The Interest in vs. the Desire to Solve Mysteries - Talking Toynbee Tiles with Resurrect Dead director Jon Foy

One of the chief delights of Resurrect Dead:  The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles is how its cocktail of detective story, conspiracy paranoia, street art, and pop science fiction coalesces into such a compelling story.  The film gives an overview and history of the appearance of hand-cut linoleum tiles embedded in public roadways across the mainly in the eastern United States but as far away as cities in Brazil and Chile.  The tiles bear the cryptic yet evocative text

Resurrect Dead won the Directors award at this years Sundance Festival, and was one of my personal highlights at HotDocs 2011.  So much so that I tracked down director Jon Foy (who also wrote and recorded the films catchy score) to talk about the his particular approach to filmmaking, solving mysteries, and the empathy of the films central figures.  Below is a condensed version of the conversation:

Resurrect Dead opens in NYC on today before expanding across the country theatrically.  Alternatively, it is available VOD via iTunes.

Kurt Halfyard:  When did you first come across the Toynbee Tiles?

Jon Foy:  In 1998, I was working at a movie theatre in Philadelphia and my friend Adam introduces me to the tiles.  The conversation when something along the lines of "Adam, what did you do this weekend?" "I went to New York and I took these pictures of stuff in the road"  And back then, for us, it was a big deal, to take a trip to NYC, but he said, "I just took these pictures of this thing in the road, then we turned around and drove home."  And I said, "What?  Wow, that is all you did?  Crazy."  And so I started asking him about things in the road and he told me that someone was embedding these messages in the road about resurrecting the dead, and they have been appearing for decades.  And I thought he was pulling my leg, and I said, "so where is the closest one?"  "Well, right by the Liberty Bell on fifth and Chestnut."  So I went on break because the theatre was right near there (where the Liberty Bell used to be,) and holy crap, that is for real.  Then I realized that I had been seeing them for years.  It was subconsciously there, it just had to be triggered.  

KH:  Because Philadelphia was sort of ground zero for the tiles.

JF:  Exactly.  It still was, it still is.  I happen to think that most people in that city tend to walk around, carrying these things in the back of their minds, and if you show it to them and say, they would have a similar reaction to mine.  I had a late night of prank phone calls, we used to prank call a number of people, which are still friends to this day.  These were not malicious pranks, they were just more like goofing around.  There used to be a program on the internet where you type in a message it will deliver that message in a robot voice.   In the summer of 2000, I prank phone called Adam, who had shown me about the tiles, pretending to be the person who makes the tiles, and Justin (Duerr, the principle subject of the documentary) gets the call and thinks he just made a break-through with the tiler, the mystery, and Justin was like he was off and running, "How did he get my number!"  

KH:  You can see it in the film when Justin gets any new piece of information, the excitement.

Yea, later I apologized to him, and introduced myself, explained the prank and he just sort of shrugged it off.  But then I asked him what more he knew about the tiles, and he showed me his huge collection of photos and just started telling me his theories of the spelling and the grammar in the tiles, and his trips to New York, and Pittsburgh, and I thought, Oh my god!  At that point, there was this gut feeling, that there was a story here and we were going to make a movie out of it.   

KH:  So how far was he in his own investigations when you came in?

JF:  He started noticing them in 1993, as you see in the beginning of the movie, when he was working as a foot courier walking all over town.  He would notice the tiles and he is just attuned to things like this and at first he took a notebook and started writing down the messages, and then he started buying disposable cameras and taking pictures of them everywhere he went, developing them, and collecting them.  He did tell a number of other people about the tiles, and tried to get them on board with him, and their response was, "I don't get it, their tiles in the road"  And his response was, "But yea, isn't that crazy?"  So he was into it, and traveling around in a band called Northern Liberties, and another called Eulogy, so when they would go to other towns he'd go off looking for and taking pictures of tiles, but then started traveling on his own.  In the winter of 2000 he came upon the fresh tile, as this is re-created in the movie, upon a late night trip out to the convenience store.  He is always scanning the roads, he says has, 'tile vision' almost like he is hallucinating, "wait, I think I see a tile!"  Then he gets closer and no it is just a piece of trash in the road.   We all got 'tile vision' once we started doing this film.  So he sees the fresh tile and that was the big moment for him.  He was writing a 'Zine at the point (and still does) and he wrote a big article about it, with photos of the fresh tile, and speculation on how it was made, all the while kicking himself because he just missed the tiler, and that was about the point where I met up with him.  Part of what sold me was that article which became the starting point for 'Act 1,' the first 20 minutes of the movie.  And I just went over to Justin's hows and said, "Just show me your stuff."  A little bit about the structure of the movie.  The first act is the past-tense that leads up that point.  Act 2 starts in 2005 when I moved back from college, and we started the actual investigation.  There really is this kind of break in the movie between past tense and then suddenly it is present tense.  

KH:  At one point I thought that Justin was making his own documentary.   The first shot of the movie you can see his head shaved, which is different from the rest of the film.

JF:  That is still us filming, that shot was in 2007, and he had just got back from touring, and he shave his head for god knows what reason.  I was a little upset about continuity at the time, but our take on that was that we shot over six years, things being a bit all over the place is fine.  

KH:  When I watched the movie, my take was that it starts off about the tiles, but at a certain point it does does become Justin's movie.  Not even about totally solving the mystery of getting every ounce of the mystery into the film, it becomes Justin's obsession and how he comes to grips with this particular obsession.  When you shoot for 6-7 years at some point you have a mountain of footage, when how you are going to frame the movie?

JF:  I'm glad you took the movie that way!  That is how I see it.  The tiles are the starting point, and Justin is the spine of the film.  At what point do we end the story?  The ways things unfolded, when we got answers to a number of questions.  That is when we realized it is not just a search for information, but Justin is actually reaching out to this guy.  I think the best way to say it is that Justin felt like a kindred spirit with the tiler, and as we came closer and closer, we realized that it was just was not going to happen, and to keep pushing ourselves closer and closer, wasn't going to work, and we did not want this person to feel as if we were intruding.  Justin really wants is to connect to this person, and you cannot force that.  People would say, why didn't you do a stake out or something, and the reason is best described as if same if you have a crush on some person, and you run into them a couple times, and you say, "hey do you want to go out with me?"  And she says, "no."  And you can turn into a sleaze if you really start pushing.  So when someone says, "no" you have a choice:  Keep pushing harder, and now the person really doesn't like you, or you can take no for an answer and leave it at that.  But where were we?

KH:  OK, what elevates Resurrect Dead from a good movie to a great movie (for me) is this.  It is easy to look at the mystery and the procedural aspects of the whole thing, but the film ends of a moment of what is best described as 'human dignity,' a moment of empathy.  And in the world we live in, when it comes to celebrity or sports or pretty much anything in popular culture, the urge to grab it, squeeze it for everything and take, take, take and this movie seems to stay on 'the right' side of that line.  It took me by surprise, hell, I felt like a better person walking out, simply for how Justin handles the whole thing.

JF:  Yes, I think that was a good moment for him.  When we cut the film we were pretty much all on the same page as Justin.  We all wanted to stop, we all thought that was the right amount.  Our main concern now is the level of intrusiveness for having made and put out the movie.  It is a real concern and it raises a series of questions.  When we reached that point, we were several years into this, and I felt we had a really great story.  We backtracked for a bit, asking, "how did we end up at this point?"  where we find ourselves pushing on someone who does not want that.  We started out know that it was a very public phenomenon.  The information we had was put into the public space, and we felt that things were public enough, with news coverage and whatnot.  Then when we found a lot more stuff out, there was a serious discussion of what do we do.  Do we pull the plug on the whole project and keep the whole thing to ourselves, or do we continue on trying to make a movie out of this.  And after a lot of soul searching, I said to myself, that I'm going to keep making the movie and we are going to keep doing it, and the best thing we could do, having made that decision is put it all out there and let people see what we discovered when we discovered it and let people judge for themselves if we went too far, or if we did not go far enough.  Certainly there is people who say both, that it is hypocritical to both respect someone's privacy and make the film.

KH:  As more people see this film, do you have concerns about this guy being hassled by people who watch the film and want to go further?

JF:  I am concerned.  It is hard to know how to feel. As the film picked up some steam at Sundance, we had a lot of late night talks.   I would say it like this.  The best thing that we can do is to try to present it all respectfully and to try to take the idea seriously.  Treat it with dignity.  I do not happen to believe in the Toynbee Idea, although I think there are a lot of profound things in the idea, and yet you have to have a sense of humour in life too.  We nerds and we are nerding out over something that is relatively inconsequential (we are not curing Cancer or anything!) but I do not want to be condescending to the tilers ideas.  We presented everything we did as we were learning as we went.   Would I feel bad if there was someone who went out and harassed the tiler?  Yes, I would.  Would I feel responsible?  Well, I would have to know what exactly happened.  It is possible that I would feel responsible.  I would feel like one of those links on that chain.  But I also feel that the tiler made the stuff himself, and put himself in public, and what we did was investigate all of his stuff and put that out in public.  By the same token, I would say this.  If you are an artist, and you are trying to make your art, and out of 1000 people does something irresponsible, do you water it down, or censor it completely?  At a point you realize that you cannot let yourself be captive to someone else, who might not have the right level of sensitivity that they should have as a human being.  So, I do not really know.  Would I feel bad?  Yes I would.  I would be open to suggestions to how to do things better.  At the very least, I feel like we are being very reasonable filmmakers on this.

KH:  Was there a moment of surprise for you when everything seems to click, when you said to yourself after collection all this footage, that you thought, NOW we have a film here.

JF:  I very naively thought, assumed actually, that I would move back to Philadelphia and start shooting the investigation and it would unfold into this wonderful movie mystery and we would solve it.  I just took it for granted that that would be the case.  Now that I look back and think about it.  That is completely insane.  I would never advise anyone to take that for granted.  Justin took things for granted too.  But I would say a little differently.  Justin would pick up on little things about the tiles.  He noticed a lot of things that hinted to him that this was actually bizarre.  Beyond the surface level thing.  I remember having an early conversation with Colin, and Colin is more on the filmmaking side of things, we produced the film together, even as he was one of the investigators on screen, we had been shooting for a couple months and having this conversation along the lines of, what are we going to do with this?  Is this going to go anywhere, I dropped out of school and moved back to Philadelphia and I do not know what I am doing and we were not sure what was going to go on.  We thought it was going to make a pretty pitiful movie, but once we started going to the neighborhood, and that is when the neighbors said, "There is the birdman and the railroadman," and that is when we said, "holy crap!  this is getting good!"  

KH:  One of the joys of the film is that when you have a mystery and you have this belief, and you have this collection of information, and when you want to believe something, you can go off on these gut-beliefs, whether they are true or not.  The movie captures the joy of the mystery, and the joy of WANTING to believe.   The joy of the chase...

JF:  People say, "don't you think you are ruining something by solving the mystery?" and I will say you spend a lot of time cooking a good meal, and then you eat the meal.  And then it is done.  And you would never say it is a waste, because there will always be more meals.  It is the eating of the meal that is good.  It is not like you race to the point where the meal is eaten and you think, now I am going to start enjoying it.  It is the process.  It is the process.  Or another way, when you get a gift and it is still wrapped, that gift could be anything, or at least, a lot of things.  That is really a magical point.   Until you actually open it and all the possibilities collapse into a single outcome.  When you are a kid, life is more like that because you are so young, and there are a lot of gaps in your understanding and you fill the gaps in your understanding with imaginative responses.  I wanted that kind of feeling to the movie.  When you present people with gaps of information, it makes them sit up and engage.  It gives you something to do to interact with the movie and rewards paying close attention.  When you are writing music, even if you are singing the scale to someone, and you do not go to the last note, in peoples heads, they complete the last note, people want that last note.  But if you get to the last note, it just sits there, if you do not get to it, there is forward momentum because people are propelled forward by their own thought.  Jazz introduces a lot of tension because things are not fully resolved, you leave gaps of information and let people do the work.  That is important.   I would like to think it is a film you could watch multiple times and notice more things, I'll never know that at this point, but I would like to think that.