In My Mind is a film documentary about Thelonious Monk, Jason Moran's creative explorations of Monk's music, W. Eugene Smith's jazz lofts, and the Thelonious Monk Orchestra's 1959 concert at Town Hall in New York City. The film was directed by Gary Hawkins, produced by Emily LaDue, with Tom Rankin, Executive Producer.

     In My Mind will be shown at the Chicago Cultural Center tomorrow (Friday, September 3). This screening is part of the Jazz Loft Project Exhibition: W. Eugene Smith in NYC, 1957-1965, which is currently showing at the Cultural Center. Recently I spoke with Hawkins about his influences, directing In My Mind, how a string of shots in a film conspires to form an invisible meaning, and his other ongoing projects. 

Dan: How did you first get interested in the arts?

Gary: Never thought of it that way. My father could paint and my mother could write, but they never gave themselves permission to pursue their interests. They passed along that permission to me.

Dan: Who are some of your influences?

Gary: Goya. Joseph Cornell. Hendrix.

Dan: What is an early memory you have of doing something in the arts?

Gary: When I was six I tried to make a perpetual motion machine with tinker toys and magnets. The machine didn't work but the construction was beautiful in its own way.

Dan: What are some interesting things that you like about working in film?

Gary: I love how a string of shots conspires to form an invisible meaning. For example, the ending of the Elsie Beckmann chapter in Fritz Lang's M -- Lang gives us an undisturbed place setting at a table followed by a ball rolling out of the bushes followed by a balloon caught in power lines. What is he saying? A child has been murdered. Coaxing a narrative from its orbiting elements, that's magical to me, and enormously satisfying when you manage to pull it off.

Dan: How did you first hear about Thelonious Monk’s music? What are some things you like about his music?

Gary: I can't remember when I first heard Monk. Probably in college when I got into Davis and Mingus. I love the thuggish, offbeat stuff he does with his own simple melodies. It's as if the man is of two minds. Bakes a cake and kicks it across the floor.

Dan: How did you first come across W. Eugene Smith’s photography? What are some things that you like about his work?

Gary: I'm more floored by Smith's commitment than the actual results -- although the results are impressive. I work predominately in non-fiction and over the years I've come to appreciate the artists and craftsman and average joes who made the effort to document some event. It's so easy to say, "Nobody needs this," and be right about that -- for a time. To die before the documentation becomes necessary. I wanted to thank Eugene Smith for his efforts, but he's been gone a long while.

Dan: What are some things that you found particularly interesting about Smith's jazz lofts? 

Gary: The fact that Smith made the effort to wire the whole building for sound, and to photograph Monk's rehearsals with Overton, that's impressive to me. I hear the small talk on the tapes, the enormous effort Monk is making to be understood -- because Monk wasn't a big talker you know, didn't bother to enunciate, spoke often in asides, inscrutable asides -- but here is Smith capturing these private moments. I just wanted to hug the guy -- buy him a carton of Camels.

Dan: How did you first hear about Jason Moran’s music? What are some things that you like about his music? 

Gary: I knew Jason's music before the Monk show, but I'd never seen him perform. The main thing of course -- he's a killer pianist. Not just a craftsman, but an intuitive artist. The piano is his true voice. The Moran I like most tends toward trippy. The dreamy cues. He does dreamy well, and I'm heavy into dreamy. I prefer trip hop to hip hop. Tricky's old stuff.

Dan: What courses do you teach at Arts of the Moving Image and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University? 

Gary: I teach a Fiction Production course and a lecture course on the French New Wave at AMI, Nonfiction Filmmaking and Performance-based nonfiction for the CDS.

Dan: How did you get involved with “In My Mind”?

Gary: I wanted to make my intermediate doc filmmaking class more enticing, so I pitched Duke an idea they hadn't heard before -- fly a group of Duke students to NYC for a few days and shoot Moran's tribute to Monk's Town Hall concert. They went for it and we actually pulled it off -- returned with footage strong enough to justify a film that deconstructs the performance as it presents it.

Dan: Did you do much research as you were preparing to direct the film? For instance, did you watch any documentaries such as “Straight, No Chaser” to help you to get a handle on your subject?

Gary: I confess to watching NO, and that means zero, jazz films before tackling this one. We watched Straight, No Chaser late in the process, and only then to raid it for shots (which we were denied). So our research was limited to the actual music, Smith's tapes and photographs, and prose.

Dan: What were some things you were thinking about, as you were structuring “In Your Mind”?

Gary: When to let the musicians play, and when to interrupt them with commentary. It's trickier than it sounds. We didn't interrupt the first and last songs -- "Thelonious" and "Crepuscule with Nellie." The songs themselves would not allow for it. What else were we thinking about? Finding the internal rules? Watching and listening and trying to figure out what the material wanted to do? I remember discussing this with my partner, Emily LaDue. We decided early on that the entire film, start to finish WAS music. That we could never be "out of music," meaning, Everything we see and hear IS music. The imagery, the commentary, all of it. When we photographed to hauntingly empty streets of Rocky Mount for example -- Monk's hometown in North Carolina -- we timed the changing of the stoplights to the downbeats in "Monk's Mood." We also decided that the non-performance segments should be interesting enough to compete with the performances. We didn't want to bounce out of a song into something less interesting -- and that's saying a lot when Moran is covering Monk. Were we successful? Doesn't matter. That was our orientation.

Dan: Would you say that the filmmaking process developed that way you had originally planned, or were there any unexpected aspects of the documentary that made you decide to take a different tack? 

Gary: I think I covered most of that in the question about structuring. We had a fuzzy idea of what we wanted to do, and every day the process became more clear. At some point we decided to limit the commentary to the artists who contributed to the performance. Keeping the commentary in the family as it were. It was LaDue's idea to interview Brother Ah (Robert Northern), and Ah became the host of the show without actually commenting on Moran's performance. He played for Monk at the original Town Hall concert in 1959 and brought that evening to life for us. But no one thing threw us off track. It was more a matter of deepening the mystery of Monk, and exploring Moran's profound affection for his mentor. Those elements were clear from the beginning.

Dan: Monk was born and raised in North Carolina. What are some aspects of his early years that you found particularly interesting, in terms of what was depicted in the documentary?

Gary: Standing on the forked train tracks in Rocky Mount, staring at the bed of pine scruff where his house once stood. That was an interesting experience because his birthplace wasn't just forgotten, it was practically buried. The young pines tell us just how long no one has cared about that place.

Dan: Would you mention a few more aspects of Monk’s life that you found particularly compelling, as you were directing the film? For instance, how he used the loft, how Smith's photographs and audio recordings shed light into the creative process, and how Monk prepared his band for the iconic concert at Town Hall in 1959?

Gary: The most compelling part was the level of effort that went into the transcriptions and the rehearsals. I guess I keep coming back to this point. The jazz loft was unheated, very old and cold, must have been depressing to its tenants - but inside of this bleak dump, and in the middle of the night, players were getting off work and showing up to rehearse this unique new music. I find that compelling, maybe because I've been in similar situations. I've lost sleep, suffered the elements, to paint, write, make films. But it's not heroic. It's the endeavor that's so compelling. You lose all balance and perspective, and that's a good thing. Something about it feels like life worth living. Maybe that's what I admire most about Monk, Smith, Moran. The surrender.

Dan: The “Not His Hands” scene is particularly poignant. Would you like to comment on some aspect of that scene that you find interesting, or something about the process that was involved?

Gary: The players had their solos. That was my solo. The idea was to depict Monk's beating at the hand's of the Delaware State Patrol. No pictures, films, existed of course, and in Jason's show the stage goes dark. The onstage screen fills with ben day dots, and while the dots worked well enough for the live show they didn't work so well in our film. The film seemed to be calling for an increased narrative, not a gap in the narrative. So at some point I came up with the idea of depicting Monk's ordeal with faux album covers -- and when you come up with an idea like that the first thing you think is, "Oh, cool, that'll be cool..." but the second thing you think is, "Oh man, who's gonna DO all that? Not me. I haven't drawn anything in ten years! What if it looks stupid?" All that negative stuff. But you do it anyway. I pitched the idea to LaDue and we jumped on it -- LaDue scanning and photoshopping backgrounds and me rendering the compositions. It took me a week to remember how to draw and another few days to get into Martin's head -- but eventually we pulled it off.

Dan: One thing that I find interesting about that scene is how it goes between the music, Moran’s words, and the graphics that were used, in that ‘50s style. Would you comment on how you decided on including that?

Gary: Jason wrote a scenario based on his own research, recorded his voice speaking the scenario, then removed several of its connective words. So the sentence, "Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse were riding in a Rolls Royce" becomes "Thelonious Monk" "Charlie Rouse" "Rolls Royce." See? LaDue and I re-spaced Jason's words to suit our purposes, then we filled in our own set of connective graphics and imagery. We tried to make the visual presentation very "1959" and were somewhat successful. But that didn't matter either in the long run. It's just one more component to the show.

Dan: What other ongoing projects have you been working on?

Gary: Three dance films and a feature narrative about furniture workers and what they do on Labor Day weekend. 

     "In My Mind" is screening in the Claudia Cassidy Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, September 3. The screening is free and open to the public. The "Jazz Loft Project Exhibition: W. Eugene Smith in NYC, 1957-1965," will be in the Sidney R. Yates Gallery at the Cultural Center until September 19.

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