Movies into Film

Directed by Mark Decena

USA, 2003

DOPAMINE

John Livingston and Sabrina Lloyd (Photos: Sundance Films)

Billed as a romantic comedy, the visually ravishing Dopamine pursues a topic rarely examined by movies—the act of creation as an antidote to loneliness or despair. The story follows Rand, a young animation designer who has created a virtual pet called Koy-Koy. Koy-Koy, Rand says, helps him “when feeling lost.” Rand—intimately versed in neurotransmitter talk—falls for a painter named Sarah, and first-time feature director Mark Decena wisely keeps the content of Sarah’s paintings a secret from us until late in the film. When finally we view them, through Rand’s eyes, the chemical reaction you undergo might invoke feelings of pity or anguish. Decena has a painter’s eye for light and composition. Even footage of a dog being fed Alpo right out of a can seems striking. And the San Francisco setting Decena serves isn’t the standard-issue postcard banality. It’s a city swathed in blue cloud streams and a Northwesterner’s appreciation for moisture; the images are often eye-poppingly fresh. In the leads, John Livingston and Sabrina Lloyd are not only easy to behold, the nuances they bring come straight from the heart. – NPT

Decena and Koivisto on a sunny September day in Port Townsend (Photo: NPT)

“How Do You Pronounce PTFF?”

A Conversation with the makers of the Sundance film Dopamine

at the Fourth Annual Port Townsend Film Festival

I’ll venture it’s safe to say that Dopamine writer-director Mark Decena and executive producer Eric Koivisto arrived in Port Townsend as relative strangers to this particular spot on the globe and departed as strange relatives. For a while Decena and Koivisto were sufficiently swept away by PT charm to consider moving up here from Sam Francisco. Whether that remained true by the end of the weekend, I didn’t ask. Yes, readers, hurl bricks if you must, I told them about the paper mill.

Sipping lattes from Tyler Street Coffeehouse on the second day of the festival, the filmmakers and I traded reviews of Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, which had screened the night before, and we agreed that Warren Oates and Verna Bloom had much more chemistry than Fonda and Bloom—so perhaps Hand’s downbeat ending isn’t quite as fatalistic as it initially appears. We also speculated on that evening’s drag competition to be held before the midnight screening of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, an event I did my very best to wriggle out of. You have my colleague Valerie Hahn to thank for my participation in that little ditty, and also thank Mark Decena who shanghaied me away from Shirley Knight’s James House reception, with its rewarding platters of oysters on the half-shell, just in time to fulfill my duty as a judge.

One more item: try saying “Koivisto” aloud a few times—there you have the linguistic source of Koy-Koy, Dopamine’s endearing digital onyx eater.

Eric Koivisto: My expectations for the contest [Priscilla] just increased after last night. The persona of this town and this festival, I think, is pretty amazing.

NPT: I would love to hear your take on the persona of this town.

EK: It has a distinct personality, a very present personality. It’s not shy. But in an attractive way. When we were driving into town, Becky [the spouse of Peter Fonda] said to Peter, “I hear this is kind of an old hippie town, and you’re gonna like it!” Everybody that you talk to has a different story, a different interesting story, and they’re willing to share it. It’s not hidden and reserved.

Mark Decena: We were being driven up to the screening. There was—I don’t remember the woman’s name—the hospitality coordinator. She had a car that was a diesel Mercedes, but it was running on vegetable oil, and we got a ten-minute description of how clean it burns, how you could stick your face down in front of the exhaust pipe and you wouldn’t get hurt.

NPT: Nnnniiiiiiice!

MD: Yeah! No, it was great! Then we were driving up the hill, and we saw two people that were dressed up.

EK: In cop outfits or something.

NPT: The Kinetic Cops.

MD: She told us, “Those are our friends!” Then she just lit up with a laugh that shook the whole car. I get a feeling that it’s a very tight-knit community. A place that... it’s interesting because after talking with you [at the Fonda reception] I felt like I wanted to move here.

NPT: Well, moving on to your movie, I liked how you used clouds in Dopamine. Not just the obviously beautiful ones, but also the ones where the sky is the color of blanched almonds. It’s all so terribly Northwestern. And that opening sequence of the woods in the mist...

MD: An ode to the fog. In the Bay Area, it’s like a living, breathing being. It’s a presence.

NPT: Are you a painter? That’s what the film suggested to me.

MD: I used to paint. I think Rob [Robert Humphreys, Dopamine’s director of photography] is a painter. Maybe not. He’s an incredible visualist. Our collaboration was over a month in pre-production, sitting in my basement going through the script making not only creative decisions but technical ones...how to capture the stuff we wanted to capture.

NPT: After the Thursday night preview, Valerie Hahn told me that she saw Dopamine as very much a pro-bike movie.

MD & EK: [Two thumbs up!]

NPT: The scene with the cyclists—is that Critical Mass?

MD: Yeah. We were at the Orinda Festival and that scene came on and all of a sudden there was this buzz...oohhhhh weeeeee bzzzzzzzz... constant through the whole scene. Shh! Shut up! Afterwards I found out that the extra who wore the pink feather boa had been in the audience and all her friends had come to see her in the film.

EK: That was the 10th anniversary of Critical Mass. Shooting that scene was a logistical nightmare.

MD: They thought we were a car commercial. We had set up where they usually take off down Market Street to capture it. And the way they are, this amorphous organic protest happened. They said, “They’re a car commercial! Ride the other way!” So, they took off down the Embarcadero, and our locations manager ran after them, “No, no! They’re good guys!!” And they turned this whole snaking mass around for us.

NPT: Another intriguing aspect of the film, for me as an off-again, on-again Seattle dweller, living there during the tail end of the boom years and through the exciting times of the bust years, was how you made use of the high-tech background, of the dot.bomb culture where things were so rosy and then were so sketchy almost overnight.

MD: When we were developing the script, it was in the boom time. The positive thing of the bust—as well as San Francisco getting its soul back—was that it jelled the script for us, putting it in that timeframe where everything was in question, including love. That was a definite change in the script when that decline happened. Plus, we had more time to do stuff.

EK: It made locations more affordable, too. Had we shot this thing in 2000, I don’t think we would have been able to shoot it in San Francisco.

NPT: It’s also encouraging to see a movie where the characters respond to visual art. One of the most incredible scenes is Rand at the gallery opening for the painter who has Alzheimer’s, and the way that impacts Rand was skillfully portrayed. Because we just don’t get that in movies. If films touch at all on art, usually the artists are depicted as crazy; the paintings—such as in Neil Jordan’s The GoodThief—are mere commodities to be bought, sold and blown-up. It’s as though we as a culture are supposed to have no response to art.

MD: The paintings we used were actually from a place called Creative Explorer, which is an art therapy gallery, and the artists were...what’s the PC word for mentally disabled?

NPT: You don’t have to be PC in Vigilance.

MD: They were mentally disturbed.

EK: And seniors.

MD: [surprised] Were they seniors?

EK: Mentally disturbed seniors, yeah.

MD: The first time our production designer brought those paintings to me, I had the same visceral reaction. And John Livingston [who plays Rand] had the same thing. There was one painting that triggered stuff in him that we had to strategically move around for the point where he had to make the emotional turn.

Visceral describes the reactions evoked for many moviegoers when Dopamine screened at the Broughton on the Festival’s closing night. Several viewers commented on how well—in addition to succeeding as a comedy—Dopamine rendered a family coping with Alzheimer’s. No one summed it up quite so well as D.D. Wigley. From the Q&A with the crew and Livingston, I quote her: “Two things that were really subtly stunning were the color and the pace. But I also wanted to add to what other people have said...was how, how amazing it was for you to have tied these two loves. You have the love of the child who is had, but not had. And the mother who is there, but not there. And you have these two enduring loves that are frozen, and then you have this active love in the middle, and how amazing that you brought all these three things together. Thank you.” – NPT (September 2003)

Movies into Film

npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

Home