Since South by Southwest is happening now I thought I should do a SXSW throwback post. I went to SXSW 14 years in a row and it was not only one of my favorite music festivals, but it was also a fantastic film fest and I did a long running series of film portraits there that I thought would be good to highlight.
I went to SXSW for the first time in 2004 when I was managing a band called the Gaskets. The first couple years we went and played backyard BBQs and stuff like that but in 2006 they were finally accepted as an official act to the music festival, and not only that, but we submitted a music video to the film festival and got into that as well. Because we were in both parts of the festival (SXSW Interactive barely existed back then) we were given Platinum passes which got you into everything. We had a blast watching movies, seeing bands, and playing shows.
Fast forward t0 2010 and I was covering the South By Southwest music festival for The Village Voice, LA Weekly and their other dozen or so weekly papers around the country. I had this idea of trying to get them to let me cover the film festival as well, so I pitched this idea of shooting red carpet stuff and covering some of the interactive and just pumping out some extra galleries. I think I was making $250 a gallery back then so it wasn’t about the money, it was about getting that Platinum press pass. My editor agreed.
My plan was just to fuck around, shoot a handful of red carpets and watch a bunch of movies but as soon as I was approved for the press pass I started getting emails from publicists asking me to interview their directors and stars. I had never covered a press junket before, but I had this idea. I started emailing publicists back and asking them if instead of an interview I could get five minutes with their talent for a photo. Honestly the publicist were a little confused by the request. These days every festival and award show has pop up photo booths for post event coverage, but at the time that wasn’t really a thing. Luckily a handful of publicists granted my request, and between those portraits, my red carpet coverage, and a few random celebrity sightings, I ended up with a gallery. It must have done pretty well because my SXSW Film Portraits series continued for five years, running until the Village Voice was sold in 2015.
I have so many stories from these shoots, but I will try and just pick a few. It was such a high pressure situation for me and great training because often I would have less than five minutes with the talent and almost always terrible lighting and locations. I would go to wherever they were doing the junket and try and find some place to pull people for a shoot. Sometimes we’d get to go onto the street, but you can’t really do that with bigger celebrities, so it would be in ugly hotel conference rooms, hopefully by a window. It’s so funny to me to see how many of these photos are backlit because all I was working with was a window. I even backlit Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr .for some reason even though we were outside. So many of these are taken on the balcony of the Driskill hotel which is fine for one year, but when you keep shooting there for 5 years it gets a bit repetitive. Despite all that, I do have a few shots I love. The gallery is a mix of some of my better photos with some of the bigger names I photographed. I tried not to post more than two photos of the same person from the same shoot and I only posted my digital work. Some of my best shots were actually shot on black and white film. I would always sneak in a shot or two for myself.
The story I have probably told the most was from the very first year I did it. I had photographed plenty of celebrities in my work as a nightlife photographer, but photographing Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek together was a very next level and I was late for the shoot. Austin during SXSW was a mess and in the pre-Uber days you had to just call a cab. I was staying 15 minutes north of the city at my buddy Mike’s place and it took over an hour for me to get a cab. Luckily the publicist was understanding and he just moved me to the end of their day. When I got there I was so stressed out and by far the most nervous I have ever been for a shoot. I had to sit around for a while waiting for them to finish just getting more and more nervous and when it was finally my turn, Bill and Robert just absolutely let me have it. They kept joking about how I was too good for them and just giving me so much shit for being late. Since it was the last thing they had to do, we walked outside behind the hotel and there were a ton of people watching and I was too nervous to tell them to do anything so I just tried my best to get something. I wanted to get solo shots of them but I didn’t want to tell them to move away from each other which is if you look at my solo shot of Bill Murray you can see Robert Duvall’s whole arm in there. When I went to get a solo shot of Sissy I got really close to her and she said something about how I was too close to her, and I told her it was a wide lens. She was like “let me see the photo, I look terrible wide!” I showed her the photo and she actually loved it. Later that night I went and shot the red carpet for their movie Get Low. When Sissy was on the carpet she saw me, and ran over to me, gave me a big hug, and told all the other photographers how great I was. One of my all time favorite celebrity interactions.
One of my least favorite celebrity interactions was photographing Adam Brody. I have had celebrities be dicks to me, but I am always understanding because it has to suck to have people shoving a camera in your face all day long, but when you are doing a press junket, 90% of your job is to be nice to the press. Adam Brody wasn’t mean to me or anything, but it was even worse. He just wouldn’t acknowledge me or make eye contact. His publicist actually had to apologize to me later. That same publicist was also the publicist for Get Low and became one of the biggest supporters of the project and he actually ended up getting me two jobs. He was Robert Duvall’s publicist and got one of my Duvall photos on the cover of Texas Lifestyle magazine and he had Duvall hire me to photograph a SXSW after party for his film Wild Horses.
My favorite person to photograph for these was Alia Shawkat. She is just so god damn photogenic. I got to photograph her twice and both times I got shots I love. I shot the press junket for The Final Girls and every photo I took for that was in this hideous mixed fluorescent light inside a restaurant, but when it was time to shoot Alia she walked into the kitchen and I shot her pulling out a bunch of potatoes on a kitchen rack and it’s honestly one of my favorite celebrity shots of all time. Kate Lyn Sheil and Emmy Rossum are two other insanely photogenic humans who I was lucky enough to photograph.
I had some very quick but very good conversations with a handful of people. Adrien Brody told me how excited he was to take photos with me because his mom worked for the Village Voice. Paul Walker was really interested in my film cameras and was so unexpectedly great. Matt Lucas and I talked about the death of close friends which meant a lot to me. Jermaine Clement’s publicist told me I couldn’t take photo of him until he was done eating a sandwich and I told him about my upcoming book Dinner With Igor where I photographed people eating, and he was super into that and every photo I took of him was with a sandwich in his hand.
I got to photograph a bunch of people I knew from the NYC comedy scene and it was cool to catch up with people like Kumail Nanjiani and Mike Birbiglia who I hadn’t seen in years. I used to be friendly with Reggie Watts back in the day and when I shot the people behind JASH (Tim & Eric, Michael Cera, Sarah Silverman and Reggie) I didn’t think he recognized me, but suddenly in the middle of the shoot he realized who I was and started telling everyone they needed to check out my website. That was a cool moment.
I got to shoot some celebrity crushes which was fun. I got to shoot my 90s “Kids” crushes Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson but honestly don’t remember much from either shoot. Juliette Lewis was way more memorable and two out of the three times I photographed her she was super flirty with me which my 15 year old self would be incredibly psyched to hear. I didn’t have a crush on her until I met her but Gillian Jacobs became a new crush. I had two deeply awkward moments with Aubrey Plaza that I would tell you about but this is way too long already.
I totally forgot to mention at the beginning but one of the main reasons I wanted to shoot the film fest in 2010 was because a bunch of my friends were going. My friend Lena Dunham had made a small film called Tiny Furniture that got accepted into the festival. My friend Teddy did the music and titles, my brother did some editing, my ex girlfriend was in it, and I really wanted to be there with all of them. Tiny Furniture ended up winning best film or something and it was so crazy to see a friend of yours just blow up instantly. Judd Apatow ended up seeing it and two years later I was there with them watching the GIRLS premiere. Oh, I also ran the Tiny Furniture Twitter account and was in the first season of GIRLS but my scene got cut out. Ironically I never did a proper portrait of Lena for the gallery, just shots on the street during the premieres.
Man, I did not see myself writing nearly 2000 words today, but here we are. I guess when you have five years of boring name droppy stories to tell and are on your third cup of coffee things happen… Anyway, I hope you dig the photos and I hope one day I get to do more portraits at film festivals, because they are a lot of fun and I love movies.
