Carol Murphy talks to acclaimed documentarian Doug Pray about his new feature film Infamy, premiering at this year's Resfest.

Toomer, Earsnot, Jase, Claw, NM, Saber and the Graffiti Guerilla. Look closely at the walls, doorways, pillar boxes, street furniture, train carriages, and kerbs of America and these artists will make their presence felt through the years of tags and blasts that consume the urban cityscape.

This year's Resfest houses the premier of Doug Pray's melancholy look at the urban art of the graffiti artist. After the success of his previous feature length documentaries – Scratch (2001) about the world of hip hop DJs and Hype! (1996) which explores the emergence of the Seattle rock music scene – Pray decided that another 'scene' movie was not for him. Instead he offers a surprisingly dark passage into the lives of six driven American graffiti artists and one equally consumed buffer.

Pray has also made numerous music videos and commercials, however it was a major in Sociology at Colorado College that marked out his desire to investigate movements particularly the working mechanisms of subcultures.

Carol: Can you describe your journey from studying sociology to making documentaries?

Doug: The sociology part of it is when you are in college you have to come up with a major and I did sociology. But I guess I have always been interested in movements and what groups of people do. I just have and I don't have a reason for that really. I think maybe because I was the youngest of four boys and watched them in the era of the 60s and the music they listened to and got a really good first hand experience of how a movement of people work, and maybe that made me more predisposed to really getting into different music movements. Then when I needed to study a major I just decided to study why people do what they do. So there is a connection and the trend is there – I am definitely doing films about subcultures.

But specifically subcultures that penetrate and almost take over the mainstream – for instance with hip hop music it is almost ubiquitous now.

Yeah although with that one it was with people who you don't always know. Another theme in the films that I have done is that they are all underdogs. I am not making films about big stars and I haven't done any biographies of big stars ever. And say that because I was speaking to someone about this only last night and they were asking why I lived in Hollywood and did I want to make movies about all the stars here. I realised that the only films that I get excited about are films about total underdogs – not that they don't want fame, I mean all these graffiti writers want fame – but I guess I really enjoy being with people who are out struggling and doing art.

Are you primarily interested in making documentaries or do you think that they are going to lead you onto making fictional films?

I love feature films and I love working with actors and all that but I also really get into this thing of doing interviews and of trying to get people into sharing their lives with me and if it is working I'll keep doing it and I have decided not to fight that. I do other commercials and I have done a bunch of music videos and stuff but it is usually the process of interviewing and the manner in which I edit or direct and edit where my style is.

What draws you towards a subject matter? When you have an idea how do you seek the subject matter and how does the process start in starting a documentary?

One bizarre little thing and I don't know if there is any meaning in this but every project I have done was somehow been presented to me from someone else. With this one it almost began like a job. They said that they wanted to do a 60 minute DVD of interviews with graffitti writers and I was like 'I have just done this huge hip hop movie. I love hip hop and I am so proud of it but I don't know if I wanted to try to do another hip hop movie'. I was like 'I am done with that and it is so cool and lets move on'. In the case of Infamy I talked to this guy Roger Gastman who I really have to say I worked very closely with. He just knew all the artists. I couldn't have made this film on my own. But with Roger I instantly realised that I loved how my perceptions were shattered. First of all this wasn't going to be about hip hop at all. I think the next thing was the idea that graffiti was just a wildly different art form than anything else that I have ever documented and I don't mean in the use of paint and the way it looks but in the psychology of these guys and women who were doing this. They were so…

Addicted.

Tormented! And just great artists! They were tormented because they were doing illegal art and what were they going to do in the future – every artist goes through that – but it is not illegal to DJ and it just became really interesting how complicated it all became.

There is also the element of risk involved and the need to create risk in their lives. They almost created a war situation by putting themselves into dangerous situations.

Well I don't know if I would apply the war metaphor but maybe it is just that idea…

…of the fear factor.

Sure but I didn't know when I walked into this movie that it would be a dark movie. And there is funny stuff and there is some plain old great art in it too. But my last film was like a fairly innocent celebration of DJs, Just a total positive vibe. And this isn't at all. I think people may watch this and think I never want to write graffiti.

I found it to be a very melancholy film. The case studies are like old children who are stuck. They haven't got the youth anymore and they are still connected to the addictive aspect of graffiti making but they are also hankering towards a more normal lifestyle.

That is also the result of the people that Roger suggested to me. Well, first of all I will tell you quickly how we chose the artists featured. They all are admittedly of a certain generation. They are not seventeen year olds. And they are also not the people, with all due respect, who were the pioneers of the art, you know, all the great amazing old school writers form New York. We don't even touch on that. There is a little bit of a tip of the hat to that but there is not a history. These are people who I would call 'lifers' who have been doing this all their lives. They are all at that perfect age where they are trying to figure it all out – even the decision to be in the movie. I mean, a friend of mine told me that Toomer was over in their house and he freaked out with the idea that the movie was coming out. He realised again that it was going to affect him and that gives me this awesome feeling of responsibility.

I think that Toomer particularly was the one who expressed the strongest desire to have a normal life. He was the big father figure with his posse and even the way he worked was older – he wasn't running after trains anymore or climbing up buildings anymore and he was really getting himself depressed, wasn't he?

I wouldn't say that he wanted a normal life and he is probably going to regret that after being in this movie he can't go out and tag anymore. Maybe of all the characters he showed the most depth in the sense that he showed his emotions the most. What I was going to tell you briefly was that I told Roger early on that I was really interested in doing this movie but that I didn't want to do another 'scene' movie. I didn't want to do a movie where I have to interview 50 people and they are all great amazing people who all get about 25 seconds and you walk out of the theatre and you feel ok that is that scene. I said to him specifically 'I just want to get to know a handful of writers really well and they don't have to be the most world famous'. They are all A list writers but we got a list of seven we never turned back.

The only one who didn't engage with a sense of melancholy was Earsnot. Out of all of the seven featured he was really aggressive, still in the mood, wanting to go out there, and so full on.

I think at the end of the movie he represents that youthful 17 year old.

He was angry, wasn't he?

He has got a lot going on. He is one of the most interesting characters I have ever interviewed without question.

I found that Claw's work was the most uninteresting – although her background was. She is moving into fashion etc but in terms of her work she didn't do anything other than her claw logo and that was it.

No, she has done other stuff. She is really well known in New York and they all respect her because she has put in the hours on the street to prove that she is real and that goes way back.

It is like having a job and getting respect from putting in your time in the office only this is on the street. All these rules and regulations that grow up with a sub culture are intereting.

What other art is like that. Even in music we just honour the new people. In graffiti I don't care how good they are forget it.

I suppose it is because they are not selling what they have got and no one has to package it and it is not making money. If someone had to package it and sell it, they would have to invest time into making the audience in awe of it whereas it is built up within its own rules.

That is a really interesting point.

It is interesting talking about Claw and the monotonous aspect of the repetition of tagging especially in relation to the addictive nature of the process. But what she said that was interesting was that graffiti has given her a work ethic, 24 hours a day work ethic.

It is so true it is a work ethic. They work hard and they don't get paid and everybody hates them and they get chased and they have to live in the world's worst alleys. That is why I kept showing dead cats. It wasn't like I was trying to shock the audience, it was just that every time I went out to film them I was filming in the worst places. But it is true they work very hard. One last thing about Claw: I would say that the scene where we visited her home and see her mom is really important for me because the other thing that surprised me was learning that a lot of the graffiti that you see is done by kids coming in from the suburbs. It doesn't make it bad graffiti or anything else it is just a fact. They assume that it is an urban poverty thing and so many sociologists say things like 'it is kids' way of expressing themselves and rising up from the working class' but that is just a load of crap. They are expressing themselves but it isn't just that. It is about something else. Maybe in the late 70s when graffiti really exploded and hip hop exploded you could make strong arguments for that and say that it was a unified arts movement, and, of course, it came from the Ghettos and the music came out of the Ghettos. But in general, when you look at Graffiti today, it has nothing to do with white or black or rich or poor. It is much more to do with the psychology of some kid who is into it and wants to get their name out.

There was a nice scene with Jase. He was watching trains go past and he saw a train with a tag that he had done years before and he said that that train had been all over America. It was like revisiting an old photograph of himself. But he did seem really depressed – talking about losing his father in the Vietnam War before he was born, and losing friends through the practice of graffiti writing and looking back on his youth etc. And then his past returns to him written on the side of a train.

I feel so honoured that they shared their stories. It just poured out. They were the most honest group of people that I have ever hung out with. Did graffiti teach them that? I just love these seven people. I only spent like a day with each of them!

I haven't mentioned Joe Connolly – the Graffiti Guerrilla. He seemed just as obsessed if not more so as the graffiti artists.

Totally.

He seemed a bit nuts.

No more nuts than the other guys. He is dedicated and driven, and frankly he is as addicted to graffiti as much as the people who create it and I have to say that I completely respect the guy. I went into this thinking ah man I don't want to demonise him but the audience just loves him and they just go nuts over Joe.

But it was fantastic then when he did his own signature on a wall that he had just cleaned. And he was really funny. You could easily spend a day with him and laugh your head off.

Non-stop. I'm sure you noticed his shirt. It said 'The fighting Irish'.

Resfest is taking place in Dublin on October 20th-23rd at the Irish Film Institute and Filmbase; and in Belfast on November 4th-6th at Queen's Theatre.