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McCall:
Well, actually, they were mistakes. We were using a huge amount of animation in that film, and you know how time-consuming and complex that is. We did it as best we could.
Tyndall:
Our constraints were financial as well. The hands-on process was prescribed by budget.
McCall:
We were borrowing George Griffin's animation stand. It's in the middle of his living room. Andrew had a full-time job and I was intermittently doing free-lance work. We sometimes had to go there at six o'clock in the evening and work all night until it was time to go to work again. We had to work on nights when George and Karen [Cooper] were out, or out of town. We did make some total errors, and it was miserable to go back in there and shoot for another fifteen hours because the calibration was off.
Anyway, there were a lot of reasons why we decided that it was absolutely fine that the film looks the way it does, and that those mistakes were all right.
MacDonald:
How much did you show
Argument?
McCall:
We did three seminars at the Collective, four or five at Millennium Film Workshop. We showed it at Center for Media Studies in Buffalo; at NAME in Chicago; at the International Film Theory Conference at the University of Wisconsin; at the Edinburgh Film Festival; and at the London Film-makers' Co-operative. Andrew and I were present at those screenings. But since that first year when we were working with it quite a lot, it hasn't been rented on a regular basis.
We saw it again about two years ago and I think we were both quite disappointed. I think we both realized how differently we would do it if we remade it.
MacDonald:
What would you do?
Tyndall:
First, we'd do it on video, rather than on film. It really belongs on video.
McCall:
That amount of information and talking would seem much more normal on television than it does when you're waiting for it up on the screen. The last time we talked about it, we agreed that we'd put much more on the visual level and take a lot of the talking out.
Tyndall:
Or maybe just take a cut. The film does play long. Of course, now we can stand outside it and have a look, but it was never made for that sort of detached reaction.
McCall:
We made the film on ready credit at Citibank. We each borrowed five-thousand dollars, which was like a car loan. My debt is still about forty-five hundred dollars. Citibank is doing well on their investment. The principal hasn't changed, and we've been paying ever since.