Tales from the Brothers Quay | GreenCine

s first live-action feature in eleven years, , is, among many things, a tragic fairy tale drenched in otherworldly visual splendor, as has put it for Slant.

spoke with the Quay Brothers at their London studio in February, 2006; this is the first part of their conversation, more will follow.

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As I understand it, your escape from America was not a thing that was necessarily planned but something that evolved.
Timothy Quay: We were at the and a visiting professor asked what we were doing after we graduated.

He said that we should apply to the in London to get a Masters degree and venture into more film work and animation. He said, They have a film department and you can apply as illustrators, which we were, and then transfer. We were accepted but the film school wouldn t let us in.

They wouldn t let anybody else transfer into the department. As we hung around with other filmmakers, they would loan us their cameras on the weekend. That s when we shot a couple of our animated films on the fly.

You were using a 16mm Bolex?
Timothy Quay: Yes. We were creating cut-out collages.

We set up two lights on our kitchen table and just shot it that way on the weekend. Then we came back to America after those three years to pay off our debt and ended up completely unemployed. We were dishwashers and waiters in a café in Philadelphia and we said, We ve got to get out of here and get back to Europe.

So we took all of our savings, thinking that it had to be better over here.
Was it during this time that you became familiar with [Jirí] and other puppet animators?
Timothy Quay: We first started seeing those people at the end of 1968 or 69 at a festival in Philadelphia.

It was much easier to see them over here.
You were initially interested in cut-out animation?
Stephen Quay: I think that we had a hankering for it.

I think we probably felt more at home with cut-out.