Interview: Matt Smith talks about his Last Year with the Nuns
Long time Seattle actor and monologist Matt Smith tells the story of growing up on Capitol Hill in a year of his life, 1966 in the new movie My Last Year With the Nuns. It was a generation removed from the Capitol Hill that many in Seattle are nostalgic for, and two generations from what it is becoming right now. It is often very funny and occasionally discomforting. My Last Year With the Nuns was one of my favorite movies when it premiered at SIFF 2014 but is finally getting a proper release in Seattle starting this weekend with a week-long run at the Northwest Film Forum. The film was directed by Seattle theater veteran Bret Fetzer and shot by Genius Award winning cinematographer Ben Kasulke.
To learn more about this film, I met the star and author, Matt Smith for an interview. We met during that weird time after Christmas and before New Year’s, in a downtown Seattle skyscraper.
Did I also mention that he played the character of Chuck on “Nature Walk with Chuck” on “Almost Live”?
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I guess we should probably start at the beginning. Can you talk about how My Last Year With the Nuns came to be?
That’s a good question. I wrote it about 19 years ago. I had done a solo piece with Bret Fetzer called Helium about living in Japan. I told him I had another idea and that I’m sure there’s here about how Capitol Hill, the way it was. Over the course of a year, I would sit with him. I started telling stories.
Through the course of the year, we turned it into this piece about what it was like growing up in 1966 as a white, Catholic kid on the north side of Roy Street, which was redlined by the bank at the time. You couldn’t get a loan to buy a house if you lived on the north side of Roy Street if you were black. It became clear to me, in college and beyond, that not everyone had a comparable situation where they grew up.
I’m still living in that same house with my ninety-three year old mom, and my niece and her kid. He’s now a fifth generation Capitol Hill kid.
Anyway, these stories started coming out and they’re very interesting stories. It started as a play, of course, about twenty years ago. We took all these stories and combined them. If I told stories about what really happened to me, it wasn’t all that interesting. I said that a lot of things that I did, but my best friend Bill did them. But when I told them, it didn’t sound as good as telling them as if I had done those things. He was more of a troublemaker and I was more of an observer, (laughs) so I could later recount the stories for the masses, so I could watch him push it too far.
I was the youngest in my family and he was the oldest in his family, so he had no sense of when to stop. Youngest kids know exactly when to stop and the oldest kids don’t. To make it interesting, we made it up into one character. Most of the characters are made up of three or four people. The stories happened, but none of the stories happened exactly how I say they happened and who they happened to.
I wanted throw in a bunch of what I would call the oral tradition of that part of Capitol Hill. It starts with my dad and my uncle. I interviewed my uncle for this. I wanted to create a time and place for what it was like.
What I found that made me really respond to your story was that it felt so timely because there’s a lot of talk about how Capitol Hill is changing right now and how people are nostalgic for how it was, a largely gay, arts-oriented, young, hip neighborhood. But My Last Year With the Nuns tells of what Capitol Hill was like a generation before what everyone seems to remember.
I costs so much to buy a house now. All of the houses on my block are now going for over a million dollars. It doesn’t need to. We have really good neighbors.
You can tell who the old-timers are by the shape of their lawn. I look at my lawn and it looks like it did in 1966. We never paid any professionals to come in or anything, so when you walk by, you see “gorgeous house, gorgeous house, gorgeous house, our house.” (laughs)
Maybe someone should restore it as a tenement museum. My wife and I moved in there with my mom and since she’s 93, we wanted to keep it as her space. My wife and I have a very small footprint on the house, so it pretty much looks now like it did in the late sixties. There are rosaries hanging around and everything. It’s nice and at least no one has tried to “fix it.”
I want to talk about the process of turning this into a feature film, from a stage production.
Bret wanted to start with doing one piece, like maybe the opening, alter boy scene or something like that. Michael Seiwerath called out of the blue. I had been talking with Michael over the years about another piece that I wrote called All My Children. He had produced Outsourced and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, and I was an actor in both of those movies. He got the itch to start producing films again. He wanted to produce four films, and this was the first one. He had brought My Last Year With the Nuns to the Northwest Film Forum after it had been at the Little Theater on 19th. That was almost right across the street from the old paper shack that I talk about in My Last Year With the Nuns. He loved it. He’s a Catholic kid from Tacoma. He went to Bellarmine Prep.
The idea from Bret and Michael was to shoot it on location. My idea was to shoot a really good performance. They were convinced that it would work, so I went along with it. You’ve seen the film, so you can imagine how bad it could have been, right?
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I watched it, but I thought that because the stories were interesting, and often very funny, so I thought that could have sustained it.
We did it at a festival, not to be named. For some reason, they did something to the print we gave them and compressed it onto something else so they could add a short film to it or something. We didn’t know, so when I walked in at the end, I saw that it was so blurry you couldn’t read the subtitles or anything, and my voice was delayed about three seconds from my lips.
Oh no!
…but everybody stayed. I thought that was really fantastic. That’s a testament to the stories. If they’re willing to sit through a really bad quality film, it’s because the stories are pulling them in.
So anyway, it was Bret’s and Michael’s idea to do the film, and Michael was able to get Ben Kasulke to be the cinematographer. He’s really good and because of [his involvement], I started to realize that this could be the real deal.
We thought that even though Ben said that he’d do it, would he really do it? Would he have the time for it? We weren’t really sure because something could always come up. We scheduled it after Lynn Shelton’s movie. That worked out perfectly. It was the key.
Bret had never directed a feature film before, so it was great to have his expertise to mentor us along the way.
I know his work through theater and I’ve seen him read stories before. We’ve never met, but I’ve always admired what he’s done.
He’s a very smart and prolific guy. He does everything: he acts, directs, and writes. He did what a director is supposed to do, so we know going in what was going to be shot where, what was going to be in the performance and what parts were going to be shot on location. He had a very smart way of looking at it, and I couldn’t tell you what that is, but certain things were enhanced by being shot on location and others were enhanced by being part of the performance.
We also got some Ken Burns-style photographs that we used. And Clyde Peterson did a great job on the animation.
When you talk about it, it’s like “It’s a sixty-year old guy spinning yarns about when he was thirteen years old…but it’s not so bad!” That’s the pitch. In fact, there’s so much support to the stories that it’s not just me driving the whole thing. It’s me with a whole bunch of help. The music was great, too. That’s from John Osebold.
I was very impressed going through the credits and seeing so many people I knew by reputation in the Seattle arts world.
It was amazing how many people said yes to helping us out. It was also amazing at how many people said yes to giving us money. A lot of people gave because they’ve known me for a long time and trusted me not to squander it. That’s what I was afraid of because so many films don’t get finished. What happens if you borrow money from people and it doesn’t get finished? I had an experience like that, where I raised about $3,000 for a film that was finished but ended up not being good enough to show anybody. That was about thirty years ago, but it was in the back of my head. Michael is a magician in getting people to buy in.
It was a very sane shoot. It felt like summer camp. With most low-budget, independent films, you’re shooting for sixteen hours a day. But we were only doing eight hours, because I couldn’t handle more than eight hours of talking.
How long did shooting take?
Three weeks. Then we went back and reshot a couple of things and that took about a day.
One thing I need to ask about was about using some of the words you had used that, let’s say, are far less acceptable in 2014 than they were almost fifty years ago, when the stories took place.
You mean like the “N word?”
Among others, yes.
Sure. It wasn’t really appropriate back then, either. Here’s wanted I wanted to do with that. I understand that when you use words like that, you’re taking a big risk. I wanted to depict the essence of who I was and what I experienced at that time. I thought that if I removed those words, it would take me off the hook. I didn’t want it to be like that. I wanted to say, “This was me back then” and be forthright about it. I wanted to be stark and honest about it. I also didn’t want to embellish it and make it sound worse than what it was. I was trying to get to the place of where it was as close to what it was as I could get.
I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not to put that in. I was not flippant in any sense, as you could probably tell. After having performed it many, many times, I’m aware of what happens at that point. It changes the whole story. It gives it another way of looking at it, so that you see it’s not just “hardy har har” Catholic schoolboy stories. It’s more about what it was really like. Part of that was homophobia, racism, and misogyny. A friend of mine, who is a doctor, said it depicts the disorganized, prefrontal cortex of a thirteen year old boy as well as anything she’s ever seen. That was the idea of what we wanted to do. Whether or not we pulled it off, I don’t know.
Right. I didn’t think it was flippant and thought it was probably necessary in the context of the story you were trying to tell. I asked that for a couple of reasons. One was, like you said, it shifted the tenor of the film away from the hilarious stories of a miscreant Catholic schoolboy and the audience was forced to confront that. The other is that there are a lot of very smart people who are arguing, sometimes persuasively, to remove such language from Mark Twain’s novels, for example.
That’s revisionist history and pretending that it didn’t happen is almost as bad as allowing it to happen. But it was a really long, thought-out process where we decided to use that. I think we framed it pretty well.
What was it like watching the film take shape and differ from how you were presenting it on stage?
It was gradual. I was in on the editing, at least for the first few days. Then it became clear it would go a lot faster if I wasn’t around for that. I was amazed at how well it flowed. We had already rewritten it two or three times for the play and then rewrote it for the film. We took out anything that didn’t move the story forward. I’m always really hard on myself but for a story that is just one guy talking, I don’t feel like you get bored.
I could see how that could work with an audience because you have some control over how you interact with an audience, but I didn’t know how that would work on film, where there is no audience and where people may be used to multi-million dollar films that have five seconds of film having a thousand cuts. I was delighted that I was well taken care of.
We had a list when we were editing: Number one: Story; Number two: Performance. You have to have a good story and then you have to give a good performance. If you don’t, people get sick of that guy really fast.
My Last Year With the Nuns plays at the Northwest Film Forum starting this weekend (January 9–15), what is coming up after that?
We don’t have a distributor yet, so there are different ways to think about that conundrum. One is: don’t do anything at all or a distributor won’t be interested. But we figured that no one is going to be interested in it anyway. We got some help with some people that know what they’re doing. We decided to start with our strength, which is Seattle. We’re going to start with the Northwest Film Forum, and if we do well, maybe we’ll get a second week. Maybe something will come of it after that.
Our plan is to take it to LA and New York, and then after that, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. We’re kind of figuring out as we go along. There are so many models of how to do it. There’s something called four-walling, where you rent the theater and do it yourself. There’s another group that will help you with publicity and put on an opening. That’s probably what we’re going to do in LA. Everything is up in the air right now because there are so few independent films that get distributed and there are so many movies out there. It would have been almost a miracle to get through.
The nice thing is that I had no expectations, so it’s all a bonus. The opening at SIFF exceeded any expectation I could have had. We sold out both shows, four hundred people. It was people from almost every aspect of my life. I knew almost everybody there. It was an incredibly affirming, cool experience.
I’ll ask one last question, but is there anything you want to cover that I didn’t ask about?
Just that there are a lot of really talented people in Seattle making films. I was amazed at how much help there was. You might think that since I wrote this and am in every frame, that would be the lion’s share of the work, but it’s not even close. It’s such a small percentage. It’s mind-blowing how much work goes into making a film. It’s humbling to see what’s involved in making a film.
{My Last Year With the Nuns plays at the Northwest Film Forum Friday, January 9 through Thursday, January 15. Showtimes, tickets, and more information can be found here.}
