Aaron Katz is the director of Dance Party USA and Quiet City, both of which are screening as part of The New Talkies festival at the IFC Center. The former plays Tuesday and Wednesday; Quiet City opens on Wednesday for a week-long run. Both films will be released by Benten Films as a two-disc DVD set in January 2008. I love the intersection of high and low in this interview: Aaron talks about Antonioni in the same breath as Can’t Hardly Wait, and puts Ornette Colman on the same list as Mario Kart. He also discusses the pros and cons of the Mumblecore label, and offers up some intriguing details about his next project. All that, and much more, is waiting for you on the other side of the jump.

We start each installment of The Media Diet with the desert island question: you’re packing your suitcase to live out your days on a remote, tropical island that somehow, miraculously, is also home to a full state-of-the art entertainment system and wired for high-speed internet. Which books, movies, records, video games, websites, magazines, etc do you take with?

I’ll go through these in order.

I think I’d lean towards having more books than anything else, or books and music maybe.  Anyway I’d probably try to take several unread P.G. Wodehouse books.  Most Wodehouse books are equally fun to read so I’d want to go with ones I hadn’t read instead of ones I had.  Also I think I’d bring Travels With Charlie, because that’s my favorite book at the moment.  I would also want some Raymond Chandler books.  And as many Lester Bangs essays a possible.  Although they might be depressing because they’re usually inspiring and it’d be hard to make the most of that inspiration on a desert island.

Music, like I said, would at least be the second most important thing for me to have, if not equal to books.  If it was really up to me I’d bring a massive collection with me, but for the sake of keeping it short I’ll limit it to five.

1. James Brown - Star Time (this is cheating since it’s a collection, but since I’m making the rules here I’ll allow it)
2. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (for me this album could be listened to a thousand times without getting old)
3. Ornette Coleman - Free Jazz (I don’t know that I understand this album fully and with all the time I’d have on the desert island I might be able to get to the bottom of it)
4. Elliott Smith - Either/Or
5. The Cure - Disintegration

I’m very tempted to add something on impulse that I’m listening to right now which is the album Stairs and Elevators by Heartless Bastards.

I don’t know that I’d really want video games, but I guess they would help pass the time.  I’d go with NBA Jam for Super Nintendo and Colonization or Civilization for the computer.  If I had a friend on the island I might want Mario Kart.

I’d like to have access to ESPN Fantasy Baseball and box office tracking sites.

Do the magazines come on a regular basis?  I wouldn’t mind having a New Yorker subscription.  Possibly also some back issues of National Geographic.

Both Dance Party, USA and Quiet City feature long, sprawling party scenes. What are your favorite movie party scenes? Are there any that were specifically influential?

The two parties in movies that come to mind are Can’t Hardly Wait and La Notte.  In the former example the whole film is one long party scene, which I think is really great.  I remember the first time I watched it was over at my first real girlfriend’s house.  I’ve watched it many times since and I still love it.  La Notte was kind of an inspiration for Quiet City, but there weren’t any particular things lifted from the party.

By day, you’re a film projectionist. What was the last film you watched for pleasure (or, at least, outside of work), and what did you think?

I saw SuperBad this weekend. I thought it was great. Michael Cera is amazing. He’s really natural and he has a ridiculous sense of comic timing. Even when he’s just in the background of a shot he’s funny! The movie in general is good too, but I think there’s quite a few missteps with the police officers. And when it gets down to dramatic moments I don’t always buy it.

I read an interview you did with indieWIRE around the time Dance Party premiered in NY, in which you talked about all these projects that you had in mind in a variety of different genres — a Western, a comedy involving “an airplane traffic jam.” Are any of these in progress? Is there a specific genre that you’d most like to work in, if you had unlimited resources?

I wasn’t kidding about the western or the airplane traffic jam movie. I would love to do both of those if I had unlimited resources.  The western would be based on the first half of this book called Flashman and the Redskins.  It’s this really bitter and really funny account of a  Victorian era British war (supposed) hero (he’s actually a coward and a cad) and his adventures in the American west during the summer or 1849.  I have done nothing whatever to pursue this.  Mostly it’s just a book I love that I think I could make a great movie out of.  To put it simplistically, imagine Barry Lyndon meets Black Adder in the American west.

The airplane traffic jam would be just part of a larger thing that focuses on an ultra modern airport that just opened.  It would sort of focus on one guy stuck there waiting for his plane, but it would be pretty wide in scope and we would see a lot of things going awry.  The whole thing would be kind of like the beginning of M. Hulot’s Holiday where the people have to keep moving to different train platforms. Again, I have done nothing at all to pursue this beyond having it as an idea.

What I am actually working on is a movie that takes place in the 1970’s in a medium sized Midwestern town.  It’s about a black jazz drummer who is friends with a white country musician.  They both play in house bands and spend their days sleeping too late and drinking in the afternoon until they have to go to their gigs.  Eventually the drummer reconnects with an old girlfriend and the country musician’s niece shows up and they all go to hang out at a river together.  I just finished a first draft of that a couple weeks ago. I’ve been very busy with Quiet City stuff, but I’m hoping to get going on the second draft soon and then start working on trying to get it made.

I posed a question to Aaron and Andrew from Benten Films last week, and Andrew’s answer sparked some friction in the comments. I thought, since Benten will soon release your films, it would make sense to also pose the question to you: Even before the New Talkies festival came about, your films had been grouped in with the “Mumblecore” movement. It seems as though a lot of people are uncomfortable with both the idea of grouping these films together, and with the name Mumblecore itself. Is it a legitimate movement, or is it just a nice hook for feature stories and film festivals? As a filmmaker, is there more upside to having your films tossed in the Mumblecore bucket, or more downside?

In some ways it is a legitimate movement enabled by the accessibility of technology and an interest in exploring the world in our immediate vicinity.  Then also we all met each other at festivals and liked each other’s work and many of us became friends.  So it’s easy to look at that and start to see patterns and connections.  On the other hand I feel like most of the articles written recently are overly simplistic.

Critics are looking for all of the films to fit in neatly with each other when I think they don’t at all. Dance Party and Quiet City have a lot more to do with my friends from North Carolina School of the Arts who worked on the films than they do with Mutual Appreciation or LOL.  Joe is in Quiet City, but really Hannah is the only movie that connects everyone the way that the articles are talking about. There’s a lot of talk about collaboration between the different directors, but to me the more interesting thing to talk about is collaboration between the crews of each movie.  Brendan McFadden and Ben Stambler, who produced Quiet City, and Andrew Reed, who shot Quiet City, are much closer to the creative process than anyone else.  A lot of what we were able to accomplish was the result of us all being friends and understanding one another.

I think that right now there is more of an upside though.  Giving newspapers something to write about is always helpful, especially when you’re don’t have money to spend on publicity.  I think together we’ve been able to get covered in a way that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Also it’s good for audiences who might have seen The Puffy Chair or Funny Ha Ha and are therefore more willing to see Quiet City.  It’s good for distribution, too.  I think that Mumblecore emboldened IFC Center to take a chance on programming films that might have been a hard sell.  Later on Benten, who’s putting out Quiet City, Dance Party, and LOL on DVD, will have titles that are more bankable.  Those are all good things. In order to be able to continue making movies you need to be able to find an audience and have it make financial sense for people to want to put money into production.