Top image: Howard Brookner with William Burroughs © Paula Court

Aaron Brookner was on the set of Bloodhounds of Broadway as a young child and it was this exposure to the world of filmmaking that turned him onto the idea of becoming a filmmaker himself, an ambition achieved through Uncle Howard.

Bloodhounds’ director, Howard Brookner, was Aaron’s uncle. By then, the senior Brookner had won acclaim for his documentaries Burroughs: The Movie, about the leading light of the Beat Generation, and Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, about an unsuccessful attempt to stage a daylong opera which would have accompanied the 1984 Summer Olympics. With Bloodhounds, he was making something different—a comedy, starring Madonna, Matt Dillon and Rutger Hauer. And he was determined that the studio would give him final cut. He was also battling AIDS.

The medication offered to sufferers at that time only made it harder for Howard to work and so he came off it during his attempt to finish the film. Before it was released, Howard lost his battle against the illness, at the age of 34.

Now, the documentary Uncle Howard reveals the story of Howard Brookner’s filmmaking career. Director Aaron Brookner here reflects on the project ahead of its UK cinema release.

Benjamin Knight: You saw Howard making Bloodhounds of Broadway while you were still a child. When did you see any of his finished films and how did you respond to those?
Aaron Brookner: I discovered them all as an early teenager and I could see Howard in them. Burroughs: The Movie and Robert Wilson and The Civil Wars are both incredibly warm films because of the director-subject relationships. Even in Bloodhounds, which is fiction, there is a lot of Howard’s humour and charm. It comes across through his characters.

BK: Now that you have seen Howard’s work from behind the scenes, by viewing the archive material that exists, has the way you see Howard’s films changed at all?
AB: I’m not sure if I see his films any differently. I loved them before and still do. But seeing his process was definitely a new insight in itself. Above all, what stands out is how much he loved what he was doing. And it was infectious. Everyone around him, whether it was Madonna, a grip, Robert Wilson or William Burroughs, was affected by it. This experience has definitely reaffirmed my love of filmmaking and the many different directions you can take it in. Film is such an exciting medium and it’s still relatively new.

“Burroughs, especially in the early days of shooting, wasn’t so comfortable on camera. Howard would get a couple drinks in him and then be ready for the moment when he was comfortable but still lucid, because, after that, it would get a bit messy.”

BK: We also see the younger you, via Howard’s camcorder – what’s it like when your home movies are made by a filmmaker who might’ve also been filming a Burroughs or a Madonna that week?
AB: Whether on home video or film, Howard shot everything with a director’s eye. One of my favourite transitions in Uncle Howard is the cut from Howard filming Burroughs and Ginsberg to his own grandparents. You can just see how he treats them all the same. He was very open and never judgemental and genuinely interested in the world and people around him — me, as a kid, included. It’s probably why so many of us loved him and were inspired by him.

BK: What did the archive teach you about Howard’s method? And his subjects?
AB: Sometimes it’s handy to have a vice. Burroughs, especially in the early days of shooting, wasn’t so comfortable on camera. Howard would get a couple drinks in him and then be ready for the moment when he was comfortable but still lucid, because, after that, it would get a bit messy. There was a window, Howard knew how to create it and he could catch everyone, Burroughs and beyond, when they were at their peak. It’s a lot harder to execute than it sounds and it requires a lot of patience. I could go on and on about the things I learned, especially about Burroughs — or from Burroughs. I mean, listening to him and Brion Gysin discuss the nature of time, space and human evolution would blow my mind; “We are here to go.”

“What stands out is how much he loved what he was doing. And it was infectious. Everyone around him, whether it was Madonna, a grip, Robert Wilson or William Burroughs, was affected by it.”

BK: How much material from Howard’s working and personal life was made available to you?
AB: Nothing was ‘made available.’ We had to go out and find everything. The entire Uncle Howard team was looking and reaching out to people. We had no idea what existed or even how much. We were scouring archives, storage units, and closets on the hunt for physical artefacts. And then we had to make them digital and start sorting through it all. It took years but the benefit of that was that things came to us in chunks. I would just focus on what I had in front of me. So, for example, in the years before I actually saw footage from between ’78 and ’83, the time spent with Burroughs, I got hold of the safety sound rolls and worked from the audio only. I set it to abstract imagery, other archive or new footage. Many of these experiments, done just to be working, actually led to important editorial choices later on. Once we finally had all the footage, I made a reel for my editor of all the times we see Howard on screen clearly and worked from there.

BK: Did that establish the same structure we see in the finished film?
AB: This film was alive and morphing every day. Putting this film together was a very free-flowing creative process. It was also very hard to find the right narrative shape and tackle the many different themes. So, my editor and I had a look at Kurosawa’s Ikiru, where the main character dies halfway through the film and you learn about everything he affected in the second half. Our story was not the same but the idea of ‘killing Howard off’ near the mid-point of the movie gave way to a structure where we could go beyond life and into themes about death, memory, and legacy while retaining narrative tension.

BK: In choosing Howard as your subject, you’ve had to find a way of making a documentary that’s very different from the way Howard made his; his subjects were living subjects, while you’ve had to look back. Did that give you pause?
AB: It presented a real challenge. I wanted to make a movie about a director who was dead, whose life and work were largely unknown, and whose films were largely unavailable. Tom DiCillo told me very early on that my challenge as a filmmaker would be to let the audience fall in love with Howard, as opposed to telling them to fall in love.

BK: The events of the film are still recent history; there’ll be a split in the audience between those who know the background first-hand and those for whom this is all new. How have you managed to address them both?
AB: I have a tape where Howard is describing the audiences for his masterpiece Burroughs and they were split between the middle aged ‘Beat Generation’ and the younger ‘Punk’ generation. I’ve almost seen the same split for Uncle Howard, where there is the audience who lived through these times, and the newer one, who have grown up influenced by them — and I am part of that particular audience. Around the world, audiences have reacted to the film very strongly by making personal connections. At the core of the film, there is an emotional narrative that is universal. We’ve all had someone in our life who has influenced us, who we wish we could have gotten to know more or learned things from. This film turns that into action. It’s a rare opportunity.

BK: Did you encounter problems owing to the fact that the technology Howard used is no longer current?
AB: All the time. There is a scarily small number of facilities, worldwide, who have the equipment and the know-how to work with 16mm film and sound. It really is disappearing. Added to that, Howard wasn’t with us, obviously, and neither were any of his camera and sound logs, if there ever were any. This meant having to manually sync some 300 cans of film with very few slates left, because they had mostly been trimmed out. It was extremely arduous, and costly.

BK: Do you know what Howard wanted to or would’ve worked on next, if he had gotten the chance?
AB: We found out that he had a few projects which he was developing when he died — adaptations of Brad Gooch’s novel Scary Kisses and James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and The Works, for which he had a good script; a film on David Bowie; I was told Madonna wanted him to direct Truth or Dare. He also had a concept to turn Burroughs’ Junkie into a musical.

BK: And how about you; will you now step into fiction, as he did?
AB: Yes, my next film will be Black Deutschland, a screen adaptation of the novel by Darryl Pinckney

Uncle Howard is being screened at Curzon Bloomsbury and at the ICA from 16th December. For full screening times click here.