All images courtesy of Christopher Seufert
by Rebecca M. Alvin
When Christopher Seufert returned home to Cape Cod after completing his graduate degree in anthropology at what is now California State University, East Bay and living in Australia for a brief stint, he was ready to get to work on a documentary film project but didn’t yet have a subject. He made some films about local aspects of his hometown of Chatham, Massachusetts—documentaries about the fishing industry, Cape Cod history, etc.—but now he was looking to expand his audience with a subject that could have global interest. It was the 1990s, a time when independent filmmaking was in a kind of golden age in the United States, with filmmakers making low-budget films on their credit cards, not waiting to ask for permission or funding, and ending up with huge successes, in some cases (and a lot of debt in others). But what would be a good subject?
“I kept running into people that summer when I returned mentioning Edward Gorey. ‘Oh, have you heard about this guy in Yarmouth?’ And it just kept coming up. It’s one of those things, I’m sure you’ve seen it in your life, where it’s just the same name or something keeps coming up repeatedly in a way that you can’t ignore it,” Seufert recalls. He says he’d never heard of the Tony-winning designer Gorey, didn’t know his books, or the famous intro animation he’d done for the PBS series Mystery!, but he wondered why everyone was so interested in him.
“I went to the Yellow Umbrella [bookstore] in Chatham and just saw, ‘Wow, this guy has a lot of books and is extremely prolific. I don’t understand what he’s doing, but just on the basis of how prolific he is, I’m interested in what he’s doing here on the Cape.’ So I wrote him a letter, and he called me back within the week,” says Seufert.
What he couldn’t have known then was that this film would be more than 30 years in the making, even as its subject died only four years into filming. Gorey is best known as the writer and illustrator of 116 gothic, yet humorous books featuring Edward Lear style nonsense, darkly funny stories that often involve children, seemingly set in the Victorian era, and illustrated with his famously detailed black and white drawings. He also illustrated some 500 books by other people, and wrote numerous plays that were produced on the Cape, and was known for his flamboyant style of dress, often featuring furs.
Seufert’s journey with Gorey has taken him through his entire career, one in which he’s worked with Walter Cronkite, Julie Harris, Suzanne Vega, Vince Clarke of Depeche Mode, and documentary legend Albert Maysles. All the while, he has also created six photography books and grown a business as a local photographer and videographer here on the Cape. This week, he will be appearing at East End Books Ptown with Memento Gorey: The Last Interviews with Edward Gorey, a book of interviews with Gorey and other notable people influenced by Gorey, such as Neil Gaiman, Terry Gilliam, and Danny Elfman, who are in the film, which is just now nearing completion. But while this, as well as a soundtrack CD he produced, were originally derived from a need to have rewards to motivate donors to the film on Kickstarter, the book offers something truly unique for Gorey fans: unedited interviews that show how the mind of Edward Gorey worked, and photographs of his home, as it was when he actually lived there, before it was emptied and recreated for tours at the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts. If you know anything about Gorey or have been to the Gorey House, you’ll know he had many cats and was known for his oddball collections, often featuring macabre, darkly humorous items that inspired his work. Seufert took the photos in the book almost immediately after Gorey died.
The film features animated sequences that take place in the house, with very specific details that Seufert knew because he was there before the artist died and saw how he lived. “When you’re looking at the animation, it has a validity to it. It’s not just like, oh, show Edward Gorey at a desk. No, his desk is going to show him at the desk in his house with the magnolia tree outside, you know, what he was wearing, how many cats, what a wall looked like,” he explains.
The interviews in this book demonstrate a behind-the-scenes look at Seufert’s working relationship with Gorey. As a cinema verite documentarian, Seufert says he had planned on shooting close to 200 hours with Gorey but only managed to get 60 hours before he died. The raw interview transcripts reveal tangents and idiosyncrasies that are always lost in a film, due to the medium’s need for conversations to be edited down to a matter of minutes. These unprocessed interviews do not have Gorey explaining himself or his work directly, but they intrinsically show who he was through his humor, his manner of speaking, and the things he doesn’t say.
“For every 15 minutes of talking about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I was able to get five minutes of him talking about his books,” Seufert laughs. He says his process for interviewing Gorey was very much directed by the artist himself. “A lot of people might ask, you know, more than any other artist, ‘What does it all mean?’ You know, ‘Is this about your childhood?’ He hated that. He wouldn’t even entertain that with an answer. The good thing was that for me, I actually enjoyed pushing that button with him a little bit because he’d be very humorous about it,” says Seufert. “I would say, ‘Do you mind if I ask you about this?’ and he’d say ‘No,’ like a very flat no… And he would say, ‘Can we go now? Can we just go get a beer?’ We developed a relationship where I felt, you know, it was safe to poke him. And I think he would give me a few minutes or something real, as long as I would take it back to what he wanted to talk about,” Seufert says. “Which was, you know, not the Red Sox, but anything else, you know, Andy Garcia in Jennifer 8. Or who’s the actor that is in the most movies you’ve never seen? You know, Donald Sutherland. And he would go on and on about that stuff. And then I came to realize while I was shooting it, hey, you know, people are going to be interested in this. These are the details. This is the mind of Gorey that’s going to go. His work’s going to be here. So my job is to get the guy behind the artwork.”
After all this time, Seufert says he is just now thinking about what he would have asked Gorey if he’d had more time with him. “I’ve only recently begun thinking about that…as I’ve gotten older and perhaps a little more sentimental with it. There are some things I wish I could ask him,” he admits. “I was letting Edward direct the film in a way by letting him have his way. When I asked him for something and he didn’t give it to me, he would give me something else. And so by default, along the way, Edward was in somewhat of a co-director’s seat. And I really thought that was good for the documentary and good for what we were doing because it was all sort of Gorey-approved. And the last thing I would want, in this particular case, is to come out with a film that he didn’t like. Mostly because he’s got such a great sense of humor. And if I can capture nothing else, it’s his sense of humor. So I hope that that comes through in the film and in the interviews…I would love to ask him… ‘What else about you do you hope comes through in this film?’”
Then again, Seufert says, “Whatever question I had, I don’t think he would have given to me. That’s the answer. Because that’s the way Edward was.”
Christopher Seufert will be speaking about his book, Memento Gorey: The Last Interviews with Edward Gorey at East End Books Ptown, 389 Commercial St., on Sunday, September 6 at 5 p.m. Books will be available there for sale and are also available everywhere books are sold. For more information about the event call or visit eastendbooksptown.com. For more about the film project, visit edwardgoreyfilm.com.
