Essentially a lost film, legendary director Charles Burnett’s 1999 feature The Annihilation of Fish mostly lived on the festival circuit (and in bootlegs) for a quarter-century until a recent miraculous restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation. Despite featuring recognizable leads in James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave, one bad review from an influential critic (who seemed strangely wary of the film’s tonal risk-taking) was enough to sink its commercial prospects for potential distributors.
A mental-illness romantic comedy of sorts, the film has a strangeness that may be potentially alienating to some, but it seems inexplicable, years later, that a work which so movingly wears its heart on its sleeve would be denied the audience it deserved. Burnett, a straight shooter, joined us over Zoom to discuss the film’s new path as well as the state of cinema and, frankly, American society today.
The Film Stage: To the best of your memory, what happened with the film following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999? Do you remember speaking to potential distributors who were skittish? It was just the one bad review from Variety that presumably sank it, right?
Charles Burnett: That was the first we heard of it after the screening in Toronto. We got a good reception there. Later on, we got the negative review. And everything sort of fell apart then. But we screened the film on the 11th, 9/11, near San Diego. And two theaters were packed and we asked the audience––because we didn’t think they were going to show up because of the thing that happened in New York––”Why were they there?” And they said, “Well, we had to be with somebody.” They felt the need to be with humanity, to be with people. And so we got good reviews from them. And then, of course, the review came out and it just killed everything. And so that was the beginning and the end of the whole distribution––things just fell apart.
Did you feel there was something in particular that the Variety review, or ones by other critics, didn’t really understand about the film?
I think there was one particular critic, Todd McCarthy, who wrote this really, really awful review. And so that was the only one that I know of that was just completely negative––like, over-the-top negative. In fact, we had a nice response from the audience [in Toronto], so that was quite a surprise. It may have something to do with Pierre Rissient, who was a good friend of Todd McCarthy’s. Pierre and I had fights throughout our relationship, and I had cast a person Pierre didn’t particularly like in The Glass Shield. So we argued constantly about that. And so, I don’t know.
This film came at the end of the ’90s stretch of your career, which was a really fascinating one––it seemed like there were really sharp contrasts between the films in certain ways. You did the aforementioned The Glass Shield, which is somewhat of a genre film; Nightjohn, a period drama for the Disney Channel; The Final Insult is practically an experimental film; and The Annihilation of Fish is a comedy. At the time, were you conscious of wanting to do different things with every project, or did you see them all as strongly connected?
You wanted to do different things. You had opportunities to do one film after another––not one film after another, but different films. So you take the chance. You never know how they’re going to turn out. That’s what happened: just trying to keep working.
The Final Insult in particular is incredible. I like to tell people that’s one of the great hidden gems on the Criterion Channel. It’s especially different than those other films you were making in the ’90s, so were you feeling the need to experiment then, cinematically speaking?
Oh, no, it wasn’t that at all. What happened was: there was this festival in Germany, Documentary X, and they had these new cameras, these new Sony cameras, and they gave a bunch of filmmakers a use of these cameras and just said to go out and do something with it. I was interested in the homeless people [of Los Angeles]. And so there were a bunch of homeless people in my neighborhood, so I went out and shot them, tried to do a story about them. That’s how that came about. It wasn’t really planned, but it was a chance to experiment with this new Sony camera, and so I put together something with the people that I met on the streets of Los Angeles and it resulted in The Final Insult. It wasn’t really a traditional release; it was just meant to demonstrate the ease of the camera.
With The Annihilation of Fish and Nightjohn you were, for the first time, directing other people’s scripts. Was that initially something you had some hesitation towards or was the connection with the material strong enough that there was no worry?
I think it was strong enough. Nightjohn was a Disney project, which was quite different from the other projects because it was more realistic and didn’t try to soft-peddle [slavery] or anything like that. They were really trying to get at the essence of slavery.
The Annihilation of Fish saw writer Anthony C. Winkler, who’s no longer with us, adapting his own novel for the screen. Was he very collaborative, since it was an adaptation of his own work, or did he give you a lot of free reign when it came time to make the actual film?
No, he was very free about it. In fact, he was exceptionally so. And he sort of leaped into me and [producer] Paul Heller’s hands to come up with a good version of his novel.
This film deals with mental illness, and it seems like that’s an issue that America in particular seems to struggle with. The Reagan administration gutting most services for the mentally ill in the early ’80s created somewhat of a crisis. Do you think there’s a fundamental issue of people just wanting to ignore mental illness? Or, with the film, were you not considering a grander social statement about that? Or were you just honing in on the characters?
We thought more about the characters, how people need companionship, you know, and both suffer from a lack of companionship and are looking at these illusions as something real. And we wanted to give them a sense that, from their perspective, there’s probably some element of truth in it––because we had these little moments where you see Fish battling his demons, and you get a hint that these things may be real when he throws them out of the window. You see that the effect of hitting a tree that this thing has a body. And so it must have some sort of relevance or realness about it.
Was there any worry on your end about properly representing the subject matter? Or was just Winkler’s material and your connection to it strong enough that there was never any worry?
There’s always worry. It’s sort of a humanist perspective. We had to make sure it didn’t look like we were making fun of it and not respecting people with issues of mental illness. So yeah: we were always concerned about that.
It can definitely be said that you’re one of the great LA filmmakers. There’s a line in the film where Lynn Redgrave’s character remarks that Hollywood is pretty boring if you’re not a movie star. With the film, were you being very conscious about depicting Los Angeles in a certain way or rather showing unseen parts of it?
Not really. We thought people could look at it and say, “Well, this is a specific element in LA.” Because right now you see homelessness that is just absurd. It’s everywhere. The kids, mothers, families, fathers––it’s just awful. When I grew up in Los Angeles it was rare that you saw this kind of magnitude of homelessness. I mean, like, to see a homeless person, bum, on the railroad tracks near Grand Central Station was sort of a rarity. It was, you know, thought of like it was an independent person who had this sort of romantic idea about homelessness or the bum, or what they call it––a hobo or whatever it was. But they weren’t looked at the same way. And they didn’t see the kind of devastation that it took on ordinary people as an escape, you know, to have an alternative way of living.
I think [Los Angeles] has changed completely now. In fact, these characters, Fish and Poinsettia, aren’t like homeless people; they have other issues that come from being overpressured and being one check away from being solvent. It’s a whole different ballgame now. It’s not the same kind of group you find in shelters downtown and on the streets of Los Angeles. I mean, you find it in Beverly Hills and the Brentwood area, people that you would never see in these areas before looking in garbage cans. That’s different. That’s a different group of people.
I mean, you sound very passionate when talking about the subject of the current homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Have you thought about making a film about it? I guess it’s tough getting stuff made now.
I would like to. It’s different from doing a The Grapes of Wrath or something like that, which is a whole different ball game altogether. It was people moving from the Depression, the Dust Bowl, into some area where there was help––the federal-work program and things like that. But now it’s just: where do you go?
You’ve been active in documentaries as of late, but do you find yourself missing fiction filmmaking?
Yeah, I do. I think there’s something more you can say than in terms of documentaries. I could be wrong, but I just feel I can contribute more and turn it into talking about the plight of people in fiction.
The Annihilation of Fish opens in limited release on Friday, February 14. Learn more here.