Banksy (34 page)

When
Exit Through the Gift Shop
first came out, critics very understandably appeared a little nervous. On the whole they liked the film but they were not entirely sure whether or not they
were being conned rotten. A year after its first release the
Los Angeles Times
was still remarking: ‘The uncomfortable question persists: is it real?’ Was this ridiculous bumbler
speaking English with an unbelievable French accent too good to be true, or was he perhaps Ali G having a laugh, or maybe even Banksy himself in disguise? Anthony Lane in the
New Yorker
was
one of the few critics who did not like the film, calling it ‘overstretched’ and suggesting it ‘feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult – almost, dare one say it,
of a brand’.

But for the most part critics enjoyed it. David Gritten in the
Daily Telegraph
called it an ‘amusing curious documentary’. However, he admitted that he
left the film ‘not knowing quite what to think . . . Who actually made the film? What’s true? What’s not? Is it a Banksy stunt satirising the art world?’ In the
Evening
Standard
Nick Curtis neatly covered his bets: ‘If art-prankster Banksy’s first film is a hoax, as it just might be, it’s an extremely complex and clever one.’ The
New
York Times
compared it to Banksy’s best work: ‘a trompe l’oeil: a film that looks like a documentary but feels like a monumental con’; and in
Vanity Fair
Julian
Sancton wrote, ‘It would actually make
less
sense if he put out a movie that wasn’t in some way pulling a fast one on the audience.’

Banksy on the other hand, in the run-up to the Oscars, was having none of this. He told A.J. Schnack, whose website All These Wonderful Things specialises in documentary film, ‘Ordinarily
I wouldn’t mind if people believe me or not, but the film’s power comes from the fact it’s all 100% true.’ Well, up to a point . . .

It needs to be said first that despite the critics’ worries, Thierry Guetta is for real, mutton-chop whiskers and all. He is not Ali G, he is not Banksy, he is a man who has miraculously
landed on his feet and is enjoying every minute of it. His life before Banksy was that of a member of a comfortable French immigrant family in Los Angeles. Shortly before the Oscars the
Los
Angeles Times
decided to make some background checks and Thierry, perhaps advised by the Banksy team, gave his first extended interview. His parents, Tunisian Jews, had fled to France to avoid
persecution and he was born in a suburb north of Paris. He lost his mother when he was eleven and his father took the five children to Los Angeles when Thierry was fifteen.

In Los Angeles he dropped out of high school – being unable to speak English did not help – and ended up working in a vintage clothing store and then, as
Exit
suggests, owning and running the store. So he was just a shop owner who got lucky? Well again, not quite. The Guetta brothers’ shop was called World of Vintage T-Shirts,
‘Hollywood’s top source of Vintage T’s for over a decade’. His brothers Patrick and Marc had a book published by Taschen in 2010 on the same subject, its almost 400 pages
depicting 650 T-shirts for the enjoyment of dedicated T-shirt fans. In his foreword to the book Patrick writes, ‘My brothers, Marc (aka Tony), Thierry and I started an apparel company in 1987
called Too Cute which manufactured high-end embroidered T-shirts, licensing characters from Disney and Warner Bros to the Beatles and Betty Boop. We also developed our own characters the
Junglenuts.’

The three brothers also founded TMP Enterprises – the initials of their Christian names – which is both a clothing company and a real estate company. Shepard Fairey says Thierry
‘owns a lot of property around Hollywood’ and according to one of his tenants, writing on the web, he was no more organised as a landlord than he was as a cameraman: ‘He’d
bought our house in North Hollywood and made it “look” beautiful, with polished concrete floors, vintage lighting fixtures. BUT, nothing in the house worked. The appliances were
constantly breaking. The roof leaked . . .’

But whatever his abilities as a property owner, there is something rather more substantial to Thierry’s background than
Exit
might suggest. Indeed, according to the successful
street artist Ron English, he actually came from a wealthy French family who bought up property in Los Angeles to help them in their efforts to obtain permanent residency in the States. Part of
Thierry’s attraction for street artists was that he could provide ‘legal’ walls
for them to paint on – for he, or his family, actually
owned
the buildings concerned.

However, the film’s image of Thierry trekking around Los Angeles, sticking his camera up everyone’s nose in the most unselfconscious way possible, rings absolutely true. Sean Bonner
now writes for the website boingboing.net, but in 2005 he ran a gallery with his ex-wife Caryn called sixspace in Los Angeles and was putting on a show by the French street artist Invader (who,
with awesome determination, for ten years now has been gluing on to walls around the world mosaic tiles depicting the characters from the old video game Space Invaders). Invader happened to be
Thierry’s cousin and his passport into the world of street art. Thierry was happy to drive his cousin wherever he needed to go, but with Thierry came his camera: ‘He always had a camera
and he was always sticking it into people’s faces,’ Sean says now. Through Invader Thierry got to know Shepard Fairey and then, through the force of his own personality, drove out a
rival, persuading Shepard that he was the film-maker best able to make a documentary about him.

I had read one description of Thierry as ‘klutzy’ and ‘bumbling’, and another describing him as a force of nature. So how did Sean see him? ‘I would lean more to
the fumbling and klutzy. He always seemed like he was walking around and bumping into things. I would think maybe he’s rude, maybe he’s dumb, maybe he’s whatever, but I would be
talking to people and he would walk up and stick the camera in between people’s faces, people who were talking to each other who couldn’t see each other because he would stick a camera
in front of them. So I don’t think he had much comprehension of the world around him. He was like bouncing through it in a lot of ways. He was hanging around with
Shepard a lot and on some nights I would go out bombing with Shepard and he would tag along . . . Things worked much smoother when he wasn’t around.’

What about the accent? ‘It’s for real, definitely for real.’

And what about his film-making? At one point, when a Shepard Fairey exhibition was being held in sixspace, Thierry set up a stop-motion camera that took one frame about every thirty seconds.
‘It would go click and then thirty seconds later click again. He filmed everything: spreading out Shepard’s work, putting it up, the opening reception, taking it down afterwards.’
But no one ever saw it. ‘I kept asking him for it, like “Hey, can we get that video of the stop motion thing?” And he’d say “Oh, I haven’t had a chance to go
through it yet.” I’d say, “It’s not really editing, it’s simply start to finish, just give us the tape and we’ll put it up.” And he was like “I
haven’t had a chance.” So after about a year of asking for that I just stopped asking. I realised I was never, ever going to see it.’

During all this time, he says, Thierry ‘had no aspirations as an artist’. They bumped into each other once more before the Brainwash show. ‘He told me that he was going to put
on an art show and that he had gotten a really huge space in Hollywood and maybe he was going to ask me to help out with some part of it. And I said “Whatever it is, get in touch.” I
assumed it was an art show of other people’s work. I thought he was going to open a gallery.’ Little did he know how far and how fast Mr Brainwash had come. And no, he never went to the
show.

Bonner is actually rather more polite than others. One source who worked with Thierry on the West Coast says, ‘He was in everybody’s way and in everybody’s face. You just
wanted to slap him really. He was so rude, the rudest most obnoxious French guy you could ever imagine. The worst . . .’

But if any more evidence is needed that Thierry is really Thierry and he really did have serious ambitions to make a documentary, then it comes from Alex Jablonski, a
young film-maker who, in 2008, was just finishing the graduate film programme at UCLA. He got a phone call from a friend asking if he could help out logging and sorting what his friend said was
‘tons and tons of unbelievable footage of Shepard bombing various cities, all shot by a crazy Frenchman named Thierry’. This was for a different documentary on Shepard Fairey’s
rise from unknown street artist to the man whose inspirational ‘Hope’ image became a part of Barack Obama’s successful bid for the presidency. He was given all the film that
Thierry had shot (at least he thought it was all the film, but when he came to watch
Exit
he discovered that Banksy had taken some of the best bits). In need of the money, he took the job,
and he says, ‘It was like every day you knew you were going to be locked in a room with a madman for eight hours.’

He had over 100 tapes to go through and there was no ‘rhyme or reason’ in how they came to him: ‘The only markings might be something like “tape 71 New York, tape 72 Las
Vegas”.’ On his website thesparrowsongs.com he explained the problem:

So Thierry Guetta certainly exists and, give or take a little, very much in the form that Banksy portrayed him. But at this point things start getting more complicated. Yes, it’s for real,
Thierry is
a very persistent but not very good cameraman, but is he anything more than that?
Exit
was short-listed for an Oscar in the Documentary category, but rather
than a simple story about Thierry’s rise to fame as Mr Brainwash, it seems much more a documentary about how Banksy constructed Mr Brainwash from the eager model that was Thierry. As Thierry
told the
Los Angeles Times
, ‘Banksy captured me becoming an artist, in the end, I became his biggest work of art.’

It was immediately after the point when Banksy had sat through the ninety minutes of Thierry’s film and pronounced it ‘unwatchable’ that the whole Mr Brainwash phenomenon
became very much a stage-managed documentary. When Banksy sent him back to Los Angeles to ‘make some art, you know, have a little show’, you might expect Thierry to be toiling away on
the city’s streets for years before anyone would notice him, let alone put on a show. But as soon as he was out on the streets Banksy’s crew was filming him, providing the essential
early scenes to go with the narrative of Thierry’s metamorphosis into Mr Brainwash. Even in these very early shots Thierry needed assistants and rather than painting on walls, he was, like a
considerable number of street artists, pasting up posters that had been created in a studio. From this earliest point there was no opportunity to see whether he had any practical ability to draw or
spray.

What Banksy had spotted was that Thierry had enough quirkiness and endearing naïvete to be his lead actor. In his revealing email interview with A.J. Schnack, Banksy said: ‘I needed
the film to be fronted by a personality the audience could engage with. The producer Robert Evans said that “vulnerability” is the most important quality in a movie star and
that’s a hard thing to portray if all your interviewees have masks over their faces . . .
Thierry’s entertainment potential wasn’t difficult to spot –
he actually walks into doors and falls down stairs. It was like hanging out with Groucho Marx but with funnier facial hair.’

Banksy has found the perfect character to lead a general audience into the unknown world of street art. As the producer of
Exit
, Jamie D’Cruz, says: ‘To make a film about
something as obscure as street art you need the guy. You need the character. Thierry was a brilliant cipher through which you can get into a world which is actually quite dull in many
ways.’