Watching Ray Tintori’s short film Death To The Tinman for the first time, I felt a little bit like Jean-Luc Godard must have when he first saw Alain Resnais’ breakthrough feature Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Godard related the experience to that of being an American working at NASA throughout the 1950s, only to be shocked when the Russians launched Sputnik first. As a film student and and filmmaker, I’ve always been interested in trying to push cinema forward and find inventive ways to use the medium. Few short films have achieved these ends with the seeming ease and gracefulness of Death To The Tinman (as well as its predecessor short, Jettison Your Loved Ones). Adapted from L. Frank Baum’s novel The Tinwoodsman of Oz, Death To The Tinman tells the story of how the Tinman came to be the Tinman, in a tone that goes from chaotic to quirky to downright poignant.

The fact that Tinman was a student film (Tintori’s thesis at Wesleyan) only adds to the impressiveness of its feat - or perhaps, it explains it. Assured, rigorous formalism is existent but uncommon amongst professional American filmmakers; films that display an audacious, frenzied love of the medium are equally infrequent. To see all these factors displayed side-by-side in the same work is downright rare. It makes sense, then, that a filmmaker developing as unique a style as Tintori would be working from within a film school, where one is somewhat insulated from the expectations and constraints of the film industry.

Yet the case is even more complex than that, because Tintori’s work is so different from what film students typically produce. As Tintori noted in my conversation with him, most student filmmakers make films in one or two locations, with a small cast and a short story. His films have sizable casts, incredibly long stories, and seem to switch locations every scene. He might not be operating according to typical film school guidelines, but he must be doing something right: his “Sight & Sound” project at Wesleyan, Jettison Your Loved Ones (available to watch here) was accepted into South By Southwest, and Tinman (available from iTunes via the link here) got into Sundance, where it was one of six films (out of 80) to receive an Honorable Mention. If you’re interested in reading this interview but you haven’t seen Tintori’s work yet, I would highly recommend taking at least the twelve minutes to watch Tinman. It’s a small investment for a sizable payoff.

There are two filmmakers Tintori’s work has been compared to more than any others: Guy Maddin and Wes Anderson. The Maddin influence is clear, and Tintori himself more than acknowledges it. The Anderson attribution, however, seems more of a mistake - while Tintori’s films do have something of the quirkiness and arbitrary turn-of-events tone that Anderson employs, Tintori’s films seem to take themselves far more seriously. Death to the Tinman features an ending that has to have drawn some tears.

When I met up with Tintori in his Tribeca studio not too long ago, he was finishing a music video he directed for MGMT, a band comprised of Tintori’s college buddies. The video, for the song “Time To Pretend,” features the sort of excessive, aesthetic absurdity that would make sense if one crossed Tinman with a music video for a hip indie band. We walked to a nearby, indoor atrium and conducted the following interview sitting on a massive set of steps.

TFR: The first thing that struck me about your two shorts - Jettison Your Loved Ones and Death to the Tinman - was how unique your style was. Where did that emerge from?

RT: Well, I edited both films on a flatbed - when you edit at Wesleyan, you edit on a flatbed if you’ve shot film. I had that experience with the film itself, and I decided that I wanted to make films where every strip of the film would be totally different from the one before it, so I just tried to make movies that were as kinetic as possible. I mean, Jettison Your Loved Ones is almost just an excuse to have people flying through the frame, moving through the frame in different ways. I used to do sculpture for a long time, a lot of mediums that were very static, and I was just drunk on the idea that film moved. So many student films feel very stuck in one place, because often that’s what they tell you - “keep it in one location, don’t shoot outside,” et cetera. And in terms of movies that I’ve seen, Heart of the World is absolutely at the top in terms of influence. Guy Maddin is kind of like, for me, the way The Ramones were for a lot of bands. I mean, I don’t say to myself, “I think I can do that,” I just think to myself, “I have to do that.” And it always stuck with me how he once said that when he was young, he knew that he wasn’t that talented and he didn’t have a lot of money to make films, but he thought he could just kind of be like this garage band that only knows three chords, but they play those three chords really, really passionately. So, I know that I’m not emotionally mature, but I hope that if I make films well, these kind of pop-song films, the passion that I have for them will kind of show through.

TFR: It’s interesting that you draw a reference to the short three-chord song. Death to the Tinman, when it gets going, it really takes off, but what I wonder is how well your style would transfer to a feature-length film. Do you think you’d be able to sustain it and keep the film interesting? Even in Death to the Tinman, the style is unique, but I do wonder how you managed to keep that style interesting for twelve minutes straight, without it starting to get stale.

RT: I don’t think you could do this style for a feature, just because you’d run out of story. But one of the differences between Jettison Your Loved Ones and Death to the Tinman is that Jettison Your Loved Ones has no breaks in it. None. It just goes, it doesn’t stop. For Death to the Tinman - one of the things I’m learning as I make movies is how to pace things so the audience has room to breathe. Even in the “Time To Pretend” video, when it cuts for a second to the lead singer just on the black background, the video kind of stops, and it allows you to get ready for what’s about to come. You need to have those moments, moments where the audience can stop and breathe, because otherwise it’s just too much stimulus and they’re not going to pick up on anything. But a lot of this style is about giving respect to the audience - assuming that they’re going to pick up on stuff fairly quickly, and so in order to stay ahead of them I need to move even faster. Because then it’s fun, to hear a story - if you don’t know what’s going to happen.

TFR: I read The Reeler interview you did with Stu, and you said something similar just then, and it reminds me of a comment Quentin Tarantino made when Kill Bill was coming out. He said he was really interested in getting the audience “rocking,” to get the moviegoing experience to be like going to a rock show. And it seems like that drive is in Tinman, especially with the music you have, which is so passionate and driving. Was it an original score? It just had this amazing energy to it.

RT: Yeah, it is an original score. I edited the whole film as a silent film first, on the flatbed. Every time I showed it to people, I would do all the voices, all the narration, but no one really got the film until we put the music to it. The music was one of the most important things in terms of pacing the audience, guiding them through the film. We did the music really quickly, as all of the editing had to be done quickly. From initially meeting with the composers through recording the music was five days. There’s maybe four different themes in it. The composers are a kid who’s been one of my best friends since second grade, Dan Romer, who’s in a band called Fire Flies, and the other is Ben Zeitlin, who I work with a lot - I art directed his film Egg, he made Glory At Sea. I wanted the score to have hooks, I wanted you to be able to get into it, and Dan makes this pop music and he really gets it, how to be catchy. Ben is primarily - because he’s a director more than a musician, he really understood how to use the music to affect the audience. This was the first score that Dan ever wrote, so we needed Ben to kind of guide him as a filmmaker. It was a really interesting collaboration. And I was glad to contribute to it as well. It was almost like I had the idea of the music very clearly, but I didn’t know how to manifest it. I’ve never been able to write music, but I was able to imagine it, and they were able to make it happen. That was the coolest thing. I know what I like, and I think that if you work with the right people, the things you like tend to appear seemingly out of nowhere.

TFR: So I have to ask - if that all only took you five days, how quickly did you edit the film itself?

RT: Well, we shot it in the first semester, then there was winter break, and it had to be done by April 17th, so post-production was pretty quick, when you factor in that I was taking five and a half other classes just to be able to graduate on time.

TFR: Well, one of the thing that really strikes me about the film is that it’s so big in terms of its style, and yet it’s such a modest film in terms of craft - shooting on 16mm black & white, the film looking grainy and whatnot, the score done in five days, the budget miniscule, I imagine. And then it gets into Sundance and wins an award. It’s refreshing to see that, indicative of a certain strong work ethic.

RT: Well, if I had had more money, I might have spent more, but I just didn’t. I got a grant for $6,000 to make this film, and the total budget ended up being $9,000. Most of the budget just ended up going to buying film and getting it processed. I had to be realistic and work with what I had to work with. Y’know, you can make a whole film out of cardboard, but if you do, the whole film has to look like it’s been made out of cardboard. It has to be consistent. So the movie’s definitely rough, there’s a lot of cuts and shots that wouldn’t work in another movie, but because from beginning to end the level of professionalism is consistent - I mean, as soon as the movie starts, you stop seeing that. You can tell a story that looks very rough, but if you lull people into that style, it’ll work. A lot of the reason why we made the film the way we did was - well, we shot the film handheld - I operated the camera myself, which allows me to solve problems on the fly really quickly, and just move around really fast. And that energy in every shot just adds up.

TFR: It’s just impressive that you did so much with so little.

RT: Well, I think it’s just important to have motion in your shots. I mean, you can make something that’s really cheap, but as long as there’s motion through space, and depth, I believe that will lead to something being entertaining. I don’t think teachers really emphasize that enough - this is moving pictures.

TFR: Someone reading this without a knowledge of your films themselves might get the sense that the characters are somewhat detached, because the style is so “out there” and unique, but in fact there’s an enormous amount pathos in the film, especially at the end - the end of Tinman. There’s an enormous amount of investment in your protagonist, in the final scene, and so even though it’s so stylized and there is not a lot of traditional characterization, you still get a poignant sense of character from the film. How’d you go about creating that?

RT: Well, it’s an adaptation of a really good story. The good thing was that I could explain the story to someone in say, six sentences, and they would just get it. They would get this look in their eye. If you can tell a story in six sentences, than it’ll work as a short film. The thing with so many student films is that often they’ll try to be very emotionally intense, right from the beginning. Someone will be melting down, the music is making you feel like you want to have a panic attack, and then it just goes even further down. But you know, one of the hardest things you can ever do is be sincere. If you try to be sincere with an audience, you leave yourself so open - people don’t want to feel that way a lot of the time. If a student film tries to be intensely moving, a lot of the time people will start laughing or try to pull themselves out of it - no one wants to be taken there, a student film about someone’s mom dying or something. That’s when people start laughing at continuity problems, too - when a film is trying to really pull you over, emotionally. I always thought that the Tinman story was really beautiful, and I decided to make a film where I would try to get an emotional response from the audience, but I would have the whole thing build to it - so I could earn that moment. So it wasn’t just manipulation, my aggression on the audience. Because it’s an origins story - I mean, my Tinman has a heart, and it’s only at the end that he loses it. Because that’s the defining element of the Tinman, I thought that’d be a good thing to have as a climactic decision - you realize that this is why he did it. I didn’t want to make it a sacrifice film, either - his sacrifice doesn’t work, the meat puppet raptures and the girl doesn’t really love him in the end. I just thought it was a sweet ending, and an ending that people wouldn’t see coming. And that last shot is so quiet, and lonely and static, after such a kinetic, crazy movie.

TFR: The film got into Sundance and won an Honorable Mention. What was that experience like for you, being just out of college and going through all that?

RT: Well, I tried to get some work in New York, trying to work in art departments and such, but I realized that it’s very difficult to get an interesting job in New York if it isn’t an internship. And Ben Zeitlin was going down to New Orleans to make this movie Glory At Sea, and I just decided to move down there, get some credit cards and go into debt. Because at least down there I would be making a movie, I would know what I was doing and why I was doing it. So the Sundance thing happened when I was very broke, I was basically in a squat house in New Orleans making this movie - which was really fun - we were living in this house without heat in this totally destroyed city. And then all of a sudden you’re in Park City and there are all these people from Hollywood. And they’re there, and all of a sudden I started to get the impression that I was a real filmmaker. Which was really exciting, and really bizarre. It was really unexpected, really cool. It was like a huge non sequitur. It’s like, “we’re working, we’re working, we’re student filmmakers, we’re independent filmmakers,” and all of a sudden I was being treated as a legitimate filmmaker.