“A Safari Through This Bohemian World” | Ari Gold, Brother Verses Brother
Combative twin musicians hunt for their dying poet father, in an improvisation performed by the director’s own family, in a single unbroken shot through the streets of San Francisco. One brother seeks love and excitement, while the other seeks to disappear into his music. But as night falls and their father remains missing, their frantic safari leads them from the secret haunts of the Beat poets into the heart of their family. Their tale becomes a testament to the power of music, brotherhood, & the lifeblood of a city—experienced by the viewer in real-time.
Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's concept of Live Cinema, Brother Verses Brother is a radically personal musical odyssey. Screening on May 3, at 4:15 p.m., at the Music Box Theatre, as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival, the film is directed by Ari Gold, who co-wrote the film with and stars alongside his real-life brother, Ethan Gold. Both of the filmmakers will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A; this screening is free for Music Box members.
Ahead of Brother Verses Brother screening at the festival, Ari Gold graciously took the time to answer this year’s CCFF filmmaker questionnaire. Below, his individual responses.
How did you first become interested in filmmaking? What was your path toward directing your first film?
I grew up wanting to write stories as a career, and practiced alone or sometimes on my dad’s typewriter. He was a writer, and my mother worked in the factory of American Zoetrope for Francis Coppola for a short while. But it wasn’t until many years later, after my mother's sudden death, that I began to realize that filmmaking was actually something I myself could do, since by that time I didn’t want to spend my life alone with a typewriter.
I started making short films that did well enough to bring me to Sundance a few times and then, in a fit of insanity, decided to take my eighth screenplay and carry it through to the finish line. It was a comedy about air drummers called Adventures of Power, which Harvey Weinstein walked out of 10 minutes into its Sundance premiere, but which eventually found its cult audience. I believe it’s the greatest air drumming film of all time.
What inspired you to make the film you're bringing to the festival?
I always wanted to make a movie about my strange, tragic and comic relationship with my identical twin brother Ethan Gold, and our sporadic attempts to make music together.
I had written a surrealistic fantasy screenplay about us at one point, but it sort of fell into disrepair. I was showing one of my no-budget short films at an ombudsman festival of Belarusian films in Madrid, and a director friend of mine, Nikita Lavretski, showed his one-shot improvised movie which fictionalized his real relationship with his girlfriend. When the movie ended I ran up to him and said that he had inspired me to make a similar experiment, but about me and my brother.
Motivated by the sense that our father might not live very long, I pressured my brother into making the movie with our dad just two months later, building the improvisation on what was essentially a short story that I wrote about us, with themes of brothers and fathers, love and death, and the challenges of the musical life.
Tell us about a film that you consider a guiding influence (whether it has informed your overarching vision as a filmmaker, directly informed the title you're bringing to the festival, or both).
One of my earliest obsessions was Apocalypse Now. I would stare at the LP of the soundtrack and listen to those helicopters and Carmine Coppola‘s music for hours on end. Years later, my mother died in a helicopter crash. It’s no coincidence that I was inspired by Francis Coppola’s concept of Live Cinema!
Brother Verses Brother is nothing like Coppola’s film on the surface, but this early formative memory made me want to capture a place with that level of intimacy. The multilayered use of sound has become one of my filmmaking obsessions, and for all of my films including this one, the story is told as much through sound as through picture. I learned that by being obsessed with Coppola and Walter Murch.
Tell us about a location that's held significance to the film you're bringing to the festival: a setting where filming took place, a geographic area that provided a source of inspiration, or another type of space that comes to mind for you in thinking about the film. What made this place so special?
Continuing the previous thought, if Apocalypse Now could capture the feeling of Vietnam through sound and vision, what if I were to capture the essence of North Beach, San Francisco, with the same intimacy, where you could taste the drinks, smell the mix of car exhaust and Chinese food and Italian espresso, feel the texture of those streets that I grew up knowing so well?
These were the streets where Ferlinghetti and Kerouac and Ginsberg and my father made poetry come alive for a new generation. But my dad hated Kerouac so, in a kind of inside-joke, I start the film on Kerouac Alley and end it in my father’s apartment. I wanted the audience to experience a safari through this bohemian world, as much as I experienced a safari through Coppola's vision of Vietnam. This special place, so unlike anywhere else on earth, is informed by music: the music on the streets, and most specifically, the music created by twin brothers who can’t seem to figure out how to get along with each other, but perform together anyway because of love.
The theatrical experience brings us together to celebrate artistic experience and expand our horizons as human beings. Tell us about a memorable theatrical experience from your life.
One of my favorite movies is Babe—yes, the pig movie. The third time I saw it in the theater, at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, I remember the packed audience going dead quiet when the pig has succeeded in convincing the sheep to follow his polite instructions. It’s a beautiful moment of shock and comedy right before the triumph of the film, and onscreen, the sound goes completely quiet other than the footsteps of the animals. Then, from the back of the theater I heard a woman, I’m guessing in her 50s or 60s, and clearly crying, suddenly and loudly saying into the silence, “You go, pig. You go.” In that moment, we were all that little pig, and the way the woman expressed that was so funny, so beautiful, and so honest that it made me never want to watch a movie at home again.