My Dinner with The Brothers Quay
TJ: Has your second feature The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes made it to video?
Q: It’s actually coming out here for a limited theatrical run. Maybe 14 days. (laughs)
RD: Is Keith Griffiths involved in any aspect of the day-to-day operation of the production? You’re managing your finances; you’ve got your own bank account…
Q: We have two companies. We have Koninck, which is three of us together, which we did the feature film on, or any of the fiction films on. And then we have our own private company, which is Koninck QBFZ, Quay Brothers, which we tend to do our more private work, whether it’s commercials or theatre or opera or ballet or whatever it might be, which Keith is not in any way involved in like that. For the new work in progress, it’s something that we entirely funded ourselves at this stage.
RD: Do your commercials hit American TV at all?
Q: All the time, a lot. The majority of them are made for the agency that we work with here, Believe Media. We also have an English agent where we do certain things in England, but ever since 9/11 the bottom’s collapsed out of the commercial market for us. We haven’t done anything in four years here.
TJ: Who are some of your clients?
Q: Monsanto, Nikon, Murphy’s Stout. We did an AIDS commercial.
RD: Did a Coke commercial.
TJ: Do you ever get those works back? Would the DVD rights be too tough to navigate?
Q: Never thought of about it for one second.
TJ: Is it because of the content of the work?
Q: No foresight. (laughs)
TJ: It’s bizarre, because those commercials inevitably have the biggest budgets of anything out there.
Q: I know, it’s extraordinary! The budgets that we were given, and to think — we could have made three or four short films. They don’t bat an eye.
RD: What kind of budgets are your shorts films made on?
Q: Thirty thousand. Crocodiles was the biggest budget we ever had in our life — no, the Stockhausen [In Absentia] was £100,000. The music was already cleared, the BBC paid that. So we had £100,000 just to do that film by itself. And Crocodiles before that was around, I think, £75,000, which was a lot at that time. After that everything was about £20,000 – £40,000.
TJ: What was the original venue for Crocodiles?
Q: Camden Plaza. It showed with a Parajanov film, Suram Fortress, which was, like, 78 minutes.
RD: And the MTV stuff? Do you have rights to be able to use that?
Q: Keith has managed — they’re fine about it. They just let us do what we want with [Stille Nacht I]. 4AD, the same thing. They’re very happy to let us just run with it [Are We Still Married and Stille Nacht IV]. The same with the two dance films. When the BFI brings out the new package, hopefully it’s going to have Institute Benjamenta on it, plus the two dance films as extras on the Benjamenta side. It’s good for them to get it out — otherwise it just sits in the archive.
TJ: How do you feel about doing commercials?
Q: It’s purely a pact with the devil. You say one commercial a year will pay for the studio. For instance, we did a commercial in the year that we did Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies. Channel Four gave us £20,000, so the commercial paid for the studio, but yet allowed us with that little bit of money to work for a year and a half on Rehearsals. So in that sense, it’s just practical. You just bite the bullet. And also, it’s not like you’re saying “Oh, Jesus, it’s terrible, we have to work on this commercial.” Actually the commercials were very interesting subjects that we like – the Dulux Wood commercial was all about preservation of wood. Well, we like working with wood!
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