be OK” and “I

Am So Proud Of You” back-to-back. And I’ve been in production on something

constantly since I was 17. I’ve never had a break, partially because every movie’s

necessarily had to pay for the next one. I could never take a break, I could never

relax, because if I wasn’t working on something, now, I wouldn’t have anything to

release next year, and I’d have no income. So, I needed to do something stupid and

goofy again. It was perfect timing for that. I kind of blew off some steam there, and

then I felt more ready to do the third one.

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AVC: “It’s Such A Beautiful Day” wraps up the Bill trilogy, but it also feels like a

transitional work in the way that “Rejected” did, where by the end you seem to

have broken through to a new level. There’s a lyricism to the coda that’s not like

anything you’ve done before. Does it feel like a breakthrough in retrospect?

DH: I guess so. It’s just constant pushing, exploring something different. Going back to

“Rejected,” I think everybody, myself included especially, would be have been really

bored if I did “Rejected” sequels for 12 years. I think of the trilogy the same way. It’s

going in different directions. And I wanted to make sure first of all that each chapter

can stand alone as its own piece. Like if you didn’t see one or two, you could still see

three and not be confused or annoyed. And you need to justify their existence. You

can’t just keep treading water and doing the same thing over and over. So it’s just

constantly trying to push in different directions and do something different. I think I

still feel like I’m learning with every film. I think when I was doing stuff like “Billy’s

Balloon” and the student films, I wanted to make films like these, but I just wasn’t

clever enough to know how to put them on the screen yet. Through something like

“The Meaning Of Life” through “Rejected,” you get a little better, you get a little closer

to those ideas. I think these films are just building on top of that and whatever’s next,

maybe I’ll get a little closer still. But it’s the carrot on the end of the stick. You’re never

going to make a perfect movie. You’re never going to get 100 percent of what was in

your head. But you get a little closer every time.

Having the freedom to write as I go is the only reason those films are what they are,

because my initial drafts are terrible. I guess I should put it this way: If anything, if

any of the shorts for the past 17 years had to have been pitched, like in L.A., in the

traditional process, not a single one of them would have been made. They’re terrible

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on paper. They only work when I’m in there with the camera, and each one has had

to pay for the next one. I would like to do a feature film next, and we’re getting

started in that direction. The script is nearly finished, but it’s going to need a big

budget, and it’s going to need a big crew, and I’m looking forward to not drawing

everything by myself and collaborating. I’m really curious where this thing’s going to

get made. With the shorts, it’s that incubation period, I’m so used to that. And I think

it’s going to have to be reversed now, so the script needs to be perfect before I even

start. I’m well aware that I can’t work the same way under the system. It’s going to be

interesting. So much of writing is that inexplicable exploration. And I think so much

is also about rewriting. The hardest part is the first draft. Getting that out, and then

the rewriting, that’s really 90 percent of the work, and that’s where the best stuff

comes from.

AVC: It’s truly been amazing over the years watching not just your abilities but

your audience grow. That a solo animator who’s never made a feature can sell

out multiple screenings across the country really speaks to what’s possible for

an independent filmmaker these days.

DH: The most rewarding thing has been the fact that each film has paid for the next,

that each one has sort of snowballed. It’s entirely based on DVD sales, ticket sales to

tours like these, and people literally paying for the next movies. I think they’re aware

of that. It’s a lot different than buying something from a distributor or buying

something from a corporation that’s going to take 40 percent, and the artist gets

nothing. You don’t feel like you’re supporting anything. I think people like that, they

like knowing that when they buy a DVD, they’re literally paying for the next movie.

When they buy a ticket, it’s not going to some strange third party’s Ferrari

somewhere. It’s actually going to something that they like.

AVC: Apart from just handing you money, it’s as direct as support can get. It’s not

like you buy a ticket for a movie and figure some fraction of that price might

make it back to the filmmakers, or that showing your support might enable films

like that to be made in the future.

DH: It’s as direct as possible, and that has been fantastic. It’s been a long slog through

7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 15/22

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• Reply •

Wild World of Sporks • 2 years ago

For the love of God, and all that is holy, MY ANUS IS BLEEDING. 35

• Reply •

kate monday • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

yaaay! 15

• Reply •

hamster_in_a_butt • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

Tuesday's coming, did you bring your coat? 12

Jerglar • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

imachie porkchoppy in my MOOTS!

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making these. I often don’t know where most of my 20s went. I have very few

memories of working on a lot of these movies, because so much is repetition, so much

is routine, where you’re just seven days a week, drawing little round heads, and your

brain stops paying attention because there’s nothing remarkable going on after a

while. But at the end of the day, it’s every filmmaker’s dream to just be able to make

the movies that they want to make and have an audience waiting for them. I just feel

so lucky, and I think that’s a big part of the reason I work so hard, because I feel

stupid when I’m not making a movie. I feel stupid when I’m not in production on

something, because this is such a rare thing. I just feel dumb if I’m squandering it and

not doing something.

AVC: That’s a nice note to end on.

DH: In the body of the article, you should just quote, “I feel dumb.”

Chris Hardwick Now, Now’s Cacie Dalager

7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 16/22

• Reply •

imachie porkchoppy in my MOOTS! 5

• Reply •

Double-Hawk • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

Fuck! 6

• Reply •

Arthur Edens and His Bread • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

I'm feeling fat and sassy! 9

• Reply •

Wright Lawyer • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

I LIVE IN A GIANT BUCKET. 9

• Reply •

Spacemonkey Mafia • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

I live in a giant bucket! 3

• Reply •

Kirk Cameron Left Me Behind • 2 years ago Spacemonkey Mafia

You both do! 3

• Reply •

Raymond Luxury-Yacht • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

I am the queeeeeeen of France! 5

• Reply •

Spacemonkey Mafia • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

@Kirk Cameron Left Me Behind Good thing then the bucket's sogiant. I've never even seen @Wright Lawyer in there!

3

• Reply •

BobbyBrownGoesDown • 2 years ago hamster_in_a_butt

I am a baNAna!

I tried, but there is really no way to encapsulate with the written word theway that phrase is spoken

6

• Reply •

TheFakeInspectorHound • 2 years ago BobbyBrownGoesDown

You came pretty damn close, @BobbyBrownGoesDown . I'd gowith:

Iiii-am-a baNAAAAna. (hyphens to indicate tempo shift.)

Double-Hawk • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

Everybody dance!

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7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 17/22

• Reply •

Everybody dance! 5

• Reply •

rip van winkle • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

THE MONKEY POURED COFFEE IN MY BOOTS 4

• Reply •

Miller • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

Not from Rejected but the Hertzfeldt line that most often goes through my head:

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTS! 1

• Reply •

Guest • 2 years ago Miller

IT'S LIKE I CAN TOUCH YOU! 3

• Reply •

glazomaniac • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

the fact that this is the first comment means there is a god, and s/he's a stickfigure animator.

2

• Reply •

much more cleverer than the po • 2 years ago Wild World of Sporks

Mah spoon is too big!

I am a banana! 1

• Reply •

kate monday • 2 years ago

Now with more sodium! Sweet Jesus! 16

• Reply •

Arthur Edens and His Bread • 2 years ago kate monday

And how! 6

• Reply •

Wright Lawyer • 2 years ago kate monday

I'm a consumer whore! 12

• Reply •

Is the space pope reptilian • 2 years ago Wright Lawyer

and how! 8

• Reply •

Guest • 2 years ago Wright Lawyer

I have that shirt.

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7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 18/22

• Reply •

Raymond Luxury-Yacht • 2 years ago kate monday

Ballin' user name and picture, @kate monday. 1

• Reply •

kate monday • 2 years ago Raymond Luxury-Yacht

I've had the account for months, and then today multiple people recognizethe MathNet reference :)

yay, nerds!

Some folks in the Hackers thread were excited about it too. 2

• Reply •

Raymond Luxury-Yacht • 2 years ago kate monday

I bet some of the folks commenting on the Star Trek reviews wouldget the reference. That place is full of nerds.

(brandishes calculator) Freeze! Mathemeticians! 1

• Reply •

urgh • 2 years ago kate monday

Ha, I actually clicked on your name yesterday because I was like,"Wow, MathNet! I've never seen this person before!" And I wasgoing to comment until I noticed that you have been here formonths so I thought, "Ahh, somebody probably already pointedthat out...."

As Raymond said, excellent choice. George Frankly showed up onDollhouse two years ago as the original Dollhouse doctor and Igeeked out about that.

1

• Reply •

Presuming Ed • 2 years ago kate monday

Now with vitamin C!

• Reply •

urgh • 2 years ago

Awesome interview! I love Don Hertzfeldt!

I got to see his touring Bill trilogy a few weeks ago. (Is it over now? If not, catch it in yourcity!) It's Such A Beautiful Day had really fun camera effects. I could watch a randomHertzfeldt-drawn old man pick up and put down a real-life pay phone receiver all day.

1

• Reply •

ElDan • 2 years ago urgh

I bought a ticket for Atlanta tonight, then forgot about it and made plans to go toa show in Athens tonight. I'm so bummed.

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7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 19/22

• Reply •

Miller • 2 years ago urgh

Great interview, the suggestion for the pull quote at the end is a perfect capper.

• Reply •

The Hobo Life • 2 years ago urgh

Yeah this was a really good interview. Was there a link to buy tickets to his showsor DVDs or anything? I didn't see one anywhere.

• Reply •

Guest • 2 years ago The Hobo Life

http://www.bitterfilms.com/his website: you can get DVDs and stuff there to support him. I'm holdingout hope for a bluray of the whole trilogy or something.

The Bitter Films Vol. 1 dvd is worth it, I have watched it all the waythrough many times.

• Reply •

jerkheadface • 2 years ago urgh

I missed him in Tampa last week and now I feel bad.

• Reply •

simonillyan • 2 years ago

my SPOON is TOO BIG. 19

• Reply •

Bitter Dregs • 2 years ago simonillyan

I'm a banana! 13

• Reply •

flowsthead • 2 years ago simonillyan

@simonillyan @Bitter Dregs Those are my favorite quotes, and ones that I think of all the time in unrelatedscenarios. Every once in a while when I see a banana or spoon, or someonementions them in conversation, the relevant one of those quotes will pop up in myhead.

The only sad thing is when I say them out loud no one gets them. 3

• Reply •

simonillyan • 2 years ago flowsthead

In my house, we whip out that quote every time we empty the dishwasher.

• Reply •

Gumbercules • 2 years ago

I am feeling fat, and sassy. 11

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7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 20/22

• Reply • 11

• Reply •

Miller • 2 years ago Gumbercules

Thank you for the proper comma placement. That quote isn't right without thepause.

7

• Reply •

Double-Hawk • 2 years ago

The shot toward the end of REJECTED of the two figures trying to pound their way outof the paper is still one of my favorite images of all time

7

• Reply •

Miller • 2 years ago Double-Hawk

Yep, that and the final blur and freeze frame. I've never seen something be both asfunny and terrifying as that movie.

• Reply •

Sam Adams • 2 years ago Miller

I'm glad I'm not the only person it scared the shit out of. Not an easy oneto explain: "There are these stick figures, right? And they start bleeding?And then you confront the utter meaninglessness of life and the emptinessof the universe."

8

• Reply •

Miller • 2 years ago Sam Adams

"They're trapped in a collapsing and indifferent world, but there'salso a guy with a big spoon! So it's not all bad."

6

• Reply •

Headache With Pictures • 2 years ago Sam Adams

Just thinking about the dancing, ass-bleeding puff once made melaugh so hard that I nearly crashed my car.

The next time I thought about it, though, I called to schedule acolonoscopy.

Talk about funny and terrifying... 1

• Reply •

mrs. izzard • 2 years ago

Give me your money. Give me your money. Give me your money.

Hertzfeldt's Meaning of Life > Python Meaning of Life. Deal with it. 4

• Reply •

Abraham Sandwich • 2 years ago mrs. izzard

Boy do I love fish sticks! I could eat them all day long! 4

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7/4/2014 Don Hertzfeldt · Interview · The A.V. Club

http://www.avclub.com/article/don-hertzfeldt-72307 21/22

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• Reply •

LandoftheHotKnives • 2 years ago

I am the queen of France! 2

• Reply •

Quiet Wyatt • 2 years ago LandoftheHotKnives

For a long time (because I had the cruddy Spike'n'Mike dub), I thought that linewas,"I'm feelin' fancy!"

Which also totally works in context.

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