Filmmaker Andrew Neel and I are at this moment speaking about philosophy. "It’s the imperfect part of our lives, our reality and our art that make it real and valuable," Neel says. Applying this idea to his second feature film Alice Neel, a look at the life of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters honored portrait painter, it's easy to see how beautifully those imperfections are rendered. A far cry from the traditional biopic, it's a film like a song, its rhythmic grace hiding meaning beneath layers of conscious comprehension.

"It’s a non-moral tale," Neel explains. "I wouldn’t say it’s an immoral tale, but like life, it’s a mixture of the two, and people have to draw the conclusions they feel comfortable drawing. Alice’s conclusion is that man is the measure of all things, and if you’re sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world." Appropriately, that best describes Alice Neel's life as a whole. Struggling for years against annonymity in the mainstream art world while also contributing portraits which elucidated the generations of human spirit, her subjects varied from neighbors in Spanish Harlem to internationally-recognized art hipsters including Andy Warhol, Neel doggedly pushed her work despite the sacrifices made with finaces and family. From abandonment by her first husband to abandonment of her first born daughter to domestic disputes and to constant household anxiety, the Neel family life was anything but stable, a fact that influenced the moderation of both sons Richard and Hartley.

It's on this last account that filmmaker Neel has a personal connection. Despite the pain Alice Neel's bohemian lifestyle caused his father Hartley, grandson Andrew Neel has with filmmaking fallen somewhat into her footsteps, crafting here a film moving, utterly honest and brave enough to show its humanity.

SM: Going from Darkon and coming into Alice Neel, what was it that you as an artist learned from both of these experiences?

AN: One of the things that’s most apparent to me having gone through the process of making both films is that every film has an internal logic. That internal logic is something that you think you may understand before you get into it, but, it’s only something that you can learn as you create it. Partly with Darkon, that process was more intensive in the shooting period whereas that process may have been more intensive in the editing period with Alice Neel. They’re such different genres, yet I still think you can feel some similar approach to the movies.

I never thought that I would make a biopic. It’s just not a genre I was necessarily interested in. So, I think one of the things that I experienced moving from Darkon into Alice Neel was a certain amount of frustration, reckoning with the rigid rules or preconceptions about the biopic. I had to stick to that to at least a certain extent out of respect for the story, the person and telling the story correctly. Whereas with Darkon, we were bending the facts, bending reality; it was all about fantasy and reality and how those two things mix. In the end it was a really good exercise just in terms of my skills as a filmmaker, to have to take a radical seat change and approach to the material and create an engaging story in a very different kind of way.

SM: I was wondering about the biopic format. You’d mentioned that in the New York Times feature as well. What did you feel constrained by when you were working? 

AN: It’s just someone’s life from A to B. In general, I’d have to say that I’m interested in the elements of documentary and fiction that can be blurred, bent, confused and played with. It’s a taste thing, but I tend to think the biopic is one of the more conservative genres not only in documentary filmmaking but filmmaking in general.

SM: Don’t you feel like it’s the responsibility of the filmmaker—much as you have done with this documentary—to re-invent and no longer see those lines?

AN: I don’t think it’s the duty of the filmmaker. The duty of the filmmaker is to just do whatever they think is best, what comes naturally to them or what they think is effective. But, I do think interesting filmmakers and good filmmakers hopefully would try to do something new and different, try to bend those rules. In the case of the biopic, I mean specifically, you’re more bound to the rigid facts of someone’s life than you are maybe looking in (fiction). The field is just wider, broader, more open to interpretation and manipulation whereas I hesitate, especially with someone’s life, to try to speak for them or read into their life. I don’t like assuming some position where I have the right to speak for them…

SM: The questions that you ask and the people you chose to ask, I’m not saying that creates a bias, but it certainly creates a point of view. Isn’t that, in a sense, speaking for someone?

AN: Not in a literal sense. To the extent at which all fiction or non-fiction is a reinterpretation, it has a point of view. But, to speak for someone would be—I don’t really know how (Alice Neel) felt when Carlos left. I don’t know that. Creating some fiction about how she did in fact feel,…I’m not really comfortable with doing that on this film because I’m trying to tell the story in the most actual and truthful way that I can.

SM: You were talking before about coming up with an internal logic to the film and that (Alice Neel’s) internal logic really presented itself in post. What were the parameters and definitions of this internal logic?

AN:…The internal logic is mixed. There are some parts of it that are ephemeral, and there are some parts that are quite literal. For instance, in Alice, I found that when I would digress into her political leanings or beliefs that somehow the emotional tambor of the movie got flatter. And so, I really tried to maintain a delicate balance between exposition of things like her politics and emotional content like Hartley and Richard’s very intimate interviews with me whereas other films maybe allow for a really indulgent digression, and the film doesn’t lose what it is through the digression, and in fact, the digression is part of what it is.

It did seem natural to digress into (Alice Neel’s) paintings,...those several minute long sections of just the faces with no audio. That worked, and that worked because her paintings were emotional. They were bound into the rhythm and feeling of my film. That might be an example of something that developed as what one might call a rule, if you wanted to classify it like that.

SM: Can you pinpoint any other rules of the logic?

AN: I hesitate to do this because I think that—I’m not trying to make it about ego—it’s a limited way of looking at the creative process of making a film. You can’t make a film with hard and fast rules about anything. You can’t. The internal logic of the movie isn’t some super rigid thing. That’s why I said it’s sort of ephemeral in that way. You feel a lot of those rules. We watch it, and if that digression doesn’t work, you start to realize how certain material reacts with other kinds of material. You just know according to the feeling that you want the film to convey, or the idea that you want to convey, that that’s not working. I cannot offer a cohesive list of rules that I followed in Alice Neel.

There’s a couple precedents I had: I didn’t want to be on camera; I did not want to over determine the story with my own presence; I did not want my story to overshadow Alice’s story; I did not want to descend into the troppish, romantized notions of the troubled artist; I did not ever want to be sentimental, or I wanted to do my very best not to be sentimental because I think that would have been a disservice to the memory of Alice, who was, at least in her artwork, an extremely unsentimental, honest, direct person.

SM: It’s interesting that you talk about the hesitancy. It’s something that I was drawn to and really love about the film, the fact that on the one hand Alice is so willing to talk about art on what seems to be really concrete terms, but then there’s something so organic and so unconscious about what she’s doing that there’s no way to define it. The film is one of the only I’ve seen that walks that line perfectly of saying, “Well, this is what I know concretely about art, and this I can’t tell you, I don’t know, and I’m not going to pretend to know.”

AN: Alice was an enigmatic person, and like any enigmatic people, attempting to strictly define them is not only futile but a disservice. Part of why they were great is because they were enigmatic and hard to define. That is a very tough line to walk, and that was definitely a line that (Luke Meyer) and I in the editing room were very aware of. We didn’t want to produce some sort of over determined interpretation of her work, but at the same time, we wanted to squarely place her within the dialogue of 20th century art and sociology.

Given what you’re trying to achieve, and in this case we were trying to achieve something very concrete in terms of her life and her legacy, one always has to try to maintain a balance between the pragmatic elements of the story or the idea and also the life of the idea and the life of the film, which are wonderful because as the guy at the Academy of Arts and Letters said, “They give us energy for their own delight.”  (The ideas of the paintings) indulge in the complicated, paradoxical energy of what it is to be a human being, and so one can’t also lose sight of that…Many, many films unfortunately try to make everything concrete, answer every question, adhere to every rule, and for that reason, in my opinion, something is lost.

SM: You talked a little bit earlier about the mix of what is intellectual or political along with the emotional, and even though you were trying to pull yourself from talking about your own emotional journey throughout the film, what was that journey for you?

AN: As a question, it’s a totally valid question and a fair question. I hate the question because what it does is it indulges in the very thing I didn’t want to indulge in with the movie. I was not too concerned with my emotional journey in terms of how the film interacted with the world, in terms of how it affected people. Separate from the world of what I made, my journey was—I don’t think it was particularly romantic or self-informing. I learned a lot about paint. I learned a little bit about my family.

But, my answer to this question, and it’s a little bit of an annoying answer is: for me, at least in the two films I’ve done so far, I don’t have some idealistic or romantic experience with some kind of inner learning. What I did learn is the experience of doing it, the experience of being there in the moment that I spent with my father on the couch on that grey day in Vermont, with him by the window. That I learned.

SM: It’s great and really refreshing that you say that because I don’t think every artistic journey has to be one necessarily that’s transformative, but I would also argue that every experience can be transformative.

AN: Definitely. It’s only I can’t define it in finite terms. There may have been some personal transformation that went on in the making of (Alice Neel). In fact, I’m sure there was because one can’t really experience things without going through that. I can’t quantify that nor do I think I would be able to quantify that maybe for a long time, if ever.

SM: In terms of getting to know your family, do you feel that it’s the same, that anything you will have learned about them exists on a very subterranean level right now?

AN: I think mostly, you know. The thing about my family is that we’re incredibly good friends. We’re all very open emotionally, interpersonally, intellectually with one another. I didn’t have any barriers with my father. We were great friends when we started the movie, and we were great friends after. Did I maybe come to a deeper understanding of his experience and both the things that he loved about his mother and some of the things that were difficult in his life? Yeah. But, most of the changes that went on with my relationship with my family were—as you said—subterranean and not a revelation really. I always hope that the film is the revelation and not my experience making it.

Most of (filmmaking) is just mundane, hard work, hard work, just the every day clippity-clop. Maybe there are moments of sublime interaction or learning, but most of it is just hard, often boring work.

SM: There are a lot of people who would argue though that the most we’ll ever learn is what we learn in a repetitive, tedious nature.

AN: Agreed. I would say that usually most of things good about the work are the profundity of it; it’s actually something that grows out of the tedious.

SM: I think for artists especially there’s this need felt for them to always be profound when in reality the majority of what they’ll do will never be seen, will never be profound. But, with that one moment in which they do achieve that, I think they’ve lived up to all the other moments in which they’ve failed.

AN: That’s the stone that we’re all trying to bleed, finding these moments or the culmination of these moments that makes something really great. It’s what we’re all chasing, and it’s kind of a quixotic journey. We’re constantly charging at windmills that we think are giants, and more often that not we just run right into the wooden planks of the windmill. That’s the whole ridiculous quest that I think people who are making films, or anything else interesting, are on.

SM: Not dealing with emotions, emotional journeys or anything so lofty, why do you make films?

AN: Creating and using my eye is a natural thing that I really enjoy doing. Then I just love ideas, discussing ideas and trying to present those ideas in an interesting way. Film and documentary in particular can be a wonderful meeting of those two desires. You get to both explore ideas and do it in a visual way. That’s the practical answer.

The impractical answer is that, and I don’t think I’d be unique in saying this, I’m looking desparately for some kind of connection between my own internal space and the world around me.  To try to bridge the gap between mind and body—I think everyone is trying to do that. Filmmaking is just my attempt to do that.

SM: What is one question as a filmmaker that you’ve always wanted to be asked about your work but haven’t been?

AN: Do you agree with Alice that man is the measure of all things?

SM: You’re right. That’s a great question. Do you?

AN: For all intents and purposes, I’d have to say yes. Given our largely limited, difficult, long, complicated, self-consumed lives, it is very hard for man to measure anything except by his own terms or standards. Maybe that makes me an atheist...Not that that's a bad thing.

SM: Even God is measured by man’s measurements.

AN: This is an ancient question, right? The Greeks were pros at debating this. I’m a Westerner and a capitalist so my answer has to be, “yes” although sometimes I do wonder.

SM: In the event that man is not the measure of all things, what—

AN: What is?

SM: (laughing) What is.

AN: And, that I definitely cannot answer.

For more information, visit www.aliceneelfilm.com.