Director Andrew Bujalski Makes a Movie, Two Ways

2022’s There There pops up in Austin as both an art installation and a theatrical screening

By Richard Whittaker, Fri., Feb. 21, 2025

There There - (courtesy of Andrew Bujalski)

Advice to filmmakers: Never throw anything out. If Andrew Bujalski had forgotten that wisdom, then he may never have undertaken his latest artistic project – a three-screen installation conversion of his 2022 film, There There. His first major artistic project outside of filmmaking arrives in Austin this week for a multi-week run at the Museum of Human Achievement, accompanied by a special screening of the original film at AFS Cinema.

Even though the installation premiered last summer in Los Angeles at Rusha & Co., being a gallery artist is all new to Bujalski. “I have so little experience talking as an artist and not as a movie director,” he blushes.

The movie is where the idea began, Bujalski says, “but it was always one step from the gallery.” The cast included familiar names such as Lennie James (Fear the Walking Dead), Lili Taylor (American Crime), and Jason Schwartzman (7 Chinese Brothers) playing nameless characters navigating their interlocked relationships. However, they were never in the same room as each other. Filming took place at the height of the pandemic, so they were all at home, bouncing their lines off a friend or family member, while Bujalski, director of cinematography Matthias Grunsky, and the rest of the crew watched over Zoom from Austin. This wasn’t so much Bujalski’s way to make a film during lockdown (“Every time I heard 'COVID lockdown movie,’ I cringed”), but his exploration of social and emotional disconnection in an avant-garde cinematic form.

“The distributor kept warning me, 'Don’t say experimental. No one wants to see an experimental movie,’” he says. “Now I feel liberated and I can admit it was an experimental movie.”

However, even during production Bujalski saw there was potential to take “this bananas idea” beyond the cinema. Filming produced more than 80 hours of footage from seven cast members who would spend hours in front of the camera in character, running through their side of the script’s 15-minute dialogues. “I could picture this physical build in the back of my head,” he says. “We could take this idea of collapsing and acknowledging distance and literalize it. [So] I told all the post-production people, 'Hey, hang on to your work here, because if I can pull this off I’m going to come back to you and we’re going to do this again.’”

For There There, the film, Bujalski edited the footage to create the illusion of connection between the characters. In There There, the installation, Bujalski said, “You’re seeing the process of performance laid bare. ... The actors hold their screens so, instead of cutting between them, you’re getting everything in the movie but you’re also getting a lot more of those individuals.” Essentially, the audience becomes their own editor, choosing what footage to watch at any one point. “You can’t watch all three screens at once,” the director says. “You have to figure out how you want to stand, how you want to receive it. What’s interesting to me when people first encounter it is there’s an instinct to follow it like a movie and just swivel your head a lot but, at some point, your neck hurts and you settle in and take that ownership.”