Return to: ATA Film & Video Festival 2008: Program 1

Why Was I Born

Why Was I Born is a film about how introspection influences the way we communicate with ourselves and with each other. The title is a question one might ask themselves when they are alone and wondering about their life. 
The two parallel stories focus on two unrelated individuals. While tape recording a love letter, a man in his apartment imagines a musician who was never recorded. This thought leads to memories of a past relationship. 
In the second part, a young woman on a bus remembers a street musician she saw once. His story recalls her own feelings about the early parts of her life.
When they both end up on the noisy city streets their simultaneous self-reflections reach a level of intensity that transports them to a place where they can feel comfortable in dissonance. Unable to communicate at first with spoken language they attempt to communicate through music.

Questions with Marlon Gonzalez

Elizabeth Wing: Your two main characters speak to us in English through subtitles. What nationalities are they representing, and what was behind those choices?

Marlon Gonzalez: The two main characters are Serbian and Chinese. I wanted them to be foreign but not related in anyway except for the fact that they do not speak (or think) in English. The fact that they are speaking different languages gives the two characters specific identities that we cannot relate to on the surface. They are foreign to us (as an American audience). In China or Serbia this idea wouldn't translate. Those audiences would identify with one or the other. I wanted them to be distinct from each other and from the audience and perhaps if the audience can't understand the characters then they themselves might feel detached like the characters. It would be hard for me to get the same thing out of a Russian film that a Russian person would. Just because it's translated into English doesn't necessarily mean that I understand the nuances of the specific rhythms of that language which could change what something means. It's why there are often different translations of foreign literature. They don't do that for films. So I wanted the audience to feel that distance between themselves and the characters. I should also mention that aesthetically I like to see text in a composition. I like subtitles... As far as their nationalities are concerned I just chose people I knew (non-actors) that were foreign to this country and spoke languages that I thought would compliment the music and the rhythm of the editing.

EW: Can you tell us about the music you selected for the film?

MG: The music I chose is extremely important to the film. Most of it was chosen way before any film was shot or any words were written. Music is what dictates the ideas in the film. The music always comes first. I wanted the film to feel like an old record that someone found somewhere. I'm obsessed with post war black and black influenced music and I feel that I haven't really seen too many films that articulate the feelings present in that music. I think that it's really complicated to translate an Eric Dolphy solo into a narrative film but I figured I'd try it anyway. Some of the jazz I chose I would call Post Bop and that style of jazz I'd like to think is similar to the form of my film. The film is "out" but not too "out"... The music on the bus is Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin and I thought that that particular piece felt like a jazz ballade to me. When I first heard it I had a lot of the same thoughts that the character has in the film.

EW: What's the story of Chicken Ernie, and why did you choose to use him in the first scene?

MG: Chicken Ernie is at the beginning of the film because I wanted to jump right into a feeling of a stream of consciousness. I'm personally interested in all of the artists that never got their film out, or never recorded, or were never published etc. All you have is what someone said about them and their work and the rest is for you to imagine. He's imagining what Chicken Ernie would've been like. I imagined an electric harmonica player from the 1950's would've probably wanted to sound like Little Walter so when the character thinks of him the sound is different excerpts of Little Walter solos skipped from LP to LP. The text in the very beginning is something that you might read in the liner notes of a record. I also felt that it foreshadowed the girl on the bus and her memory of the accordion player as well as the ending of the film when the two main characters meet in the same "vortex" that Chicken Ernie was imagined to have lived and died. And finally, the main character considers Ernie to be someone who was important to him and someone who was lost in time: a "forgotten ace". He feels the same way. His girl lost him.

EW: If there's anything in particular about your film you'd like to be addressed, please include that here.

MG: All I wanted to shoot was a harmonica player in a field with some cows and a woman who says that she's alone – freeze frame- Johnny Burnette's "Touch Me". That's it. So all in all I got pretty lucky with what came out of that. I had no script, I shot/wrote as I went along and I finished with a film that means something to me. I'm not always sure what the film is exactly but it was basically improvised and I can't really complain. I hope to continue making films for a long time.

Marlon Gonzalez was born in 1978 in New Jersey. He moved to San Francisco in 1996 to study illustration at the Academy of Art. He switched to film directing in 1998 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2001. He is interested in finding an honest translation of blues and jazz to film.

Last updated 09/22/2008.