“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” The opening sentence of Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City was, until last year, my favourite first line.
Then it was knocked off its podium by this: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifying, insultingly short.”
That’s how Oliver Burkeman begins his book Four Thousand Weeks, named after the average human lifespan (Be still your panicky denial, the maths checks out).
Subtitled “Time management for mortals”, this brilliant book suggests we need to think about time differently. It’ll improve your to-do lists, and convince you that having an affair probably isn’t worthwhile (versatile).
It’s also where I first came across Lance Oppenheim’s The Happiest Guy In The World (2018).
Part of a trilogy that focuses on transient lives (the others focus on a retirement home and people who live in an LA airport carpark), the short follows “Super” Mario Salcedo, who lives full-time on cruise ships.
Mario is, he insists, winning – devoting his days to idle pleasures and unencumbered by any hint of responsibility. But Burkeman sees something darker in this sun-kissed but solitary lifestyle.
“Having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant,” he writes, pointing out that our ancestors would punish miscreants by banishing them, removing them from “the rhythms of the tribe.”
Super Mario has taken full control of his time, but at what cost? Lance’s film captures this trade-off with virtuosic storytelling skill.
While inviting us to question Mario’s world, he’s damn sure that Mario doesn’t see any irony in the film’s title – of course he’s the happiest guy in the world…
I spoke to Lance over Zoom from California. You can see more of his work on his website.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I’m from Florida and cruising is sort of a rite of passage. I'd go with my family a lot growing up and it's an overwhelming experience.
It's like being in a floating city and almost every event has a predetermined start and end time – all these activities scheduled back-to-back.
As a kid, it was fun, but it also stressed me out. When I went to Hawaii with my grandparents, I faked being sick because I didn't want to go.
And on the ship, I just stayed in my room most of the time playing on my Nintendo DS so I could avoid everything. I feel guilty about that, still, years later.
I started making films when I was in high school. My parents are both real estate attorneys, so they were helping people buy houses and then, in the recession, they were representing all these people who were suddenly losing their homes.
So the idea of home was interesting to me. People who don't really have one, or they’re trying to run away from something that gave them stability at one time, or they're in pursuit of one.
In Mario's case, he had a whole life. He had a marriage, he had children – there's a whole other side to him. I don't even really know what happened or why he decided to leave everything behind.
But as a storyteller, I thought it was really interesting. Who am I – who is anyone – to say that what he's doing doesn't bring him joy?
He's discovered that for him, the way to achieve pure happiness is to basically sever yourself from any real relationship, or anything that could cause you disappointment, or heartbreak and live a life of solitude, essentially.
You're always around people, but you're also always alone. How, stylistically, can we enter that space with him? Even if it felt so alien to me, I love the idea of just trying to inhabit that psychology.
What were the biggest challenges?
He’s so used to controlling the outcome of every social interaction on the ship. But I was telling him what to do and trying to plot out these big sequences, and take him to places he didn't want to go to.
There was a tension because he wanted to have the same level of control over the filmmaking process as he does over his life. So he got frustrated, and I don't fault him for it.
We were there for such a short amount of time, and I think we all felt like we didn't really accomplish what we set out to do. A lot of the big ideas and set pieces, he just didn't have the patience for.
I'm happy with the film, but I still look back at it and think it could have been better if we had more time, and more of an understanding, Mario and I.
Is there anything you’d do differently?
I wanted to show his routine, where the same things happen every week. He goes to these shows on the ship and he's bored, on his computer, or zoned out, but he knows all the words.
So he's singing along to himself as he’s doing something else, distracted.
Also I wanted to find some way to bridge the gap to his past, have him Facetime with someone he’d been ignoring for a while, like a family member. But he didn’t want to go there.
What are you most proud of about the film?
The film wouldn't be worth watching if it wasn't for the work that Nate Hurtsellers, our cinematographer, and Jarrett Morgan, the steadicam operator did.
This was the first time I had worked with Nate. He really pushed me to a place that sharpened what I want to do as a filmmaker, being intentional about what we shoot and how we shoot it – introducing more of the narrative language into the documentary process.
When I look back on the experience, it was a real learning curve and I came out of it thinking – holy shit, there's a whole other way to do these things that feels really good.
And I'm proud of the fact that we were able to evoke the head space Mario was in.
Everyone thinks documentaries are supposed to be 100% nonfiction. I find that boring – I like the idea of collaborating with a person that you're making a film about.
And rather than just hearing in an interview frame how they're feeling, I really love the idea of taking the form and mirroring the emotions of the person. This was one of the first times I feel I was able to successfully do that.
How did this film change you?
I went from a place of making things that were a lot more representational into a place that felt more expressionistic.
I realised you don't have to necessarily shoot everything objectively, you can do a lot more emotionally, if you're able to express things through different means.
That was the thing with Mario, every time I'd asked him about the past, what his life was like and why he left, he just never wanted to talk about it.
I love the idea that he just told himself that his life was always the way it was. That if you tell yourself something long enough, you start to believe it.
He's not lying to himself – the truth of his life is what he's living right now. That gave me the chills. It was a very literary idea, almost like this guy would exist in a Raymond Carver story.
It hasn’t really changed my mind on cruises. I think if anything it amplified the transactional nature of it.
I went on a cruise a few years after the film and every part of the experience felt like I was being pampered to this extreme degree. It freaked me out.
After each interview I ask the filmmaker to recommend other films I might feature. The Happiest Guy In The World has come up more than any other, a perfect ten minutes of character-led storytelling.
Big thanks to Lance, and to your for reading. See you in a couple of weeks (really easy to eat up that 4,000 right?! )