County Line Press would like to thank filmmaker Bill Daniel for sitting down to talk to us at his home in Braddock, PA. The following is an excerpt from our conversation. For more information about Bill Daniel, visit his website at www.billdaniel.net.

CLP You’ve been all over the country; how did you make your way to Pittsburgh?

BD Gordon Nelson who does Jefferson Presents, they do a monthly screening at Garfield Arts, so even though they only do 16mm screenings they’ve made a couple of exceptions for me because I generally present on video now even though I really came up as a 16 maker. So I had really good shows with them whenever I came through town and it’s a great town so that’s pretty much why I made the decision to come to Pittsburgh.

CLP Do you have any thoughts on the ideas of destination and escape? In broad terms, people seeking the urban because they feel limited by their rural origins.

BD There’s definitely the draw to the city, the freak magnet aspect of the city, like Austin is the cultural magnet in Texas, the freak magnet, and it’s interesting to see that. Some people come to cities because they don’t have the kind of connections they need, there’s not enough of a density of weirdoes like themselves. However you want to characterize their differentness, it’s the need to have a community of likeminded people, to have a reason to call on people. That’s definitely a draw that brings people to the city. And certain cities have certain kinds of draws regionally, nationally.

CLP Can you speak to that personally with your experiences traveling around the country?

BD Yeah, certain towns are punk towns, certain towns are artist towns, certain towns are filmmaker towns, certain towns are queer friendly towns, certain towns are activist towns. Places like Tuscon are where people gravitate toward generally for radical activism. Earth First is based out of there, there’s a really cool bike collective there. It’s kind of in a sense the opposite of the southwest in a lot of ways, but I think in particular it has this outdoorsy, really aggressive environmentally active theme. On a small scale, a place like Little Rock is a real magnet for punks.  It had a real thriving punk scene in the 90’s, and I’m not sure what it’s like now.  But on a regional scale, there are magnets like that. Right now, Oklahoma City has a growing punk, back-to-the-land scene. And when I’m talking about punk I’m talking more about this broad sense, with a lot of it really infused with back-to-the-land or self-sufficiency, so all of these things are going on, all of these different currents that speak to everyone. What about the land? Well you can get a bunch of beater houses in Oklahoma City, for cheap, that all share backyards and have a giant collective farm. And I just came from there and saw a bunch of punks doing just that and they’re a mile from the city center, like a little rural paradise.

CLP That’s something we’re constantly grappling with, because it seems like that attitude, that back-to-the-land mentality is from urban centers, and rural environments are often populated with hunters and SUV driving families who aren’t of that mind set. And that seems like an interesting divide. People don’t flock to the land, rural areas aren’t brimming with those kinds of people and attitudes.

BD That’s going to change for sure. I mean, there have been waves of it through the 60’s and 70’s and certainly with what’s going on right now. I guess there’s always an aspect of being a minority. When you’re from a small town and move to the big city, you’re used to being a minority in that way. You come to city, as an artist or contrarian or resistant culture person, you’re in the minority, but in the country you’re a super minority.

CLP With that idea of minorities, when you do screenings—I know you’ve done some backyard screenings and things like that—are most of those in metropolitan areas or do you ever do projects in more rural areas?

BD I’ve shown in small towns, partly out of the necessity of being on the road, to fill in the gaps and not do so much driving. There is that economic imperative to stop frequently, but really for me it’s about getting a different audience and for me, myself, just the enjoyment of seeing people live differently, for the pleasure of being in a community in a more laid back place. And also basically as a service to people because it’s really important to people, and they are really appreciative when you bring something to them that they don’t get otherwise. It’s easy to have a show in New York City and have almost nobody there, and then you drive to North Carolina and have a hundred people show up in the middle of nowhere, people of all ages, and they want to stay and talk.

CLP So you are already sort of speaking to it, the ways that those audiences are different. Is an urban audience a little more savvy—a little more critical—than an audience in a small town?

BD Yeah, for sure. Of course, a lot of times their criticisms are homogenous, you know, went to school, studied the same thing. Their criticism is based in a really shared experience. But your criticism in a rural setting is based on the fact that people aren’t all coming from this school or this kind of culture, and that criticism is going to be totally different and very valuable as a maker. Like audiences of broader ages. In an urban area, you can be around people like yourself, people who are two years within your age. When you go to a small town, a rural place, there are going to be people of all ages and that’s really rich. That’s a problem our culture has, in a lot of ways. For instance, we don’t know what to do with people that are old. Do they live with their families, or do we put them in a home? It’s the same thing. We’ve stratified ourselves by our age, socially, culturally. So one way to escape that is to do something in a rural, small town place.

CLP I’ve been reading The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, and he talks a lot about the separation between work and the home and how that is a modern thing. Basically, he argues that the home is becoming just a place of consumption and nothing is being prepared there, whereas if you live on a farm, that is your place of work, your place to rest, and it invites a more holistic approach to living.

BD Eat, live, work.

CLP Exactly. So its an interesting dynamic, especially pertaining to art because I think a lot of artists adopt that practice, in terms of living and working in a single space.

BD Yeah, maybe out of the necessity of not being able to afford a studio and a house, but also because maybe there is a natural sense to it.

CLP So you have an interest in certain sections of the population that live in a more direct relationship to place, the homeless or people that have been displaced for whatever reason. Where does that interest come from?

BD It’s a basic wanderlust bug. I’m always thinking about where I might live next, and I really love to travel. Like my film about trains and railworker culture, I’m drawn to the idea of people living without a place and a domestic tie, but that also feeds into the idea of creating domesticity. Once you’re out in the middle of nowhere, the natural impulse is to start improvising domesticity. So what do I really need? I have to stay warm and dry and I’ve got to be close to some food and water. And people end up building social structures after they’ve fled. That is a dynamic that I’m really interested in. People living in RVs out in the desert, in the southwest there’s this whole culture of people living in Winnebagoes, some seasonally and some year round. I’m drawn to it with the idea that I see our society heading for trouble, and our whole economy is going to be on the skids to some degree, and these ways of living aren’t going to be so marginal and people are going to be forced into it. The divide between the house being a place of consumption and not production? Take the backyard garden, that’s going to come back. There’s a push and a pull. People are going to be pushed into it because they have to. Gasoline based food is going to be incredibly expensive, although its just absurd that gasoline is two dollars a gallon again. People being close to their food source, that’s major.

CLP From your experiences with the margins of society in rural and urban spaces around the country, can you draw any distinctions between the homeless conditions in an urban or rural space?

BD What are the conditions of homelessness in a  rural setting? I’m not sure how that works. There are no social services; it would be hard to be invisible in a rural place. I’m sure lots of places have their town crackpots and that would be interesting to go out and find. In places where the weather is halfway decent and there’s a clean stream nearby, there’s going to be camps there maybe families or weird uncles living out there, kicked out of the family, kicked out of town.

CLP A homeless person in a rural area is interesting to me, because you’re not asking for donations from passerbys.

BD But there’s homelessness that I see in different places that looks to me like it can be scaled up and applied laterally. Portland’s got an amazing population of homeless people on bicycles with elaborate trailers, and they support dogs, multiple dogs sometimes. Portland is really wet. It’s not super cold, but it’s not the best place to sleep outside in the winter. People end up carrying quite a bit of gear with them. With the bikes they end up looking like prospectors with a mule. Its something I really wanted to make a project of while I was there but it didn’t end up happening. It’s really an amazing thing. And there’s a really thriving form of homelessness living in vehicles, trailers, RVs.