When Alexandre Rockwell’s basement flooded a few years ago, he spotted an opportunity. Why not do the repairs himself and put the $80,000 (£58,000) insurance payout towards making a new film? He hired graduate students from New York University, where he is the head of directing at the graduate film school, as crew and cast his children, Lana, 18, and Nico, 15, in the leading roles. Lana is on our video call, too, laughing at her dad as he finishes the story. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to make a film,” he jokes. “I just hope I don’t have to burn my house down next time, or cut my leg off.”
Lana was 15 when the family shot Sweet Thing. It is the second movie directed by their dad that she has appeared in with her brother Nico – a follow-up of sorts to 2013’s Little Feet. In both, the Rockwells play siblings growing up dirt poor, constantly in harm’s way, but whose innocence is a kind of magical overcoat, protecting them from the world – up to a point. Little Feet was about two little kids taking their goldfish to the ocean to set it free. The new one is a coming-of-age tale, Stand by Me meets Badlands. Shot in black and white on 16mm film, the two movies share a freewheeling energy and a fairytale quality; the world seen through a child’s sense of wonder.
The films are the work of a passionate director, steeped in cinema, beautifully crafted, but this is renegade moviemaking on the cheap. Rockwell paid a homeless man $50 (£36) to turn up for one scene in Sweet Thing; he cast the film’s third child lead in a skatepark. It is about authenticity and energy, but budget, too. It is not the career trajectory you would have predicted for him in the mid-90s.
Back then, Rockwell was turning down Hollywood movies. It was the era of the independent film boom, the moment indie went mainstream and a new guard of young film-makers became rock-star famous: Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze. In 1992, it looked as if Rockwell had cracked the big time when his feature debut, In the Soup, won the grand jury prize at the Sundance film festival, beating his best friend Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Then his career stalled.
Rockwell’s problems began when he went to Los Angeles, where he was made offers he found easy to refuse – As Good As It Gets, So I Married an Axe Murderer, A Perfect World (the Kevin Costner movie that Clint Eastwood would go on to direct). “There was that one about generation X with Ethan Hawke.” Reality Bites? “Yeah. They wanted me to do that desperately.” Hollywood wooed him; the studios sent gifts. He would open the door to find boxes of still-warm cookies on his doorstep. But in the end, they got the message. “I said no all the time and, eventually, they get tired of you saying no.”
His problem with Hollywood seems to have boiled down to temperament. “I was young, but there was this weird thing in me that never felt …” He pauses, then reaches for a comparison with Tarantino. “It’s his nature. He’s talented and he just wanted to go that way. I was more reticent.” In meetings, they would ask him: what is the pitch? Who are the stars? “My film-making is personal. I never really knew how to articulate it. It’s an exploration, I’m sniffing it, I’m hunting it.” Looking back, he missed a lot of opportunities. “I’m OK with that,” he says.
Rockwell does not come across as remotely bitter. With a healthy dose of self-deprecation, he tells me about the time he tried to warn Tarantino against being seduced by the Hollywood machine. “I’m not much older. But I really just loved him. He was so full of life. You could almost feel the sparks coming off him, you know?” They used to stay up all night watching movies. Rockwell worried that Hollywood would chew Tarantino up and spit him out. “I remember saying to him: ‘Quentin, you’re talented. Be careful. Watch out for success, it can destroy you.’”
Tarantino looked at him with an ear-to-ear grin and told him he wanted it all – that he would subvert the system, turn Hollywood on its head. “I remember listening, thinking: the poor guy, he’s never going to make it. He’s going to get strung out on drugs and die in a gutter. But he beat them at their game.” The two eventually fell out over a script that Rockwell says Tarantino sat on for a couple of years: “I actually hated him for a while and I was hurt by him.” But they are friends again.
The saga of Rockwell’s career in Hollywood features a classic episode of bullying and intimidation from Harvey Weinstein. At the mention of Weinstein’s name, Rockwell shakes his head slowly as if he is trying to shake out the memory. “I can talk about it freely now. For years, I was scared, because he’s so powerful,” He takes his glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose.
Weinstein in the mid-90s was one of the most influential men in entertainment. His company, Miramax, worked on Four Rooms, Tarantino’s 1995 anthology film, four stories each directed by a different hotshot director. Weinstein insisted on recutting Rockwell’s segment, The Wrong Man, starring Rockwell’s then wife, Jennifer Beals.
When he refused, Weinstein switched on the menace. He tracked Rockwell down to his dentist – “I don’t know how he found me” – and bellowed down the phone at the dentist to knock Rockwell’s teeth out. Weinstein got his way on the cut. “I feel he destroyed my movie.”
Rockwell tells me about the time he was summoned to watch the re-edit: “It’s a disgusting story.” Weinstein sat there eating hotdogs while a student rubbed ointment on his back. “He was eating 10 hotdogs like sushi, dipping them in butter. And this student was rubbing ointment on boils the size of lemons.”
Rockwell believes that Weinstein was out to get him, that he sabotaged his second feature, Somebody to Love, starring Rosie Perez and Harvey Keitel. “It had troubles, but it’s a good movie. And he killed it. He made an offer to buy it. And then he dumped it after six months and cancelled the thing.” Weinstein was threatened by his closeness to Tarantino, he thinks. “Quentin was my best friend. And he didn’t like that.
“I’m not saying that he single-handedly ruined my opportunities, but he was behind the scenes telling people not to work with me.” Weinstein and Tarantino had a strange relationship, he adds. “It was like a father-son relationship, because Quentin didn’t really have a dad, but Harvey abused him and abused the situation. He is an ogre.”
After Rockwell’s years in the film-making wilderness, Little Feet saved his life. “I was in LA. Basically, I was a little lost and we were going completely broke. I had two little kids and the only thing that really made me happy was my family. So I kind of lost my compass.” He is married to the actor Karyn Parsons, who played cousin Hilary in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and is now also a children’s author.
When the kids were small, Rockwell would peek at them playing together through a crack in the door, awestruck by their imagination. “I’d watch them do these amazing things, constantly inventing the world. I just wanted to get on my knees and have them lead me through a story.”
Making Little Feet, he rediscovered his passion for film-making. “It brought me back, helped me get past my ego, feeling sorry for myself.” The job at NYU gave him a degree of financial security. He enjoys being a professor, but he probably wouldn’t be doing it if he could make film-making pay: “The older I get, I realise I only have so much time in life – and I really want to be dedicating it to developing my films.”
Lana was seven when they made Little Feet. I ask her if acting in Sweet Thing felt different. “When I was younger, it was just a fun thing. This time, I was more aware of the responsibility I had in the movie. So, I took it more seriously.”
The two films make a rough pair. In both, the Rockwell kids play siblings raised by an alcoholic dad (a terrific Will Patton in Sweet Thing). Some of those scenes are straight out of Rockwell’s childhood; his father, an actor, was an alcoholic. “I adored my father. He was my hero, but he wasn’t a great dad.” This time around, Rockwell added his wife to the cast, playing the children’s toxically selfish neglectful mother.
Lana says her mum dreaded filming those scenes. “Afterwards, she felt so bad. That is not my mom. It was trippy, having your mom treat you that way in front of all these people.”
Rockwell says he agonised about putting his daughter in front of the camera again. He was scared she might get bad reviews. “It was a big risk. What if she had not done well? Not because of her fault, but because of my fault, asking her to do something she couldn’t do. I thought I could be letting her down as a father, because what if she’s bad? Like if the film is good, but she’s bad. Actually, it’s just the opposite, the film is good, but she is really good.”
I tell him a critic would have to be pretty mean to go hard on a teenager. “They exist! Remember Sofia Coppola; she was traumatised probably for 10 years by Godfather III.” He sent Tarantino a DVD of Sweet Thing. “Quentin is prone to hyperbole, but he said it was the best thing he’d seen in 10 years.” He beams at his daughter: “He said he loved Lana.”
Last question: I am curious about the basement. Did he get round to fixing it up? Lana cracks up and for the first time in our conversation Rockwell is stumped. “It’s got some paint on it. I did some things.”
• Sweet Thing is released on 10 September in cinemas and on digital platforms
