Everything You Know Is Wrong

Academy Award-nominated director BENNETT MILLER talks THE CRUISE, creating with AI, and his first film in 10 years.

Oscilloscope Laboratories

“You cannot expect people to transform in an afternoon. And yet, I expect that. I expect the total transformation of their lives, the entire rewrite of their souls.”

- New York City tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch

In the Fall of 2003, I was fresh out of college, new to Manhattan, and in need of a job.

Hunched in the ornate splendor of the New York Public Library’s Rose Room, I scoured mandy.com, and somehow landed an internship in a tiny office on a blustery, cobblestoned corridor in Tribeca. I read and did research for producer Caroline Baron, who was prepping an up-and-coming director’s debut narrative feature, starring his high school drama camp buddy. That director was Bennett Miller. His buddy was Philip Seymour Hoffman. And the feature was Capote.

It was a freakishly lucky break, a thrilling and somewhat surreal first bite of the Big Apple and the film industry. I’ll never forget the Christmas party where Hoffman, a colossal talent and one of my all-time favorite actors, introduced me to Maker’s Mark (Truman Capote’s spirit of choice) and gushed effusively about the movie Bad Santa. Miller, meanwhile, hooked me up with PA jobs on his commercials, granting glimpses into a virtuoso director’s process at close range.

In those exhilarating early months, I discovered Miller’s first feature, a black-and-white documentary called The Cruise. Like his movies since (Capote, Moneyball and Foxcatcher), The Cruise is a portrait of an outsider - a flamboyant, mop-topped, couch-surfing bard named Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who works as a guide on double-decker bus tours - or, as he calls them, “spiritual tantric connections with international flesh congregations.”

Oscilloscope Laboratories

Armed with only a MiniDV camera, a lavalier mic, and no additional crew, Miller follows Speed as he circles the Gray Line, spraying poetic, off-kilter, and often humorous musings at bewildered tourists, his voice shrill and flighty, his hair frizzy like Tiny Tim, if Tiny Tim were a Mike Leigh character.

“I am fighting… every moment that they’re on the bus, for every day they’ve lived thus far to seem as an abstract wreckage that might have happened, but is probably a delusion. And that this is the first real day of their lives.” - Speed

Off hours, Speed roams the streets - or “cruises” - a term he embraces as a sort of guiding philosophy. “The cruise is about the searchings for everything worthwhile in existence.” He finds beauty everywhere, from gleaming skyscrapers to limp street planter shrubs, and savors it all equally. Speed doesn’t just love New York, he deifies it, and through his oddball brilliance, the city is illuminated for us.

“It is not only one of my favorite films about New York, but I think it is one of the best examinations of what it means to be young and trying to find yourself in the world that I have ever seen,” said actor Edward Norton , who named The Cruise among his favorite films of all time.

To mark its 25th anniversary, Oscilloscope remastered The Cruise and is re-releasing it in theaters this weekend. Rewatching it myself recently for the first time in two decades, I was astounded by how vibrant The Cruise remains. Although the digital imagery, new in 1998, now pervades, and the once-trailblazing form (an eccentric person talking to the camera) is familiar to anyone who’s gotten lost on YouTube, what has become exceptionally rare in the years since is the cruise itself - the sincerity, poetry, and nonconformity that Speed embodies. Perhaps now more than ever, we would be wise to hop aboard the Gray Line bus, and be transformed.

The Cruise (1998)

Where to Watch The Cruise

• In theaters! Oscilloscope has lined up a number of screenings and Q&A’s with Bennett. Get tickets and info here. For those in NYC, Bennett will be at this Saturday’s 7 pm show at IFC Center.

• For those who live elsewhere, The Cruise is available to rent or purchase from Amazon, Fandango, and other platforms.

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An Underexposed Interview: Bennett Miller on The Cruise, AI Art, and His Return to Narrative Filmmaking

I had the pleasure of catching up with Bennett Miller on the re-release of The Cruise. Here is our conversation, condensed for clarity:

ARB: I watched The Cruise the other night, after like two decades of not seeing it. How long had it been since you’ve seen it?

BM: I realized that I did watch it when Lionsgate did the blu-ray or dvd, so that's probably 15 years ago.

What inspired you to embark on this re-release? Was this your idea?

BM: No, it wasn't my idea. It was totally Dan Berger and Oscilloscope. He said, “Hey, I would love to do this,” because he knew that the licensing agreement was up with Lionsgate. I had a 25-year agreement with Artisan, which was acquired by Lionsgate, or maybe there's someone in between, but 25 years was up, so, I said, “Knock yourself out.” They've been incredibly impressive. They're just totally into doing what they do. The energy around it has been really uplifting, so I'm excited. I got a very strong feeling from myriad people who saw it the first time around, and it was a very different world, pre-911, so I'm curious to see if or how it resonates with anybody.

I'm excited to see it on a big screen. I feel like this movie should be issued to people that are new arrivals to the city, and then reissued to people who are falling out of love with it and need to be reminded of how great it is.

BM: [laughs] Yeah.

It’s amazing to see it at different stages of life. How was it for you to re-watch it?

BM: Well… you want a real answer?

Yeah.

BM: A real answer is that being as young as I was, although I don't I think this changes too much for me with age, there is some sort of fever to make a thing, you know? You have to have a bit of a fever to do something like this, which made no sense to my friends or anybody. When you make a film, it is the most important thing in the world, and you care about it more than you care about yourself. You might think you have your reasons for doing it, but the truth is, something inside you really compels you to do it. And when you let that go, when time passes and you look back at the product of that thing, it's sort of like, you know, reading your journal from high school or something. But I had extraordinary affection for it, for Speed, for that time, for the city. I don't have the words for this, but one learns something about themselves, I think, when you have a passion project that you can look back on as a kind of time capsule of your soul. I will watch it again; so this will be the second time in 25 years that I've seen it.

It’s interesting to consider that it was among the first fully digital movies ever released, which are pervasive now, as is the idea of a strange person talking to the camera. But there's something that's vanishingly rare at the core of this film, which is the poetry. It’s what makes the film vital, to me anyway, even more than when I saw it originally. I wondered if the changing of the industry had anything to do with how you felt about the movie, and how you hope it might be received now.

BM: I don' t track the industry so closely. I couldn't comment on that. Yeah, another thing that strikes me, even from watching the trailer, is the earnestness, the authenticity which is a very surprising thing when it happens, when a person or a film is just totally authentic. It's very uncommon, especially in a movie but in life as well. And it's something that was very compelling about Speed. He was incapable of being anyone other than his authentic self and he talks about it in the film.